Opening the Day: Your Morning Post-partisanship

by: Matt Stoller

Tue Aug 26, 2008 at 03:40


I don't have time to do an ordinary 'opening the day', so please put what you're reading in the comments.  I'm not reading convention coverage, it's all meetings and panels and convention watching and parties, so if you throw your thoughts on how the convention is being covered in the comments I'll read and absorb and learn and use that to inform how I write back from the scene on the ground.  Meanwhile, here's a picture of Cass Sunstein, Sam Powers, and me.  I keep running into these two.  Powers dotes on Sunstein, who is selling his book Nudge.

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Matt Stoller :: Opening the Day: Your Morning Post-partisanship

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Opening the Day: Your Morning Post-partisanship | 23 comments
AT&T Party for Blue Dogs (4.00 / 1)
Greenwald and Hamsher's video of the Blue Dog party (as close as they could get) is interesting.  As Greenwald says, these guys were even more secretive than Cheney's energy task force.

I especially appreciated the security people muscling G&H out of the way.  Are they ex-Blackwater?

A glimpse of Washington Behind Closed Doors, you might say.

Blue Dogs on Parade (0.00 / 0)
Also, an excellent report on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now.  

I'm now contacting my representative, blue dog Kirsten Gillibrand to determine what her involvement was in this atrocity.

I'd be interested in hearing reports from other blue dog constituents on how they are attempting to defend their appearance.

[ Parent ]
So last Wednesday... (4.00 / 2)
I was in a conversation with a truly interesting character.  Staunch liberal Jewish Democrat who went down as a college student to the South to help register blacks in 1965, stayed close with the King family, was the only Jewish student who stayed on as part of their staff, helped write the speech Coretta Scott King gave when the government finally honored her late husband with his own day.... and who is now a strong Bush supporter because of the war in Iraq.  Classic neocon, like Lieberman.  (The guy ranted about how the "far left" of the party kicked Lieberman out in 2006, and bashed Lamont for having "done nothing" with his life other than being a spoiled rich kid until he decided he wanted to be a Senator.)

For a guy who worked his whole life for civil rights and human rights, and cares deeply about Darfur, he was also OK with the U.S. torturing detainees, because they're the "bad guys" in his mind.  Even when I said some were innocent and we were getting bad intel from the torture, he didn't care, because it was that kind of people who were responsible for 9/11.


Anyway, the reason I bring him up is because early on in the conversation, before I realized he was such a neocon, he had been going off on Samantha Power, saying she's too "pro-Palestinian", and that she's just like the Iranian president in her view of Jews.  Of course, it seems that even saying they should have a place to live is already being "anti-Israel".


Neocons are scary one-track-minded people.

JUMAs? (4.00 / 2)
Anyone who's a strong supporter of Bush because of the war in Iraq is unreachable.

I'm not sure exactly what happened to guys like this, and I suspect the only person who could explain is Philip Roth. Something about the psychological obsession, like Lieberman's to be the Most Moral Guy in the Room, which leads to an inability to change positions or accept responsibility for mistakes, or to acknowledge in any way that one is not always the Last Good Man.

[ Parent ]
my take: (0.00 / 0)
this doesn't actually surprise me too much.  after all, the neoconservative movement was started by a bunch of (ex-)trotskyists.  i think that for this kind of person, fascism (rather than, for instance, imperialism) is, by far, the most dangerous form of political organization, and should be opposed vigorously, even if that means that you are (sometimes) engaging in immoral actions.  

such individuals see islamism as a form of fascism, in large part because of the (real or perceived) role that anti-Semitism plays in this movement.  the most intellectually honest of these 'anti-fascist' folks will also be quick to point out that islamists (as well as some arab nationalists, such as Hussein) are or were staunchly anti-Left, and have been involved in purges and massacres against secular Left movements throughout the Middle East.

personally, i think that such individuals would serve a salutary role in the political world, if it weren't for the fact that, in practice, they have often made common cause with anti-liberal elements in the United States, and individuals who are much more interested in geo-political dominance (and resource extraction) in the Middle East than liberal democracy.    

[ Parent ]
Hopefully (0.00 / 0)
You can get Cass Sunstein to admit that yes, it is very important for an Obama administration to set up a special prosecutor to look into the Bush administration crimes. I remember his debate with Glenn Greenwald, the guy seems a bit soft on this subject.
Sunstein is the guy, the (4.00 / 7)
'even the liberal Cass Sunstein', who supported John Robert's nomination, and says that John 'Torture' Yoo "doesn't deserve the demonization to which he has been subject."

Sunstein is pro-military tribunal (the Military Commissions Act, if memory serves) and says that "if FISA is interpreted as preventing the president from doing what he did here, then the president does have an argument that the FISA so interpreted is unconstitutional."

He's spent years giving cover to all the pearl-clutching, faux-liberal Democrats to vote the wrong way.

He appears to live in a world where ideas--and ideals--have no consequences. Haven't read her for years, but I thought, at least, that Powers focused on just that--the real consequences of dangerous ideas.

[ Parent ]
Exactly (4.00 / 3)
That is an excellent description of Cass Sunstein. The conclusion I have reached after watching him do this repeatedly is that he doesn't have the ability to distinguish between academic debates and policy debates.  

Lawyers like to think that what they do is eminently practical, and law professors like to think that their little debates are the most crucial issues in the history of the world.  Law school itself often requires that law professors test their students on obscure and unusual fact patterns--everyone gets the easy cases.  So, as a whole, law professors like to debate and talk about strange aspects of the law. Thus, they often fail to recognize how extremely impractical the issues they raise and the debates they have are.  

Sunstein, as far as I can tell, is a terrible transgressor in this way.  It's nice for academic lawyers to have those debates, but they really have to stop at some point.  At some point, the debates have to stop and we really have to find the best policy--the policies where we don't torture, the government respects civil liberties, Congress is equal to the Presidency, etc.  

The problem with Sunstein, though, is that he has gained a certain amount of popular fame, and he loves it.  He wants to be famous.  So, he isn't going away anytime soon.

[ Parent ]
Sunstein on Roberts (4.00 / 1)
Basically came down to well, he's not as bad as some other folks Bush could have nominated.

I will say that he and Power make a very cute couple, and they were very much still in honeymoon mentality in Austin last month.

[ Parent ]
My mom's view (4.00 / 1)
My 78-year old retired white nurse mom from Queens (getting the demographics out of the way) was in tears retelling the story of Caroline Kennedy introducing her Uncle Ted and the camera shots cutting to Maria Shriver in the seats. My sister called during Michelle Obama's speech so she said she missed most of it but she liked the family aspects of the night (his sister, his bro-in-law, his kids and his wife). Nice family images play well with older people.

Note: I'm not sure if you know this but Samantha Power is married to Cass Sunstein so she can dote on him all she wants and vice versa...wink wink...nudge nudge..say no more. Sunstein is definitely marrying up in every way. Samantha Power combines the best qualities of George Kennan and Sabrina Duncan in one kickin' package.  

John McCain

Samantha Power (0.00 / 0)
She looks younger than I expected, very girlish. Not that there's anything wrong with that.  
[ Parent ]
martha nussbaum called (0.00 / 0)
she said Samantha was a boyfriend-stealing "monster".
[ Parent ]
I googled Martha Nussbaum (0.00 / 0)
She looks wicked cool. I guess bald smart dudes are big with the academic babes. At least that's what I learned from Captain Picard.

John McCain
[ Parent ]
it is absolutely impossible (0.00 / 0)
to discuss anything even tangentially related to Cass Sunstein, Samantha Powers, or Martha Nussbaum here at the U of C without having an obligatory gossip session.
[ Parent ]
My God (0.00 / 0)
Sunstein has lost his hair.
By all accounts ... (0.00 / 0)
... he has not lost his squash game.
[ Parent ]
a dollop of weirdness from Bob Herbert (0.00 / 0)
I really like Bob Herbert. But he's had a sort of tunnel vision about the way race has been playing in this election. I suspect that at some level, he doesn't really believe that a black man can win the election. He says this today:

Not only do the polls show this to be a close race, but the polls, when it comes to Senator Obama, cannot be trusted. It is frequently the case that a statistically significant percentage of white voters will lie to pollsters - or decline to state their preference - in races in which one candidate is black and the other white.

After many years of watching black candidates run for public office, and paying especially close attention to this year's Democratic primary race, I've developed my own (very arbitrary) rule of thumb regarding the polls in this election:

Take at least two to three points off of Senator Obama's poll numbers, and assume a substantial edge for Senator McCain in the breakdown of the undecided vote.

Using that formula, Barack Obama is behind in the national election right now.

That's just factuallly inaccurate. The "Wilder effect" has been shown to no longer apply, even if it once did. And it didn't apply in the primaries this year - I believe that overall, Obama just slightly overperformed the polls.

I definitely understand where Herbert's anxiety is coming from. From his insistence on these assumptions, against all evidence, seemed a bit weird to me. Almost as if he was searching for a theory about how Obama must be behind...

Glad y'all cleared up... (0.00 / 0)
...that "Sam Powers" is in fact Samantha Power. I was scratching my head at the woman in the photo's resemblance to her, but the names confused me--especially because my family calls my sister Cass. Anyway, they look like a happy couple. If Samantha's in the room for Hillary Clinton's fete tonight, it'd be great to have some reaction shots, no?

"This ain't for the underground. This here is for the sun." -Saul Williams
Stuart Rothenberg explains how the big boys do it ... (4.00 / 2)
At the Jewish Vote Seminar yesterday in Denver, Rothenberg admits the media gives John McCain a free pass.

One questioner asked why mainstream media coverage lately has been so soft on McCain and why they've reported virtually nothing about McCain flipflopping on social issues and spending quality time with far right leaders like John Hagee.

Stuart Rothenberg managed to lower my opinion of mainstream journalists even more than I thought possible.

His response went like this:

   "Most journalists know McCain personally and know he doesn't care about social issues.  We know he cares about national security and foreign policy - and isn't interested in social issues or even the economy for that matter - so we give him a free pass."

Other notable quotes from Rothenberg at the same meeting:

  "It's up to Democrats to bring up all the stuff about his record.  Journalists just aren't inclined to pursue the story."

and,

   "We don't believe what he's saying anyway so we don't take it seriously."

Join the conversation at Left In Alabama.

And the TradMed .. (0.00 / 0)
will be the first to get thrown to the lions .. if Rome falls
[ Parent ]
And for those who don't know... (4.00 / 1)
Powers and Sunstein were married a month or two ago. And while I don't know if I'd call her a liberal hawk (others might), but Powers supports US military intervention abroad for reasons not immediately related to US national security, and Sunstein believed that the recent FISA bill was AOK and that Obama did the right thing in flipping on it. So there.

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton
Ask Sunstein about war crimes trials? (0.00 / 0)
is that politicizing politics? Was Lyndie England a political activist?
After hearing Cass Sunstein speak on FISA, (0.00 / 0)
I think you should be careful getting pictures taken with them Matt, might just hurt your reputation...
Opening the Day: Your Morning Post-partisanship | 23 comments
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