10 Months Ahead-a-Ya Dere Joe

The Iranian study group headed by fmr Sens. Coats (R-In) and Robb (D-Va) says it's time for war with Iran.

I think Obama is going to inherit the worst political raw materials of any president in history:

1. A War in Iraq with an end in sight is in some respects more difficult than a war with no end in sight, because you have to write the final chapter.
2. A bipartisan study group just said we need to amass soldiers on the Iran/Iraq border. This sounds an awful lot like the Bay of Pigs, which the Nixon Cold Warriors couldn't pull off during Eisenhower's presidency, but managed to almost sneak under the fence of Kennedy's administration.
3. The economy is seriously fucked.

It's interesting to think about perhaps-the-real Bckwdz B, Joe Biden's comments about the intl. crisis. The world will like Obama, but they'll want to see how he responds under pressure. This will be a great, great challenge for him, and one which I do not expect him to pass (nor do I expect him to fail).

High Satire

SNL has risen to the occassion this election.

The Bush-McCain-Palin video, courtesy of MyDD (still can't figure out how to embed).

I feel like it's the cast that makes the difference. There's something about not seeing a comedian do the proverbial "fart machine" sketch from 30 Rock that makes them seem a bit more Swiftian...

Pakistan Hedging Their Bets

Or maybe they feel like they'll finally have air cover if BckwdzB wins...

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-AS-Pakistan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Spend on Shite

Watching Krugman on Charlie Rose right now. He's saying people aren't spending enough, on replacement consumer goods, he's implying through his responses to Rose's follow-up.

This is how pathetic our economy is. The only way to spur ourselves out of a recession is to spend money on shit we don't need, and which we don't produce in this country. We are purely mercantile and service-based. We have no industry or technological innovation creating economic value anymore.

Our shopping mall patriotism is the final house of cards that will make this country collapse. We need to do two major things in the next 10 years:

1. Tax Big Oil in Iraq, after Iraq gets its share. Perhaps Iraq could license out its oil (like the Alaska Territory), and we could impose such high taxes that Big Oil would basically be contracting for our Department of Energy.

We need to do this in order to sap Big Oil profits that will be used to kill Americans' will to crush their technological monopoly on energy, to repay our Iraq-incurred debt, and to offset major government spending on new energy development.

2. Major New Energy Development. This will produce jobs, value, patents, and competitive advantage in the most important economic sector on the planet. We need a Manhattan Project for renewable energy; massive wind and solar building projects; and aggressive trade policy for our energy-efficient cars, including, if need be, the threat of tariffs on foreign cars; and more.

I can't believe Krugman, the Great White Hope of progressive economists, is telling us to buy a new fucking TV. When will we ever start to actually produce in this country? Every Democrat should be saying New Deal in public or to the press at least once every day for the rest of their political careers. Make that a memo, Schumanuel.

Where Do Go From Here, Frum?

Taking a look at Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, original Bush speechwriter David Frum's nearly year-old guide to remarketing conservatism by reforming it. Here's a smattering of his ideas, from the American Enterprise Institute's summary.

*A conservative commitment to make private-sector health insurance
available to
every American
* Lower taxes on savings and investment
financed by
higher
taxes on energy and pollution
* Federal policies
to encourage
larger
families
* Major reductions in unskilled
immigration
* A
genuinely
compassionate conservatism, including a
conservative campaign
for
prison reform
and government action
against the public health
disaster of
obesity
* A new
conservative environmentalism that
promotes nuclear
power in place
of coal and
oil
* Higher ethical
standards inside the
conservative movement and the
Republican party
* A renewed
commitment to
expand and rebuild the armed
forces of the
United
States--to crush
terrorism--and get ready for the coming
challenge from
China

A few great things about Frum, Bush's original speechwriter, and his brand of conservatism here:

1. He doesn't get that conservatism is by definition a state of ideological inertia. Conservativism is on one spectrum the enemy of liberalism, and another the enemy of progressivism.

2. The only passionate phrase in his new platform is "to crush terrorism." Pretty much shows Frum's only use for the modern party is ideological dryhumping.

3. Frum suggests "education and persuasion rather than coercion" when it comes to fighting abortion by pursuing "changes in attitudes and beliefs rather than changes in law and public policy." This is so absurd. I'm a middle of the road pro-choicer, and this is exactly how I feel. But I am a cultural elite, and there aren't enough of me who will jump ship to the Republican Party to compensate for all the cultural populists that would be lost in the break-up of the conservative coalition over shmashmortion.

4. He equates conservatism with the GOP. Check out the cover (link above). The title is written on a campaign button with Grateful Dead dancin' elephants. Overhauling your political philosophy to keep the elephants boogie-oogying isn't conservative, it's preservative.

5. There's a word for Gerald Ford Republicans (the ones who fought your precious Reagan at the 1976 convention) who try to reclaim the term "conservative" with the ideas you seem to have discovered yesterday...

6. Progressive Bloggers!

7. Bleeding-heart liberalism doesn't get much worse than stumping for conjugal visits and "enjoyable" food for prisoners, as Frum suggests in his book.

Frum is out of his mind. He is basically presenting to grab the Republican brand from the cultural populists and the libertarians and preserve it for the neocons. Some of his proposals are more to the left than voter expectations of administrable Democratic policies.

And there's the rub. Frum is basically proposing a Neoconservative Democratic party that preserves the GOP name, a doppelganger which could siphon off enough votes from the Dems to make the cultpop/libertarian remainder of the old coalition competitive against the Dems. "We'll rejoin the Dems if Joe Lieberman becomes the party leader," they would bargain.

This would be a one-shot deal, but as a short-term play to Keep Hope Iran, it's sort of savvy. But if what Frum is proposing now is the New Conservatism, we need a new name for neoconservatism to prevent confusion....

Israelofascism?

Coming Soon...

An essay, of sorts, on the free market justification for public spending on new energy. Basic premise: Big Oil has a technoligical monopoly on Energy. The anticompetitive nature of the energy market is evident from the fact that Americans have been demanding new energy from the highest levels of government for over 40 years, but these demands have come to naught. The reason for the failure is the lack of economic force behind these demands. There is simply no viable consumer alternative to oil: We all want new energy, but can't afford to boycott oil to force a change. Hence, only government intervention will break this technological monopoly, and restore competition to the energy market.

Unlimited...

Abortions. Palin tells crowds that Obama wants "unlimited abortions" (presumably not for himself). This phrasing may have troublesome implications for the future of cultural conservatism.

The doomsday phrase used to be, and may still be (cue that phreneticalyptic opera melody used in movie commercials), "Abortions on Demand." I think this died out when, suddenly, Miley Cyrus "On Demand" became a daily part of L'il Jenny Sixpack's life, and a nightly part of Joe Sixpack's (spiritual) death.

I think that "unlimited abortion" is more abstract, and thus less urgent, that "AOD." And as a rallying cry, "UA" leaves the pro-life platform vulnerable to some fun rhetorical play on the part of Sam's Club sluts who buy babycide in bulk.

First of all, if your problem is the unlimited-ness of abortions in pro-choice America, then it stands to reason that you would be happier if we limited the number of abortions. A person who decries unlimited abortions would presumably be open to bargaining on a set number of abortions that every woman and her uninvited guest is allowed in a lifetime.

(And what about the afterlife? Do all pregnancies come to term in Hell, or do they fail? I would imagine that for some abortionees, Hell would be an endless senior year as a pregnant-fat has-been bearing the scarlet stretchmarks of miscalculated sin beneath her shirt.)

The question, then, is how many abortions are within "-limit-"s?

OH GOD NO NUMBERS!!! Don't worry, pro-lifers, this is where your corporate confederates in the Republican leadership will step in to underwrite an efficient, laissez-faire, Friedman(OH GOD I LOST IT)esque scheme for choosing a proper freakonomical figure. But corporate conservatives must beware the Coasean cabal of Cap-and-Traders calling for credits for kid-killing cuteblockers. Because we all know some unscrupulous speculator would end up monopolizing the market. This evil financier, let's call him George Soros, would undoubtedly use his economic position to spend even more money on ACORN and ending talk radio.

So, Sarah bear, i think it's time to go back to decrying "Abortion On Demand," Comcast be damned.

Socialism Smear: Long-term Failure

In the last post, I argued that the Republicans' smearing of Obama as a socialist (see below for links) will fail in the short-term by failing to grab current Obama leaners, mystifying undecideds, and energizing the Obamaniacs. This will not help McCain win the election... indeed, it may hurt him.

Now for the long-term, which is perhaps more grim for McCain and his partisan buddies. There is a misconception in political campaigns that when you throw a negative at an opponent, it will either stick and bring him or her down, or bounce off and leave him unscathed. The fact is that nothing ever really bounces off. It may not hurt a candidate, but its always there. The question is not whether something will stick and stay, but whether it will stick and stop a candidate in his tracks. The socialism smear will not stop Obama in his tracks; it is something he will carry with him into the White House. And this is very, very bad for Republicans.

A little history is in order: In January 1992, 4 weeks before the Democratic primary in New Hampshire, Gennifer Flowers (Wiki) claimed that she had carried on a 12-year relationship with then Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Bill Clinton. She produced incriminating tapes of phone calls between the two. The Clintons denied Flowers' story and the authenticity of the tapes before 50 million people on 60 Minutes following the Super Bowl that year. However, Clinton did apologize to a politician he dissed on the tapes. Nevertheless, he survived the scandal, won the NH primary, the nomination, and general election. Later, during the Paula Jones deposition, he admitted to having slept with Flowers once in 1977.

During his two terms in the White House, he weathered at least three more sex scandals (Paula Jones, Katherine Willey, and... fuck, what was her name...) and left office with an approval rating of 65%, higher than any post-war president. Clinton was impeached (not removed) for the Lewinsky affair, but this was a product of partisan retribution. Polling showed that the sexual indiscretion did not much affect his popularity. In fact, a week after the scandal broke, he achieved what would become the highest approval rating of his entire administration (69%, appropriately).

I believe that the womanizing president was made possible by the womanizing candidate. People who voted for Clinton in both the primaries and the general were forced to accept the fact that he may have cheated on his wife. And they were reminded of his womanizing, old and new, during his time in office, they accepted it, because it was part of the candidate. His supporters didn't like the negative itself, but all the publicity had forced them to make the compromise, and that--the compromise--stuck.

Remember when Bushes were so fiscally responsible that they violated campaign promises in order to set the stage for an economic recovery? When they nominated Thomases and Souters? When they were all about hittin it n' quittin it in the Middle East? When they claimed victory in the Cold War? Crazy, but there was a time.

Let's go back to the first memory. Poppy Bush created a welcome expectation when he promised in the '88 campaign not to raise taxes. When he did it at president, he took a particularly big hit. Had he not made the promise, or if he had said he might raise taxes in order to survive a recession, then he might have won reelection even with the tax hike.

Of course, Bush didn't have this luxury in 1988. But Obama does have the luxury of becoming president despite the label of socialism, IMO. Therefore, I believe that McCain is preparing the electorate to compromise on Obama's leftiness. McCain is creating an expectation of an Obama presidency that his supporters will have to accept to some degree. Therefore, when policies that McCain calls socialist are on the table, the Republicans will find it much more difficult to work the electorate up against these policies. The McCain campaign's new strategy may mean the difference between a one-term Obama presidency and a war-time/Depression-era/court-packing (see 60 seats) Democratic executive so powerful it'll make George Bush look like Edmund Burke.

The Republicans' Socialism Smear will be a Short-Term Failure

The McCain campaign, through its VP candidate Sarah Palin and campaign surrogates, are beginning to use the so-called "S word" to describe Barack Obama's fiscal platform. Republicans hope that the word can still raise hairs on the back of the American electorate's neck, making it seek comfort in the familiar economic dogma of Ronald Reagan (or Mitt Romney, circa 2012). In the short term, this electoral strategy will fail.

First off, McCain cannot count on swaying many Obama voters to his side this late in the game, no matter what his strategy. If he pulls off an upset victory this November, he will most likely do so by grabbing up support among undecided voters. The low-IQ and/or ADD-afflicted legal adults who are currently responding, "Duh" in presidential polls respond best to attacks that are easy to grasp. The Berlin Wall is no longer recent history--we are, after all, three wars deep into a new historical struggle. Socialism is just an abstract idea now, and as such is beyond the mental pale for undecideds.

McCain could colorize these attacks by painting Obama as Cuban, Venezualan, or North Korean in his spending proposals, but even he isn't that hysterical. Perhaps he knows that the media, Newscorp. included, would close the book on him if he went that batshit. McCain has thus lowered his symmetrical sights, decrying Obama's programs as similar to the spending of our NATO allies (yes, the same whose currencies are destroying us). These attacks will fall flat because they invoke viable First-World alternatives to Bush America, and that's what this election is about, after all. And who in God's name would not want to live in Paris or Toronto?

Just as McCain's new strategy will not influence undecided voters, it will energize the perhaps tiring base of Obama volunteers and activists. In an election where "ground game" is constantly singled out as the difference between winning and losing in swing states (or all states, given the deadly Bradley Effect), energizing the Obamaniacs and first-time volunteers will be key. As Obama pulls ahead and presumably tries to plant himself in the center, these people might hang up their campaign spurs early. Perhaps McCain's long-spewed message (video), now abandoned, that Obama's "Change" platform is political corn syrup has gradually sapped the base's motivation.

But now Obama is "dangerous," "radical," even "anti-American," like Roosevelt, RFK, and Ali. He's not just offering a middle-class tax plan, now he's offering a Brave New World. This ought to give Obama '08 the extra historical momentum his active (and, in pockets, socialist) supporters need to propel them through the finish line. McCain's accusations of socialism has made this a major election, and campaigns, from top to bottom, compete harder the more important the larger the prize.