Yeah, Policy Matters
Princeton economist Larry Bartels observes a trend:

The Census Bureau has tracked the economic fortunes of affluent, middle-class and poor American families for six decades. According to my analysis, these tabulations reveal a wide partisan disparity in income growth. The real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents. Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House. Only the incomes of affluent families were relatively impervious to partisan politics, growing robustly under Democrats and Republicans alike.

The cumulative effect of these partisan differences is enormous. If the pattern of income growth under postwar Republican presidents had matched the pattern under Democrats, incomes would be more equal now than they were in 1950 — a far cry from the contemporary reality of what some observers are calling a New Gilded Age.

It might be tempting to suppose that these partisan differences in income growth are a coincidence of timing, merely reflecting the fact that Republicans held the White House through most of the past three decades of slow, unequal growth. The partisan pattern, however, is remarkably consistent throughout the postwar period. Every Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower presided over increasing economic inequality, while only one Democrat — Jimmy Carter — did so. (I allow one year for each president’s economic policies to take effect, so the recession of 2001 is counted against Clinton, not Bush.)

Bartels also grapples with the question of why Republicans win elections at the presidential level even though their policies typically don't favor working- and middle-class households over the course of their presidencies, and concludes that the tendency of Republican presidents to produce good economic results, broadly speaking, in election years--but pretty much only election years--specifically explains their success. Maybe there's something to this; the Reagan expansion was going pretty well by 1984 after two horrible years, and 2004 was easily the best year of Bush's presidency to that point.

His explanation, that early in presidential terms, Republicans tend to inflict economic pain (through "reining in inflation and cutting social spending") while Democrats invest in stimulus "producing economic booms that raise all boats in their second and third years but trail off as the next election approaches," doesn't hold up quite as well to me. Republican presidents tend to sling the pork around--which we might describe in a less pejorative way as "stimulus"--when they're up for re-election, and the Democrats have had exactly as many incumbents defeated in a re-election bid since WWII as the Republicans: one each (Carter and Bush 41).

But that's also less important than the trend itself: when you prioritize investments in people and broad-based growth over de-distributive policies that favor those who already have the most, and view government as the art of the possible rather than a "beast" to "starve," a larger segment of the public tends to benefit.

All Too Easy
I think someone on the New York Times editorial staff has a wicked sense of humor. Today they featured a guest op-ed by Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former presidential candidate John Edwards, right alongside Maureen Dowd's latest excretion. A representative sampling follows.

Edwards: Bowling 1, Health Care 0

The problem today unfortunately is that voters who take their responsibility to be informed seriously enough to search out information about the candidates are finding it harder and harder to do so, particularly if they do not have access to the Internet.

Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden’s health care plan? Anything at all? But let me guess, you know Barack Obama’s bowling score. We are choosing a president, the next leader of the free world. We are not buying soap, and we are not choosing a court clerk with primarily administrative duties.
...
The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. Second place! And he had not done or said anything that would allow anyone to conclude he was a serious candidate. A major weekly news magazine put Mr. Thompson on its cover, asking — honestly! — whether the absence of a serious campaign and commitment to raising money or getting his policies out was itself a strategy.

I’m not the only one who noticed this shallow news coverage. A report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy found that during the early months of the 2008 presidential campaign, 63 percent of the campaign stories focused on political strategy while only 15 percent discussed the candidates’ ideas and proposals.

Watching the campaign unfold, I saw how the press gravitated toward a narrative template for the campaign, searching out characters as if for a novel: on one side, a self-described 9/11 hero with a colorful personal life, a former senator who had played a president in the movies, a genuine war hero with a stunning wife and an intriguing temperament, and a handsome governor with a beautiful family and a high school sweetheart as his bride. And on the other side, a senator who had been first lady, a young African-American senator with an Ivy League diploma, a Hispanic governor with a self-deprecating sense of humor and even a former senator from the South standing loyally beside his ill wife. Issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn’t fit into the narrative template and, therefore, took a back seat to these superficialities.

And now, for the defense... here's MoDo.

Hillary grows more and more glowy as Obama grows more and more wan.

Is she draining him of his precious bodily fluids? Leeching his magic? Siphoning off his aura?

It used to be that he was incandescent and she was merely inveterate. Now she’s bristling with life force, and he looks like he wants to run away somewhere for three months by himself and smoke.

Hillary is not getting much sleep or exercise, and doesn’t, like the ascetic Obama, abstain from junk food and coffee and get up at dawn to work out on the road. She’s still a long shot and she’s 14 years older than her rival.

Yet she’s the one who is more energetic and focused and beaming, and he’s the one who seems uneven and gauzy, often fatigued and unable to disguise being fed up with the slog. Even his speeches don’t have the same pizazz.
...
The Nixonian Hillary has a ravenous hunger that Obama lacks. Literally — at a birthday party in Philly for her photographer, she was devouring the chips and dip with two hands — and viscerally.

At Joe’s Junction gas station in Indianapolis, Obama did his best to shoo away the pesky elitist label. Accused by an Indianapolis reporter of looking like a GQ cover, he said he has only four pairs of shoes and buys “five of the same suit and then I patch them up and wear them repeatedly.” But his campaign refused to reveal the brand, presumably because it’s not J. C. Penney.

I know it's not the job of the opinion page to present candidates' proposals and policy views in their full detail. But what they can do--remember, these are supposed to be the best writers, not the best reporters (though most of them did start as reporters)--is to write about those positions in a way that makes them come alive for readers, and to call for a higher level of discourse in coverage overall. Remember that in the 2000 election cycle, when a little more analysis of the differences between Al Gore and George Bush might have been useful, MoDo was writing about Gore's sighs and sartorial choices, and Bush's ease and grace. Heaven forfend she ever learn or improve.

It's enough to make you wonder if the Times has the wrong choice of these two women as their regular columnist.

What's the Matter With MontCo?
Flipping on my computer Tuesday night between the Phillies game and the Pennsylvania primary returns, I kept waiting for Montgomery County, where I grew up right outside Philadelphia, to flip from blue (Clinton) to green (Obama). It never happened: though Clinton's ultimate margin was tiny--50.7 percent to 49.3 percent, around 2,200 votes--she held it, and the Clintons' unexpected success in the supposedly pro-Obama 'burbs, with their high median income and plentiful college grads, probably explains why they won by 9.2 percent and get to continue the Become What We Hate Tour, rather than, say, 5 percent and home to their own private dysfunction.

Philadelphia Inquirer political columnist/blogger Daniel Rubin went out to Montgomery to ask what happened:

"I voted for Hillary," said the first person I ran into, Shelley Goodman, a 53-year-old psychologist walking her coonhound, Blue.

"I don't think this country is ready for a black president." This again.

Goodman has adopted or fostered a household of mixed-race children, and so she is speaking from a giant heart.

"In this country, you are not half-black," she went on. "If you are any black, you are all black. We have a very skewed view in the East Coast. We think everyone thinks as open-mindedly as we do."
...
I found a balance of opinions at a home in Melrose Park, where twin signs sprout from the front yard, one for Hillary, one for Obama.
Inside, Linda Riley and her husband, Carl Rotenberg, sat in separate armchairs, parsing the results. Riley, the Obama supporter, relayed a recent conversation with a Jewish woman at the Philadelphia Council for the Aging. "She was concerned Obama would not protect Israel," said Riley, 57. "I don't know what he could do to assuage that concern, as he has said he would support Israel, is a friend of Israel. I guess it is not enough."
...
I reached Art Matusow by phone. He ran canvassing for Obama in Lower Merion and Narberth. Matusow said he'd been asking his door-knockers whether they'd seen support soften since Obama was hammered for calling some Pennsylvanians "bitter," for not wearing a flag on his lapel, and for the incendiary comments of his former pastor.

Matusow talked of two counties, the progressive inner suburbs like Cheltenham and Lower Merion, and the more rural and blue-collar places farther from the city.

He heard nothing, he said, to suggest voters were wary of Obama's race, but said some people did come into his office concerned about Israel's safety. The campaign had armed workers with pamphlets to try to quell the fears. "It is an area where Israel matters," Matusow said, "so I'm not going to say it is a nonissue."

Both my parents--my mom, a huge pro-Clinton Democrat, and my dad, a nominal Republican (I think) who generally votes for the Democrat on the presidential level--have raised this Israel question with me in conversation or e-mail. My mom, who flashes uncanny political astuteness once a year or so, actually predicted that the exchange about Israel in that disgrace of a debate last week would redound hugely to Hillary's advantage.

I guess it did. But I think the real story here is that upscale voters can be as attuned to "dog-whistle politics" as those church-going, gun-loving, salt-of-the-earth types before whom the mainstream media simultaneously venerates and sneers.

Clinton's formulation, that Israel was under the American nuclear umbrella and that any attack by Iran on the Jewish state would result in its "obliteration," might strike some as irresponsible or immoral. Obama's--that "all options would be on the table"--is much more in keeping with the tradition of strategic ambiguity around nuclear deterrence. (It also takes into account, at least implicitly, that Israel has a far larger nuclear arsenal than Iran ever will; if anyone is going to be doing the "obliterating" there, it'll be Israel.)

But from growing up around these people, having some idea how they think, I'm pretty sure that Obama misread or simply didn't understand the politics around this question.

The point is that when it comes to Israel among these folks, emotion trumps logic. The Clintons get this; Hillary (or Bill, which is the same diff in this context) understood that to the secular Jews of Montgomery County, belligerent rhetoric around Israel is a signifier of a larger worldview. That it's irrational--who the hell talks about "obliterating" anyone?--is actually the point: Israel is the one thing these folks actively choose to be irrational about. (The only time my late grandmother, probably the finest and gentlest person I've ever known, ever scared me was when she talked about how much she hated Arafat.)

That she did this against a man of color is an important point as well. I've read Obama's statements about Israel, the things my dad sent me. He's solidly in the mainstream in terms of America's relationship with the only Middle East democracy. But, as is his wont, he refuses to dumb it down beyond a certain point. And he does have relationships with people whom, I promise you, the decent folk of Montgomery County view as Scary Black Men: Wright directly, and Farrakkhan by (unfair) association. Because he's an honorable man, Obama doesn't throw Wright all the way over the side--and the Clintons, unburdened by honor, exploit that indirectly.

The people I grew up with certainly aren't "racist" in the Bull Connor sense, or even the Patrick Buchanan sense. But they are susceptible to indirect racist appeals--and "the black guy won't protect Israel as ferociously as I will" counts as one of those. This isn't the only issue where such an appeal can be made, triggering some lower-level or comparative ("he's just not enough like me in how he thinks") prejudice; I'm not sure how Obama pushes back against this.

For God's Sake, Don't Say the Obvious!

Here's that silly Barack Obama, committing another "gaffe":

Senator Barack Obama likes to tell his audiences that electing Senator John McCain would be the equivalent of giving President Bush four more years in the Oval Office.
...
Yet as he offered his closing words at a town meeting at Reading High School, after he delivered a speech and took questions for 40-minutes, Mr. Obama offered a different view of Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.

“You have a real choice in this election. Either Democrat would be better than John McCain – and all three of us would be better than George Bush,” Mr. Obama said. “But what you have to ask yourself is, who has the chance to actually, really change things in a fundamental way?”

In case you missed that line – “all three of us would be better than George Bush” – you almost certainly will be hearing it again and again from Republicans as a rebuttal to Mr. Obama’s often-stated argument that there would be no daylight between a President McCain and President Bush.

The Clintons--evidently forgetting Hillary's words about how she and Johnny Mac both offer "a lifetime of experience" compared to "a speech [Obama] made in 2002," and Bill's about a Clinton-McCain race being between "two people who love this country"--immediately went on the attack. But we know that consistency and honesty aren't big priorities for them, and anyway, what else are they gonna do?

Meanwhile, what Obama said seems pretty much incontrovertible to me. Who among us doesn’t think McCain would be better than Bush? Is McCain as weak-minded as Bush, as willing to empower the likes of Cheney and Addington because he can't be bothered or doesn't care about their weird obsessions? As cavalier about war and death? As likely to empower hyper-partisans, turning the bureaucracy over to monsters like Karl Rove? No, no, and no. This doesn't mean he'd be a "good" president; merely that he's a more thoughtful and more honorable guy than his predecessor, the near-consensus worst president we've ever had. A lower bar is difficult to imagine.

If you accept this premise, then what you’re left with is, “Well, yeah, but Obama shouldn’t have said it.” Why not? Because the public is so dimwitted that they can only accept absolutes–you’re either the Bestest Preznit Evah or the Chimpenfuhrer? Bullshit.

I think it would be a big mistake for the Democrats to try and win this thing by demonizing McCain. That’s the exact wrong approach to take--especially for an Obama campaign, which is trying to transcend and get beyond the zero-sum politics of the Bush/Clinton/Bush era. First of all, it’s a continuation of Rove/Carville, Clinton/Bush tactics: every contest is a Manichean, life or death struggle in which Everything Is At Stake. What that dynamic does is force everyone to dig in deeper; it pushes moderate Republicans and independents, who might have fuzzy fondness for McCain but doubt about his policy choices, back into his corner, because when you say he’s as bad as Bush, you’re insulting them too.

Second, people like McCain. Hell, I like McCain. I’d never vote for him and I don’t want him anywhere near the center of power, but that isn't entirely to do with him: mostly, I don’t like the idea of another president who cedes his budgetary policy to a psychotic asshole like Grover Norquist, won’t fully repudiate Bush--which is the real objective of this election, what I think the country at its deepest level wants to do--and is willing to countenance the monstrous likes of Bill Kristol.

The Democrats need to nail McCain to Bush on policies, not personality-–to make his unwillingness to repudiate Bush the anchor that sinks him. Holding that McCain is a good man in thrall to awful policies, Bush's policies, strikes me as the best way to do that-–and it subtly erodes those positive associations people have with him by raising the notion that he’s selling out to stay in the good books of people like Norquist and Hagee.

If this election is contested on the issues, Obama (or even Clinton, probably) can't lose. If it's conducted on the sort of nonsense that somehow dominated the 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he probably can't win.

Malaise, Despair, and Spring Fever
If it weren't for the Clintons' mad insistence on staying in a race they can't possibly win but just might force their enemy to lose, the country would be enjoying a much-earned and devoutly wished-for respite from presidential politics right now. I see this everywhere in work and social settings: nobody wants to talk about the race anymore, and everyone is disgusted with everybody.

Yes, the ABC debate Wednesday night was a singular disgrace; the absurdity of 45 minutes devoted to insider-politics bullshit and manufactured pseudo-scandals actually raises the question of whether representative democracy can thrive or even survive when its media tribunes are so entirely devoted to minutiae and irrelevancies. The lame excuse of the moderators--that all the issues they raised had sprung up in the two months since the previous debate--looks even lamer when you think about what else has happened since then: the collapse of Bear Stearns and the roiling of financial markets, the deepening mortgage crisis, the Petreus/Crocker hearings on Iraq, new revelations that the highest officials of the Bush administration discussed the specifics of torture tactics, the administration's vacuous promises of steps toward thinking about the discussion of long-term potential action around climate change, and all manner of other things.

But the outrage also reflects despair and bafflement that the good and necessary contest we were looking at two months ago, Obama versus McCain, is obscured by the refusal of the First Narcissists to go away and the hijacking of an issues-based campaign in favor of, literally, complaining about complaining. Democrats have the additional frustration of seeing their prospects dim in a year when everything should be going their way.

I'm not immune to this either. In about an hour and a half, I'll be headed to the Philadelphia area for the Jewish holiday; my plan had been to go down earlier today and do some volunteering for the Obama campaign in my home town. But between personal and spousal fatigue, and my own utter exasperation with the campaign that won't end, here I sit on Saturday afternoon, waiting for it to be freakin' over already.

edit: okay, this and this are almost-sufficient reasons to be glad the campaign continues...

Now Why Might They be "Bitter"?
Barack Obama is in "trouble" again, as reports surfaced of remarks he made at a closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco last weekend and the Clinton and McCain campaigns--yet again singing from the same songbook--raced to condemn him as elitist and out of touch. Here's the apparently offending statement:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The great sin here evidently was to suggest that voters' attachments to "guns or religion" as criteria on which to vote isn't sincere and heartfelt, and that people are "bitter" about the inability or refusal of Washington to address their economic concerns. Neither the McCain campaign, which simply used the comment to blast Obama as a Kerry-like liberal elitist, nor the Clintons, who risibly claim that Obama is trying to divide the country between "those who are enlightened and those who are not," bother to address the underlying premise of the comment: that the residents of "these small towns" have been fucked over both by macroeconomic changes and the near-total absence of governmental response to help them cope.

Admittedly, he didn't phrase this as well as he could have. "Guns or religion" are loaded words in American politics, concepts near and dear to millions of voters (and not just economically marginalized conservatives or Republicans; far from it, in fact). By using them, he distracted the audience from the crucial underlying point.

Interestingly, a Times column just three days ago provides a lot of the backstory behind that "bitterness." In a brilliant piece about the economic expansion of this decade that's both chilling for its content and heartening in how it connects the dots, David Leonhardt gets at both what's fueling the dissatisfaction in the electorate, and why it's going to be so difficult to address:

The bigger problem is that the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.

This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did. You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy’s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?
...
The slowdown began in the 1970s, with an oil shock that raised the cost of everyday living. The technological revolution and the rise of global trade followed, reducing the bargaining power of a large section of the work force. In recent years, the cost of health care has aggravated the problem, by taking a huge bite out of most workers’ paychecks.

Real median family income more than doubled from the late 1940s to the late ’70s. It has risen less than 25 percent in the three decades since. Statistics like these are now so familiar as to be almost numbing. But the larger point is still crucial: the modern American economy distributes the fruits of its growth to a relatively narrow slice of the population.

Leonhardt makes the point that postwar prosperity didn't just happen, but was fueled by conscious measures to grow the middle class like the GI Bill, the highway system, and all that money invested in R&D. He suggests that we can do this again, and that finding the specific means and winning the related political fights will (or at least should) be Job Number One for the next president. But, he adds, this won't be easy:

[T]here is still a lack of strategic seriousness to the discussion, as Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution notes. After all, the United States spends a lot of money on education already but has still lost its standing as the country with the highest college graduation rate in the world. (South Korea and a couple of other countries have passed us, while Japan, Britain and Canada are close behind.)

The same goes for public works. Spending on physical infrastructure is at a 20-year high as a share of gross domestic product, but too much of the money is spent on the inefficient pet programs championed by individual members of Congress. Pork barrel spending does not add up to a national economic strategy.

Health care and taxes will have to be part of the discussion, too. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of the National Institutes of Health pointed out to me that a serious effort to curtail wasteful medical spending would directly help workers. It would spare them from paying the insurance premiums and taxes that now cover that care.

The tax code, meanwhile, has become far more favorable to high-income workers at the same time that they — and they alone — have received large pretax raises. That doesn’t make much sense, does it?

Here's where we get to the core of Obama's message: it's not that we haven't tried to make investments that advance the general prosperity, but the problem is that the twisted, insider-dominated politics of Washington, DC render those investments inefficient or counter-productive. In education, it's political game-players like the Loyal Bushies and the too-powerful teachers' unions who resist accountability at the cost of student outcomes. Regarding infrastructure, the elevation of pork as the guiding principle of funding (a killer issue for McCain, btw, if he has the guts and cleverness to seize it) is why we get a quarter-billion dollars invested in a Bridge to Nowhere while bridges that support hundreds of thousands of cars per day are at risk of collapse. We need not even name winners and losers when it comes to health care and tax policy during the Bush/Clinton/Bush years.

The question is whether Obama can change any of that. I'm skeptical, as you pretty much have to be if you've lived through the last 30 years. But at least he somewhat acknowledges the problem. His response Friday night, just an hour and a half or so after his rival campaigns went on the attack, suggests an awareness that he's stumbled upon a potential winning issue:

YouTube of Response in Indiana

Where I'm Booing From
I love New York. I've lived here for all but two years since college, when I went to grad school in DC, and I hated those two years away in large part because DC was just so freakin' lame compared to New York. Brooklyn in particular is a wonderful place; I've been here for most of the last eight years, and the last five have easily been the best period of my life.

(I hate New York too--everyone who lives here sort of does--but we'll leave that for another time. The two emotions are not contradictory, even on a moment-by-moment basis. If you're here, you understand; if you don't, just trust me and let's move on.)

But I'm from Philadelphia, and that definitely shapes certain things. I can't really claim to "know" Philadelphia anymore, not having lived in the area full-time in nearly 20 years now, and my main attachments to the place are family still residing there, and the Phillies and Eagles. That said, those are serious attachments. Especially, with no disrespect to my family (with whom, after all, I'd presumably remain close with wherever they went), the Phillies.

Being from Philadelphia, and particularly having made an unhealthy, excessive and evidently irrevocable emotional investment in the Phillies at a young age, does certain things to a person. It inculcates a degree of fatalism tinged with inferiority. The team fails, you boo and jeer and otherwise act boorish, and the two things seem (some would say are) connected--though whether it's that non-supportive fans drag down the performance, or that poor performance is a just reward for the lack of faith, none can say.

So I read this article in Tuesday's Philadelphia Inquirer with both dread and recognition:

[Mitch] Nathanson, an associate professor of legal writing at Villanova's School of Law, set out to chronicle his own baseball pain, using his darkest memory - "Black Friday" - as a reflector.

"Black Friday," as all scarred Phillies fans recall, refers to Game 3 of the National League Championship Series on the sparkling afternoon of Oct. 7, 1977. The Phillies and Dodgers were tied, one game apiece, in the series, and Games 4 and 5 were set for Veterans Stadium. But with two outs and no one on base in the ninth inning, the Phils blew the game and eventually the series.

Somewhere in the research, however, the academic in Nathanson surfaced. He recognized that it wasn't just his mental state that had been negatively affected by this baseball tragedy, it was the entire city's psyche.

The result is a book that, though in carefully footnoted terms, perceptively dissects the always stormy three-sided relationship involving Philadelphia, its fans and its teams, particularly the Phillies.

"Philadelphia has seen its reflection in the Phillies more than in any other team or institution," Nathanson wrote, "finding in them support, or blame, for its opinion of itself. . . . While Philadelphians may love the Eagles, they identify with the Phillies."
...
The 1977 Phils were likely the best in franchise history. They won 101 games. They had power, speed, Steve Carlton, and a remarkably deep bullpen. That's what made Black Friday so maddeningly difficult to fathom. And when that optimistic bubble burst, it affected how Philadelphians felt about their city as well.

"We like to think we're rational decision-makers, that we reach conclusions like judges do, issuing a verdict after weighing all the evidence," Nathanson said. "But research shows that's not the case. We usually develop a gut feeling first, and then we rationalize it later. We pick and choose facts that support that.
...
"[The negativity] manifests itself, however, through sports and particularly baseball," he said. "In this way, we retain a link to our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers. In short, it's in our blood, passed down from one generation to the next. . . . It's what makes us uniquely Philadelphian.

I was four and not yet a fan when "Black Friday" struck, but I get it. Nathanson must have been 12 or so; I can't imagine what a bummer that must have been. By the time I was that age, the Phillies had fallen from their late '70s/early '80s peak and were beginning a 15-year stretch of awful play interrupted only by the improbable 1993 pennant... and, of course, the agonizing World Series loss that followed it.

Meanwhile, the rot has spread to the town's other teams as surely as the soul-corrosion of Philly fandom spreads within those families the author describes. Not only has it been 28 years since the Phillies' first and only championship; no Philadelphia team in any sport has won the big prize since the NBA's 76ers did it in May 1983. I was 10 then. In a few weeks I'll turn 35. Given how depressing a prospect that is to start with, perhaps I'll get Nathanson's book for my birthday.

When the Window Closed
As you've heard, today was the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's assassination. Two worthwhile reminiscences: E.J. Dionne, on the King murder as the death knell for 1960s liberalism, and Kai Wright--a man with whom I shared an office wall for a year or so--on King's forgotten radicalism.

i have just one thing to add. In the incredibly consequential and ultimately horrific year of 1968, there was a period of not quite four days that I believe stands as the high-water mark for progressive politics in America: between March 31, when Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not stand for re-election, and April 4, when King was gunned down in Memphis. For those 90-odd hours, I imagine it was possible to believe that a proud liberal, probably Robert F. Kennedy, would win the White House, end the Vietnam War, begin to bring healing to the divisions of the period, and fulfill the promise of Johnson's Great Society. The killing didn't foreclose those possibilities, but it--or rather the riots that ensued--exacerbated the white backlash that ultimately helped elect Richard Nixon, and it began the demoralization and (to Dionne's point) self-doubt on the left that greatly deepened when Kennedy himself was murdered. The Chicago convention, at which the orphaned constituents of Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy first lost the nomination, then got their brains bashed in, was in some sense insult to injury.

Likely the promise of those four days was never realistic. Had there been no assassinations that year, had RFK won the presidency, things still might have come apart. Disengagement from Vietnam was never going to be easy, in a political or strategic sense. The Cold War was still on a low simmer, and we hadn't yet engaged China. (Indeed, with Kennedy instead of Nixon, who knows if that would have happened at all.) The Great Society was already stalled by 1968, and the racial backlash was going to continue anyway.

Even so, James Earl Ray's second victim was the hope that had bubbled up through the first few months of that year.

April: Baseball's Cruelest Month
Every year I get intensely excited for Opening Day. Springtime, the assured presence of my favorite sport, maybe my favorite thing in the world, on TV somewhere more or less 24/7, the return of the Phillies.

And every year, within no more than 72 hours after that first pitch is thrown, they find some way to kick me in the figurative balls.

Monday's season-opening loss was at least characteristic of the team's pattern of play over the last few years: they fell behind, came back to tie it on some huge hits, then shat the game away in the 9th with cover-your-eyes, hide-the-children caliber relief pitching to lose 11-6. Tonight, though, just felt like the sort of metaphysical screw-you one only experiences through sport. (My strongest memory ever in this line was the 2006 game the Eagles lost to a last-place Tampa Bay Buccaneers squad, when a waiver-bait kicker beat them with a 62-yard field goal as time expired. I swear I could almost see some ghostly hand floating behind the uprights, all fingers folded in but the middle one.) Cole Hamels, Phillies ace and hero of the internets, pitched eight innings of one-run ball; the run was a wind-blown bullshit OFJOAB ("Our Fucking Joke of a Ballpark") special homer. The Phillies offense, meanwhile, was that special combination of inept (one hit all night) and unlucky (at least three rockets hit right at defenders in the final three innings).

So the team is 0-2 with the two good pitchers having taken their turns without any wins to show for it, and The Crap due the next three games. Usually I don't make this AIS post--it is a yearly tradition--until they hit 1-6 or so, but this year I figured why wait.

Worlds Collide
edit, 3/31: Okay, he was booed pretty good. That makes me feel a little better.

The unofficial but real start of the 2008 baseball season (not counting those novelty games in Japan last week) came tonight when the Washington Nationals broke in their brand-new ballpark with a thrilling 3-2 walkoff win over the evil Atlanta Braves. I didn't watch the whole game, but flipped back and forth all evening and got to see four of the five runs scored: two for Washington on two-out hits in the first inning, the Braves' equalizer in the top of the 9th against substitute Nats closer Jon Rauch, and the game-winner in the bottom of the inning when Ryan Zimmerman sent the fans home on Cloud 9 with a solo home run off Peter Moylan. The new park looks great, the game was a taut pitchers duel (Tim Hudson retired 19 in a row after those initial two runs), and the end was a thriller.

Yet in the middle of all this good feeling, there was President George W. Bush yukking it up on screen like a turd in the middle of your birthday cake. He'd thrown out the first ball--which I managed to skip when I saw it was coming--then came back for what felt like a fucking hour to talk with announcers Jon Miller and Joe Morgan. I kept flipping back, saw that he was still sitting there in his little sweater under a blazer, smirking away.

As time goes on, the outrageous comes to seem mundane just because one gets used to it. I suppose Bush's presidency is like that. Conceived in dishonesty and corruption, it's come to full, rank, tragicomic flower. How this inane and repellent and small person managed to do so much damage will be a source of dismay to millions of us for as long as we live. Every day, we grumble at his arrogance and belligerence, and gasp at how far short he falls in facing up to severe problems. That's bad enough. But to see him getting to join in the celebration of baseball's renewal, as if he wasn't the most colossal fuckup in American history, just turns the stomach. He has been and remains a walking, talking middle finger in the face of meritocracy.

(This isn't really a partisan thing. I don't think I could ever vote for John McCain, but I'd be perfectly happy, even a little psyched, to see him throwing out the first ball. This must have been how the hardcore righties felt seeing Clinton in such circumstances; it honestly sucks. Maybe the answer is just to take the president out of this equation and let everyone enjoy the game without intrusion from the miserable world of politics.)

The irony, as I've probably noted here before, is that Bush could have had a much more central (and positive) role in major league baseball. Former Commissioner Fay Vincent wrote that the former Texas Rangers owner wanted to become the game's commissioner, but then-interim boss Bud Selig kept putting him off and putting him off, and finally Bush decided to enter politics. He picked the Republican landslide year of 1994 to make a run for the Texas governorship, and the rest is tragedian farce. With his fan's sensibility, it's almost certain that he would have been orders of magnitude better as a commissioner than he's been in his actual job. Then again, it might have been worth it to divert him even if he'd been as atrocious in that job as he is in this one.)

Just another reason to hope Selig roasts in hell. Still way second to the Strike, though.

Stasis
Every day for awhile now, I've gone online looking for one of two things: some indication that the Phillies have made a move to complete a pitching staff that currently has just ten guys on it (12 is the norm, and there's no way they'll have fewer than 11), and Hillary Clinton bowing to reality and dropping out of the Democratic presidential race. The calendar suggests that the first thing will happen soon--the Phils' season starts on Monday--but we'll probably have to wait at least four more weeks, and more likely six, for the second.

Clinton can't win. She's managed to damage Barack Obama somewhat--he now trails John McCain head-to-head among independents, after leading the Republican through the first two months of this year--but not help herself. Even if Obama were to fall short, his enraged supporters--and the Democrats' terror of losing African-Americans--would ensure it went to Al Gore or someone else not currently in the race. This CQ Politics article--titled "Clinton Struggling With Her Likability Problem"--would be funny if it weren't so painful:

[O]ne race Obama is winning by the numbers is the favorability race whether the measure is positive/negative reactions to the two, or traits that voters like or dislike about each.

Here’s a collection of findings on this score from a range of polls:

• Obama bests Clinton among Democratic voters by margins of 15 percent to 20 percent on the traits of being “down to earth,” “inspiring” and “honest,” according to Pew. More Democrats think Clinton is “phony” and “hard to like” than they do about Obama.

• Pew said the things Democrats most dislike about Clinton are her personality, the idea that she has “too much baggage,” and that she is too ambitious.
...
• The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll said 48 percent of Democrats in its survey viewed Clinton as somewhat or very negative versus 37 percent who had very or somewhat positive perceptions of her. Two weeks ago, 45 percent viewed her positively, and 43 percent viewed her negatively. Obama is viewed positively by 49 percent of voters and negatively by 32 percent.

• In a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted March 14-16, forty-four percent of those surveyed said they considered Clinton honest and trustworthy while 53 percent did not. By contrast, McCain was considered honest and trustworthy by a 67 percent to 27 percent margin, and Obama was close at 63 percent to 29 percent.

• A Quinnipiac University poll of Connecticut voters found that 47 percent of all voters viewed her unfavorably to 46 percent who viewed her favorably. Obama’s favorability rating was 59 to 24 percent and McCain’s was 52 percent to 31 percent. A quarter of Clinton detractors in the poll said she was dishonest.

In a widely cited article earlier this week, David Brooks (admittedly not the best or most objective source when it comes to the Democrats) suggested that Clinton has perhaps a five percent chance to win the nomination. I think he overstates the mark. Clinton's "likability" problem has gotten worse as she's thrown the kitchen sink, the hallway closet, the bathroom toilet, the cellar door and whatever else isn't nailed down at Obama: to really maul this metaphor, she's destroyed her own house in the process.

Still, the Democrats can't just shove her off the stage, even if (as is starting to seem evident) they really want to. Why? Consider this comment, left last night on The Carpetbagger Report:

I will vote in the primary for Hillary. I will vote in the election for Hillary. Even if the party picks Obama I will write in a vote for Hillary. I will not vote for a man who has the nerve to say that he has never heard his minister talk that way when he’s been attending for around 20. Poppy cock. He’s lying period.

Look around the liberal blogosphere--and I'm not even talking about the fanatical Clinton sites--and you'll see a lot more of the same. There's some number of dead-ender Clintonites out there--probably not the 25 to 28 percent suggested by some polls, but between a few hundred thousand and a few million--who are deeply, deeply invested in this candidacy. These hardest of the hard-core, almost all of whom seem to be women, evidently see their own life struggles reflected in Sen. Clinton’s campaign... and see in Barack Obama every man who’s put one over on them and gotten away with it because of the sexism that still is a force in our society.

It’s at least somewhat irrational, and certainly subjective--I can't see how one considers Obama's unwillingness to repudiate his pastor as more offensive than Clinton lying about her Mission to Bosnia. And I think Hillary Clinton is about the worst imaginable champion for the legitimate grievances of American women… but she’s the one in this race, so that doesn’t matter either. Much as I wish we had Laura Roslin running for president, we don’t.

Now, if Clinton were a responsible leader who put party and principle ahead of personal ambition, she’d see the writing on the wall and conclude that her historical reputation and future clout in the Senate–-which is what she’s playing for now; it’s a near-certainty that she’ll never be president, however much some think she's trying to kneecap Obama for 2012–-would benefit by graciously withdrawing and offering wholehearted support for the party’s nominee.

But for the moment at least, she seems willing, if not eager, to lead her supporters right over the cliff–-and take the party with her. The painful irony is that the Democrats need those supporters sufficiently badly that they can't yet cauterize the wounds the Clintons continue to inflict. They'll need to feel that she had her full opportunity and lost fair and square, so to speak, rather than getting shoved aside as another victim of institutional sexism. The problem is that she might never make that graceful concession--and that until she does, she'll continue to attack Obama, driving up his negatives and costing the Democrats a precious opportunity to start making their case against John McCain and a continuation of the Bush/Cheney reign of error.

Hillary Clinton, Lying Liar
Per my point in a post last week about Barack Obama as a departure from the recent norm of national politicians who lie with a straight face even when we know they're lying and they know we know, consider Hillary Clinton's Excellent Bosnian Adventure.

Sen. Clinton's longtime claims of a "danger assignment" in the Balkans in 1996, which she uses to bolster her (rather thin) foreign policy "experience" credentials, got a little attention recently when Sinbad, the comedian who was also on the trip, essentially said she was full of shit:

Sinbad, along with singer Sheryl Crow, was on that 1996 trip to Bosnia that Clinton has described as a harrowing international experience that makes her tested and ready to answer a 3 a.m. phone call at the White House on day one, a claim for which she's taking much grief on the campaign trail.
...
In an interview with the Sleuth Monday, he said the "scariest" part of the trip was wondering where he'd eat next. "I think the only 'red-phone' moment was: 'Do we eat here or at the next place.'"

Clinton, during a late December campaign appearance in Iowa, described a hair-raising corkscrew landing in war-torn Bosnia, a trip she took with her then-teenage daughter, Chelsea. "They said there might be sniper fire," Clinton said.

Threat of bullets? Sinbad doesn't remember that, either.

"I never felt that I was in a dangerous position. I never felt being in a sense of peril, or 'Oh, God, I hope I'm going to be OK when I get out of this helicopter or when I get out of his tank.'"

In her Iowa stump speech, Clinton also said, "We used to say in the White House that if a place is too dangerous, too small or too poor, send the First Lady."

Say what? As Sinbad put it: "What kind of president would say, 'Hey, man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife...oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.'"

The Clintons, as they tend to do, subsequently doubled down, adding the detail that the First Lady's transport came under sniper fire as it landed in Bosnia and a planned ceremony at the airport had to be called off as the party ran for their lives. Unfortunately for them, the press was on hand as well, and now the Washington Post offers this full-on fact check and awards her "Four Pinocchios," their highest honor for stretching facts well beyond recognition.

According to Pomfret, the Tuzla airport was "one of the safest places in Bosnia" in March 1996, and "firmly under the control" of the 1st Armored Division.

Far from running to an airport building with their heads down, Clinton and her party were greeted on the tarmac by smiling U.S. and Bosnian officials. An eight-year-old Moslem girl, Emina Bicakcic, read a poem in English. An Associated Press photograph of the greeting ceremony, above, shows a smiling Clinton bending down to receive a kiss.

"There is peace now," Emina told Clinton, according to Pomfret's report in the Washington Post the following day, "because Mr. Clinton signed it. All this peace. I love it."

The First Lady's schedule, released on Wednesday and available here, confirms that she arrived in Tuzla at 8.45 a.m. and was greeted by various dignitaries, including Emina Bicakcic, (whose name has mysteriously been redacted from the document.)

You can see CBS News footage of the arrival ceremony here. The footage shows Clinton walking calmly out of the back of the C-17 military transport plane that brought her from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

Is this the issue on which the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination should be decided? Of course not. Has Barack Obama ever stretched an anecdote or altered a story to make himself look better? I'm guessing yes. (Though it's probably worth noting that the Republicans did pretty well by demonizing the last two Democratic presidential nominees as incorrigible liars, and none of their alleged whoppers were as blatant or easily disproved as this Clinton fabrication.) But this is so typical of the Clintons: not only the truth-stretching, but the brazenness of the dishonesty and the ease with which it can be exposed. Nobody has ever called them stupid, so I'm assuming what went on here was that someone made a calculation that the story would generate political value before it was exposed for the untruth it was. But is this really what progressives want? And can the country really afford another president or would-be president with such transparent contempt for the truth?

An Experiment in Disconnection
I'm out of here again until Sunday, heading to Florida for some sun and March baseball. Not bringing my laptop, no plans to visit Internet Cafes, nuthin. Can't remember the last time I went four days without tapping on a keyboard... should be interesting.

Obama Passes Test; Will We?
By now you've heard about or read about or actually read Barack Obama's speech, given this morning in Philadelphia. Reaction around the blogosphere and, far as I can tell, within the mainstream media, breaks down into two categories: he either gave a brilliant speech that reaffirmed why his campaign has so far exceeded expectations from, say, six months ago, or he gave a good speech that didn't address his immediate political problem, which is winning (or winning back) white working-class voters who might have been open to Obama's appeal but were likely turned off by what they heard about Jeremiah Wright.

(Myself, I thought it was brilliant and easily cleared the bar Sullivan set for him--but if he can't get me with a simultaneously erudite and heartfelt speech about an issue that gets to the core of his candidacy, he probably should just pack it up. So we'll put my response off to the side here.)

Both these analyses are correct, but they both miss a larger point. The speech was, among other things, a challenge to get past the sound bites and out-of-context attacks that have come to characterize our politics and grapple with real, difficult, complex issues. He rejects the demonization of Jeremiah Wright, but doesn’t make him a martyr either; he presents him, I think accurately, as a man who's done admirable things but seen and suffered a great deal from our national legacy of discrimination. Obama essentially condemns Wright's speech--not the man himself, a point that seems to track with what I understand of Christianity--for telling just one side of the story:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

I'm not sure that we are ready for this kind of complexity--for a public person like Wright who's neither a hatemonger nor a righteously enraged saint, but someone trying to serve his community and in some sense speak truth to power whose own experience has twisted him beyond the capacity for objective consideration. Maybe we are; our popular entertainments, at least, are starting to get past two-dimensional heroes and villains (think about The Sopranos). But not in our politics. The right wing in particular has always thrived on caricatures—Democrats are either waffling wimps, lecherous monsters, or serial liars--and the Politics of Extreme Simplification worked to win Bush a second term in 2004. But the left has gone too far in that direction by demonizing Bush—who isn’t evil so much as painfully out of his depth. (His policies might be evil in consequence, but it's absurd to think of him, or even Cheney, sitting there stroking a cat and laughing maniacally like Mike Myers.)

And this brings us back to Obama. He doesn’t present himself as perfect, even if some voices in the media have characterized him as doing so. Rather, he's a guy who seems almost to be thinking out loud, trying to reason through some very complicated problems. That's essentially the story he tells in his first book, and it's watching him go through that process on the page, grappling with fundamental questions of identity, that convinced me he has the capacity to lead in the presidency.

This is a little different from what we've become accustomed to: an image of power and leadership that admits of no mistakes, that lies with ease and even grace when we know they’re lying and they know we know. Obama isn’t a saint and his judgment, though good, isn’t perfect: the Rezko association and the failure to realize that Wright would be a political problem are more than ample proof of that.

So the question might not be so much whether or not we’re ready for a black president, as for one who is recognizably human, with the inevitably flawed nature that implies.

My Torah
I don't remember much from my early exposure to the Jewish religion, but one of the practices I do recall is that devout Jews read the Torah all the way through each year, breaking it up into regular increments that typically fall around the same time every year. (The vagaries of the lunar calendar--which had my brother thinking Passover is this weekend, because Easter is--leave me unsure that each selection comes at the exact same time every year.)

When I was a kid, I thought this was a little weird--essentially like watching the same TV shows over and over again.

As an adult, I watch the same TV shows over and over again.

The Simpsons has been in syndication for well over ten years now; I remember when I worked at NBC in 1996-97, we'd put on the big TVs in the bullpen/office whenever we were still there when it came on at 6 or whenever it was. The Fox affiliate here still airs The Simpsons twice a day, and at this point I must have seen many of the episodes, even those from seasons I don't have on DVD, a good dozen times. Tonight I watched the classic "Beer Baron" episode, which I do have on DVD, while working out at the gym. This one I can actually remember watching on at least four occasions: when it first aired in 1997, at a bar over the head of a girl I was out on a (terrible) blind date with a year or two after that, once on the DVD, and this evening. But I can give you that episode almost line-for-line, so I have to believe the number of actual viewings has to be closer to 15.

That isn't the worst of it. The Simpsons is among the longest-running shows in TV history; they've made something like 450 of them. The Fox station tonight went out of order to show the Beer Baron episode, which begins on St. Patrick's Day; otherwise, they've been airing them sequentially since late last year, from the very first "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire"--aired in the 1980s!!!--to, presumably, the most recent one they'll be allowed to show when they hit the end of the road in early 2009 or thereabouts. The show that I seem to watch almost as compulsively is "Futurama"... of which only about 70 episodes were made, not including the new ones that will debut on Comedy Central this Sunday. (Yes, I'm deeply excited.) Comedy Central airs about five hours of "Futurama" every week, and I probably watch a bit less than half of them; previously, the series played on Cartoon Network as part of its Adult Swim block, and I watched that at least a couple times a week.

Why? I still enjoy the shows, but there's got to be a few thousand better uses of my time. All I can come up with, other than Occam's answer of inertia (and what fun is that?), is that I get some kind of comfort, spiritual sustenance even, from doing it. It's not exactly Maimonides reading the Exodus, but I gotta go with what I have...

Wright's Righteous Rage
The Washington Post offers this selection of "greatest hits" from Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's longtime pastor at his Chicago church.

(At this point, upon reading the link, you're supposed to swoon, faint, and be revived with smelling salts. I'll wait. Ready? OK.)

Obama is taking all kinds of fire for this guy and his "inflammatory" statements, even after responding in print yesterday. I hadn't watched any video of Wright until seeing this earlier this afternoon, and a colleague of mine at the office yesterday, whom I asked about this, said that you really had to see the clips to appreciate why people are getting bent out of shape. Fair enough--though now that I have seen Wright in full boil, I still absolutely don't get what the big deal is. I'd submit that any intelligent and educated African-American man of a certain age, in a position of responsibility within his community, is likely to feel the anger that Wright expresses over the question of race in America--and justifiably so! Is he over the top? Perhaps. But he isn't wrong.

I also watched this lengthy clip of Obama talking with Keith Olbermann last night about the Wright (and Tony Rezko) controversies. I think he sounded the proper note:

Reverend Wright represents a generation that came of age in the ‘60s. He is an African-American man who, because of his life experience, he continues to have a lot of anger and frustration and will express that in ways that are very different from me and my generation. … Part of what we’re seeing is a transition from the past to the future. I hope that our politics represents that future.”

Obama admits that he'll see Wright's sermon clips again, most likely in ads produced and paid for by independent 527 groups, if he wins the nomination. He repudiates the sentiments, but not Wright (who is retiring) himself. And he adds that he hopes to use Wright's statements as a way to talk about race. What I'm guessing he means by this is to make the point that Wright has cause for anger. The aftereffects of de jure discrimination, its structural legacy, continues to harm black America almost a half-century after the triumphs of the civil rights movement: schools remain unequal, housing remains largely segregated by race, and some cultural pathologies of the black community--which Obama has admirably, if not heroically, addressed throughout his career--remain tragically intact. Obama is probably the one person in the country, though, who can tell this entire story, which is a lot more complex than Wright presents it: enduring bigotry and progress side by side, a new world of possibilities (embodied, not least, by Obama himself) and the same old dead ends and traps, pride and shame.

I think it was the United Negro College Fund that launched a campaign several years ago with this brilliant slogan: "Much has changed. Much has not." That's the story of black America in the 21st century, as this white boy sees it. Obama is the man to tell that story, and to move the country to more fully acknowledge the history of discrimination--but not be ruled by it, and not allow it as an excuse for failure to make progress or confront the problems within the black community itself.

But we only get to have that desperately needed conversation if Obama wins. Meanwhile, the circus is in full swing. That right-wing radio people are comparing Wright to the Nazis or KKK, or that Rush Limbaugh—Rush fuckin’ Limbaugh!—is calling him a race-baiter and hate-monger, is beyond silly. But there’s no primary for five and a half more weeks, and the media must clutch its pearls. This story will linger for another week, his poll numbers will dip, and then the circus will move on to another issue that might or might not have anything to do with our crippling financial and economic problems, the desperate need to reform our health care and education systems, the quagmire in Iraq, or any of the myriad other problems that are really at issue in this election. I’m guessing not.

The Power of Shamelessness
About ten years ago, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal was threatening to engulf the Clinton administration and capsize his presidency, I remember thinking with admiration that Bill Clinton had no shame. How else, I asked myself, could this guy go out every day, in the highest of high-profile positions, and continue to do his job? In his place, I thought at the time, not only wouldn't I be able to go in front of cameras and talk about intervention in the Balkans or instability in the Russian economy or whatever was on the table at that time; I wouldn't have been able to breathe. The embarrassment, and the pain caused to those betrayed, might or might not be survivable.

The Clintons' shamelessness served them well then, in a cause I supported. Now they're displaying the same trait in one I deplore--but it might serve them well again. Sending out Geraldine Ferraro as a sort of Archie Bunker with estrogen might drive away some of their already-meager support among People Like Me and You: the over-educated, upper middle classish, online types who demographically if not temperamentally speaking are already inclined to favor Barack Obama. But will it hurt Hillary Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary where the former president now has declared she needs a "big win"? I'm inclined to believe not. Racial resentment is still a powerful motivating force at the polls: just ask whatever's left of Jesse Helms, or his opponent Harvey Gantt. An effort to paint Obama as an affirmative-action candidate could play well in the part of the state that James Carville famously described as "Alabama."

We who oppose this Clinton candidacy and decry the former First Couple as supreme narcissists can wring our hands and threaten to sit out the fall election, though they don't necessarily need us anyway. I do wonder if this sort of soft-racism-by-proxy would hurt Sen. Clinton in November; if African-Americans sit home in large numbers, she'd be sunk. But maybe they wouldn't; part of the Clintons' sick genius is that they frame the world in such a way that we all must be partisans, typically on their behalf. That they resemble nobody so much as the Bushes, who also see the world as two camps With Us or Against Us, doesn't strike me as a coincidence.

The Downfall of "Client 9"
I said late last year that no official I've politically supported had been a bigger disappointment to me than New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, elected in a landslide win two years ago with a mandate to finally clean up our corrupt and dysfunctional state politics. Turns out that Spitzer's disastrous 2007 might prove to be a high point, given new revelations that he's been consorting with ho's:

Just last week, federal prosecutors arrested four people in connection with an expensive prostitution operation. Administration officials would not say that this was the ring with which the governor had become involved.

But a person with knowledge of the governor’s role said that the person believes the governor is one of the men identified as clients in court papers.

The governor’s travel records show that he was in Washington in mid-February. One of the clients described in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, the Emperors Club VIP on the night of Feb. 13.

Mr. Spitzer appeared on a CNBC television show at 7 a.m. the next morning. Later in the morning, he testified before a Congressional committee.

An affidavit filed in federal court in Manhattan in connection with that case lists six conversations between the man, identified as Client 9, and a booking agent for the Emperors Club.

To me, this is about equal parts really funny and deeply sad. My father, however, is not so torn: as a former insurance agent, he's not very fond of Gov. Spitzer, and his reaction when I called him a little while ago made this all a little better.

GET OUT! GET OUT! (laughing hysterically) THAT HOLIER THAN THOU PIECE OF SHIT!

He later calmed down enough to wonder "how they caught that motherfucker," and made in somewhat more colorful prose the point that Josh Marshall just raised on his blog:

We don't know the precise details yet of this 'prostitution ring involvement' on the part of the Gov. Spitzer. But how exactly is it that someone who makes it his business to bust the chops of big wall street titans uses prostitutes? TPM HQ is in Chelsea. And I'm expecting the streets to deluged at any moment now by joyously rioting stock brokers coming up from Wall Street. We do know that this financial industry honchos all have big 'security' offices and have tons of PIs who work for them. I'm frankly shocked they didn't smoke him out before this.

I guess the upside of this is that it makes it somewhat more likely that Mayor Bloomberg will make a run for the statehouse in two years' time, if Spitzer resigns. (I doubt he will, given what we now know, but we'll see; the knives were out for him before, and this won't help.) And as a Clinton supporter, his embarrassment might cause a little discomfort for Team Restoration.

Still, as someone who enthusiastically voted for Spitzer, and still thinks the guy has a great combination of idealism and toughness, I'm more than a little bummed.

Reagan vs. Nixon
At the office the other day we were trying to come up with a Republican parallel to the Obama/Clinton contest, reinvigorated after the Clintons' victories last week in three primaries and likely to be sustained by the shamelessness of the former First Family as well as the media's interest in a horserace. Putting aside the remote possibility of the Republicans, always deferential to authority and ready to fall in line, engaging in a nomination battle that not resolved early in favor of the front-runner, it can be done. You just need an inspirational, potentially transformational candidate on one side, and a very well-known, highly polarizing political institution on the other.

The analogy is Ronald Reagan versus Richard Nixon. It actually could have happened in 1968, if Reagan's first fledgling presidential run had been somewhat more in earnest. The parallels to the battle between Obama and Clinton are almost spooky.

Reagan, like Obama, had come to national attention with a widely seen speech in praise of another presidential candidate; his "A Time for Choosing" was a sensation, and impelled not a few Republicans to wish it was the former actor, rather than the rhetorically impaired Senator Barry Goldwater, on the ballot in 1964. Similarly, Obama's "Audacity of Hope" keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention provided a stunning contrast with John Kerry's overly mannered acceptance speech. And while many view Obama with skepticism for his short resume in elected office--half a term in the U.S. Senate, eight years as an Illinois State Senator--he looks like Henry Clay compared to Reagan in 1968, when he entered the presidential lists a year after winning his first political office as California's governor. None of this even gets into the similarity between the critique of Obama today and Reagan in 1980, noted by the right-wing writer Stephen Hayes (who warns his fellow Republicans not to repeat the Democrats' '80 mistake of underestimating the guy with the sunny rhetoric) among many others.

The Nixon/Clinton comparison is a bit more of a stretch, though Matt Taibbi at least thinks it works. Certainly both were hated by half the country, but supported by a large chunk of their party establishments. Both had eight years in someone else's White House which they somewhat dubiously claimed as experience, though Bill Clinton certainly has been more amenable to his wife's taking credit for Clinton administration accomplishments than President Eisenhower had been for his #2. Both are certainly open to charges of secrecy and dishonesty. (Okay, Nixon's actually open-and-shut; but Hillary more than holds her own here.) Both tried to secure the nomination by calling in chits from the party establishment and leveraging name recognition and brand loyalty from lower-information voters. Both were willing, if not absolutely eager, to kneecap rivals within the party. (What Clinton has done to Obama lines up pretty well with the doubts Nixon sowed in 1964 about Goldwater and four years later about both Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller.) Both offer a platform of "knowing how to get things done" on behalf of a constituency overlooked by the press and elites.

And both seem fueled by paranoia and resentment--at the press (ironically enough, in this respect; had it been Obama who'd lost 11 straight contests, or failed to release his tax returns, the frenzy would have been decisive) and other enemies--more than anything else. Here's Taibbi on Clinton's stump speech:

At one event I attended in Iowa, she railed against the Republicans who tried to crush her over health care, the Chinese who tried to stifle her over her "women's rights are human rights" speech, a pharmaceutical industry that bucked when she passed a law requiring that drugs be tested for use on children, and a press that tells lies about her. The speech conveniently ignored the fact that Hillary (a) takes more money from Big Pharma than any candidate in the race and (b) voted to keep most-favored-nation trading status with China despite her human-rights concerns, and that she and her husband were bogged down in a scandal involving campaign contributions from the Chinese.

Hillary's campaign is and always has been presented as a pitched battle for political survival against bitter enemies, and no reporter who has watched the way she stage-manages every last utterance and generally treats the press like a gang of rattlesnakes (which they are, of course) can possibly fail to appreciate the similarity to Nixon's own troubled, hypervigilant relationship with the fourth estate.

In a much lower-profile contest than either this year's Democratic nomination battle or the tragic debacle that was the Democratic race that year, Nixon beat Reagan, and a host of others, for the 1968 nomination because Reagan wasn't quite ready for prime time and because Nixon didn't face as much grass-roots or institutional opposition within his party as Clinton has in hers. And their contest, such as it was, didn't do any lasting damage to the Republicans for the fall campaign or beyond. From where we sit today, neither outcome seems likely this time around: Obama's pledged-delegate lead and strong campaign still make him the favorite, but the Clintons' desperate scorched-earth tactics are likely to leave deep wounds, to the Democrats' ultimate disadvantage in a year they should be poised for easy victory. The willingness to tear apart others for personal tactical gain could be the signature Nixonian trait.

"Classic 120 Minutes"
Around midnight this past Sunday night I was flipping through the channels and saw a mind-boggler: VH1 Classic: 120 Minutes. This is the refitted version of a show that was, when I was growing up, MTV's nod to what's now mis-labeled "alternative rock," which in those pre-Internet and pre-Nirvana days really was mostly confined to the margins of popular culture. 120 Minutes played videos by bands who otherwise had virtually no national exposure: few made top-40 or Album-Oriented Rock radio, and at best they might get to play one song for a late-night TV audience with Letterman or whoever was filling in for Johnny Carson.

The bands made it, such as they did, through airplay on college stations, touring, little blurbs in big magazines like Rolling Stone or SPIN or big writeups in tiny 'zines now lost to history, at least as far as I know. Between the stresses and difficulties of the music business at the time, and the generally contrarian nature of angry young men (and a few women) in all times, most of those groups soon broke up; interestingly, more than a few of them have reunited in this decade, seizing upon the new abundance of distribution channels for their work as well as, I guess, the middle-aged realization that nothing is really cooler or more satisfying than playing great music with people you love. Oh, and the money: the Pixies, for instance, probably didn't get rich while they were making albums, but they sure as hell did on the reunion tours.

But that's all wide-world stuff. For me at age 13 through 15 or so, 120 Minutes was almost a lifeline, the place I first heard many of the bands that still rank among my all-time favorites today--Camper van Beethoven, the Church, Robyn Hitchcock, Sonic Youth--as well as lesser favorites They Might Be Giants and the Jesus and Mary Chain, and mostly-forgotten acts like Cactus World News, the Dream Syndicate, Game Theory (I probably could still sing you "Erica's Word"), Screaming Blue Messiahs and Scruffy the Cat. Perhaps more to the point, it was a window into the world beyond the 'burbs, my family with its standard-order but still painful dysfunction, where maybe I wouldn't feel quite as out of place. When I was off school or couldn't sleep, I'd stay up to watch; other times I'd set the VCR and look forward to coming home from a miserable day at middle school and watching the tape. (This was also good because you could fast-forward through the crap, which was usually plentiful.)

That said, watching the current version is a little bit like visiting a theme park based on a place where you once lived. The sense of newness, obviously, is gone: all the videos are at least 15 years old. There's no chance of hearing a little gem like Scruffy the Cat or the Cavedogs (a Boston band I once saw play live during college; I've never comprised a larger share of an audience); it's all big-name groups like R.E.M. and The Cure, whom I imagine get at least one play just about every week. Still, there are worse ways to spend a couple late-night hours, and it's a trip to ponder that all these bands that represented the future are now sufficiently back in the rearview to merit the label of "classic."