Sunday, October 29, 2006

President Obama


Blacks in Chicago average about half the income of local whites, although Mr. Obama himself is probably doing his part to bring the average up. And good for him - he's a sharp guy who took advantage of his opportunities. But every politician has a pretty good living wage. What's different about Obama? Why do people love him so?

I think it's his silver tongue. Obama can give a damn good speech when he wants to, and frankly that's something recent Democratic Presidential nominees Kerry and Gore were unable to do. He's a charismatic guy, and he gives off the air of someone who is thoughtful, principled, and really smart. And what's more, he looks less stupid than most Democrats when he talks about religion. It's abundantly clear that there has to be someone providing a voice to counter the rampaging maniacs who currently control religion-in-politics. So on these two fronts, I think Obama is a great candidate.

Unfortunately, Obama doesn't meet the leadership standards I would really like to see, at least not at this point. These leadership standards are essentially the same ones that are being pushed across the internet by concerned rank and file Democrats about pulling the debate to the left instead of caving to the center, unplugging the influence machine in DC that puts its own above the country, and so forth. But Obama came of political age at the tail end of the Clinton triangulation era, before these values rose to prominence.

In 2000, Obama was dealt an embarrassing defeat in the Congressional primary by entrenched incumbent Bobby Rush right here in Hyde Park. His stated reason for tilting at this particular windmill was an astute observation that Bobby Rush is full of crap. Incidentally, Rush himself is beloved across the netroots for his sponsorship of the legislation to destroy the democracy of the internet, especially after receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign contributions from telecom interests. Moreover, he helped arrange a hefty donation by telecom interests to a technology center in Englewood, which I would argue benefits the long term interests of his constituents less than having a measure of freedom on the internet, which would allow normal people to fight insiders like him. I guess I've talked myself into a circle at this point.

So Obama took his purified optimist schtick out for a test drive and was soundly defeated. He challenged the corrupted insider interests, and they put him in his place. The lesson he appears to have learned is that he should play the insider game, even if he sticks to his populist rhetoric. For example, he has had problems respecting the will of the party's voters in Connecticut, where his show of support for Ned Lamont has been tepid at best. He apparently feels it's OK to praise George Bush. And while offering up some bipartisan praise or refusing to go against a powerful guy at your office aren't capital sins in and of themselves, putting things like this together leaves one with the distinct impression that Obama isn't really on board with the whole grassroots platform. Not to say he wouldn't be an OK President (and certainly better than anything Republicans will ever offer), and not to say he couldn't straighten himself out, but I'm just not sold on him yet.

Friday, October 27, 2006

Freedom Through Regulation


Freedom is something that literally everyone can agree is a good thing, like puppies, true love, or, in a bygone era, bright copper kettles and brown paper packages tied up with string. However, unlike puppies, freedom means different things to different people and in different situations. George Lakoff has recently examined how contested the idea of freedom is and what it means to liberals and conservatives. I think of freedom as something you get more of when there is more regulation, and I am opposed to those who think of it as something that comes from lack of regulation.

An incredulous observer might ask, "How can you say freedom comes from regulation? Do you mean like when prisoners, with their regulated lives, are granted the freedom to do a prison rodeo?" As it happens, that is not what I have in mind. What I'm thinking of is the Roosevelt conception of freedom from want, need, and fear. These are things that America must have collective freedom from, and, as influential theorist Jurgen Habermas has observed, "Group needs, which cannot expect satisfaction from a self-regulating market, tend toward state regulation."

Over the last few years, freedom through regulation has been overshadowed by so-called "free market" ideas, which use the "unfettered" definition of freedom. In my opinion, they piggy back on the good will engendered by the term freedom as most people know it to advance an anarchical freedom from interference by government in their despoiling of the world. You would have thought we'd learned our lessons about how well the "free market" does at protecting freedoms during the gilded age, but apparently at least some of us are at least tempted to forget the drawbacks of "free market" policies.

Let me put out a couple of examples. Everyone is free to lobby the government and public for what they want, so powerful corporate interests lobby against unions, and telecommunications companies lobby against net neutrality. The regulations establishing the right to collective bargaining and the egalitarian structure of the internet have done quite a bit to enhance our freedom from need and of ideas. But naturally these two sets of regulations promoting freedom are being targeted by the anti-regulation crowd. To return to Habermas, "The political public sphere in the welfare state is characterized by a singular weakening of its critical functions. Whereas at one time publicness was intended to subject persons or things to the public use of reason and to make political decisions susceptible to revision before the tribunal of public opinion, today it has often enough already been enlisted in the aid of the secret policies of interest groups..."

Corporations are actually pretty highly regulated, which is why it's so interesting that they are fundamentally intended to fight against the common good in favor of a very narrow definition of their own interest. Under US regulations as they are currently constituted, it is the obligation of stockholders to remove any corporate officer who acts against profit-making by standing up for what would actually benefit society, say by promoting environmental concerns. Never mind that it's going to be bad for profits when we have complete environmental collapse.

I suggest that it's time to rethink many of the economic regulations we have in place, to get them more oriented towards producing freedom, in other words, to start building a new economic paradigm. What I am specifically interested in is freedom from crushing income inequality and cataclysmic environmental degradation. One piece to this puzzle could be rewriting the definition of the corporation to make it less selfish. Another piece could be to stop calculating economic progress based on outdated measures like GDP, which count environmental degradation as a costless part of profit-making, and to start factoring in the totality of our actions by accounting for the negative side effects, as U of MD professor Herman Daly has urged. Some people have started to resist the free market, globalization-happy wave, but it might be time for something bolder than rethinking trade pacts. Clearly there isn't a lot of momentum for this specific plan at this time, but it's clear that sustainability is likely to be the defining issue of the 21st century. Our group needs in this regard cannot expect their satisfaction from a self-regulating market.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Blue Dog's in Congress

Good LAT piece about what may happen when the Dems take back congress. The piece ponders whether a Democratic victory in the House would be the liberal love fest everyone predicts, including republicans:




Or instead as a byproduct of running conservative Democratic candidates to win conservative house seat, we're actually in for a much more conservative congress when we take back the House and the Senate in November.

The article fits well within my fellow blogger's discussion of liberalness vs. winningness. Do we sacrifice our ideals to take back the country, or are we merely feeding the fire of a conservative take over by serving up Bush Light.

I think that the answer lies somewhere in between abandoning ourselves and abandoning the South. As much as I'd like to, we cannot just leave the conservative parts of America for dead and move on forward our liberal agenda. Clearly the Republican vision for America does not work. But just because that's true, doesn't mean we liberals are given the mandate to do whatever we want. We need to convince people. And that will take time, and compromises.

At this point in the debate, Democrats need to present solutions to the problems America faces before we can expect people to buy into our ideology and agenda. If that means sleeping with some blue dogs, so be it. Only when the Democrats can prove to America that we can be trusted can real change occur, and can we really start converting people's hearts and minds.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Anchors Aweigh!

No, not the nautical kind, the psychological kind. And, shamefully enough, the title of this post is also a song reference. Moving along, as many students are doubtless aware, there has been a movement amongst the Democratic rank and file of late to force the party to stop pandering to "centrists" and refocus on the liberal agenda all us diehards believe in. The intellectual justification goes beyond "Me me me! Do what I want!" though. Two prominent strains to this justification are the anchor strain and the values strain.

To me, all the most interesting aspects of psychology and politics deal with how people make decisions without comprehensive information, and anchors offer a great perspective on it. The idea is that there are some areas where most people just don't have any information of their own - say deaths caused by the occupation of Iraq. They've heard some estimates in the range of several dozen thousand, maybe 100,000. Then Johns Hopkins goes and reveals that it's closer to 700,000, and it's so far out of the range people are used to thinking about (i.e., that they are already psychologically anchored to) that they don't believe it. As the WaPo link above indicates, this phenomenon does not have to be bad, though.

The anchor strain of logic for pulling Democrats to the left goes that ever since the party lost Congress in 1994, it has tried to move a little more to the right in order to peel off just enough Republican voters to retake it. In so doing, the public essentially gets two right-wing visions: one that's real and well articulated, and one that seems like it's pandering to get your vote. Faced with this situation, you go for the real one, but more importantly, your frame of reference is anchored to right-wing policy frames. Then when someone comes along with a good liberal policy, it seems so far out of the range you're used to considering that it can't even be seriously considered. This argument has been partially vindicated by recent scholarship showing that over the past thirty years or so, people have consistently mischaracterized the Democrats as leaning further left than they do, suggesting that people's definition of "left" may be something just past whatever Democrats actually offer.

The values strain builds on the work of my main man George Lakoff. Liberals and conservatives work off distinct moral systems, liberals' based on nurturant parent metaphors and conservatives' based on strict father metaphors. But the two sides have enough accessibility to each other that they can still be mutually conceptualized - as a liberal, it's not like I can't understand what a strict father is. So when conservatives talk conservative values, it activates my conservative cognitive chanels, and when liberals talk liberal values it activates conservatives' liberal cognitive chanels. But when the Democrats give up on liberal talk and go for "centrist" talk, the voter is left with only his or her conservative cognition activated and therefore votes conservative.

And, in fact, Republicans have taken advantage of this fact by basing their ruling philosophy on the strategy of limiting choices. They keep yapping about a liberal media bias in order to anchor us to the idea that what we thought was non-partisan is actually too liberal, trying to force us to see conservative and really conservative as the only acceptable options. They don't let Democrats bring any bills to the floor, because that way it looks like only Republicans have any ideas. Then they spend a few years intimidating Democrats out of offering any alternative to Bush on Iraq, helped out by Democrats (like I Voted for Kodos whipping boy Rahm Emanual) who try to avoid running campaigns on the Iraq issue. But fortunately most Democrats have by now realized that Iraq is totally screwed up and worth holding Republicans accountable on, so when Democrats didn't give in to the Rove line about the need to Stay the Course, it ended up looking really stupid.

To the extent anchoring has been employed recently as a campaign tactic, I would say it is working, since Democrats are capturing more and more centrists despite (because of?) their more leftist appeals. But outside of campaigns, the stakes couldn't be higher. It turns out that on torture, Bush's re-positioning of the worldwide anchor is having the completely predictable, and tragic, effect everyone else anticipated: foreign regimes around the world are justifying torture as OK because the US does it. Hopefully the anchor strategy will stick in domestic campaigns and change in the international human rights arena.

Monday, October 23, 2006

Yousir

How much longer will Keith Olbermann be confined to MSNBC? I am ready to assert that his is the boldest, most admirable voice in television news and analysis. And it's not that he seems particularly liberal, it's that he has decided to call things as he sees them. We all know that reality has a liberal bias, but these days that has more to do with the fact that Republicans are being purposefully misleading (to put it charitably) than any inherent quality of the truth itself. No, Olbermann seems like a prime example of an enraged moderate, someone showing that you don't have to be a crazed communist hippie to think that eliminating a recent democratic innovation called habeas corpus (seems like 1215 was just yesterday) is a bad thing:



Since I like Olbermann's j'accuse tone, I think I am just going to start calling him Yousir. At any rate, former Salon editor Boehlert has come out with a recent book all about how cowed the American press has become, and it is supposedly very interesting. But you don't need to read the book to know what he's talking about - reading the newspaper with even a little skepticism over the past six years should have been enough to tip off just about anyone.

Yousir implies that there will always be an urgent threat that absolutely requires giving up some sort of freedom, just as demonstrates that there always has been. The powerful blog software we work with here at UC Dems can't predict the future, so we can't test whether there always will be an urgent threat. But my own investigation has turned up evidence that urgent threats existed at least as far back as 1947. Beware, the video below is long (I think a little over fifteen minutes), and it has some pacing and plot structure problems, but for an old news reel I found it to be pretty eye-opening.

And I am thrilled to be able to link to this incredibly good article by Corey Robin that touches on these very subjects. Just as it was hypocrital of J. Edgar Hoover to purge homosexuals from the State Department, it was also hypocritcal to claim you need to torture terror suspects when it has been shown that it is more useful to monitor them for longer before capturing them - and in any event torture doesn't work. This article sums it all up and puts the issue in perspective better than I can.

But Yousir makes a larger point, which does not actually break new ground: George W. Bush has been a criminally destructive force for our democracy and our country in the best case scenario. Things are definitely bad when Nixon's cronies start questioning your ethics and behavior. But you know how Bush has had a pretty bad year? It was well over a year ago that he had basically cemented his place in history as the WORST. PRESIDENT. EVER. This is not liberal hyperbole, this is academic consensus - much as some people like to whine about liberal bias in universities, they would do well to remember that academics study reality, so they can take up the liberal bias with that if they really don't like it. But despite the seeming obviousness of the President's shortcomings, not just to liberals but to anyone who values the very basis of democracy, Yousir is apparently the only member of the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM) who is on the BS Detector beat. Even supposed Democrat George Stephanopolous, host of ABC's This Week, failed to call Bush on his obvious, blatant, easily correctable lie (see link in first paragraph) about never being for "staying the course" when as late as a month ago he was using those precise words. Yousir is out there all the time proving that you don't have to be a partisan to appreciate the truth, and I hope that in the near future he gets a more prominent forum than MSNBC can provide.

Obama '08?

Local boy, and Oprah Presidential Favorite, Barak Obama kinda sorta threw his hat into the ring for the 2008 Presidential Race.

One word: awesome.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Lessor of a Lonely Heart

Yes, it's not the best pun I've ever made. But it is a good introduction to a discussion of the crippling flaws with the right wing vision of an "ownership society". Said society combines the Republicans' predilection for disasterous policy ideas with their predilection for sink-or-swim isolationist obstinance. It might come as a shock, but it turns out that this idea favored by Bush is actually a little disingenuous.

In essence it promises that when people own more, they will get and give more. They will get a larger stake in the American dream, and they will give more back in community spirit and involvement. This concept of the effect of ownership goes back an awfully long time. But another thing we know about Republicans is that they are completely corrupt and only look out for the richest one percent or so in their economic policies. So surely they don't mean that we should be letting poor people own things and get involved in politics, right?

Thankfully, the answer is yes - they have no intention of letting poor people own things or participate more meaningfully. Just because Social Security privatization is off the table for now doesn't mean they haven't won some battles on behalf of their ideal society. Last year's "reform" of the bankruptcy system made it easier to get credit while making it harder to file for bankruptcy, thus nicely wrapping up a gift to credit companies that are now allowed to entice people with more free money and then make sure it is remunerated no matter what. Incidentally, Republicans are now refusing to stop predatory lending to troops on the outskirts of military bases.

Needless to say, the results of right wing victories in the Ownership Society battle haven't really worked out for much of America. Serious problems are still going ignored, even in areas where a good faith interpretation of Ownership Society would predict positive things. Obviously things aren't going well for the poor (otherwise they wouldn't be poor), but they're hardly looking up for the middle class either. So not only do Republicans want to make us lonelier by abolishing our means of collectively caring for each other (i.e. Social Security), they want to make it harder for us to own things by getting us up to our necks in debt. So think twice before you put any earnest money on that lonely heart.

Horse Race!


Click for www.electoral-vote.com





Click for www.electoral-vote.com






Thanks Phil for the links.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Seals Closing In, Bean Struggling to Hang On

The latest polls from Constituent Dynamics have Dan Seals making ground in the IL-10 and Melissa Bean slipping in the IL-8.

No poll has yet to put Mark Kirk below 50%, so this is big news.





Check out this map http://www.majoritywatch.com/

Liberals: Then and Now

Over the past, say, thirty years, while the Right has been on the offensive, liberals in America have been confused. Way back when, liberals had moral theories of society locked up, but somewhere along the line, conservatives took control of the discourse on morality. How did liberals cede it? Generally speaking, I think it boils down to complacency.

As anyone with a liberal arts education knows, the term "liberal" does not just apply to dirty hippies. In the beginning, liberals were right about the direction to take society. Not only were they right, but they put things into a morally imperative context. By way of example, let me put up a few quotes from noted father of sociology Emile Durkheim, who I would consider to be part of the liberal intellectual tradition.

On the value of equal opportunity to society as a whole:
"If societies attempt - and they should attempt - to eliminate external inequalities as much as possible, it is not only because the undertaking is a noble one, but because in solving this problem their very existence is at stake."
On the justification for government regulations:
"Yet, apart from the fact that it is incorrect to say that any form of regulation is the product of constraint, it so happens that liberty itself is the product of regulation."
On the moral underpinning of the interdependence Democratic ideology recognizes and Republican ideology rejects:
"We may say that what is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to take account of other people, to regulate his actions by something other than the promptings of his own egoism, and the more numerous and strong these ties are, the more solid is the morality."

Contrast this ethic of togetherness, this moral basis for things like regulation that liberals today intuitively support, with the "leadership" of liberals like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Why did our leadership descend to this level? Well, there is no easy answer, but part of the solution is that it upsets wealthy corporate donors to make bold moves. Plus it's just plain scary to take the risk of going out on a moral limb to support something that hasn't been focus-grouped. But mostly I think liberals got used to being right all the time, and it made them lazy.

For most of the post-war period, there has been a cordial bipartisan spirit of collegiality in Congress. The only problem with this system of relative honesty and meritocracy is that it screws Republicans - since they are wrong all the time, working together honestly and in good faith would allow superior policies to be enacted, thus by definition precluding their own policies from ever coming to fruition. So when Republicans took over in 1994, that spirit of collegiality was one of the first things to go, and since then Democratic bills and amendments haven't been allowed. Democrats let their persuasion skills atrophy. They saw that things were easier when you were right, and that all you had to do was trot out some figures to back that up, and as long as the other guy did the same thing, your right figures would prevail. When the other guy stopped playing the honest truth game, being right was no longer enough. Demorats fell for the seduction of Pleasure Island, and they turned into donkeys. (Or do I mean donkeys? I definitely don't mean Pleasure Island.)

At any rate, a book happens to have just come out that offers the most direct treatment of this issue yet: Being Right Is Not Enough, by Paul Waldman. As a bonus, an initial inspection of the book's website promises the most comprehensive treatment of politics and foosball in some time. Unfortunately, my tried and true methodology of judging books by their covers (who could argue with that?) may not prove sound in this instance, as closer inspection reveals that it doesn't reach quite the depth of foosball coverage I was hoping for. But I digress. Waldman basically argues for the kinds of things I argue for on this blog, including a more morally compelling presentation of a unified progressive vision.

So this fall, the winds are at the Democrats' backs. We'll probably take some territory in the Senate, and we'll almost certainly win the battle for the House, and then we'll take our Risk card and wait for our next turn in 2008. But so far, the best that party leaders seem to be able to offer by way of vision is that We're Not Quite Republicans. And it's too bad, because when you look at what will actually happen, you can see that we actually are still right. Emile Durkheim was an uncommonly brite man, and I'm not saying we need to reinvent the wheel here by starting from scratch on the liberal tradition - we just need to reconnect it to our morals.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Political Advertising

I grew up in California, which is as safe as any single color-state, so I didn't watch a lot of presidential campaign ads. The only ads I saw were aired during Jeopardy, and since the only other ads aired during Jeopardy are not targeted to my demographic, I have to assume I wasn't being particularly targeted by these ads either. However, that doesn't mean I can't recognize good ads when I see them:



This series of ads is actually from defunct HBO comedy program Mr. Show, which was at one time almost certainly the best show on TV, a mantle which has since been passed to less meaty fare.

At any rate, we are now at one of those epochal moments when it is absolutley crucial for Democrats to snare young people (note my use of culturally relevant comedy material near the top of this post). The link in the preceding sentence postulates a fascinating scenario in which voting patterns for entire demographic blocs can be set for their lifetimes by the direction political winds are blowing when they come of age. So how come I'm not being targeted with ads?

As regular readers of this blog know (thanks, Mom!), I have a short fuse for all the jerks giving advice to Democrats. However, I feel free to advise that microtargeting is something the Democrats would do well to embrace a little more enthusiasticlly. Part of the problem, as explained by blogger hot shots, is that relationships between media consultants and the party have gotten altogether too cozy. Since the media consultants make their money on commission, their incentive is to just dump a wad of cash on some network ad buys, take their money, and go home, and the party lets them.

Aside from the obvious eternal goal of accountability, it's basically inexcusable in today's technology environment to behave that way. There are plenty of new (albeit sometimes creepy) ways to gather tons of information on not just how people vote, but what they watch/IM/text/read/skywrite. Geographic Information Systems are invaluable for mapping it out household by household. And there are many other tools that are by and large under-utilized. So get out there in your skywriting plane and start delivering the Democratic message! (Either that or make a note to mention this issue next time Democrats call you about a donation.)

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Republican Implosion

There is a crucial line of reasoning that all progressives should familiarize themselves with. Unfortunately, I didn't originate it, and frankly I don't have a lot to add to it, but it's so important I thought I'd try to pull together some of the stuff on it that other people have put out there. The gist of it is that Republicans are wrong without making mistakes. Let's set this up, shall we?

Flash back as far as you like: Republicans lie their way into Iraq, which they then screw up beyond belief. Republicans embarass themselves trying to privatize Social Security. Republicans are totally unable to even moderate the horror of Hurricane Katrina. Republicans intentionally cover up a sexual predator within their ranks in order to save a seat in Congress. Surely they must have really screwed up, right? Wrong! This is actually the perfect functioning of the conservative world view, exactly as it was always intended.

It all goes back to the man I love to cite, George Lakoff. In his paradigm-setting book Moral Politics (and in a more accessible way in Don't Think of an Elephant), he outlines the deep cognitive structures that form two archetypal political worldviews. The liberal, "nurturant" view holds that the highest values are mutual responsibility to take care of each other, to grow as individuals, to be respectful and inclusive, encouragement, and so forth. The conservative, "strict" view holds that the highest values are hierarchy, moral order, obedience to authority, discipline, paternalistic protection, and so forth. I found this understanding to be quite valuable, as it helped me to see how the apparent contradictions in conservatism (think support of the death penalty and opposition to abortion) were logically consistent within their own system.

So, taking a second look at Iraq, what do we see? A moral authoritarian, at the head of the hierarchy, forces everyone to be obedient to his authority because he knows how to protect them best. How about Social Security? Well part of the strict view is that you have to push the kids out of the nest, sink or swim, do or die. You can't be making their investments for them, they need to learn to discipline themselves by facing the harshness of the real world. Hurricane Katrina? In the conservative moral order, loyalty to superiors is highly coveted and rewarded. Michael Brown was a loyal donor, so who cares that his most significant experience prior to running FEMA was heading a horse racing group? "Sink or swim" got a particularly macabre chance to prove itself in the ensuing flooding, but hey, the government doesn't hold anyone's hand and people knew the risks of living there. The Foley scandal? Same thing about loyalty - Foley, it turns out, was instrumental in pushing against the 2000 recount in Florida. Plus, since one of the most important goals is preserving the moral hierarchy (which holds Republicans above Democrats), you should do everything possible to preserve the Congressional majority.

So, as I say, the Republicans were wrong: these were all horrible things to do to the country. But they did not make mistakes: these events were all the logical conclusions of various aspects of the conservative world view, and they were not done through unfortunate accidents or simple incompetence. The good news is that people are starting to recognize it. Libertarians and Mountain West states are both traditional Republican allies (although they overlap to a significant extent). And now the CATO Institute is about to publish a piece detailing how the libertarian vote has been trending Democratic recently. The Christian Science Monitor has noted that the Mountain West region is starting to trend Democratic. People are showing their frustration with Bush's lies and Hastert's obfuscations in poll after poll. To alter a famous Jimmy Hoffa quote (and one of my all-time favorites), people may forgive some mistakes, but being wrong ain't one of them.

Foreign Policy for Idiots

I took a class last year entitled Strategy, taught by Robert Pape. In the class Pape, described an incident between Taiwan and China during the Clinton Presidency in which China had become especially belligerent towards the "rogue province" and invasion seemed like a legitimate threat.

Clinton's move was to send an aircraft carrier into the Taiwanese straight, right in the line of fire if any kind of confrontation were to occur. This move diffused the situation as it signaled to China that an invasion of Taiwan meant war with the US, because they'd necessarily have to go through our carrier. Thus the situation was diffused, lives spared, and the peace preserved by using the THREAT of a response.

Bush seems totally incapable of this type of maneuvering. With our armed forces committed to both Iraq and Afghanistan, they become fundamentals useless as a lever in foreign policy. We can't fight a third war, and Iran and North Korea know this. Ultimately this is why both will be able to successfully acquire nuclear weapons, thus creating a deterrent to invasion.

And to add to that, not only has Iraq reduced our literal capacity for war, it has also made our case as the International Keeper of the peace seem like the excuse of a tyrant. Because we decided to "go it alone" in Iraq, the world has decided that we'll being "going it alone" in the perfectly legitimate quest for nonproliferation.

Theodore Roosevelt's famous invocation of the proverb "Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stick" is thus twice violated by the Bush Administration.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Democrats and Demographics

One of this richest traditions in Americana is the people in the South not getting along with everyone else, let alone each other. First, white Southerners insisted on enslaving black Southerners, then they insisted on putting up their dukes when people tried to get them to stop. But stop they did, picking fights thereafter with the general progress of the nation, which wasn't real thrilled with the South either. Eventually, the South's enthusiasm for evangelical Christianity may have reached a tipping point or something, because the social conservatism it transmits to the rest of the country is getting overwhelming.

During the post war period, Southerners have basically been Congressional kingmakers: whichever party dominated Southern Congressional districts dominated Congress. This was the Democrats up through 1994, at which point it became the Republicans. The net effect was that the ruling party was always disproportionately conservative on social issues because of the large role played by Southerners in its coalition.

Well that might be about to change. When Democrats take control of the House in the near future, there is basically no chance they will hold a majority of the Southern Congressional districts. People, specifically this guy Schaller, are starting to talk about why Democrats indeed should start ignoring the South. Much of the argument seems to boil down to this: who needs those jerks anyway?

Traditional libertarian Republicans have been getting more and more sick of the ideologically insane tripe spewing forth from the ultra-conservative evangelical wing of the party, and it is turning some key blocs blue. To wit, the Mountain West region in general is seeing a resurgence in support for Democrats in New Mexico, Idaho, Wyoming, and especially Montana and Colorado. Assuming the transition goes smoothly, and Democrats effectively trade the South for the Mountain West, how smart is that?

The MyDD article from above mentions that the South is slated to add 19 Congressional seats over the next 30 years, whereas the Southwest is slated to add 12. Well, despite that growth, the majority of the country still would not be living in the South. Perhaps more important, though, is the length of that time line. I foresee issues like global warming, which will make it even more necessary than it already is to have air conditioning in Arizona and Mississippi, and peak oil, which will make it prohibitively expensive to run an air conditioner, throwing a huge monkey wrench into those works. So basically I think the comparative growth concern is not one that should be factored into Democratic coalition building.

That leaves us with the medium-term wisdom, and on this count I think the idea of ceasing to meet Southerners half-way is a good idea. George Lakoff has shown that pursuing progressives' partisan agenda is actually the best way to build a larger coalition and more successful movement anyway, so why bother accepting ideological impurities just to please that bunch of jerks? The one note of caution I would sound is that it's not worth completely pulling out of the South. It would be great to stop accounting for its conservatism by moderating policies, but keep the ground troops there and keep trying to push the agenda there. Abandoning it wholesale will make it very difficult to get back, if it should ever become desirable to do so, and it would be unwise to completely abandon all those dedicated Democrats who do persevere there.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Go west, young man

Alternately, go north. Note: also applies if you are a chick. As many of you have probably noticed, there are a whole bunch of election campaigns going on right now. As you may have also heard, things are looking pretty good for the Democrats. As you may also know, there are a couple hot races right here in Chicagoland (a term, incidentally, that I love - makes me think of Legoland): one to the West, Tammy Duckworth vs. Pete Roskam, and one to the North, Dan Seals vs. Mark Kirk.

It's time to get out of Chicago and go out into the provinces - we're so close, and having people knocking on doors is one of the single most effective campaign techniques. As Marx tells us,
[M]ankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve...[I]t will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
The material conditions were not so much at hand for Democrats until the Republicans started imploding, but now the task is eminently soluble. Also, let's bring in Jack Handey to help us understand what Marx may have meant when he referred to "mankind":
Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself: "Mankind". Basically, it's made up of two separate words - "mank" and "ind". What do these words mean ? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind.
Moving right along, one of the criteria you may want to consider when choosing which of these candidates you help out is each one's politics. I canvassed for Duckworth yesterday, and although I found her likable and supported many of her policies, she seemed a tad more conservative than I would otherwise like. For example, she's pretty into tax cuts, which aren't something I see as a pressing issue, but more importantly her message is more conservative. You can tell because she keeps referring to her opponent, Roskam, pejoratively as a trial lawyer - a frame promulgated by the right since most trial lawyers are Democrats. This is bad for the progressive movement as a whole, even if it helps her win right now. Although I'm really not that surprised, since Mr. Win Right Now Instead of Planning for the Long Term (local boy Rahm Emanuel) basically forced out a more progressive Democrat who nearly beat long-term GOP rep, Clinton antagonizer, and alumnus of my very own undergraduate alma mater, Henry Hyde in 2004 anyway.

I met Seals today at a DailyKos event at some stupid bar, and he was both charming and had a somewhat more appealing policy list. But more importantly, his message was a lot stronger. He talked about accountability first and foremost, and I think that is the single most coherent and potent message Democrats can use this election cycle. Plus, if this is really going to be a message to the establishment election, the more progressive the Democrats we send to Washington are, the better off we are. However, that said, Duckworth is still totally worth supporting, and more importantly, she will pick you up in a bus and provide you with an incentive to work for her. My understanding is that the Seals campaign, in that it wasn't hand-picked by Lord Rahm, doesn't have the money to do that. Either way, get involved through UC Dems!

Thursday, October 05, 2006

People Always Want You to, Like, Do Stuff

Part of a general trend in media coverage of politics over the last 25-30 years has been to cover the various salvos in the political battle rather than the substantive issues at stake. It's basically the collusion of beltway insiders who all agree that talking about what you should talk about if you want to win is more interesting than exercising actual leadership...words, in this world view, speak louder than actions. But George Lakoff, hero to many progressives for his books such as Moral Politics, has actually produced one of these pieces that is worth looking at.

As Jacobs and Shapiro chronicle in their book Politicians Don't Pander (which I understand to be considered a rather definitive tome on political discourse in general), at some point major news organizations really started focusing their coverage on the machinations between politicians and the ramifications of same on the eventual chances of a policy being enacted. While political junkies like me sometimes find this interesting, it is frustrating as it comes at the cost of covering the actual implications of policies. In essence, journalism has largely stopped being about providing information and context for responsible democratic citizens to make up their minds and started being mindless "he said-she said" stenography.

For me, this really hit a low point in the early days after 9/11 when the Republicans were ramming through the first of their ludicrous tax cuts. I remember news coverage of that process consisting of a recounting of each side's spin: "Democrats challenged the tax cuts on the basis that they were disproportionately weighted to favor the wealthiest 1% of Americans," a typical story might go. "Republicans then accused Democrats of class warfare and insisted that the majority of the benefit would go to the middle class." Then nothing. No mention of how, if you actually took two seconds to look at the bill, the tax burden was being shifted disproportionately off the super rich and onto everyone else, no mention of how how one side was actually right while the other one was just lying.

So, I would argue that as an outgrowth of this same trend, we are now subjected to unwanted advice on what steps we need to take at every turn. The DLC, for example, might was well change its mission statement to "Telling everyone what Democrats need to start doing" - to quote from an actual speech by their chair, Tom Vilsack, "In order for us to strengthen the American community, I think we...need a very compelling vision of a different America." OK, great Tom, how about you just skip the part about the purpose of the vision and get right to it. Then there are the non-partisan efforts to tell all comers which switches to throw in their quest to run the political machine, such as the new book by a couple national political editors for major news operations.

Then there is George Lakoff, who has produced a much more interesting piece, not coincidentally aimed much more squarely at actual people instead of wannabe beltway hacks.
Another key to this being more interesting is that he is not giving it as a policy address or an insider book, he is delivering it as a resource on a website for people who may be interested in taking a more active part in strategy. It is not, in other words, substituting for actual policy ideas. That's what really separates it from the DLC.
At any rate, I would especially like to draw attention to point #3, the Laundry List Trap. The idea here is that whenever anyone asks a Republican how to address a problem, she has some snarky three word answer. Whenever that same question is put to a Democrat, she has a ten sentence answer that revolves around nuance, caution, and incrementalism. (On a side note, I would assert that this pussyfooting is what makes Democrats look weak, not the substance of their policies.) So I would ask every Democrat out there to do one thing: come up with one sentence describing why you are a Democrat. If your answer involves any specific policy, you already got it wrong; we're focusing on values here. Got your answer yet? Here's mine: because Democrats get that we all need each other. That's it. That creates a whole narrative for any further depth you get into and an easy fall-back for anyone to remember. All the idiotic pundits who try to get Democrats to talk about values to recapture Republican "values voters" would do well to just concentrate on something like this. Our values are never going to be the same as Republican values, so it's time we establish ours firmly.

Excuses Excuses

What really disgusts me about the Foley thing is how the Republican leadership and spin machine are handling this scandal. Jon Stewart skewered the Republicans last night for their buck passing: it was the booze talking, Foley was molested by a priest, Democrats have sex scandals too, and my personal favorite: Mark Foley IS a Democrat.





















As shown above, during the O'Reilly factor clips featuring Mark Foley had captions labeling him as a Florida DEMOCRAT!

Welcome to the bizzaro world. Up is down. Right is left. And Saddam Hussein organized 9/11 and has WMDs.

I'll post the Daily Show segment when it goes up on Youtube.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Fear the voices

Fear the voices - no, not the Alice in Chains song. Fear the political voices. Fear seems to drive everything in politics these days. You probably noticed this phenomenon getting under way a couple years ago. Anecdotal evidence abounds of tactics of bullying and intimidation by Republicans to get themselves elected and to get their extremist agenda pushed through: my personal fave was when Bush took crass advantage of the horror and tragedy of 9/11 to weaken his political opponents, the unions. But this isn't just fear-mongering, it is certified authoritarianism.

Researcher Karen Stenner (a/k/a the #1 Stenna) has done some interesting development recently of the already formidable literature on the political psychology of authoritarianism. An essential contribution of hers is the notion that authoritarian tendencies lie somewhat dormant in individuals until they are activated by threats to the things that unify us: common authority and shared values. As we all know, preservation of unity around these elements is butter on the authoritarians' bread, and nothing gets them riled up faster than the fear of erosion of authority and values.

A couple of first-rate fellows recently examined how authoritarianism might apply to our current electoral situation. The astute academics looked specifically at levels of authoritarianism in the electorate, the levels of participation in elections by authoritarians, and the nature of that participation. And guess what they found? Over the last ten years, participation by authoritarians in elections increased dramatically, despite no increase in prevalence within the population overall. Moreover, that participation was funneled almost exclusively into support for Republicans.

In other words, Republicans have sewn fear as a way to strengthen their coalition of authoritarians. Looking back, we see a threat to our shared values was introduced on 9/11/01, bringing on a period of deliberate unity. Gradually that threat faded, but as it did, other threats were introduced to prolong the gain for Republicans. Most of the country eventually figured out that they could resume use of their critical faculties, but some 30% + of people still support Bush. This percentage must be composed primarily of people who like authority more than sound policy, so the plan to scare authoritarians into unwavering support must be working on some level.

But thank goodness the winds are now at the Democrats' backs. Surely that means fear is now overcome, right? Well, there is one more group that remains fearful: beltway insiders. Joe Lieberman is afraid he might be held accountable, the Republican leadership is so afraid of losing one seat that they completely sold themselves out, the right wing echo chamber is afraid of competition from the left, and the punditry is afraid of the democratization of information gathering. All this fear on the part of insiders is due to the democratization of democracy that the internet (and blogs in particular) has brought on. Whereas once we had to fear terrorists or Bush's latest caprice or endless Republican domination, now we've got the insiders on the run from us common citizens. Today the last thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Illinois, Credibility, and Touching Little Boys

Just when you think you have the Republicans in a hole, they go and dig themselves deeper. By now most have probably heard about the criminal behavior of Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) in soliciting teenage page boys in the House of Representatives over the internet. Unfortunately, most didn't hear out about it until well after the House Republican leadership did (as early as five years ago), and that is going to be the real issue that comes out of this.

And, lucky us here in Chicago, when we're talking about despicable misconduct by Republican leadership, it all comes back to Illinois! That's right, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was well aware of the problem going way back, as was some guy named Shimkus, who I guess is from downstate somewhere in Illinois. On a side note, many people have heard of Howard Dean's "50 State Strategy", and I would observe that this is why you run a candidate in every district. At the beginning of this cycle, few expected Foley's seat in Florida (let alone the seat of the sitting speaker!) to be a close contest, but by gum it's a lucky thing we have someone in those races now: Laesch in Illinois and Tim Mahoney in Florida. The Illinois connection continues, since local boy Rahm Emanuel is the foremost opponent of this strategy as a whole.

The irony is that the age of consent in Washington, DC is actually 16, so technically a Congressman having sex with a 16-year-old page wouldn't have been illegal. But those fun-hating Republicans, champions of the buzzkill, defenders of the moral order, had to go and pass a bill specifically targeting the solicitation of minors under 18 over the internet - oh wait, it wasn't just Republicans, it was Mark Foley's bill! So despite the legal acrobatics of the case, Foley has still joined some pretty elite company (8-year-olds, Dude.). It's interesting, however that few of the moralizing right wing groups we have come to know and love have come out with any harsh language condemning Rep. Foley or the Republican leadership to date.

So the question for right now, as far as I can identify it, is how discredited are Republicans really becoming? They've always told us that they are strong on national security/defense and moral values, so now that they have f***ed up Iraq, the hunt for Bin Laden, and moral values, who believes them any more? I would guess nobody, but then again one of my faults has always been an unshakable lack of faith in the sagacity of anything Republicans say.