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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More tributes here and here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The elimination of the draft


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forever Squaring Circles
Maybe I should be a pundit, because I just noticed that Maureen Dowd today wrote the blog entry I've been thinking about but not previously set down for the last few days. To save myself a little time, I'll start by quoting here here:

He roams the country but never strays from Bushworld, going from military bases to conservative powwows to Republican Hill allies to sworn Bush supporters to sympathetic columnists.

“It helps crystallize my thought to answer your questions,” he told conservative columnists called to the Oval Office this week. But he made it clear that his thoughts were contentedly calcified: “Let me just first tell you that I’ve never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions. I’m oftentimes asked about, well, you’re stubborn and all this. If you believe in a strategy, in Washington, D.C., you’ve got to stick to that strategy, see.”
...
Besides saying he’s in “a struggle between good and evil” — which inflames many Muslims — W. told the columnists he thought America might be experiencing “a Third Awakening,” a religious fervor, because people he meets in rope lines tell him they’re praying for him. That could also be because W.’s policies have led to so much global chaos and hatred for America, his supporters know he needs more prayers.

As I'd planned to do here, Dowd captures what I thought were two of the more interesting stories of the week: Bush's assertion, to a gathering of reporters, that he's "never been more convinced" of the rightness of his decisions, and his observation, based on his experiences, that the country was undergoing a "third awakening" of religious fervor.

President Bush said yesterday that he senses a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as "a confrontation between good and evil."

Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history. Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln's strongest supporters were religious people "who saw life in terms of good and evil" and who believed that slavery was evil. Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms.

"A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me," Bush said during a 1 1/2 -hour Oval Office conversation on cultural changes and a battle with terrorists that he sees lasting decades.

There seem to be two points here, which Bush has chosen to connect. On the one hand, there's some notion about a growing religious fervor in the United States, which some have argued is a "Third Awakening," following trends in the mid-18th and early 19th centuries. Bush believes we're in the midst of another now, and he's certainly entitled to his opinion.

But then there's the other hand.

Based on his comments yesterday, the president is under the impression that he's driving this "Third Awakening" personally, by allegedly launching a war on terror. In other words, Bush is not only taking responsibility for Americans turning to Christianity in greater numbers, he also believes the war on terror is a motivating factor, if not the motivating factor.

Taken together, the picture here is of Bush more firmly ensconced in his own reality than probably any president ever has been. We know, from many accounts by administration insiders and unquoted sources, that this is not a man who welcomes dissenting views or bad news; by Bush's own account, he doesn't really read the newspapers. If he turns on the TV for news, it's a safe bet he's watching Fox. It's a perfectly sealed worldview in which he hears no criticism and faces no blowback.

Thus, Bush becomes ever more certain of his world-historical prescience--and because his relatively rare public appearances are limited to friendly audiences, and only the dogmatic "Christians" who view their faith with a loyalty better suited to one's favorite football team are solidly left in his camp, he meets a lot of "believers."

This is like if I decided I'd only watch televised porn and only leave the house to visit adult bookstores, peepshows, and gatherings of the porn industry, and thus concluded that Americans were much more into kinky group sex than I'd previously noticed. The difference, of course, is that my (theoretical) view of the rising tide of national perversion doesn't color life-and-death decisions.

And that my certitude about this doesn't lead me to push for a change in natiotnal policy that, for the first time in our history, condones torture. I can't really put this any better than one of Josh Marshall's guest bloggers did on his blog today:

The torture debate in Congress--I never expected to write such words--is as surreal to me as watching the collapse of the Twin Towers. If the Democrats are able to take control of at least one chamber in November, then surely the President's pro-torture bill will be viewed in hindsight as the nadir of the Bush presidency. If not, how much lower can things go?

I am beyond being able to assess the political implications, one way or the other, of this spectacle. Regardless of which version of the bill finally passes, this debate is a black mark on the soul of the nation. Of course passage of a pro-torture bill will diminish U.S. standing internationally and jeopardize the safety and well-being of U.S. servicemen in future engagements. But merely having this debate has already accomplished that. Does anyone honestly believe that if Congress rebuffs the President in every respect that the rule of law and the inviolability of human rights will have been vindicated? Of course not.

The Republicans have defined deviancy down for the whole world, including every two-bit dictator and wild-eyed terrorist.

This surreal "debate" underscores something that has seemed clear to me for a long time now: the Bush/Cheney/Rove crowd utterly fails to comprehend what truly constitutes America's greatness. The reason we are the most successful nation in human history isn't, as they seem to think, because we have a lot of guns and a lot of money. We have those things because of our greatness--and we have (hopefully not "had") the greatness because our ideals traditionally have spoken to the best in human nature. We've fallen far from that standard, and perhaps the saddest thing is that there's nobody in the country with both the courage and stature to state this directly and get a real hearing from Americans of all political persuasions.

Bad Memories
In my mind at least, September 11 has become something like a secular Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day devoted to contemplation. The fasting isn't a part of it, and I don't go to the "atonement for sins" part of that particular analogy (though to suggest that the attack on America that fatally beautiful morning was an isolated incident in history is to court repeating all kinds of mistakes), but in terms of how I view the day, it feels the same. Minimal TV and media, time for quietude and reflection.

Monday was no exception. I watched a few minutes of survivors reading the names of the dead when I woke up, and that was pretty much it as far as "coverage." I've no wish to see blow-dried bobbleheads try to impose their test-marketed and sanitized view of "what it all means" on something that I, like millions of New Yorkers, experienced in a searingly personal way.

I do feel a strange kind of pride, though, that it was New York City where the killers chose to strike. The terrorists' hatred of New York stems from some of the same reasons Hitler did: our concentration of Jews, the unique admixture of tolerance, competition and general attitude that one former city official recently described to me as "street-fighting pluralism"; and indeed from some of the same reasons why American social conservatives fear, if not hate, NYC: the perception of licentiousness, the proliferation of "alternative lifestyles," the wretched excesses. They attacked us, in other words, not because New York City is distinct from America, but because we are the concentrated essence of America. It's all here--stunning success and unbearable failure, enormous wealth and grinding poverty, all manner of unique and worthy voices and the unending background roar that usually drowns them out.

I don't want to get too deeply into the politics of the day, but this piece sums it up pretty well. Where I differ from Dionne is that I never thought Bush was especially "heroic" or worthy of particular respect for his immediate responses to 9/11. I just thought of the guy who seemed to be peeing his pants in fear, flying around the country after reading to those schoolkids in Florida. Granting that he said some of the right things in those first few weeks, there was little to me that suggested he had either the strength of character or sense of history to really unite the country as it could and should have been united.

Still, it would have been wonderful if I'd been proven wrong on that one. Here, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter offers a look at what might have been. It's painful to read, because what he describes would not really have been a stretch. McCain grasped that the country wanted to be called to its "appointment with destiny"; Bush just wanted to ram through tax cuts and beat up on Democrats. The thing is, I agree with Alter that a response more worthy of our country's greatness would have been supremely effective politics as well as more productive in terms of results in the fight against murderous extremism.

On philliesphans.com tonight, somebody dredged up an old thread from 2003 in which people recounted their experiences on that day. I was among them, and I reproduce my post here; but the whole thing is well worth a look, just to get a sense of how this event reached into pretty much every American life.

I was in a bagel shop on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn around 8:45, waiting in line. A woman was sitting at a table listening to a walkman and announced that a plane had hit the Trade Center. Back outside on Flatbush I could see the plume of black smoke from Tower 2 two or three miles away. I thought it was one of those small planes--the idea it could take down the building didn't even occur to me. I got on the subway and headed into work.

My stop is at Wall Street and William, maybe half a mile from the Trade Center. As I came out I saw men near tears, talking about bodies falling from the Towers--I think the second one had been hit by then. My office is at the other end of Wall Street and I still didn't grasp the extent of the disaster; I must have been on autopilot. I do remember wanting to call my family in Philadelphia to tell them I was okay. I got to the office and did that; others in the office filled in the unbelieveable details: the by then two planes, their mammoth size, the attack on the Pentagon. A bit before 10, there was a general announcement to evacuate the building. We went down by the stairs, from the 20th floor, but few wanted to go outside. Around 10:30 when the first building fell--after I'd seen people from the site, clothes shredded, covered in dust, some bleeding, stumbling in a shocked daze through the lobby--I decided it was time to go.

The walk from Wall Street to the Brooklyn Bridge and over was the most unforgettable part of the whole experience. When I left my building the pulverized concrete hung so thickly in the air that I couldn't see beyond 15 feet or so. I'd taken a surgical mask they were handing out in the lobby and tried to breathe as shallowly as possible. I could faintly see hundreds of others moving in the same direction, up the Seaport road, past the Fulton Fish Market. By the time we got close to the Bridge, the air had cleared. As many have pointed out, it was a perfect late-summer day: warm, no clouds, deep blue sky. I passed a group of guys who looked like contractors, listening to a radio that announced a Palestinian group in the West Bank had claimed responsibility for the bombing (I never heard this rumor again).

The walk across the Bridge felt almost like a hallucination. Occasionally an ambulance or police car would come to part the slow-moving thousands trying to get home to Brooklyn; otherwise, deep silence. A woman walking next to me asked if I thought the next attack would be directed at the Bridge, and I tried to convince her that was unlikely. I had my own panic moment after passing into Brooklyn, when I saw uniformed officials brandishing shotguns outside a building; they told me it was a federal building and they'd been deployed to protect it. They seemed relatively calm and professional, as virtually everyone in uniform was that day.

I got lost walking home and wound up on Court Street, relatively far from my home on 15th in Park Slope. I passed a Mormon church where some kind volunteers were passing out bottled water to folks like me who were obviously coming in from Manhattan. All through the streets were silent, except for the occasional radio left on for news. As I finally got close to my house I heard some kids laughing and had to restrain myself from an angry reaction.

I got home around 12:30. One of my roommates had been sick and never went into work; before I woke him up he knew nothing of what had happened. Our other roommate worked in the Trade Center for J.P. Morgan. We had a half-hour of utter black panic before some level of common sense returned and we listened to our messages. She had called around ten to let us know she was alright; she had been in the lobby of her building on the way in when the other tower was struck, and left immediately. She made it home by late afternoon and we spent the rest of the week watching news, drinking and generally in shock.

That Friday night was a candlelight vigil for our local fire company, which had lost 12 men in the rescue effort. I will not try to describe the heroism of those men or the grief shared by their comrades and their community. A lot has been made of the commercialization of Sept. 11, its appropriation for political purposes and related mischief, but those 12 and hundreds of other police, firefighters and rescue personnel demonstrated the very best of America, and of values core to our humanity.

This morning I was in the same bagel shop. It's a beautiful day again, maybe a bit cooler. The children of victims are on TV, reading the names, and we're all left to deal with this tragedy that continues to disorder our lives and disfigure this city.

Rick and Bob Meet the Pumpkinhead
"Meet the Press" began its fall series of Senate debates today with what many consider The Big One, in my native state of Pennsylvania: incumbent Republican Senator Rick Santorum versus Democratic challenger Bob Casey. As you've probably heard, Casey has led this race for more than a year, though the size of his margin is in question: some polls have his lead down to six points, after a Santorum ad blitz over the summer, while others still have Casey leading by as much as 18.

I described this race to a friend as similar to watching the sports team you hate the most being challenged by a team to which you're largely indifferent. Casey's social conservatism--he's anti-abortion and tepid at best on gay rights and other issues--doesn't bother me that much, and his economic populist positions and closeness to labor are appealing. But he's bland and careerist--he's run for four offices in six years--and doesn't come across as particularly thoughtful or passionate. Santorum, of course, is the darling of the radical right: he's been deeply involved in the K Street Project, and his reactionary views on gays, women, and social organization in general have led opponents to describe him as "one of the finest minds of the 13th century." And he's voted with Bush upwards of 95 percent of the time in every year since Bush took office.

Today's debate probably didn't change any minds. (The video and transcript should both be available at the link above.) Santorum came across as what he is: a dogmatic Bush follower who's got nothing to offer on the war and on the "broader struggle" against "Islamic fascism" but simplistic thinking and appeals to the reptile brain. He called Bush "a terrific president," which isn't going to play well in PA, nor will his flimflammery on Social Security of the issue of his residency.

Casey was underwhelming but seemed competent. He gently poked holes in some of Santorum's wilder ravings, though he also missed the opportunity to really highlight the contradictions and essential incoherence of the Republican position: "we're in Iraq and must win there, but even though it's going badly we were right to go in and the mistakes can't be blamed on us, and besides the scary dark men are coming and want to kill us all, and even though the world is more dangerous now than in 2001 Bush has done everything right..."

But Casey's not that candidate. What did disappoint me was that he didn't at all hit Santorum on the three issues where Casey can make a positive case that will appeal to voters: economic populism, Republican corruption, and the poisonous and divisive culture wars in which Santorum has played such a notable role. In part, that was a result of how Tim Russert framed the debate, and what questions were and weren't asked.

I hope, however, that the Casey people pick this up later in the campaign. While it's possible that Casey will win anyway because of just how much people dislike Santorum and are generally dissatisfied, it obviously would be preferable for him to make some kind of positive argument that would get people energized.

Bottom line: Casey was the beneficiary of low expectations in this debate, and he met them. I doubt the polls move much either way.

Unhappy Anniversary
Today marks one year since Hurricane Katrina struck. Frank Rich and others have beaten the drum on the politics of this story, but to me the more interesting and relevant question is how the nation's governing conservatives have actually responded to the challenge of rebuilding much of a major city in a way that's both resource-efficient and considerate of (though not necessarily deferential to) community sentiment.

If ever a situation demanded "competence, not ideology" from the federal government, the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast would seem to be it. But without absolving city and state of their richly deserved share of blame--nobody ever pointed to New Orleans or the state of Louisiana as shining beacons of good government--thus far, it's tough to give the federal response positive marks. According to this report (and trying to filter out the excessive lefty ideological trappings that adorn anything Robert Borosage gets involved with), approximately half of all bus and street car routes are up and running, but only 17 percent of buses are in use; unemployment is much higher than either pre-Katrina or the overall state and national averages; and by December 2005, of the 28,540 loan applications received by the federal Small Business Administration from the Gulf Coast, only 10 percent had been processed and just three percent had been approved. As of May 2006, SBA had denied approximately 11,500 Louisiana loan applications and approved about 11,400, but had distributed only 4,200 checks. This more robust set of indications from the Brookings Institution notes that "[g]as and electricity service is reaching only 41 and 60 percent of the pre-Katrina customer base, respectively." (As in Baghdad, so on Bourbon Street?)

Clearly, competence has been a problem with the recovery effort. But so has ideology:

Bush 43 governs under the considerable shadow of conservative icon Ronald Reagan, who famously said in his 2001 inauguration speech, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Bush 43’s inept embrace of Reagan’s maxim has resulted in the literally deadly combination of negligent government and record government debt. The negligence continues to hamper the effort to repair New Orleans and other Katrina-damaged communities. The debt, a product of the billions poured into the Iraq misadventure and wrongheaded tax cuts, drains capital-—both financial and political—-away from housing, education and other pressing needs. But, perhaps most importantly, the conservative ideology that says we are not each others’ keeper—and yet applauds as government fiercely defends the interests of those who have the most—has brought us to where we are today: To a Gulf Coast where the old inequities of race and class have been amplified in the year since the storm.

It is that ideology, it is worth recalling, that helped drive the key decision to downgrade the Federal Emergency Management Agency from a highly praised, Cabinet-level organization to a backwater operation buried inside the labyrinthine Department of Homeland Security. It is an ideology that valued cronyism over expertise and put the dubiously qualified Michael D. Brown in charge. It is an ideology that put property rights and commercial prerogatives over wetlands protection in the Mississippi Delta, which led to the removal of many of the natural barriers that would protect New Orleans from the full force of a hurricane. It is an ideology that also drove many of the short-sighted funding decisions about levee construction in the years before Katrina struck—-for many conservatives only grudgingly support federal infrastructure investment-—and which today continues to value what is cheap over what is right.
...
...[A]n administration that is so parsimonious in the face of requests for aid to the poor appears almost nonchalant in the face of the continuing waste of billions of taxpayer dollars on such items as thousands of unused FEMA trailers in Hope, Ark., and other holding areas. The administration’s apparent unbridled faith in the private sector, its persistent cronyism and its resistance to vigorous oversight has dominated the government response to Katrina. One result, according to a report this month by House Government Operations Committee ranking member Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., has been the awarding of $8.75 billion worth of “problem contracts” in which there is evidence of waste, fraud or mismanagement.

It is true that the failures of the Hurricane Katrina recovery are not the fault of only one branch of government or of one party. But what is clear is that entrusting the reins of government to an administration which holds in utter contempt the very notion of government as a protector of the public welfare is folly. The Bush administration’s inner circle of advisors still includes Grover Norquist, the never-met-a-tax-cut-I-didn’t-like crusader who famously pledged to fight to get government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Conservatism, it should now be plain to see, is not the answer to the problem; conservatism is the problem.

Emphasis mine. As I think I've noted here before, I don't want the Democrats to go crazy with subpoenas and hearings if they retake a House majority next year--but the one area where I want them to focus like a laser is fraud and waste, in Iraq and on the Gulf Coast. Not only would such a focus shine light on bad actors whom, I would hope, even those on the right would agree deserve shame and punishment; investigation into these matters might help make the case that this essay makes--conservatives, or at least those of the stripe currently running the government, essentially aren't interested in governing or well-suited to do the work of governing. At some point, the relationship between anti-government ideology and governing competence--or the lack of it--has to be noticed.

Po-Mo Feudalism

Okay, of course it's not really that bad. But as we commemorate the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and await new federal statistics on poverty this week (as well as the final recommendations of Mayor Bloomberg's Commission on Economic Opportunity here in NYC), some new economic numbers suggest one of the core problems:

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”

Until the last year, stagnating wages were somewhat offset by the rising value of benefits, especially health insurance, which caused overall compensation for most Americans to continue increasing. Since last summer, however, the value of workers’ benefits has also failed to keep pace with inflation, according to government data.

At the very top of the income spectrum, many workers have continued to receive raises that outpace inflation, and the gains have been large enough to keep average income and consumer spending rising.

In the American Prospect blog, Ezra Klein focuses on what the Times authors briefly reference at the end of their article: the fundamental but largely overlooked change in relative bargaining position between workers and managers over the last several decades:

The culprit here is a simple lack of bargaining power on the part of employees. The pernicious fiction that corporations will happily redirect their profits into appropriate raises and benefit increases has been widely adopted -- we're now supposed to assume that whatever Wal-Mart or UBI is paying is exactly what they should be paying, and the willingness of workers to take those jobs is proof that the compensation is adequate. That, of course, is nuts. The balance of power between worker and employer has shifted radically in the employer's favor, and while folks still need jobs, the decline of unions and the rise of conservative (and neoliberal) regimes in government have allowed corporations to set the terms. Those terms, as you'd expect, prioritize executive salaries, corporate profits, and share prices, while seeking to keep labor costs as dirt low as possible. They've succeeded.

I don't think it's quite this simple, much less reducible to basic Marxist tenets of surplus labor value and the inevitability of exploitation in capitalism. Market economies run, in large part, on faith: one tenet of that faith (which I've at times shared myself) is that business ownership and top management will see long-term value in fairly compensating their workers. Doing so, the argument follows, both helps them maximize productivity and cuts down expenses related to turnover, re-training, goldbricking, and what have you. A related point is that as long as this is the case, we're generally better off not regulating the economy, because even a more equitable distribution of profits might not be worth it if the regulation unduly shrinks the overall size of the pie.

At this point, though, it's tough to argue that things aren't out of balance. Conservatives and their fellow-travelers essentially have argued that there's nothing immoral about a state of affairs in which those at the very top take home an enormous, disproportionate share of the bounty, and that (with some obvious exceptions) those who make the most deserve the most, by nature of the opportunities they create. I suppose it's possible that those exceptions--the crooks, like Ken Lay, and the grotesquely overcompensated based on performance, like Mr. Triple-Chin Exxon CEO (seriously, given world events, profits would be crazy regardless of who held that job)--are so glaring that they overbalance the entrepreneurial goodness of the "good super-rich."

But although this view is certainly defensible (I disagree with it, but I acknowledge it's plausible), it doesn't really do much for those in the middle and below who are working just as hard but seeing their real incomes decline. It also bodes ill, of course, for the party in power that has done so much over the last 25 years to tilt the field in favor of those at the very top. The Times story also notes:

“Some people who aren’t partisans say, ‘Yes, the economy’s pretty good, so why are people so agitated and anxious?’ ” said Frank Luntz, a Republican campaign consultant. “The answer is they don’t feel it in their weekly paychecks.”

Dear God… it all makes sense now!

One recent story I posted on The Good Phight addresses the question of whether Phils manager Charlie Manuel deserves credit for the team’s surprising push back into the playoff picture. My contention is that he does, and that in fact if they win the wild card, Manuel has a strong chance to take home Manager of the Year honors. (Not that I'd necessarily vote for him, mind you, but I think he could win based on how the BBWAA seems to handle that award.) In the comments to the article, favorably comparing Manuel to Larry Bowa, one poster added that:

Dall[a]s Green liked Bowa and I'm rapid[ly] realizing, to my dismay, Green is not the just hero/manager of the 1980 team but a big gas bag who thinks every problem with players is to solved with more practice and louder volume--a graduate of the Gen. Patton school of management.

It's hard to argue with this. Over the last few years as a "Special Adviser to the GM", Green has helped push out the door Scott Rolen, one of the most talented players in club history, and he's publicly sniped at other players and team personnel--most recently, Charlie Manuel himself. Beyond that, Green has been notorious in his career for wrecking the careers of talented young pitchers through overuse in an effort to teach them toughness. (His most famous victims were the Mets' Big Three of the mid-1990s, Jason Isringhausen, Paul Wilson and Bill Pulsipher. Also, as Yankees skipper a few years earlier, he kept Al Leiter out for over 150 pitches on a cold night in April; Leiter didn't fully recover for three seasons.) He comes off as both clueless and mean-spirited.

This comment about Green, which I entirely agree with, popped back into my head when I read the following today in an article about the Iraq War:

Convinced of his own brilliance, Rumsfeld freely substituted his often hastily formed opinions for the considered judgments of his military professionals. He placed in the most senior positions compliant yes-men, like Myers, and punished those who questioned his casually formed judgments. He enjoyed belittling his subordinates. ...His aides followed the same approach: Steve Cambone, Rumsfeld's closest aide, "jested that Rumsfeld thought the Army's problems could be solved by lining up fifty of its generals in the Pentagon and gunning them down."

Bullying, dismissive, arrogant, convinced of their own brilliance. Yes, Donald Rumsfeld is America's Dallas Green. (I suppose it follows that "missile defense" is the nation's "Big pitcher who throws high 90s but doesn't know where it's going"--you keep trying to perfect it and spending money on it until you get it right. But again, while the Phils have blown some dough over the years on bad pitchers, it's not $92 billion and counting.)

Unfortunately for the country--though I guess fortunately for the Phillies--there are two differences. Unlike Rumsfeld's weak and ignorant boss, Green's boss brings his own expertise to the question and has the stature and experience to blow off Green's bad advice and perhaps even keep a muzzle on him. (It seems likely enough to me that Gillick let his "special adviser" know to shut the fuck up after the altercation with Manuel made the papers.) And, of course, Dallas Green was involved (regardless of his contributions or lack thereof--he was most definitely there) in the greatest triumph in the history of the franchise. Rumsfeld was just there for Nixon, Ford, and of course this guy.

Anthology
While continuing to search for the time and mental toughness to flesh out an idea about why the Right is having such difficulty with Iraq--in a nutshell, it's that success there depends on "nation-building," which is itself comprised of things conservatives either don't value at all or dismiss the government role in here at home--a couple links and short thoughts:

• My annual--for the last four years, at any rate--NFC East preview package is now live on nfl.com (though it's not yet linked from their main page--I guess that's a production decision). Propers to the editorial team there for putting a terrific headline ("The Great Wide Open") on the main piece. My only regret is that I bothered to make specific record/order of finish predictions--because I have no idea how to handicap the division, and I don't think anyone else does either.


• Today was the tenth anniversary of President Clinton's signing into law the measure that "ended welfare as we knew it." He writes about the milestone here; some of his former staffers, and various other smart folks, weigh in here. I wrote an assessment for the Joyce Foundation that's coming out in the next edition of their quarterly newsletter, which I think is to be released in September; at some point I'll probably post the "director's cut," or some facsimile thereof, here.


• Here's a fascinating and haunting exercise in alternative history: What if 9/11 Had Never Happened? I've never been a particularly big fan of Andrew Sullivan, but there's little question the dude can write.

Fightin' Phils back above .500, on the powers of Jamie Moyer and, um, Danny Sandoval? Tonight, all things seem possible.

CT Primary: the Aftermath

Note: I wrote this Wednesday night, but wasn't able to post until getting home from vacation. Hopefully it holds up. This article from the American Prospect, though a couple months old, nicely captures by analogy how Democrats have been fighting under outdated rules; I'm not actually sure Lieberman deserves inclusion with an undeniably decent guy like Tom Daschle, but the two Senators were both unwilling or unable to realize how their environment had changed.

If the Lieberman defeat is any indication, the Republicans might be about to reap what they've sown over the last 25 years. Rove/DeLay polarization and relentless gerrymandering has driven most of the moderates out of politics; Lieberman is now on the same course, though his removal is a bit more directly related to the changed climate.

"Bipartisanship" only works when both sides legitimately don't want to destroy each other. Read the rhetoric, over the last quarter-century, of guys like Norquist, Abramoff (back when he was a political operative, not a crooked lobbyist), Ralph Reed, and Rove himself. They didn't want to share power with the Democrats; they wanted to wipe them out of existence.

Probably because they were in the majority for so long and saw accommodation as a basic premise of governing, it took the Democrats years and years to realize this. But they do now--and in Lieberman's case, the voters got it before the candidate did. Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer aren't guys I'd want to have over for dinner--but they're exactly the guys I want leading the Democratic campaign operations.

Once this anti-Constitutional Cheney/DeLay strain of Republicanism is crushed, hopefully moderates and principled conservatives will re-emerge in their party--and then it will be safe for Democrats to let go of Al Davis politics ("just win, baby") and start looking for consensus policies again. But in the context of Rovian polarization, Lieberman looked less like a statesman than a quisling. That's why he lost.

True Colors

Edit: Hey Marshall! Scoreboard...

One of the most fascinating things about the Lieberman/Lamont primary in Connecticut has been watching all the big machers in the country’s political firmament weigh in. From the current and former president--the first a tacit Lieberman supporter, the second a louder and prouder one--to most of the current Democratic Senate caucus, to ostensibly non-partisan "elders" like David Broder and much more partisan voices ranging in vitriol from David Brooks to Michelle Malkin, everybody's got an opinion. And it seems like the closer they are to the Washington status quo, the more they love Holy Joe.

Which brings us to Marshall Wittman, the Talleyrand of fin-de-siecle American politics and probably the loudest, most dogged champion of Lieberman.

Wittman hasn't changed the name of his Bull Moose Blog to "The Daily Lieberman," but otherwise he's on this every day, with the same lame-assed put-downs of challenger Ned Lamont ("Limousine Liberal") and his supporters ("the nutroots") that you might expect of a guy who spent years working for the Christian Coalition. Wittman has landed at every point on the political compass, but in his current incarnation he works for the Democratic Leadership Council and presents himself as an heir of Teddy Roosevelt and Scoop Jackson: progressive on domestic issues, hawkish internationally. There's a problem with this formulation, as I'll explain below, but the point in conjunction with the Lieberman campaign is that Wittman sees Joe as squarely in this tradition. That Lieberman is anything but progressive on a range of domestic issues, from the disgraceful 2005 bankruptcy legislation to his embrace of steps toward censorship and his unwillingness to call corporate malefactors to task when he had the power to do so, as a Senate committee chair in the summer of 2002, doesn't seem to bother the Moose.

But today, he went too far--and showed that he'd learned perhaps too well the lessons taught him by former colleague Ralph Reed and other purveyors of political slime. In his hatred of Markos Moulitsas, the proprietor of Daily Kos, Wittman might have left himself open to a libel suit. He wrote:

Only a few weeks ago, Lamont featured the kingpin keyboarder in a campaign ad (the same one who once made the infamous "screw 'em" comments about the American victims of terrorism).

Who were these "American victims of terrorism"? Mercenaries hired by the U.S. government, paid exponentially more than the rank-and-file soldiers... of whom Moulitsas was once one. The mercs had been rumored to be committing abuses; an Iraqi mob led by the al-Sadr forces publicly executed them. Moulitsas, in an ill-advised blog post, wrote that he had no sympathy for the mercenaries; his sympathies were with the troops.

Still, hired Blackwater killers are a pretty far cry from what comes to mind for most of us when the phrase "American victims of terrorism" is used. It's a smear based on blurring facts together that might make Karl Rove rub his pudgy little hands together in delight.

This isn't a DLC thing. Wittman's colleague Ed Kilgore, who blogs as New Donkey, has written a series of insightful posts on the CT Senate race; see this one and especially this one, in which Kilgore defends Lieberman but concedes that

Much as I stubbornly admire Joe Lieberman, it's clear he is a clumsy politician who lives in the pre-Karl-Rove atmosphere that permitted genuine bipartisanship. The Clinton New Democrat tradition in the party would survive his defeat.

No, it's Wittman. Maybe he shouldn't be blamed; he's achieved his greatest renown in a period when quisling Democrats like Lieberman were the norm, forever reaching out to close the gap between themselves and a Republican majority tacking hard right. Like Wittman himself, Lieberman seems to believe that his integrity and statesmanship transcends partisan politics; as I wrote a week or two back, that's a theoretically appealing notion--but it's simply not possible in the current Rovian context.

What's strange to me is that Wittman hearkens back to that pre-1968 Democratic model--progressive at home, hawkish abroad--and puts himself in the tradition of leading lights from that time, guys like George Meany. But he never takes into account that some of the most salient issues today--the social "values" shit that he and his Christian Coalition colleagues did so much to poisonously insert into our discourse--simply weren't on the table back then. At the same time, he blasts "the nutroots" as the heirs of the liberal activists who derailed the Democratic coalition that had dominated from FDR's day through LBJ's as "McGovernites with modems."

I happen to know a fair amount about those earlier-generation liberal activists; there are some similarities, but there's also a hugely important difference. Back then, the protest often took the form of demands for greater deference to this or that interest group--with the result that "the majority," white middle-class and working-class Americans, eventually turned away from the Democrats as an amalgam of special-interest pleaders. Today, it's the Lieberman wing of the party that wants to keep pandering to the special interests, appealing to abortion-rights groups, environmentalists, African-Americans and so on with a list of what he and they have done for those groups... and the activists who want the party to advance a more coherent progressive vision. Were Wittman the acute observer of politics he claims to be, and not an ultimate Washington insider who will always acclimate himself to whoever's currently buttering his bread, perhaps he'd understand this.

Anyway, the Bull Moose is gone from the AIS blogroll. But check out The Inclusionist, a new domestic policy blog I found populated by former Clinton administration adviser Margy Waller and a bunch of her friends. Truly good stuff.