Oratorical Animal

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In the past year or so, the Democrats have won 3 seats in previously Republican territory--two in the South (Louisiana and Mississippi) and one in former Speaker Dennis Hastert's district in Illinois. In a trend that began in the 2006 midterms (see: Shuler, Heath in NC), the MSM inevitably describe the winners as "conservative" Democrats.

I haven't done a ton of research, but as far as I can tell, all three want to get out of Iraq as soon as possible, dislike trade agreements, hate the Patriot Act, support civil liberties, support some sort of universal health care, want to assist hard-pressed homeowners, and want increased regulation of Wall Street. In short, each takes significantly more "liberal" positions on these issues than Bill Clinton ever did. Why, then, are they "conservatives?"

Guns, gays, and abortion. That's it. In American politics today, those are the only tests. And, frankly, the gay test is increasingly sliding into the background. It is now at least an acceptable, moderate position in most areas to support "civil unions," as opposed to gay marriage. Or to run a states' rights argument; even McCain refuses to support a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage. Let "those people" in California and Massachusetts do what they want; here in (fill in the blank), we're still Americans. This is not ideal, but imagine someone predicting this a decade ago.

So, you can agree with the Democratic Party on everything except guns and abortion, be wobbly on gays, yet still be a "conservative." I suspect that this is partly an effort, a desperate, continuing effort, on the part of pundits like Charlie "Professors earn 200k a year" Gibson to ignore the rise of economic populism in the nation. But when winning Democrats in these districts embrace an African American nominee from Chicago and his foreign policy and economic agendas, then one has to wonder. Is there any practical meaning or force left in "conservative?" What kinds of redefinitions will start to happen?

The One-Two Punch

The Republican presidential campaign kicked into high gear yesterday with a revealing glimpse at their rhetorical strategy. This ought to be interesting.

Taking the high road was Senator John McCain. He spoke yesterday about the "results" of his first term. It was a bizarre speech. Mark Salter, McCain's frequent ghost, wrote the address and came up with its, for lack of a better term, science fiction strategy. McCain simply projected what he thought would be true at the end of his first (only?) term. I like this idea. I'm hoping that my new employer will allow it for my annual reports: "By January of 2013, the Oratorical Animal is a productive. much loved scholar. His two books have made their mark inside the field and out. Equally important, his active role in public service has brought peace to the Middle East and a World Series Championship to the Chicago Cubs." This is fun.

McCain adopted this strategy, of course, because 1) it allows him to take the high road and identify goals with which everyone agrees (peace in Iraq); 2) it allows him to ignore pesky questions of means--policy? We don't need no stinkin policy; 3) it allows him to ignore equally pesky questions of facts. One needs no evidence for science fiction.

Meanwhile, President Bush took the low road. In a speech to the Israeli Knesset, he said that "some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals." Ah, the return of the repressed; it's always fun to see the Nixonian "some seem" in American politics. From here, Bush trotted out the appeasement canard, most famously used by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in the run-up to the 2006 midterms. Remarkably, he compared Obama to appeasers at this venue. At the least, that's extraordinarily bad taste.

So, McCain takes the high road and Bush the low. Olbermann wondered last night why Bush stepped on McCain's big speech, but that was exactly the point. McCain is all sweetness and light (while endorsing Bush's statement) and Bush is all Nixonian. It appears that, at least until McCain has a VP candidate to perform the role of attack dog, the incumbent president is willing to take on those responsibilities. That should tell us all that we need to know about the relationship between McCain and Bush. Third term, indeed.

The Silly Season

The cable news networks are trying to work up topics of conversation as they cover Hillary Clinton's big win in West Virginia tonight. Since Barack Obama has locked up the nomination, interesting issues don't come easily. The favorite is clear: Senator Obama's "weakness" among white, high school educated, working class voters. Oh, they're crying, Obama has no chance to win this constituency! Needless to say, the Clinton campaign is egging on this talk. It's silly.

As I've noted before in this space, projecting general election performance in specific states among specific groups from primary elections in those states is, well, stupid. It's a bit like noting that Duke beat Wisconsin in the Big Ten/ACC challenge in November and then Wisconsin beat Michigan State during the Big Ten season in February and so, of course, Duke will beat Michigan State during the tournament in March. If you do your pool that way, please invite me to join. I like prizes.

Take a couple of examples. Will older, feminist women, Clinton's strongest cohort, express their anger by abandoning Obama for McCain? Not unless they're idiots. Obama will blanket the country with a pretty straightforward and absolutely true argument: John Paul Stevens is a million years old. Honest to God, he was in Wrigley Field for Babe Ruth's called shot in the World Series. Babe Ruth. He is also the one Justice that stands between your daughter and back-alley abortions. John McCain has just about the strongest pro-life voting record in Congress and last week guaranteed conservatives he'll be appointing more Scalias, Alitos, and Thomas's to the bench. Yes, these women prefer Clinton to Obama. I sincerely doubt they'll prefer McCain to Obama.

Similarly, John McCain believes deeply in so-called free trade agreements and has already traveled to Ohio and Pennsylvania to tout his support for NAFTA, CAFTA, and any other TA that comes rolling down the pike. Yes, a good number of white, male factory workers preferred Clinton to Obama. Are they willing to embrace four more years of corporate friendly trade agreements, much less tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts in discretionary spending that funds job retraining programs? And all-out attacks on company health insurance (through elimination of the tax deduction for it) and new efforts to privatize social security. You can bet Obama will hammer those issues.

The reverse, by the by, would also be true. I sincerely doubt that college-educated, "elite," Democratic voters in any number of states would suddenly flood to McCain if Clinton was the nominee. He's so good on the issues that matter like, say, the Iraq war.

The real danger, of course, is that some of these groups might stay at home. Yet this election year has shown, on the Democratic side, such a rise in participation and such a loathing of Republicans and all their works among Democratic primary voters, that I doubt even that will occur. Apart from that, who knows what will happen in the next several months to change the campaign; for all we know, Bush could find a third war to fight.

So, as you listen to pundits gnaw on these issues, remember: silly season.

Looouuu

The statheads generally tell me that a good manager is worth 5-10 wins a year. That doesn't seem like much, but think about this. Every team will win 60 games and lose 60 games. It's the other 42 that matter. A good manager gives you roughly a quarter of that total.

Lou gave us one yesterday. Bad weather and wet conditions caused both managers to scratch their original starters. Both had to piece together a full game of pitching out of their bullpens. That also meant that both would have to pinch-hit, maneuver their bench players, and all the rest. Lou figured it out. He found ways to use everyone--the pitchers, the hitters, one and all--to their best advantage.

So, Arizona came into Wrigley with the best record in baseball and we swept them. This team is coming together nicely. The big question remains the middle of the starting rotation: Ted Lilly, Jason Marquis, and Rich Hill (now at Iowa). Lilly is starting to pitch better. But two of those three need to come through for the Cubs to make the playoffs and/or to make a splash there. The rest of the team looks good, but without that pitching, it won't work. Even now, Lou's being forced to use key guys in the bullpen--Marmol, in particular--too often. We need more innings from the starters.

Reaganland

In today's NYT book review section, George F. Will pens a thought-provoking, amusing, and deeply silly review of Rick Perlstein's new book Nixonland. It's hard to be silly and intelligent at the same time, but Will, as usual, manages. I've not yet read the book, although I'm likely to do so. It's the sort of 800 page popular history slog that, in my weirdness, I find deeply enjoyable. It's the review itself, and also the brief editors' note at the beginning, that's so fascinating.

On the one hand, Will takes Perlstein to task for inaccuracies. Hallelujah. Editing at major publishing houses has gone into a steady and perhaps irreversible decline; not only are all kinds of books often far too long, they're also filled with basic factual errors. Good for Will for pointing this out.

On the other hand, Will's clearly got an intra-conservative ax to grind and that tells us a lot about the state of affairs in the contemporary Republican Party. To Will, Perlstein's thesis is clear: Nixon created contemporary Republican politics and profoundly influenced the nation as a whole. Nonsense, says Will. This may be a rollicking, enjoyable read, but it's fiction (thus the catalogue of factual errors). Will contends that Nixon cared not a whit for domestic policy and used that purely for political advantage. In foreign policy, Nixon's fabled realism was too pessimistic about the power of our primary adversary and, in effect, made choices that hurt the United States by overestimating our foes. On one level, Will concludes, the substantive issues today are so different from those of 1968 that it makes no sense to see any links. On a second level, he says in the editor's note, Nixon had no influence in any way: "How, then, does Nixon fit into the larger story of modern conservatism? 'He doesn't. His tenure was an empty parenthesis.'"

Really? An Administration uses domestic policies purely for political advantage, to buy off potential foes and supporters, and, as a result, badly damages the nation's economy in a variety of ways, from budget deficits to a sinking dollar. At the same time, it proclaims the extraordinary reach and power of foreign foes and insists on staying in an unwinnable distant civil war long past the time that this war serves any reasonable purpose. It does so to show "credibility" and demand peace with "honor," yet badly damages the military in the bargain. All the while, it claims that it and it alone is patriotic and it and it alone supports the troops it continually abuses. The Administration also lies to the American people and tries to keep secrets from said people while wiretapping and spying to an unprecedented extent. Those activities eventually leak out, however, and, along with the policy failures, make the president among the most unpopular in polling history. That model has influenced no contemporary conservatives?

George Will's preferred history of modern conservatism might read something like this: Part I The Rise of Barry Goldwater, 1960-1964; Part II The Glories of Ronald Reagan, 1976-1988; Part III Um, hmmm, dang, uh, The Rise of, um, 2009-?.

In all seriousness, commentators have used a variety of labels to identify conservative factions: realists, neoconservatives, social conservatives, etc. It seems evident that Will has a different, simpler set in mind: Nixon's heirs (the House of Bush) and Reagan's heirs (just about everyone else). And he knows who the "real" conservatives are. It's always a good time for a party to stare at its navel and decide who counts as a member and who doesn't. That makes for electoral success, all right. As a liberal, I couldn't be happier with Will's discourse.

Clinton and Iraq

Wow. Publius does a beautiful job of explaining the influence of Iraq on the Clinton campaign. I couldn't agree more. I wish I had written this.

The Price is Right

Any time someone starts to talk about energy policy or foreign oil, s/he inevitably runs into the "horse" argument. That's my shorthand for the love Americans have for their personal transportation; we hanged horse thieves in America and, by God, you'll have pry my SUV out of my cold, dead hands. Those funny Europeans may take trains, but, if American exceptionalism means anything, it includes my inalienable right to an Escalade.

Turns out, not so much. If gas prices start to reach previously unthinkable (read: European) levels, we'll pull the trigger on Ol' Trigger and hop that train faster than any baguette crunching Frenchman. The trouble, of course, as Paul Krugman points out, is that we don't have the infrastructure truly to make this work. There will have to be major shifts in the way we build and think.

Perhaps the current rise in fuel prices will finally make this possible, but the rhetoric constituting our right to move and drive whenever we want (and I'm looking forward to the Associate Dean's analysis of this discourse) is powerful in the American imaginary. All of the Democratic candidates paid lip service to the idea of public transportation, but it's been very hard to get anything done. We'll see if Obama's willing to start us down this road, er, these train tracks.

I'm reminded of the "planning" around here. I moved to Georgia eleven years ago and the local papers were full of talk about a light rail connection between Atlanta and Athens. I'm now leaving and they're still discussing the "possibility." Heaven knows, during the past three years in particular, I've often thought of the money and aggravation I could have saved had I been able to get on the Marta at the Atlanta airport, ride to say, Decatur, jump to a light rail connection to Athens, and ease on home. Given that in the deep, nasty depths of my heart rests the urgent desire to hop an F-16 and cluster bomb Highway 316 between Atlanta and Athens, well, you get my point. Be nice to see such public transportation in my lifetime, but I've got serious doubts. Every little bit, however, would help.

Yes, but...

That's usually the response from a number of friends when I point out the ways in which the Clinton campaign has used the time-honored Republican tactic of race-baiting. Yes, but the former president was just analyzing the South Carolina primary. Yes, but Geraldine Ferraro doesn't speak for the campaign. Yes, but, yes, but. Now, we have this. When does the junior Senator from New York cross the line from politically stupid to ethically challenged?

The Dog to Your Right

There's the beagle. Or Deagle. Thanks to Andrew Sullivan.

Coincidence?

Senator Barack Obama is now scheduled to give his nomination acceptance address on August 28, 2008--the 45th anniversary of "I Have A Dream."