It's obvious to anybody paying any attention whatsoever that Sarah Palin's foreign policy knowledge is limited. She had to get a new passport to visit Alaskan troops in Kuwait. OnTheIssues records no foreign policy positions taken by her. She supported Pat Buchanan, for chrissake.
But of course, Fox News and the right wing swung into action. Of course she has foreign policy experience! Alaska borders Canada! And Russia!?!
Most people seem to be laughing this one off or ignoring the charge as beneath reasonable notice. Michael Kinsley pointed out that though her state does include the Aleutians, which were occupied by the Japanese in WW2, there's no evidence that Palin herself was involved in driving Hirohito's troops from American shores.
Still, I think there's an opportunity here. Maybe it can wait a few days (and maybe her candidacy will implode before we get a chance to ask,) but I think we could actually perform some pretty nice aikido here.
We just have to get Palin to talk about her negotiations with Russia. Join me on the flip for my reasoning.
We appear to be entering a silly season in the presidential election, if this Telegraph article is anything to go by.
Nevertheless, there are two important points in here.
One is that Republicans are picking a VP. This is particularly important since McCain may very well not last two terms and the GOP tends to base its primaries on the theory of "The Turn", so McCain's VP is likely to become the de facto head of the Republican Party within the next eight years.
The other was mentioned by McCain. For all that the joke was bad, he was right about one thing:
"What you can find out now on the internet - it's remarkable."
John McCain won't be using Google to pick his VP. One imagines the internet both confuses and appalls him and he has a team of researchers and advisors to dig up the dirt on potential running mates and help him make the choices.
But swing voters don't have these resources. If they want to know about VP candidates, they'll have to turn to potted summaries on TV or in newspapers and to the internet.
The Democrats have plenty of strong VP picks this cycle. Amongst those who get a lot of blogosphere attention I'm particularly partial to Sherrod Brown, Brian Schweitzer, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Kathleen Sebelius and Bill Richardson.
Nevertheless, the blogosphere doesn't make the decision. And we have less influence than the media. The conventional wisdom in the media is that Obama needs to pick a moderate elder statesman with defence and foreign policy credentials. A lot of people seem to be backing Sam Nunn.
This would be a truly appalling choice. He's been good on nuclear non-proliferation issues and is no doubt a dab hand at negotiating with banana republic despots, but he's terrible on economic issues and routinely favoured regressive social policies.
He supported the Iraq war and he mulled an independent run this year. The only saving grace is that he's too old to run as Obama's successor.
Thankfully such a choice appears unlikely at present. Obama's decision to interview Patty Murray suggests that he's not fooled by the beltway consensus that Unity 08 was a great idea.
Nevertheless, there's still an outside chance that Nunn, or similar wastes of space like former Indiana congressmen Lee Hamilton and Tim Roemer. And even if that doesn't happen, this kind of media discourse pushes the Overton window leftward, so figures like Feingold are not perceived as remotely plausible candidates.
To that end, I have a solution: David Bonior.
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In 2000, Ralph Nader was on the ballot in 44 out of 51 jurisdictions. He scored 2.74% of the vote and might have done better if Gore had not worked in the final few weeks to bring Nader voters into his camp by emphasising their policy similarities. He took more than 5% of the vote in seven states and DC. In Alaska he actually broke the 10% barrier.
If Al Gore had won, perhaps this would have been a brave new dawn for the Greens. A narrow Gore victory and an encouraging Green showing would have encouraged the president to tack left.
But that, of course, is not what happened. Nader took only 1.6% of the vote in Florida, but Bush and Gore ran so close that it's hard to argue that his 97,000 votes weren't determined. Nader argued that "If [Gore] can't beat the bumbling Texas governor with that terrible record, he ought to go back to Tennessee."
Whilst one can agree that Gore ran a bad campaign, Nader did untold damage to his party with this attitude. And in refusing to accept that he'd made a mistake, he torpedoed the standing of himself and his party.
In 2004 Nader ran as an independent with Peter Camejo as his running mate, whilst David Cobb ran on the Green Party ticket. Even allowing for this division and Cobb's strategy of primarily focusing on safe seats, their vote total cratered. Between them they took around 0.5% of the total vote.
In 2008 Nader is running again, but at beast he's a stalking horse for John McCain. The Greens seem likely to nominate Cynthia McKinney and look to be resigned to irrelevance. Although they're on the ballot in 20 states and DC thus far, don't expect them to make it on everywhere else.
But if the Greens have failed - and they most definitely have - other third parties on the left have had some success. The Working Families Party, for example, has a pivotal influence in New York through adept use of that state's fusion voting.
Join me after the break, where I shall attempt to make an argument for the utility of third parties on the left as an aid to progressivism in certain rare circumstances and to suggest strategies for this:
As a Briton I'm less bothered than most of you about the outcome of the primary election. There are two good but not perfect candidates, either of whom would be an improvement on the present administration and either of whom could win. That would in turn be good for Britain's foreign policy, the political situation the world over and Britain's (currently craptastic) world standing.
So I could go with either candidate. But neither of them excites me especially. I admire Clinton's ability to fight and Obama's rhetorical gifts (and I admired John Edwards' willingness to say what doesn't get said enough.)
But however much Obama may have rebuilt the Dean coalition or have come to political prominence contemporaneously with the blogosphere, he's not the candidate of the section of the blogosphere with which I'd identify myself.
He's the candidate of those in the blogosphere (a fairly large proportion) and those who followed in their tracks (the overwhelmingly majority of this group) who want Obama to lead a return to civility, forcing a mutual rhetorical disarmament. If you want that, fine. Good luck with that, but I'm far too cynical to believe you'll do that without first making the situation much worse.
I'd identify myself with the other section of the blogosphere - the one which wants to reduce the conservative movement to a gibbering wreck, so it's safe for us to disarm slightly. The movementarian section, if you will.
[Cynical aside - I'd probably prefer a Clinton victory as her shortcomings are well known and she won't be associated with us. Failures on her part negatively impact us and our ideas much less than failures from Obama, and I think he'll have to use every inch of his not inconsiderable talent to have even a 50% chance of leaving office with his credibility intact. But I'm a cynical and hateful bastard, so feel free to disregard my opinion.]
Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is reportedly planning to introduce legislation in parliament granting the Turkish military authority to launch sustained military operations into Iraqi Kurdistan against PKK training camps, in response to a series of attacks from that group, which amongst other things killed 13 Turkish soldiers in an ambush in Sirnak province.
Whether or not Erdogan uses this authorisation (and reports are that he may not, being less than sanguine about the chances of such operations succeeding) it would nevertheless do much to destabilise the only region of Iraq where a degree of stability is to be found, poison Turkish-U.S. and Turkish-Iraqi relations, complicate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, present the Turkish military with the opportunity to start a war on their own initiative and endanger the (already somewhat threatened) democratic regime in Turkey.
Before we go any further, some background.
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Cross-posted at [shameless plug] Forgotten Countries, my new foreign policy-focused blog [/shameless plug]
Pervez Musharraf has been re-elected. He won an overwhelming victory, which would point to a truly massive level of popular support, if it wasn't for the fact that the election had slightly less legitimacy than Joshua Norton's claim to be Emperor of the United States.
The President of Pakistan is, in line with the Presidential Election Rules, 1988, elected indirectly. The people of Pakistan do not get to vote for the president they desire. The electorate is instead made up of the Senators, National Assembly Members and members of the four Provincial Assemblies. Elections to the Provincial Assemblies are direct (with some seats reserved for women and religious minorities and distributed through a system of proportional representation) and this is also the case with the National Assembly.
The Senate is somewhat more complicated. Each Provincial Assembly picks 22 Senators, four of whom must be women and another four of whom must be Islamic scholars, whilst the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas select another eight. The final four Senators are elected from Islamabad, of whom one must be a woman and another an Islamic scholar.
In many ways it appears to resemble the U.S. Senate of the late 19th century - no direct election and a massive regional imbalance - Punjab is about eight times as populous as Balochistan, but receives no more representation in this chamber.
This problem is exacerbated in the election of the President. Because even with this electorate of slightly over a thousand voters, it is not one man one vote. Rather there are 702 votes. 442 of these votes come from members of the Senate and National Assembly. The other 260 are divided equally between the four provinces, which benefits the North-West Frontier and Balochistan at the expense of Punjab and Sindh (the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas and the Capital Territory are almost completely marginalised).
Obviously, this is not a fair system. It should clearly be reformed. But that doesn't even rank in the top five reasons why these elections are a "farce, a mockery and a fraud upon the electorate" That quote is from the Electoral Reforms Commission of Pakistan's description of elections in 1956. Read on and I'll tell you why things are no better now.
The Bush Dog campaign has more or less achieved its first step: compiling profiles of all those designated as 'Bush Dogs' by the criteria Matt laid out.
Some of the profiles are positive, some are negative (largely based on who authored them) and there is certainly room for more profiles to provide a more nuanced outlook, but the overall picture is in place. Now the question arises of what to do with them.
In the netroots there has been rather more caution, stemming not only from the traditional emphasis on partisanship but also from fear of strengthening a Republican Party which is almost entirely made up of Bush rubber-stamps.
Nevertheless, in general we can divide those on the list into 3 groups:
1) Bush Dogs in safe Democratic seats. It would be nice if they suddenly changed their positions, but frankly it's probably smarter to primary them and replace them with someone who doesn't have to be pressured into making the right votes. The best example here is Lipinski (IL-03) and it also seems fair to consider challenges to Costa (CA-20) and Cooper (TN-05) although the latter will quite definitely be the most difficult of the three.
2) Bush Dogs in seats with a PVI close to 0. Primary challenges here are riskier, but possible in the last resort. In general, however, the safer option is to make sure that any open seats in this category are occupied by progressives and in the meantime to try to bring the current occupants into line with their constituents.
3) Bush Dogs in blood red districts. Nobody in their right minds thinks that we can primary this lot and win a general election. Hell, we'd be lucky to win the primary. Whilst there might in theory be some value to a primary challenge here to put the fear of the netroots into the right wing of the party, it would essentially be a cynical and most likely foolish sacrifice of a seat, so I don't see there being sufficient support for that kind of enterprise. A more subtle approach is needed here.
Read on, and I'll suggest how we can put real pressure on the Bush Dogs, tailored to individual seats, without unduly biasing our chances in a general election.
