The Martyr and the Mischief-Maker
(Note: I posted a slightly more polite--but still too mean for the faithful--version of this entry at Daily Kos: see here if you're wondering how this was received by the lefty sheep)

The Democratic polemicist David Sirota recently wrote on Daily Kos asking the same plaintive question that Democrats have been wondering for almost forty years now: Where is Our Bobby Kennedy?

It's an odd question for Sirota to ask. This is the guy who helped turn the liberal challenge against Joe Lieberman in Connecticut into something of a jihad, who's assailed Barack Obama as an empty-suit sellout, and who's constantly pushing every Democrat on the national scene to be more absolutist, more unyielding, more extreme, more confrontational. He's the enemy of equivocation, compromise and inconstancy--all traits that the flesh-and-blood RFK, as opposed to the sainted memory of the man, showed throughout his too-brief career in public life.

Remember the circumstances by which Robert F. Kennedy went from a talented but ambivalently regarded inside political operator to the great martyr of the modern American left. The loss of his brother humanized RFK, transforming him from "JFK's Haldeman" best known for his sharp elbows in the 1960 campaign and his stint working for Joe McCarthy, into a figure of popular sympathy. But that didn't immediately translate into power: Kennedy's strange journey in 1964, running a carpetbagger Senate campaign in New York simultaneously on the coattails of and at arm's-length from LBJ, ended in victory, but he won by a full two million votes less than Johnson's margin in the Empire State.

Over the next three years, he tiptoed toward and back away from the mantle of progressive leadership from within the Democratic Party, pushed on the one hand by idealistic young aides like Peter Edelman (who remains a great progressive champion in his own right today) and on the other by the old politicos who'd advised his brother and were keeping an eye on the 1972 presidential campaign for Bobby. Kennedy's equivocation on Vietnam and his personal rivalry with Johnson captured press attention, and his occasional brilliant speech on South African apartheid and Appalachian poverty indicated some growth and deepening in his character. But he was neither a powerful lawmaker nor an unambiguous public champion--more show horse than work horse.

When it became clear that a large faction within the dominant Democratic coalition, led by the liberal New York activist Allard Lowenstein, was going to push an intra-party challenge to Johnson in 1968, Bobby was the man they wanted. But, with the Sorensons and O'Donnells whsipering in his ear to keep his powder dry for '72, he wouldn't commit--and it fell to Eugene McCarthy, who had his own personal animus against LBJ, to pick up the standard. The David Sirotas of that time eagerly and entirely gave themselves over to Gene; the Tet Offensive in January 1968 transformed the debate over Vietnam; and McCarthy nearly upset Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, coming close to a majority of the votes and winning most of the delegates. Only then did RFK join the race; soon after that, LBJ withdrew, and the progressives enjoyed four days of bliss before Dr. King was assassinated and the horrors of 1968 began in earnest.

If Sirota had been active in the mid-to-late 1960s, I have absolutely no doubt that he, of all people, would have assailed RFK as an unprincipled sellout, a vampire sucking at the lifeblood of the great and good McCarthy who was trying to justify, or at very best make an insignificant gesture of atonement toward, the deeply immoral Vietnam policy Bobby himself had helped craft as the sinister helpmeet to his similarly unprincipled brother. Two scions of the Establishment, Sirota would have called them, trading on their looks and charisma to manipulate the emotions of the people toward the goal of perpetuating the power of monsters like their father.

It need hardly be said that the Kennedys' heroism is in no small part a product of their untimely deaths; they did a fair amount of nasty stuff, as was noted at the time. JFK's 1960 victory was greatly aided not just by Mayor Daley's shenanigans in Illinois, but by just enough racist pandering to keep the South in the Democratic column. And even in RFK's last campaign in California, he made some of the same appeals to soft racism--implying that McCarthy would favor building tenements in white suburban communities outside LA--that would help Nixon win the election.

Sirota would have hammered Kennedy on these points, on all the Kennedys' compromises and corner-cuttings. Just as, if he'd lived in the time of FDR, or Lincoln, he would have gone after those presidents for their moral failings. That those men might have known what they were doing--just as, perhaps, did RFK, or similarly flawed heroes of today--never occurs to the infallible Sirota types.

What Sirota constantly fails to understand--as was never more evident than in his imbecilic and infantile Nation hit piece on Barack Obama a few months back--is that the (notionally) principled heroes of the Gene McCarthy or Russ Feingold type are history's lovable losers: the people who at most can set the stage for a pragmatic leader to come in and accomplish real change--and at least as often, in their unassailably good intentions, pave the road to hell. Consider the possibility that the McCarthy and RFK challenges to the undeniably flawed Lyndon Johnson opened the door to Nixon's election and the disasters, from the perpetuation of the war to Watergate and the permanent degradation of our politics, that followed.

Yes, the world needs Charles Sumner types to lay down the occasional moral marker. But it takes a Lincoln--and, dear lord, how Sirota would have flayed his habeus-suspending, slavery-equivocating ass--to bring the country toward that better place. That the leader can't get them as far, or as fast, as one might prefer, is the sad reality of history... but that these people are subsequently venerated suggests that they did the best they could, and on balance succeeded brilliantly.

I can't imagine a leader more foreign to Sirota's absolutist sensibility than the late Robert F. Kennedy.

Batter Up: Reform or Retreat?
As is often the case, Stephen Colbert aptly summed up one of the predicaments the new Democratic congressional majority will face in his "The Word" segment the other night. Urging Democrats to "Play Ball," Colbert sets out why the newly empowered party should put aside its pledges to curb the power of lobbyists and rein in the ethical transgressions that clearly contributed to the Republicans' downfall earlier this month. "You can't reform lobbying unless you stay in power--so if you want to end politicians taking money from lobbyists, you need to take money from lobbyists so you can stay in power to end it!"

The faux-Fox pundit pithily sums up one of the two dilemmas here: is there more to gain, in terms of power perpetuation, by pushing back against the abuses of the system, or by co-opting them? He addresses the other, normative, question by implication: should Democrats try to do the right thing even if it works against their own parochial interests?

My answer, of course, is "of course." The value of a Democratic congressional majority has three main aspects: one is to block the worst instincts and ideas of the Deciderer in the White House, another is to try and shore up the sagging foundations of American governance, and the third is to shift public priorities and the resources to make change happen. Of the three, the last is what the press focuses on, to the extent they focus on substance at all: Democrats will raise the minimum wage, try to amend Medicare Part D so the government can negotiate drug prices, begin redeployment out of Iraq, and so forth. This is connected to the first part: without a rubber-stamp Congress, Bush can't really launch any additional wars, destroy the social safety net, put cronies in top positions, et cetera (though it's worth noting that Michael "Brownie" Brown was confirmed as FEMA director while Democrats controlled the Senate, thanks in large part to our pal Joe Lieberman).

But without progress on Front #2, gains on the other two fronts are tenuous and provisional at best. The Republicans have locked in an institutional advantage by aggressively courting the lobbyist community, which multiplied many times over between 2001 and the present and eventually mutated past all previously held restrictions of propriety and common sense. The result has been a fundamental perversion of policymaking, with laws substantially crafted for and written by the most powerful interests in the country.

So where stands the reform push? In flux, according to the New York Times:

Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate, mindful that voters in the midterm election cited corruption as a major concern, say they are moving quickly to finalize a package of changes for consideration as soon as the new Congress convenes in January.

Their initial proposals, laid out earlier this year, would prohibit members from accepting meals, gifts or travel from lobbyists, require lobbyists to disclose all contacts with lawmakers and bar former lawmakers-turned-lobbyists from entering the floor of the chambers or Congressional gymnasiums.

None of those measures would overhaul campaign financing or create an independent ethics watchdog to enforce the rules. Nor would they significantly restrict earmarks, the pet projects lawmakers can insert anonymously into spending bills, which have figured in several recent corruption scandals and attracted criticism from members in both parties. The proposals would require disclosure of the sponsors of some earmarks, but not all.

Now, though, some Democrats say their election is a mandate for more sweeping changes. Many newly elected candidates, citing scandals involving several Republican lawmakers last year, made Congressional ethics a major issue during the campaign.
...
Sweeping changes, however, may be a tough sell within the party. Representative John P. Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, was embarrassed by disclosures last week that he had dismissed the leadership proposals with a vulgarity at a private meeting. But Mr. Murtha is hardly the only Democrat who objects to broad changes. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who will oversee any proposal as the incoming chairwoman of the rules committee, for example, said she was opposed an independent Congressional ethics watchdog. “If the law is clear and precise, members will follow it,” she said in an interview. “As to whether we need to create a new federal bureaucracy to enforce the rules, I would hope not.”

Other Democratic lawmakers argued that the real ethical problem was the Republicans, not the current ethics rules, so the election alleviated the need for additional regulations. “There is an understanding on our side that the Republicans paid a price for a lot of the abuses that evolved,” said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, referring to earmarks.

Frankly, Frank should know better. (Sorry.) The Founders understood that human nature was not to be trusted (and of course they weren't overly fond of parties in the first place): laws, not the judgment of individuals, were to guide the behavior of public servants. This is a less blatantly evil variation on the argument that there's no need to explicitly ban torture, because the enlightened administration of George W. Bush simply wouldn't do such things. Except, of course, he would, and similarly some number of Democratic legislators will bend any too-lax rules and standards to their breaking point and, almost inevitably, beyond. Crooked Democratic Rep. William Jefferson isn't even gone from Congress yet--hopefully he'll lose his runoff next month--and it already looks as if the party might have forgotten the lessens his crimes should have taught them.

And Feinstein, who has legal but shady ties to all manner of corporate concerns and lobbyists, shows her colors by pushing against any strong enforcement measures. Hopefully a large enough number of her colleagues will show more common sense. Chellie Pingree, herself an unsuccessful Senate candidate from 2002, points the way here:

Advocates of an overhaul believe the reaction to the Congressional embarrassments make the Democratic takeover of Capitol Hill their best chance for significant change since the aftermath of Watergate, when Congress created the presidential campaign finance system. But they consider the Democratic proposals just the beginning of a cleanup.

“A ban on gifts, meals, corporate jet flights — a lot of that resonates with the public because people think there is just a lot of free giveaways in Congress,” said Chellie Pingree, president of the ethics advocacy group Common Cause. “A lot of this is sort of skirting the issue of how campaign funds are shaping the legislative process.”

Ms. Pingree noted that the scandals of the last Congress arose from actions that were illegal but went undetected for years because of lack of oversight. “Are they going to enforce the rules?” she asked.

Spurred by the election results, several Democrats are pushing bigger changes. Mr. Obama, for example, is proposing an independent Congressional ethics enforcement commission.

Ideally, the way this works is that the two parties engage in a virtuous cycle of "can you top this?" on the subject of process reform. There's almost no chance, however, that the Republicans will play: corporate corruption is their main raison d'etre, and it probably would (and hopefully will) take a succession of "thumpins" before the erstwhile Party of Lincoln shakes free of its many negative norms and associations (I'll probably write more about this soon). McCain might pick up the reform mantle--but it looks to me like his Republican partisanship has long since trumped his better instincts for change, and the only reforms he's now interested in are ones that just would happen to hurt the Democrats more than his own party (like banning 527s).

One wonders if this could be Obama's window. Between a possible emergence as the new champion of ethics reform and his overtures to some of the less aggressive and dogmatic elements on the Religious Right, the senator is staking out some very interesting ground. I'm personally more interested in the destination--cleaning up Congress--than the journey; but if the senator's own ambition is fueling his push for more thoroughgoing reform, that's pretty much how the Founders drew it up.

Skullduggery, Parts I and II
Last week's announcement by Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) that he would seek the Majority Leader post, and his endorsement Sunday by House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi, sets the stage for the Democrats to conduct some of those high-profile pattycake-Shakespearean court intrigues that the Republicans so often indulged in while they held the majority. (They’ll continue to have their own, and indeed have already begun, but when you’re out of power nobody really cares, as the Dems have long known.)

The Houses of Pelosi, Murtha and (Steny) Hoyer have seen their fates inextricably intertwined, their ambitions in constantly shifting patterns of opposition and alignment, virtually since they all joined the national political scene, and intensely since the House Democratic Leadership began to shift in the first years of this decade. This recent Washington Monthly profile of Hoyer, written a few months back with the view that he likely would claim the Majority Leader position if the Democrats won, lays out the ugly history: Hoyer and Pelosi have been rivals for decades (from her Baltimore antecedents), Hoyer and Murtha have long detested each other, Murtha gave crucial support to Pelosi in a Whip race a few years back and indicated earlier this year that he wanted the Leader position). Pelosi, whose leadership style evidently has been marked by what rivals might describe as paranoia and vindictiveness, was just helping her ally and gently pushing back her old rival.

Because of that reputation, I have the weird feeling Pelosi’s support will be decisive, if she wants it to be. Behind the scenes, she’ll lean on the members to support Murtha; she determines committee assignments now, she’s got control over whatever potential pork there will be in the next budget (and presumably it’ll be plenty; these people hopefully won’t be as rapacious as the Republicans—-and if they are, they’ll be nailed for it—-but they’re still politicians and trying to lock in a majority), and she has a long memory. She won’t lean on everybody; she’ll want to let Hoyer save face. But she’ll push enough otherwise more or less indifferent members to back her guy.

Then the race will be on to define “Jack” Murtha.

If you’re not familiar with Murtha’s life and career, in some respects he’s got the perfect story and profile to serve as a high-visibility Democrat in a time of anxiety over national security. Murtha was a Marine who served with distinction both as a young man in Korea and a late-thirty-something in Vietnam. When he publicly came out against the Iraq war last year, it changed the whole tenor of the debate: suddenly it was safe, or safer, for Democrats to broadcast their opposition. He’s a conservative Democrat from an old union district in Western PA, known for the high regard in which he’s held by current and former military leaders and his bullish determination to advance the interests of the defense community.

That last sentence, though, should give you a hint why the Republicans would like to define Murtha. He comes with serious ethical questions, some very similar at least in atmosphere to the Abramoff-related corruption charges that did so damage to Republican hopes this year. And he sort of looks like an old-timey crooked pol.

The Democrats obviously want Murtha’s credibility on security issues, and perhaps as a signal-bearer that conservative-ish blue-collar guys should feel at home in today’s Democratic Party. And maybe-—this could be the genius element—-they figure that virtually every potential Republican critic can be counter-attacked by exposing their own strong ties to this and that lobby. But his ascension could allow the Republicans, if they can get Murtha’s ethics-question storyline into the mainstream fast enough—-and do so without seeming to attack his personal character, as that idiotic hag Mean Jean Schmidt did—-to actually present themselves as the reformers and ideologues they claimed to be twelve years ago. That's exciting not only for "the base," which has bought into the Gingrich mythos, but also for a certain kind of pundit that, hearkening back to the glory days of Newt and Armey, gets misty-eyed like an old Bolshevik 45 years ago thinking fondly paternal thoughts about Castro.

Nothing Left to Lose
I always figured the only reason Lincoln Chafee remained a Republican was that he thought a change of party would dishonor the memory of his father John, a legendary public servant who served Rhode Island in the Senate from 1976 until his death in 1999. The story of the younger Chafee is, to my read, among the sadder political tales of the last decade or so. A Republican in one of the country's most Democratic states, Lincoln Chafee was in a sense selling back bits of the public esteem his father had enjoyed in return for his own political viability. He talked like a Democrat, cast a lot of high-profile votes like a Democrat (against the war, against right-wing judicial nominees, etc), and famously even chose not to vote for George W. Bush in 2004 (writing in a vote for Bush 41).

This year, he repeatedly found himself in the strangest of circumstances, narrowly fending off a ferocious primary challenge from a hard-core conservative with a massive influx of resources from the national Republican establishment Chafee had all but repudiated and then losing Tuesday to a solid but unspectacular progressive Democrat despite sustained high approval ratings from his Ocean State constituents. Watching the returns, it gave me satisfaction but no pleasure to see Linc go down; as I wrote Monday night, this was a parliamentary vote, and we had to boot his party. If he'd changed his registration in 2003--as I still think he might have, if Paul Wellstone had lived and won the victory that would have left the Senate tied 50-50--he would have won 70 percent or more the other night and essentially secured his father's old seat for as long as he wanted it.

Oddly, Chafee evidently is considering making the switch now--years after his political self-interest would have been best served by doing so:

Two days after losing a bid for a second term in an election seen as a referendum on President Bush and the Republican Party, Sen. Lincoln Chafee said he was unsure whether he'd remain a Republican.

"I haven't made any decisions. I just haven't even thought about where my place is," Chafee said at a news conference Thursday when asked whether he would stick with the Republican Party or switch to be an independent or Democrat.

When asked if his comments meant he thought he might not belong in the Republican Party, he replied: "That's fair."
...
When asked whether he felt that his loss may have helped the country by switching control of power in Congress, he replied: "To be honest, yes."

"The people have spoken all across America. They want the Democrats and Republicans to work together," Chafee added. "I think the president now is going to have to talk to the Democrats. I think that's going to be good for America."

A lifelong Republican who succeeded his father, the late John Chafee, in the U.S. Senate, Chafee said he waged a lonely campaign to try to bring the party to the middle. He described attending weekly Thursday lunches with fellow Republican senators and standing up to argue his point of view, often alone.

"There were times walking into my caucus room where it wasn't fun," he said.

Chafee seems to blame the national party for his loss, and at this late point he evidently feels no reason to hold back: today, after Bush re-nominated belligerent John "Yosemite" Bolton for a permanent appointment as U.N. Ambassador, Chafee essentially ensured that Bolton would not be confirmed.

Sen. Lincoln Chafee (news, bio, voting record), R-R.I., who was defeated by Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse on Tuesday, told reporters in Rhode Island that he would continue opposing Bolton. That would likely deny Republicans the votes needed to move Bolton's nomination from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the full Senate.

"The American people have spoken out against the president's agenda on a number of fronts, and presumably one of those is on foreign policy," Chafee said. "And at this late stage in my term, I'm not going to endorse something the American people have spoke out against."
...
In 2005, Chafee wavered on his support for Bolton, citing concerns at one point about Bolton's tie to a government investigation into faulty prewar intelligence on Iraq. In September, Chafee — who was in a tight re-election race — said he would oppose Bolton's nomination until the administration answered questions about its policy in the Middle East, which in effect delayed any vote until after the elections.

If Chafee finally does sever his ties to Republican Party, he'll have as much right as any pol in recent memory to paraphrase Ronald Reagan and say, "I didn't leave the Republican Party; the Republican Party left me."

We Won. Now What?
Today was the most beautiful 40-degree rainy November day I can remember, even if I didn't join it until about noon after staying up nearly til 4 waiting for someone to call Montana. The Democrats won the House by a substantial margin, evidently have won the Senate--it's difficult to see how the canvassing or even a recount can lift Felix Macacawitz over my man Jim Webb--and now control a majority of governorships and either a majority or a plurality of statehouses. Whether or not Donald Rumsfeld would have resigned regardless of yesterday's outcome, the two events certainly will be linked in the public mind, and together they tell a story of a war policy that was first repudiated by the sovereign people, and then abandoned by its architects.

A collection of first impressions and second thoughts:

• After 12 years in a defensive crouch, Democrats can stand up and begin to go on the offensive. But--to beat the metaphor into a bloody pulp--they haven't stretched those muscles in a long, long time. It will be interesting to see what they have to offer in the way of a concrete positive agenda. Speaker-presumptive Pelosi's 100 Hour Plan is a good and wholly logical place to start, but it’s still remedial/ameliorative, fixing Republican foul-ups rather than launching something fresh.


• Figuratively speaking, more monsters (Santorum, Burns, evidently Allen; Sherwood, Weldon, the ghosts of Foley, DeLay and Ney) were destroyed yesterday, and more good men and women elected (Tester, McCaskill, Klobuchar, evidently Webb; Sestak, Gillibrand) than in any election I can remember-—though ’98 was close, with D’Amato and Faircloth going down. The Congress certainly will be a better place with its better composition and to call those results satisfying would be a severe understatement.


• With control of a majority of governorships and a plurality or majority of statehouses, the Democrats now can substantially dictate the action at the state level. Just as the 1920s saw the runup to the New Deal in states' progressive experiments with social insurance, market regulation and labor force interventions, the late ‘00s could see the same as governors like Spitzer, Patrick, Richardson, Rendell and Granholm either take over or return to office in stronger position. Both for their own ambitions and the larger project of building a new national governance agenda for Democrats, these governors should have a very interesting 2-4 years.


• Big as “the wave” was, it could have been bigger—-I counted at least a half-dozen House races where tough Democratic challengers got 49 percent and barely lost. This included races in Ohio, Connecticut, and New York, where reports of the political demise of moderate Republicans in districts slightly to either side of 50/50 were greatly exaggerated. This should be seen as a signal from the electorate that they want bipartisanship--and hopefully between their political near-death experiences and the shattering of the unitary Republican model, these Republicans reps will do the right thing and be freer to vote their consciences without fear of reprisal from a goon like Tom DeLay. If so, they’ll win again in two years with more room to spare; if not, the Democrats will come at them much harder next time and, barring a change in the broad context (or something really dumb like Hillary Clinton atop the ticket), probably win some of those seats.


• The Democratic caucus is both much bigger and much more ideologically diverse than yesterday, and Democrats now have power in places where they haven’t been heard from in many years--since 1994, in many cases. Unless they’re idiots, this will push the party more toward the center and ensure an agenda focused on meat-and-potatoes economic issues and pragmatism in foreign affairs, rather than the hubristic cultural liberalism that always seems to screw us. While cultural liberalism perhaps arises from our best instincts and principles-—equal opportunity, respect for differences, self-determination—-in practice it often looks ugly and elitist. Before we take up these fights again, we need to figure out better tactics; in the meantime, the focus should be on reducing unwanted pregnancies, ensuring equal civil rights for gays and gay couples, and respecting religion in the public square while resolutely defending the church/state wall. (If I were a Democratic strategist today, I'd actually urge trying to figure out a way to co-opt the "faith-based initiative"--maybe by emphasizing the positive potential role of religion in strengthening marriages and lowering the divorce rate.)


• After his disappointing win, Joe Lieberman-for-Lieberman has the balance of Senate power in his hands. But this is a two-edged sword: he can do a lot of damage to his reputation and legacy by giving in to his more narcissistic instincts. I'm now cautiously optimistic that he'll choose the pragmatic course of caucusing with the Democrats rather than join the sinking ship of the Bush administration or giving the Republicans a tenuous Senate majority that, as of today, couldn't have very strong hopes of lasting past 2008 (when Democrats should win Colorado and Minnesota at the least) in any event.


• Reading the transcript of Bush’s remarks today, he comes off as more conciliatory than he evidently seemed to those watching. If he keeps to this note, though, I expect his approval ratings to rise into the high 40s or even low 50s. Democrats should proceed with caution--while keeping in mind that he’s now the lamest of ducks. In other words: be polite, be respectful, ignore him to the furthest extent possible, and use targeted hearings (see below) to extend the longer-term case against his disastrous governance style and the deep flaws of right-wing ideology.


• Between Jon Tester’s win in Montana and the defeat of the draconian South Dakota abortion ban, interior west libertarianism is evidently alive and well, and no longer particularly Republican. Obviously this is a big opportunity for Democrats, and could advance the presidential hopes of another big winner last night: New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson.


• If the Democrats are smart, they will focus congressional hearings and investigations in two areas only: war profiteering and the politicization of the bureaucracy. I defy any of the harshest right-wing pundits to defend the misdeeds of politically connected contractors that charge the government $50 for a six-pack of soda and serve dirty water while billing the taxpayer on a "cost-plus" basis that offers every incentive to overcharge. And while it won't get as much broad attention, it's important that the Democrats show there are consequences to tossing out experts in favor of apparatchiks in federal agencies from EPA to the Iraq Provisional Authority.


• On the Rumsfeld resignation, it’s an acknowledgement that the war policy has failed and the “course” will be changed. Between presumptive new SecDef Bob Gates and the so-called Baker Commission, we have a Clark Clifford and it’s March 1968 all over again. Interesting aspect to this is that when Gates comes up for Senate confirmation hearings (probably under Democratic control--anyone know who the committee chair would be? Biden?), the war will be in some sense "re-litigated." Avoiding this was one of the big reasons, supposedly, why the administration wanted to keep Rumsfeld on. I guess their risk/reward calculus changed. Since Gates isn't tainted by association with the runup to the war, and the Democrats will want to show a conciliatory face, I suspect he'll be confirmed very quickly and by a wide margin. But the Senators will have their say on the war, and probably the administration will get it from both sides: Hagel and Warner among others will have choice words.

That's all for now. After six years, it's pretty nice to feel like I have some representation in Washington again.

(And, oh yeah: I did steal this post title from Taegan Goddard's book.)

Election Eve: Two Thoughts and a Complaint
First of all, I keep thinking there must be some great drinking game out there I could come up with for watching the returns tomorrow night. But thus far, bupkis. It's just not that interesting to go with "sip whenever Chris Matthews says 'macaca'; chug whenever Norah O'Donnell says '72-Hour Plan'."

On a hopefully more substantive note, I wonder how much of the electorate realizes the way our political system works now. It's not necessarily permanent, but the major political development of the last 12 years has been that the institutions established by the Founding Fathers no longer work the way they intended. Where as recently as 1993-1994, a Democratic Congress restrained and blocked a Democratic President, it's now almost unimaginable that Republicans at least could privilege institutional loyalties above partisan ones. In essence, we have taken on a parliamentary system; the individual candidates, their virtues and shortcomings, matter much less than the letters after their names.

I don't think people in the media or the general public really want to acknowledge this, because the unspoken (and accurate) view that partisan politics is kind of dirty and ugly remains strong and we like to think of our public officials as human beings rather than unthinking instruments of a broad worldview. And there was a serious notion, again as late as the 1990s, that parties didn't matter very much and were, if anything, increasingly less important. But in the age of hyper-polarization, where the parties command vast resources that can make or break the viability of a campaign and centralized power players with long memories and the inclination to bear a grudge can dictate the next 20 years of one's career, they do, and maybe moreso.

So while Bush isn't technically on the ballot tomorrow, as the head of an essentially unitary Republican Party, the election is and should be almost solely a referendum on his job performance and that of his congressional enablers. And by any objective standard, the verdict there shouldn't be a hard one to reach.

And now the complaint:

I live in Brooklyn, where to my knowledge I won't cast a single meaningful vote tomorrow: all the races seem to be foregone conclusions. Worse, every Democratic candidate on my ballot aside from Eliot Spitzer, who's about to be elected governor by acclimation, is more or less repulsive. We've got:

--Hillary Clinton, Senate. Our Lady of Perpetual Triangulation, who's more interested in trying to make herself palatable to people who detest her than supporting the values of the actual progressives who got her in office. In hopes that if her margin of victory is less than Spitzer's, she might not run for president, I'll be voting for the Green, whom I know nothing about but I assume is an unserious far-left type.

--Andrew Cuomo, Attorney General. This guy has a personality about as attractive as the vomit sometimes left on my floor by the cat with the heart murmur. Cuomo helped torpedo a very good man, Carl McCall, in a bitter gubernatorial primary campaign four years ago. He's a second-generation pol, and we aren't a hereditary monarchy. But his Republican opponent, Jeanine Pirro, is even more repulsive: she began this cycle running against Clinton, made an astounding mess of it, quit that race, launched this one, and has gotten more attention for her philandering felon husband (a big wheel in the Republican Party here) than any of her positions. I don't know if there's a third-party option. If so, I'll take it.

--Alan Hevesi, Comptroller. A candidate for re-election, Hevesi seemed to do a good job in his first term after holding the same position at the NYC level. But he illegally used a state car to ferry around his wife, at a total cost nearing six figures, and lied about it for years. Spitzer disavowed him and won't work with him. His Republican opponent is an extremist who seems about as committed to fiscal oversight and good government as his co-partisans at the federal level, and looks like the fat principal from "Head of the Class." I might sit this one out.

--Yvette Clarke, U.S. House of Representatives. Possibly the worst of this whole bunch. Clarke is another second-generation pol, her mom was a crook, she's the sort of strident special-pleader Democrat I can't stand, she narrowly beat three far superior candidates in a bitter primary dominated by race, and I think she's running unopposed. No idea how I'll vote here. If there's a Republican, I'd be tempted to cast a protest vote, but for reasons described above I don't think I could bring myself to support any Republican for any federal office.

Honestly, I'd love to see a Republican Party that doesn't show traces of theocracy, oligarchy, and selectively applied fascism, and this is a large part of the reason why: my local Democrats really, really stink. But again, they're mostly just weight on the scale, and right now the top priority is just getting the damn thing back into something resembling balance.

In a Nutshell
The biased liberal media was at work again this week: as I'm sure you noticed, the latte-sipping America-hating Fourth Estaters relentlessly pushed the Republicans' politically motivated decision to publish online documents that happened to include technical data crucial to construct an atomic bomb--while barely mentioning it at all when John Kerry screwed up a joke.

It's not that the Republicans knowingly or intentially published this information; that would be something akin to treason. It's just that they cared more about the potential political gain than the potential risk of providing secrets to would-be mass murderers. (This is the Valerie Plame story: same tune, different words.) The experts complained--and as always in this administration, the politicals blew off the experts. Some details:

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.
...
The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.
...
The government had received earlier warnings about the contents of the Web site. Last spring, after the site began posting old Iraqi documents about chemical weapons, United Nations arms-control officials in New York won the withdrawal of a report that gave information on how to make tabun and sarin, nerve agents that kill by causing respiratory failure.

The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation’s spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents — most of them in Arabic — would reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American search teams never found such evidence.
...
In Europe, a senior diplomat said atomic experts there had studied the nuclear documents on the Web site and judged their public release as potentially dangerous. “It’s a cookbook,” said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his agency’s rules. “If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things.”
...
Ray E. Kidder, a senior nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, an arms design center, said “some things in these documents would be helpful” to nations aspiring to develop nuclear weapons and should have remained secret.

A senior American intelligence official who deals routinely with atomic issues said the documents showed “where the Iraqis failed and how to get around the failures.” The documents, he added, could perhaps help Iran or other nations making a serious effort to develop nuclear arms, but probably not terrorists or poorly equipped states. The official, who requested anonymity because of his agency’s rules against public comment, called the papers “a road map that helps you get from point A to point B, but only if you already have a car.”

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private group at George Washington University that tracks federal secrecy decisions, said the impetus for the Web site’s creation came from an array of sources — private conservative groups, Congressional Republicans and some figures in the Bush administration — who clung to the belief that close examination of the captured documents would show that Mr. Hussein’s government had clandestinely reconstituted an unconventional arms programs.

“There were hundreds of people who said, ‘There’s got to be gold in them thar hills,’ ” Mr. Blanton said.

This is actually a perfect manifestation of the two trademarks of Bush/Cheney/DeLay-era Republicanism: raw political calculation mixed with astonishing incompetence and irresponsibility. Wouldn't it be a basic point of due diligence to figure out what's in the files before posting them online?

This story broke in the same 24-hour period as the news that the Republicans were going to fire the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, who has been investigating fraud and waste among contractors; and that the publications of the four newspapers of the military are about to call for Donald Rumsfeld's dismissal. I will be very surprised if all three of these news items--which I think most observers would agree are fairly significant--get nearly as much ink and air time as Kerry's flubbed lines.

And that kind of brings me to a larger thought about the election, three days and change before polls open. This really might be the last shot to reign in the people whose bad ideas, bad management and bad belief systems are corroding the power, and the soul, of this nation. I knew that if we didn't win in 2004, some awful things were going to happen; in the space of about a year, we saw New Orleans all but destroyed without an effective federal response and we've seen the death of habeus corpus and the embrace of torture as national policy. The economy hasn't collapsed, but it's wobbling. Iraq has gotten even worse. And this Congress spent less time in session, did less work for the public, and endured more black marks of members' corruption and immorality than any in memory.

If we truly did have the parliamentary system that our politics has come to suggest, this would be easier: I don't doubt that the electorate would simply vote the Democrats into a majority. But since you can't cast a national vote, it remains quite possible that while the substantial majority will vote Democratic, the majority in one or both houses will remain Republican. The direction of the country, whether we keep digging this hole or start to climb out of it, might depend on one or two million voters clustered in about 20 House districts in Ohio, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York, Arizona and a handful of other areas.

However it comes out, that somehow doesn't sit right.

YouTube, Time-Wasting Marvel
There's an entire YouTube trove of old Husker Du clips. Right now I've got on their "Tonight Show" appearance from 1987, featuring the relatively well-groomed trio in the band politely submitting to surprisingly well-informed questions from the impeccably coiffed Joan Rivers. (Seeing Johnny interviewing them, though, might have been even better.)

Also on there are clips from very early Minneapolis shows, recorded on super-8, featuring songs that I'd never heard before but foreshadow stuff they wouldn't actually put on record until years later; live clips (usually of two or three songs each) from throughout their career; MTV videos; and all manner of other crap.

This might be something that others have known about for years, which as usual I'm very belatedly getting around to finding; my first-ever exposure to YouTube came earlier this year when a friend of mine posted a clip of her boyfriend struggling to get their cat in the carrier to visit the vet. Since then, I've seen all kinds of political ads on there, tracked a mid-summer Battlestar Galactica trailer I'd missed, and probably done some other things. The idea that the majority of a great band's career might be captured on there, though, hadn't occurred. Either way, it's more proof that one really never need leave the house anymore to find entertainment...

My Kind of Soldier
One of the most interesting, though so far least impactful, political developments of the last few years has been the migration of political candidates with military backgrounds to the Democrats' banner. In 2004, my first choice for the Democratic presidential nomination was retired General Wesley Clark; the nominee, of course, turned out to be John Kerry, who got there in considerable part due to his distinguished service record in the Navy during the Vietnam War. (The Republicans' achievement in turning Kerry's war heroism into a negative during the general election campaign has to rank as one of the greatest tactical triumphs in American political history.) This year, around 50 Iraq War veterans ran for Congress as Democrats; no more than a handful of these "Fighting Dems" are still in serious contention to take the oath next January, but the failures of Bush's Splendid Little War still could give the out party control of at least the House of Representatives next year.

Perhaps the most interesting Democratic candidate of this cycle, though, is former Marine, Reagan cabinet member, novelist and journalist Jim Webb, running for Senate against George Allen Jr. in Virginia. Here's a man who not only served with distinction in Vietnam, but went on to be Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. He's about as far from a career partisan pol as one can get; as this New Yorker article puts it, "in Virginia’s 1994 Senate race [Webb] endorsed the Democrat Chuck Robb over the Republican Oliver North; he then backed George Allen over Robb in 2000; and now he [is] running against Allen for that same seat."

Like Wes Clark, Webb was a Republican for a large part of his adult life. His critique of the Democratic Party might not sit well with many of us, but understanding it and fairly appraising it remains crucially important to the long-term project of reviving the Democratic brand. Here it is, from the same New Yorker piece:

The unifying theme of Webb’s fiction, his popular history of the Scots-Irish, and, especially, his opinion journalism has been that of put-upon people (the military, Southerners, white men) suffering the smug disregard of a hostile élite. In the Webb reckoning, much blame resides in nineteen-sixties-era liberalism, which has influenced the Democratic Party for a generation. That he now finds himself a Democratic candidate in a pivotal U.S. Senate race is a development that proceeds, by its own stubborn logic, from this insistent theme. Webb’s candidacy is partly a quest to reclaim the Democratic Party for what he sees as a natural constituency.

When Webb deployed to Vietnam as a raw second lieutenant, in 1969, he had no particular political leanings. His mission was to protect the tactical space in front of him, and to bring back as many of his men as possible. Returning home, he felt that he and others like him had been driven from a Democratic Party that had, he believed, sacrificed a broad populist tradition to the passions of the intemperate margins. Webb proved to be a natural polemicist. He denounced “the ones who fled” the war, and inveighed against the acts of the Watergate Congress, which, elected after Richard Nixon’s disgrace, in 1974, halted funding to South Vietnam, hastening its doom. (The plight of the Vietnamese boat people came to have particular meaning for Webb. A girl named Hong Le was among those fished from the water by the U.S. Navy and transported to this country. She became a lawyer, practicing in Washington, and a year ago she became Webb’s third wife. She travels with him on the campaign trail, and is expecting their first child in December.) Webb declared Jimmy Carter’s blanket pardoning of draft resisters a rank betrayal and an abuse of Presidential power. When President Clinton left office, he wrote, “It is a pleasurable experience to watch Bill Clinton finally being judged, even by his own party, for the ethical fraudulence that has characterized his entire political career.”

Webb reserved a good portion of his pique for the “activist Left and cultural Marxists” and their efforts to effect “what might be called the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness.” He saw the Pentagon’s prolonged investigation of the Navy Tailhook sexual-abuse scandal in the nineteen-nineties as a political witch hunt, driven by a radical-feminist agenda to undermine the masculine culture of the military. Affirmative action, he posited, quickly became a means of victimizing white men through “state-sponsored racism.”

In “Born Fighting,” Webb developed the thesis that has become the rationale for his Senate run. Democrats, he argued, had foolishly written off the Southern white male, in the mistaken belief that it was a necessary cost of the Party’s leadership in the civil-rights era. Southern rednecks thus became a convenient symbol of all that impeded progress. “And for the last fifty years,” he wrote, “the Left has been doing everything in its power to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions in order to make them, at best, irrelevant to America’s future growth.” In alienating the South, Democrats ceded the region to Republican strategists, who took the trouble to cater to its culture. Webb, who had been a nominal Democrat in his youth, knew this from personal experience.

Personally, I wonder if Webb's problem with what he saw as the dominant Democratic ideology and worldview was the views themselves or the arrogance with which those views are expressed and how reflexively they are held. My strong suspicion is that if Webb had sat down with, say, Sam Brown, organizer of the 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam and a deeply thoughtful person who'd accepted personal risk and sacrifice on behalf of his views, in 1974 or so, he would have had an interesting conversation and might have seen Brown's points about the war. But most of us don't judge a broad social movement by the personal attributes of the best people engaged in that movement.

If he wins, Webb will be an odd duck in the modern Democratic Party. He's a foreign policy realist more along the lines of James Baker and even Richard Nixon rather than either a liberal hawk or a neo-isolationist. On economics, he's a populist, almost a rabble-rouser, which would stand in contrast to both the reflexive free traders of the DLC and the somewhat more thoughtful and development-oriented free trade views of his fellow Virginia Democrats Mark Warner and Tim Kaine.

Oddly, considering his "Born Fighting" bona fides and obvious belief that this race is of vital importance, Webb isn't doing close to everything he could be doing in order to win the election. His son is a Marine, now fighting in Iraq; Webb mentions this as rarely as he can. He's chosen not to go after his opponent, the odious George "Felix Macacawitz" Allen, for either his obvious idiocy (it's hard to imagine a greater intellectual gulf between two candidates) or the ugly revelations about Allen's character that turned this race from a walkover to a nailbiter; and as this clip shows, he still doesn't really know how to speak to a crowd. (Note the three minutes Webb spends recounting the reviews of his novels--astonishing.)

But there's no doubt in my mind that, one, this man is exactly the sort of person who should be serving in the Senate; and two, that his victory could yield greater long-term returns for the Democrats as a truly national and inclusive party than anyone else running this cycle. Here's hoping he pulls it out.

Remembering Wellstone
It was four years ago today that America lost its best public servant, Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. Then leading in his race for a third term, Wellstone died in a plane crash along with his wife, daughter, two pilots, and three campaign workers. At a time when we needed him most, he was taken from us.

Below is what I wrote two years ago on the second anniversary of Wellstone's passing. Today, with habeus corpus gone, the nation embracing torture as national policy, and the worst Congress in U.S. history thoroughly enabling a cartoonishly inept chief executive, the void of courage and principle he left seems larger than ever.

Wellstone was probably the man I admired most in public life, with Georgia Representative John Lewis a fairly close second. Though his politics were a bit to the left of my own, particularly on questions of fiscal responsibility and to a somewhat lesser degree on the use of force, I deeply admired him as a man of outstanding principle and commitment to public service. Wellstone never forgot why he'd gone into politics after a long and successful career as an academic and community organizer, and he managed both to serve his constituents and faithfully uphold his principles while in the Senate. His autumn 2002 vote against giving George W. Bush authorization to use military force wasn't popular, and carried risks in an election year--but Wellstone managed to make the case to Minnesota voters that his vote was one of principle. Knowing what we know now, and keeping in mind that the Senator had supported the Afghanistan incursion, it seems clear that his decision was based not in reflexive pacifism but rather in a healthy, and fully merited, distrust of what was informing the push to war. After running even or slightly behind his opponent, the Democrat-turned-Republican and former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman for most of the year, Wellstone was pulling away at the time of his death.

The aftermath of his passing seemed to underscore the tragedy: not only did Coleman, whose transparent opportunism marked him as clearly as Wellstone's principles characterized the Senator, beat former vice-president Walter Mondale, who was foolishly drafted to fill in for Wellstone--the distraught sons of the late Senator had some input into the decision--but the Democrats arguably lost control of the Senate with the vote. (I believe that the renegade Republican Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island might well have switched parties or gone independent as Jim Jeffords did, had control of the chamber been in the balance. Zell Miller of Georgia might have crossed in the other direction, but he was much less alienated from the Democratic Party at that time than he later became.) The turning point might have been Wellstone's memorial service, which Republican operatives successfully painted as a hateful call to political jihad rather than what it was, an anguished remembrance of a man who touched the hearts and stirred the ideals of millions.

I found out about Wellstone's death at a truck stop in upstate New York, while Annie and I were on our way to a weekend vacation in the Finger Lakes region. The story was running on the TV over the counter, and my loud gasp got a lot of stares. I'd met the Senator, very briefly, a few months before at a conference of workforce development advocates and researchers in DC. He spoke very softly and walked slowly, a reminder of the back pain that supposedly kept him out of the 2000 presidential race, but had an undeniably magnetic presence.

Even many of those who disagreed most strongly with Wellstone's politics felt great affection for the man. Jesse Helms, of all people, grieved at his passing. And Senator Sam Brownback, a very conservative Kansas Republican, stated on the first anniversary of Wellstone's death that he still prays for his friend and former colleague.

More tributes here and here.

Lieberman in the Pincers
Reports indicate that yesterday's three-candidate debate for the Senate seat now held by Joe Lieberman (???-CT) might have changed the dynamic of the race. The surprise winner, according to these reports, was none other than heretofore-overlooked Republican nominee Alan Schlesinger. After months in which he only made news for cheating at cards and getting kicked out of casinos, and consistently polling within the margin of error, Schlesinger busted out with passion, some policy specifics, and a series of stinging attacks on Lieberman. One less-than-neutral source hailed the debate as "a new GOP primary."

Thus, a race that many figured was over after Lamont failed to kill off Lieberman in August might now be back to Square One. Schlesinger's presumed irrelevance had left a vacuum to Holy Joe's right, but his pledges to caucus with the Democrats (always offered, though, with the caveat that he retain his precious seniority) and his long affiliation with the party allowed him to somewhat have his cake and eat it too: he appeared as the de facto Republican candidate--with considerable financial support from Republican donors, and tacit backing from the White House and RNC when they chose not to endorse Schlesinger--but could still semi-plausibly distance himself from those aspects of the Republican Party that would infuriate the solid moderate-to-liberal majority in the Nutmeg State. (For a darker, but very possibly valid, take on Lieberman's "understanding" with the Republicans, see here.) To put it briefly, if you were inclined to view Lieberman favorably, you could.

Now, not so much. With Schlesinger attacking his "liberalism" on immigration and other issues, and Lamont continuing to blast him on the Iraq debacle and his close ties to special interests, Lieberman can't present his bona fides as a representative of either major party. So he's now trying to present himself as a figure who "transcends" party politics while attempting to micro-pander: supporting John Bolton's confirmation to the UN (which he'd previously twice voted against) while stating that he'd like to see the Democrats win the House (a day after, stunningly, expressing no preference on the question) but only if they "change" to be less stridently partisan.

The message that elected officials should transcend partisanship is a worthwhile one and, in the abstract, probably very appealing to the current mood of the electorate. But I just don't see how a three-term incumbent, who was his own party's vice-presidential nominee, is well positioned to make it. Lieberman seems to be counting on voters to make the logical leap that his many small panders to constituencies on both sides somehow add up to a record of disinterested statesmanship--that many small acts of political cowardice, taken as a whole and viewed from a distance, will appear as political bravery. It might work. But without the resources of a party organization or, according to most reports, a solid ground operation in place, saddled with a bad position on the ballot, and open to charges of hypocrisy from all sides, it feels like a long shot.

I make no secret of the fact that I want Lieberman to go down like the sqealing hypocrite I believe him to be. That he might do so because of a permutation of Harry Truman's old adage that given the choice between a real Republican and a pretend Republican, the voters--in this case, CT Republican voters--will choose the real one, is just an enjoyable bit of irony.

Going to War
The news of the recent study estimating that more than 650,000 have died in Iraq, as well as the process-related revelations in the Bob Woodward book State of Denial and the latest spike in American casualties in Iraq, have had me thinking for a few days that our system has made it much, much too easy for the United States to go to war. What should be the most momentous decision a nation can make has become just a bit more involved, for the president, than any other routine function of executive-branch governance.

As I see it, there are three main aspects to this:

• The elimination of the draft


• The concentration of foreign policy authority and use of force in the executive branch, and


• A cultural ethos that both glorifies and oversimplifies the use of violence to solve problems.

The end of the draft and the switch to an all-volunteer army might be the biggest factor. Absent a draft, Americans don't find themselves in battle unless they choose to be there. This means that the pro-war voices in the media can advocate "strong measures" with no fear of finding themselves or their loved ones on the front line (and, as has been shown repeatedly by the right-wing "chickenhawk" bloggers, shame doesn't work on them); by contrast, the opponents don't have the added motivation of worrying about the same. My read of the early Vietnam era (I wasn't alive) was that until the abolition of the draft, the fear millions had of being forced either to fight, go to prison as draft resisters, or flee the country spurred anti-war mobilization beyond what it otherwise might have been.

The end of the draft has had a second effect: we no longer really fight wars as a representative sample of the country. Compared to the general population, the military is much less white, somewhat less educated, and much poorer. It could be reasonably argued that the U.S. armed forces are an economic advancement program as much as anything else. IMO, this isn't intrinsically a good or bad thing--but it does mean that families and communities can go through a war with much less personally at stake than when everyone knew somebody who was in harm's way.

I can think of exactly one person I know who served in Iraq--the younger brother of a close friend. This guy was a Stanford graduate who worked at a foreign-policy think tank in DC; he left that a bit more than a year ago to join the Marines, and chose to forego officer training; he enlisted as a grunt. He wasn't for the war, but he felt that his patriotism compelled him to serve. (He's first-generation Indian-American; he was born here, but my friend, his older sister, was born in India.) Thankfully, he came home unharmed a couple weeks ago, after eight months of house-to-house patrolling in Baghdad. I admire the hell out of what he did--but I wouldn't have done it, and I don't think I know anyone else who would have; his decision was clearly exceptional.

The second aspect is how power has shifted within our government. Congress can only "vote to authorize the use of force"--which offers them the out, since taken by so many Democrats, that they didn't themselves choose to go to war. Worse, though, that vote now has a political calculus that any politician with a self-preservation instinct can't ignore. The 2002 vote on Iraq (296 to 133 in the House; 77 to 23 in the Senate) wasn't nearly as close as the 1991 vote (250-183; 52-47)--though, by any reasonable analysis, the substantive case in 1991 was far stronger with Saddam Hussein's forces actually in Kuwait.

A handful of pols in very left-leaning districts can safely cast a "no" vote; another, smaller handful of exceptional leaders like the late Sen. Paul Wellstone might vote their conscience and then find a way to forcefully and successfully defend their positions. But most can't or won't. The way to fix this, I think, is to force them to actually declare war--but I don't think we've done this formally since 1941! The Founders did not place the war-fighting power with the Congress by accident; the idea, as I understand it, was to spread the responsibility collectively as they could, with the people's representatives making the fateful decision.

Of course, giving this power back to the people's representatives would mean making the entire defense intelligence apparatus accountable to Congress, rather than just to the president. Considering that presidents of both parties have concentrated all this power in the executive, barring a (IMO salutary) Constitutional crisis, that's unlikely to happen anytime soon.

The final point is the cultural aspect. Our heroes are fighters: generals, not diplomats, get parades and seven-figure book deals and movies made of their accomplishments. When they succeed, they do so quickly. It's a cliche, but an accurate one, to say that we're an instant-gratification society; the speed of things colors our perception of those things. I think half the public frustration with Iraq is that it's gone on for as long as it has. In this sense, the occasional criticisms of people like McCain and Santorum that the president has mismanaged the public handling of this war have some merit; no question, Bush did not prepare the people for a long slog. But I don't think he could have, and I'm not sure that any leader now alive could have. We don't really do long slogs--which is why diplomacy, which is almost by definition an indefinite process with endless contingencies and adjustments, is so quickly dismissed.

Closing an Old Wound
Sometimes, sports eases the pain. Sometimes, sports makes things much worse.

I experienced the latter on the first Sunday of December, 1994, watching the Eagles-Cowboys game in the basement of the house where I lived my senior year in college. My personal life was a mess: I'd just been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis about three weeks earlier, and a couple days after that my girlfriend of more than two years had dumped my ass. I felt physically sick and emotionally beaten. In the outside world, meanwhile, the Republicans had just taken over Congress and the baseball strike was entering its fourth month. So there I was, watching the Eagles, who had gotten off to a 7-2 start through early November but then lost three straight games to the Browns, Cardinals and Falcons. (It's distressing how well I remember all this.) If they couldn't right the ship against the Cowboys--the team they, and I, hated above all others--they'd probably miss the playoffs.

It was a back-and-forth game most of the way, but late in the second half, down by less than a touchdown, the Eagles had the ball inside the Dallas 10-yard line. Randall Cunningham looked unstoppable, and the Vet was rocking. Then Cunningham misfired into the end zone, Cowboys safety Darren Woodson intercepted the ball, and he ran the length of the field for what was essentially a game-icing touchdown. The Eagles lost their final three games to finish 7-9, and my very bad groove continued until March or so.

Not quite 12 years later, married, sort of fat and reasonably happy, I was thinking of this yesterday when Lito Sheppard returned the favor in the final seconds of the Eagles' thrilling 38-24 win over Dallas. The win was huge for the team, breaking a seven-game division losing streak and finally, I think, burying the awful experience that was their 2005 season, but for me it also put to rest the ache of that Woodson pick and return: the sense that, just as you were prepared for maximum joy, the fates would instead deliver maximum pain. Yesterday, with Sheppard's heroics coming two plays after a 57-yard pass interference penalty on a 4th-and-forever for Dallas, the trick was perfectly reversed.

A few other thoughts from the best game of the season:

• It's amazing how much having the better QB can make up for. Donovan McNabb made a series of near-perfect passes in the second half, while Bledsoe compounded his lack of mobility and the ferocious Eagles pass rush with bad decision-making.


• Somebody on Philliesphans reported that the FOX broadcast including 61 shots of a mostly sulking Terrell Owens on the sidelines. For myself, I just kept yelling at the TV to the effect of "NOBODY CARES ABOUT HIM EXCEPT YOU MEDIA DIMWITS!" (actual quote modified for content)


• The Dallas coaches did not call a good game. On their first scoring drive, they had something sustainable going: give excellent running back Julius Jones the ball, and throw short passes. The Eagles couldn't stop it. But they didn't stay with this; they kept dropping Bledsoe back, and Dallas couldn't handle the relentless blitzes in addition to stellar play from the Eagles' defensive line.


• The Eagles secondary didn't have a good game--they had a great game. To go single-coverage and hold Terry Glenn and TO to what they got is just superb. Joselio Hanson is a better DB than I'd thought, certainly good enough to play in the nickel.


• Given how solidly they won most of the battles on both lines--there were two series in the first half when the Cowboys got to McNabb, but otherwise he generally had more than enough time to throw--the Eagles probably shouldn't have needed the pick and return at the end to win the game. But Andy Reid's play-calling is still goofy: at some point he needs to commit to the running game at least enough so that when he needs to pick up a first down on third and inches, he can call it with confidence. Facing that exact situation in the third quarter, he called a pass--which fell incomplete. Infuriating, though ultimately it didn't hurt. If I had to choose, I'd rather have the quick-strike offensive capability the Eagles possess than a grind-it-out ball-control scheme where one mistake--a missed block, a holding penalty--can stall out a drive. But the Birds' offensive line is big enough and strong enough that they shouldn't necessarily have to choose.

Next week should be another good test for them in New Orleans. The Saints are 4-1, though (like the Eagles before yesterday) you could argue they haven't beaten anyone. More worrisome might be whether the Eagles can avoid a hangover after yesterday, when they were playing with more emotion than I've seen in years--maybe in Reid's whole tenure. Pretty sweet, whether or not it was worth a 12-year wait.

Return to Iraqtica
A few thoughts on the Battlestar Galactica premiere last night:

• That was really one of the more grim two hours of fictional TV I've ever watched. I'm not saying they should have lightened it up--I think the plot as they set it up at the end of Season Two required a heavy dose of misery en route to however they're going to extricate the protagonists. But compared to what television ostensibly offers--escape and recreation--it was a lot to ask of the audience. Maybe that's why I like the show so much: they never make it easy for you.


• Watching it with my wife and a friend, they somewhat resented the heavy-handed nature of the Iraq metaphor. This was part of what made it tough viewing: our heroes, driven by nationalism and religious belief and personal tragedy and just the simple wish for self-determination, mimicking the tactics of and occupying some of the same mental space as people who are, in real time, killing Americans. But part of what makes Battlestar so compelling is that the show's politics are slippery. In Season One, the trick was to make liberal viewers turn against due process--in the "Litmus" episode, when Adama shuts down the independent tribunal because he thought it was becoming a witch hunt, my response (which may or may not have been yelled at the TV) was that, dammit, they needed a witch hunt! In Season Two, one aspect of it was that what we might call the Bush worldview--Roslin's taking guidance from religion, even her intermittent messiah complex--isn't necessarily wrong in all circumstances; but another piece was that power unmoored from principle doesn't deserve to succeed (Admiral Cain is assassinated, even after Adama cancels his own plan to kill her on grounds that "it's not enough to survive--you have to be worthy of survival"). Now the writers are trying the enormously audacious trick of suggesting that good and evil are almost always contingent: Jammer's comment to Tyrol that "some of those guys [the New Caprica Police] are in way over their heads" is in some sense defensible, but so is the contention of the Resistance that they need to be killed to accomplish a larger good. If anything--as with Admiral Cain's defense of her own actions in Season Two--I wish the writers had given (or will give) Jammer more of a platform to make his case.


• As usual, the villains are more interesting than the heroes. The Dean Stockwell Cylon, who seemed relatively benign at the end of Season Two, now comes off as a nihilist and a sensualist--he might not believe in the Cylon God, but that seems to render him with even less of a moral compass than the fanatical models. And the fact that all the models seem to be "individualizing" but at different paces should open up great vistas for the writers for as long as the show stays on the air.


• Finally, I have to note that on the BSG website, they're pushing hard for the show as a good-time cultural phenomenon: there's a cheesy song/video (which I could only take about a minute of) and the gimmicky "frak parties" which I guess is something like a Meet-Up function for sci-fi dweebs. (Still, for your own amusement, I urge in the strongest possible terms that you click on the link and then run your cursor over the image at the top of the page. Seriously--go do it. I'll be right here.) But I can only imagine that watching last night's episode--with its large doses of personal and institutional cruelty, intimations of physical and psychological torture, and graphic scenes of loveless sex and amoral killing--in the company of strangers, would have been somewhere between unpleasant and excruciating.


• Seems like most of the time when something momentous happens, the Raptor pilot Racetrack is involved. She was Boomer's ECO (yeah, yeah--I'm a dork) when they nuked the base star and Boomer saw all the other models of her; she flew the Raptor that got lost on the rescue mission back to Caprica and accidentally discovered New Caprica; and in last night's episode she was flying the Raptor when the resistance finally broke through the Cylon jamming. Maybe she's a Cylon, or maybe the producers find her easier to reach when they need a short appearance than, say, Olmos' son or any of the other less-known pilots.


• For the first time, I think there's real reason to believe that Baltar's internal Number Six is just his own mind manifesting externally, as he originally said back in the mini-series. Her telling him to sign the execution order, against whatever moral pull he felt, sounded for all the world like self-interest and justification.

This Isn't Brain Surgery
Here's my last political post for a bit--tomorrow is the Battlestar Galactica premiere, and there's some football game of note in Philadelphia this weekend that I think I'd like to muse on some.

But as this Mark Foley scandal continues to metastasize, a couple points. First, this episode finally illustrates the whole narrative of gross corruption by power that Democrats have been trying to explain for two years now, mostly without success. While the Jack Abramoff bribes-for-votes affair is much more upsetting as an indictment of how our system of governance has been perverted, and the failues of the Bush administration in Iraq are much sadder in terms of the pure human cost and illustrative of the failures of both policymaking and oversight that characterize Republican one-party rule, the Foley story is simply easier to explain. Try making a TV Movie of the Week about Abramoff or the failure to secure post-war Iraq; you can't. But the Foley story can and will be cinematized, and probably anyone reading this could write the script in the span of a coffee-fueled weekend.

There's the human element--a guy with personal demons living in denial of his true self (I mean, I knew Foley was gay in 2004; it was the reason he didn't run for Bob Graham's Senate seat. And a colleague who has many more national political connections than I said to me today that the gay community spent years trying to ease him out of the closet, through flattering profiles in The Advocate and other measures, giving him passes on bad votes and everything), who probably had a lot of self-loathing and some purer instincts to go along with his perversions and despicable actions. And there's the corruption-of-power arc: it seems clear that a lot of people knew that Foley was into teenage boys, but they figured tolerating his predations was a worthwhile exchange for his fundraising prowess and the near-certainty that he could hold Florida's 16th District for as long as he wanted it. This went on for years, kicked up and down the hierarchy of the Republican House leadership; as is generally the case in dysfunctional organizations, nobody took ownership of the problem, and the result is the ugly and inevitable crossfire now engulfing fat tub of crap Denny Hastert, Cigarette Smoking Man John Boehner, RCCC chair Tom Reynolds, and others.

But the culture of corruption remains, at its core, the demon child of Tom DeLay, the man for whom all tradeoffs were acceptable if they strengthened his grip on power. I keep waiting for Hastert to tell the truth: that for the first six years of his nominal Speakership, he was nothing more than DeLay's grossly oversized hand puppet, and that it was the Bug Man who knew of Foley's sins and forgave them in exchange for his abilities to raise big piles of cash. In addition to this being almost certainly true--DeLay, like all great political operators, reputedly knew everything about his caucus members--it's also politically convenient: the guy is gone, and he's not coming back. Is it possible that fear of DeLay remains so strong that the Republicans aren't even willing to use him as a scapegoat?

Bush Jujitsu
Carpetbagger today has an item about Bush's latest smears against Democrats on national security during a series of recent campaign events. It's the usual bleating: weak-willed, passive, waiting to get hit again, and deedle-deedle-dee.

The blog has a laugh at Bush's growing irrelevance, measured by the lack of a Democratic response, which Carpetbagger thinks is a sign that the Dems don't consider Bush worth a response at this juncture. But I think he somewhat misses the point that when Bush makes these appearances--always Bubbled, of course, so he's just speaking to the faithful, with pre-canned and probably pre-queued applause lines--the real point isn't what he says, but what he does. What he did yesterday, in the course of making his dim remarks, was raise $400,000 for Richard Pombo, the thuggish Republican congressman from California. Later, he raised $600,000 for the Dickensian-named (and, of course, corrupt) Congressman John Doolittle, and still later he raised $1.3 million at an RNC event. The Pombo appearance triggered a protest of about 150 administration opponents, which merited a one-line mention in the Yahoo! story from which I drew this information.

What I want to know is why there isn't a mobile operation run either by the DNC or the two congressional campaign committees, or by an independent group, that shadows Bush when he makes these appearances, working with the campaigns on the ground. I see two big benefits from such an operation:

1) Use the heightened level of Democratic/progressive disgust at having the First Asshole in town to raise some coin for the local opponents of whoever is about to receive the Bush-generated largesse.

2) Conduct "War Room"-style rapid response to get our message into the local press and rebut the inevitable lies and half-truths that Bush's monkeys pen for him to spout.

Basically, such a rolling effort should provide support for the local candidates, who themselves can give the quotes and otherwise go on point as "standing up to the President." Given that majorities of all voters, including a large number of self-identifying conservatives, distrust Bush--and that progressives just loathe the guy--an aggressive pushback to his appearances will force those candidates he's supporting either to tie themselves to an unpopular president and all his perceived failures, or to disassociate themselves, which in turn will lessen their support from the RNC.

The Democrats have a rare opportunity to get maximum value out of Bush's unpopularity and can use the president himself to make their case of tying every Republican to this failed administration. Some campaigns on the ground have done this--but they all should be doing it.

The Object of Power is Power
It's rare that events unfold in such a way that the whys--the reasons people do what they do--are as clear as the whats. But the last two days of the 109th Congress saw such a sequence of events. Within about 24 hours Thursday and Friday, Republicans in Congress voted to empower the president to suspend habeas corpus, detain individuals without time limit or need to show cause, and unilaterally disregard an international treaty... and then it came out that their leadership had known about and protected Florida Rep. Mark Foley despite being aware that he had an unhealthy fixation with teenaged boys.

Their reasons for shredding a chunk of the Constitution and for sheltering a man they had full reason to suspect was a sexual predator were one and the same: to preserve a majority that they evidently feel they can't defend on the merits of their actions.

The difference is that they voted to make torture a sanctioned policy of the United States because they felt this would appeal to voters--itself a shocking and devastating indictment of where we are as a people now--while they kept Foley's secret (and preserved his standing as chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children--perhaps it takes a crook to catch a crook?) because exposing him could put yet another congressional seat previously assumed "safe" into play.

This Congress, which left town yesterday, failed in its most basic duties: to protect and defend the Constitution, and to pass a budget. Nearly every government agency will be funded until mid-November, when this Congress reconvenes for a lame-duck session that hopefully will represent the last six weeks of right-wing misrule, by Continuing Resolutions, because these Republicans couldn't even agree with each other on funding levels. Needless to say, this does no favors for the agency employees and state and local workers who rely on funding to run programs and set plans for the year. This past February, the Republicans finally passed their budget through an omnibus bill that no legislator actually read all the way through; they had a few hours to try and determine the merits of a document that was in the neighborhood of 1,000 pages. This has become par for the course, and the substantive results have been as bad as you'd expect from such a process.

Since then, they've spent three days on hearings about gay marriage... but allocated just ten hours to debate that abomination of a torture bill. They failed to pass a bill on immigration that was both a priority of their president and enjoyed the support of large majorities nationally. They outright refused to exercise oversight on a war that, in squandered blood and treasure, might be the greatest debacle in the history of U.S. foreign policy. And they would only consider raising the minimum wage, to the benefit of millions of hard-working Americans on the economic margins, if doing so would also mean a repeal of the estate tax, which would have meant a windfall in the billions for the richest few hundred American families.

This is a record that can't be defended--even before we consider the "culture of corruption" embodied by super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who also returned to the news at the end of this week with newly released details of his extensive contacts with the administration. To distract voters from this catalog of catastrophe, the Republicans tried, again, to put the focus on fear and suggest that, by their greater willingness to waterboard poor schmucks picked up on routine patrols with no more ties to terror groups than you, me, or Joe Girardi, they should be returned to office for more public policy hijinks. In their concern that this and other gambits might fail in more districts than not, they knowingly sheltered a would-be pedophile.

So I think it's fair to ask: is there anything--anything at all--that this group wouldn't do to retain power?

How the Torture Policy Will Really Work
Amidst all the protestations from the pro-torture right about the need for "clarity" in interpreting the Geneva Conventions (a need that evidently never existed before this war and, for that matter, this election cycle, but never mind that for now), and various theoretical explications of why maybe torture isn't so bad, and more fevered notions of how we need to torture or else we're all gonna die, something important has been missing from the conversation. To me, this is first and foremost about American values and American claims to moral leadership in a conflicted world. It's sadly clear that the people now in charge of our country don't care a fig about our values and traditions--and it seems more likely than not that they envy the "operational freedom" of the terrorists to act as they feel they must. They see our values and our moral premises as a shackle, not a strength.

But I'm not even thinking, right now, about that. I'm thinking about how this is going to work in practice. Not in a movie script scenario where the hardened terrorist won't tell the particulars of the evil plot. But how it's going to work with the poor schmuck who's picked up in a sweep of a Baghdad neighborhood one evening right before curfew.

On a secure phone, the supervisor of the facility is being yelled at by someone who was yelled at by someone who was yelled at by someone who was yelled at by Donald Rumsfeld or David Addington. The supervisor has a career to consider; he's got a wife and two kids, and he's worried about how he's going to take care of them.

One of his deputies notices that this poor schmuck who the patrol just picked up looks like someone on a watch list. Or maybe he has the same last name but for one letter that might have been screwed up in a transliteration.

And the two of them figure, okay, there's now a policy in place that "harsh methods" are allowed. It's not really torture, because it isn't rape or Nazi Doctors stuff; they're just going to have to stand naked for 20 hours in a 50-degree cell with Megadeth's second album blasting at 130 decibels, on repeat. It's just discomfort.

Now, maybe this prisoner has an undiagnosed medical condition--high blood pressure, irritable bowel, a kidney problem. He can't go to the bathroom, so he starts to foul himself in the cell. Every half-hour, a contractor from Blackwater comes into the cell, motions to the guard, and the guard pauses the CD. The contractor asks a few questions that our poor schmuck doesn't know the answers to; when the contractor/interrogator doesn't get the answers he wants, he throws a few biffs and baffs, and now the guy has a bloody nose and a black eye. After a few hours, he goes home to his hotel, and another interrogator comes and starts the whole thing again.

This interrogator, though, thinks that she's much better at her job than the blockhead now on his way home for a late dinner and some pay-per-view; her daring, outside-the-box methods might involve grabbing the guy's balls, or trying to force-feed him a pork chop. Okay, maybe some pencil-necked lib lawyer would argue that this is "humiliating or degrading" under Article 3 of Geneva--but that lib lawyer will never know, of course. So why not? Rumsfeld's office wants intel.

This goes on for about a day. Then the prisoner is released, given some new clothes, maybe allowed to sleep for an hour before he's thrown out of the facility. There's another group of usual suspects since rounded up, and the whole thing starts again.

THIS is how the torture policy will work in the real world. Not ripping off fingernails until the turbaned terrorist finally admits where the nuke is. Just a lot of "banality of evil," that ultimately probably will create some real terrorists.

Maybe not until the next time we need to go into the middle east to test out some think tanker's theory about pre-emption, but it will happen, and our own sins will be revisited upon us.

"Real-World" Voters
At New Donkey, Ed Kilgore recently weighed in on the emerging cognitive split between older observers of politics, who look at the meta-trends this year and foresee a Democratic blowout, and younger ones, who have never seen such a thing and are deeply skeptical that in the end, whether it's through strategic brilliance, shameless fear-mongering or flat-out theft, the Republicans won't pull through. He writes:

This generation gap has been especially notable if you read progressive prognosticators, such as Chris Bowers or Kos. These are people who by and large are completely obsessed with the hope that Democrats will retake Congress. This is largely what they live for. Yet they are very reluctant to predict that their Ahab will indeed slay their Great White Whale. At the same time, nonpartisan and Washington Establishment crystal ball analysts--the very people that progressive bloggers regard as thinly veiled allies of Bush and Rove--are typically suggesting that Bush and Rove's party is about to get 1994'd.

Cook gently suggests that Old Folks remember earlier elections that provide the relevant empircal data for what's happening this year. Bowers responds by noting that young'uns are fixated on recent elections where the only real pattern was Democratic futility.

As an Old Guy who pays a lot of attention to Young Folk commentary, I think both sides have a point. Cook and Rothenburg and all sorts of conventional handicappers are right to examine the historical evidence for what might happen when you have a deeply unpopular president whose party controls Congress, especially six years into a presidency. But Bowers and company have experienced two straight midterm elections that broke all the rules about the performance of the president's party.

Perhaps I'm showing my age here, but I tend to agree with Charlie and Stu and company that it's hard to find any precedent for a presidential party controlling Congress in the sixth year of an administration that avoids disaster when the electorate is completely sour on the status quo.

But we're in an era when precedents are being broken every day, so who knows?

As a Young Guy (well, 33; my political memory doesn't really go back further back than 1986) who watches attentively to what the Old Guys are saying, I devoutly hope Kilgore is right about what will happen this November. But, like the rest of the twenty- and thirty-somethings, I just can't believe it, even before the poll results today that showed Bush and the Republicans enjoying a possible bounce.

Part of that surely is, as Kilgore describes, seeing all the "rules" repeatedly broken in the last four congressional election cycles. And part of it is that is best explainable with a suffering-sports-fan analogy: as when one is (say) a Phillies fan, you just expect the bounces to go against you... AND you're worried that the other side's manager and GM are much smarter than yours, based on the results of past seasons.

But another part of it might be that many observers--probably "old" and "young" both--might not understand just how completely the national perspective has been fractured. I'm just not convinced that, given factors of money and gerrymandering and expertise at turnout/electoral endgames, large enough majorities in a large enough number of districts are sufficiently "sour on the status quo" that they'll break their recent voting habits--whether those habits are voting Republican or just not seeing any reason to get involved. (And admittedly, to the casual observer of politics it's probably very easy to conclude that "they all stink.")

And one reason why not is that some core percentage of the electorate is, effectively, impervious to empirical evidence about how the country is doing and how their elected officials are performing in office.

For these folks, bad news from Iraq, stagnant real wages, debts and inflation, and perhaps especially the sad changes in our national/historical character and who's driving them, are all either shrugged away or blamed on the Democrats or other malign actors. These are the people who only watch Fox, who hear from their preachers and neighbors about the righteous rule of the Republicans and the rampant immorality of the Democrats. At best, they're trying to reconcile what they might be seeing on TV or feeling in their own bank account with all those built-in factors pushing them to vote Republican.

In short, an election held solely in the Reality-Based Community would put the Republicans out on their collective ass. But many of us felt that should have happened two years ago. Albeit under somewhat different circumstances, it didn't--and I'm not at all sure our guys have figured out since how to drag voters into the real world where the fatal flaws of faux-conservative governance are impossible to miss.