An Even Less Convenient Truth
Check out this book excerpt from Al Gore's The Assault on Reason.

This is an insightful but profoundly depressing read. Gore grasps a point that should be obvious--modern American culture is defined by the passive experience of watching television, and that passivity has drained the vitality of the public sphere. He doesn't say, but could, that the fracturing of the culture was coincident with and reinforcing of the fracturing of the "vital center" postwar consensus. As we've stepped back into our little pursuits and niches, we've left the playing field of politics to those who have the most resources and interest in grabbing a piece, from interest groups at all points of the political compass to millionaire campaign bundlers.

Gore paints a dire picture of American democracy "in danger of being hollowed out." That at least he's got right. Unless and until there's a Great Depression-level economic crash (and I'm starting to think we know too much about the economy for that to be very likely) or a series of terror attacks that make everyone feel personally endangered, we are very unlikely to succumb to an overtly authoritarian form of governance. There will still be campaigns and elections and different levels and branches of government, all contested by different political parties. It just won't matter. The barriers to enactment of the popular will--from gerrymandering to unlimited corporate money to institutionalized trivialization of the news--will become ever stronger, while the popular will itself is thinned to nothing.

But he's not dire enough, or has a mistaken sense of the timeline. One can plausibly argue that this all has happened already, it's gone, and what remains is entertainment and ritual. It's not primarily corporate pervidy or trash TV or the rise of the political consultants that killed it; "we the people" just lost interest, because we don't collectively do great things anymore. We can't even really win wars, be they military or market-based. We're still coasting on what we were 60 years ago, the fluky comparative advantage we ended World War II with and then somewhat reinforced when the Cold War concluded. That ride will end, and then we'll start to become as fractured economically as we are in the other ways. In fact, that's already well underway too ("The Shrinking Middle Class").

Thus, the fights of the late Bush years, for those who care about the Constitution and think the system as enacted in 1789 and refined through the Civil Rights era was worthwhile and effective, are really just about trying to preserve the tools and framework of American democratic governance. For today, people are doing this to push back against individuals or factions that seek to abuse power--but for the longer term, the hope is that if the public ever feels like taking a real interest at some future point, they'll still have the capacity.

Just When I Thought He Was Out...
Maybe Mike Bloomberg really will run for president. I'm always loath to credit the Washington Moonie Times, but per Political Wire, that paper reports that he's set aside $1 billion and "lowered the bar" to potentially jump into the race. Charlie Cook's weekly political e-mail (unlinkable, alas, as it's not on a website so far as I can tell) speculates as well, specifically focusing on the possibility of a Bloomberg/Chuck Hagel ticket. (Hagel's certainly into it, though he might want to reverse the names. No way that happens, by the way--Bloomberg is nobody's #2. More likely, Hagel would be a de facto co-president, more or less running foreign policy, perhaps in tandem with a Democratic Secretary of State like Bob Kerrey, who represents for both Nebraska and NYC.) And the New York Times speculated again yesterday about a Bloomberg campaign, noting that he's reactivated his old campaign website.

I realize that it makes as much sense to complain about a partisan rag slanting its coverage as about a rabid dog biting passers-by, but I'm a little miffed that the Moonie piece evidently characterizes Bloomberg as "a social liberal and fiscal conservative." The first part is true, but the second is absurd. Bloomberg isn't a budgetary tightwad by any means: he's pledged $150 million of city money to the most ambitious anti-poverty campaign NYC has seen in at least 35 years, and potentially wants to obligate billions toward his "PlaNYC" campaign to manage the city's growth over the next 20 years or so. He did dig New York out of the $6 billion budget hole he inherited from Rudy Giuliani, but that's not "conservative" so much as "responsible"--especially considering that the biggest means by which he did this was a record tax hike on home owners. That assessment is actually the example par excellence of Bloomberg's pragmatism: it was steep and came in for understandable but brutal criticism--and as soon as the books were balanced, he started making good to those he'd dunned with big rebates and other goodies. You can't have a 73 percent approval rating with home owners still mad at you.

A Bloomberg/Giuliani race would be fascinating, considering that New Yorkers themselves (ourselves) overwhelmingly prefer the current mayor both in that job and the presidency. I could see Rudy running against New York even as he presents himself as its, and the nation's, defender against the turr'ists. But I don't think Rudy's getting to the general election, which would obviate the awkwardness of Bloomberg running against the guy who (like it or not, and I don't) basically gave him the mayoralty in late 2001.

But the real intrigue would be Bloomberg versus Hillary Clinton.

For thinking Democrats, particularly the more progressive activists who disdain (or detest) Hillary and are currently supporting Barack Obama or John Edwards, this will be a conundrum. Bloomberg's a better manager, he would have vastly more ability to get legislation passed, and in some respects he could run to Sen. Clinton's left--he's simply a much stronger social liberal, with a demonstrated commitment to economic justice. But he's not a Democrat (anymore). The unions probably would back Hillary... though the NYC unions don't hate Bloomberg, and Clinton's top advisor, Mark Penn, has some pretty ugly anti-labor credentials that Bloomberg's team would be quick to exploit. She'd have African-Americans, probably, though Bloomberg is sufficiently popular with black leaders in the city that he could send out a bunch of plausible surrogates and probably do at least as well as Bush did in '04.

I've almost convinced myself that this could happen. If ever the country were ready for a "short, divorced Jewish billionaire" who doesn't pander or dumb it down, it would be after the disastrous years of Bush, who is Bloomberg's polar opposite. If the Democrats really do nominate Hillary, that will block off millions of independents and moderate Republicans who would be open to some Democrats but not to That Woman. None of the Republicans really look credible in a general election; Fred Thompson has huge flaws that will come into focus if and when he gets in, McCain is too tied to the war and carries the baggage of his past good deeds; and Romney is just sort of pathetic.

It still feels like a stretch that the country would recognize Bloomberg for the excellent president he could be. But not nearly as much as it did a few months ago.

Al Gore and the Buyer's Remorse Primary
Josh Marshall's blog reports that a collection of onetime Al Gore staffers met for dinner last night in Washington, and the sense was strong that Gore isn't running in 2008 after all. While Democrats looking at their presidential selection pool haven't expressed the same level of dissatisfaction bordering on despair that Republicans seem to be suffering, there's no question that Gore's absence from the race leaves many partisans a bit sad and unfulfilled.

As someone who disdained Gore in 2000 but has come to admire him very much since then, I somewhat share this sentiment. HIs being denied the presidency through cheating, lying and strong-arm tactics set the tone for the disastrous years since then, with the worst administration in American history; if only they'd been as incompetent at winning political fights as they've proven to be at everything else. That Gore has grown in stature, figuratively as well as literally, since then, just adds salt to the wound of the Bush years.

I still maintain that his not entering the race shouldn't surprise anyone: fat people can't win in America, and Gore is big as a house. But there's time to drop the weight, and I don't think the "news" from this dinner really changes a thing.

Gore won't "jump into" the race in that he'll run in the primaries; he doesn't want to come down from the clouds, and after what the press did to him in 2000, it's hard to blame him. Not to mention that this was a guy who, unlike the president he served from 1993-2001, never seemed happy or even comfortable engaging in the theatrical aspects of politics. But he will keep his powder dry and stand ready to come to the rescue if/when the party needs him next year.

The scenario is that there's either a deadlocked convention--not very likely IMO--or, far more likely, a massive case of buyer's remorse after Hillary Clinton wins the nomination with 35-45 percent in every primary and polls show her losing to McGuliomney by 5-10 percent, despite the 20 percent advantage a generic Democrat has over a generic Republican.

Right now, about 50 percent of those polled from the general electorate claim they won't support Hillary no matter what. A year from now, that number could go even higher: I believe that for Hillary to win the nomination she'll have to throw the patented Clinton sharp elbows--and, in doing so, will alienate supporters of Obama and Edwards to the point that they'll be open to a third-party candidate who broadly shares their values and worldview. My man Mike Bloomberg still could be that guy, though the polls don't show much potential support for the short, divorced Jewish mayor who's enjoyed drugs and talked some smack over the years. But if it's not Bloomberg, it'll be someone else--Oprah, Jim Webb, a former general or two. Polls will bear out this hunger for a third option, and they'll also show that as HRC sinks, Al Gore rises. The pressure will build for him to get in.

Would he do it? Who knows. But if you're determined to hope for a Gore '08 candidacy, that's your scenario: he wins the Buyer's Remorse Primary.

Baseball-Related Despair
The Philadelphia Phillies cause me a lot of misery and countless (well, uncounted) wasted hours every year, but I'm not sure I've ever gotten to the moment of bleak resignation that, yes, they're going to fall short again, as quickly as I have this spring. Barely five weeks into it, I'm waiting for the end. After the usual hope-inducing winter and spring, the team staggered out of the gate to their annual 1-6 start; they rallied to within two games of the .500 mark, then went out on a ten-game road trip that mercifully concludes tomorrow night and fell on their collective face again. Now five games under the break-even point and 6.5 behind both the Mets and Braves--two well-run organizations that aren't going to collapse--the season *feels* over, whether or not it actually is.

Readers of The Good Phight probably have picked up on my despair, but if a man can't fully wallow in the sadomachistic psychological mire of his obsession on his own blog, then where to do it? Here's what's wrong with the Phillies, as I commented on another Phils site Tuesday afternoon:

1) The fish rots from the head, and bad process leads to bad outcomes. The poison unquestionably starts with principal owner Bill Giles, who should be put in jail for what he's done to a great franchise (while making unfathomable money!) since making the purchase in 1981, and team president David Montgomery, who seems sufficiently dumb it's a wonder he can dress himself. Regardless of what you think of Charlie Manuel as a manager (myself, I think he's about average--his positives and negatives more or less cancel out, though right now the negatives are on display given how little margin for idiocy the bench and bullpen give him), he was hired because the team's best player at the time loved him. That's no way to do business. And GM Pat Gillick, though nominally an outsider, seems to be the epitome of the 1970s/early '80s mindset that has suffused the organization ever since.

2. The roster is unbearably top-heavy. I'm working on something for TGP to more fully tell this story, but it's hardly an original observation that this team has about 5-7 really valuable players (Utley, Rollins, Hamels, et al), a similar number who are fine for now (e.g. Geary, Moyer)... and another dozen guys who are stealing money. Incredibly, this has been the case for three years now: an island of excellence in a big lake of stinkola.

3. None of this is likely to change. Great players will emerge, bearing hope, and leave, trailing bitterness. (Sometimes we call this "The Rolen Cycle.") Near-great players will come in and suddenly stink. The front office will be characterized by indifference, proud and belligerent ignorance, and near-transparent contempt for the fans. We only get released when the schmucks sell, and they won't do that until Giles dies, based on his own statements.

Another commenter on that same site offered this bon mot on the Groundhog Season Phillies: "Its beyond heartbreaking. It's just plain tedious."

The Counterforce
Over the last few years, as liberal-leaning websites have grown in size and importance and evolved into something one can describe as a true political movement, I've watched and to some extent joined in with eighty percent gratitude and excitement, twenty percent anxiety and concern. In a real sense, the convergence on the left has served as a defender, one of the strongest defenders, of American democracy in its time of challenge from a dangerous and coherent movement on the right, led by the Bush administration. That convergence has pushed the Democratic Party to stand its ground, rewarding those who do so with financial and logistical support, and has called to account a media that had been steadily adopting right-leaning contexts and premises. Starting with the Howard Dean campaign of 2004, focusing through Daily Kos, and spreading out to dozens of mid-size blogs and thousands of small ones, the online progressives have hosted countless helpful discussions and arguments, given new candidates and embattled incumbents platforms with which to reach people open to help, and more broadly built a sense of community and hope among millions of us finding little grounds for either in conventional and mainstream political life.

That's the eighty percent. The twenty is that the online progressive movement, like all movements, has drawn to itself dogmatic thinkers, self-appointed loyalty enforcers, and would-be demagogues who often seem eager to seize upon the near-crisis context of the Bush years for their own ends.

Assuming our society persists long enough, no doubt there will be weighty books and seminars and college courses and all the other media of collective remembrance in years to come that will seek to explain, track, analyze and spin this movement. But it's The New Republic, ironically enough, that might be first out of the gate with an explanation of how the online progressives emerged, and why they matter, in a great piece by Jonathan Chait. Here's a taste:

The 2000 recount is an apt birthing ground for the netroots. It perfectly fits their view of U.S. politics as an atavistic clash of partisan willpower. And their analysis of that episode, while somewhat crude, has a certain truth. The liberal intelligentsia, and much of the Democratic establishment, tried to hold itself above the fray. During the recount, liberal pundits were concerned above all with maintaining civility and consensus, and they flayed Democrats for any hint of partisanship or anger. (In a New Yorker editorial, Joe Klein scolded that Al Gore "reinforced his partisan reputation by challenging the results in Florida" and cautioned that "vehemence of any sort--ideological, political, analytical--seems ill-advised.") Elite liberal opinion-makers insisted that their side play fair. Gore, they declared, must allow for the possibility that his opponent could win a fair recount, must renounce street demonstrations, must be intellectually consistent--permitting, say, military ballots that did not fulfill the letter of the law to be counted. Members of the Gore recount team like William Daley and Warren Christopher, seeking to uphold their reputations as statesmen, nervously complied.

The contrast with the Republican side could not have been more stark. The only complaint conservative pundits had with the George W. Bush operation was that it was too soft. (George Will wrote that there was a "ferocity gap"--but, in a classic case of projection, he insisted that Democrats were more ferocious.) Bush never conceded the possibility that he could lose. Nor did he feel any obligation to maintain intellectual consistency. His campaign demanded the letter of the law be carried out in those instances when it suited his side, and it flouted the letter of the law in those (military ballots, illegally submitted absentee ballots in Seminole County) when it did not. It whipped up a mob to halt a recount in Miami-Dade County that at the time appeared potentially decisive. Conservatives celebrated these developments without a hint of dissent. While Democrats in Washington constantly undermined the Gore campaign by telling reporters that Gore should concede, Washington Republicans maintained ranks. Through their greater resolve and partisan discipline, the Republicans triumphed.

All the lessons the netroots have gleaned about U.S. politics were on display in this noxious denouement, and those lessons have been reinforced time and again throughout the Bush presidency. The Democratic leadership and the liberal intelligentsia seemed pathetic and exhausted, wedded to musty ideals of bipartisanship and decorousness.

Chait spends considerable time discussing the element of the online progressive movement that I'm most ambivalent about: its willingness, or perhaps eagerness, to take on other actors within the center-left coalition in pursuit of larger (and longer-term) strategic objections. To my mind, there are moments when it's useful, or even necessary, to smack your sometime allies: the Democratic Leadership Council, to take perhaps the most frequent and notorious of online left frenemies, has undercut the progressive message, and triangulated for the sake of triangulation, so many times that it was vital to create consequences and pushback for their doing so. And the primary challenge to Joe Lieberman last summer was justified both by Lieberman's evidently pathological wish to be accepted and loved on the right, exemplified by his more-Bush-than-Bush stance on the war, and by the fact that the circumstances were in place--a solid blue state, a viable challenger, and sufficient money--to mount the campaign.

But there's sometimes among the lefty blogs a certain joy in attacking organizations and leaders who might agree with you on 75 percent (or 95 percent) of the issues. David Sirota, whom I've come to call "Der Kommissar," might be the worst offender here, but there are dozens if not hundreds of high-profile posters across the liberal blogs who sometimes do the same. Again, sometimes I think this is justifiable--see Clinton, Hillary--but when you're attacking Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or Barack Obama for this or that sin of political noncomformity, it's very questionable whether you're doing more good than harm. The same question can be asked of whether it makes sense to lump in groups and publications generally in agreement with the Forces of Evil:

Just as the Goldwaterites reserved their strongest contempt for the moderates who controlled the GOP, the netroots are at their most single-minded in their opposition to the moderates who they believe control the Democratic Party. The netroots often identify this enemy in amorphous, populist terms--"the Beltway," "the D.C. establishment," etc. When it comes to identifying its adversaries more specifically, the two institutions named most often are the DLC and tnr. Netroots activists speak of these two institutions in stark terms. "This is the modern DLC--an aider and abettor of Right-wing smear attacks against Democrats," wrote Moulitsas, who proceeded to threaten to "make the DLC radioactive." In a posting about tnr, titled "tnr's defection to the Right is now complete," Moulitsas wrote that this magazine "betrayed, once again, that it seeks to destroy the new people-powered movement for the sake of its Lieberman-worshipping neocon owners." Both the DLC and tnr are perpetually described as "dying" or "irrelevant," yet simultaneously possessed of sinister and ubiquitous control over the national discourse.

In reality, of course, the DLC is a political enterprise and tnr a journalistic one; each has on its staff individuals who do not always agree with each other; and neither institution exerts total control over every individual on its payroll. While both the DLC and tnr supported the Iraq war, both stridently opposed almost every other element of the Bush agenda. The overwhelming majority of DLC missives and tnr articles are perfectly congenial to mainstream liberalism and perfectly hostile to the Republican Party of George W. Bush. But these sorts of subtleties generally escape the Manichean analysis that pervades the netroots.

What makes such internal enemies so dangerous is that they engage in self-criticism. It is not that the netroots forbid internal debate. Far from it: They indulge in all sorts of disagreements, tactical and substantive, just as conservatives do. What they consider treasonous is any criticism of any part of the Democratic Party or its activist base from the right. You can attack the Democratic leadership in Congress for failing to force a troop withdrawal from Iraq, but you cannot attack it for opposing a troop surge. ... It is permissible to divide the party from the left, by opposing a moderate Democratic position. But if you divide the party from the right, you are an enemy of the movement.

I'm not sure we'll really understand the true nature of the online progressive movement until the crisis moment passes and a new president, likely a Democratic president, takes office. I can see the push for "unity" in the context of an opposing movement that, even now when its popularity is in the toilet and some of its adherents fervently wish the standard-bearer would go home to Rancho Plastico, still pushes inexorably for an unbound unitary executive, war without end, and de-distributive taxing and spending policies. As Paul Krugman pointed out, the "loyal Bushies" (including the Dobsonites and Norquisters) are a "revolutionary power"; pushing back the rabidly partisan challenge they've posed to the established American system merits a higher degree of partisan discipline on the other side.

My question is how the liberal bloggers and netroots will respond if and when we have a Democratic president--especially if it's a relative progressive like Obama and Edwards--and Democratic majorities in Congress. Mark Schmitt recently published a thoughtful article (also in TNR) about how the experience of 1993--the last time Democrats held unified control of government--is informing, or haunting, party leaders today. Back then, the Democratic coalition was different, and more obviously divisible against itself; if history repeats in 2009, the question might be whether the netroots activists can reconcile their enthusiasm and impatience with a system of checks and balances that, even after Bush (and happily so), isn't really conducive to rapid major changes.

A second concern will emerge if and when Democratic leaders start to show the same propensity for corruption and self-dealing that helped undo the Republicans in the middle years of this decade (and hopefully is continuing to do so). Already, there's a sense that the 110th Congress is less prone to self-dealing and special-interest pandering than its predecessor--but that's a low bar. There's William Jefferson, the corrupt Democratic congressional backbencher from Louisiana who unfortunately won re-election last year while waiting for federal charges; he hasn't been embraced, but he hasn't been kicked out of the caucus either. What happens when a more prominent Dem comes under serious allegations of self-dealing? Will the online progressives stick to their principles, or try to explain away the misdeeds as so many Republican apologists have done in the DeLay/Bush era?

As always, we'll see. I don't think anyone of progressive outlook can disagree that the rise of the online left has helped bring American politics back into something resembling balance and served to counter the rabid right that organized itself through talk radio and church-related institutions. But all movements carry the seeds of their own undoing: self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and overadherence to dogmatic thinking. That this is an essentially conservative fear may or may not be ironic.

I don't know why I'm thinking about this tonight, but I am, so...
Two serious questions I wish the "liberal media" (or anyone else) would ask about Iraq:

1) How will we know we've "won"? Is it when the incidence of violence drops below a certain level? When the power is on for more than a given number of hours in a day? Some political resolution to what looks and evidently feels like a civil war? Economic measures (jobs, oil revenues, Iraqi GDP)?

2) Assuming victory can be defined, is there any price, in lives or money or time or "opportunity cost" (i.e., forces committed there can't be used elsewhere), that's too great to justify it?

The questions are somewhat irrelevant, in that the narcissist-in-chief will keep playing with his toy soldiers until they're no longer his to play with, and then the next president--pretty much regardless of who that turns out to be, unless it's somehow McCain--will wind down the war as fast as he or she can. (If you're going to preside over the unsuccessful end to a war, best to do as early in your term as feasible.) But I'd just really like to know the answers, or even if anyone has taken a serious shot at coming up with answers.

The Bush Party
The first Democratic presidential debate was held this past week in South Carolina, with moderator Brian Williams taking note during the opening that the event, more than 18 months before the 2008 election, reflected an unprecedented early start to the campaign. What Williams didn’t point out was that it’s also unprecedented, at least in modern times, for any sitting president in his second term to be as fully a lame duck as George W. Bush obviously has become.

More than 600 painful days remain in Bush’s term, but his ability to set and pursue a policy agenda is totally gone, and his political power exists almost entirely in negative terms: he can block the Democrats, on everything from de-funding his tragic disaster of a war to giving the District of Columbia a vote in Congress, and he presumably can influence his party’s next presidential choice in a variety of subtle or overt ways. But that’s really it. Increasingly, news accounts include blind quotes from senior Republicans to the effect that this administration is incompetent, dishonest and counter-productive; the fear that Bush’s ineptitude and mendacity will have long-term consequences for their electoral prospects is now almost palpable.

And yet, it’s still all about the Bushes. The First Lady astounded the political world last week with her remark that no one “suffers more than their president and I do when we watch [news from Iraq]." And Old Bush, George the 41st, recently agreed with the notion that his son Jeb! (he hasn’t formally changed his name to add the exclamation mark yet, but it’s only a matter of time) won’t be on the 2008 presidential ballot because of “Bush Fatigue.”

But more than anyone, of course, it’s about the incumbent. Everybody, Democrats and Republicans, loyalists and Bush-haters, wants Alberto Gonzales out of the attorney general’s office. But George W. seems to dig in more with every call for Abu G’s dismissal. Then, of course, there’s Iraq, where the goalposts on “the surge” started moving almost as soon as they were set. And Bush continues to abuse the appointment power, sending up obviously unqualified individuals for high offices and trying to jam as many through as possible during congressional recesses.

Bush’s narcissism would be comical if it weren't so harmful for the country (often it's comical anyway), but at least it’s hurting exactly the people who should suffer most by it. I’m no fan of David Brooks, but he really nailed the Republicans’ predicament in his NY Times column today:

The Republicans suffered one unpleasant event in November 2006, and they are headed toward an even nastier one in 2008. The Democrats have opened up a wide advantage in party identification and are crushing the G.O.P. among voters under 30.

Moreover, there has been a clear shift, in poll after poll, away from Republican positions on social issues and on attitudes toward government. Democratic approaches are favored on almost all domestic, tax and fiscal issues, and even on foreign affairs.
The public, in short, wants change.

And yet the Republicans refuse to offer that. On Capitol Hill, there is a strange passivity in Republican ranks. Republicans are privately disgusted with how President Bush has led their party and the nation, but they don’t publicly offer any alternatives. They just follow sullenly along. They privately believe the country needs new approaches to the war against Islamic extremism, but they don’t offer them. They try to block Democratic initiatives, but they don’t offer the country any new ways to think about the G.O.P.

They are like people quietly marching to their doom.

And at the presidential level, things are even worse. The party is blessed with a series of charismatic candidates who are not orthodox Republicans. But the pressures of the campaign are such that these candidates have had to repress anything that might make them interesting. Instead of offering something new, each of them has been going around pretending to be the second coming of George Allen — a bland, orthodox candidate who will not challenge any of the party’s customs or prejudices.

Though his analysis is on point, Brooks is too much of a hack to acknowledge the specifics: that it’s not George Allen the Republican candidates are trying to emulate, but George Bush they’re terrified to stray too far from.

The root of the problem is that his party has fully embraced a top-down authoritarian structure in which The Leader is infallible, and his belief system must not ever be transgressed against (Brooks rightly identifies Grover Norquist—though not by name, alas—as the Ideological Enforcer for Tax and Spending Policy, and Radical Cleric James Dobson as the Christatollah for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice) and there is no middle ground between absolute loyalty and outright treason.

So while Republicans might be “privately disgusted” with Bush–as I’m sure many are–they know that to directly challenge him means that the party apparatus will turn on them, with primary opponents, a cutoff of financial support, and endless hounding.

They’ve put themselves in this jam, and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.

Chills
Meeting with some colleagues the other day, I repeated a remark I've made many times over the past five years or so: the Bloomberg mayoralty is likely to be remembered as a kind of golden age for policy wonks. Mike Bloomberg himself has done a lot to make this so: his administration has been about as bereft of partisanship or ideologically driven policymaking as possible, and his personal wealth and lack of evident concern over a future in politics--the still-quixotic dream of a Bloomberg '08 presidential campaign notwithstanding--have freed him, and his administration, from any incentive to pander either to powerbrokers or even the voters. What he's done with this freedom of action hasn't always been what I'd want to see--the (defeated) West Side stadium, and the worrisome Atlantic Yards project, were and are unnecessary and potentially damaging, maybe devastating, to communities--but I've never doubted his motivations. Considering the political norms of our time, that's pretty amazing... and, given the absolute contrast it presents to the current presidential administration, inspiring too.

Today, Bloomberg made a speech that I think will stand as a challenge to his successors, whoever they turn out to be, to follow a similar course. It kicked off the "PlaNYC" initiative, a set of ten goals to dramatically improve the natural and built environment of New York City by 2030. While the first wave of media coverage has focused on the mayor's proposal to charge "congestion pricing" for drivers in Manhattan during weekday work hours, the big stuff--enormous infrastructure changes and environmental cleanup, among other things--might pass below the radar.

Maybe for reasons of personal outlook, maybe because of political realities, I am not especially optimistic that this audacious vision will be realized. All the institutional forces that have a stake in the status quo, largely relegated to the sidelines (or bought off in various ways) during the Bloomberg years, presumably will reassert themselves through the power of the purse in the next campaign, and the ones to follow. The price of their support will be what it always is: "compromise" on matters of principle, and an official willingness to at least somewhat privilege special interests over common interests.

Additionally, this plan, admirable as it is, speaks to the physical well being of the future city rather than the socioeconomic well being of those who will live in it. I anticipate doing some work around this question for one or more of my freelance clients, so I won't go into detail here--but a "PlaNYC" that doesn't make some provision for preserving and growing a middle class, risks saving the body of New York City while doing nothing to save its soul.

Still, I feel a deep pride in this place, and a great admiration for the mayor and his leadership here. A golden age, indeed.

A Letter to MoDo
Dear Ms. Dowd:

Today's oh-so-insightful and relevant column about John Edwards' haircut has convinced me that you should re-brand your own biweekly contributions to our political discourse.

I offer two suggestions. If you prefer a simple descriptive name, go with "Skin Deep Politics." It certainly captures what your column, with its endless references to "Sex and the City" and Botox and those other cultural touchstones so meaningful to wealthy, bitter, half-smart women of a certain age, has come to. The name also has a deserved hint of self-congratulation, given how your work has helped create a culture in which the made-for-TV "authenticity" of a George W. Bush trumps the actual qualifications for high office of an Al Gore or John Kerry. I've often wondered if you, Frank Bruni, Kit Seeyle and others, (I won't even mention Judy Miller, whom you so memorably shivved once it was safe to do so) who did so much to inaugurate and perpetuate the glorious Bush years, gather to exult in your accomplishment.

The other name, a bit more literary, is "Much Ado About Nothing." If nothing else, it's more directly descriptive of what you contribute.

The Real Deal with Imus
I don't have a whole lot to add here, though I think the Rude Pundit has his (presumably smelly) finger on one big issue here with this post. I've always found Imus something of a jackass, a supreme narcissist jaded by nonstop verbal fluffing from his crew of mutant flunkies. And it always bugged me that so many political leaders--mostly but not all white men, in both major parties--treated him like a down-market Larry King (it's exceedingly faint praise, though true, to say that Imus was a better interviewer) and solicited his approval in between the mean-spirited little jibes and sketches with which he otherwise filled his time slot. At times, the show was inadvertantly useful--as when former Senator Al D'Amato would come on to throw around ethnic slurs--but generally, the people who were dicks on Imus's show were dicks in any context; at best, as in D'Amato's case, their conduct got a bit more widely noticed.

Annie and I watched Tim Russert's "Meet the Press" roundtable chew over the Imus affair this morning, and it was one of the more interesting half-hours of Sunday morning TV I've ever seen. You had Russert and David Brooks, mainstream white guys who had been on the show multiple times, offering occasional defenses of Imus's character or, more feebly, trying to change the subject to the bad language and bad behavior of hip-hop artists and others. Then you had Gwen Ifill, repeatedly calling bullshit on them both. I'd never had strong feelings about Ifill one way or the other (though I did enjoy her recent Colbert appearance) until her Times guest op-ed last week, regarding Imus:

The serial apologies of Mr. Imus, who was suspended yesterday by both NBC News and CBS Radio for his remarks, have failed another test. The sincerity seems forced and suspect because he’s done some version of this several times before.

I know, because he apparently did it to me.

I was covering the White House for this newspaper in 1993, when Mr. Imus’s producer began calling to invite me on his radio program. I didn’t return his calls. I had my hands plenty full covering Bill Clinton.

Soon enough, the phone calls stopped. Then quizzical colleagues began asking me why Don Imus seemed to have a problem with me. I had no idea what they were talking about because I never listened to the program.

It was not until five years later, when Mr. Imus and I were both working under the NBC News umbrella — his show was being simulcast on MSNBC; I was a Capitol Hill correspondent for the network — that I discovered why people were asking those questions. It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.

“Isn’t The Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

Maybe I'm more aware of Ifill than I am the Rutgers women's hoop team, this hit me even harder than the recent comment. Being an African-American woman at the pinnacle of her profession, and having to hear that, must have felt like getting kicked in the stomach. It was groundless, cruel, and easy. And I hope she relished sticking the knife in last week; revenge might not be pretty, but it's sometimes justified.

Still, Ifill's passion and eloquence, both in the op-ed and in the discussion this morning, isn't really the point here. As everyone has noted, what Imus said a couple weeks ago isn't new for him, nor does it particularly stand out in his legacy of cheap shots and bigotry. He hasn't changed; the world has. Both Russert this morning and network drones like Leslie Moonves of CBS over the last week or so talked about the personal objections of staff within those companies; that's bullshit. The reason Imus didn't survive this one is very simple: the sponsors got scared and pulled out, and the networks got scared about both having to replace that ad revenue and becoming the business target of whatever wrath remained among the public.

The untold story here is why the sponsors pulled out, and why the networks then dumped Imus. I suspect it has a lot to do with the rising economic and political power of African-Americans--and I'm not talking about the mostly irrelevant Jesse Jackson and the mostly embarrassing Al Sharpton.

The big companies that own the networks can't afford to potentially alienate millions of American consumers--much less the public figures who are now or might soon be in positions to do a great deal of damage to corporate interests. Charlie Rangel chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, which makes tax and spending policy; John Conyers chairs Judiciary; Jim Clyburn is Majority Whip. And there's some chance that Barack Obama will be the next president or vice-president. Simply put, and totally independent of doing the moral thing, you don't want to piss these guys off.

I'm actually a bit surprised that nobody has picked up on this. It's a pretty encouraging story for capitalism (the growing wealth and spending power of the African-American market) and democratic pluralism (the rise of thoroughly mainstream political champions who happen to be black). That these big forces helped bring down a jerk like Imus is nice and all, but that they exist suggest that in some fundamental ways, our system is still working.

So He Goes
We lost a great one this week: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. died at age 84.

I think the first Vonnegut I read was "The Sirens of Titan," in 9th grade study hall. This was 20 years ago, and I've never re-read the book, but the audacity and absurdity of the ideas--from the opening section in which a depressed, nearly suicidal man makes his fortune by choosing stock investments based on three-letter sequences from the Book of Genesis, to the close when it's revealed that the greatest architectural marvels of the Earth were built so they could be read from space--still blow me away today. "Cat's Cradle," "Breakfast of Champions," "Welcome to the Monkeyhouse," and "Slaughterhouse Five" all made similarly deep impressions; at a time when I felt so at odds with the world around me, here was a man whose mind seemed to work in similar ways, and who could somehow transform his outrage and sadness into incredibly inventive, comic, touching stories. His work was inspiring, and a big part of why I wanted to become a writer.

I wouldn't put Vonnegut's prose up there with Delillo or Pamuk or any number of other great novelists of this period, but what he arguably lacked in style or literary pyrotechnics, he more than made up for in social conscience and human warmth. One had a sense of who he was as a person, and what he cared about--a claim that can't as readily be made about most of the great postmodern writers. This clip of Vonnegut on The Daily Show, from a year or two back, shows the man in all his lovable cantankerousness. His passing leaves a void for both his humor and his heart.

Good to See
Well, this is encouraging: as George W. Bush again tries to demagogue the Democrats over funding his Splendid Little War, both the Democrats and the media are refusing to read his script.

WASHINGTON, April 10 — President Bush delivered a stern lecture to Democratic Congressional leaders today, asserting that they are being irresponsible in not passing an Iraq-Afghanistan supplemental-financing bill to his liking.

“The bottom line is this,” Mr. Bush said. “Congress’s failure to fund our troops will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines. Others could see their loved ones headed back to war sooner than anticipated. This is unacceptable.”
...
Mr. Bush chose a friendly venue for his remarks (an American Legion post in nearby Fairfax, Va.), and the timing was surely no coincidence. The Senate reconvened today, and the House of Representatives will be back in session next week.

The president got a friendly reception from the Legionnaires, some of them veterans of World War II or the Korean War, and a sharp reaction from Senate Democrats, who vowed not to back down.

“Democrats are united in our commitment to fully fund our troops on the ground in Iraq and here at home,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. “But we are also determined to provide our troops a strategy for success in Iraq, which President Bush has failed to do from the very start of this war over four years ago.”
...
“We are speaking for the American people,” Mr. Reid said at a Capitol news conference. “He isn’t.”

Reid is hitting all the right notes here: they've agreed to pass a bill to provide for the troops "on the ground in Iraq and here at home" (an allusion to the disgraceful Walter Reed care scandal, directly caused by the administration's fetish for outsourcing government functions) but also insist on changing course in Iraq. It's probably somewhat disingenuous at best to assert that the Democrats' legislation provides "a strategy for success"--a better description would be "a strategy for cutting our losses"--but the message is there: Bush has dug us a huge hole in Iraq, and Democrats are determined to take away his shovel.

Some kudos for the story here too. Note the descriptor "to his liking" in the first graf; there are similar notes throughout the piece. Maybe the Times feels a particular obligation to be neutral on Iraq now; in any event, it's nice to see that they aren't just serving as message-stenographers for the Bush Imagineers.

I'm not generally all that into the George Lakoff stuff, but I think Reid and Pelosi are doing something shrewd here: every statement they make reinforces the notion of a petulant, uninformed president who, if he can't set the rules of the game and isn't allowed to win every time, will take his policymaking ball and go home. I think that this piece of satire captures Bush's mindset on the war better than any more sober analyses I've read.

Faith, Not Theocracy
At the risk of offending Bill "Butt Sex" Donohue, who's presumably looking for an easy target after the spanking "South Park" gave him this week, I commend this Easter Weekend Blogswarm.

So many topics, so little time. But rather than rant against the religio-ideological perversion of our public sphere under the Idiot King, or the disturbing similarities between the most repressive strains of Islam and Christianity (and the unmasked yearning of some at the far fringes of the right to fuse the two movements in an attack on the common enemy of secularism), I'll go with something happy here.

Tomorrow my in-laws are coming down for the holiday, and my mom and brother are coming up from Philadelphia. This should be an interesting day: my wife's parents, and her brother (who also will be here) are practicing Catholics, Annie is basically a lapsed Catholic, my mother is a not-very-good Jew, and my brother and I are agnostics though I consider myself culturally Jewish. (I'm sitting here eating matzah as I type.) Convenings of Catholics and Jews can be awkward--especially given the long-accepted narrative around this particular holiday--and I made a few "Running of the Jew" jokes at my family's seder last week in Philly. But this isn't going to be like that. Annie's cooking a leg of lamb, my in-laws always get a charge out of coming down to the city from Connecticut, my brother-in-law just got back from a vacation in California. I expect it'll just be a good time with the family.

This isn't the direct purpose of religion, of course, but if you go by that NYT magazine article from a month or so back, it's not too far off. Some evolutionary theorists believe that religious belief played a community-strengthening role:

The trick in thinking about adaptation is that even if a trait offers no survival advantage today, it might have had one long ago. This is how Darwinians explain how certain physical characteristics persist even if they do not currently seem adaptive — by asking whether they might have helped our distant ancestors form social groups, feed themselves, find suitable mates or keep from getting killed. A facility for storing calories as fat, for instance, which is a detriment in today’s food-rich society, probably helped our ancestors survive cyclical famines.

So trying to explain the adaptiveness of religion means looking for how it might have helped early humans survive and reproduce. As some adaptationists see it, this could have worked on two levels, individual and group. Religion made people feel better, less tormented by thoughts about death, more focused on the future, more willing to take care of themselves. As William James put it, religion filled people with “a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life . . . an assurance of safety and a temper of peace and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.”

Such sentiments, some adaptationists say, made the faithful better at finding and storing food, for instance, and helped them attract better mates because of their reputations for morality, obedience and sober living. The advantage might have worked at the group level too, with religious groups outlasting others because they were more cohesive, more likely to contain individuals willing to make sacrifices for the group and more adept at sharing resources and preparing for warfare.

I've long believed, and probably written here, that religion has had value as, among other things, "the training wheels of moral social norms." The Golden Rule, most of the Ten Commandments, and other tenets of the various monotheistic traditions don't require belief in an anthropomorphic God to have appeal; they're also good guidelines for how to act within a society or community. The problem of course is when religious groupings, like any other community of affinity from gun owners to Yankees fans, get too aggressive in their proselytizing (in the non-theological sense, I mean). They wind up very far afield from their belief systems; at best they get into self-aggrandizing doctrines with obvious temporal ramifications like papal infallability; at worst it turns into jihad and people get blown to bits.

Keeping it at the personal level, though, isn't something I think secularists should worry about. If anything, they should just enjoy the togetherness, and the lamb.

Thoughts on the "Money Primary"
I don't generally put much stock in fundraising numbers this far in advance of presidential primary voting, and haven't ever since 1995. I remember, as a senior in college in the first half of that year, reading that Phil Gramm, Republican Senator of Texas, was shattering every money record on the books, and being terrified over the prospect that this rabidly evil little shit would be running the country. (Yes, I was five years early--except that Gramm's delusions might at some point have been countered by the fact that he has a working brain, unlike the little Texan shit we did eventually install.) The point is that Gramm was such a miserable human being that he'd blown through his money, and ended his candidacy in defeat, before the primaries even began. At best, you can say that money is necessary but nothing close to sufficient.

That said, there have been some interesting developments stemming from the release of the contenders' first-quarter fundraising numbers.

• Barack Obama delayed the release of his numbers because, apparently, they needed extra days to count the haul from house parties on the last day of the quarter. With that in, he evidently raised $25 million--about the same as Hillary Clinton. This reinforces my suspicion that if, as I've long held, the Democratic contest is going to come down to Hillary vs. Not-Hillary, Obama is the most viable Not-Hillary of the people currently in the race, and maybe of anyone in the party.


• John McCain's evidently disappointing total has prompted him to revise his whole fundraising apparatus. He's now wholeheartedly embracing the big-donor strategy Bush used to beat him in 2000. Campaign finance reform? Nah, never heard of it. It's not nice to say, but nothing McCain has done since about 2003 is going to serve his historical reputation very well.



• Not a money thing, but it's interesting to me that the Bush White House is praising New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson's trip to North Korea as head of a bipartisan delegation trying to bring home the remains of American soldiers killed during the Korean War. If Richardson somehow won the Democratic nomination--and I still think he'd be, by far, the strongest general-election candidate for the Dems--his Republican opponent inevitably will try to paint his negotiations with the world's bad guys as limp-wristed appeasement. Having the support of the Bushistas for this one could blunt that attack.


• Richardson also signed a bill legalizing medical marijuana. I'm telling you, this guy's the man...


• My longtime dark horse Republican contender, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, has serious money problems. He raised only about $500,000 in the first quarter. Huckabee's path to the nomination--win over social conservatives with his religious background and blameless personal life while appealing to moderates by virtue of his non-hate-addled personality--is probably blocked by the actual or potential entrance of the Two Thompsons, Fred and Tommy, who can make the same case but are better able to raise money.


• Huckabee's great sin? He raised taxes at a few points in his ten years as governor. Burn him! He's a witch!!

Much Music
I've been going through one of those phases recently in which I've acquired a lot of new music. ("Assload" may or may not be the appropriate technical term here.) In early March I bought about 5 used CDs for $23 or so on St. Marks Place in Manhattan, around the same time I bought the new Arcade Fire LP online, last Saturday an old friend I saw at a wedding gave me a copy of her band's disc, and last Sunday I passed a guy on Court Street in Brooklyn who was evidently moving, and selling all his old CDs. I bought eight for the grand total of $30.

The first bunch included the following:

Radio 4--Enemies Like This
Bruce Springsteen--18 Tracks
Son Volt--Straightaways
The Who--30 Years of Maximum R&B, Disc 1
The Who--30 Years of Maximum R&B, Disc 3

Of these, I've only listened closely to the Springsteen and Son Volt albums. "18 Tracks" is an enjoyable oddity, released in 1999, with outtakes and alternate takes from different stages of the Boss's long career. There are acoustic versions of "Growin' Up" and "Born in the USA," studio cuts of live favorites like "The Fever" and "My Love Will Not Let You Down," some fairly conventional rockers. Son Volt, Jay Farrar's post-Uncle Tupelo project, sounds basically like an older and more mellow UT; he hasn't kept up with the weird brilliance of his former bandmate Jeff Tweedy (Wilco), but it's pleasant listening that seemed perfectly suited for the Sunday night when I first put it on.

Radio 4, which I have on here as I type this, is yet another band from my home borough of Brooklyn. They remind me of the Hoodoo Gurus, an Aussie pop/post-punk band from my youth, but with less humor and more danceability. The two Who CDs were steals for what I paid for them, including a lot of the band's classic tracks (I've long wanted "The Seeker" in particular) as well as some weird stuff like Pete Townsend screaming at (I think) Abbie Hoffman to get the fuck off the fucking stage.

My friend's band is Beware the Blunted Needle. I got to see them in NYC about a year ago, and the live show put their first recording to shame. The disc that Abby gave me last weekend is much, much better--it sounds great, the songs are better represented, and the whimsy and fury of their live performance is represented. BtBN sound a little like Helium and Sleater-Kinney fronting Camper van Beethoven, with half the musicians on 'ludes and the other half on crank. Check them out at the myspace.com link above. Unfortunately, I think they've stopped, but they deserve a wide hearing--and, happily, in this internet age it's not impossible they could get one.

I don't really have much to say about Arcade Fire that hasn't been said elsewhere. They seem like pretty annoying people, frankly, but their sound is unique and powerful and it's compelling to see them still putting things together. I worry that they might suffer the U2 curse of taking themselves too seriously to the point where it screws with their music, but this album, Neon Bible, is really pretty good.

Which brings me to the killer haul from last Sunday. For $30, I bought these eight discs:

Sonic Youth--NYC Ghosts and Flowers
Jane's Addiction--(first album, live)
Phantom Tollboth--Beard of Lightning
Public Enemy--It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
Joy Division--Unknown Pleasures
Sebadoh--Bakesale
Pixies--(double live CD, 12/18/04)
New Order--Substance

A couple of these--the Jane's and New Order--were upgrades about 20 years in the making, of things I copied on blank tapes from friends when I was a teenager. The live Pixies CD is great sound quality; the PE and Joy Division are classics that I'd just never bought. (It's both funny and a little upsetting to remember my suburban white-boy reaction when that Public Enemy record first dropped, also about 20 years ago [!]. It seemed they were scary black dudes who, it was rumored, hated Jews. To me now--years after first coming to like PE, but never previously having any of their albums--it just sounds heroic.)

The other ones are more interesting and surprising. I have most of the Sonic Youth catalogue, but this album had never really interested me. I was under the impression that everything SY had done since about the mid-'90s sounded the same... but this one is by far the most interesting of the recent bunch, still quiet and tuneful but much more experimental in terms of the song structures and lyrical content. It reminds me of how exciting it was to hear "Daydream Nation" back in the day.

Sebadoh is a band I've known about for as long as they've been around, but I'd never liked any of the songs I heard. Those must have been aberrations, though, because this CD is great. It's a little more subdued than the classic Dinosaur Jr stuff from which I'd known Lou Barlow, but raucous enough. This album is from 1994, so I have no idea if Sebadoh still sounds anything like this.

Phantom Tollboth is the freak of the bunch. This evidently was a prog/punk band from the late '80s, almost like the Rush half of Living Colour's sonic mindspace. They released this album, "Power Toy," in 1988, and it disappeared without a trace. Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices loved these guys, though, and he convinced them to let him write new lyrics and sing new melodies over these songs. The result sounds freakin' fantastic--if you liked mid-period GbV (Pollard plus Cobra Verde, the "Mag Earwig!" era lineup) but felt like it wasn't quite what it could have been, you'll love this.

All in all, one of the better $30 I've ever spent.

Jump
Say this for the Battlestar Galactica producers: they swing for the fences. Tonight's season finale--the more-or-less last show until 2008--had courtroom melodrama that would have made Matlock blush; back-from-the-dead shockeroos; and Bob Dylan (well, really Jimi Hendrix, depending on how much one takes authorship to heart). I'm not totally sure I liked it, but I certainly respect it.

Probably the most admirable aspect about this one was that it directly took on the many, many implausible aspects of the storyline--all the betrayals, the cut corners, the contradictions, the tangled motivations, and the fact that the same ten or so characters have now, through three seasons, been thrown into almost every mathematically possible alignment and confrontation--and threw it back in the viewer's face. I'm sure discussion on the interwebs will focus on the Big Cylon Reveal and the resurrection/reappearance/hallucination that ended the show, but the real climax for my money came with Lee's rambling-but-brilliant answer to the question of why Baltar deserved a trial. Summed up, it was this: we're no longer a society, but just a bunch of people thrown into tubes flying through space, hoping to survive; we've all done horrible, unforgivable things to each other; they've all been forgiven. So why make this one exception?

My only objections are stylistic. The "All Along the Watchtower" motif was more camp than I can comfortably handle in my docu-scifi, and this episode retained the tension, unnecessary IMO, between the compelling philosophical questions that the show addresses when it's at its best, and the soap-operatic plot arcs that the writers sometimes fall back upon. (Maybe the problem in part is that some of the characters--Anders and Tory, for two--just look like soap opera performers.)

But this also is probably a reflection of the evidently endless battle between the network and the producers, the business side and the creative side. Salon.com published an interview with show honcho Ron Moore yesterday that gets at this nicely: asked about how to keep and grow an audience in a serialized narratve, he has no answer.

It's a genuine problem I have no solution for. We have long conversations with the network about the extent of the serialized nature of the show. It's certainly not something they're in love with. We the writers are always pushing to make it more serialized because it makes for better storytelling. We've done a few stand-alone episodes here and there, and they're almost never very successful for our particular series. They're not what the audience tunes in for. But the network's legitimate concern is just what you were saying: The audience tends to attenuate over time. It's hard to bring new people on board. There's the hurdle of them having to catch up on all the old episodes, and any hurdle you put in front of the audience is just a bad thing. I don't know what to say.

In a perfect world, I guess what he'd say is "Why the fuck should I pander to the audience? Let my work stand or fall on its merits." But this isn't a perfect world, and until we get billionaires willing both to fund their own favorite entertainments and to let the creators of those entertainments tell their stories without any interference, that answer won't ever be heard.

As it is, I feel like they try to split the difference in two ways: one, those standalone episodes, which with a very few exceptions have been the weakest entries in the series, and two, with some of the cheesy peripherals such as poll questions you can answer by texting on a cellphone or awful alterna-rock played over the coming attractions. These things detract from the quality of the show for me, probably in part because they feel forced and extraneous to the main thrust of the story.

All that crap fades, though, and what you're left with is the story itself. The show asks its viewers to swallow more now--that old favorite characters, including some of the most stalwart personalities in the story, are Cylons and have been all along--and I'm not sure I can do it; I'm not sure I trust them to validate my making that leap. But I like that they're thinking big and trying something that, if it works, will be spectacular. I'll be looking forward to the DVD/TV movie/whatever they're calling it, evidently dealing with a backstory of the Pegasus and the late, lamented Admiral Cain, toward the end of this year; and around when we have a winner in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, the resumption of the show that, after the last two weeks, again can call itself "the best on television" with something like a straight face.

System Crash: the Prosecutor Purge
Insomuch as anyone is trying to defend the Bush administration's decision to fire eight U.S. Attorneys late last year for what even sympathetic observers concede were political reasons, the justification offered is that these appointees serve at the president's pleasure: he can bring 'em in and ship 'em out as he wishes, without any particular cause or explanation. "No crime was committed" because there was no rule, much less law, to break.

Though liberals don't want to hear this, it happens to be true. To the best of my knowledge, no law was violated here. While the "Clinton did it" justification is as groundless as it usually is--Clinton changed them up at the beginning of his term, as many of his predecessors had done, and as Bush himself did in 2001--it's also irrelevant. If the question is, "Was Bush within his legal powers to fire the lawyers?" the answer seems to be an unambiguous "yes."

But, obviously, that shouldn't be the question. The reason this didn't come up before was that no president since Nixon has had anything close to the ambitions of the "Bushies" for trying to politicize, not only the Justice Department, but the entire executive branch. Despite the assertion of evil halfwits like Tom DeLay and John Bolton that the sole criterion for appointment and retention in a position should be personal loyalty to the president, the operating assumption traditionally has been that the president chooses these professionals, the Senate confirms them, and at that point they do their jobs to the best of their ability--without any consideration of partisan goals or consequences.

Of course, this premise was thrown off in the case of the fired U.S. Attorneys because of the provision slipped into the Patriot Act--the gift that keeps on taking, in terms of our democratic institutions--that during an "emergency," there was no need for Senate confirmation. (Happily, that provision was rescinded by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in a Senate vote earlier this week.) As with so much else in these sad last six-plus years, the hiring power for attorneys seems to have served the administration as nothing more or less than another way to reward friends--"loyal Bushies"--and punish enemies.

The concept of checks and balances is at the very core of our system of governance, and it's something that every American who attends public school learns about before puberty. But all the ways in which the Bushies have subjugated the public interest for explicitly partisan objectives makes me wonder if we need to address this question--to head off the potential for abuses that was always present, but never previously exploited--in a more explicit way. Whether it's new law, constitutional amendments, forceful Supreme Court decisions, or something else, we can't keep going with the door open to abuses no less corrosive for the fact that they might be within the boundaries of the law.

The Wasting Effects of Potomac Fever
I'll admit it; I'm one of those progressives who used to get a little gooey for John McCain. The POW experience, yes; his leadership on campaign finance reform and willingness to speak out about the absurdity of defense spending (something I need to start thinking/writing more about; consider the appalling fact that what we pay for any number of obsolete Cold War weapons systems still getting built would, if canceled, provide body armor and excellent health care for all troops who have served recently) during the '90s, absolutely; his positve eagerness to take on the more repulsive aspects of the Zombie Army in 2000 and promise of an inclusive national politics, more than anything.

Needless to say, that inspiring individual has long since disappeared. The only time I've ever heard McCain in person was during the summer of 2000, when he spoke at the Philadelphia "Shadow Convention" organized by Arianna Huffington, who had left the ranks of conservatives a few years earlier but wasn't yet a loud-and-proud Democratic partisan. Huffington, like a lot of us who were fairly disgusted with both major-party options that year, venerated McCain as a voice for reform who could transcend the endless partisan battling that's come to characterize our politics, and made him the keynote speaker at the Annenberg Center event. McCain came out onstage, started with a joke or two, and then quickly stated that he supported his party's nominee, George W. Bush, as the true candidate of reform in the race. As he said these words, his face said something very different; McCain looked like a kid sitting down to a meal of liver and creamed spinach. He was booed relentlessly, and stormed off the stage, leaving an embarrassed Huffington to apologize.

Though he continued to work closely with the Democrats through the first two or three years of Bush's term, and reportedly considered changing parties, his path was set. In 2004, there were two men who had sufficient stature and universal appeal that they could have ended the Bush presidency: McCain and Colin Powell. One, McCain, still entertained national ambitions, and fellow Vietnam vet John Kerry tried to appeal to them by making overtures regarding the vice-presidential slot. McCain declined--and having done so, he quickly turned into George W. Bush's most enthusiastic and effective advocate. Then and now, it seemed almost like a case of Stockholm Syndrome: Bush operatives had dragged McCain's name and family through the mud of South Carolina in 2000, and the blood feud between Bush consligiere Karl Rove and top McCain strategist John Weaver had gotten so bad that Weaver had begun to consult for Democrats. But obviously some bargain had been struck.

Now here it is three years later, and McCain is unrecognizable from his insurgent-Republican 2000 incarnation. Jonathan Chait sets it up pretty well here:

"This is not Luke Skywalker here," said Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), discussing his friend and Senate colleague John McCain's second run for the presidency. "This is a totally different campaign."

Graham was looking for a way to reassure his fellow conservatives that they no longer had anything to fear from McCain. His choice of metaphor is one of those windows into the fundamental cultural gap that separates hard-core conservatives from the rest of humanity. To most people, who think of Luke Skywalker as a hero battling an evil and immensely powerful empire, Graham's implication would be seen as an unmitigated insult. In the world of the GOP elite, though, it's a form of praise: No, no, don't worry, McCain's with the empire now.
...

Now watch him madly pander. In the same interview, [National Review reporter Ramesh] Ponnuru asked McCain about cloning:

"Sen. McCain: I'm obviously against any human cloning. Obviously.

"Ponnuru: Would you be willing to ban it?

"Sen. McCain: Sure.

"Ponnuru: So you'd support something like the Brownback bill?

"Sen. McCain: Yes. I think I'm a cosponsor."

At this point in the interview, his advisor interjected to say, "I'll double-check that." It turned out McCain was not a cosponsor. His casual language about a matter of the deepest philosophical weight--Ban it? Sure!--suggests he knows little about the bill except that supporting it would help him win the nomination.

Chait goes on to note that "What makes McCain's conversion all the more tragic is that it's plainly not working." I'd replace "tragic" with "pathetic." McCain was so appealing in 2000 because he seemed to represent a politics that was both authentic and principled. He was a victim of the multi-stage process by which we now elect presidents: had he somehow been able to face the general electorate first rather than chunks of Republican or Republican/independent primary voters in a handful of states, he likely would have won by acclimation. Instead, Bush's campaign used their deeper pockets, stronger campaign apparatus, willingness to swim in muck, and--crucially--the five primary-less weeks between New Hampshire and South Carolina that blunted McCain's momentum, and he wasn't able to continue much beyond that. (At the risk of getting run out of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, I'll recommend a second New Republic piece here--this article about the weirdness of our presidential selection process. Suffice to say that McCain 2000 would have been an unstoppable candidate a few decades earlier.)

Evidently, the political lesson McCain learned from 2000 was that principled guys finish last, and that Straight Talk takes you straight to the loser's lounge. Hence his now-relentless pandering and constant visits to "crazy base land." The Carpetbagger reports an even more stomach-turning instance of this:

I was skeptical about John McCain’s chances in the GOP primaries before, but now I’m convinced — he’s going to lose. What convinced me was a chat McCain had with reporters yesterday aboard his campaign bus, which eventually turned to the distribution of taxpayer-subsidized condoms in Africa to fight the transmission of HIV. What followed, the NYT’s Adam Nagourney explained, “was a long series of awkward pauses, glances up to the ceiling and the image of one of Mr. McCain’s aides, standing off to the back, urgently motioning his press secretary to come to Mr. McCain’s side.”

Q: “What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence?”

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy.”

Q: “So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?”

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “You’ve stumped me.”

Q: “I mean, I think you’d probably agree it probably does help stop it?”

Mr. McCain: (Laughs) “Are we on the Straight Talk express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. [Speaking to Press Secretary Brian Jones], would you find out what my position is on contraception — I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it.”

Q: “But you would agree that condoms do stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Would you say: ‘No, we’re not going to distribute them,’ knowing that?”

Mr. McCain: (Twelve-second pause) “Get me [Sen. Tom Coburn’s] thing, ask [senior adviser John Weaver] to get me Coburn’s paper that he just gave me in the last couple of days. I’ve never gotten into these issues before.”

First, on the substance, McCain comes across as a bumbling fool. He doesn’t know if he believes condoms are effective in preventing the spread of HIV? He’s been a member of Congress for 24 years, has participated in thousands of policy hearings, and has voted on hundreds of bills relating to public health. Now that he’s running for president, McCain literally has no idea what he thinks about something as simple as condoms and HIV? Please.

I was particularly fond of the “I have to find out what my position was” remark. Someone can ask him an extremely simple question, but before he answers it, McCain wants to check to make sure he believes what he thinks he believes. “Would you find out what my position is on contraception?” Here’s a wacky idea, senator, why don’t you just tell us what you actually think?

Which leads us to the second problem — he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to think anymore. McCain is so embarrassingly desperate, he’s utterly lost when it comes to basic questions like these. It’s almost certainly what he was doing with those 12 seconds of silence, thinking over what James Dobson might do if he acknowledged that condoms can play a role in stopping the spread of HIV, and what the media might do if they find a dozen examples of him supporting broader public access to publicly-financed contraception.

So the poor, sad man says nothing. McCain can’t tell the truth, he can’t share his opinions, and he can’t remember what he thought before he sold out. It’s so genuinely pathetic, I almost feel sorry for the guy.

Don't feel sorry for McCain; feel sorry for America. It wasn't intended to be this way, but we've created a process that deforms and deranges once-proud public servants. That reality-resistant psychos like Preacher Pat Robertson and Radical Cleric Dobson have, or are perceived to have, an effective veto over the Republican presidential nomination is terrible for our country--even when they lose. In a two-party system, each party has to be a check on the other; as the Republican primary electorate drifts ever-farther from the mainstream of national political life, a void opens for the Democrats to indulge their own worst tendencies and complement the Republicans' terrible screw-ups with awful mistakes of their own.

McCain has become a sad old man trying and failing to keep up with the parade, undone as a leader by his own ambitions. As they say, the only cure for Potomac Fever is embalming fluid.

Schizoid Men
Big-picture assessments of where we've been, where we are and where we're going are harder to frame, spin and sell than whatever's going on in the current news cycle--whether it's something really significant (Iraq, the slowly unfolding US Attorney scandal, of which more below), or something basically goofy (e.g. whether it's an insult to use the adjective "Democrat" instead of "Democratic"). But when historians sit down later to figure out what happened, or even when astute people within the moment try to do the same, it's those big-picture assessments that they weigh and evaluate.

Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post and TAP has such an assessment, and it's a more powerful articulation of something I've been trying to say for months, maybe years: to take modern American conservatism seriously means to accept that it's fundamentally at war with itself, and must remain so.

In [the March 3] Washington Post, reporter Blaine Harden took a hard look at the erosion of what we have long taken to be the model American family -- married couples with children -- and discovered that while this decline hasn't really afflicted college-educated professionals, it is the curse of the working class. The percentage of households that are married couples with children has hit an all-time low (at least, the lowest since the Census Bureau started measuring such things): 23.7 percent. That's about half the level that marrieds-with-children constituted at the end of the Ozzie-and-Harriet '50s.

Now, I'm not a scholar of the sitcom, but I did watch "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" as a child, marveling that anything labeled "Adventures" could be so dull. And I don't recall a single episode in which the family had to do without because Ozzie had lost his job or missed taking David or Ricky to the doctor for fear he couldn't pay for it.
...
Over the past 35 years, the massive changes in the U.S. economy have largely condemned American workers to lives of economic insecurity. No longer can the worker count on a steady job for a single employer who provides a paycheck and health and retirement benefits, too. Over the past three decades, workers' individual annual income fluctuations have consistently increased, while their aggregate income has stagnated. In the brave new economy of outsourced jobs and short-term gigs and on-again, off-again health coverage, American workers cannot rationally plan their economic futures. And with each passing year, as their level of economic security declines, so does their entry into marriage.

Yet the very conservatives who marvel at the efficiency of our new, more mobile economy and extol the "flexibility" of our workforce decry the flexibility of the personal lives of American workers. The right-wing ideologues who have championed outsourcing, offshoring, and union-busting, who have celebrated the same changes that have condemned American workers to lives of financial instability, piously lament the decline of family stability that has followed these economic changes as the night the day.

American conservatism is a house divided against itself. It applauds the radicalism of the economic changes of the past four decades -- the dismantling, say, of the American steel industry (and the job and income security that it once provided) in the cause of greater efficiency. It decries the decline of social and familial stability over that time -- the traditional, married working-class families, say, that once filled all those churches in the hills and hollows in what is now the smaller, post-working-class Pittsburgh.

Problem is, disperse a vibrant working-class community in America and you disperse the vibrant working-class family.

It might not be too much to call this the great untold political story of our time. As the respective saliency of the two conservative appeals has waxed and waned, and external circumstances made one or the other compelling, the results have changed. In 1980, a decisive chunk of the white working class vote--the people who were leery of the "new, more mobile economy" but concerned about "the decline of family stability"--shifted right. They really stayed there for a quarter-century... and then last year a significant portion shifted back.

This isn't a condemnation of that new economy, by the way--just a realization that, as Meyerson suggests, it really only works for you if you have education and skills in demand. (In my job, our shorthand for this notion was "More Ed, More Bread.") In some sense, this is a much more meritocratic economy; my personal preference would just be to make the playing field as level as possible by ensuring that everyone had access to good education and other tools to build their own figurative ladders. But in the meantime, if you don't have those tools at hand now, and if you believe that financial stresses tend to destabilize families rather than support them, a world without unions, worker protections or even a decent system for people to add skills will have negative social consequences.

I'm not representing that 2006 was the year when millions of suburban, exurban and rural families suddenly realized what was the matter with Kansas. But I do think that in conjunction with the tragic mismanagement of the war, the nonstop congressional scandals and the general ugliness of politics, it figured in there somewhere to give Democrats an opening. How they'll fill it remains to be seen, but it also seems unlikely that this problem--the final consequence of the Republican merger between greed and cultural conservatism--can be made to go away anytime soon.

The Right's Worst Fear
No, it isn't that Barack Obama will prove to be a madrassa-attending Manchurian Candidate, or that Hillary Clinton (or John McCain) will discard their putative disguises of moderation and theoligarchical conservatism, respectively, once in office. It's that government, now partly under Democratic control after last November's elections, might actually do something constructive that improves the lives of everyday Americans.

It's pretty much a given by now that the right is largely defined by what, and who, they hate. And with the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend, the movement types are getting their hate on in a big way. But while anti-tax fanatic Grover Norquist isn't quite as viscerally offensive as the Dartmouth crypto-Nazi crowd, he's far more dangerous. He was at CPAC too, and his message was a simple one: don't let anything happen over the next two years.

This is vitally important. Norquist's movement has been premised on a two-word concept: Goverment Sucks. It's worthless; it does nothing well, and accordingly shouldn’t be allowed to do anything. The New Deal, in his eyes, was a blow from which it took the country more than 50 years to recover--because it was, at bottom, an affirmation of the idea that government could add value to people’s lives, and it did. Whenever government succeeds, when it functions the way the Founders and their best successors imagined it should--as the democratic expression of popular will, designed to increase overall utility in the country through consensus-based action--this dismal view loses credibility.

With the Republicans in total control for the last four years, Norquist's vision of Hobbesian corporatism--a world of unfettered companies and unlimited profits, with all negative externalities borne by the poor saps who can't afford to buy a voice--seemed almost at hand. Obviously, neither the administration nor the bought-and-paid-for DeLay/Frist majorities were about to do anything to expand economic opportunity, redress the inequities of various tilted markets (like health care or housing), or really strengthen families or communities by seriously investing in schools, infrastructure, wealth-building tools, or social insurance. Indeed, Norquist's top priority during this time was the dismantling of Social Security--the biggest New Deal legacy, and the most successful social insurance program ever. Advancement of the You're On Your Own Society--accelerating the erosion of collective institutions--was the goal. They fell short, of course, in part because the idea was so obviously a bad one and in part because, for once, the Democrats beat them on the political blocking and tackling.

Then something unexpected happened: Norquist's goal of helpless, inept government manifested in more explicit form than ever before, in the horribly botched response to Hurricane Katrina. Then there was the Iraq war, prosecuted with equal ineptitude, and the unprecedented convergence of record corporate profits and stagnating real wages. The Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mexico and the gulf between the wealthy and connected and everyone else all pushed people to wonder if competence maybe didn't have some value after all.

Everybody agrees that the Democrats didn't so much win last year as the Republicans lost. The "Six for '06" agenda didn't hurt, but it didn't change many minds either. Where it has potential to do so is going forward. If the Democrats can expand access to affordable health care (or even get Medicare Part D--a weird Republican initiative that did expand government, but in the most bloated, inefficient and private profits-maximizing manner possible--to work better), if they can make it easier to pay for college, or make progress toward energy independence, Grover's got a big problem. The Right must make "Government Sucks" a self-fulfilling prophesy. The rest of us must not let them.