Kennedy: Policy Over Politics

Over the last two weeks, I’ve heard countless arguments about what the death of Ted Kennedy means to everything from health care to bipartisanship to the legacy of the New Deal to overall themes of leadership and compromise in Washington. At least in the mainstream media, there has been little nuanced introspection and examination of the what his legislative accomplishments may teach us about the policy dilemmas of the current day. Rather, most commentary, like virtually everything else on the airwaves during the congressional recess, has been dominated by political opportunists and windbag journalists who know of little outside of the rules of thumb that they have been taught in their elite circles. As I think about all of this, I myself ponder what Ted Kennedy’s real legacy may be for the substantive policy debates in months and years ahead

Outside of the man, his family, and close friends, most of us cannot begin to know for sure what Ted Kennedy himself would think. Instead, let’s take a look at his life of policy work through our own unique lens. By understanding this legacy, we can better frame our own ideas about the current situation and what may be the way forward.

Policy Lessons: Liberal Lion or Man of Compromise?

Of course, like all of us, Ted Kennedy’s life was anything but perfect. From the privileged youngest son of Camelot and playboy philanderer to the elder statesman who became a champion of the working class, Ted Kennedy lived an interesting life indeed. Most of us probably know the beginning and end of this story, along with several chapters in-between. However, what I believe is most instructive are the policy and legislative lessons of the period post-1980, after Kennedy’s presidential ambitions were slammed shut for good.

It was during this latter stage of his career that Ted Kennedy became known for being able to reach across the aisle to get things done. During this era, Kennedy was largely responsible for more legislation than any other Senator could dream of. There are too many bills to mention, but a few significant ones that Kennedy played a major role in during this time include:

The Americans with Disabilities Act

The Family and Medical Leave Act

The State Children’s Healthcare Insurance Program

No Child Left Behind Act

I purposely have included No Child Left Behind on this list as it is a bill that is often not all that popular with the base of the so-called Liberal Lion. This bill in particular has led many right-wing commentators to argue that Ted Kennedy was all about a compromise akin to capitulation, as so many of his centrist Democratic colleagues unfortunately have been over the past three decades. However, nothing could be farther from the truth. While Ted Kennedy was perfectly willing to compromise the means, I have yet to find an instance in this period where he compromised the ends. In order to get more funding for education, yes, he was willing to agree to tougher standards for teachers and more accountability through testing.  (Yes, the Bush administration did not follow through on all of the promised funding, but funding did increase.) Sure, in order to get a path for citizenship for illegal immigrants, he was willing to negotiate other issues with John McCain and George W. Bush in the immigration bill on which President Bush jumped ship after a backlash from his own base. However, at the end of the day, while he often was willing to meet the other side half way, that is not the same thing as capitulating on the main reason/goal that brought him to the negotiation table in the first place. If your goal is to provide all Americans affordable insurance options, you can be willing to negotiate the means of getting there, but any man or woman of principle simply cannot be willing to negotiate away the end goal.

While Ted Kennedy’s legislative record does teach us that one can accomplish much by being willing to accept frameworks that could be expanded in the future, it tells us nothing of  agreement to self-aggrandizing political compromises that have no real policy implications to ever improve the lot of those who you aim to help. According to recent reports, this type of debate is currently going on between the policy and politics people in the Obama administration. I firmly believe that the lessons of Kennedy’s legislative experience squarely support the ideals of the policy camp and those who choose real substance over faux accomplishment and photo ops.

What’s the Matter with Such Principled Negotiation Today?

Part of the problem with going a bipartisan route to achieving such compromise on policy matters, including the processes and mechanisms of bills such as health care, is that lately it seems that virtually no Republicans share the same overall end goals to improve policy. Sure, we may all disagree on what policy improvement should look like, but in order to negotiate we must at the very least agree that our end goal is to actually improve policy and not to simply pump up our political agendas. If it was a given that 10 GOP Senators honestly agreed to the goals of a good health care bill that extended affordable coverage to 95% of Americans, then Ted Kennedy’s type of compromise would work. If such honest negotiation was taking place on both sides of the aisle, the Senate finance committee would have reached an agreement months ago instead of being nothing but a vehicle for delay meant to kill any real reform. Unfortunately, in the current debates, it seems that with the possible exception of the two Senators from Maine, there are no honest brokers on the GOP side of the aisle today. For believers in a healthy diverse intraparty political system, this is disappointing to say the least.

Given these current dynamics, anyone who falls for such a bipartisan negotiation trap in the current political environment is at best naive, at worst guilty of political malfeasance. It would be akin to negotiating with Strom Thurmond over civil rights or Jefferson Davis over slavery. In times when there is no loyal opposition that is serious about policy improvements, bipartisanship is nothing but smoke and mirrors. Thankfully during many legislative battles of the past, such as the civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s, there were supporters of change on both sides of the aisle and bipartisan compromise was not only possible, but the only way forward. Unlike today, during this time period both parties had national support that crossed both geographical and ideological lines.  When ideology and worldviews cross cut party identification on certain issues, those issues are ripe for bipartisan compromise. Otherwise bipartisanship means nothing.  Unfortunately the only real substantive policy negotiation that can occur today is between members of the same political party. This much has been obvious for a long time to anyone who has had their eyes open.

Bottom Line

When it comes to health care and other pending issues such as global climate change legislation, President Obama and Democrats in Congress need to choose policy over politics and hold out  the hope that doing the right thing for those who elected them will win out at the ballot box at the end of the day. It can’t be the other way around.  A real leader can do more with a four year window than a series of weak leaders could ever hope to accomplish in decades of impotent rule. It’s time for real leadership and adherence to ideals that would make Ted Kennedy proud.

Any views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of any organizations that the author is in any way affiliated with.

A Progressive Health Care Solution

In one of my earlier posts, I said that I hoped President Obama would be progressive. I further tried to offer a definition of progressive, to be contrasted with liberal and conservative. That didn’t go over too well. I’m trying again, this time by using the concrete example of health care. How would a progressive go about health care reform? This is the question that I answer in Demockracy’s first-ever podcast – take a listen:

Progressivism and Health Care

The Legends Win in the End

On a rainy Saturday afternoon this past November, San Francisco said its final goodbye to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Or at least it said goodbye to the one veteran of the brigade who could make it – the hundred-year-old Hilda Roberts, one of about sixty American women who served the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Apparently, a couple of other vets had planned on being there but the weather kept them away, and there’s not a large pool to draw on – only about twenty-two or twenty-four of the veterans are thought to still be alive.

The San Francisco event was a commemoration of a much larger leave taking that took place seventy years earlier, almost to the day. For that farewell, remembered in Spain as the Despedida, the crowd numbered in the tens of thousands, as Spaniards filled the streets of Barcelona for a last look at the departing International Brigades, the 35,000 or so volunteers from 53 countries who had come to defend the Spanish Republic from General Francisco Franco’s military uprising two years earlier. Among the departing were about 2,800 Americans – less about 800 who died in Spain – who subsequently became known as the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

At the time, Spain seemed a microcosm of all the world’s conflicting ideas on one peninsula in Europe. Within five years after the 1931 fall of the monarchy that ruled it almost continuously for centuries, Spain’s disparate points of view had crystallized into two opposing coalitions: The Popular Front of Socialists, Communists, and left-wing Republicans; and the National Front of Christian Democrats, fascists, and monarchists. Five months after the Popular Front’s electoral victory, the two sides would become transformed into the warring Republicans and Nationalists when army officers in the Spanish colony of Morocco began the uprising that would end democracy in the country for nearly four decades.

It is hard to convey today what Spain meant to the world in those days, but perhaps the title of Andre Malraux’s novel about the Civil War does it best: It is called Man’s Hope. And the fact the events, while certainly not clearly recalled or understood, have never entirely receded from popular memory came to the fore in the most recent presidential election when both Barack Obama and John McCain claimed Republican sympathizer Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls as one of their favorite books.

Just a few years ago, the Bay Area Veterans, while few in number themselves, were holding annual reunion events at the Oakland Hilton or the Kaiser Center that drew crowds in the high hundreds. Speakers like Ariel Dorfman and Molly Ivins talked of the relevance the Spanish war to the events of the day, and the whole audience joined members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in singing “Viva la Quince Brigada!” and the other songs of the Spanish Republic. But seventy years is a mighty long time to keep an organization going when there’s no source of new members. A recent obituary for Jack Shafran noted that the 91 year old was “one of the youngest volunteers in the Lincoln Brigade.” So the decision was made to dissolve the Veterans, either upon the death of two of the group’s remaining activists, Moses Fishman and Abraham Sorodin or on the seventieth anniversary of the Despedida, whichever came first. The organization’s work would be continued by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

By the time of the San Francisco event, both of those veterans had in fact died, so there no longer was an organization known as the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The singing would be thin on the choruses of the old songs at the final event, and the 150 seat Delancey Street Theater was less than half full for a showing of a British newsreel on the Despedida apparently never before seen in the US. On the screen, Dolores Ibárruri Gómez, better known as La Pasionaria (or “the passion flower”), delivered her famous send off speech to thousands of the then young volunteers. As a rule, Ibárruri’s speeches included the Republican cry, “No pasaran!” – they shall not pass. But there were no such illusions on that day in Barcelona. Franco’s Nationalists had indeed passed and the Internationals were being sent home because the cause was lost. Instead, Ibárruri told them, “Sois la leyenda.” You are legend. And legends they would be, for the rest of their days. People used to cite the phrase “May you live in interesting times” as an ancient Chinese curse. It seems, however, that this widely cited bit of eastern wisdom may have originated in the east coast of the United States, for it appears to be neither ancient nor Chinese. In fact, the earliest date anyone can find evidence of its use is 1936, the year the Spanish Civil War began. And maybe that’s about right because the veterans of that war embodied this apparently modern curse as well as anyone ever has.

When the western democracies refused to aid Spain’s fight against the military uprising, the Internationals came without sanction of their governments. (The only significant foreign assistance the Republic received came from the Stalin-era Soviet Union.) Afterwards, some volunteers, like the Italians and the Germans who constituted the largest bloc, couldn’t go home. In Spain, they had fought against their own governments because, unlike France, the United Kingdom, or the United States, Mussolini and Hitler’s governments had not hesitated to assist their ally Franco – and take the opportunity to hone their military operations for the larger conflict on the horizon. Others like the Americans were able to return home but were now considered suspect as the times got ever more “interesting.” It seems they had been “premature anti-fascists.” They were anti-Hitler before being anti-Hitler was cool.

The interesting times continued. When US Attorney General Thomas Clark decided to warn the nation about the subversive organizations in its midst on 1947, he did so by releasing a list in alphabetical order, starting with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. And since a good number of the volunteers had, in fact been Communist Party members, they faced “are you now, or have you ever been” questioning for decades.

By the Vietnam War era, the Spanish Civil War was a largely forgotten event in the US. Most of the participants in the big antiwar demonstrations of the day would likely not have noticed the group of old men and a few women, marching behind a Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade banner. But they were always there, probably the most antiwar group of veterans you were ever going to meet. And an activist core continued on, and on, and on. When the Reagan Administration subverted the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the Lincolns were well past the age of volunteering to fight the Contras, so they sent an ambulance down instead.

In her speech on that long ago afternoon in Barcelona, La Pasionaria went on to exhort the 13,000 Internationals who were there, “When the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves entwined with the laurels of the Spanish Republic’s victory, come back.” Considering the Republic’s desperate military position at the time, this seemed like so much bravado. And, at the time, it was. But not in the long run. As the viewers of Saturday Night Live would be reminded week after week, in 1975 General Francisco Franco finally died. And more importantly, with him died his dictatorship. Two years later, La Pasionaria, returned form exile, was elected to represent Asturias in the first post-Franco government.

Still, Spain was reluctant to revisit its Civil War in those first post-Franco years, and it would be nearly another two decades before the volunteer veterans were invited back. But in November 1996, sixty years after the war’s start and three years after Ibárruri herself had died, 400 of them returned to finally see the olive trees of peace and receive a hero’s welcome at the “Homenaje,” the homecoming. Twelve years later, a mere twenty-three of them were on hand for the seventieth anniversary Despedida commemoration in Spain, their numbers having plunged worldwide just as they have in the Bay Area.

But things have continued to change in Spain, and the reluctance to confront the crimes of the Franco has declined with the passing of those personally involved. A recently passed law mandates the removal of symbols of the Franco era from various public buildings and funds the unearthing of Civil War-era mass graves. And it begins the real Homenaje: As of the end of 2008, all descendants of those Spaniards forced to leave the country from the beginning of the war through 1975 will be allowed to claim the Spanish citizenship denied them by Francisco Franco’s war and dictatorship. And although most did not live to see it and had to content themselves with being legends in their own time, this is the final victory of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

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:

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