Obama’s Progressive Street Cred

The selection of Rick Warren for the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration is troubling, to say the least. Many progressives are rightly outraged at the selection of a man who is virulently anti-choice and homophobic. Yet, this is only the latest in a series of Obama decisions that has left many progressives wondering who it was, exactly, they voted for. Apparently, “change” looks a lot like the Clinton administration. Rahm Emanuel is back. So is Eric Holder, formerly Deputy Attorney General. Most conspicuous of all, Hillary Clinton will be Secretary of State. A bevy of liberal-but-not-quite-progressive apologists have tried to explain away all of Obama’s decisions. Here is a list of some of their justifications:

• Obama is pursuing Abraham Lincoln’s “team of rivals” approach. Authors of this justification also cite Lyndon Johnson’s phrase: it’s better to keep one’s enemies “on the inside, pissing out” rather than “on the outside, pissing in.” By keeping his enemies in the White House, those enemies are not in Congress or on K Street trying to defeat his plans.
• Remember how we all said for six months that Obama’s qualifications don’t matter? Not so much. As such, he’s surrounding himself with a group of people who have experience working in a presidential administration, and the last Democratic presidency was Bill Clinton’s, so it only makes sense that he would choose people from there.
• Obama is sneakier than he seems (think I, Claudius, I suppose). He’s putting a lot of center-left (and, in some cases, center-right) Washington establishment politicians in key positions to pay lip service to that establishment. Don’t worry, it’s only a front. The real reforms are going to happen, but from behind a veil of mainstream non-reform. That’s the only way he can get things done down there.
• Obama does not want to continue the divisive politics of George W. Bush. Even though it might anger those on the hard left, Obama would rather heal and reconcile than punish.  Turn that cheek!

Some of these justifications are disturbing. The last one, that Obama should be conciliatory instead of punitive, is put forth by people who believe that the crimes of the George W. Bush administration should not be investigated. The country needs to heal, they say. It’s time to get on with the business of the United States, where “business” is defined so as to exclude investigations of the previous administration. Of course, this logic ignores the fact that the law has been broken. As Glenn Greenwald has observed, politicians are more than ready to throw the full force of the law at marijuana dealers, but when it comes to prosecuting their own, politicians are equally ready to be lenient, even though the marijuana dealer harmed no one and the politician may have, oh, I don’t know, been responsible for torture, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless wiretapping at the least. When crimes are committed, they should be investigated and prosecuted – not just for poor people, but for everyone, including politicians. For Barack Obama to suggest that Bush administration criminals should go free is to suggest that politicians live in a special class above the reach of the law. It also encourages more illegal activity in the future, once it is known that the government won’t prosecute those activities.

Furthermore, it’s not even up to Barack Obama to decide what is or is not investigated. The cult of personality surrounding him is great (in fact, it contributed to getting him elected), but even though we like him we must not forget that, as the president, he has constitutional limitations. It was irresponsible for the media to even ask what Barack Obama thought about Joe Lieberman being kicked out of the Democratic caucus. On November 5, Obama’s life as a senator ended, even though he didn’t officially resign the position until three weeks later. The president has absolutely no say – none! – in the operation of Congress. It would be different if Obama were acting in his capacity as a senator, but after winning the presidential election, especially in a nation eager for a new leader, any notion of Obama acting solely in his capacity as a senator would be extremely naïve. Obama must repudiate the unconstitutional powers that George W. Bush has claimed for himself, either through complete fabrication or malicious misreading of constitutional law.

Given his opinion of things like same-sex marriage (he tactfully says that same-sex couples should not be allowed to “marry” as such, but then says that they should have the same rights as heterosexual couples), NAFTA/CAFTA, and Israel, no one could confuse him for a true progressive. Obama’s apologists rationalize his decisions by pointing out that Obama never claimed to be a progressive at all!

Or could they? George W. Bush’s method of saying-without-saying is well-documented. While he never explicitly said that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks, there is definitely a reason why, in 2001, virtually no Americans thought Saddam Hussein was responsible, but in 2003, one third of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was responsible.

Could it be that Barack Obama, whose campaign P.R. was spectacular, performed the same saying-but-not-saying function? Yes, it is entirely possible that Obama clothed himself in the cloak of progressivism while still wearing the mainstream Democrat’s clothes underneath. He has suggested massive new spending on entitlement programs, but he wants to increase the size of the military. He wants to let the Bush tax cuts expire, but he voted in favor of retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that assisted the administration in warrantless wiretapping. His foreign policy goals consist of using real diplomacy instead of threats, but he voted in favor of NAFTA. He wants to provide government health care for people who have no health care, but he stops short of suggesting a universal-payer system like Canada’s or Great Britain’s. Obama’s positions are a wash: for every progressive-sounding idea, there is another conservative-sounding one to balance it out.

Or, on the other hand, it could be that Obama never suggested anything, but that he was forthcoming about his non-progressive credentials. It could be that we, the progressive Americans, were so thirsty for a change that we latched onto the only candidate (outside of Dennis Kucinich) who even brought up the issue of health care reform (at those early Republican primary debates, not a single candidate brought up the issue of health care), social reform, and getting out of Iraq (Hillary Clinton and John Edwards failed on at least one of these). We projected onto him the candidate we wanted him to be, ignoring the fact that he was not that candidate. Did we set ourselves up for disappointment? Yes, that is possible, too.

And then there’s the argument that all this complaining is pointless, that Obama isn’t even the president yet, and we should all just wait and see what happens on Jan. 20. Well, Rick Warren will happen Jan. 20, and that gives me even less optimism that, at noon on that day, Obama will suddenly throw aside his centrist mask and shout, “You fools! You thought I was just like Bill Clinton! But you were wrong! Free health care for everybody!” Agreeing to take part in Warren’s Saddleback (which sounds dangerously like “bareback”) debate with John McCain, Obama could conceivably have been seen as paying lip service to evangelical Protestantism, just like every president since Nixon has had to do. But putting Warren on the bill for Inauguration Day? Imagine if George W. Bush had hired Hillary Clinton to give a speech at his second inauguration. Yeah, it’s like.

Most troubling in my opinion, though, is Obama’s own insistence, ever since March of 2007, when he announced his candidacy, that he is not an ordinary politician. His grassroots, fifty-state strategy was unparalleled in its success. His speech about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was intelligent and it treated the American people as though they, too, could understand long speeches that contained nuanced thoughts, as opposed to the Manichean sound bites of George W. Bush. His political maturity happened after the Vietnam War era, and, as Andrew Sullivan has suggested, the very core of his being is not instilled with a reflexive fear of Republicans and conservatism.

Conservatism demands the acknowledgment of a false dualism in every aspect of life, with the promise that conservatism will lead people to the correct side of this duality. Democrats buy into this framework and then try to argue the opposite side. The true progressive would never let the Republicans frame the debate and then proceed to work within their ill-conceived framework. To the progressive, there is no debate about whether or not health care should be free, or if there should be a premium for minimum services, or if the government should control it. The answer is: the current system of privatized health care doesn’t work and it should not be repaired, it must be rebuilt from the ground up. Obama appeared unafraid to work outside the existing framework and create a new framework that works in the interests of everyone. “Should it be a public solution or a private solution?” is not the correct question. “What solution is best for the country?” Now that’s the right question. It’s a question that Obama appeared to be asking during the campaign, but one that is being substituted by justifications for increasingly conservative behavior.

The Morning After

National Journal: Barack Obama is the most liberal U.S. senator.

American people: Okay, so what’s the problem?

The mythology that liberals must become more conservative in order to win votes has been successfully body-slammed. This tactic rested on the assumption that America is a right-leaning country, and the only way for a liberal political party to succeed is to cater to those conservative urges. As Daily Kos observes (see link above), however, Americans overwhelmingly voted for a candidate whose message was clearly liberal: yes, let’s give Americans access to government healthcare. Yes, let’s reduces taxes for the middle class while increasing them for the very wealthy. Yes, let’s end preemptive foreign wars. These are all liberal positions, and yet Obama didn’t back down on one of them. (His stance on gay marriage, however, leaves much to be desired.)

It’s time to acknowledge that the United States is becoming more liberal. Everyone agrees that the economic crisis of this fall is what did McCain in. His blustering and sputtering about what to do — combined with revelations of his history as a de-regulator — caused even his supporters to lose confidence in his ability to solve such a problem. You can’t fix the problems caused by capitalism by throwing more capitalism at them. What’s required is a change in ideology: a shift away from the time-honored veneration of The Market and a shift toward more government regulation. The Market can’t solve all our problems, and indeed, it can’t even solve its own.

And what conservatives have failed to realize is that Americans are overwhelmingly against the Iraq War. A CNN poll conducted a week before the election found that 64% of those surveyed opposed the war. In a separate Pew Research poll, 50% thought that it was the “wrong decision” (compared with 39% who thought it was the “right decision”). In a third poll, conducted by CBS News/New York Times, 54% of respondents said they thought we should have stayed out of Iraq. Hindsight is 20/20, but at least there is hindsight. A John McCain administration would have promised only more wars, since war is all McCain knows. With reports coming out for the last two years of veiled threats against Iran, and last week’s incursion into Syria, more war is what McCain would have delivered. A McCain victory would have been interpreted as a mandate for more preemptive war.

Here’s some more news for you: while 22% of the country voted more conservatively than it did in 2004, the rest of the country either stayed the same or voted more liberally. Where has the Republican Party gained power? The South. Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, eastern Texas, Oklahoma. The House and Senate numbers show this, as well. Even Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida were Obama country. Barely Obama country, but his, nonetheless.

As it turns out, Joe the Plumber and Joe Six-Pack may not like the abstract concept of the government taxing people who make more than $250,000, but they don’t make that much money right now, and right now, they could use a tax break. They could also use some health care. Maybe they’ll worry about supply-side economics when they’re making money again.

And that’s the key to this victory: Obama got 65 million voters to believe that the Democrats, not the Republicans, could make their lives better. I recall something he said in his closing argument of the last debate: the question is not “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The answer to that is a resounding no. The question is, “Which party will make you better off four years from now?”

We have our answer.

What Today Means

Today is not just about voting Barack Obama into office. It’s like a national colon cleansing. Today, hopefully, we will vote to restore the rule of law and the Constitution to their rightful places. Today, we will vote to end the doctrine of preemptive war, dial down the militarism, and begin focusing on fixing the problems we have in this country rather than starting new problems in other countries. John McCain would indeed continue the failed policies of George W. Bush, but voting for Obama is not merely about making sure McCain doesn’t become president. It’s about removing the Republican Party from power and in so doing, sending its operatives a clear message that we will no longer stand idly by as our nation engages in war, terror, and torture in our names, under the moniker of protecting the “homeland.” We will no longer watch as we are told that the government is not here to help us, that we should not help each other, but that we should fend for ourselves, and if we lack the wealth or imagination to do so, then so be it.

For eight years I have not been proud of the United States. It has engaged in atrocities that I had never thought a country as grand as ours could engage in. Most cynically, the president, vice president, and the Republican Party used the spirit of cooperation that existed after September 11 (Karl Rove’s imagined memories to the contrary) as their ticket to pure, unbridled power. In attempting to analyze why things have happened the way they have, this is the conclusion I come to: power. Though we often want to ignore the more animalistic parts of our brains, the limbic systems of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and others are alive and well and thirsty for control. I can think of no other explanation.

The machinery that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton designed to prevent the concentration of power is failing us as the executive asserts ever more “powers” that are not to be found in statues or the Constitution. As long as the Republican Party remains in control of the country, that machinery will continue to deteriorate.

This is not to say that the Republican Party has always been bad. It was once the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. It was once the party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who helped create the America we know today. Even Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency; but Nixon’s contempt for the law was his own, not the party’s.

But the Republican Party has mutated into something that none of the above people would recognize today. Even Ronald Reagan, the venerable godfather of modern conservatism, would not recognize the Republican Party. Its sleaze knows no bounds: like a feral dog, it resorts to its most primal responses when threatened. As it has sensed, over the past few weeks, that its time is up, it has tried to associate Barack Obama with terrorists, socialists, Marxists, Muslims, and anyone else it thinks are evil. When that has failed, experience has shown us that it will resort to trying to forcibly stop people from voting, by placing “observers” at polling places to question legitimate voters’ registrations (in swing states only), intentionally delivering too few voting machines to Democratic precincts, or attempting to cut Democrats from voter lists altogether.

Karl Rove’s attempts to create a “permanent majority” have led to an undeniable fact: the Republican Party of 2008 does not care about anyone but itself. It seeks to enrich itself, to place its operatives in positions of power so that those operatives can amass wealth, and most of all, power. The party that clothes itself in patriotism is, underneath the bloody flags it wears, virulently unpatriotic. “Patriotism” involves respect for the nation and its people. The modern Republican Party has nothing but contempt for the nation and its laws, especially when those laws get in the way of its quest for power. And the people? The modern Republican Party doesn’t care about anyone who is not an elite member of the party. George W. Bush would be perfectly happy to throw Joe the Plumber to the sharks — if, that is, he didn’t need Joe’s vote.

And then we come to soldiers. Time and time again, President Bush has shown that he doesn’t care about soldiers. He wants meat that can absorb bullets in his ill-begotten, ill-fated War on Terrorism. Once the meat comes home to its family, brimming with trauma — both physical and mental — from the experience of war, President Bush has fought as hard as he can against paying for that meat, which it turns out, is a living, breathing human being that must now be taken care of.

Today is probably the nation’s most important day in many, many years. A vote for Obama is a tourniquet to stop eight years’ worth of hemorrhaging caused by a party that couldn’t care less about anyone but itself. A vote for McCain is a vote to continue things as they have been, despite his protestations to the contrary. McCain has demonstrated — not the least through the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate — that the modern Republican Party will continue to play an intimate role in the operation of the United States, as it has for eight years. Four more years of that will run our country’s veins dry.

Barack Obama does represent change. He represents hope. He represents a return to the Constitution, a return to the values of equal protection under the law, a return to a nation that defends itself when actually threatened and not a nation that attacks other countries due to perceived threats. A President Obama will lead a nation that we can be proud of again.

Signs of Desperation

It is not unusual for John McCain to employ robocalls. It is unusual for him to deploy robocalls in his own state! Robocalls should be treated as a sign of desperation: once a candidate has run out of decent options, the only thing left is the dirty stuff. (Hey, at least it’s not push polling … yet.)

McCain’s home state of Arizona should be totally safe. And it may yet be safe. But robocalling shows that McCain has scared. And perhaps he is, given polling data that indicate Obama is closing his gap in Arizona. A 21-point lead has dwindled to five points in less than a month. Maybe it’s the heat.

McCain Debates Letterman

After ducking his late night show during his “campaign suspension,” John McCain finally went on David Letterman Thursday night. Here’s a good portion of the interview:

Search Insights into Election Trends

While polling is an imperfect science due to issues related to measurement and unexpected shifts in the electorate, it can often be looked at in combination with other sets of data to provide insight into voter trends. One such set of data is Google search volume, calculated at both a national, state, and city level, which can provide some insight into general voter interest, if not intent.

A few points to note (caveats, really) on these informal data sets are that they exhibit sample selection bias in that they pool from Google searchers (who may be more or less correlated with a certain demographic than, say, MSN or Yahoo searchers) and that the volumes are ordinal data points which can be used as comparative sources, rather than attributing any absolute level of searches (we’ll delve into Google estimates of actual searches, along with several other data sets, in a follow-up.)

Our first sample draws from US national searches from January - December 2007, a period in which Senator Obama emerged as a viable primary candidate, while Senator McCain remained a prominent GOP Senator among many possible primary contenders. For the year, “Barack Obama” searches out-numbered “John McCain” searches more than three to one on a national level, driven by the spike of interest when he entered the race in January, although McCain began to narrow this gap toward the end of the year when his campaign began to gain momentum:

The 2008 search data becomes even more interesting, as the campaigns shifted from hard fought primaries to focusing on the general election. Overall, McCain narrowed the search gap from 3:1 to 5:3, and further established near parity towards the end of the electoral cycle. Obama’s search volume is aided by the intense Democratic primary fight which ended only in June (see A below), while McCain clinched the nomination in Feburary.

In order to get a better understanding of recent trends, we’ll take a look the August and September data sets. Overall, for August, Obama attained a 30% lead in search query volume.  September marked a shift toward near parity in the candidates’ search volumes, with Obama retaining a slight 4% lead in overall searches.McCain achieved a strong spike after he introduced Sarah Palin as his running mate at the GOP convention in early September, while Obama’s convention “search bounce” is muted by McCain’s running mate search announcement on August 29 (data point C) immediately following the Dem’s convention August 25-28 (data points A,B).

While candidate searches may indicate a vareity of potential motivations (which may or may not be correlated with support), candidate site visits tend to be more highly correlated with loyalty. According to this metric, BarackObama.com has steadily received 2 visitors for each 1 to JohnMcCain.com over the past 30 days - in part, this reflects the demographic self-selection (Obama supporters may be more likely to seek information over the web), as well as differentials in advertising and media strategy. Over the last 30 days, BarackObama.com has held a steady 2:1 lead, while the two sites have largely mirrored each other in relative trend lines:

While this national-level data can provide some insight into overall electoral trends, we’ll delve into state and city-level search data, with a focus on the battleground states, in the next part of the series on election search trends.

Bailout Spin

It’s been a hectic financial week leading up to tomorrow’s Vice Presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis. Interestingly, there has been a coalescence of ideology that combined with a public disdain for the “bailout” that united the left-wing of the Dems with the right-wing of the GOP in voting against the recent credit bill.

While it’s still likely that we’ll see a revised bill by the end of the week (the Senate will vote on their version of the existing legislation today), McCain seems keen to ride the coat tails of resurgent GOP post-Bush positioning:

A Different Take on the Expectations for Palin

Many of the most seasoned pundits are of the opinion that each time Sarah Palin commits another gaffe, she makes her job easier in the Vice Presidential Debate by lowering the public expectations. Certainly there are many examples in history of a less-than-stellar orator winning a debate by split-decision, for no better reason than because he or she exceeded the lower threshold that had been set for him or her. And anyone who hesitates to agree need look no further than the 2000 debate performance of the White House’s current occupant. When the public expects one candidate to dominate the other, so sayeth the conventional wisdom, these expectations leave that apparently superior candidate with the narrower window in which to perform well without dog-piling on his hapless opponent across the stage.

All of this worked in 2000 precisely because the general public had little basis for doubting Mr. Bush’s core competency to hold down the job. True, he had performed dreadfully in a series of now infamous Sunday-morning news interviews. (”I know how hard it is to put food on your family.” “Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?” “I understand the challenges of small business: I was one.”) But the general public–or at the very least, that segment of the general public that is still undecided at the end of Setpember–doesn’t watch Sunday-morning news interviews. To them Mr. Bush was a self-confident, likable guy who was true to his word, essentially untarnished by scandal (as far as they knew), and ready to take the Lewinsky-weary country in a new direction that included big, ripe checks in the mail for everybody. Indeed in hindsight it is a small miracle that Mr. Gore fared as well as he did under the circumstances.

Governor Palin, by contrast, has burned her honeymoon capital with the media and the larger body politic–first by repeatedly lying with respect to the “Bridge to Nowhere,” even after the lie was documented, then by stonewalling an investigation started by state legislators of her own party, and finally by spectacularly and very visibly mangling her should-have-been-rehearsed answers to the interview questions being posed by the unimpeachably non-partisan Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. By the time of the second installment of her Couric interview she was already the least-favorably viewed of the four major candidates, and shortly thereafter she was called upon to remove herself from the ticket, both by CNN’s self-appointed national conscience, Jack Cafferty, and by National Review columnist Kathleen Parker. The latter is the far more devastating blow, since Ms. Parker may not be summarily dismissed as either an Obama supporter or as a sexist in the McCain campaign’s now daily conference calls to blast the treatment they’re getting.

In the meantime Palin has continued to dig herself an even deeper hole, first by refusing to directly answer questions about her acceptance of over $25,000 in gifts, and then by seeming to contradict her boss on the subject of surgical strikes on terrorist bases in Pakistan. She’s been mocked by Tina Fey and David Letterman, and her very image alone is generally enough to start Jon Stewart’s audiences at the Daily Show into a fit of merciless cackling. If nothing else, it sure does seem like a long time ago that anyone was worried too much about what might tumble unexpectedly from the lips of Joe Biden!

To put it bluntly, the public has seen what it needs to see in order to have grave doubts about Governor Palin’s basic intellectual competency to stand a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. And those are not the sorts of low expectations upon which a candidate may capitalize. Indeed the true state of the situation is probably closer to the opposite. Barring a major surprise victory against Joe Biden, one which shows her both thoroughly in command of the the discussion and thoroughly proficient on issues that she has not thus far demonstrated any aptitude whatsoever, the persuadable voters watching the contest will undoubtedly resolve that the Alaska Governor has just officially run herself out of chances.

McCain Admits He Hasn’t Read Bailout Bill

John McCain, campaigning in Cleveland, Ohio today, admits that he hasn’t read the bailout bill

What!?!? I thought he suspended his campaign? If this financial crisis is apparently all of a sudden so important to him, then why hasn’t he even bothered to read the bill that would allocate 700 billion dollars to address it?

Although fear not, he’s apparently swooping into Washington tonight to rescue everyone from a bill that he hasn’t even read. Republican are apparently even delaying the compromise long enough so McCain can be present and take credit. Word on the street is that apparently McCain may even “rediscover” his hidden populist side in the next 12 hours and vote No!

Power to the people, John McCain!

Letterman Suspends McCain by the Balls

Forget about suspending your campaign, just don’t suspend your campaign AND cancel an appearance on David Letterman on the same day!

David Letterman quotes from earlier today:

You don’t suspend your campaign. This doesn’t smell right. This isn’t the way a tested hero behaves. I think someone’s putting something in his metamucil.

He can’t run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second string quarterback, Sara Palin. Where is she?

What are you going to do if you’re elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We’ve got a guy like that now!

And now, the long awaited video from tonight:

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