Postmodern Conservative.

More things we're not supposed to talk about

by Demophilus

Interestingly, in light of my post earlier today, I see Obama's lead in the latest Gallup tracking poll is down to one point.

And, to repeat, if you really can't wrap your mind around the fact that a mere one point lead for Obama, given all the structural advantages he has (and coming off his European tour), actually is good news for McCain, than you really must be deluded. I certainly am not saying McCain will win, nor am I one to obsess over daily poll numbers, but such a small lead at this point really is worth noting, and those of us who care about politics are not insane for wondering about what this might mean about the dynamics of the race.

In which Obama insults my intelligence

by Demophilus

From an AP story today:

A day after Democratic candidate Barack Obama warned that Republican rival John McCain would to tell voters "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills," McCain's campaign on Thursday accused Obama of playing racial politics.

[snip]

Stumping in Missouri, Obama, the first black candidate with a shot at winning the White House, argued Wednesday that President Bush and McCain will resort to scare tactics to maintain their hold on the White House because they have little else to offer voters.

"Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me," Obama said. "You know, 'he's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name,' you know, 'he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.'"

Obama himself didn't make clear what distinctions he thinks McCain is likely to raise regarding the presidents on U.S. currency - white men who for the most part were much older than Obama when elected. McCain has not raised Obama's race as an issue in the campaign; he has said Obama lacks experience.

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday that the senator was not referring to race.

"What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn't get here after spending decades in Washington," Gibbs said. "There is nothing more to this than the fact that he was describing that he was new to the political scene. He was referring to the fact that he didn't come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race."

This is stunningly idiotic. Does Obama, or his spokesman, take us to be so lacking in judgment and intelligence that we do not know he, in fact, was talking about race? What else even vaguely make sense here?

They want us to believe that Obama was referring to the fact that "he didn't get here after spending decades in Washington." As opposed to everyone else on our currency? Let's review.

On the one dollar bill, we have George Washington. Because Washington actually chose the site for the city, which was named in his honor, it was impossible for him to have spent "decades" in Washington before coming to power. Since, as it were, the city didn't exist. You can't spend decades in a non-existent place. And as our first president, he simply couldn't have spent decades working for the government of a country that did not yet exist.

On the five dollar bill, we have Abraham Lincoln. Do I need to explain this? Lincoln, whatever he was before becoming president, was not a Washington insider. He certainly did not become president after "spending decades in Washington."

On the ten dollar bill, we have Alexander Hamilton. Who was never president.

On the twenty dollar bill, we have Andrew Jackson. Now things become slightly more complicated -- yes, Jackson served in the House of Representatives and briefly in the U.S. Senate. But we know him as a product of the frontier, an outsider, a "man of the people." At the least he didn't spend "decades" in Washington.

On the fifty dollar bill, we have Ulysses Grant. We know what he did before becoming President.

On the one hundred dollar bill, we have Benjamin Franklin. Who was never president.

So, obviously, Obama and his spokesman are just making this up as they go along. Perhaps his comment really wasn't about race, but the explanation they gave really makes no sense. Even a very minimal knowledge of history shows them to be wrong. I think its fair to say that it won't really help Obama win "working class whites" by playing the race card, perhaps implying that those who don't vote for him do so for unsavory reasons, then just pulling stupid excuses out of thin air to cover up for it, ones that have zero connection to historical reality.

Random Acts of Blogging

1. BBC News provides a little practical therapy for the workaday world. Their captions: priceless.

2. Life after Stevens in Alaska: will Palin spearhead a vanguard of new-generation-cons?

3. McCain's new strategy for sinking Obama is, as Marc Ambinder suggests, dreadful. For it to succeed, it must be cruelly, brutally hip and funny. The Bush people who have come on to implement it are sometimes cruel and often brutal but will never, ever be hip and funny, and if McCain lets them have their way with his campaign, he is doomed. 

4. Saletan thinks zoning fast food megachains out of poor, fat neighborhoods is just awful. My question: what right do you have to a McDonalds in your neighborhood? 

Do I really need to explain this?

by Demophilus

It seems as if once a day Matt Yglesias has an incredulous post about a story in a newspaper or on television that deals with the latest polling data indicating that Obama's lead is not what it might be, replete with a sarcastic post title -- such as today's, "Obama's Leading...Good News for McCain!"

Am I the only one who thinks this daily ritual is utterly moronic? If you can't understand why its surprising that Obama has such a slim lead -- and in a recent USA Today/Gallup Poll survey actually was four points behind McCain -- then you basically have to be either so shrilly partisan that any bad news about your candidate is viewed as some kind of hit job, or you are utterly disconnected from reality.

Campaigns of course are not just about what platforms the candidates have their staffers put together for them on their websites, which seems to be what Matt wants the media to spend their entire time writing about. Now I sympathize with him somewhat on this point -- the media really could, and should, have their coverage driven more by actual issues. But there is, of course, a merely political, horse-race element to campaigns that is of some importance, given that people actually vote for president. Its not irresponsible to discuss, within reason, how candidates are doing in the polls. And to me, one of the very surprising things about this race thus far is that Obama, facing an old man who gives mediocre speeches and who is representing a party whose current leader, George W. Bush, may be the most unpopular president in our nation's history, is not winning by more. Indeed we know he is under-performing a generic Democrat right now. Why is this? It seems to me to be an important question.

Its worth pointing out, too, how bizarre Matt's feigned shock is over the coverage in question given his own thoughts on McCain. If you read Matt's blog, you know McCain is a pathological liar, perhaps senile, an obvious moron whose policy prescriptions -- such as they are -- are manifestly bad ideas. And then, when the media stops to ponder why the Messiah isn't that far ahead of this old dolt, Matt is stunned! Well, if you read Matt's blog, you really should be stunned. Either McCain is who Matt says he is, and thus should be 20 points behind, or perhaps Matt's being just a bit unfair in terms of how he describes McCain.

I know Democrats are frustrated right now -- I would be, anyways. But blaming the media for pointing out your candidate's surprising polling weaknesses won't be much help. What's next, will they start calling McCain racist? Oh wait...

Worst Title of the Year?

Hopes of World Trade Deal Collapse -- New York Times

'Knowledge Not Worth Knowing'

Shorter Philip Rieff:

Hamlet talks too much, especially when nobody is listening. -- Noah Millman's six-year-old son

Raising McCain

Ambinder, trying to carve an exit door into the hazy daze of summer:

There are two main criticisms of the McCain campaign right now. They both follow the premise that McCain will win only if uses the next 98 days to espouse a unified, coherent message that simultaneously lifts McCain above Obama while highlighting Obama's profound inexperience. One line holds that McCain is too reactive and angry, that his campaign's contempt for Obama manfiests itself too obviously, and that McCain seems small. The other is that there is nothing in McCain's portfolio right now that reminds voters of the guy who capitivated millions in 2000. [...] Put Obama aside. Why is McCain running? What are his first principles? And why can't he articulate them?

As smart as this is, there's a bit of slippage. Or there are a few assumptions at work that may be at cross-purposes. Must a unified message be coherent? (No.) Must a coherent message be unified? (Probably.) What is a unified message? Is a unified message different than a comprehensive one? How is a unified and coherent/comprehensive (UCC) message different from a comprehensive political doctrine, i.e. an ideology? Can McCain issue a UCC Republican message, or a conservative one? Should he do both? Can he? 

And how do all these questions relate to the mystical unicorn of First Principles? How can McCain himself have first principles? Shouldn't he be articulating principles that operate at a superpolonian level? More than simply to his own self being true? Patton was awesome, but he was leading men in the field, not leading a party, a movement, and a country.

Aha: cognitive dissonance, stacking up. This is part of why McCain can't articulate whatever it is we think he should be articulating, and why Obama is doing a kind of multilayered shuffle that oscillates between brow-furrowed focus and the politics of yearning. McCain's problem is both more obvious and more acute, but his ability to fudge through is much greater than Obama's -- both because of his own personal style and history and the persistent reticence of Average Americans to flock toward Obama. 

Which suggests to me at least that McCain may do himself far more harm than good -- and ditto his campaign -- getting hung up on the chimerical need for some Grand Vision. McCain is no Grand Vizier. This isn't Bush Sr.'s problem -- McCain gets the vision thing okay. He's just stymied by the apparent need -- exacerbated by Obama, yes, but by trouble on the right all the more -- to trot out and hammer home some kind of comprehensive neo-Republican program of consistent, coherent, interlocking policy proposals all traced by thick, bold pedigree lines back to the all-unifying nut of a comprehensive doctrine manifested itself by First Principles.

Ain't gonna happen, folks. Asking this of any Republican this year would be unfair and cruel, and asking it now of McCain is tantamount to shaking a baby. It's not even clear on a general level that the Republican Party needs the kind of sweeping/UCC message that seems to be crippling McCain, or that having one wouldn't actually work affirmative harm to the McCain campaign, the generic Republican Congressional brand, or the GOP period. For now, anyway... and at this rate, now could last a very long time.

Skeleton Crew Watch

Another one bites the dust. Where will the GOP find its new blood? John Boehner, at a recent press event, told me ruefully that the Party faced "tough" battles for five or six seats in '08. He remained confident about the rest, but lowballed the number of open seats. And he insisted that Great New Candidates were on the way, possibly already on the make...and hurried back to talking about Energy as the Biggest Issue of the Year. I, in my skepticism, was doubly unmoved.

Nuke the Fonz

By Shawn Macomber

So this is the point we've come to as a culture: The New York Times is helping us suss out the relative merits and/or hipness of dueling catch phrases, one drawn from the television show Happy Days ("jumped the shark"), the other from the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ("nuked the fridge"), both designed to describe something that has become meritless due to a loss of hipness. Sort of like this argument (probably before it began) and even, perhaps, this post.

Just to be safe, until this gets sorted out, I'll be adopting the compromise phrase of "Nuke the Fonz."  

Random Acts of Blogging

1. The ground game is changing in Iraq. Policy convergence is appropriate. As I've said, the choice is not between empire and defeat. I supported the surge because it was good military tactics, but good military tactics had been nested within rotten political strategy in Iraq almost since the outset. (Predated by, even.) My support for a ninja-like stealth reverse surge, a parceled and staged withdrawal in times and places of our choosing, now seems like a prescription of prudence and normalcy. 

2. Although I'm against large numbers of noncitizens living lives of permanent residence in America, I'm always looking for ways to defuse a battle royale with uberlibertarians. One way to do this is to look at the numbers Kerry Howley has provided us and say -- okay, so if we import and export, on a staggered basis, half-decently-sized cohorts of non-migratory foreign workers (presumably stable human beings with skills), we get such a bigger bang for our and their buck that we can scale down some of our less effective attempts, public and private, at bettering the lives of others? Attempts like foreign aid and Gerson-style intervention? This sounds like an excellent idea. Bringing a modest crew of disadvantaged strangers here to America, as sort of a one-time gift of friendship that keeps on giving when they return home, would allow us to feel better about ourselves while having to do it on a far more face-to-face basis...and without gallivanting all over the world to gratify our sense of messianism. A win-win.

3. Ross returns from the Bat Cave to hint that Burton's Batmans are better than Nolan's because they don't labor to transcend themselves. Sounds like a veiled attack on Obama-style politics. Hmm. Actually, I haven't seen Nolan's Batman yet. But in talking with my maniacal friend and Lawler-beloved movie guru Peter Suderman, over a fat lunch of coconut shrimp and gin & grapefruit, we agreed that a film which tries to hold the audience to account for thrilling to evil is better than a film which soft-pedals the truth about wickedness -- even if that certain hypocrisy in offering a thrill later to be damned is unavoidable. We concluded that George Romero is perhaps best at this trick, which indeed isn't a trick when done well as much as it is a reckoning with what's bad in human nature, and an attempt to raise our souls through mortification, like Kafka. Dangerous business, but necessary.

4. If Obama really does pick Veneman, the main effect will be to force moderate Republicans and RINOs into an even tougher spot, including McCain himself. Deep right types will flip their lid, smiting anyone in the big tent who looks even a little crosseyed, and everyone will be forced to choose a side. On the other hand, liberal Democrats will have to reckon with the possibility that Obama really does have the largest ego of our times.

5. The widow Thompson, Anita, writes on the Dalai Lama. I will bite my tongue. I report, you decide.