Finally, Barack Obama answers the “Which Side Are You On?” question so many of us have been asking, and starts talking about trade and working-class economics:
I have three simple thoughts on this ad:
1) Though unspectacular in its production, it is a very important thematic step in the right direction. Let’s hope unions and progressives use this step to keep Obama in the right place, rather than floating stories like this from the Hill newspaper that would seem to undermine the cause.
2) Where have you been, Barack? How are you only starting to talk about China and trade issues now?
3) Better late than never. Even though I’m not sure why it has taken this long to get to these issues in such a forceful way, it’s nonetheless terrific that Obama’s getting there now…it’s just in the nick of time.
Last night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow and I discussed John McCain’s new rhetoric claiming he supports better financial regulation. But instead of focusing only on McCain’s words, we examined the Arizona senator’s career as a public official – and took a look at an issue that, until Sen. Sherrod Brown’s statements today, no major elected Democrats have been willing to touch: the issue of McCain’s formative regulatory experience coming as a member of the Keating Five pressing federal financial regulators to stop doing their job in advance of the S&L; crisis. Though that crisis is the most analogous economic event to today’s Wall Street meltdown, it is an issue that, until Sen. Sherrod Brown’s statements today, no major elected Democrats have really touched.
McCain, as the S&L; scandal first suggested, is no run-of-the-mill free-market fundamentalist. Yes, he voted for the ill-advised repeal of the key Depression-era law that might have prevented the rampant consolidation and speculation that brought on today’s emergency. But, then again, Bill Clinton and his DLC Democrats supported it too. Yes, McCain’s top economic adviser is Phil Gramm, the UBS investment banker who pushed through so much deregulatory legislation as a senator. But then again, Barack Obama’s top economic adviser is Robert Wolf, Gramm’s UBS boss.
Where McCain really leaps to the fringe and differentiates his extremism from others is in his use of the deregulatory label to publicly define himself. That’s how you can really tell what a politician believes in.
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MSNBC takes a look at the politics of the Wall Street meltdown, and while it’s a solid piece, I think it misses one important point: As much opportunity as there is for Obama to maximize Democrats inherent advantages on economic issues, there are equally significant opportunities for John McCain.
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I thought the House Democratic Caucus Chairman was a position whose mission is to help elect more Democrats, so that Democrats can do more things Democrats promise to do. According to Inside U.S. Trade, I’m wrong.
Here’s the snippet (no link because the publication is subscription-only):
“Among the House Democratic leadership, Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) is actively advocating that Democrats would be better off having the votes on pending [free trade agreements] this year for a number of reasons, sources said. They said that one of the reasons Emanuel cites is that there are likely more Republican members in this Congress than there will be in the next, which would mean that fewer Democrats would have to take a potentially divisive trade vote now.”
Correct: Emanuel – one of the original architects of NAFTA – wants congressional Democrats to pass controversial NAFTAs with Colombia, South Korea and Panama right now, so as to avoid inevitably STRONGER opposition from his own party in the next Congress.
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Here’s a screen shot of ABC News’ front page today. Memo to producers over there: You may want to have more than one woman on your panel of five commentators when talking about “The Female Vote.”
With the presidential campaigns issuing competing press releases about the weekend’s Wall Street meltdown, it’s instructive to step back from the partisan sniping, take a look at the empirical record, and therefore try to get a handle on who, in fact, would be better equipped to handle the crisis as president.
There are indeed good sides to both John McCain and Barack Obama’s record when it comes to the issues this crisis involved – and there are, as well, bad and ugly sides, too. But once you look at the whole picture, it is clear who would be in a better position to deal with the meltdown.
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Yesterday morning, my nationally syndicated newspaper column asked whether, in fact, Republicans really do put “country first?” On the afternoon of the same day, Barack Obama asked the same question.
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My newspaper column this week takes a hard look at the Republican convention, and specifically, at the notion that the GOP puts “country first.” You can read it here.
The meta narrative of the campaign right now is pretty simple: The GOP has made a political strategy out of the old adage that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” Knowing that the Bush-DeLay-Abramoff scandals (which continued this week) have made many Americans believe the Republicans are scoundrels, the Republicans are doing everything they can to make the campaign into a competition over who can be more hypernationalist. This is the saber rattling of the 2004 campaign on steroids.
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A few years ago, the film “The Aristocrats” made audiences guffaw with clips of comedians reciting their version of the dirtiest joke in history. Conservatives seem intent on following that flick up with their own version of The Aristocrats – this one starring the aristocrat, George Will, with his own obscene joke, only his isn’t funny.
In a column about underfinanced municipal pension systems published on 9/11, Will uses the anniversary of the horrific attacks to express deep anger that veteran police, firefighters and municipal workers – the people who Republicans rhetorically heroize when trying to exploit 9/11 – eventually get paid well for their services. In one California town on San Francisco Bay, Will tells us that – gasp! – “after just five years, all police and firefighters are guaranteed lifetime health benefits.” The horror of giving lifetime health benefits to people who have to inhale toxic fumes in burning buildings, or who often sustain serious lifetime wounds on the job.
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A series of new polls shows John McCain closing in on Barack Obama in industrial swing-states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and widening his lead in places like North Carolina. I was on CNN this morning suggesting how Obama can turn those trends around – namely, by talking about John McCain’s NAFTA cheerleading and about his support for spending $12 billion a month of taxpayer money in Iraq – positions that are controversial, to say the least, in precisely these swing states:
This goes back to my earlier post and newspaper column about how Obama can counter McCain’s odious cultural populism bewailing sex education and screaming “Country First,” and I think he can counter it with a strong brand of economic populism – a brand Obama has only fleetingly embraced. Issues like NAFTA and the war are issues McCain can’t muddle like he has taxes or health care. Put another way, those two issues are the ones that draw the most clear, easy-to-understand contrast between the two candidates.
I think Obama has to make this kind of contrast, or he could lose the election.
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The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza publicly ponders whether my buddy Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer will one day run for president. Some of you have emailed me about the story, asking if I know anything. You can read political reporter Mike Saccone’s blog at the Grand Junction Sentinel for my answer to that question. You can read below for a bit more. If you don’t care about this question because it’s manufactured, substance-free, Beltway-generated media speculation about a hypothetical election at least 5 years in the future – I totally agree with you (as you will see in the Grand Junction Sentinel) and wholeheartedly endorse your decision not to read any further.
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Last night, I appeared on Rachel Maddow’s new MSNBC show to discuss John McCain’s new ad attacking Barack Obama on education. You can watch the discussion here:
In airing this ad, McCain has done something I never thought I would see: He has sponsored a new television commercial that effectively declares his support for child molestor rights.
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The assumption in conservatives “drill, baby, drill!” energy policy is that high gas prices are the result of crude oil supply shortages. Drill more, they say, and that will result in more crude oil supply, which will result in lower prices. Sounds logical…until you realize the gas price crisis has nothing to do with crude oil supply. That’s not my theory, that’s fact, according to market analysts. As the Associated Press notes upon today’s release of a report by Masters Capital Management, “Speculation by large investors – and not supply and demand for oil – were a primary reason for the surge in oil prices.” Here are more details from Bloomberg News:
“The work by Michael Masters, president of the Masters Capital Management hedge fund, blames investors who buy and hold an index of commodities for driving prices to records and for their subsequent drop…Masters testified three times before Congress this year, arguing that limits on traders would cut oil prices to $65 to $70 a barrel. He has been cited by lawmakers who introduced at least 20 measures to curb speculation.”
The Masters report is new in that it goes over current data, but the phenomenon it reports on is anything but new. In sum, we know A) high gas prices aren’t related to supply, and therefore drilling more won’t curb high gas prices and B) re-regulating Wall Street, cracking down on oil industry consolidation, and investigating energy company collusion is the best way to get at the problem. We know this not just because of whats happening now, but because of what has happened over the last decade.
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Why is Barack Obama slipping in the polls? Here’s why:
“In a Washington Post-ABC News poll, Obama’s edge on the economy has slipped to only five percentage points, a low for the campaign.”
That’s really sad on a lot of levels, especially when you consider the contours of the candidates’ tax plans:
“All taxpayers would receive a cut under McCain’s plan. Taxes for those who make less than $226,982 would go down under Obama’s proposal and they would rise for those who make more than $603,403. Obama would give the biggest cuts to those who make the least, while McCain would give the largest cuts to the very wealthy.”
Then again, even considering those facts, I’m not really surprised.
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Note: Colorado, my home state, is hosting not just a tight presidential and U.S. Senate race, but also a battle over a series of progressive ballot measures that, if passed, would be landmark models for progressive economic campaigns in the future. This post looks at the kinds of dirty tactics the right is using to try to stop these initiatives – tactics that we will likely see all over the country in all different ways as this election season heats up. – D
A good rule of thumb: Beware those who cite silly examples 5,000 miles away, when there are real-world examples just up the road that they could cite – but deliberately ignore because those close-to-home examples undermine their entire point.
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“U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, runner-up in Montana’s Republican presidential caucus last winter, will appear on Montana’s November ballot as the presidential nominee of the Constitution Party of Montana, it announced Monday. David Hart of Kalispell, who ran Paul’s campaign in Montana, predicted that Paul’s candidacy would hurt the other four candidates on the state’s presidential ballot, particularly McCain. ‘Here in Montana, I think it’s pretty much sealed the deal that McCain will not win Montana,’ Hart said. ‘If he doesn’t win, Ron Paul will probably be blamed for it. They only need to look in the mirror and blame themselves for nominating someone who doesn’t represent true Republican values and causes like Paul.'”
Bill Clinton won Montana in 1992 because of Ross Perot. Obama, who is already close in the polls in Montana, could very likely win the state because of Paul.
Everywhere you look – from Republican congressional press conferences, to newspaper op-ed pages – the political world is abuzz with the news that China is drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, thanks to cooperation with Cuba. How, ask these outraged conservatives, could Democrats oppose offshore drilling knowing about this incredible news?
Because this incredible news is, in fact, a fabricated lie.
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To start this post, let’s first stipulate that the Republican Party of artistocrat George W. Bush labeling “elitist” the Democratic Party of up-from-the-bootstraps Barack Obamais about the silliest, most intelligence-insulting frame ever attempted by a major political party in contemporary American history. But let’s also consider the very important point in this fascinating article by Aziz Rana in N+1 magazine.
Rana suggests that the reason Obama – and Democrats in general – have had trouble with working-class voters has to do with the underlying assumptions in their most favorite contemporary narrative – you know, the ones about people working hard, going to college and becoming high-paid professionals. That’s Obama’s whole life story, and the story that countless Democratic politicians tell as their version of “The American Dream.”
The problem is that’s not the only American Dream.
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There is nothing like getting completely off the grid to clear one’s mind, and put things into perspective – and there is no place better to do just that than Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.
I spent the last week at a cabin on Lake Sutherland, just outside the gates of Olympic National Park – and I’m proud to say I watched almost no television, didn’t check my email, and didn’t answer my cell phone. I read a few books, hiked a few trails, grilled a few meals, drank a few beers, and simply gazed out at the view in the photograph at right for more than a few hours. In the process, I hashed out a few things in my own head – something that’s almost impossible in the increasingly nonsensical lyrics of the moment-to-moment death-metal ballad that is Campaign 2008.
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I can’t say I’m all that surprised by John McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) as his runningmate. At first glance – and this will be negated if bad scandals come out – the choice is a very smart one, so smart, in fact, that, as an Obama supporter, it scares me.
Here’s four reasons why this is a pretty smart choice – and for progressives, I think its a good idea that we look at these factors as we head into the final stretch of the campaign:
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If his convention speech tonight is any indication, Barack Obama has (finally) signaled that progressive economic populism is going to be the central thrust of Democrats campaign in the stretch run of the 2008 election.
The speech is probably the most populist national speech Obama has given.
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This is part of my ongoing dispatches about the convention for In These Times magazine. – D
As the world waits to hear Barack Obama’s message of change tonight at Invesco Field, I am still marveling at how I got to eat dinner last night with the American ruling class. Well, OK, not with, but near – and the experience was one of those “more things change, more things stay the same” moments that make it hard to hear Obama’s soothing bromides – and that led me to opt out of the final night of the convention.
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After a flood of email from folks asking me to come back early from my hiatus, I figure I’ll post a few choice posts from the convention every now and again, before making a full return after my vacation. Here’s the first. – D
At various times in my career – as with all of us in the business of making trouble – I have been attacked as a polarizer, a finger-pointer, and/or a divider. But the picture above should tell you, in fact, I am neither.
At left is Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago economist who is Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser. He and I have become friendly over the last few years. Though we have a number of disagreements on some policies, I think we both respect each other, and challenge each other – and through that, we’ve developed an ongoing dialogue about economic issues that has been rather productive.
At right, is Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), an old friend from my time working for his congressional colleague Bernie Sanders. DeFazio, who hails from an Oregon swing district crucial to Obama’s performance in that swing state, is one of the most passionate fair trade advocates in the Congress.
While I was walking out of the Pepsi center today, I happened upon Goolsbee and then, while we were chatting, saw DeFazio. What a perfect time for a little bridge-building, I thought. And so I introduced them.
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A programming note: I’ll be taking something of a leave of absence from OpenLeft. Between the exhaustion of a three-month book tour, and then this week’s convention in my hometown (where I will be blogging at CAF and at In These Times), and then a vacation next week, I won’t have time to be here on a consistent basis. Also, I’ll admit it: The personal vitriol in the comments was psychologically overwhelming and prompted me to use this time to take a break.
I know, I know – in the machismo world of cyberspace, you aren’t supposed to acknowledge that anything bothers you. But the intensity of the hatred expressed was, well, pretty intense. So, this is by no means an overwrought GBCW – I’ll be back at some point (and there’s a decent chance I won’t really be able to stay for more than a few days!). But the convergence of a scheduling glut and a bit of feeding frenzy of personal attacks make this a perfect time to try to take a bit of a break.
It’s funny what the Internet can do to one’s psychology, and how it can skew one’s perception of reality. I spent three months on the road, using a lot of my own limited personal resources to travel the country for book events that were simultaneous organizing and fundraising events for local groups. I was in front of big, and hugely supportive crowds almost every night for three months (including giving the keynote speech last night to 500 people at the Boulder County Dems’ Truman dinner). It was one of the most gratifying experiences of my life – both because it contributed to the grassroots progressive cause, and because I could see the real-world implications of my work.
Yet, at times, I turn on the computer, and I’ll be doing my thing in the progressive Netroots, working on sites that are supposed to be about the progressive movement, and I’ll be the target of very personally directed anger and hate. Not ideological disagreements, mind you – but sheer, unvarnished personal hate. And it will lead me to forget the thousands of people who subscribe to my email list, the thousands more that I met this summer, and the thousands more that I work with through so many different groups. It’s Saul Alinskyian in that a tiny minority of very loud people can have a huge impact – in this case, a negative one on my own psyche.
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Team Obama and Biden have to learn from Kerry’s grand blunder and “Get There First.”
In Drew Westen’s “The Political Brain“, his chapter ‘Positively Negative’ concludes:
Kerry would have prevented most of the problems that ultimately undid his campaign if he and his advisors had just followed this simple, well-researched strategy ( psychological inoculation ). There was no sensible alternative to inoculation on the issue of his Senate testimony of April 1971. Kerry needed to explain to the American people why he had turned against the war and why he had testified about American atrocities. Leaving an “eighteen-minute gap” in his narrative simply telegraphed to Karl Rove where Kerry’s team thought he was vulnerable. Embracing this part of his history would have given him the platform he needed later to speak about Abu Ghraib and to respond to the Swift Boat Veterans, who scored some of their most powerful points with the notion that Kerry’s testimony was a betrayal of his fellow soldiers.
Whenever Democrats are tempted to take a “wait and see” approach, they need to remember that in politics, he who frames first usually frames best.
Biden needs to remind (teach) everyone that he and Dick Lugar (R) wanted a different version of the Iraq war bill – a version that was better in many key ways. The White House wanted a blank check, and the compromise bill is what Biden voted for.
Biden has to get into how his resolution differed from the White House proposal in that it 1) limited the authorization of force specifically to Iraq, while the White House wanted a blank card to wage war throughout “the region.”
2)Biden’s proposal placed a greater emphasis on international cooperation and focused on disarming Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, rather than the political project of regime change.
This difference is key, his version the BIDEN-LUGAR AMENDMENT, which the White House rejected and the Republican lapdogs snuffed out, would have avoided the occupation of Iraq altogether.
3) It authorized the use of force to disarm Saddam Hussein only after the exhaustion of all diplomatic efforts and weapons inspections.
The White House gave key Senators like Lugar and Biden personal assurances and then went back on their word.
The AUMF that was eventually passed was a compromise between what Biden wanted and what Bush hoped for.
Biden, to this day, regrets trusting this Administration with any power – let alone any more power than his bill would have constricted Bush to.
But unlike the Senior Senator from Arizona, Biden learns from errors.
A catastrophic Administration doesn’t get 4 more years to ‘get it right.’ It gets changed – Obama/Biden is bringing change.
Something like that should be our story of his vote.
It’s a pain to have to go there, but if we don’t get there First, on our terms, then the GOP will tell the story in a way that negates most or all of Biden’s strengths.
I’ve gotten some email today about my column in the Denver Post about the concept of “presidentialism” – ie. the obsession with presidential election politics to the exclusion of all else. People are asking me whether presidentialism is as pronounced as Vanderbilt professor Dana Nelson’s new book makes it out to be – and what it looks like in practice. To answer those queries, I present to you the above graphic, juxtaposing two pages of the Denver Post, where my column runs every week.
As you can see on the left, most of the entire front page is taken up with presidentialism – specifically, speculation about who one candidate might choose for vice-president – an office that has almost zero power or impact on ordinary people’s lives. Now take a look at the right side where there’s an image of page 7A. Right, you see it there if you squint hard enough – a tiny AP story headlined ” U.S., Iraq Negotiate Gradual Pullout” about a potential end to the war in Iraq, wedged next to a Dillard’s ad.
Mind you, I’m not at all trying to pick on the Post (in fact, the paper’s coverage of serious issues like energy and water has been far better than most, and you could argue that with the Democratic convention coming to Denver, the paper has a reason to focus on the presidential hullabaloo – and also, in this same paper, they ran my column questioning presidentialism). This is merely a mundane example of a much broader phenomenon that all of us are part of. I checked around other media today and found that many major dailies (for instance, Boston Globe, Detroit News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Columbus Dispatch and Columbia State) made little or no mention of the potential end to the longest and most expensive war in American history among others, but carried stories about the latest presidential gossip.
But as I said in my column, the media is just as much a reflection of presidentialism as a manufacturer of it in our culture. Politics has been celebrified to the point where everyone from bloggers to activists to regular voting citizens see the American Idol quality of a presidential campaign as more important than the actual issues that campaign is supposed to be about. We are left to believe that the only thing that matters in American democracy is the White House horse race – and what a travesty that line of thinking really is.
If the Founding Fathers could see us all now, they would be appalled. As America has been trained to treat the presidency as a royal throne, we have stomped all over the very anti-royalist revolution that brought this nation into being. As I show in my weekly newspaper column today, the presidential-palooza that has come to dominate every media instrument – TV, radio, newspapers, blogs, email – has suffocated the most fundamental tenets of Jeffersonian democracy.
Living here in Denver, the tragedy of all this is on display in full relief. As huge tax and energy fights roil the Rocky Mountain West, we are about to have the entire presidential-focused political Establishment from D.C. swoop in here, turning the city into a carnival of White House obsession. While I’m excited for the fun of it all, I’m also dreading it – both because I moved out to Denver, in part, to get away from the D.C. culture, but more importantly, because the convention exemplifies the true rot of our democracy.
The reason the presidential race gets almost all of the attention – and every other level of government gets none – is because we have come to believe democracy is a quadrennial vote for president, and that’s it. As I say in the column, that has happened over time, thanks to the decline of journalism and evisceration of social movements. And no one is faultless – we are all part of the problem.
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For the next week, I’m going to be doing so many different things, I’ll be impersonating a chicken with its head cut off. Here’s what I will be up to – I hope to see as many of you as possible at these events, and if you aren’t here in Denver, I hope you tune in:
8/22, 8am MST – AM 760 with Jay Marvin: I’ll be on my regular Friday spot with Jay Marvin on AM 760. We’re going to be talking to Rep. Mark Udall about his race for the U.S. Senate.
8/22, 1pm EST – Meet the Bloggers: I’ll be on the panel of bloggers talking to Michael Moore about his new book.
8/23, 7:30pm MST – Boulder County Democratic Dinner: I’ll be keynoting the Boulder County Democrats’ annual Truman Dinner.
8/24, 4:00pm MST – Live from Main Street Denver: I’ll be speaking at the Live from Main Street townhall meeting that kicks off the Big Tent outside the Democratic Convention.
8/25, 3:30pm MST – Air America/Progressive Book Club: I’ll be speaking on the Air America-Progressive Book Club book panel with Paul Krugman, Arianna Huffington and John Podesta. I’ll be signing books at the Tattered Cover immediately after the event.
8/26, 12:00pm MST – SeaChange/Starz Book Presentation: I’ll be delivering a presentation about my new book, The Uprising, in the Starz Lounge at the Democratic convention.
On top of all this, I will be inside the convention hall reporting on the goings on for In These Times magazine. So check back here for updates, and if you see me around the Mile High City, make sure to say hi!
FYI – As part of the Campaign for America’s Future’s new weekly Trade Report, we caught this snippet from Virgina. Yes, that’s right, the McCain campaign is citing the wealthiest county in America as proof that the government’s economic and trade policies are working well – and it is a perfect symbol of just how out-of-touch the Royalist Right really is:
WHITE HOUSE ’08 – GOP CITES RICHEST COUNTY IN AMERICA AS PROOF ECONOMY IS GREAT
The Roanoke Times reports that as Barack Obama convened a discussion about unfair trade policies in economically ravaged regions of Virginia, the national Republican Party countered by citing Fairfax County as proof the economy is doing just fine. “It doesn’t take a lot of courage to go to Martinsville and talk about trade,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Davis (R) said in a Tuesday conference call arranged by McCain’s campaign. “What would be courageous is to come to Fairfax County, where you have 362 foreign-owned companies and tens of thousands of employees with foreign-owned firms…and take the same stand up here.”
Besides the tone deafness of holding up foreign-owned firms as proof of a solid domestic economy, Davis forgot to mention that according to Forbes magazine, Fairfax County has long been the wealthiest county in the United States – a place where the median (the median!) household income is over $100,000 a year. The county is home to many of the millionaire corporate lobbyists that have been instrumental in the passage of rigged trade deals.
Davis citing Fairfax County today as proof that trade policies are working for the vast majority of the country would be like Herbert Hoover citing the Rockefeller family as proof that the economy was working for most Americans during the Great Depression.
There is nothing like getting completely off the grid to clear one’s mind, and put things into perspective – and there is no place better to do just that than Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.
