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

The first bunch included the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ponnuru: Would you be willing to ban it?

"Sen. McCain: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Movie Recommendation
As the Academy Awards show evidently is going on right now, it seems appropriate to praise Pan's Labyrinth, which Annie and I finally caught this afternoon following a month or so of failed attempts to see it.

I'm having trouble articulating exactly what it was about this film that moved us so much. It's beautifully shot (I saw on the NYT site a few minutes ago that it won Best Cinematography) and visually amazing (ditto Best Art Direction and Makeup). The performances are remarkable, even more so for the filmmakers' decisions to cast a bunch of key roles against type, at least if Wiki is to be believed.

But I think it's the story, really. Or rather, two stories. One plot involves an anti-insurgency action in a remote corner of Spain, five years after the Francoite fascists won that country's civil war: an army captain has set up an outpost to capture or kill a group of Republican holdouts, summoning his pregnant wife and her daughter by a previous marriage to live with him for the duration of the campaign. As this story plays out, the captain's cruelty comes into sharp focus: he summarily executes two villagers, tortures a captured guerilla, and bullies his wife and her daughter. As his kind but meek wife weakens through the course of her pregnancy, the captain makes it increasingly clear that her value to him is nothing more than the bearer of his son-to-be.

The second story, which frames the movie at beginning and end and recurs throughout, involves the daughter. She is the reincarnation of a princess from the underworld who in ages long past went to the surface of the earth, forgot who she was, and died in confusion. Upon arriving at the captain's outpost, she discovers a labyrinth in the woods, and is subsequently visited by a faun who tells her of her true identity and sets her three tasks to prove that her "essence is intact."

Over the course of the movie, the girl is torn between the imperatives of her increasingly desperate "real life" and the mission she must complete to fulfill her destiny. Compared to virtually every other character in the story, though, she is blessed and fortunate: while the rest of them--fascist soldiers, resistance fighters, household staff, her own mother, perhaps even the captain--are caught up in forces beyond their control and reduced to acting out set roles in a larger drama, in the shadowy world of the faun she at least has some control over her own dispensation.

The movie works as narrative, as wish fulfillment, as drama and fantasy. It's probably the best film I've seen in three years, maybe longer. And it took me far away from a relatively dismal February Sunday without very much else to recommend it.

Are They Cracking?
In the classic Simpsons episode "Sideshow Bob Roberts," the Springfield Republican Party meets to choose a candidate to run against Diamond Joe Quimby, a Democrat, for the mayoralty. The group, which convenes in a scary-looking castle, includes Mr. Burns, Rainier Wolfcastle, Birchibald T. Barlow (a right-wing radio host modeled on Rush Limbaugh), the Blue-Haired Lawyer, and the Rich Texan, as well as Dracula.

Aside from the fact that the Springfield Republican cabal didn't, to my knowledge, include any rabidly intolerant religious fundamentalists, the gathering is reminiscent of the Council for National Policy, described in this article from today's New York Times as "a secretive club whose few hundred members include Dr. James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, the Rev. Jerry Falwell of Liberty University and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. Although little known outside the conservative movement, the council has become a pivotal stop for Republican presidential primary hopefuls, including George W. Bush on the eve of his 1999 primary campaign."

The main thrust of the story is that the Council, and its members who constitute much of the leadership among "movement Republicans," are struggling to find a candidate to rally behind for next year's presidential election:

Many of the conservatives who attended the event, held at the beginning of the month at the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island, Fla., said they were dismayed at the absence of a champion to carry their banner in the next election.

Many conservatives have already declared their hostility to Senator John McCain of Arizona, despite his efforts to make amends for having once denounced Christian conservative leaders as “agents of intolerance,” and to former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, because of his liberal views on abortion and gay rights and his three marriages.

Many were also suspicious of former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts; the council has been distributing to its members a dossier prepared by a Massachusetts conservative group about liberal elements of his record on abortion, stem cell research and gay rights. (Mr. Romney has worked to convince conservatives that his views have changed.)

And some members of the council have raised doubts about lesser known candidates — Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Representative Duncan Hunter of California, who were invited to Amelia Island to address an elite audience of about 60 of its members, and Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who spoke to the full council at its previous meeting, in October in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Although each of the three had supporters, many conservatives expressed concerns about whether any of the candidates could unify their movement or raise enough money to overtake the front-runners, several participants in the meetings said.

Yes, 2008 is shaping up to be a tough one for the collection of ideologues and psychopaths that's done so much to give us all the black spot on our history that's been these last six years. McCain and Giuliani are desperate to kiss their asses, but Dobson and Norquist simply won't drop their pants. They have long memories, for one thing: if Dobson had been as prominent in 2000 as he later became, McCain likely would have labeled him (correctly) as an "agent of intolerance," and Norquist has detested McCain at least since the Arizona senator started holding the hearings on Indian Affairs that eventually helped destroy Grover's pals Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed. As for Rudy, I guess they just can't stomach his deviations from orthodoxy on abortion (which I'm sure he'd renounce if he credibly could) and, perhaps even worse, his sympathy for gay rights (about which I have the feeling he's sincere, and stubborn enough to stay with--the one thing I admire about the man). They'd probably like to support Romney, but his own sins against the dogma are too recent for them to shrug off with a straight face.

How about the next tier? Every time I've seen or read something about Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who shares Bill Clinton's home town and working class roots, I've been impressed with his potential as a candidate who could talk the talk of the Dobsonite hate crowd, but do so in a way that isn't as viscerally ugly as when, say, Rick Santorum did it. And Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator who was Santorum's political soulmate, seems reliably right-wing enough. But both evidently have their drawbacks for the Council crew, as do the rest of the Republican hopefuls.

A spokesman for Mr. Brownback said he would not comment on the senator’s presentation to the council, citing its rules about strict confidentiality. Several others who attended his speech said he received heavy applause for his emphasis on restricting abortion and amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. But foes of illegal immigration objected to his support for a temporary guest worker program, and some faulted him for touching only briefly on the threat of Islamic terrorists, an increasingly central focus of the council and many social conservative groups since the Sept. 11 attacks.
...
In an interview, Mr. [Duncan] Hunter, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee and a supporter of Mr. Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq, said the need for a strong national defense was the centerpiece of his speech. That defense, he argued, should include cracking down on illegal immigration, building a wall along the Mexican border and renegotiating foreign trade deals to protect American manufacturing. “We are losing the arsenal of the democracy,” he said.

But several people at the council meeting said his stance on trade alienated the business wing of the Republican Party, compounding his substantial fund-raising challenges.

Mr. Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister who was the head of the Arkansas Baptist convention before becoming governor, has the advantage of strong personal ties to many council members. Many prominent evangelical Christians consider him a friend, and he has appeared several times as a guest on Dr. Dobson’s popular Christian radio program.
...
But many conservatives, including several participants in the Amelia Island meeting, said Mr. Huckabee faced resistance from the limited-government, antitax wing of their movement. Some antitax activists fault Mr. Huckabee for presiding over tax and spending increases. (He says the only tax increase resulted from a public referendum.)

In what could prompt the greatest moment of schadenfreude I'll ever know, there seems to be a decent chance that the once-vaunted Republican machine is about to take a wrong turn into 1980s Democratland. An insistence upon ideological purity, as defined by a checklist of issue positions, is a great way to lose elections. The guy hasn't always hated gays? He once allowed a tax hike? He isn't fanatically pro-free trade? WE WILL NOT SUPPORT HIM!

There's an issue of potentially even greater significance here, though. Over the last forty years, the emerging and then dominant Republican coalition of free-market fundamentalists (the small group that provides the money) and social reactionaries (the large group that provides the votes and organizational structure) has persisted because of an unwillingness to acknowledge the core contradiction between those two groups that is in some sense positively admirable. The contradiction is that the same cultural forces the social reactionaries deplore--the trash TV and debased media--make enormous sums of money for the free-market fanatics, and that the negative externalities of their ever-growing profits--the need in almost all families for both parents to work, the erosion of once-assumed benefits like health care and retirement savings, the stagnant or relatively declining wages for most segments of the workforce--place unbearable additional strains on families. To my knowledge, the next time "Focus on the Family" addresses the tilted economic landscape in this country will be the first... but its members are living this problem, and they can't hide from it forever.

To this point, they've been able to obscure this question--to ignore the contradiction--by finding one scapegoat after another, whether it's Muslims or gays or Hollywood celebrities or feminist bloggers. Combined with more money and better political organization, the scapegoating was enough for them to win more elections than not from 1994 through 2004. Last year, though, it started to unravel (with, admittedly, a big assist from the tragic mismanagement of the war and the excessive corruption antics of Tom DeLay's Congress). And as time goes on, this probably will get tougher: successive generations just don't hate and fear gays the way older social reactionaries evidently do, and all sides in the endless war over abortion are feeling fatigue, as the South Dakota votes have shown.

In the end, I can't quite bring myself to believe that the Republicans will dash themselves to bits on the rocks of an ideological purity that the contradiction renders impossible. They just like winning too much. Norquist, a government-hating fanatic who might be the most purely evil political figure of the last forty years, ultimately will leverage whatever he can out of Giuliani or his old enemy McCain in exchange for support, and then the question will be whether the Democrats can push hard enough on the cracks to cause a full-on rupture that will split the money chunk of the party from the reactionaries.

Following up on an Earlier Story...

NEW YORK—At a well-attended rally in front of his new Ground Zero headquarters Monday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani officially announced his plan to run for president of 9/11.

"My fellow citizens of 9/11, today I will make you a promise," said Giuliani during his 18-minute announcement speech in front of a charred and torn American flag. "As president of 9/11, I will usher in a bold new 9/11 for all."
...
"Let us all remember how we felt on that day, with the world watching our every move, waiting on our every word," said Giuliani, flanked by several firefighters, ex-New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and Judith Nathan, his third wife. "With a campaign built on traditional 9/11 values, and with the help of every citizen who believes in the 9/11 dream, I want to make 9/11 great again."

According to Washington–based political analyst Gregory Hammond, Giuliani's candidacy "should not be underestimated."

"Sure, he has no foreign or national policy experience, and both his personal life and political career are riddled with scandal," said Hammond. "But in the key area of having been on TV on 9/11, the other candidates simply cannot match him. And as we saw in 2004, that's what matters most to voters in this post-9/11 world."
...
With more than a year until the primaries—unless Giuliani's court-filed request to hold New York's primary on the second Tuesday in September is approved—Giuliani said it is too early to discuss potential running mates, though he refused to rule out the possibility of naming a twisted, half-melted aluminum beam, an FDNY ball cap, or even John McCain. Giuliani, however, called rumors that he had met with a large shard of glass from the wreckage of the Pentagon "patently untrue."

"Letting 9/11 fall into the hands of the Democrats in 2008 would be nothing short of a national tragedy," Giuliani said. "Ever since 9/11 was founded that fateful day on 9/11, 9/11 has stood for one thing: 9/11."

A Tale of Two Mayors
I've made no secret, here or anywhere else, of the fact that I'm a big fan of current NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and an equally big detractor of his predecessor Rudy Giuliani. And even considering that we're 20-plus months from the 2008 presidential election, I find it distinctly unnerving that Giuliani, with his unholy blend of narcissism and authoritarianism, is leading in many primary and general election polls.

Yes, it's more likely than not that he'll blow it in one of several ways. He might find it impossible to sufficiently pander to the Zombie Army voters who swoon for his perceived toughness but choke on the abortion-supporting, gay-tolerating, drag-dressing track record that was his price of entrance for high office in socially liberal New York City. (As a side note, the frequent descriptions of Giuliani as a moderate or even liberal Republican has to be Exhibit A for the silliness of these labels. There's more that goes into political character than one's stances on sex-related "issues" that sell copy and draw eyeballs but are crashingly irrelevant to most Americans.) His many unsavory personal ties, from marrying his cousin and publicly running around on his second wife to elevating the odious Bernie Kerik from personal driver to NYC police chief to Secretary of Homeland Security nominee and setting the even more odious Russell Harding loose within the city bureaucracy, could be his undoing. Or he might simply blow up at a questioner at a New Hampshire diner or Iowa fair, while a cellphone or digital camera silently captures the moment for YouTubing. It's also possible that he just isn't up for a tough political fight; after all, he hasn't had one since 1993, rolling over the politically inept Ruth Messinger in 1997 and bowing out early from the 2000 Senate campaign.

Somewhat like Hillary Clinton (but with perhaps a bit more justification owing solely to 9/11), Giuliani is trying to mount a cult of personality campaign around a personality that isn't really likable. He must hope that his aura of "leadership" will outweigh the many factual strikes against him, and that his stature as mayor of New York City during a period when perceived (and, to be fair, actual) quality of life improved here will obscure some of the specifics that mar his record.

Meanwhile, there's Bloomberg. He has no cult of personality; for the first two years of his mayoralty, it wasn't clear that he had a personality. But he's made city government work better here than it ever has, and probably better than it's worked anywhere. He's taken on the toughest issues and almost redeemed the Ross Perot ideal of "running government like a business"--if that means demanding performance and accountability, rather than seeking to maximize profits for investors (the Bush/Cheney version of this trope). Will he run for president? At the moment, I doubt it, though there will be a huge window for some third-party candidate to jump in during the six months of buyers' remorse between when the nominees are decided and the conventions are held. Could he win? I doubt that even more, because his money can't buy him a myth, and that's where our politics are right now.

Jacob Weisberg, writing in Slate, deftly compares the last two Republicans to run the Big Apple:

[T]he presidential bid Rudy announced last week is... based on the notion that he is an effective manager who tamed an out-of-control metropolis and ran it efficiently. The real picture is somewhat more complicated. Giuliani was a frustrated and not very popular mayor on Sept. 10, 2001. Today, most New Yorkers do see him as a hero, but also as a self-sabotaging, thin-skinned bully. To put it more bluntly, we know he's a bit of a dictator.

The leadership/management dichotomy runs through Giuliani's two terms. When he first took office in 1994, New York desperately needed the kind of head-knocking at which he excels. After a quarter-century of decline, the city had become ungovernable and increasingly unlivable. The bloated public sector soaked up more and more resources to deliver less and less; quality of life measured by a dozen different indicators continued to erode. Like Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Rudy arrived bearing a strong message of "enough!" With a relish for combat, he took on a long list of civic tormentors who had been comfortable for too long, including municipal labor leaders, racial demagogues, and uncompromising civil libertarians.
...
But over time, Giuliani's Putin (or Rasputin)-like tendencies became increasingly evident. Instead of taking on new challenges after his re-election in 1997, he dedicated his second term to punishing his enemies, including his wife at the time. He made his former driver, Bernard Kerik, chief of police and retreated even further into the comfort of his cronies. Fran Reiter, who served as a deputy mayor under Giuliani, describes him as depressed and directionless after being sworn in for the second time. "He can get mired in the petty stuff," she told me. "He doesn't suffer political opponents well, and there are times when he doesn't compromise well."

In his second term, Giuliani showed himself to be a classic micromanager, unable to delegate and unwilling to share the spotlight. He had already driven out William Bratton, his victorious chief of police, in a battle over credit. Bratton's fate was sealed when he, not Rudy, appeared on the cover of Time. Nor could Giuliani abide mockery. He went to court to try to stop New York magazine from advertising itself on the sides of buses as "POSSIBLY THE ONLY GOOD THING IN NEW YORK RUDY HASN'T TAKEN CREDIT FOR." After Sept. 11, he threatened, in Caudillo-like fashion, to ignore the legal term limit and run for re-election again if the candidates running to succeed him didn't all agree to let him stay in office for three extra months.

Rudy's weaknesses as a manager—and as a human being—have become more evident in the light of his successor, Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg has neither a whim of steel nor a pandering bone in his body. Arriving in 2002 at a City Hall that had no e-mail system or computerized payroll, he quietly cleaned up the mess—including a huge number of dubious, no-bid contracts—without faulting his predecessor. He and his police commissioner, Ray Kelly, have managed to continue to make further gains against crime, which few thought possible, without becoming obsessed with their press clippings. Above all, Bloomberg has taken on the big problems Giuliani never faced, without the constant attitude that he might declare martial law if you cross him again.
...
This comparison doesn't make the case for Bloomberg as president so much as it underscores what a scary place a Giuliani White House could be. President Rudy would give powerful speeches denouncing terrorism while assuming extraordinary wartime powers. He'd reject compromise with his antagonists and ignore the nuts and bolts of running a government. After a few years, he'd be on nonspeaking terms with much of his cabinet, never mind his fellow world leaders. By the time he got done, he might make us appreciate George W. Bush.

Pretty much. Giuliani is obviously much smarter than Bush, and he's made his way in life far more on his own merits than the Deciderer. But he shares Bush's vanity and essential uninterest in policy, and he might be even more arrogant. A Giuliani administration could take the core bad ideas of the Bush presidency--that all politics is personal, that the perception of toughness is more important than actual deeds, that nuance is defeatist and that power is best exercised by one inspired Leader rather than through a messy collective process--and match them with some degree of operational competence. A scary thought, that.

Hillary's Iraq Vote; or, A Brief for Political Courage
Just from an armchair perspective, it's fascinating to watch the Clinton campaign try to square the circle of their candidate's vote in favor of authorizing military force against Iraq in 2002. Five years later, the main theoretical question left about the war is whether it's the very worst foreign policy blunder in American history, or merely among the worst, and the most important practical question is how to minimize the consequences of the tragic mistake. Some of those who voted for the war then repented of it later, most prominently John Edwards among current Democratic presidential hopefuls. Senator Clinton, though, has refused to "apologize," or even clearly and loudly say "I made a mistake."

And she's now trying to present this stubbornness as an act of political courage:

Several advisers, friends and donors said in interviews that they had urged her to call her vote a mistake in order to appease antiwar Democrats, who play a critical role in the nominating process. Yet Mrs. Clinton herself, backed by another faction, never wanted to apologize — even if she viewed the war as a mistake — arguing that an apology would be a gimmick.

In the end, she settled on language that was similar to Senator John Kerry’s when he was the Democratic nominee in 2004: that if she had known in 2002 what she knows now about Iraqi weaponry, she would never have voted for the Senate resolution authorizing force.

Yet antiwar anger has festered, and yesterday morning Mrs. Clinton rolled out a new response to those demanding contrition: She said she was willing to lose support from voters rather than make an apology she did not believe in.

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

There was a place and a moment, of course, for the Senator to show political courage. But it wasn't New Hampshire in February 2007; it was Washington, DC, in October 2002.

Twenty-three Senators--21 Democrats, a lone Republican (Chafee), and an independent (Jeffords) showed their courage that day. In a vote three weeks before a close election, with the mainstream media beating the war drums so loudly that even the best-grounded, most credible skeptical views couldn't get a hearing, they voted against going to war. Among them were four Democrats who were up for re-election the following month: three of them--Durbin, Levin, and Jack Reed--won easily, and the fourth, Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, was pulling away when he tragically died in a plane crash two weeks after voting against the war.

By contrast, you had Hillary Clinton, more than four years from having to face the voters again, but representing a state where the emotional echoes of September 11 were still deafening. She voted to give Bush authorization to use force, evidently hoping against all evidence that he would brandish this authorization for diplomatic leverage rather than to directly send Americans into harm's way. She wanted to set out a middle course--shocking, I know--between immediate, pre-emptive attack and indefinitely waiting for the diplomatic process to play out. (Read her speech and see for yourself.)

Senator Clinton's thought process, as she details it in the speech, actually shows both her strengths and weaknesses. She takes into account a number of relevant factors: Saddam Hussein's history of defying the UN, America's own degree of culpability for his crimes (arming him in the 1980s and shrugging off his massacres of the Kurds, then standing aside as he had thousands of rebelling Shi'ites and Kurds killed in 1991), her own views on the great power of the executive to use force, formed during her husband's tenure in the White House, and, by her own admission, the emotional resonance of representing New York 11 months after the devastating and traumatic attack:

And finally, on another personal note, I come to this decision from the perspective of a Senator from New York who has seen all too closely the consequences of last year's terrible attacks on our nation. In balancing the risks of action versus inaction, I think New Yorkers who have gone through the fires of hell may be more attuned to the risk of not acting. I know that I am.

What's missing is any consideration of the particulars of the case against Saddam, or even healthy skepticism that the collection of ideologues within the administration might have a thumb on the scale.

And the political calculation is pretty clearly there as well. I don't know if she'd already resolved to run for president in two or six or ten years' time, but it's hard to believe the thought hadn't crossed her mind--as well as the idea, probably justified at the time, that voting against use of force would ensure that she'd never host meetings in the the Oval Office.

I believe that the Clintons, and the wing of the Democratic Party that they lead, have a predisposition toward using force. It's politically rational--and it's deeply immoral.

Like many of the "New Democrats"--and no small number of Bush/Rove/DeLay-generation Republicans--neither Clinton ever served in the military and both came of age politically in a period when Democrats were successfully portrayed as “weak,” they are terrified of living into that stereotype. With no personal experience of war-–hell, probably few if any close friends who were ever in combat-–to balance against that political calculation, combat is theoretical to them. The primary concern is political; the primary means are symbolic.

It’s no coincidence that many of those who have been most skeptical about the Iraq debacle from the outset were individuals who themselves had served. For the Clintons, the Bushes and everyone else who constructs “patriotism” as the whole of symbolic parts-–a flag pin in a suit lapel-–what's most at stake, at the moment of decision, is the next news cycle and earning some credit for “political bravery” from out-of-touch DC-based fools like David Broder and David Brooks.

Not everyone bought the war hype. Here is one speech from a state senator, given just two weeks after Hillary Clinton and 76 others in the US Senate put the gun in George W. Bush's hand:

I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power.... The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors...and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

That state senator was Barack Obama. Sometimes political courage does pay off.

Obamarama
It seems like a long time ago now, but I watched Barack Obama's announcement speech yesterday and was pretty excited. Given my overall view of the 2008 race--that it will boil down to Hillary vs. Not-Hillary, and that it's vital for the Democrats, and for the country, that Not-Hillary prevail--I think Obama fits the bill better than any other candidate out there. I set all this out in a diary at Daily Kos yesterday, my first since I decided to go to war against asshead lefty commissar David Sirota a few months ago; you can read the whole thing here.

Making Sense of the Impossible
The Phillies fan online community lost a dear friend and great leader today. Dave "mvpsoft" Snyder, founder and proprietor of philliesphans.com, died in a one-car crash near his home in Michigan. He was 50 years old.

I wrote a tribute to Dave on The Good Phight. In part I did this because this was a man for whom I had real fondness and great respect, but also because writing is my way of trying to concretize and explain things, even--mostly--to myself. And it just isn't working.

The guy was 50 fucking years old. He had a great family with whom he was very close, a successful business, friends, a wide range of intellectual and community interests. And it all disappeared in the space of seconds.

This isn't a "why do bad things happen to good people" lament. Dave was a spiritual man, a Christian in the best sense of that term, similar in that way to my old friend Eric who sometimes comments here: their commitment is to living their values, and to a faith of the mind as well as the heart. Intellectually, I see no connection between this tragedy and my own ongoing questions about faith and spirituality and the nature of the divine; I guess I simply don't believe in a personal God. It seems presumptuous, frankly; I can accept that there's a spark of the divine within humans, but not that there's an essential human element in the divine.

But this is my hangup, not Dave Snyder's. If he had enough time between when the car went out of control and when he suffered his fatal injury to consider what was about to happen, I'd like to think he was okay with it. Dave did believe; I'm of the view that he accepted the judgment of his God and whatever disposition of his soul.

I have known, in "real life" or through virtual communities, way too many people who have died before their time. My dear childhood friend Jeremy, at age 25, in 1999; another friend, Murray, around the same age a year or two earlier; a co-worker, Susan, of whom I was very fond, age 36, in 2004; the brilliant satirical Phillies blogger "Tacony Lou" this past autumn, age 41. Jeff Lamana, the founder of philaphans.com, passed away from cancer earlier in 2006; he was my age. My brother is a cancer survivor, a gift for which, despite my unbelief in a personal God, I give thanks.

Another virtual Phillies friend sent me a message earlier tonight that every day is a gift. I would phrase it that nothing is guaranteed, and that every moment should be made to count, to mean something.

I will miss Dave. I'm glad that I knew him.

Our Fight, Like it or Not
I'm most of the way through The Assassins' Gate, George Packer's 2005 account of the Iraq war. Like Fiasco, the Thomas Ricks book mostly detailing the military experience in Iraq, Packer's book inspires equal parts bafflement and fury, and in its more detailed examination of the intellectual underpinnings of the decision to go to war, it calls to mind the old Daniel Patrick Moynihan line that "There are some mistakes only someone with a Ph.D. can make."

Whether you call them mistakes or failures of morality or imagination, the "defense intellectuals," neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists, who drove us into this war with what I consider mostly noble intentions, put in harm's way hundreds of thousands of Americans, and some much greater number of Iraqis. But both the organization of the military and the fragmentation of society have meant that the domestic impact of this conflict, and the ripple effects through society, have been much more concentrated than ever has been the case before. I went out for drinks last night with three colleagues, and we got to talking about Iraq; I asked if any of them personally knew anyone who had served. None of them did. I know one man, the brother of a good friend, who enlisted as a Marine grunt in late 2005 and spent nine months on patrols and other extremely hazardous duties; through good fortune, he rotated home last fall uninjured. His circumstances, though, were almost unique: a Stanford graduate, working at a DC think tank, who got frustrated with all the complaining about the war (which he personally opposed) and just decided to get involved. It was, to my mind, both incredibly admirable and almost incomprehensible.

Everybody professes support for the troops, and I tend to believe that they mean it. But talk, of course, is cheap; few of us have offered anything beyond words, and, shamefully, our government hasn't asked us to do so--unless you count Tom DeLay's profession that nothing is more important in wartime than tax cuts, or George W. Bush's sympathy for everyone who's had to sit through bummer TV images from the combat zone.

This guest op-ed in Friday's NYT, by the wife of an Iraq war vet, makes this point far more eloquently than I could, and suggests the proper response:

Though some claim that all Americans are making sacrifices for the war on terrorism, it’s just not true. The few who are sent to fight and those left behind who are an intimate part of their daily lives are the ones whose mental health, finances and relationships are taking the hit.

A universal draft would certainly help spread the sacrifice. But we all know that the privileged will find a way to avoid serving, as they did by paying $300 during the Civil War or claiming college deferments during Vietnam.

What we need is a war tax, dedicated to financing the support services needed by military families and combat veterans. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a long-term costs-of-war tax. Because the tax I’m proposing, like the needs it’s intended to meet, will not end when the war does.

Historically, war taxes are how America finances its military conflicts — taxes on income, beverages, tobacco, utilities and more. The federal government first imposed what became a 3 percent tax on long-distance telephone calls in 1898 to help pay for the Spanish-American War. Since then, it’s been repealed, most recently last summer, and reinstated several times.
...
If a phone tax were reinstated, or a tax on oil or clothing — something we use in proportion to our income — then all Americans would wind up shouldering at least a small portion of the burden of our nation’s wars. Military families would be exempt.

Unlike the old phone tax, however, this new tax must be dedicated to financing programs that support and heal combat veterans and their families during deployment and afterward — combat trauma counseling, respite child care, part-time jobs for spouses trying to make ends meet, marriage counseling. These programs have always suffered from meager budgets, and while the public’s interest will inevitably move on, the needs won’t go away as long as America has a military.

I couldn't agree more with this. The Bush administration and the Congress--Republican-run through the first four years of the war, in Democratic hands now--have compounded their disastrous management of the war, and near-total lack of interest in accountability and oversight, by shoddy treatment of those who have sacrificed the most, during and after their service, and by allowing those individuals and their families to bear all the costs. (We'll all pay later, I guess, considering that this conflict has been fought "off the books"; that's immoral too.) I guess it's consistent with the general Republican philosophy that each of us is essentially on our own, that collective action is at best unnecessary and at worst immoral, and that government has no real community role at all aside from providing basic security and, in most but not all cases, ensuring that private property is sacrosanct.

But we are a community. Whatever one thinks of their mission, those Americans in uniform aren't just fighting for their families, or for a paycheck, or for corporate profits. All those things might be true, but in some sense they're also defending our ideals and values. We all should help foot the bill--and if this slight fiscal imposition acts in future as something of a check against engaging in dumb-assed wars just because some simpleton president feels his balls are in question, or a vice-president sees an opportunity to redraw a map or service a former employer's balance sheet, or a bunch of crypto-Trotskyites with messianic delusions envision a chance to commit heroic revolution by proxy, so much the better.

Market Magic, Market Madness
What a dreary, miserable week this has been for political news. You've got the totally fallacious story the right wing is pushing about Nancy Pelosi's travel "demands"--so outrageous and offensive that the freakin' White House is siding with her; you've got the utterly absurd "controversy" about what John Edwards' bloggers wrote online before they became John Edwards' bloggers, with the ever-charming Bill "I can't stop talking about anal sex" Donohue presuming to make staffing decisions for Democratic presidential campaigns; and this comes after the embarrassing spectacle of Congress proving itself unable even to conduct a real debate about Iraq--even granting that doing this now is four years too late.

While these little sideshows play out, other priorities go unaddressed. As he generally does around this time every year, President Bush submitted a dishonest, bloated yet mean-spirited federal budget, heavy on defense spending (up 11 percent from last year), light on programs to enhance the upward economic mobility of low-income working families; fortunately, the new Democratic majority probably will block at least some, hopefully most of its nastier provisions. But the deficit and the costs of the war (including, prominently, replacing some of the equipment that's been junked in this debacle) will constrain new spending over the near future.

A second constraint in taking on the full range serious and worsening problems, however, is not budgetary but conceptual. This piece at tompaine.com names the problem as "market fundamentalism," describing it as "the exaggerated and quite irrational belief in the ability of markets to solve all problems... that has dominated our national political debate for a generation."

This might be the single most taboo subject in public discourse, but it's vitally important--and best to be debated openly. The one change I've noticed in my personal worldview as I progress (maybe that's not the word) ever deeper into my 30s is that I've become a confirmed believer in capitalism. It is pretty clearly the best wealth-generating model in history, and while it doesn't require personal liberty and free expression--as several Pacific Rim countries among others have sadly proven--free markets mutually reinforce with the rest of the freedoms we cherish. Capitalism isn't perfect; it's just far, far better than anything else that's been tried as an economic system for a large society.

It's been awhile since grad school, but I'm pretty sure that while markets maximize wealth, they don't--they can't, they aren't supposed to--optimize how it's distributed, or necessarily account for the externalities they produce. And that's assuming conditions of perfect competition, which never exist in the real world. The simplest form of this all-pervasive provlem is that the way we pay for our politics, somebody's thumb is always on the scale. It's this phenomenon that the article seeks to address head-on:

What do catastrophic climate change, the widening gulf between the wealthy and the poor, America's obesity epidemic, and our society's lack of care for the young and the elderly have in common? Each has powerful special interests who insist that we need to let the market work its private magic and that government action would create more problems than it would solve.

These interest groups also block any effort to enlist the government by invoking the arguments of market fundamentalism: Privatize everything, rely on yourself and expect nothing from your government.

Market fundamentalism has become like the air we breathe; we hardly notice it. Every time George W. Bush argues for more tax cuts, he relies on the unquestioned assumption that we all embrace market fundamentalism. Like religious fundamentalism, it is based more on faith than on reason. Through constant repetition, however, the American public has been bullied into believing that private spending is rational and efficient, while public spending is always wasteful and unproductive.

Last Sunday, the NYT ran a piece detailing the astonishing extent to which the Bush administration has privatized government services, a development that reflects this same mindset--as well as, of course, the constant Bush/Cheney emphasis on using government to reward and enrich friends and donors. No money was saved; if anything, quite the opposite. Outsourcing public functions becomes an end in itself; if it costs the taxpayer more for a contractor to perform the exact same function previously carried out by a government bureaucrat, the idea seems to be that this extra expense must be worth it, because any private employee inherently does a better job than any civil servant.

This would be funny were it not, in the context of rising deficits and falling service provision relative to need, so painful. Stripped of all the emotional associations, government is just one possible mechanism for accomplishing shared goals; at scale, it's probably the most efficient mechanism by which to do many of these things, particularly when it's beneficial to universalize (think of educational standards). Often, government is the only practical mechanism to carry out certain functions, as in national defense or some kinds of regulation. And--especially if you believe, or even want to believe, that it's still of, by and for all of us who vote and pay taxes--it has both a great deal of power to tangibly improve the conditions of life for millions, and the positive responsibility to moderate market outcomes.

Particularly toward the end of their mid-20th century heyday, American liberals were too quick to screw with markets. Now, though, the pendulum has swung too far the other way: we tolerate absurd inefficiencies in certain areas (health care) and some scary negative externalities (climate change) out of near-superstitious fear that interfering in some company's capacity for profit will cause something terrible to happen. In field after field, though, terrible things are happening now--and our undue deference to a distorted view of markets forces us to sit back and watch. Rather than market fundamentalism, we need market utilitarianism--the mindset that these systems are here to serve the community, not the other way around.

Mr. Schilling Goes to Washington, Metaphorically
John Kerry's announcement late last week that he wouldn't mount a second presidential campaign next year ensured that the junior senator from Massachusetts instead would seek a fifth Senate term in 2008. In his first four Senate campaigns, Kerry fought a close race only once: 1996, when popular governor Bill Weld, a liberal Republican, polled evenly with him through most of the year before Kerry eventually won his third term with 52 percent to Weld's 45 (a third-party conservative took 3 percent). In 2002, running against token opposition, Kerry was re-elected with 80 percent.

Given Massachusetts' reputation as among the most liberal states in the union, one would figure Kerry's seat a safe one as Democrats set out to defend and expand their effective 51-49 majority next year. But if anything can shake up a race like that, it's the emergence of a charismatic, rich opponent with no name recognition problem and an emotional connection to the electorate. In Massachusetts, Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling could be that candidate--if he wanted it.

Curt Schilling seemed surprised yesterday by the sudden groundswell of local supporters hoping to draft him into national politics and a 2008 Senate run against John Kerry.

The Red Sox [team stats] pitching hero didn’t flatly rule out the idea, either, though he didn’t sound like he was about to hit the campaign trail anytime soon.

“I couldn’t rule it out because it’s not something I ever thought about in a serious capacity,” Schilling told the Herald.

“I envision that I will probably be pretty busy in 2008,” he said. “But I’m flattered as hell to even make this phone call.”

...
But Schilling may doesn’t feel he’s a good match for Capitol Hill.

“While I am a registered voter, I have too many problems with the political scene, and I don’t think I’d fit into it,” he said.

Schilling, who is planning to retire from baseball after this season, did give a glimpse of what he would do in a political office. His first task would be to “fire everybody and anybody who had anything to do with the Big Dig,” he said.

Schilling said in 2008 he’ll vote either for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whom he called a personal friend, or Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). “If they are both on the ticket it will be a tough choice,” he said.

For now, I'll take Schilling at his word that he won't run for Senate in 2008. I don't think he has the legislative temperament--though I could see him wanting to be a governor someday--and I think he's sincere in his plans to work in charity and run his video game business, probably carving out time to kill Doug Glanville online. He'll do those things until he gets bored, at which point the competition and ego gratification of politics could well appeal to him.

I think what is interesting is that his top two choices for president next year are McCain and Obama. For one thing, those choices suggest that Schilling's politics aren't particularly ideological; like his baseball thinking, they seem driven at bottom by emotion.

Of course, what Obama and McCain have in common is a great story to tell. For Obama, it's his almost comically diverse background and unlikely emergence as a post-racial hero offering the potential of partisan reconciliation; McCain's POW ordeal remains compelling in a time when the media culture is loath to tell stories of sacrifice from our current quagmire of a war, and his gradual emergence into a leader who seemed like he could transcend the usual partisan crap and appeal to something more fundamental and benign in the national character appealed to voters across the spectrum. (This is what has made his non-stop pandering to "crazy base land" since 2004 all the more disheartening, not to say disgusting.)

Mike Huckabee was on the Tim Russert yakfest this morning, explaining his plans to run for president, and reminded the audience that "Americans love an underdog." This might be true as far as it goes, but I think it's not quite descriptive when it comes to voting choices. In picking the president, Americans want a leader who makes them proud to be Americans; at least on paper, and at this tired and somewhat dispirited moment in our national life, Obama and McCain come a lot closer to filling that bill than, say, the guy who lied even when he didn't need to and couldn't stop cheating on his wife, or the inarticulate, proudly arrogant boob who was born rich and screwed up everything he ever touched, with tragic results.

Curt Schilling probably identifies with McCain and Obama, given his own weird path in life: moved around as a kid, close to his dad, his dad passed away, bounced from one organization to the next with a Nuke Laloosh reputation, suddenly seemed to catch up with his talent, then did some legendary things over an eight year stretch (from 1997, when he set a modern NL strikeout record with the Phillies and, with Scott Rolen, saved them from the ignominy of losing 100 games, to 2004, when he stained a sock red and helped end the Red Sox curse). You just hope our next president's story has such an ending.

Now or Never
In early 2004, many of us were bemused at how quickly the Democratic presidential nomination was settled. John Kerry, almost an afterthought through the first few weeks of January of that year, was the all-but-assured standard-bearer for his party less than two weeks after the Iowa caucuses. This had been the intention of the Democratic National Committee: determine the nominee early, allowing the party to save money and resources and emerge without bad blood or inevitable intra-party attacks that the Republicans could then use in the fall. But it also served to elevate a candidate who had not been as politically battle-tested as he should have been, and it reinforced the suspicion that money (Kerry had opted out of the public financing system and used his own sizable family resources to fund his campaign) and organization were largely decisive in settling the race.

As Democrats conducted their quadrennial reconsideration of the nominating process, they concluded--not wrongly, IMO--that part of the problem was giving Iowa and New Hampshire, the two early-voting states that don't reflect the national electorate in terms of demographics or priorities, so much weight in the process. So they agreed to move up Nevada, a western state with many Hispanic voters and a large union presence, and South Carolina, which has a large percentage of African-Americans among its Democratic electorate.

Then all hell broke loose. It now seems likely that California, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey will move their primaries to February 5, two weeks after Iowa, one week after New Hampshire. They will join, and totally overshadow, a half-dozen or so smaller states set to vote that day.

There's debate about what this will mean--whether it will make the first four states more important, by virtue of giving one candidate momentum heading into the quasi-national Feb. 5 primary, or less, given how many more votes and delegates will be at stake that day and how much more focus will be on those states, which include or border on a majority of the biggest media markets in the country. But what I think is undeniable is that the front-loading of the calendar gives a big advantage to the candidates with the name recognition and bank account to fight hard out of the gate for those Big Four. Right now, that's Hillary Clinton and John McCain. And their campaign managers can hardly stop themselves from blurting this out:

Associates of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the New York Democrat, and Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, said that should either of them stumble early on, the respective party primaries in California and New Jersey — two states that would seem particularly hospitable to them — could offer an expensive but welcome firewall.
...
“I think this is huge,” said John Weaver, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain. “And the unintended consequences could be even bigger.”
...
“We don’t set the calendar, and we don’t control the calendar, but we are going to compete aggressively in all these states,” said Patti Solis Doyle, who is the manager of Mrs. Clinton’s exploratory presidential effort. “And I will also tell you we have the resources and the organization to compete in all those states.”

If you're one of the many, many Democrats who doesn't want Hillary, or one of the many, many Republicans who doesn't want McCain, this front-loading is bad news, and the process it will create seems directly counter to how the last two presidents seized their parties' nominations.

The Democrats' Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary in 1992 didn't mean that much because favorite sons were in play: Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin won his home state almost uncontested, and former Sen. Paul Tsongas (of neighboring Massachusetts) took New Hampshire. Clinton needed more time to break through; had 10 or 12 states gone to the polls immediately after his place/show finishes in the first two races, who knows if he would have gotten it. In 2000, meanwhile, John McCain stomped Bush in NH and almost immediately pulled even in South Carolina, where the next vote was set... but Bush had three weeks before that primary to bring his campaign strengths--unlimited money and unlimited willingness to smear McCain--to bear.

I think that of the two parties and presumptive front-runners, Hillary Clinton gets more of an advantage than does McCain--whom I increasingly believe will plummet into the ever-widening gap between his "Straight Talk" persona and his relentless far-right pandering (which today included a vote against the minimum wage). This should scare Democrats who particularly want to win the White House, given this note from Charlie Cook:

Among Democrats who knew enough to rate the candidates, 74 percent said they were enthusiastic or comfortable with Edwards and Obama, compared with 71 percent for Clinton and 39 percent for Biden.

When it comes to the candidate voters simply cannot support, Clinton tops the field with 46 percent, followed by Edwards with 32 percent, Giuliani at 26 percent, Biden and McCain at 25 percent each, Obama at 23 percent, Romney at 19 percent and Brownback at 17 percent.

46 PERCENT. That's pretty close to half the country, a far larger chunk of the electorate to write off from the jump than any other Democrat, and twice as much as Barack Obama. And this isn't someone who can reintroduce herself, or pander her way to greater acceptance; people know who she is, and they know they think she is.

So anti-Hillary Democrats who figured they might have two shots to take down Our Lady of Perpetual Triangulation--before the primaries began, and after the race narrowed to Hillary vs. Not-Hillary--have to reconsider their options. The race is being decided now; we might know who the nominee is by the end of 2007, with the first four primaries as confirmation, the Feb. 5 delegananza as coronation, and the remaining five months to the Democratic Convention set aside for a crushing case of buyer's remorse. If an alternative is to be found, it probably has to be now.

Now, Matters Are Worse
It wasn't a surprise, but it was still a bummer to wake up this morning to the news that Hillary Clinton, Our Lady of Perpetual Triangulation, has officially jumped in to the 2008 presidential race.

How her campaign unfolds will tell us a lot about where our political culture is after two terms of a president who never should have been allowed within 500 yards of the Oval Office. George W. Bush won in 2000 on the strengths of a famous name, an enormous bank account, undue and undeserved deference from the media, and perhaps most importantly a widespread sense that it didn't much matter who was president. Hillary Clinton has the first two, and while she won't get anything like the kid-glove treatment Bush got from the press, the experience of 15 years in the unblinking spotlight has made her perhaps better than anyone alive at talking without actually saying anything.

Will the mediots point this out? Will her opponents? On a certain level, the question becomes whether or not one can get away with saying nothing of substance so long as the megaphone is sufficiently powerful.

I won't reiterate at length my other objections to Hillary's campaign--that there's no clear purpose to it, that Democrats down the ballot (perhaps most importantly, those freshmen House members in purple or light-red territory) would be forced to run away from her, that even if she wins she won't be able to effectively govern. But it's worth pointing out that the advantages of money and organization are probably largest in the first stretch of the nomination race. With seven or eight candidates in the field, she can win pluralities in the high 20s and low 30s; as the field thins, those dropping out will be under pressure to endorse the likely winner, and eventually it could and probably will come down to Hillary versus Not-HIllary. At that point, a ton of institutional weight falls upon Not-Hillary: stop resisting the inevitable, stop doing the Republicans' oppo work for them, stop squandering resources we'll need for November. Unless she's been bloodied by then, Not-Hillary won't win that duel.

Then to a convention and nomination that, in its staged meaninglessness, will make the Democrats' last two gatherings look like the Algonquin Club; a hyper-motivated Republican base and millions more who might be disgusted by Bush's failures but would sooner eat their own livers than vote for That Woman; the endless re-fighting of the Clinton Wars; the eventual election of a president whom either half the country hates or whose victory could be seen as a vindication of the Bush disaster.

It's a potential nightmare, for the Democrats and much more importantly for the country. We are facing HUGE problems in the next ten years, from global warming, to demographic change and strain on entitlements. to unsteady competitive standing in the post-industrial economy, to the viral spread of religious extremism worldwide. The idea of that stuff getting crowded out of the debate by still more analysis of the Clinton marriage and scandals should horrify every American who cares about our collective future.