Joe Conason, still debunking Clinton pseudoscandals

Joe Conason, co-author with Gene Lyons of The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000), has addressed two sets of Clinton pseudoscandals. Uranium One is a relatively new entry in the portfolio of Clinton pseudoscandals. The allegation is that Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was bribed by Russians via the Clinton Foundation into approving the sale of a company named Uranium One to a state-owned Russian company, Rosatom.

Clinton Conason writes in One radioactive smear campaign New York Daily News 11/19/2017:

Neither the House Republicans nor Sessions have yet explained how the Clintons could have controlled the disposition of Uranium One's assets. Nor have they explained how the Uranium One deal, which prohibited the Russians from selling so much as an ounce of uranium ore outside the borders of the United States, could have endangered American national security.

And they have also failed to explain why the entire deal matters anyway, since the portion of U.S. reserves owned by Uranium One represents a tiny fraction of a fraction — a tenth of 1% — of the world's uranium supply, most of which comes from Kazakhstan, Australia and Canada.

He sketches out the claim here:

Through a complex series of business deals, Russia had obtained control of a portion of U.S. uranium reserves, using a Vancouver-based company called Uranium One. Some of the Canadian investors who profited from the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom, the Russian state-owned atomic energy corporation, had given millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.

Russia's acquisition of American uranium had been approved by the State Department while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State. And Bill Clinton had received a $500,000 fee for a speech delivered in Moscow at a bank that had some connection with Uranium One.

What weakened that apparently damning story was a single big flaw: Hillary Clinton never had the sole authority to sign off on the sale of Uranium One to the Russians, but held only a single seat on a government panel that included members from nine agencies, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

What Conason doesn't say, though I think it's important, is that the laws are far too permissive on ways that donors and/or bribers (sometimes there is no difference) can channel money to candidates and campaigns. Payments to a candidates spouse of, say, $500,000 for a single speech - and even the prospect of earning such speaking fees after leaving office - certainly can be used in that way. But it's not at all clear that such a thing occurred in the Uranium One deal, or that the payments to the Clinton Foundation were in any way illegal. It looks like a pure pseudoscandal to me.

But I see this problem in the larger context of the Citizens' United campaign-funding regime, which is an oligarchical system that inevitably creates de facto corruption, even if much of it is de jure legal.

And, of course, our Pod Pundits can never resist a return to the Bill Clinton Penis Hunt of the 1990s. And the Republicans are skilled in playing to that obsession and to the corporate media's posture of trying to provide a Both Sides Do It phony equivalency between the Democratic and Republican parties on all issues.

So it took only a few days after the Roy Moore sex scandals broke for the Republicans to get the media back on the BCPH again. And there are always Democrats feckless enough to play the same game. Conason addresses the Return Of The BCPH in A ‘Reckoning’ For Bill Clinton? Don’t Forget Starr’s $70 Million Probe National Memo 11/17/2017:

Unlike Weinstein, Moore, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, or any of the dozens of powerful men whose misdeeds have provoked a wave of justified fury, Clinton endured a long, painful, and very costly series of official investigations of his alleged sexual misdeeds. Various accounts of his private behavior, whether invented or truthful, filled thousands of hours of national airtime, millions of inches of newsprint, and dozens of books ....

Unlike the Fox News criminals and many other creeps who quietly reached settlements that kept the most lurid details of their behavior under court seal, Clinton’s alleged acts were litigated publicly all the way to the Supreme Court — with attendant coverage that included, among other embarrassments, a debate about the appearance of his penis.

And most important, unlike any of those now in the dock, Clinton underwent a $70-million investigation by a zealous federal inquisitor who had all the powers of the Justice Department, a team of relentless and experienced prosecutors, and the forensic services of the FBI, which he employed in a wide-ranging sex probe that went back decades. That special prosecutor’s name was Kenneth W. Starr. He would be dismayed to learn that his dogged efforts to destroy Clinton have so soon been forgotten.

He also reminds us of the eager but unsuccessful results of Kenneth Starr to validate the claims of Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, two favorite icons of the latest BCPH. Which, for the Republicans, will apparently never goes away. I expect them to be harping on it 50 years from now. He also reminds us of the outcome of Paula Jones' charges.

Even after all this time, I still feel stunned when I'm reminded by an article like this how ridiculous the Clinton pseudoscandals lumped under the "Whitewater" rubric really were.

It was the New York Times that vaulted the Whitewater affair into a national issue by its credulous reporting in 1992, which was very competently dissected by Conason and Lyons in The Hunting of the President, and earlier by Lyons in Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater (1996), and in the documentary film version of The Hunting of the President.

So the NYT at least deserves credit for reporting on the final report of the special counsel in the Whitewater case, headed in its last phase by Robert Ray, Final Report By Prosecutor On Clintons Is Released 03/21/2002

In a final report that ends the Whitewater investigation that sprawled across a range of subjects and vexed President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton for most of his two terms in the White House, the independent counsel's office said today that there was insufficient evidence to show that either committed any crimes.

Robert W. Ray, the last occupant of the office of independent counsel for Whitewater matters, said in the 2,090-page report that the Clintons' principal business partner in the Whitewater land development scheme in Arkansas, James B. McDougal, had committed several acts of fraud, but that there was no credible evidence that the Clintons either knew of or participated in those acts.

The report concluded the long legal melodrama that resulted in Mr. Clinton's impeachment and sharply split the nation about whether he was the victim of a politically motivated criminal investigation or had truly committed substantial offenses.

The whole underlying pseudoscandal around Whitewater turned out to have been completely bogus.

Newt and the protest against the 1%

Joe Conason made an important point a few weeks ago about Newt Gingrich that reminds us of the surprising ways in which popular movement like Occupy Wall Street can affect mainstream politics, The True Importance Of Being Newt National Memo 01/21/2012.

Whether Newt Gingrich ever wins another primary after South Carolina or not, he has performed an important service to American voters in this election. Not in the self-important way that he imagines, of course. But Gingrich's mocking assault on Mitt Romney, his career at Bain Capital and reluctance to disclose his tax returns has driven a national discussion of economic unfairness, tax avoidance, and abuse of financial power that might never have occurred without the Gingrich intervention. The angry intensity of the former Speaker has overcome the usual timidity of the mainstream media - which hesitate to address such matters forthrightly or to offend Republican sensibilities -- forcing the salient questions about Romney into the spotlight.

Newt's campaign even made "vulture capitalist" as momentarily familiar term.

Newt is as staunch a defender of the 1% at the expense of everyone else. He certainly wasn't the one that made inequality and predatory capitalism and current issue in the Presidential campaign. But in the current climate, Willard Romney's has a vulnerable spot in his lord-of-the-manor mentality. And I'm glad that the Republican primary has exposed it early.

Tags: 2012 election, joe conason, mitt romney, newt gingrich

Papa Doc Paul and today's Republican Party

Joe Conason asks the right question about Ron "Papa Doc" Paul: "What is it about the kindly old doctor that attracts some of the most violent and reactionary elements in society to his banner?" (The Lethal Fantasies Of Dear Old Ron Paul National Memo 12/21/2011)

Conason briefly recounts Papa Doc's history as "a perennial favorite of the John Birch Society and kindred extremists on the right" because of his general opposition to the 20th century, forget the 21st.

In that column, he doesn't address Paul's isolationist and civil-liberties issues that make him occasionally attractive to progressives. The depth of Papa Doc's libertarian views is indicated by his opposition to abortion choice. He may not like the gubment spying on Patriot Militia groups, but he doesn't think libertarian freedom includes women's reproductive choice over their own bodies.

Paul's Old Right isolationism is based on a narrow nationalism which opposes all international alliances and treaties, including arms-control treaties. He does allow that trade agreements can be acceptable. After all, they can help drive the wages and living conditions of American workers down to Haitian levels, which would fit in well with his Bircher libertarians Utopia.

Conason defines Papa Doc's political significance this way:

There is little reason to worry about the policies of a Paul administration, despite his current lead in the Iowa polls. But the rise of the Tea Party and the vacuum of leadership in the Republican Party have created a space for Paul's lethal fantasies, which if enacted would return us to the bad old days of mass poverty, rampant pollution, racial supremacy, and all the other ills that characterized the America of the robber barons. [my emphasis]

Tags: joe conason, ron paul

Will there be a split between Ayn Rand conservatives and the Christian Right?

Frederick Clarkson and Frank Cocozzelli speculate about a possible split between Ayn Rand fans who worship selfishness and greed as virtues and the Christian Right in The Randian Fault That Could Shake Conservatism Talk to Action 05/02/2011:

Movement conservatism usually presents itself as the stalwart guardian of traditional faith. But conservatism may experience a profound identity crisis due to the increasing popularity [of Ayn] Rand's philosophy of Objectivism -- which celebrates selfishness as a virtue; declares religious faith to be incompatible with reason; and altruism -- including self-sacrifice - is a vice. Objectivism says there are only two kinds of people in this world, creators and parasites. Suffice to say, such a view is very far from the vision of most conservative Christians.

All this suggests a deep fault line just below the normal fractiousness of the active factions of conservatism. If the exposure of the Randian Fault is a quake waiting to happen among movement conservatives, it could very well be The Big One.

It could happen. But I suspect they are being too logical here. The Christian Right has shown little hesitation about supporting tax policies that accelerate the increase in the maldistribution of wealth and income between the very wealthy and everyone else. And supposed Randians also don't seem to be that uncomfortable hanging out in the same political neighborhood as sex-hating fundamentalists theocrats.

Today's Christian Right base differs from that of the Scopes Trial fundamentalists of the 1920s in that that some of those in the fundi orbit then were also attracted by left-populist ideas on economics. Today's fundis seem to have comfortably integrated the values of "killer capitalism" (as Europeans have been known to call the American version) and of warmongering militarism. Promotion of Christian love and peace on Earth/good will toward men aren't high on their list of political priorities. And forget good will towards women!

Unfortunately, political analysts since Ronald Reagan's first term have been predicting an immanent split between the "Wall Street" and "Main Street" Republicans, another way of referring to economic libertarians vs. Christian theocrats. Joe Conason wrote about this in It Can Happen Here (2007), describing "the informal but clear division of functions" between the two groups as follows:

The corporate sector (and especially corporate lobbyists) provide the hundreds of million of dollars needed to fuel and lubricate the party, while the religious right (and a few other related constituencies, such as gun owners) motivates and mobilizes the millions of volunteers and voters needed to win elections. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the rest of Washington's vast network of trade associations and lobbying outfits funnel their money to Republican candidates, taking direction from the party leaders and mostly shunning Democrats. The Family Research Council, Traditional Values Coalition, American Family Assocation, Focus on the Family, the enormous religious broadcasting apparatus, and state and local ministries and megachurches send their devout followers into Republican campaigns while demonizing the Democrats.

Cynthia Tucker was speculating about the pressures for such a split in 2007.

It hasn't happened yet.

Tags: christian right, joe conason, radical right

Joe Conason on the Social Security phaseout drive

Joe Conason apparently changed his business arrangements around in some way. His column has appeared in Salon for several weeks, and last week it was also not in the New York Observer or Truthdig. But a column of his from 02/17/2011 shows up on Yahoo! News, Why Do They Hate Social Security? And even though we largely know "who", the "why" actually is something of a puzzle:

Among the mysteries of modern politics in America is why so many of our leading pundits and politicians persistently seek to undermine Social Security, that enduring and successful emblem of active government. In the current atmosphere of budgetary panic, self-proclaimed "centrists" are joining with ideologues of the right in yet another campaign against the program — and yet again they are misinforming the public about its purposes, costs and prospects. [my emphasis]

Conason is also someone who has followed closely the rightwing and (now) "moderate" Democratic campaign to phase out Social Security:

The actuarial experts whose job is to monitor Social Security's fortunes have long assured us that small and gradual rises in the tax revenues that support Social Security, accompanied by small and gradual shifts in benefits over the coming years, will solve whatever fiscal challenges the program may eventually confront. There is no reason to panic, and there is certainly no reason to consider wholesale changes in benefits.

Well, there is a reason, but only if your real aim is to destroy the system and replace it with something less useful but more profitable. Wall Street and its servants on Capitol Hill have lusted after Social Security's revenues for many years. And they regard the current uproar over the budget as a fresh opportunity to get their hands on a trillion-dollar bonanza. Given their record in recent years, it is all too easy to imagine how badly that would work out for everybody — except them, of course. [my emphasis]

Tags: joe conason, social security

Debating spending on Republican terms, unfortunately

Joe Conason observed last week that in Washington these days, "nearly every elected official is eager to prove that he or she is a single-minded accountant with the same mindless mindset as the Tea Party." (Need To Reduce The National Debt? Just Ask Clinton. New York Observer 02/10/2011)

This competition to slow the economy at the start of a very weak recovery by cutting government expenses is a result of the Republican narrative that government spending is the problem with the economy dominating in Washington with the Democratic President eagerly reinforcing it. One of the crazy things about that narrative is that Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush II showed vividly in practice that they didn't care at all about the debt or about deficits or high government spending as such. Tax cuts for the wealthiest are always priorities for the Republicans.

Which is the point of Conason's column:

Clinton isn't shy about explaining what happened on his watch. The budget deals he made with the Congressional Republicans were significant, but not nearly as significant as the tax increase on the wealthy that he passed, without a single Republican vote, in his first budget in 1993.

I actually take the still-unconventional view of the federal deficit that Jamie Galbraith advocates in his book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008). So I see the federal deficits and surpluses as driven primarily by the accounting equivalence by which combined public and private deficits will match the external trade deficit, rather than directly by budget-balancing efforts by the federal government itself.

But Conason's argument is nevertheless an important one. As long as the national debate over taxes and spending is fought on Republican terms of the virtues of deficit reduction, Democrats need to do as much as possible to make sure the revenue side of the equation is fully recognized along with the spending side.

He also has some acid comments on some of the "stupid ideas to restore fiscal order" that are being put forward with straight faces by supposedly serious political leaders:

Then there is the House Republican plan to slash domestic discretionary spending and then freeze it for the next ten years at the same level as 2006, which sounds reasonable until you realize that would require reductions of more than 40 per cent in essential government services like border security, federal law enforcement, food safety, education and environmental protection.

For politicians who are more or less on the payroll of the coal industry or the meat packing cartel, that doesn't necessarily sound so bad. As long as nobody is dying from E coli poisoning in the Capitol Hill cafeterias, maybe they believe we can afford to lay off half of our agricultural inspectors for the next ten years. Meanwhile the rest of us belong to the special interest group that breathes the air, drinks the water, and wonders what hellish bugs lurk in that package of hamburger. [my emphasis]

Tags: clinton administration, joe conason, republican party

Hope from the SOTU for Obama and the Democrats?

Joe Conason takes the most thoughtful approach I've seen to arguing that President Obama's State of the Union speech was a significantly constructive moment for the President and the Democratic Party. He argues that Obama offered an appealing and popular vision of the American future "that contrasts powerfully with the partisan negativity and apocalyptic pessimism voiced by the Republicans."

In Solid State: Forget the Haters—Obama Delivered New York Observer 01/26/2011, he argues, "The president cannot expect the Republicans to move his agenda forward during the next two years, but he can start to demonstrate why their own agenda is empty and stagnant." And, "Gently but persuasively, the president suggested that the electoral turn toward the Republicans last November was a mistake, and began to explain why."

This is important. Obama has articulated a vision that is, in contrast to that of the opposition Party, hopeful and even inspiring. Conason also points out that it was a dramatic contrast to the gloomy vision articulated in the Republican responses by Congressman Paul Ryan and the loopy babbling of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. The latter, he said, "repeated the same stale talking points that always issue from her mouth when she isn't inventing fables about our history."

Joe's hopeful take on the SOTU is reasonable on its face. Presumably he's also drawing on his intensive research into the thinking, personalities and tactics of the Republican Party over the last 20 years, including "Gingrich Revolution", when the Republicans also had taken a House majority against a Democratic President in the 1994 elections.

But, as he also notes at the end of his hopeful piece, "the true state of the Union is more perilous than Mr. Obama dared to admit." The factual flexibility the US has on its deficits and debt as a result of the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency in a system of (mostly) free-floating currency values gives the federal government a lot of leeway. But the realities of climate change are not going away.

And, in an issue that is more urgently pressing, the US has a high unemployment rate that the Administration is simply not addressing in an effective way. That, more than anything else, gave this speech a weird disconnect with the real state of the American public. It polled exceptionally well in the flash polling just afterward. But that's almost certainly because Obama kept things on a very high rhetorical plane, mostly avoiding saying anything that would quickly anger anyone.

Robert Reich makes the point this way in The President Ignored the Elephant in the Room 01/26/2011:

. . . the President’s failure to address the decoupling of American corporate profits from American jobs, and explain specifically what he’ll do to get jobs back, not only risks making his grand plans for reviving the nation’s “competitiveness” seem somewhat beside the point but also cedes to Republicans the dominant narrative.

The address he gave last night could have been given (indeed, was given) by Democrats in the 1980s when Japan seemed to threaten America’s preeminence. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign manifesto, "Putting People First," laid out the case. Only now the competitive threat comes from China. [my emphasis]

Both political and economic conditions were different in 1995 for Bill Clinton. The economy was recovering and would become turbo-charged from the dot.com bubble. And as bad as the Republicans were, FOX News hadn't started up yet and the national media were only a few years into the steep slide in quality they've been on ever since. Obama and the Democrats today face a very different situation.

Reich's complaint about Obama ceding the dominant narrative to the Republicans isn't necessarily inconsistent with Joe Conason's more hopeful view. Let's put it this way: Joe's hoped-for scenario may play out well for Obama and the Dems - but only if they do a better job at challenging the Republican narrative about government and the economy. Cute anecdotes about the gubment not being able to regulate salmon right won't get them there.

Reich also expresses understandable reservations about the Sputnik metaphor:

It's one thing to challenge the nation to re-embark on the equivalent of a race to the moon when most people feel confident about their own family finances, but quite another when economic security is as endemic as now.

I really hate to say it, but Sarah Palin's hick response to the SOTU - a "Spudnut" moment (?!?) - actually illustrates how little the "Sputnik" imagery registers with a lot of people. Even though what Palin says is so goofy it gives dumb a bad name. See Dave Neiwert's account with video, Speaking of 'WTF moments': Palin launches into weird babble about Spudnuts C&L 01/27/2011. Dave also has a memorable description of Palin's image as "her whole naughty-librarian schtick."

Also, it's one thing to lay out a potentially useful framework for putting the Republicans in a less favorable light. Actually engaging in political conflict with them in ways that create a sharp and clear contrast between the parties is another. We'll see if Obama is willing to do that. At this point, Harry Reid looks far more willing to join that battle that the President is. Digby has already caught Obama's political honcho David Axelrod waffling on defending Social Security. (Veto-proof Bipartisanship Hullabaloo 01/27/2011)

That's a good two-word way to define the problem with getting to where Joe Conason is hoping the vision of the SOTU will eventually take the Democratic Party: "Social Security". As long as core Democratic constituencies have to worry about the Obama Administration accepting Social Security Phaseout, neither Obama nor the Democratic Party will be able to do what they need to do to change the dominant Republican narrative.

Tags: barack obama, democratic party, joe conason, social security, state of the union 2011

Joe Conason is ready to see the Democrats make a frontal assault on the crazy

Joe Conason has been on holiday break from his usual venues in the New York Observer and Salon. He's back, with a piece in the former called The GOP Is Holding the Economy Hostage, and It's Time to Call Their Bluff 01/06/2011. As the title indicates, he's ready to see the Democrats rumble with the Republicans:

In their ideological zeal, the new Republicans on Capitol Hill seem eager to gamble everything — the financial reputation of the United States, the international status of the dollar, even the chance of a worldwide depression — on a showdown over the national debt ceiling. What has been mostly a routine if unpleasant debate in years past, with each party blaming the other for the nation's rising indebtedness, is rapidly becoming a mortal threat to economic recovery. ...

No doubt the Obama White House, which too often prefers "bipartisanship" to principled confrontation, will be tempted to make such a deal. The problem is that cutting the budget so drastically will undo the stimulative effects of the December tax-and-spending agreement — and plunge the economy back into recession. The President loses either way.

Perhaps the time has come for the Democrats to adopt a different strategy. Let the Republicans govern, or misgovern. Don't rescue them from their own recklessness. Don't vote to raise the debt ceiling unless and until the Republican leadership supports the bill — and if they refuse, let them take the responsibility for the consequences. Let's see how long they can listen to the screaming of their major contributors on Wall Street as the world economy shudders. Make the hostage takers surrender this time. [my emphasis]

Tags: democratic party, joe conason, republican party

Can Obama be a new "Comeback Kid"?

Joe Conason in Obama should push back -- like Bill Clinton Salon 11/05/2010 makes an important point. Though he doesn't put it quite like I'm going to.

Comparisons of Obama's situation now to Bill Clinton's situation after the 1994 "Gingrich Revolution" are inevitable. Despite Bill Clinton's devotion to the gospel of neoliberal economics and his famous/infamous "triangulation", i.e., giving Republicans some of what they wanted, he was also willing to fight Republicans. As Conason points out:

... the most important political events in the first year following the ’94 midterm were not compromises over policy, but confrontations that swiftly became disruptive, angry, polarizing -- and that Clinton won. When the Gingrich Republicans twice shut down the government at the end of 1995 in order to win their way on the budget, the president faced them down and portrayed them as right-wing extremists whose ideology portended chaos. He kept that message alive not only as he confronted the Republicans in Washington, but in a series of stealthy political commercials heralding his reelection bid that started airing in the summer of 1995, nearly a year and a half before the 1996 election. [my emphasis]

Conason has some suggestions about how Obama could do that. I'm not nearly so confident as he is that so-called fiscal responsibility would be good for the Democrats politically. To put it mildly. I think it's terrible politics for Dems. More importantly, cutting back government spending now may seal the economy's fate to be a "lost decade" like Japan experience in the 1990s and still hasn't fully recovered from.

But some of his suggestions are good and the basic idea is sound. The problem is that after fighting Republicans successfully in the 2008 campaign, Obama has been stunningly unwilling to fight them as President. He was far more willing to fight progressive Democrats to eliminate the public option from health care reform.

But it's what he needs to do politically for himself and for the Democratic Party. As Conason also points out, "Obama's position today is stronger than Clinton's after 1994. Today, unlike then, the Democrats can look forward to retaining control of the Senate."

Obama in 2009-10 let the best opportunity for legitimating a genuinely progressive Democratic message since the Great Depression go by. He's unlikely in the extreme to get that kind of opportunity again. But he can make far better use of the opportunities he does have.

Obama has spoken publicly about how the filibuster rule in the Senate is outdated and undemocratic. Harry Reid at last summer's Netroots Nation convention made the best brief case against the filibuster I've ever heard. Fighting to abolish the filibuster rule like they fought to keep the public option of health care reform would be a real step toward progress in the right direction.

barack obama, filibuster, joe conason

It shouldn't have come to this

I'm holding off on doing a post on the need for inner emigration for progressive Democrats. But depending on how the health care reform comes out, I could be there in a couple of weeks. Maybe less.

Joe Conason states the problem well in Healthcare didn't have to go this way Salon 09/04/09:

The essence of President Obama’s problem can be found in an anonymous quote, attributed to a White House official, that appeared on the front page of the New York Times last Wednesday. “It’s so important to get a deal,” confided the unnamed aide, that the president “will do almost anything it takes to get one.” Such desperate confessions of politics as usual, which have appeared in dozens of such remarks in the press over the past several months, not only serve the president poorly but damage the fresh brand that he brought to Washington after his triumphant election last year. They are the residue of an ill-conceived strategy that has left Obama politically vulnerable, attenuated his connection with loyal progressives, and blurred his most important message. [my emphasis]

We're on the verge of seeing an historic opportunity to initiate a new era of progressive ascendancy flushed down the drain. Not by Republicans or FOX News or Hate Radio, though they've all played a part, but by a Democratic Party that refuses to go to the mat for the most important needs of its supporters. It may be down to the Progressive Caucus and their willingness to vote down an inadequate health-care bill. Unless they force Obama to choose between a good health care reform package and no health care reform package, a critical moment may be permanently lost. This isn't about "the perfect being the enemy of the good". It's about a critical strategic decision about America's health care system that is likely to be with us for decades.

As Conason writes:

Nowhere has this fundamental mistake been more visible than in the effort to reform healthcare. From more than six decades of struggle over the question of universal coverage and cost control, the Obama team must have known that they would face enormous opposition. They should also have known, from the ugly mood of the Republican campaign during the final weeks of the election and the partisan history of the past 15 years, that chances for bipartisan agreement were minimal. And they ought to have realized that the energy of the progressive movement, expressed in their own campaign, could become their most formidable weapon in that battle. ...

But this president surrendered that powerful weapon when he chose aides who prefer lobbyists to activists and adopted a strategy that ranks bipartisan agreement above policy substance. The telltale remark came from still another anonymous aide who boasted recently that the White House would welcome a "confrontation" with Democratic liberals over healthcare because it would "show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done."

Obama has a chance, based on what we can see of our current situation right now, to be a positive and transformative President. Or he has a chance to win limpid compliments from our media priests of High Broderism for fighting against the core of his own Party, and spend the rest of his three-to-seven years as President fighting an essentially conservative battle to stave off the worst damage from a Republican Party that is already intimidating cowardly and irresponsible local school officials into requiring students have a parental permission slip to hear a saccharine speech by Obama about the importance of education.

That would be a tragic waste for Obama. It would be a devastating defeat for the people of the country.

Gene Lyons, Conason's co-author on The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000) addressed the same problem in his Salon column of 09/03/09, A cake knife is useless in a gunfight:

If President Obama expects Congress to pass a healthcare reform bill worth signing, he'd better grasp that "bipartisanship" is a means, not an end. After eight years of cheering themselves hoarse over one catastrophic Bush blunder after another, Republicans will start dealing with reality only when they're afraid not to. Right now, it's their talk-radio/Fox News-hypnotized base that's got GOP congressmen running scared.

On healthcare reform, Obama has mainly his own high-minded fecklessness to blame. To alter the cliché, he hasn't just brought a knife to a gunfight, he's brought a cake knife.

Tags: gene lyons, joe conason, health care reform

Timely warning on health care reform

From Joe Conason, Beware the Bad-Faith Reformer PolitickerNY 05/12/09:

Uplifting as it was to see insurance executives, pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospital officials and doctors gather at the White House on May 11, pledging cooperation toward health care reform, nothing they said or did was inconsistent with precisely the opposite objective. According to the famed pollster who is helping Republicans in Congress to block reform, in fact, the first critical step toward stopping real change is pretending to support it.

Tags: barack obama, health care reform, joe conason

Conason on Republican filibuster prospects in the Senate

Joe Conason says he ain't worried about no stinkin' filibuster!

In Who's Afraid of a Filibuster? New York Observer 11/11/08, he walks us through the math in the newly-elected Senate. I've been thinking that the Dems might have to use the so-called "nuclear option" of changing the rules and eliminating the filibuster to get measures like health insurance passed. And I for one wouldn't be very sorry to see that particular Senate tradition's demise. In practice, the Republican threats to abolish it, settled in a "compromise" broker by the "Gang of 14", abolished in anyway.

But Conason looks at Republicans who are facing tough re-election fights in 2010. And I like the results of his calculations:

Six Senate Republicans will face reelection two years hence in states that went for Mr. Obama: Judd Gregg (R-NH), Arlen Specter (R- PA), George Voinovich (R-OH), Mel Martinez (R-FL), Chuck Grassley (R- IA), and Richard Burr (R-NC). Having seen their fellow incumbents fall in the last two elections, that half dozen may well consider themselves in varying degrees of political peril. Poor Mr. Gregg watched his New Hampshire colleague John Sununu drop this year as their state turned deep blue. Mr. Martinez won his seat in 2004 by a single point and is widely considered vulnerable. So are Mr. Specter, nearing his 80th birthday, and Mr. Voinovich, now 72.

Several other Republican incumbents may confront difficult reelection races in 2010 too, including Kit Bond (R-MO), whose state went for John McCain by a miniscule margin (many votes fewer than the number who voted for Ralph Nader). Nor should we forget Jim Bunning (R-KY), 77 years old and aging badly, who was nearly taken out in 2004 by an underfunded, little-known Democrat. Recent polls show him sinking.

And finally there is Mr. McCain himself, whose popularity in Arizona has diminished markedly this year. His term will expire in two years as well, and at least one poll shows that he would lose his seat to Janet Napolitano, the state’s popular Democratic governor. Perhaps that is why he returned home to campaign on the eve of the election.

If Obama puts on a full-court press and mobilizes the base on key issues, he should be able to steamroll the Republican obstructionists.

Tags: barack obama, joe conason

McCain + Iraq = Clueless

At least that what Joe Conason says in his 10/27/08 Salon piece, On Iraq, McCain doesn't have a clue.

The problem is that the bold Maverick keeps talking about glorious Victory in Iraq. When what's happening is that even the Shi'a Iraqi government is demanding that all US troops leave on a fixed timetable. Even though the Cheney-Bush administration capitulated on that point in the negotiations over a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) - which meant that "the White House abandoned its own long-held position and completely undercut McCain at the same time" - the Iraqi government is now demanding more concessions.

At this point, the SOFA may not be completed by the new President's inaguration. The contending parties in Iraq may very well finish up their civil war(s) after US forces leave. But both Shi'a and Sunni factions want the US out. As Conason writes:

So much for the fantasies of the neoconservatives, who once imagined the new Iraq as a permanent base for American troops in the Middle East, with a client government that would reflect U.S. priorities. What has come to exist instead is an Iraq much closer to Iran than to the United States, one that will countenance no permanent U.S. bases and prefers that our troops depart sooner rather than later.

Yet McCain still seems to believe that we will be able to have a "conditions-based" agreement with the Iraqis that allows the withdrawal of our troops according to the judgment of American commanders and the president. Someone should try to bring him back to reality, and soon — just in case he wins this election. [my emphasis]

War the Republican Party way. Nothing quite like it.

Tags: iraq war, joe conason, mccain

Two images for Obama, McCain and the Establishment press

The McCain campaign rolled out the Republican dogma of the Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press! a few days ago, claiming that the mainstream press is in the tank for Obama. Lisa Benson of the Washington Post Writers Group immediately picked up the McCain campaign's message in this cartoon, which ran on July 24.


McCain is adored by the national press corps. And they're generally pretty shameless about showing it. Both McCain himself and Chris Matthews have said that press is McCain's "base". And Matthews wasn't being disapproving in saying that. He adores the bold Maverick.

So the Establishment press is happy to help McCain promote his campaign themes. Even, as in this case, when the theme turns out to be the Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press! meme that the Republicans have been using for decades now to "work the ref" and browbeat the press into giving their spin favorable treatment.

This willingness by our "press corps" to fawn on their favorite Maverick is a huge advantage for McCain's campaign.

We need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time when looking at this problem, though. The press corps hate and despite the Clintons even more than they luu-uuv their Maverick. So when their Wicked Witch was still in the primary campaign, they did give Obama much more favorable treatment than they did Clinton. Or, it would be more accurate to say that the way the pundits trashed Clinton relentlessly was not matched by any such hostile treatment of Obama.

But the press played Rev. Wright controversy as a potential scandal for Obama. McCain's kissing up to crackpot radical clerics like John Hagee never came in for remotely the level of criticism and negative commentary that Obama did over Wright.

And check out this column from Maureen Dowd, who is ostensibly praising Obama in it, Is ‘The One’ Cocky or Commander in Chiefy? New York Times 07/23/08. In it, she uses the Obama-as-cult-leader labeling of him as "The One". Her first three paragraphs deal with that all-important issue of clothing style and its clues as to "presidential judgment". She refers to the wife of the French President as Obama's "glittery groupie". On his Middle East trip, Obama had been "girding his messianic loins" for his visit to Israel. The King of Jordon, she tells us, met with "the prince of Chicago". "Obama was acting as though he were already 'on a coin,' she writes, musing that "cocky or not", Obama "needs to swoop up to conquer so Americans can picture him in the role", whatever in the name of Zeus that may mean. She couldn't pass up a reference to "his paternal family's Muslim roots". She lets us know that she thinks Obama is a phony and an elitist by referring to the "old skill that Obama honed at the Harvard Law Review of listening until everyone at the table felt they had been heard (and agreed with)".

Dowd's nominally sympathetic column to Obama brings to mind the saying, "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"

But in the bizarro world of PunditLand, her column counts as a "liberal" defense of Obama.

Josh Marshall highlighted this McCain campaign poster, which symbolizes in a very kitschy, church-bulletin sort of way an important angle that McCain is working in his pitch to potential McCain voters:


As hokey as the graphics are, the poster illustrates well the image McCain is trying to project on defense issues in general and the Iraq War in particular. Including the "down-home" hokiness of it.

While those of us who have followed the war news closely realize that McCain has been a hardline supporter of the war all along and really has no clue about how to bring it to any kind of optimal conclusion, he's conveying a different image in his appeal to independents. He's claiming that he's been a critic of the war all along up until The Surge. (I.e., he understands people's frustration with the war.) And he's claiming The Surge which he advocated was a stunning success. (Therefore, "I know how to win wars", as the bold Maverick himself says.) And he's holding out the promise of peace through Victory, which is presumably a major part of this poster's intent; he's also talked about how he expects to have concluded the Iraq War within four years, thereby freeing up money to balance the budget.

The poster with its warplanes actually hints (presumably unintentionally!) at what McCain's real intentions are: escalate the war by intensifying the use of air power in urban areas, killing many more "terrorists" and civilian noncombatants. In the eternal faith of the air power zealots, undiminished by any and all countervailing factual evidence, this will break the Will of the opponents and drive them to lay down their arms in unconditional surrender, which seems to be McCain's only concept of Victory.

The idea of Sunni guerrillas and the Mahdi Army surrendering all their arms cheerfully to the US and/or the Maliki government and turning themselves in to be imprisoned and tortured for the rest of their lives is improbable in the extreme. Even more improbable as the McCain administration escalates the air war and kills more and more civilians, aggravating the hatred against the US and the allied Maliki government among Iraqis, while making the already severe refugee crisis that much worse.

But the McCain in that poster could wind up coming off to a lot of independents, even those who favor a quick withdrawal from Iraq, as being the better candidate to pull off such a withdrawal. The appeal is basically: Look, McCain is experienced and practical and he's also a mean old guy. He promoted The Surge and it seems to have worked. He's more likely to be able to persuade the other side to give up and bring this war to a successful conclusion than Obama.

And, as Joe Conason explains in McCain's embarrassing assertions on the Iraq surge Salon 07/25/08, McCain's doting admirers in the press are only too willing to let him get away with the most dishonest characterizations of his own record and the results of The Surge. In the real world, McCain's claims about The Surge border on the crackpot:

So insistently do the media's mainstream and conservative commentators repeat the Iraq success meme - echoing the mantra of George W. Bush and John McCain - that to probe its premises and assumptions is not permitted. To question the success of last year's troop escalation supposedly implies a negative assessment of the performance of American soldiers and Marines and may even imperil their morale, creating a frame that stifles dissent. But now McCain himself has inadvertently reopened real debate on the subject by claiming that strategies and tactics used to quell the Sunni insurgency long before the surge troops arrived in Iraq should nevertheless be attributed to the surge. Indeed, the surge is so brilliant and so powerful, according to McCain, that it makes things happen in the past as well as in the present and the future.

That must be what passes for "maverick" thinking, although there are certainly other names for it. For those of us who remain tethered to reality, however, the success of the surge must be measured in a context that accounts for many other factors - as must the simple assertion that we are winning the war in Iraq as a result of the escalation. (my emphasis)

But our broken press corps is happy to enable this man's campaign for the Presidency, which will mean widening the war to Iran. Obama and the Dems have to come up with effective pushback on this. They really need to go after the press corps for their sloppiness and laziness on this whole thing. Otherwise, we'll have three months of the punditocracy talking about how the Great American and War Hero McCain came up with a brilliantly successful notion of The Surge, while the pundits themselves cringe in the face of Republican charges that the press is favoring Obama.

Obama needs to take a lesson from Hillary Clinton's campaign: you have to fight media dysfunction head-on.

Tags: barack obama, establishment press, joe conason, mccain

McCain's "lessons of Vietnam"

Joe Conason asks the question that the courtier Establishment press doesn't much want to bother with: just what are the lesson John "100 Years War" McCain took from the Vietnam War? (What John McCain didn't learn in Vietnam Salon 07/04/08). He writes:

The most pertinent issue is not what McCain did or didn't do during the war in Vietnam, but what he learned from that searing, incredibly bloody and wholly unnecessary failure of U.S. policy. Clearly he learned that torture is morally wrong, illegal and counterproductive, and he has spoken with great moral authority on that issue. But listening to him now and over the past decade or so, he also seems not to have learned why that war itself was a tragic mistake - and why we needed to leave Vietnam long before we did.

Conason may be a tad generous to McCain on the torture issue. As a responsible adult, he certainly knows torture is wrong. But despite his posturing in the Senate, he supports Bush's torture policy. And he will almost certainly continue it if he's elected President.

Conason focuses on what McCain seems to have learned from the Vietnam War. He has to do quite a bit of educated guessing in the process. Because the press courtiers are too busy laughing at his jokes on the campaign bus to dig into boring policy matters like this:

Indeed, what is most striking about McCain's attitude toward Vietnam is his insistence that we could have won - that we should have won - with more bombs and more casualties. In 1998, he spoke on the 30th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. "Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, I believed and still believe that the war was winnable," he said. "I do not believe that it was winnable at an acceptable cost in the short or probably even the long term using the strategy of attrition which we employed there to such tragic results. I do believe that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed." Five years later, he said much the same thing to the Council on Foreign Relations. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal."

Very few military historians agree with McCain's bitter analysis, which suggests that a ground invasion and an even more destructive bombing campaign, with an unimaginable cost in human life, would have achieved an American victory. (my emphasis)

McCain's comments on the Iraq War have been incredibly light on what he would actually do militarily to achieve that magical result of having no Iraqis attacking American troops, which would allow us to leave the troops there for 100 years, or 1,000, or 10,000, depending on which McCain statement you want to pick.

Tags: iraq war, joe conason, mccain

Joe Lieberman's alternative history and Trot foreign policy inclination

Leon Trotsky and Holy Joe Lieberman: "comrades" at last?

Joe Liberman becomes an increasingly sad case almost by the day, it seems. He's practically become McCain's butler to judge by the number of times he appears with him in public. Does McCain even go outside without Lieberman there any more?

Lieberman's rightwing radicalism - let's call it what it is - was on full display this past Wednesday in his op-ed Democrats and Our Enemies Wall Street Journal 05/21/08. The Democratic Senate establishment was sympathetic to Lieberman in his 2006 Senate re-election campaign, even after he lost the Democratic nomination. Harry Reid is still running around defending the guy.

But here's a good example of how a timely intra-party challenge can be good for the Party rather than simply "divisive". Lieberman is building up to his Zell Miller act at this year's Republican National Convention, and his op-ed gives a good idea of what we can expect. McCain is using Lieberman to boost his "bipartisan" credentials to posture as a phony "moderate" for the general election. I don't expect it, but I also wouldn't be terribly surprised if he picks Lieberman as his running mate.

Since Lieberman, though, was not elected as a Democrat in 2006, that gives the Party a way to undercut his shtick about upholding the true Democratic tradition against that radical America-hating black guy Obama and the anti-American Democratic Party. Of course, the Dems need to actively make the effort to start creating that distance now before Lieberman puts on his clown show at the Republican Convention. Harry Reid, in other words, needs to shut the hell up making excuses for Lieberman and start discrediting him. The Dems all need to emphasize that even though Holy Joe voted with the Dems in organizing the Senate, he is the Senate representative of a one-man party, the Independent Democratic Party. Actually, the FOXist grammar using "Democrat" as the adjective would be appropriate here - the Independent Democrat Party - since Lieberman is the only known member of that organization. (Technically, I don't think it's a Party organization at all, but the point is he's not an elected Senator of the Democratic Party.)

Joe Conason rakes Lieberman over the coals for his Journal op-ed in Joe Lieberman, ideological turncoat Salon 05/23/08. I couldn't hope to outdo Conasaon's version of how tendentious Lieberman is being now. But I will comment on a couple of things that particularly struck me.

Lieberman recites the standard "Reagan Democrat" jive-talk about how Truman and Kennedy and LBJ were tough and warlike but today's Democratic Party is just a bunch of wimps. Actually, it's worse than that. What he says is:

This worldview began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party. Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the communist world, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor – a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and "inordinate fear of communism" represented the real threat to world peace.

It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America's fault. (my emphasis)

As Conason sensibly asks:

Which Democrats does Lieberman think represented this dubious worldview? Was it George McGovern, decorated veteran of World War II? Was it Jimmy Carter, the former Navy submarine officer who stood against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?

Lieberman's caricatured version of Democratic foreign policy post-1968 is actually so far off that it would would be a challenge to dig up even a few leftwing pamphlets, leaflets or articles from "the 60s" that actually stated such a case. And half those would be from FBI front groups. Even among the relatively tiny group of followers of actual Marxist-Leninist parties and sects such baldly-stated views would be scarce. Trotskyist groups always saw the Soviet Union as horribly threatening; the neocons' Trotskyist hostility to the USSR is one thing that didn't change much in their journey from Trotskyism to neoconservatism.

The "Old Left" Communist Party was pro-Soviet but saw other countries like China as big problems. Conversely, Maoist groups saw "Soviet social-imperialism" as just as threatening an evil as American imperialism. And, after 1972 and the US-Chinese rapprochment, the Maoist position was that the Soviet Union was more of a threat in the world than the US.

To the extent any of those Marxist views affected Democratic Party thinking at all, it was primarily through those hawkish Democrats who would later be known as neoconservatives and whose outlook was heavily influenced by Troskyism. Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, aka, "the Senator from Boeing", was a major mentor and sponsor of the neocons. Elliott Abrams and Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle both served as aides to Jackson. And Lieberman praises the "principled efforts" of "Democratic Cold Warriors like Scoop Jackson [who] fought against the tide" of Democratic foreign policy thought.

In fact, the very words "empire" and "imperialism" were considered a sign of lack of seriousness in foreign policy discussion among most Democrats until very recently. And that changed because the post-Trotskyist neocons started frankly and approvingly describing the United States as an "empire". In what must be in part some weird kind of projection, a lot of the statements from the neocons in the 2000s sound like what in the 1960s would have been overdrawn parodies of militarists. Michael Ledeen's infamous quote about how the US should pick up some crappy little country every 10 years or so and slam it against the wall just to show we mean business comes to mind.

In fact, given Lieberman's kind of sleaze-slinging, the Dems should insist on more aggressive reality-checking by the press on some of these things. For instance, check out this from Sid Blumenthal's 1986 The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power:

In the 1976 Democratic primaries, the neoconservatives supported Senator Henry Jackson, a black hole of charisma who could not fill the vacuum left by [Hubert] Humphrey. By now some of them were beginning to become an entrenched element within the Counter-Establishment. Their flagship publications, Commentary and The Public Interest, set the line, critical of Great Society social policy and non-interventionist foreign policy. At think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, they occupied chairs newly endowed by corporate benefactors seeking intellectual guardians. Some neoconservatives who, amazingly, still regarded themselves as socialists belonged to the Social Democrats U.S.A., which had intimate ties to key figures within the AFL-CIO leadership. These Social Democrats had battled for decades against the sins of Stalinism [Soviet-line Communism], and they viewed their position as unchanged. As they allied themselves with the right wing, they still quaintly called each other "comrade." Other neoconservatives belonged to the Committee on the Present Danger, trying to persuade the public that the Soviets had achieved military superiority and that the threat was immediate. Every deviation by the Democrats from the neoconservative line was assailed by the entity they founded in the wake of McGovern's intra-party victory, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority [CDM]. The name expressed their desire more than the reality, for they were not the majority and many of them were moving out of the Democratic Party. The CDM was the neoconservative party shadow. (my emphasis)

Since he's so chagrined by such doctrines, maybe Comrade Holy Joe should explain just where he stands in relation to these Troskyist and bastardized social-democratic ideas.

But Holy Joe has another problem in his alternative history. Since he himself was the Vice Presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in 2000, the same Party that Rush Limbaugh and all good Republican white folks were trashing then and now as being hopelessly radical, etc., he has to work in an additional revisionist twist. In Holy Joe's version, Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 represented a return to the Trot-style militarism that Lieberman supports! And the Gore-Lieberman ticket in 2000 was practically the reincarnation of Scoop Jackson and his social-democratic comrades! As opposed to that wimpy foreign policy advocated in 2000 by Dick Cheney and George Bush.

Even in a FOXified world, you would think that this would be too much for any minimally-literate person to swallow. But, at least in Holy Joe's case, you would be wrong.

In Comrade Holy Joe's history, 9/11 changed everything. Cheney and Bush were transmuted into faithful comrades and the Dems responded with "the old voices of partisanship and peace at any price". As Conason observes, "Lieberman's indictment of a party that abandoned the president after 9/11 is just as dishonest as his failure to discuss his own evolution," said evolution from being a peacenik Democrat in his youth to a Comrade Warmonger today.

Tags: joe conason, joe lieberman, neoconservatives, trotskyism

The Democratic primary race and the fog of press coverage

Is Nixon's "Southern Strategy" haunting the Clinton campaign?

I've been trying during the primary season to recognize my own preferences - Obama's Iraq withdrawal plan, Clinton's national health insurance plan - and also try to look as critically as possible at media coverage on all the Democratic candidates. Because the coverage on issues like Obama's very scary (in the minds of Big Pundits and the GOP) black pastor, for instance, was and is atrocious.

But the hostility of the press corps toward the Clintons is also downright pathological. It continues to be so to this day. And from all appearances will remain so as long either of the Clintons is still drawing breath. Even though Obama is almost sure to be the nominee, the whack-job press coverage of Clinton's campaign just continues the herd mentality of the Establishment press of pimping the most ludicrous "scripts" about Democrats.

When I try to step back from the day-to-day news on the campaign, I still think that the delegate counts are close enough to a majority for Obama that unless he gets caught on film making a secret pact with "100 Years War" McCain to keep the Iraq War going until the end of time, he'll get the nomination.

But he hasn't reached the magic number yet. So even though Clinton is a long shot, she's very much a live possibility. And I for one admire her tenaciousness. I have confidence in Obama's abilities to be a good President. I also have confidence that with either Obama or Clinton, the public and the Party base are going to have to keep fighting for a full withdrawal from Iraq and for a decent health-insurance plan with either of them in the White House. That's just the way politics works. Even with a President who wants to do the right thing, those who support the right thing have to bring enough pressure to make them do it. And with both the Iraq War and health insurance, powerful, visible, well-funded lobbies will press hard to prevent them from doing the right thing.

I have basically zero hope that the following will play a role in the fall campaign. But the war in Afghanistan is qualitatively as much of a disaster as the Iraq War. It's just that the US and NATO haven't invested nearly the same level of troops presence and dollars, and that disaster is overshadowed by the Mesopotamian one. But for a variety of foreign policy reasons, the US needs to disengage from direct combat in Afghanistan. Whatever golden chances may have existed in 2001 to avoid the end result that the Soviet Union found in Afghanistan have long since melted away.

It will be a miracle of considerable value if the next administration can get the US troops out of Iraq, stave off the most catastrophic consequences of a post-withdrawal collapse of Iraq (although that is probably more in the hands of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey than the US) and get a decent national health-insurance plan finally enacted. It would be a monumental tragedy to see a Democratic administration and a Democratic majority wrecked by the Afghanistan War. Because there aren't things in politics that I would feel nearly 100% sure about. But one of those few is my confidence that the "postpartisanship" for which Obama and many of his supporters hope will not materialize over either the Iraq or Afghanistan Wars. The day after a Democratic candidate is elected, the media and the GOP will go to work trying to blame every problem that occurs in both places of the shortcomings of the new President.

But back to the real existing campaign. I can still manage to watch David Brooks and Mark Shields on the Friday PBS Newshour without much rending of clothing or gnashing of teeth. But 4 1/2 years of blogging and five years-plus of the Iraq War has really made me much more intensely aware of the appalling state of TV journalism especially. Yes, even the PBS version, although we can still call most of what the Newshour does "journalism" without abusing the word excessively.

Their latest outing (Shields and Brooks Examine Impact of Epic Contest 05/09/08)produced what to me were some real groaners. Here's highbrow Republican hack Brooks, asked if the Democratic campaign is essentially over:

In everybody's mind but Hillary Clinton's, it seems. And I really think there's been a psychological change in the party. They've decided the nominating process is over. It was very exciting, it lasted for a while, but it's over.

And the audience is leaving the theater. And they're looking forward to the general election.

But I think, in Camp Clinton, there's really been no sign of that. They're tenacious. And she's saying, "I'm going to keep running until this is over."

And as we saw in that clip today and in the children's health hospital, she's running the same kind of campaign. It's not a graceful, gradual, "I'm a good person, I've got good ideas." It's, "Me versus him, me versus him. I've got the hard-working people, which is her new phrase for her supporter." I guess he has the less hard-working.

She's running a tough campaign, but the audience isn't there watching her anymore.

Except, you know, for the people who are still voting for her. The Daily Howler is constantly reminding us that when Big Pundits use words like "everybody", "they've decided", "they're looking forward to the general election", they are normally not using "everybody" and "they" in the usual sense that most English-speakers do. When Big Pundits say "everybody" or "they" has a certain view, what it often means is that the Establishment press thinks such a thing. Or wants such a thing to be true. Glenn Greenwald often busts pundits like Brooks (who's one of the worst offenders with this, it seems) for making statement like that without reference to current polling data showing clearly that what "they" or "everybody" thinks is plainly not what the Big Pundit is claiming. Such is our press corps. (And this is quality TV!)

Our liberal stalwart Mark Shields offered this, uh, alternative view: "I agree with David. I think the race is over. I think it's very tough for Hillary Clinton or any losing candidate to accept that reality, as long as there's any hope, as long as you're still getting crowds."

Now, I'll give Shields some credit. He actually still does make some decent political analysis, although his passion for doing so seems to be diminishing notably the last few years. He's at least been consistently critical of the Iraq War and opposed from the start. Which shows he's more sensible than the standard-issue Big Pundit.

But still, he and Brooks were united in their belief shared by they fellow pundits that Vile Hillary is finished and everybody knows it but her. And, oh yeah, those dumbass Democratic voters who are still voting for her. It's possible to recognize that she's a long shot but still stay cognizant of her real possibilities. And the fact that lots of Democratic are still voting for her.

One of Clinton's current controversies deserves notice. Shields touched on it in a blundering, half-coherent way. Joe Conason doesn't take a back seat to anyone in critical analysis of the completely weird way the Establishment press treats the Clintons. But even he was dismayed - at Hillary Clinton - by one development this past week, her unfortunate statement in a USA Today interview (Clinton makes case for wide appeal by Kathy Kiely and Jill Lawrence 05/08/08):

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

Clinton's blunt remarks about race came a day after primaries in Indiana and North Carolina dealt symbolic and mathematical blows to her White House ambitions.

As Conason explains in Was Hillary channeling George Wallace? Salon 05/09/08:

There is indeed a pattern emerging -- and it is a pattern that must dismay everyone who admires the Clintons and has defended them against the charge that they are exploiting racial divisions.

As Sean Wilentz and others have argued, there was no ugly subtext to her innocuous remark about the different roles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Baines Johnson in the civil rights crusade, although several prominent Obama supporters promoted that smear. And if Bill Clinton's comparison of Obama and Jesse Jackson was badly timed and clumsy, that too fell within the bounds of acceptable commentary. Indeed, the discussion of ethnic and racial voting preferences is not only fair but unavoidable and utterly mundane in American politics.

But this time she violated the rhetorical rules, no doubt by mistake. It was her offhand reference to "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans" that raises the specter of old Dixie demagogues like Wallace and Lester Maddox. Was she dog-whistling to the voters of Kentucky and West Virginia?

While I still cannot believe she actually intended any such nefarious meaning, she seemed to be equating "hard-working Americans" with "white Americans." Which is precisely what Wallace and his cohort used to do with their drawling refrain about welfare and affirmative action. This is the grating sound of Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, even though Tricky Dick would never quite stoop to saying such things in public. [Ouch!!]

Of course, Nixon enjoyed a more commanding position politically than Clinton must now endure. She has been reduced to extolling her support from hardworking white folks - especially those who have "not completed college" - in an effort to prove that she can build a "broader coalition" in November than Obama. (my emphasis)

Even though Dark Lord Cheney is far nastier than Tricky Dick ever was, comparing a major Dem to Nixon that way is a major-league jab. That phrase, "even though Tricky Dick would never quite stoop to saying such things in public", oh, oh, that one's gotta hurt! Of course, the George Wallace and Lester Maddox references aren't very pleasant, either. It's just that for Dems, Richard Nixon's name has a special place in the historical annals of political villainy.

Yet even with that tough a criticism, Conason goes on to observe:

On the merits of that argument, she could be correct. Despite Obama's appeal to a substantial number of independents and a dwindling number of Republicans, her chances to build an Electoral College majority may well be better than his are, owing to his difficulty in attracting white working-class voters. Yet the chance to make that case where it counts, in the ballot box and the caucus room, expired many weeks ago, when Obama's skillful operatives were organizing circles around the incompetent Clinton team. (my emphasis)

I would say, being a optimist about the Dems despite everything, and being very cynical about the extent to which the Reps have successfully attracted the segregationist vote in all sections of the country, that Obama's weakness among potential Democratic voters, i.e., swing voters who would actually consider voting for a Democratic Presidential candidate, that weakness is not so much a matter of conscious racism of the "I'll never vote for a black man for President" kind. It's part of a broader cultural conservatism that Obama may not be able to overcome in the endgame. John Kerry wasn't able to do so in 2004, either. Obama is going to have to fight the Republicans to get there on some other basis than "postpartisan" wishful thinking.

Tags: barack obama, hillary clinton, joe conason

Maverick war policy

Maybe the bold Maverick McCain has a foreign policy that's more than waging war and threatening war. But so far he seems to be keeping it a secret. Joe Conason in Bomb, bomb Iran? Salon03/21/08:

By suggesting that the Iranians are aiding al-Qaida, the Arizona senator and his neoconservative allies are building a case for strikes against Tehran and perhaps even "regime change," just as similar allegations, since proved false, were deployed to justify the invasion of Iraq. ...

The danger of a McCain presidency is not only that he would prolong our presence in Iraq but that he would seek to fulfill neoconservative dreams of a war expanded from Iraq into Iran and Syria, leading to a regional conflagration. With his campaign already sowing the arguments for a wider conflict, we will not be able to say we weren't warned.

Glenn Greenwald chimes it, also at Salon 03/21/08 in War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past:

This plea that we all just forget about the unpleasant past - stop trying to figure out who was responsible for the Iraq War - has become the principal self-defense weapon of the pro-war political establishment. That's their only hope for evading responsibility for what they've done. It's also the central hope on which the entire McCain campaign rests - that we should just all forget about the painfully wrong and misleading things John McCain said and did in making himself into the prime cheerleader for the most disastrous and unpopular war in American history, and focus instead on how he (somehow) has the experience and judgment to lead us to glorious Victory.

William Arkin gives his ratings of the Presidential types on the Iraq War in Iraq Is All About Iran? Not! Early Warning blog 03/20/08. Including the Maverick, of course:

When it comes to making sense on Iran, Hillary Clinton wins hands down over Barack Obama, John McCain and George Bush.

In his zeal to describe the mess created by the war in Iraq, Obama falls into the trap of lumping Iran in with our "enemies." McCain is even more offensive, borrowing from the president's always-change-the-justification playbook to argue that the Iraq war is ultimately about Iran. And President Bush is more confused than ever, fretting about emboldening Iran if we leave Iraq, but oblivious to how invading and occupying Iraq may have had the same effect.

And, finally, I like Steve Clemons writing and reporting as a rule. But here is an odd piece in which he sighs over the fact that our Maverick is no Richard Nixon, John McCain: An Act of Belligerency? TPM Cafe 03/21/08. Most of his post is a quote from an article by Doug Bandow in which Bandow writes:

However, the biggest problem with McCain is his philosophy. Sen. McCain once was a reluctant warrior, balking at intervention in Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and even Iraq the first time. Today he is the most belligerent of the original 2008 presidential contenders, except, perhaps, for Rudy Giuliani. If there is a war in the world, McCain can be counted on to join it. And if one doesn't exist, he is determined to start it.

The last two sentences sound right to me.

Clemons, though, wants to keep alive the hope that "perhaps McCain's acts of belligerency are all an act". This is what our Establishment press corps tends to do also, to insist that what the Maverick says and what his record shows are really just unpleansant compromises that the living saint has to make for politics. But he doesn't really mean it all.

I don't buy it. I think it's far more likely that the Maverick's greater willingness to embrace war beginning in the 1990s came from what the neocons like to call the "unipolar moment" in which the post-Cold War US remained as the only superpower. In any case, the Maverick is spelling out his war policies. As Conason says, "we will not be able to say we weren't warned".

joe conason, mccain, steve clemons

It's the war, Dems, it's the war!

Tom Hayden, who is currently an enthusiastic Obama supporter, Makes a couple of very important points about the Presidential race in McCain Flying High Again; Obama Edging Past Clinton; Clinton Facing Mass Skepticism Huffington Post 02/13/08. While McCain's "maverick" reputation is mostly phony, his personal story as a Vietnam veteran and prisoner of war does have a strong emotional appeal. "McCain is a worthy Republican candidate," he writes, "with an understated heroism of character, able to win independents and Western voters, who tends to be trusted by Americans who feel threatened by war." He cautions the Dems against trying to focus the campaign against him on "issues of age, character or temperament". Instead:

The real issues which many Democratic consultants and insiders fear to address are Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and "national security". They are haunted by the party's anti-war past, even though they understand that the Vietnam war was a disaster. McCain's strategists smell this Democratic vulnerability. They will try to achieve a bipartisan consensus that there is something called "Islamo-fascism", that the menace is unified, and that it is evil, that it can be confronted only by military force. Thus they can force Democrats into arguing that Iraq is a distraction from Afghanistan, that Marines should be transferred from Baghdad to Kabul in a downward spiral of fighting al Qaeda. They may find themselves trapped in McCain's battlefield of assumptions. (my emphasis)

The Democrats can't afford to screw this up in the fall election.

Because the bold Maverick is highly vulnerable on his support for the Iraq War. The fact that he is essentially calling for an open-ended fight tells me two things. One is that he's operating on the conservative stab-in-the-back dogma that says the US lost the Vietnam War only because the gutless public and the wimpy politicians lost their Will. The other is that he really has no clue how to bring American involvement in the Iraq War to a resolution.

Joe Conason in McCain's risky strategy Salon 02/15/08 about the Straight Talker's political weak point on the Iraq War. The Maverick, he explains, is basing his campaign on putting over a perception that The Surge is achieving brilliant succes:

One year after the first deployments of the American troop escalation in February 2007, proponents of the Iraq war have unanimously proclaimed "the surge" a smashing success. "We are winning," they proclaim on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and the New York Post (as well as in periodicals not owned by Rupert Murdoch).

Nearly everyone culpable in creating and prolonging this disastrous intervention describes the latest perceived success as a triumph over the forces of disorder and terror - and none more than Sen. John McCain, whose presidential aspirations may well depend on perception of progress toward "victory."

The American Prospect Online has been poking holes in McCain's Maverick image:

The Maverick Myth by Paul Waldman The American Prospect Online 02/12/08

Charmless Offensive by Steve Benen The American Prospect Online 04/03/07

The McCain Charade by Robert Kuttner The American Prospect Online 10/02/06

Tags: joe conason, mccain, tom hayden

Bill Clinton and the primaries

Two old Clinton reporting hands, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, have weighed in on the question of Bill Clinton's role in the Presidential primaries (Conason, Hillary Must Get Control of Bill New York Observer 01/29/08, Lyons, Campaign has one too many Clintons Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 01/30/08).

Lyons is somewhat easier on the Big Dog. Referring to the immediate aftermath of the South Carolina primary, he writes:

On TV, the usual talking heads — Chris Matthews, Howard Fineman, Margaret Carlson et al. — were partying like it was January 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky story broke and the Clinton presidency was presumed DOA. So somebody sticks a camera in Bill’s face, asks him an insulting question, and he reminds them that Jesse Jackson won the South Carolina primary twice, but never the nomination.

That set off racial sensitivity alarms throughout the media and even certain normally more sensible precincts of the liberal blogosphere. Bill Clinton had played the race card ! Hands were wrung. Lamentations filled the air. Because as we all know, Jackson (who supports Obama ) exists in only one dimension, blackness; therefore, any / all references to his political career constitute bigotry. Everybody else can spend hours parsing racial demographics, but not Bill Clinton. Except Jackson himself didn’t object. Neither did Obama. I’m with Congressional Quarterly columnist Craig Crawford, who told Joe Scarborough: “I really think the evidence-free bias against the Clintons in the media borders on mental illness. I mean, I think when Dr. Phil gets done with Britney, he ought to go to Washington and stage an intervention at the National Press Club.... [W ] e’ve gotten into a situation where if you try to be fair to the Clintons, if you try to be objective, if you try to say, ‘Well, where’s the evidence of racism in the Clinton campaign ?’ you’re accused of being a naïve shill for the Clintons.” But I’d also say this: Somebody needs to put the Big Dog back on the porch. His attacks on Obama are unbecoming in a former president; people are tired of the Clinton melodrama; and the bigger he looms, the smaller Hillary looks.

Conason also defends Bill to some degree over the same incident, but his conclusions are more critical:

Nobody who knows the Clintons believes that they would intentionally deploy racial stereotypes for political gain, let alone that they harbor racial prejudice. Listening to actual bigots like Rush Limbaugh gloat over the divisive debate in South Carolina is truly sickening.

But in the aftermath of the absurd argument over the civil rights contributions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon B. Johnson, and the stupid “cocaine” remarks of Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn, the former president’s remarks following the South Carolina primary were stunning. By comparing Mr. Obama’s huge win to earlier victories by Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, he was making a factual point that could hardly be denied. Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Jackson are black men who benefited from the dominance of African-American voters in that state’s Democratic primary.

In some circumstances, Mr. Clinton’s statement would have been heard as harmless. After all, The Nation magazine dubbed South Carolina “the black primary” on its cover not long ago, and no one took offense. In the sensitive atmosphere of this primary season, however, when every utterance from either Clinton will be twisted and turned so easily, he should have realized that any such comparison would be heard as a “dog whistle” inviting white backlash.

Cynics have joked that Mr. Clinton was seeking to harm rather than help his wife’s campaign, while others have warned against his will to power (and the constitutional issues that might raise in a second Clinton administration). More likely he believes that his wife is the best candidate—and that he is deeply irritated by the press bias against her and for her current adversary. But if she doesn’t control him, then he will undo her, no matter what he intends.

Tags: bill clinton, gene lyons, hillary clinton, joe conason