BARACK OBAMA DRINKS YOUR MILKSHAKE.

Something kind of amazing happened yesterday. After several days of pregnant silence, Barack Obama released a statement on the reprehensible new FISA legislation that essentially affirms his support for the entire enterprise, minus the retroactive telecom immunity, which he will "try" to remove in the Senate, but will vote for anyway when he can't. Russ Feingold, the man who should've been our nominee, had this to say:

Republicans, for their part, said that they got more than they even thought possible. The upshot of this is that Obama's biggest and most monolithic source of support in the blogosphere, Daily Kos, is undergoing a sudden case of No One Could've Predicted. E.g.:

Meanwhile, long-time DKos editor DHinMI:

Guess what, Democrats. This is what Unity looks like, and it's Unityman's party now. Expect many more House votes that pass with the support of all the Republicans and 46% of the Democrats.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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ERROR.

Mark Blumenthal has a comprehensive response to a London Review of Books piece that suggests, among other things, that the problem with primary polling this year has been too-small sample sizes. This implies a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what sampling is on the part of the author, David Runciman, but it got me thinking in general about how we conceptualize error in public opinion polling and how it might relate to the scattershot nature of this year's polls.

First, as Runciman correctly points out, there have been plenty of election-eve polls this year that were totally out of the ballpark, and it appears more than the 5% that should be allowed by the standard margin-of-error application. Zogby famously had Obama winning California by six, and multiple concurrent fieldings of head-to-head match-ups are frequently quite disparate. Indeed, Gallup has gotten dissonant findings from their own two concurrent polls at several points this year. Something is going with the polls, and it goes far beyond the hew and cry of the New Hampshire "debacle" that was addressed ad naseum at AAPOR this year.

I think there are a couple of major issues that could easily be addressed just in the way polls are handled in the media. The first is something that Keith Olbermann is already doing, and that he's calling the "Keith Number" because nobody else is bothering to follow his lead. This number is the stated margin of error plus the percentage of undecided voters in the sample; so, a poll with Obama leading McCain 47-44 with an MOE of +/-3 would have a Keith Number of 12. Putting aside for the moment that it should be 15, since the MOE moves in both directions, this is a pretty stark change in the way poll stories are framed. When most polls are reported, undecided voters don't exist, and neither do supporters of third parties, unless and until they make enough noise to force their candidate into the polling instrument. Undecideds are a huge part of the story of why polling has erred so much to the Obama side this year -- Democratic primary voters who decided on the last day tended to support Clinton, and those people would've been undecided when the polling was conducted.

Another problem is how strength of support is measured. Some polls include leaners -- that is, soft supporters of one candidate or another -- in the same category is strong supporters. But leaners, quite obviously, are much more likely to switch candidates or wind up not voting than are strong supporters, making their inclusion another important source of potential error. This, too, is some that could be clarified by the media.

But polling error goes deeper than that. How is it that polls conducted at the same time, purporting to measure the same thing, can be so different? Something that's almost never acknowledged in the reporting of poll results is the impact of question wording and question order. The order of names within a question can matter, whether the question includes individuals' titles or party affiliation can matter, whether the question is built around the word "vote" or "support" can matter, etc. Can this alone explain the wildly divergent results we've seen in some races? Of course not, but this and other methodological factors -- such as live vs. automated interviewer, etc. -- contribute some error in places that are often kept in shadow. When we compare polls not to other polls but to actual election results, the situation is complicated further. For example, Obama won the Missouri primary by about 11,000 votes out of over 827,000 cast. What is the likelihood that 11,000 Missourians thought about voting in that primary, but ultimately decided not to? To take an even more extreme example, what is the likelihood that 538 Floridians wanted to vote for Al Gore in 2000, but got side-tracked on Election Day and never made it to the polls? Close elections are toss-ups for reasons that are anything but political and may not even have anything to do with individual voters -- bad weather, traffic jams, etc.

Given all this potential error, how we discuss poll results is incredibly wrong-headed. While journalists give a nod to the margin of error, swings within it -- particularly swings in which the "lead" changes -- are treated as real events. Political scientists are guilty of this as well, as they try to construct predictive models that account for unaccountably close elections, which for all intents and purposes are ties from a data perspective. What I think is clear from this year's polls is that a) we have a media problems, and b) we have a polling problem. I was glad to see AAPOR talking a lot about it at this year's conference, but I'm somewhat concerned that the focus was so acutely on New Hampshire and journalist education, and not on working towards a set of best practices for public opinion measurement. What's within the power of pollsters is to sample better and measure better, and those ought to be the first steps.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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QUICK QUIZ.

In the wake of Geraldine Ferraro's awful comments about Barack Obama being "lucky" to be black, it's worth wondering what to think about the person who said this:

So who said it? Answer here.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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RELIABILITY.

The Texas primary has been called for Hillary Clinton; meanwhile, the Texas caucus is still being counted with Obama in the lead. The differential is nearly the same in each contest, about 4%. Same electorate, same candidates, eight-point swing. Does this make sense? Is this ridiculous Texas system the perfect illustration of why our primary model is screwed?

In social science, we have an idea called reliability. The idea is that you take different measures of the same thing to be sure you're measuring it right. For instance, I might measure somebody's propensity to use blogs for surveillance reasons -- that is, to observe and follow news stories -- by asking whether they use blogs to "learn how politicians stand on issues" and to "help me make up my mind about things." Using a statistical test, I can find out how much these questions seem to be tapping the same underlying idea (in this case they went with four other items, and had a Cronbach's alpha of 0.844). If an election is meant to provide an estimated measure of the "will of the voters," something is unreliable in Texas -- they're coming up different. I don't mean to say that the outcomes are necessarily statistically different -- 52C-48O and 48C-52O are fairly close -- but that these two processes, ostensibly designed to measure the same thing, appear to have different outcomes. That's kind of crazy! Texas has inadvertently given us a field experiment comparing the caucus and primary processes, and given us different results. I find that very interesting as a social scientists, but as a small-d democrat, I find it both baffling and disturbing.

UPDATE: A handful more precincts have reported in, bumping Obama's caucus lead to 12 points with 39% of precincts counted. And that will be it, because the rules in Texas make precinct reports voluntary. But rest assured, superdelegates are the real problem in this system.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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NOT DEAD YET.

Hillary Clinton got crushed in Wisconsin and has had a bad February, which makes todays new polls kind of surprising. Keep in mind that, as of a couple days ago, Obama was up 7 in the national polls and that he pulled to within 5 in Texas before Wisconsin's primary.

Caveats apply, of course, but I think it's clear that there's still a lot of room to move in this race, thanks in large part to proportional delegate allocation. If the Obama backlash is on the horizon, Clinton will get an opening that she's got a decent shot of taking advantage of. Either way, the continued splitting of national Democrats is going to make convention season very interesting.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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HILLARY CLINTON FOR PRESIDENT.

Tomorrow morning I'll walk to Lapham Elementary School and cast a vote for Hillary Clinton to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, making me a hypocrite, a cynic, or worse. I've spent more time and energy going back and forth on this vote than any I've ever cast. However, the fact that I was going back and forth between Clinton and a protest vote for Chris Dodd, who dropped out after securing about four votes in Iowa and New Hampshire, ultimately made the pragmatic decision clear. Having just decided on my choice this weekend, I have spent the past couple days coming around to the idea that I can be OK with this, and not just resigned to it.

Click to read more

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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THERE ARE CULTS, AND THERE ARE CULTS.

The Obama people may be causing a certain reaction because we don't generally see major candidate supporters acting the way they do, but political cults are nothing new. Minor and third party candidates manage to generate small ones all the time, and Obama's is by far not the oddest of this cycle. That distinction belongs to Ron Paul, whose people have brought in ridiculous amounts of money (especially compared to the rest of the Republican field), little of which has been spent, to win their guy 16 delegates. Paul ran on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988, so there's been a lot of speculation that he was using the GOP primary to raise his profile, but banking his cash for a third-party run. But yesterday he said:

So, he all but acknowledges that he can't win, won't run on the Libertarian ticket, is concerned about being targeted Kucinich-style in his primary, and is probably still sitting on a decent amount of money. Campaign finance laws allow him to transfer funds back to his congressional campaign, I believe, but he's in a pretty safe seat. Meanwhile, not a single one of his heterodox ideas got picked up by the other GOP candidates, who love the war more than ever. So what was the point of his campaign? I really don't get it. It's not like a Tom Vilsack or Jim Gilmore campaign, where they had no shot and figured that out pretty early on. There's something about the strategy that's just not lining up.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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SOME POINT.

This line from Obama, reported at CJR, has been going around for the past couple days, and I wonder if it's the beginning of the end. Getting so close to explicit messianicism in his own words can only help to enhance the perception of his most rabid supporters as a cult. If people -- non-supporters and supporters alike -- are getting ready to start talking about how creepy some in the Obama base are, it's going to be a tough narrative to deal with. That's especially true if it happens now, at a time when Hillary Clinton has suddenly found a swath of small-dollar donors to tap. Whether it's her Super Tuesday showing, her urgent e-mails or more reaction to the MSNBC id, her people are suddenly opening their wallets. I can't imagine hearing that Obama thinks he's Jesus is going to do anything but make them pony up more.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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THE SMILER AND THE BEAST.

One of the most generally overlooked pieces of recent political fiction is Warren Ellis's and Darick Robertson's comic book series Transmetropolitan. In the first major arc of the series, a journalist, Spider Jerusalem, comes out of retirement as a presidential election is just starting to ramp up. This guy had made his name going after the incumbent president -- "The Beast" -- who's up for re-election. The Beast is a mix of the worst caricature of Richard Nixon mixed with the id of some primal force of cynicism -- something remarkably like Dick Cheney, though the series launched in 1997. The Beast was a nihilst, whose only governing philosophy was to keep 51% of the population alive.

Running against him is a Senator that Jerusalem calls "The Smiler." He's a charming, young figure, pushing for unity and reconciliation in the wake of the Beast's divisive approach. He gets Jerusalem's endorsement largely on the strength of not being the Beast, but it's not long before Jerusalem discovers the superficial campaign hides and much more authoritarian and power-mad approach than anything the Beast had to offer. It's too late, though; the Smiler wins and Jerusalem unleashes his anger by throwing hand grenades off his balcony.

Ellis modeled the Smiler on Tony Blair, New Labour and the Third Way -- an optimistic style and a generational shift at the end of a reign of terror, with no mind being paid to what it all will mean in terms of governing. But I'll be honest: It's hard not to think of the Smiler every time I hear Barack Obama speak. He sounds like a well-meaning man whose greatest quality is that he's Not George Bush. I've been thinking of Obama as a new Jimmy Carter, but maybe Blair is the better analogy. I got on this line of thinking thanks to Avedon who recalls a lot of what the Obama people are expressing coming from young Labourites in 1997, only to see it fizzle as Blair and his party suddenly had to deal with the reality of governing. Avedon, in turn, jumps off this post by Roz Kaveney which ends as such:

Me too. One way or another, 2008 is probably not going to be the only time he runs for president.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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DEBATE THOUGHTS.

My guy quit the race after Iowa, so I'm paying a bit more attention to tonight's debate than I have to the others held in recent months. These are some thoughts on it.

8:09 CST - John Edwards looks like he's aged more than four years since the 2004 campaign. I'd hoped he might call bullshit on the "If you know where Osama is" question, which is about as reasonable as ticking clock torture questions, but he didn't. No one's actually talking about nuclear weapons, which is ostensibly what Charlie Gibson's question was about, though even he quickly veered into the bin Laden stuff.

Click to read more

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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IOWA.

There's been a lot of talk in the last couple days (and generally over the last few months) about the badness of the Iowa caucus system, but how's this for odd irrelevance? Checking out CNN for full results I find that the caucuses are responsible for choosing 45 Democratic and 37 Republican convention delegates. That's out of totals of 4,049 and 2,380, respectively. Barack Obama, for winning, gets 14 delegates, compared to 13 for Clinton and 12 for Edwards (CNN has Edwards in second, but Iowa has some kind of undemocratic delegate allocation scheme). So, to recap: about six months of light campaigning, about three months of heavy campaigning, about three months of really heavy campaigning, tens of millions of dollars, dozens of columns from east coast pundits about how "real" Iowans are, a couple handfuls of petty scandals, and a one-delegate lead for Obama that will be spun as several orders of magnitude more important.

(While I was writing this post, CNN took down their projected delegate allocations, but I dare say the point still stands even if Obama heads to New Hampshire with, for example, a four-delegate lead.)

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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BACKLASH SYNDROME.

Matthew Yglesias links to a New Republic essay on the "new atheism," and agrees that it is self-defeating:

This is essentially a version of the backlash argument that "serious" liberals have used to undermine their "fringe" compatriots for the past several decades. It derives, I suspect, from the fruits of the Nixon era, and all the Brokaw-ian beliefs that certain liberals hold about 1968. As the story goes, the country turned to the right as a result of all those dirty fucking hippies that behaved so horribly at the Democratic National Convention, among other places. Since then, leftist "extremism" has been the boogeyman that has scared the Democratic Party toward the center and allowed the Republicans to push ever rightward in response. Thus, countenancing the idea that secular society ought to be, in practice, secular, is seen as the kind of thing likely to destroy the liberal consensus and take tolerance of atheism with it. This is sort of ridiculous on its face, as atheism has simply never had a seat at the liberal consensus table in the United States -- this was, for decades if not centuries, a passively Christian society until very recently. When people began to suggest that the First Amendment had something to say about that, things moved toward secularism for the most part, and the Christianists dug in their heels. This is a lot like what happened leading up to 1968, when blacks, women and other political minorities stood up and demanded to be given their due. What people tend to forget about 1968 and how horrible it all was for the Left, is that a lot of what was sought was achieved back then. The way it was achieved was by fighting for it. Similarly, respect for secularism won't be achieved by people who pretend that secularism doesn't matter or who are afraid to acknowledge their own beliefs, as well as the logic behind them. And if you don't like the tone being taken by activists without much to lose individually, maybe you should hook up with the national political leaders who actively support secularism, particularly when it comes to issues like the Pledge of Allegiance court case. Actually, there aren't any of those, but thank God for that liberal consensus, eh?

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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IRAQ POLLING ROUND-UP (DECADE-LONG EDITION).

My students read about the selling of the Iraq War last week, and I spent some time looking for old polling data so I could describe the public opinion context in which all this stuff was happening. In so doing, I found that the context of 2003 -- pretty strong support for the invasion, but only if the UN comes along for the ride -- was itself made more interesting by the context of 1998. Check this out:

FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll. Nov. 11-12, 1998. N=904 registered voters nationwide.

"Do you think getting Saddam Hussein to comply with United Nations weapons inspectors is worth the potential loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?"
Worth costs 62
Not worth it 25
Don't know/No answer 13

It's also worth noting that there was a lot of polling relating this matter to the Clinton impeachment, and that majorities consistently did not buy the "Wag the Dog" line -- that Clinton was just trying to distract us -- and did want the impeachment put on hold. Shockingly, many of the same Republicans who are in power today had no problem with impeaching Bill Clinton while our troops were in the field.

Anyway, while the rhetoric of the crazy days of 2002 was certainly different from that of 1998, I do find it interesting that public opinion wasn't really all that different.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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DODD'S SHRILL HIPPIE ARMY.

This month's Daily Kos straw poll is happening today, and as it stands Chris Dodd is up to 21% from 7% in September, running second to John Edwards at 31%. His gains appear to have come largely at the expense of Edwards (down 8%) and Barack Obama (down 5%), and are almost certainly reflective of fundraising gains as well -- I threw him another $25 at our last wireless sit-down in Vancouver. This isn't a particularly surprising result, and it's a welcome one; Dodd's the only candidate that's actually strongly pushing for the agenda that the Democrats ran on last fall, and he's in a position to do something about it as a sitting Senator.

Perhaps not coincidentally, approval polls for Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have also been posted today at DKos -- they're at 12% and 10%, respectively.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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DODDMENTUM.

About a month ago I gave $25 to the Chris Dodd campaign, and added support for Dodd to my Facebook profile. The reason is that he started to be extremely vocal about getting us out of Iraq right away, and also started to make waves about it in the Senate. Unlike Bill Richardson, who has the same approach to Iraq but the worst campaigning style in history and a tendency to sell out domestic Democratic principles, or Dennis Kucinich, who is an elf and a flip-flopper on reproductive rights, Dodd is right on basically all the issues (I hate his national service proposal, but I'm sure it would be a legislative non-starter). He's showing it now by placing a hold on the completely unconscionable bill to retroactively immunize telecom companies for working with the Bush Administration to illegally wiretap American phones and computer networks, and he may get some more money from me for it, depending on how much this Vancouver trip winds up costing.

I'm not the only one to fall under the sway of the senior Senator from Connecticut -- he leapt from 2% to 7% in the latest Daily Kos straw poll, and got some public support from Kos himself. This has yet to translate into real world polling support, however, as Richardson's online support eventually did. I have to wonder if there's still time for Dodd -- Richardson broke through into double digits after the bloom was off his online support rose, and he's still there in some polls. With any luck, his pushback on the telecom thing will be enough to break him into some mainstream attention, or at least get him more free airtime on Sunday mornings and in the horribly structured "debates." I'm not prepared to say I'll vote for him yet -- he may not even be in the race anymore once it gets to Wisconsin -- but he's the only candidate that doesn't have a big strike against him in my book, and maybe the only hedge against me writing in Al Gore.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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QUALITY QUESTIONS.

A couple weeks ago, Esther Thorson from the University of Missouri was here to give a talk about the decline of American newspapers. Like most such talks in the academy, it was full of concerns over structural changes in American political media and awful it is that nobody wants to have a civil discussion anymore, etc. In the Q&A, one of our professors raised the idea that perhaps we're not turning away from the traditional press because we want an ideologically-driven one, but because we don't really care about "the news" and we never have. This comment got me wondering something else -- why don't these discussions ever contain any suggestion that there has been a dramatic drop in the quality of American political reporting over the past two decades?

There are perfectly understandable practical reasons for this, to be sure, the big one being that even the most scientifically rigorous analysis will be at least a little bit subjective, and thus open to being dismissed by partisan critics. But so what? Social science findings are frequently controversial, both inside and outside the academy.

I'm posting this because a couple recent comments by Matthew Yglesias have really gotten me thinking closely about the quality issue and the extent to which journalists and the audience view it differently. As he notes as part of an ongoing debate about why cable news channels spend so much time on tabloid stories -- the common answer seeming to be that it's because they bring in ratings -- there is no allowance for the idea that these news organizations are doing nothing but produced lots of useless crap:

As for the news organizations themselves, they also like to place the blame on the viewers by occasionally doing stories about how much the public likes these tabloid affairs, so jeez, what else can they do? When anybody complains about the content of their rare political reporting, they point fingers in both directions and declare, "Both sides are complaining, so we must be right!" But then they do things like correctly quoting Fred Thompson claiming that Medicare Part D cost $72 trillion, rather than the actual figure of $72 billion, without noting Thompson's error. Yglesias:

The problem here is that, as Yglesias says, people now believe the incorrect figure to be true, because a legitimate newspaper printed it without making note of Thompson's mistake. But the reporter would likely say that there was nothing wrong with her story because, hey, Thompson said "$72 trillion," and that's what she printed. Pointing out his mistake wouldn't have been objective, since it would mean, I guess, taking a position on whether or not Medicare Part D cost $72 billion or a thousand times that much. This inability to apply standards of truthfulness in even the most objectively supported situation is the number one problem with modern American journalism, and it should be a scandal in journalism education.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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MICROTARGETS.

Yesterday we had a talk from Sunshine Hillygus about political microtargeting via direct mail, and its relationship to cross-party vote-chasing. It seemed kind of out of place, since the general references she made to the Internet in the introduction weren't followed up with anything in the specific talk -- "information technology" was in the title, but the technology in question was data-mining and market analysis. Also, it seemed like there was a lot to be said about intra-party vote-shoring-up that she didn't cover, for whatever reason.

This morning I'm introducing Dan Gillmor, whom I'm sad to say is the only OII speaker that I'd heard of before the schedule and syllabus went out. Gillmor is something of a citizen-journalism/net-media evangelist and preach-practicer, so I'm eager to hear what he has to say about the state of the American press and its relationship to the rise of its new competitors.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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SMALLNESS.

It's things like this that make it impossible for me to support Barack Obama:

He's a bad candidate for the same reason that Fred Thompson is a bad candidate: He's accomplished little in government and doesn't seem to know what he's doing. It's hard to fault progressives for not noticing this, though, because our other choices kind of stink as well -- it's the story that's most completely getting buried by the story of the even worse Republican field. As of now I will be writing in Russ Feingold.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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WHY GORE WILL RUN.

Much has been made of Al Gore's post-2000 rededication, specifically, to the cause of sane environmental policy and global warming awareness. In fact, most pieces that conclude that he won't run for the presidency again do so on the basis of his unrelenting drive in this area. He's found the passion that works for him, and he believes his current path is the best one to follow to achieve his goals.

The artistic, informational, commercial and politic success of An Inconvenient Truth (both the film and the book of the same name) has put him in the most advantageous position of his long pursuit on change when it comes to human activity and governmental policy that affects the climate. He made a splashy appearance before the House Energy and Commerce Committee today to talk about potential solutions to the crisis. He's even putting on a Live Aid-style event this summer to raise money for and the profile of the global warming issue.

Meanwhile, he's got another book coming out in May, which will presuming involve numerous promotional appearances, signings, talks, etc. The book could've been a Truth follow-up of some kind, but it's not, at least not in any linear sense. The book is called The Assault on Reason and it appears to be nothing like the autohagiographic campaign books that most candidates and would-be candidates write today.

Here's the description listed at Amazon:

I can't help but contrast this with Barack Obama's rather weak-kneed decrying of "the smallness of our politics." Here's a man who, in the middle of a very specific and detailed campaign to get the public to understand a sometimes confusing scientific issue, steps back and looks at the context the debate is taking place in. What he finds -- not at all surprisingly -- is that our culture is epistemologically poisoned. That finding is so much bigger than any one issue, including biggies such as global warming and Iraq, that I cannot help but see his timing in presenting it as the opening volley of a campaign not just for the presidency, but for a true cultural revolution. More to the point, this is a kind of leadership that we have not had in the United States since... maybe FDR? Maybe Lincoln? I don't mean to sound hyperbolic here, but I have to believe this is something that can change our system in ways that tweaking emissions standards or US Attorney confirmation rules or the earned-income tax credit can't.

For instance, middle-east "expert" and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said again today that US forces have about six months to get things "working" in Iraq, or else. Friedman, you may recall, was a major booster of the war beforehand, and has declared "the next six months" to be crucial so many times since 2003 that the unit of measurement is now named for him. He is a joke (see Matt Taibbi's takedown for more), he has been wrong about any and everything to do with the war since before it began. He remains, inexplicably, a respected "expert" nonetheless, and has suffered no apparently consequences for his devastating wrongness. And he is not alone. Frankly, he is the product of a culture that does not value being right -- either before or after the fact -- but does value a) certitude, b) boldness, c) counterintuitiveness, and d) narcissism. The kind of leadership we need now is the kind that reconfigures our society so that the Tom Friedmans of the world come to account.

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CYNISCHISM.

I've just watching a piece on 60 Minutes about the Iraqi refugee crisis, and specifically about the Iraqis who worked with the U.S. Army during the invasion and occupation, but who are now being left to fend for themselves when it comes to, you know, getting killed by their countrymen. What strikes me as telling about this report and others like it is that so much of the mainstream reporting about the failures of the Bush administration is told from the perspective of a war supporter who feels duped upon realizing that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. never really cared about doing a "good job."

And yet, these stories belie a complete lack of cynicism on the part of the reporter. When you talk to a Ford administration official about the migration of over 130,000 Vietnamese, then to the corresponding Bush official about the 7,000 or so Iraqis we're willing to bring in -- along with every other screw-up, from body armor to Al Qaqaa -- it's hard to imagine why you don't come to the obvious conclusion. This is not a matter of good intentions paving the road to Hell, or of government failing, or of a lack of political will. Everything that is happened or not happened in Iraq in the last four years has been because of the unprecedented venality of a small handful of officer-holders. The worst President in American history. The Vice-President with the least respect for the Constitution and the American legal system ever. The Defense Secretary who is, frankly, one of the stupidest people on the face of the Earth.

This lack of cynicism marks what I see as the ebb in an ongoing cycle of political dominance, and I think it's not coincidental that it's occurring at the same time as the Christian right is experiencing loud disagreements between those who want to go along with the impure Republican Party to get along in American politics, and those who want to extend beyond abortion, gay marriage and stem cells to encompass within their movement issues like social justice and global warming. Technocrats and cynics create ideologues to use as fuel, but the fuel tank explodes when it's too full. The problem for the ideologues that blow up the machine that created them is that cynics prosper in American politics, and there's always another cynical faction waiting to step up to the top spot. The Gingrich/Rove axis kept themselves just out of the red for about eight years, but they've lost many of the true-believer hawks and they're starting to lose the honest Christians. They're so mired in scandal that they can't even get a proper pushback operation started -- I'd wager the calls for Alberto Gonzales to resign are going to make it much more difficult to pardon Scooter Libby in the short term. Meanwhile, Halliburton is moving their headquarters from Texas to Dubai. Will any of our disillusioned press corps wonder if this has anything to do with Dick Cheney wanting somewhere to go in 2009 that doesn't have an extradition agreement with the United States? My guess is no.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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DROWNING AND WAVING.

A follow-up to yesterday's post, from the AP:

This doesn't even get into the issue of nearly-two-year-long House campaigns, which are already starting to ramp up.

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SMART MONEY.

Is there anyone in the 2008 presidential contest who doesn't have one or more major negatives in his or her profile? We presently have a field comprised of nearly 20 candidates, six of whom are considered, for whatever reason, "top tier" -- those six would be joined by Newt Gingrich and Al Gore if either of them were to enter the race. All six of these candidates seem to be objectively weak, in both the primary and general elections. Alphabetically:

Hillary Clinton - The weaknesses fretted about by the pundits -- she comes with "baggage" (i.e., she is married to an extremely popular former president), she's a woman -- are non-starters. But the fact is, she remains the most hawkish Democrat in the Senate. She's basically topped out on name recognition, but most rank-and-file Democrats don't know her policy positions and probably won't like them. She's not a natural campaigner. She will have the support of the remaining centrist power centers in the Democratic coalition, but the new progressive base will do whatever it takes to keep her from being nominated.

John Edwards - Lost twice in 2004. Only came around on Iraq after the second loss. Says his support of the Iraq war was a mistake, but appears to have learned nothing from it when it comes to Iran. Is developing a reputation as a fall-back candidate for after Hillary and Barack destroy each other. Seems to have been running since early 2005 because he has nothing else to do.

Rudy Giuliani - Has been married three times, which is the second least popular of the demographic problems that five of these six will have to face. Lived with gay friends between marriages. Holds generally more liberal views than many prominent Democrats -- bad for the primary -- but is willing to jettison those beliefs for political expediency -- bad for the general. Is a "national security expert" with no expertise on national security issues. Was stupid enough to put NYC's emergency response center in the World Trade Center after it had already been attacked once.

John McCain - Will be 72 next year, which is the first least popular. Is transparently pandering on every possible issue, including at times flip-flopping within a single interview. Authored the plan for a surge of 20K troops, then disavowed the plan as "not enough" when Bush threw in an extra 1500. Has a short fuse and likes to use the word "gook."

Barack Obama - Is viewed as a political savior by many of his supporters, but the rest of us can't get a straight answer about what he would do as president that makes him so great. Seems to have inherited Ralph Nader's tin ear for progressives' concerns on social issues. Can't stop talking about unilaterally disarming the Democratic Party in order to fix "the smallness of our politics." Models himself after Joe Lieberman.

Mitt Romney - If it's possible, a more egregious flip-flopper than McCain. Has spent much of his time since leaving the governorship of Massachusetts explicitly bashing that state. Is a Mormon. Has the endorsement of Ann Coulter, who provided that endorsement just after calling John Edwards a "faggot." No one knows why he's considered top tier.

So the question is, where are the good candidates? Why can no Democrat stand up and condemn the war, or acknowledge that our foreign policy is beyond fucked and leaving options "on the table" can now only be taken a threat of invasion? Why are there no Republicans that actually believe -- and have a record of voting accordingly -- in core conservative positions? Well, there are such candidates, of course, and not just in Gore/Gingrich ponyland.

Bill Richardson seems to have settled into a comfortable fourth place among the Democrats, in what many observers think is a bid for the vice-presidency (though any Democrat that does not demand Russ Feingold join the ticket is wasting a golden opportunity). He's repeatedly made the point that arguing about details while George Bush is still in office is irrelevant -- Bush has destroyed our diplomatic credibility, and anyone who goes along with the kabuki on Iran is just making things worse.

On the other side, actual conservatives like Mike Huckabee and Sam Brownback are struggling to be taken seriously, presumably because they lack the Reagan-esque hair sported by Mitt Romney. These are candidates who lack name recognition right now, but who have the ideological credentials to win voters much more easily once their names are out there.

And yet, here we are, over 10 months from the first ballots being cast, and the fields have already been set for two months. How can this be? I suspect part of it is an unprecedented obsession with early campaign metrics -- polling, money, hires, etc. The big liberal blogs are lousy with polling and strategy information that helps to reify the notion that Clinton, Obama and Edwards are the big three -- sometimes it's information about the whole field, and sometimes it's a focus on one or more from the top tier. What's ironic is that this is just the opposite of what I'd expect the community members of those sites to what their efforts to amount to. The democratic ideal case of Howard Dean (and later Wes Clark) is about as far as you can get from what the Democratic field looks like right now. Progressives are unable to coalesce around a single candidate, because neither of the big non-Clinton candidates are especially good fits, and none of the lower tier candidates count. What's worse is that it's only March 2007, but there's probably no one out there besides Al Gore who can step into that vacuum.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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WHO CAN WIN.

It's early 2007, and who knows what's going to happen in the next 20 months, but I don't think I can vote for Hillary Clinton.

Ford and Jackson are playing some long odds here. Clinton's support among black voters is undeniable, but even her supporters are unlikely to be happy hearing "black political leaders" say that black candidate would cost the party "everything."

On top of her Lieberman-esque belief that her Iraq war vote wasn't "a mistake" and that holding that line shows resolve, which Democratic primary voters are sure to love, I am optimistic that a good chunk of her early support will evaporate. It's not a sure thing, though, and I fear the cause of female advancement in American politics will be more set back the longer she stays in. Would someone kindly draft Kathleen Sebelius into the race?

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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JACK AND TEDDY.

After two years on the national stage, Obama is running for President. I can't help but feel he's right on the issues but wrong on the politics. From his speech today:

Obama sees himself as Jack Kennedy, I think, but 2008 is not a Kennedy moment. Jack Kennedy was able to happen, in part, because we'd found a way beyond the rancor of McCarthyism. It was the beginning of a new era, and time for younger men to take charge. It was a fairy tale, really, but there it was. But right now we are anything but beyond rancor. Indeed, the "smallness of our politics" is liable to get worse over the next two years, as the Republicans bristle against their new place in the minority and over a dozen candidates seek the Presidency. When we need right now is not a Jack Kennedy, but a Mikhail Gorbachev -- someone who can lead a transition with purpose and then disappear. Obama underestimates the GOP machine, I think, probably because he never saw it firsthand in the Illinois statehouse and during his two years in Senate its been imploding. That's not going to last, and even if it did, its last throes would be violent ones. A truth and reconciliation moment is needed, but it can't happen until the old guard's defeat is total.

Still, I can't help but hope he wins. He is probably the most unlikely major candidate ever, and his victory would put some meat on the bones of "anyone can grow up to be President" for the first time in the country's history. But that's not why I'd like to see him win. If 2008 isn't his moment, he does still have one in the future, and that moment's probably never going to come. If he runs a competitive campaign (that is to say, well into the primary season at least) but doesn't win, he becomes Teddy Kennedy instead of Jack, close but not close enough and leading the liberal caucus in the Senate for decades. I can't see him getting another chance after his honeymoon is well and truly over and he's already lost once, and even if 2008 is not the time, I'd rather see an imperfect Obama moment than none at all. While Al Gore bides his time, I'm waiting for Obama to convince me.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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HOW AN IMPEACHMENT REALLY FEELS.

Those who remember the proceedings that would have led to the impeachment of Richard Nixon may recall that the hearings weren't limited to the crimes committed relating to Watergate -- they also probed Nixon's escalation of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. For a variety of reasons, these actions weren't included in the articles of impeachment that were eventually drawn up. Nonetheless, this is the historical context in which George Bush's subtle promise to attack both Iran and Syria should be considered.

There is, I think, no chance that the Democratic Congress would approve any action against Iran or Syria barring some exogenous event (e.g., one of those countries opening attacking U.S. troops in Iraq). There is also, I think, no chance that the Bush Administration cares. If they decide it's time to shock and awe Tehran, then it's going to happen. In that eventuality, there is only one recourse: impeachment. More specifically, double impeachment, since President Cheney would hardly be inclined to change course just because half the House and two-thirds of the Senate said he ought to -- after all, he's already got 88% of the American public against him on escalation.

The rub of removing both Bush and Cheney is this: Next in line for the Presidency is Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat and a woman. This sets up the Republican noise machine for the only thing it's really good for: counter-whining. The opportunity to spin such a move as a coup -- notwithstanding the fact that it would take the help of at least 16 Republican Senators -- would give them a chance to take the focus off Iraq and put it on the perception gang that the Washington media love to play. So here's the solution. Impeach them both simultaneously, with the proviso that Pelosi promises not to run for a full term in 2008. This is not because there's anything necessarily wrong with her as President (though I suspect she would rather be a long-term Speaker than become President), but because it takes the long-term coup question off the table. The double-impeachment move then becomes about the steadying and securing of the ship of state for the next 18 months or so. Pelosi could pledge to appoint Chuck Hagel as Vice-President or something, but the details of such a compromise aren't especially important in the big picture. That's the kind of bipartisan moxie that every can approve of.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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DENOUEMENT.

Welcome back to America and the real world.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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THE WIRE.

There's a week left until the most important midterm elections in 32 years. There's no point in talking about individual races, because if you don't know by now how essential it is that you vote Democratic in every race, words won't convince you. But I do want to talk about what may happen as we come to and cross the finish line, and move immediately into the 2008 election cycle.

First, what I think will happen next Tuesday:

For many people, I expect this campaign has felt like a 15-round brawl, and perhaps one that they had no interest in seeing or being a part of. Folks will feel justifiably relieved when the morning of the 8th rolls around, if only because it'll be over. But it won't.

George Bush isn't going to go away. The modern GOP isn't going to go away. Fox News isn't going to go away. Katie Couric isn't going to go way. Mark Halperin isn't going to go away. If the Democrats take over either house of Congress, these people are all going to lose their minds a week from tomorrow. Washington will face its greatest fire risk since the War of 1812 from the sudden and frantic construction of strawmen all over the city, which heroic Republicans and their surrogates will immediately swat down. All this screeching is part one of their 2008 election strategy -- blame "the Democrat Party" early, often and loudly. This is the silver lining in losing Congress: They'll have somebody else to blame. And as bad as the last two years have been, the next two will be much worse because of it.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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FOR THE WIN.

What is the pathology that allows self-proclaimed conservatives that continue to rally to George Bush to do so? Glenn Greenwald today examines an interview with Richard Posner, a hero to the group that Norman Mailer calls "flag conservatives" for his support of unchecked executive power and the view that terrorism is such a novel existential threat to the United States that we must fundamentally remake ourselves in order to fight it.

Posner's take on the nature of the Constitution is, and there's no way to put this any milder, diametrically opposed to the view taken by such arch-conservative jurists as Antonin Scalia. He calls the Constitution "flexible" and a "loose garment," arguing that we must reinterpret it to deal with problems the Founders couldn't have foreseen. The embrace of Posner's argument to support the radical conclusions of those like John Yoo -- the unitary executive theory -- is hardly the only bit of cognitive dissonance that flag conservatives have glossed over in the past few years, but it makes for a nice archetype. John Dean argues that these people are simply desperate at their cores to be ruled over, and so they support authoritarianism whenever they can, but I have a hard time seeing how that applies to them all. Sure, some of the more prominent flag conservatives may be opportunists, looking to project themselves to an audience (Rush Limbaugh comes to mind, as does noted glibertarian Glenn Reynolds), but think there's something else going on at a base level that neither of those two things explains.

For this bunch -- fiery partisans, the sort of people who stormed the vote-counting sessions in Florida's 2000 recount -- 2003 was the high-water mark of their political influence and maybe the first moment of its kind since FDR's partisan political capital peaked. Republicans -- conservative Republicans, aided by a relatively small cadre of neocons -- could've done anything they wanted then. They got the war they'd been asking Santa for for years, but little else. Now that public opinion has reined them in somewhat, they're making a last ditch effort to finally win the game at all costs, to close things out once and for all before the Democrats are able to take the field again, by instituting a quasi-Constitutional monarchy. Very few of them will benefit in any way from this, and none of them will feel "safer," but all of them will feel like they won, and that they finally showed those goddamn liberals what America is really all about -- them and the stars on their bellies.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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I'M BEING TOTALLY SERIAL!

Glenn Greenwald deftly tackles two issues of urgent national importance in one post:

He goes on to connect this almost unbelievable fact of the NSA scandal -- and easily the most underreported implication of it -- to the general culture of mulliganism that prevails in Washington.

There's not much to add, except to point that once criminal charges become a known and repeated part of this story, the Mulligan Caucus is going to become that much more desperate and vicious. If that coincides with the peak of the election season, things could become ugly on a historical level.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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THERE'S BEEN AN A. WHITNEY BROWN SIGHTING.

The Daily Show has recently been playing clips from past shows in honor of its tenth birthday, and one a couple of weeks ago featured former contributor A. Whitney Brown. He's probably best known for his commentaries (called "The Big Picture," also the title of a similarly themed book by Brown) during the Dennis Miller-era "Weekend Update" on Saturday Night Live, but he's done very little since leaving TDS in the late 90's. After briefly seeing him discuss the constant presence of NAMBLA members at Disney World, I started looking around after him. Apparently he worked as a producer for Air America Radio, got fired for "insubordination," started a blog that lasted exactly two days and is now a semi-regular diarist at Daily Kos.

It's kind of weird to see, because I think he was one of the best political humorists of the late 80's and early 90's, both in terms of message and style, and now he's part of a mass of what amounts to long tail political commentary. It'll be nice to hear something from him once in a while now, and maybe this is a stage that suits him. Two of my favorite bloggers, Digby and Billmon, distinctly remind me of his style, after all. Still, somebody, please, put him back on television. Everytime I think of A. Whitney Brown, I'm reminded of what a do-nothing punk Lewis Black is.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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PLEASING FICTIONS.

Anonymous Liberal (posting at Glenn Greenwald's blog) has a terrific post about the providence of the title of Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine:

A.L. does a nice job of digging into this issue, but I think both he and Suskind miss the essential point that they're driving towards: Bush and Cheney are not concerned about any of the foreign policy goals that they constantly espouse -- particularly national security and the spread of democracy. Unfortunately, most reporting and analysis on this subject -- even from liberals -- takes as a starting point just the opposite, that the administration's actions, even the boneheaded ones, are taken up in the service of a sincere pursuit of "freedom" or "security." But in fact, the full context of what the administration has done in the last five and a half years does not bear this out.

First, as A.L. points out, the administration has taken no action to protect America's most truly vulnerable points. Our ports remain as open as they were five years ago, and will soon be controlled in part by Dubai. Security at our chemical and nuclear sites remains abysmal. Cities that have already been shown to be likely targets -- New York and Washington -- are seeing their federal security funds cut, while small town police departments in Wyoming and Alaska rake in thousands to put CCTV on every street corner. Despite the illusion of increased security at airports, investigators were able to easily slip weapons onto planes -- the only thing actually increased by the TSA is passenger frustration. Every move made by the Bush administration to shore up national security was a theatrical one, and closing night was November 2, 2004.

The same is true on the democracy front. The administration's aversion to democratic principles at home is well documented, of course -- from demonization of the courts and the press to their use of signing statements to attempt to legitimize their outright lawlessness, it is clear that the Bush administration does not believe it answers to anyone, let alone the people. But overseas, where they claim that "freedom" is the elixir that will eradicate evil, their deeds have consistently failed to match their words. It was only under pressure from Ayatollah Sistani that they agreed to hold elections in Iraq at all -- the initial plan was to simply install Ahmed Chalabi as king and call it a day. Since Iraq's various election cycles began, they have consistently meddled in the affairs of what they boldly refer to as Iraq's sovereign government. Meanwhile, they continue to support friendly dictatorships such as those in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, while conveniently condemning the democratically elected (as democratically elected as Bush is, at any rate) but generally unfriendly Hugo Chavez.

The mistake that this administration's opponents have made with it from day one is thinking that Bush, Cheney and the rest are operating in good faith. They are not. Their goals are the accumulation of money and power, now and in the future. To accomplish these goals as thoroughly as possible, they plan to destroy the liberal society through which all Americans have prospered for the last 70 years. Anything else they say is a lie. I know it would much nicer to believe that they're just strategically misguided, but generally want the best for the world. But even the most misguided of administrations would have some clue about what to do when a hurricane wiped one of our most important cities off the map (hint: the answer is not to continue doing photo-ops in Arizona for three days).

This is one of those pleasing but fundamentally flawed narratives that our elite analysts are going to have to find some way to get past, like the idea that Europe's socialized health systems are worse than ours or that Al Gore really did tell a bunch of lies during the 2000 campaign. But unfortunately, it's going to take leadership from the top to make it happen. That means Democrats like Harry Reid and Howard Dean are going to have to not just criticize the administration for failing to protect our ports, but also for why they've failed to protect our ports. It's not just a vague reference to "business interests" -- it's because they don't give a shit.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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THOSE FAT CATS IN WASHINGTON.

For the last little while, many Democrats have hoped to avoid the dirty aspects of politics which the Republican Party has mastered, assuming that the fact that most people agree with Democratic positions on a wide range of issues is enough. This, however, hinges on something which Kevin Drum points out doesn't exist:

If we're just going to run on "the issues," we need the media to get that information out to the voters. And if the media have shown us anything in the last five years, it's that they're deathly afraid of "influencing elections." They aren't interested in telling people what party supports what position. If we want to play the politics of contrast, we have to put the contrast out there, and that means slamming Republicans for their positions as well as promoting our own.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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JACKSONS.

In the 2004 election cycle, I donated a total of $27 to Howard Dean and John Kerry. Both candidates would later get my vote in the primary and general elections, respectively. So far this year, I've given a total of $100 to three candidates outside my home districts and the DNC. I certainly don't think I'm necessarily representative of the Democratic polity in general, but I if the presence of candidates like Francine Busby, Ned Lamont and Jon Tester in the primary season is having a generally positive impact on fundraising, given the Dem leadership's continued efforts to shoot themselves in the feet.

There's been talk that Rahm Emmanuel -- chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the guy whose job it is to win back the House -- should replace Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi if the party fails to take the House back in November. On the one hand, this is actually a good sign -- it means that conventional wisdom is starting to turn towards a change of control in Congress. On the other hand, the idea of promoting another Beltway insider who's failed at his primary goal is just sickening to me. If the Democrats don't win back the House in November, Pelosi and Emmanuel should both resign. They've been presented with the best electoral environment in decades -- better than the Republicans had in 1994 -- and their weak-willed inability to stake out positions on the left is going to put at least part of that opportunity to waste.

Candidates like Busby, Lamont and Tester are not just supremely viable candidates, they should be seen as part of a vanguard of new progressivism. Instead, they languish with strong support coming only from the grassroots. The Democratic leadership can't even commit themselves to supporting Lamont if he wins his primary against Joe Lieberman -- they've hedged on whether Lieberman would get support if he ran as an independent.

Busby is in a special election for California's 50th district (the one where Randy "Duke" Cunningham had to resign because he was convicted of all sorts of corruption) and Tester is in the Senate primary in Montana; both elections are today. For Busby a win means that she goes to Congress but has to run again in November; for Tester, it means he faces the unpopular (and -- shock -- extremely corrupt) Max Burns in the general election. Both will continue to need support, as will Lamont, whose primary is on August 8. I'm going to continue sending money their way when I can -- both to provide support and to send a message to the leadership of the Democratic Party that what the mass of us want is candidates who will speak out against the war, against corporate giveaways, against cronyism, against incompetent opposition, and for oversight, fiscal responsibility, tolerance, civil liberties and the Constitution of the United States.

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OPEN LETTER #5.

Dear News Media,

Many of you have taken the opportunity this weekend to do human-interest pieces on the American soldiers in Iraq who are "defending our freedom." In your next round of these stories, please explain from what they are defending our freedom. If you don't know, please ask George Bush. If he doesn't know, please ask Henry Waxman and John Conyers.

Love,
71% of a Nation in Distress

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FINALLY!

Well, it's been a long three years, but the troops are finally coming home. The policy-making power of 24,000 Madisonians has done what Scott Ritter, Joe Wilson, Pope Jizzy Pizzy, the Democratic Congressional Caucus and tens of millions of protesters couldn't -- forced the Bush Administration to end its long-term treasure hunt in the Middle East.

Wait, that's not the case? So the non-binding resolution to bring the troops home that attracted a whopping 15% of Madison voters yesterday has no binding effect?

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

I voted yes on the referendum yesterday, but I steadfastly refused to sign petitions for it last year when people were trying to get it on the ballot. Why? Because a 69/31 win for this referendum, in Madison, was a foregone conclusion. It tells no one anything that they didn't already know. How much time, money and effort went into this whole thing? How much of that could've been spent on candidates who could've actually effected policy change?

"Winning" this resolution carries with it no benefit. Losing would've been disastrous (frankly, I think winning with only 69% is pretty close). How much did all those lawn signs cost? All the lit drops? How much more beneficial would Democratic control of the 110th Congress be?

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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A SENATOR IS MISSING.

The U.S. Senate is supposed to be the world's greatest deliberative body. It's also supposed to be where the grown-ups of official Washington reside. As power has been replaced by decorum as the currency of Washington Democrats, it has come also to be a wonderful, golden stable -- a cage for dozens of geldings who have learned that obediance gets them a sugar cube, or at least staves off the crack of the whip. And even though the stable doors are kept wide open, to show us all how docile they are, none but one ever dare to stray.

A Senator is missing today, again, and worse, he seems to be unlearning his training. He voted against dismissing the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, he voted to confirm John Ashcroft and Condi Rice and John Roberts. He also voted against the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, the Iraq War and thrice against "Strip Search" Sam Alito. Yesterday he left the ranch again to introduce a motion to censure George Bush for his illegal wiretapping of American citizens in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and every measure of human decency. With the exception of Iowa's suddenly feisty Tom Harkin, none of Russ Feingold's stablemates will stand with him, most demurring to the completion of an investigation which has already been voted down by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Many in the Democratic horse show were in the Senate during the prologue to our current national nightmare, and 21 of them voted to censure Bill Clinton for spying on an intern's genitals without a warrant. Two years later, not a single one of them would stand with the Congressional Black Caucus to challenge the certification of Florida's electoral votes. A stream of Representatives -- including one white guy who just got swept up in the moment and wanted to support the cause, even he'd had no intention of doing so prior to seeing what his colleagues were doing -- took to the floor of the House, showered in boos and catcalls from the members of God's Own Party (and probably one or two from Joementum, to boot) and presented official challenges to the results. As sitting President of the Senate, Al Gore asked each one if their challenge was signed by both a Represenative and a Senator. "A Senator is still needed." "Not a single Senator would sign." "A Senator is missing."

A Senator is missing today and the stable masters are in a tizzy. The doors are open and one's already gone. What if the others get spooked? Even if they're just for show, even if they've had their testicles removed, 43 horses can cause a lot of damage. We'd better just thank the lord that these animals know their place and little else. If they ever realized they were free, our whole system would be fucked.

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NOTHING MORE NEED BE SAID.

From the NYT's coverage of the Southern Republican Leadership Conference:

What an amazingly INDEPENDENT MAVERICKY thing to do. Yes, rarely has the Senate seen such an INDEPENDENT MAVERICKY shithead graces its halls as John McCain. Why, he's even INDEPENDENT from his own laws:

You could call this guy Mel Gibson he's such a fucking MAVERICK.

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BADLY, OBVIOUSLY.

It's still relatively early in 2006, and we haven't had an opportunity for something like "I don't think anyone anticipated the breech of the levees" yet, but Mary Matalin is on the fast track for absolute, shit-eating dumbest quote of the year:

Really? Because he shot some guy in the face.

Ladies and gentlemen, the hack that couldn't spin straight.

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ISSUES OF IMPORT.

Blogpulse tells us what's what on the important topics from the State of the Union:

Damn you, Baxter Stockman!

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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RUSS FEINGOLD AND THE EXECUTIVE.

I've long maintained that Governors beat Senators in Presidential contests not just because Senators often have complicated records to explain, but because legislators and executives speak differently. Legislators have to be able to talk in specifics to justify their jobs -- what legislation they would propose or support, why, etc. -- whereas executive candidates can speak in more general terms and allow their responses to the legislature to fill in the gaps. This is why John Kerry lost, I think -- he allowed Karl Rove to bait him into acting like a Senator instead of a President on the campaign trail.

The exception to this rule is Russ Feingold. I've had this inkling for a while -- it's why he has my tentative support for the 2008 nomination -- and it was solidified during his debate last year with Tim Michels. Feingold is not just more rhetorically skilled than Michels, as evidenced by his ninja-like takedown of Michels for having not actually read the PATRIOT Act, he spoke in more general terms, in more colloquial terms and in more congenial terms. Throughout the debate, as he sat at across the table from the poor newbie he was annihilating, Feingold had a broad, earnest smile on his face. It's part of the real, personal charm that's helped keep him popular far away from his home base on the west side of Madison. Feingold knows how Senators lose elections, even Senatorial ones sometimes, and he knows how to go the other way.

I wasn't sure that actually meant anything until now, though. It turns out that, since entering the Senate in 1993, Feingold has never opposed a Supreme Court nominee:

I was annoyed by Feingold's votes to confirm John Roberts, but in light of this information and his committee vote against Sam Alito, I'm starting to see a picture of a man who values the power of the executive in a way most of his colleagues -- including John "Tap My Phone, Tap My Computer, Tap My Ass, Just Don't Let The Terrorists Get Me!" Cornyn -- don't. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Feingold is a career legislator, but he's made his way without using legislators' tactics -- his first Senate campaign featuring a list of non-legislative promises written on his garage door and an ad in which he received an endorsement from Elvis.

The last legislator to run for President with that kind of style was John Kennedy. He was also the last President to enter office from a legislative job. National security issues will make federal experience extremely salient in 2008, and Feingold's characteristics may be just right to turn his candidacy into the perfect storm.

Now if we can just get these moronic Democratic primary voters to see that.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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TEA LEAVES.

One of the raps against Bill Clinton in the popular press was that his administration put a lot of energy into reading and following polls. This never made much sense to me -- it seems like, in a representative democracy, elected officials ought to be taking their constituents' opinions into account as much as possible. And while polls aren't perfect, I've never seen anybody take issue with a particular poll's methodology when the results favored their side.

I suspect that what was actually going on was an application of the big strong leader myth, most recently on display following Brownie's removal from New Orleans, when Chris Matthews demanded that the burly and virile Dick Cheney send a real man to take care of things. The pundit class wanted somebody who just didn't give a shit about the public and was going to do whatever he wanted anyway. They frame it as a question about "principles," but it's not as if Clinton was coming out for Coke one day and Pepsi the next.

Since Clinton left office, the Democratic Party has fallen prey to every negative narrative the press has to offer about him, including the portrayal of him as a finger-in-the-wind waffler. Now, instead of getting their perceptions of public opinion from polling data, they simply let Republicans and the Beltway pundit class tell them what's what. Molly Ivins gets to the heart of this:

Even if reading polls is not a perfect way to run a campaign or a government, it is a damn sight better than not reading polls. Howard Dean understands this. State-level Dems like Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer understand this. Even certain liberal pundits understand this, and I might be convinced that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi kind of get it, too. The rest of the national leadership of the Democratic Party doesn't. The people running the DCCC and DSCC don't. Joes Biden and Lieberman don't. This is why I almost certainly won't vote for Herb Kohl this year, to be honest.

One of things that I hope blogs are mature enough to accomplish this year is to create a shadow network that can operate apart from the party's power structure -- a group of people able to exchange information on a national level and act as opinion-leaders in their own districts. In order to rival the existing power structure, though, everything's going to have to be working efficiently and together, in a focused way. One issue -- winning on strength.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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WORDS MEAN THINGS.

When I was in seventh- or eighth-grade social studies, we learned all about the American Revolution, then called simply "The Revolutionary War." Of course, when I say "all," I don't really mean "all" -- I mean we learned the broad strokes of history, the stories that provide the mythic geneology for our dysfunctional national family. We learned, for example, that we had the Articles of Confederation before we had the Constitution, but we didn't really learn about why the switch was necessary or that ten guys, nine of whom you've never heard of, were President of the United States during that period.* But we learned about the Continental Congresses, the Constitutional Convention, various battles with the British, the Stamp Act, the Sugar Act, the Tea Act.

But what we were really being taught, looking back, was the drama wrought by men like Nathan Hale and Patrick Henry. Henry, as has been noted around the left blogosphere this week, famously demanded, "Give me liberty or give me death!"** Kos's direct reference to the deriliction of American character shown by conservatives since The Day Everything In The History Of The World Changed Forever And Ever Including The Pee Contents Of Our Collective Undies has sparked a minor firestorm among right bloggers, who have responded to everything except the substance of his charge. Conservatives are scared out of their minds, and they don't give a tinker's damn about the freedoms that Henry fought for over the course of two decades. They want a King. They want to give up their Constitutional rights -- except the ones codified in the Second Amendment, because, hey, they might have to shoot a terrorist someday!

These people are now being faced with the uncomfortable reality that words mean things. "Liberty" is not a void into which you may toss an NRA membership card, a Toby Keith CD and a dozen warrantless domestic wiretap transcripts. When Henry stirred the Virginia House of Burgesses to war, it was not over a meaningless concept designed to put political opponents on the defensive. "Liberty" meant self-determination and freedom from tyranny -- freedom of body and mind from the aggression of a corrupt government. When people in the reality-based community point out that their scare-pee has soaked their liberties, they have to implicitly acknowledge that that's true. This is the first step not just to reclaiming our country, but to reclaiming the language of national decency -- "freedom," "democracy," "justice." These words, too, mean things that for too long the Phobocons have kept hogtied in a basement at NSA headquarters.

As for Nathan Hale, we learned that, before being hanged by the British for espionage during the war, he declared, "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country." "Sacrifice" is the other one we need to reclaim, because for most Phobocons, this terrorism gambit has been the biggest exercise ever in what the French might call le sacrifice des autres.*** Noted fearmonger Jonah Goldberg can't fight in the war that he thinks is so vital and that he champions so tirelessly because, well, he's out of shape and he has a kid and anyway, he can do much more for the war effort by screaming into the echo chamber through his computer and eating Cheetos all day. Goldberg and his Phobocon cohort all have but one life to give for their country, and for the ideals that it used to represent; the tragedy is that they don't give it, and they never will.

* The one you've heard of was the seventh President of the United States in Congress Assembled -- John Hancock.

*** They probably don't call it that, though.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
Politics ... Permalink