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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are like people quietly marching to their doom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Letter to MoDo
Dear Ms. Dowd:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know, because he apparently did it to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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



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


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


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


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

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

The first bunch included the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ponnuru: Would you be willing to ban it?

"Sen. McCain: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."
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"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."
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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.
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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.