The Ragin' Cajun

You've got to give the man credit for the tenacity of his spite. James Carville has now written an op-ed about why he called Bill Richardson "Judas," why he's still right about it, and why he will neither apologize or resign.

The Iraq Flare-Up

So, as we all know by now, things are getting bad in Iraq. The military run by the Iraqi government that the U.S. Government has backed is now engaged in a pretty bloody battle with the Mahdi Army, run by Moqtada al-Sadr. I haven't heard anyone say very definitively who started shooting first, but the indications are that the Maliki government is the aggressor, trying to preempt any possibility of Sadr gaining any legitimacy in upcoming elections. Having gotten himself in over his head, Maliki now has American troops fighting Sadr's.

There are two other articles I want to point to. In the first, TPM reports that Iraqi police have begun defecting to the Mahdi army. The second is an op-ed piece by former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, making a case for why and how to get out of Iraq. The operative quote is here:

The impasse in Shiite-Sunni relations is in large part the sour byproduct of the destructive U.S. occupation, which breeds Iraqi dependency even as it shatters Iraqi society. In this context, so highly reminiscent of the British colonial era, the longer we stay in Iraq, the less incentive various contending groups will have to compromise and the more reason simply to sit back. A serious dialogue with the Iraqi leaders about the forthcoming U.S. disengagement would shake them out of their stupor.

Brzezinski's article is flawed in the "how" portion of its reasoning. A lot of his fairly rosy outlook depends on diplomacy that he assumes will be successful. And of course, "shak[ing] them out of their stupor" doesn't necessarily mean that the Iraqis will wake up to reality and all of a sudden start getting along. More likely, as we're seeing now, it will mean intensified conflict in order to beat down the competition as soon as possible once the moderator is gone. U.S. withdrawal from Iraq may mean that Turkey will be more aggressive in Kurdistan, and it's very likely that large portions of Iraq will be directly or indirectly controlled by Iran, and it's almost absolutely true that the departure of U.S. troops will lead to warring among rival groups fighting for territory. The word "clusterfuck" won't even begin to cover it. But Brzezinski also offers compelling reasons to do it anyway, aside from the traditional too many deaths/too much money/diversion from Afghanistan arguments.

• The aforementioned dependency issue. As the current imbroglio demonstrates, the Maliki government has an unfortunate amount of control over where our troops are fighting. It pisses off the Iraqi people and projects the image of the U.S. as the warlords, meanwhile allowing Maliki's people to slack because they know that we'll do the work for them.
• The longer we wait, the worse the fall-out is likely to be. Whereas once we were fighting local warlords, we're now paying them to keep certain areas under control. The longer they have our support and funding, the more powerful these warlords will become, and the worse the fighting will be when we're gone.
  
• AQI. "Locally based jihadist groups have gained strength only insofar as they have been able to identify themselves with the fight against a hated foreign occupier."

This really is a lose-lose scenario. Security in Iraq is a joke, the infrastructure is in shambles, the government is composed of thieves and warmongers, who are competing for control with other thieves and warmongers who are only considered less legitimate rulers because the U.S. is not backing them. When we leave, there will be open war for territory, and a great deal of people will die. The real horror of it, though, is that that's the best option we have left.

News Dump

• Harry Reid's dropping hints about something. I don't know what he knows, but I sure want to find out.
  
  
• Apparently what John McCain hates so much about wars is that we don't fight enough of them.
  
  
• He also loves fiscal responsibility so much that (according to his economic adviser) he plans to drain $2 trillion out of annual revenue and run up the deficit.
  
  
• Hillary Clinton on the Bosnia flap: "I say a lot of things -- millions of words a day -- so if I misspoke, that was just a mistatement." Which to me just says, "When I talk this much, some of it is bound to be lies. I just can't help myself!"
  
  
• The Bosnia thing isn't the only thing she's taking in appropriate credit for.
  
  
• If if if if if if if if if.
  
  
• I'm not a big Carville fan, but I will say two things to his credit. First, he was in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Second, he didn't bother holding back* when it came to Bill Richardson, and he stood by it.
  
  
• Spencer Ackerman does a long analysis of Obama's foreign policy and the team behind it. I think Ackerman gets a little caught up in idealism at the end: Obama could only be president for eight years, and he would have resistance the whole time. Having a vision doesn't clear the hurdles in realizing it. Nonetheless, the important part that is made throughout is that Obama's plan has a great deal of potential to not only change global circumstances, but also the mindset from which we approach them.
  
  
• Well-said (in regards to Democratic defections to the GOP out of spite for their candidate not getting the nomination):
  

  Elections are about deciding who will be the next president, senator, governor or whatever, but they should not be psycho-dramas conducted to allow people to demonstrate their high-mindedness. Those supporters of HRC who cannot bring themselves to vote for Obama or vice versa will a few weeks into the McCain administration wake up and realize that they've been jackasses. Or, at least I hope they will realize it.

*Even if you already know about the Judas thing, that write-up is well-worth reading.

Contradictions in Terms

So I opened my feedreader this morning, and right at the beginning of the list there's a clump of posts from TPM Election Central. The first contains one of the most reasonable things I've heard come out of the Clinton campaign, from Bill himself:

"I don't think any of these people oughta be asked to resign," he said. "All these guys that say bad things about any other campaign, they say, 'Should they resign?' My answer is no; they're repeating party line. They oughta stay right where they are. Let's just saddle up and have an argument. What's the matter with that? That's what America's about, right?"

For the most part, I agree with this. I think there is a certain degree of control a campaign needs to exert over its surrogates as far as staying on message. Barack Obama has painted himself into a bit of a corner with that, pledging to run the cleanest of campaigns, leaving him unable to respond in kind to Hillary Clinton's "Tonya Harding strategy." But it's completely ludicrous that someone as intelligent and talented as Samantha Power should have to resign over one word. Unfortunately that's what message consistency demands in his campaign. People need to understand that a campaign is a group of people, many of whom disagree with each other on various points of interest, but who are supporting a candidate who is ultimately the one who's going to be making the decisions if and when he or she assumes office. All of this mindless calling for resignations is just silly. So thank you, Bill Clinton, for saying that.

Then there was that second TPMEC post I mentioned, which immediately followed the one with Bill Clinton saying that surrogates should be able to speak their mind:

In Letter, Top Clinton Donors Chastise Pelosi For Statements About Super-Delegates

By Greg Sargent - March 26, 2008, 2:34PM

Twenty top Hillary fundraisers and donors have sent a scathing private letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, chastising her for publicly saying that the super-delegates should support the winner of the pledged delegate count and demanding that she say that they should make an "independent" choice.

This level of self-contradiction reminds me of another administration in recent memory. Sigh...

Invective

This article makes its case so succinctly and accurately that I'm just going to quote the whole damn thing.

In a scathing memo today, the Obama campaign describes Clinton’s “history of misleading voters” on issues like—deep breath—NAFTA, the Family Medical Leave Act, her Iraq vote, her foreign-policy experience, Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s religion, and her “35 years of public service.” It weaves these examples into a larger case that voters consider Clinton too untrustworthy to be president, citing as a coup de grace a new Gallup poll showing that only 44 percent of Americans consider Clinton “honest and trustworthy,” whereas 63 percent would say that about Obama.

But they ignore the poll’s most telling numbers: that a whopping 67 percent of Americans think John McCain is trustworthy.

If you’re surprised to see that McCain’s trust rating is so high, that’s probably because you’ve been paying attention to his reversal on Bush’s tax cuts, his recent 180-degree embrace of the religious right, and his close relationships with lobbyists. Needless to say, most people don't know or don't care. However well-known among reporters and commentators, McCain's deviations from straight talk haven’t penetrated the national consciousness. To the average voter, McCain is still a maverick. And the Gallup numbers reflect that.

McCain’s relative strength on the “trust” question could also owe to the relative quietude on the Republican front right now. While Clinton and Obama shred each other on the front page, McCain gets to schmooze donors, write legislation, and take long diplomatic trips, pausing only to lob the occasional hand grenade over into the Democratic bunker. Maybe that’s also why 20 percent of Dems say that if their candidate doesn’t win, they would vote for McCain, according to one poll. Given the state of both contests right now, no wonder voters think McCain has more integrity.

There is a decent amount of panic over the general election that I think is a little overblown, as I think the two months after the convention will be more than enough time to convince America that John McCain is flakier than a Minnesota winter (that's what "maverick" means) and his platform is composed of nothing but war, war, and more war. But I do think that this makes a solid point that not only is Obama the best candidate out there, it would really serve everyone best if half of his own party stopped trying to convince the world otherwise in a futile attempt to prop up the delusions of someone whose entire candidacy has been based on the assumption that the presidency was owed to her by virtue of her willingness to marry well.* The efforts of the Democratic party would be better served slashing the tires of Straight Talk Express.**

*My mother was and is a staunch feminist, and having been raised in that environment, I used to feel incredibly guilty about not supporting the first viable female candidate for the presidency. Then I realized that Senator Clinton, while incredibly talented and intelligent in her own right, got where she was by riding on her husband's coattails, which disappoints me as a supporter of strong, independent women. I'd rather wait and vote for a woman who got where she is on her own merits, not her husband's.

**Figuratively. Not literally. Neither I nor anyone associated with this blog condone any vandalism to John McCain's bus.

Is anyone still getting fooled?

I would like to issue a request to all political writers, commentators, pundits, politicos, party hacks, and armchair experts:

Please, for the good of the nation and the health of political discourse in America, let us all stop making references to The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again."

We get the point. Now let's move on. Please.

Here Comes the Flood, Pt. 7

Okay, I should stop here and take a breath, and get things out of the way.

1. I apologize for naming all of these posts after a Peter Gabriel song. I hate Peter Gabriel, but "Here Comes the Flood" is possibly the only song of his that I like.
2. It is also a really, really depressing song, which is part of the reason I haven't posted much since the Texas and Ohio primaries. I got pretty angry about the results and the resulting avalanche of bullshit from the Clinton campaign that I decided to step back from everything a little bit.
   
3. I've also been bracing myself and praying for the end of the Chicago winter, which is really just a mental strain after a while, and waiting for a break in the meteorological malaise to sink myself into reading 250 articles a day on what's screwed up with America again.
4. Today, as you saw earlier, is not a break in said weather. However, within two minutes of waking up this morning, I was notified that Bill Richardson has publicly endorsed Barack Obama, which put me in a spectacular mood.
   
5. In honor of my good mood, I will give you the gift of levity:
   
   • A cartoon in which Andrew W.K. sings a song about The McLaughlin Group.
   • A man is now pregnant with his own child.
   • In Macedonia, a bear has been convicted of a crime. Stephen Colbert would be proud.
   • Someone sets the lyrics of Pulp's "Common People" down on Archie comics.
     
   • John Arbuckle and I have the same problem with dancing, apparently. Garfield Minus Garfield may have been the best comic strip ever, if it wasn't for . . .
   • Achewood. Achewood has been doing more than its share of keeping me in a good mood since the Ohio debacle. Since this is primarily a political blog, I will share with you a politically related strip. Here is Roast Beef (the cat) explaining to Philippe (the otter, who is running for president) why their friend Todd (a drug-addled squirrel) can't be his running mate.
     

Have a good weekend everybody!

Here Comes the Flood, Pt. 6

• On FISA:
  

  Given the long bipartisan record of wiretap abuse, and given the greater range of possible abuses under modern technological circumstances, it's all-but-inevitable that if we further weaken the restrictions on the White House's ability to act, that abuses will happen.

  It's really baffling to me that Republican members of congress -- and all-too-many Senate Democrats -- don't see it this way. Unlimited, unaccountable power will be abused, and not always in ways that Republicans like.

• Marc Ambinder sums up the Geraldine Ferraro flap in one very, very snarky sentence: "Because running as a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama is soooo easy."
  
  
• Sinbad, the comedian and pop culture historical footnote who accompanied Hillary Clinton on one of her "diplomatic" missions, doesn't see any reason trips like that should qualify her to be president. Clinton's campaign sees this as an opportunity to say flat-out that Sinbad is more qualified to be president than Barack Obama (no really, read the last paragraph).
  
  
• My biggest political pet peeve is when politicians petulantly accuse each other of "playing politics" when they don't get their way. That's what we pay them to do. Democratic voters haven't been getting our way for quite some time, and we don't accuse people of "playing politics," we just get mad at Democratic leadership for failing to play politics well. (That's right, Harry Reid, I'm talking to you.) Finally, someone sent Nancy Pelosi the memo.
  

Here Comes the Flood, Pt. 5: Springtime!

Today is Friday, March 21. Yesterday, March 20, was the first day of spring. Everyone loves spring. It's when the rains fall, the flowers start to bloom, you wake up every morning to birds chirping, most of the animal kingdom is in heat, and so on. It's the sort of thing they write poems about. Lots and lots of poems. In fact, it's such a magical time of year, that I'm going to share some photos with you of what spring means to Chicagoans, who've been stuck inside hiding from the bitter cold, snow, slush, and biting winds for several months now.

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant king;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing.
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

Thomas Nashe (1567–1601)
Summer's Last Will and Testament (1600)

And yet . . .

The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933)
Fisherman's Luck (1899)

Here Comes the Flood, Pt. 4

• As long as I'm blaming Howard Dean for things, why doesn't the DNC have any money? The smaller party organizations have money. The candidates have LOTS of money. But the national party itself is broke. Isn't fundraising part of his job?
  
  
• The House of Representatives charged Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten with Contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the investigation into the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. The Attorney General, being a loyal hack, is refusing to do a damn thing about it. So instead of conceding, House Democrats are actually suing the Attorney General's office. It's about damn time.
  
  
• Please keep reminding all of your Republican friends that John McCain used to want to be a Democrat. Remember? Remember how John McCain used to want to be a Democrat? He gets kind of testy when you bring up how John McCain was going to play second fiddle to John Kerry on a Democratic Presidential Ticket. (Yes, I am spiteful and petty sometimes).
  
  
• He also appears to be a flagrant narcissist, and quite possibly a paranoid. Ah, the party of Nixon . . .
  
  
• Brad at Sadly, No, on the President: "It was only two weeks ago that Bush told us he didn’t think the economy was headed toward recession. The guy’s ability to be a weathervane for wrongness never ceases to amaze." (Note: that article is now a week old). He also reminds us what the current president has inflicted on a national and global level, while the last one was impeached for marital infidelity.
  
  
• Clif at Sadly, No, gives a full explanation of why David Mamet's newfound conservatism is founded on pure idiocy. For the record (and I'm pretty sure I'm alone on this), I think Glengarry Glen Ross was monotonous, abrasive, unenlightening, uninspiring and monumentally unpleasant. I will take Mamet's new declaration to be a strike in my column.
  
  
• Republican Representative Steve King has declared that if Obama were to become president, Al Qaeda would be "dancing in the streets." Lest I remind you what happened last time the Republicans promised us that someone would be "out in the streets . . . singing and flying kites".

Here Comes the Flood Pt. 3: Florida & Michigan

I will attempt to cut through this whole Florida/Michigan re-vote thing as succinctly as possible.

Hillary Clinton only wants a re-vote because it's in her best interest to keep the campaign running as long as possible so she can do as much damage to Obama as possible in hope (ironic, yes?) that she can pull off a miracle at the convention. Her plan for a re-vote that disallows the vote of anyone who voted in the GOP primary does unjustly disqualify Democrats who voted in the Republican primary because it was the only place their vote was worth something.

Obama, on the other hand, will find reason to shoot down any plan, because it plays to Hillary's advantage, to his detriment, and it wastes a whole hell of a lot of campaign money that he could be using to fight John McCain. While his reasons to shoot down Clinton's proposal may be valid technically, his campaign isn't doing anything to come up with a better solution, and that's because at this point, he doesn't want those votes to count. For purely political reasons.

So Obama's people are claiming that Clinton's people are trying to disenfranchise Florida and Michigan voters, and Clinton's people are making the same claims about Obama's people, and it's all a load of crap, because the real people responsible for this are Howard Dean and the bureaucrats in the Florida and Michigan parties who moved their primaries up too far and were too stubborn to change it when faced with the consequences. There's no good reason to be bitching about it now, they had all the time they wanted to earlier. To borrow a sentence from David Weigel, who was observing one of Clinton's appeals, "My reaction was about 6 oz. and took on a greenish-grey milky color."

[Late Addition: Oh, and I almost forgot: if the Michigan and Florida delegates are seated, Hillary Clinton may net plenty of delegates, but her "magic number" jumps from 2,025 to about 2,207.)

Here Comes the Flood, Pt. 2

• I've always believed (and I could just be playing the sucker to his charm) that Mike Huckabee had his heart in the right place even if his head was nowhere to be seen. Here he is praising Obama's race speech, and saying that he thinks Jeremiah Wright has a damn good reason to be pissed at white people.
  
  
• Obama's been after Hillary about picking and choosing which of Bill Clinton's accomplishments she wants to take credit for for some time now, and it's finally going to sink in. More than anything, she wanted to wash her hands of NAFTA, but it turns out her documents from her time as First Lady show her repeatedly making the case for it. Her campaign's fact-check has David Gergen explaining how "unenthusiastic" she was about it, but to me that works about as well as her "I was against the Iraq war so I voted for it" argument. Regardless of her private feelings about it, she bit the bullet and made the argument for a decision she claims now that she knew then was wrong. That makes her more of a hypocrite, not less of one.
  
  
• DMX's thoughts on the Obama candidacy: "What the fuck?! That ain’t no fuckin’ name, yo. That ain’t that nigga’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here." The road to racial healing is a long one, to be sure.
  
  
• Obama gets the support of the Flaming Lips.
  
  
• A very solid point about the double standard on religious zealotry. Barack Obama's pastor says "God damn America" and gets plastered all over cable news for weeks. The entire Republican Party is in bed with fundamentalist nutjobs who say every catastrophe is God's vengeance for not killing the gays and abortionists, and it's accepted practice.
  

Here Comes the Flood, Pt. 1 (or, the cure for journalistic constipation)

I think Code Pink is actually a dadaist collective. From Paul Waldman, via Andrew Sullivan, via my friend Anna:

...this week, which will see the fifth anniversary of the start of the war, Code Pink plans to "step up the pressure," as its leader Medea Benjamin said. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "Code Pink has a full roster of activities planned for the week, including: yoga every morning at 8:30; organic potlucks every noon; nightly movies and popcorn; a bike ride around Berkeley on Tuesday; an open-mike musical jam on Wednesday; and a 'send-off' to the Marines on Friday, when protesters will bring suitcases and pink berets for traveling."

Five Years

It's worth noting that not only was there an opposition to the war in Iraq from long before it began, there was a very, very large opposition to the war in Iraq from long before it began. Five years ago, some 15,000 protesters swarmed down Lake Shore Drive in a peace demonstration. I must confess that I was not there, because I was given a tip beforehand (indirectly) from a Chicago cop who was pretty damn sure some skulls were going to get cracked, and because I am a coward* I stayed out of it. But it was a pretty magnificent display of citizens making use of their right to assembly.





*I was later assured by a friend of mine who spent that night in jail that it did, in fact, get pretty rough later on, which made me feel better. Furthermore, I had already attended multiple protests before then, one of which left me with no small amount of frostbite: it takes dedication to march for any cause in January in Chicago. I came to realize later that even if I were the type of person who feels motivated to block traffic to repeatedly chant glib slogans (which I am very much not), leading street protests against this administration is like using a flyswatter to chase a bear out of your tent.

Parsing at its Finest

I don't really know what I'm doing awake at this hour, and more to the point I don't know why I'm reading articles from a radio site (!) when I have laundry yet unfolded. Nevertheless, I can't wait to link to this article (which is apparently a few days old and I missed it -- thanks Dan for sharing it). Obama's campaign, instead of sending out an email of their own, just borrowed an email from the Clinton campaign and gave it the ol' red pen treatment. For example:

After setbacks in Ohio and Texas, Barack Obama needs to demonstrate that he can win the state of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is the last state with more than 15 electoral votes on the primary calendar and Barack Obama has lost six of the seven other largest states so far -- every state except his home state of Illinois.

[If you define "setback" as netting enough delegates out of our 20-plus-point wins in Mississippi and Wyoming to completely erase any delegate advantage the Clinton campaign earned out of March 4th, then yeah, we feel pretty setback.]

It goes on.

Obama and Race

Regardless of what happens to Barack Obama's candidacy, regardless of his political future, I honestly think that your kids will someday read about this speech in history class. I cannot imagine a more nuanced and masterful understanding and explanation of the racial issues in America today. If there's anyone to lead us on the road to going "beyond race," Barack Obama is that leader.

Kuma's Corner

I'm really depressed this morning. First of all, it's snowing again, which it has done virtually every day this year. I've been at work for two hours now, and my body is telling me it's only 9 a.m., and thanks to a lovely little bout of insomnia last night I didn't get to sleep until close to 2:00 (new time). But then there's the news about Kuma's.

It's the end of an era. About a year ago, a bunch of my friend and I started frequenting this little corner bar in Avondale. It was a tiny little place with a nice patio in the back, an impeccable beer list, and quite possibly the best burgers I've ever had in my life. They played wonderfully loud heavy metal music all the time, and all the burgers were named after metal bands. After the Pitchfork festival last year, the staff told us that Mastodon had been in for stints of six hours at a time getting loaded and eating Mastodon burgers (BBQ sauce, cheddar cheese, bacon, and frizzled onions). And for as great as this bar was, we could show up any time, day or night, and have no problem getting a table. They don't take reservations, but last year I showed up on my birthday in the middle of the dinner hour with a dozen people and it took us about five minutes to put together the necessary table-space. The staff knew us on sight and took care of us, and it was pretty much just an all-around perfect situation.

But, as with all good things, word started to get out. The heavily inked regular crowd started to get diluted by more and more guys who, from the looks of them, probably aren't into many bands heavier than the Dave Matthews Band.* Waits for tables got longer. Then a few months ago, they were on the local PBS restaurant review show "Check, Please!" Since then it's been impossible to get a table in less than an hour unless you show up during business hours or close to midnight. I've taken to getting my orders to go, which is really just a travesty: if you're going to eat a burger called Municipal Waste, you should be in a place where there's a reasonable expectation that you're going to be listening to Municipal Waste.**

Now the hammer is really falling. This month they're going to get a write-up on Playboy's website, which will coincide with the Zagat Survey naming them one of the top three (if not The Best) burger joints in the country. Of course, I'm happy for them that they're so successful, but when I see the waitresses looking like they're about to grab the chef's knives and start stabbing all the customers because they're so overworked, and when I think about the prospect of how impossible it will be to get in there once my beloved little metal bar becomes a damn tourist attraction, I can't help but grieve.



*I'll admit that I'm not the toughest guy out there, I don't have any tattoos, and I generally look like a big nancy. But I've been in more than my share of mosh pits, dammit. I've gotten stomped, beaten, bloodied, and sweated on enough times that I think I've earned the right to have my eardrums pummeled while I eat a half-pound burger with pulled pork and bacon on top of it (the Led Zeppelin burger).

**The Municipal Waste was a special last month, and it was only sort of a burger. It was a hamburger patty served in a bed of chili-mac, and it was covered with another layer of cheese and topped with giardiniera peppers. There was no room for a bun. It was magnificent.

Gloves. Off. Now.

I am angry. I am really angry. I don't want to get into it too much, and I will try to maintain a civil tongue, but I am very angry at Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the same day, she has likened her Democratic opponent to Kenneth Starr, she has said outright that she thinks John McCain would be a better commander-in-chief, and it has been revealed by the Canadian press that it was the Clinton campaign, not the Obama campaign, that assured the Canadian government that all the tough talk on NAFTA was just hype.

I know, mentally, that Hillary Clinton has her heart in the right place, that she has fought valiantly for good causes, and that her goals are admirable, but I'm having an incredibly difficult time convincing myself to side with her. What my mind and my heart do agree on is this: Clinton has no taste, no sense of the reasonable bounds of human behavior, and she has no scruples in her attempts to accomplish her goals, however noble they may or may not be. This has been, and I have no doubt will be again, her undoing.

Last year, I marveled at the caliber of the people competing for the Democratic nomination. Joe Biden's sharp mind, sharp wit, and years of experience were but only confounded by his unfortunate love of speaking his mind. Dennis Kucinich has a passion so strong it is matched only by his ability to ability to bewilder and alienate the mainstream of the American public. John Edwards, having once run and lost on a platform of smiling our troubles away, became a fierce, unrelenting advocate for the poor. Bill Richardson, despite his unfortunate stiffness in formal settings (debates and the like) has experience, skill, and wisdom to address the unique problems of our time unlike any American I can think of. And Chris Dodd, my old favorite, demonstrated the seemingly lost art of making his presence known not by campaigning, but by using his place in the Senate to take bold steps towards ends mentioned by the other candidates only as pipe dreams of what would happen if they were president and had no resistance in Congress. After the dust settled, the two left were a young Senator from my own state who has been dazzling me with his intelligence and his unique approach to politics as long as I've known his name, and a former First Lady who suffered as much at the hands of the Republican Party as anyone short of her husband, and despite her shortcomings, I thought would still guide this country in a generally positive direction. Out of this stunning wealth of talent had come two candidates who I thought could each make a great nominee and a great president.

To put it mildly, I have recently become rather disenchanted with Senator Clinton. It is my intention to put together a series of posts, as well-researched as I can manage, holding up the mirror to Senator Clinton, illuminating her career as well as her character, and making the case why Barack Obama would be an infinitely better choice for our country. This won't be quick, but I intend to have it done before Pennsylvania votes.

If anyone would like to contribute sources, their own words, or very strong coffee to this effort, email me at tim.minutiae@gmail.com with the subject header "holding up the mirror."

I don't intend for this piece to be entirely one-sided or unfair. As I said at the beginning of the post, I know Hillary Clinton has admirable qualities and I do not intend to let those go unnoticed. But I know that given the option of hand-picking a president, she would be a long way down he list, and Barack Obama would be very close to the top. I simply intend to make that case.

Mandatory Smiles

I wasn't going to post today after that avalanche last night. But I was flipping through some old posts just now that I had flagged to look over later on a computer that has a sound card (the one I usually write from doesn't), and found something that, while inconsequential, I had to share. It pretty much made my day.

Moving Forward

After about five and a half hours of this now, I've finally thrown the TV on mute. This will be my 16th and final entry of the night, and I'm a little exhausted. I wish I could say that tonight was like Super Tuesday and that in the end, it didn't settle a damned thing. And in a way, that's true. Obama will likely maintain his delegate lead, if slightly smaller. Chuck Todd has Vermont and Rhode Island canceling each other out, and while Clinton could potentially pick up close to 10 delegates in Ohio but Obama may actually pick up a few net delegates in Texas. The math has not gotten any better for Clinton,* but it still remains unfavorable, and she's got to start winning big margins. The difference is almost entirely psychological. With a couple of good victories tonight, Obama could have put this down and we could have gotten on with a two-candidate race. Right now he's sitting on his February fundraising numbers and his 50 superdelegates to be announced which he hopes will change the hype pretty quickly, but there is no question that this was a setback.

So what do we see in the next six weeks?

Hillary Clinton will ride this wave of good news for about a week or so, talking all positive, beaming with pride, and milking her comeback story for all it's worth. She will do everything she can to attach her reputation to her husband's so she can take the economic issue as far as it will go. When the delegate totals start to catch up with her again, and after Obama wins in Wyoming and Mississippi, she'll go back into attack mode, and we'll have five weeks of that going into Pennsylvania. Then she'll start going on a crusade to get new elections in Florida and Michigan, which would likely be in June and make it a brutal, bitter war of attrition which would be colossally bad for the party, and undo all of the positive enthusiasm built up by the wealth of excellent candidates the DNC offered his year.

Barack Obama will emphasize the delegate totals, and if he's smart, will really get on the economic message as hard as he can. He needs to undo the NAFTA damage, but he needs to do it in a way that puts him in a race against McCain and not against Clinton. He needs to figure out a way to rebut any charges she makes without engaging her directly. What I think we'll see then is an attempt to beat Clinton at her own game: it's said that the only way she can win is by way of the "smoke-filled room," by cutting deals with superdelegates. Her disadvantage there is that Obama has the delegate advantage, so he has the opportunity to start playing to that crowd before she does. If he starts meeting privately with unpledged delegates and making his case for party unity, for attacking McCain directly and inflating his delegate margin, they can start taking Hillary down for him, and he can essentially make Pennsylvania irrelevant. But he has to work that very carefully so it's clear that he's amplifying the vote results, not overriding them.

MSNBC has just called Texas for Clinton, but only by the slimmest of margins, and that's not counting the caucus results, which probably won't be complete until this weekend or later.

The winner tonight is John McCain. The entire Democratic Party just lost: not because Hillary Clinton won, but because the entire primary campaign still has not been decisively won. Right now, two planes are circling over one runway, and each is waiting for the other to run out of fuel and crash so that it can land. Meanwhile, the people on board are out of peanuts, they're trying to get their ears to pop and they've gotten real bored with those Sky Mall catalogs.

That's about as much as I can manage tonight. G'night folks.

*In fact, the math may have gotten much, much worse for Clinton tonight. Let's round this into numbers that are easier to work with. Before tonight, Obama had maybe a 100 delegate lead over Hillary Clinton, with about 1400 delegates left to be chosen/announced for a candidate. After tonight, Clinton only has to find 90 more delegates (to tie him) relative to what he takes, but she only has 1000 more delegates to pull from. With every state she has to battle for, she's got a smaller and smaller pool of potential delegates to draw on that she has to win a larger and larger share of to overcome the gap between them. I don't want to get into it too much, because mathematical analysis isn't my strong suit, but as far as I can see, all tonight did was enable the continuation of a battle whose end will not likely be changed.

Speeches

Clinton:

• After she rattled off that list of states, I expected a big "heeeeyaaaaaaaaaaah!" I guess she's learning from Howard's mistakes.
• Her audience is turning "yes we can" into "yes she will," which I think is pretty clever. I really wish she'd let up on the "just a speech" rhetoric though. There's nothing wrong with being able to give a good speech. Some might actually consider it a good thing. Also, please note that she's talking about that in an inspirational speech where she's promising us the moon.
• That was actually really succinct. Good. Victory speeches don't need to go on for 45 minutes.

Obama:

• Obama gives his congratulations to Clinton and then goes right back to the delegate count.
• He's not really doing much here to counteract his reputation for platitudes. Hillary's speech was no better, but he's not accusing her of empty rhetoric.
  
• Someone must have given Obama the memo about keeping it brief.

Ohio

MSNBC calls Ohio for Clinton. That one's big.

Late night.

Reports are that Cuyahoga county in Ohio won't be fully counted until 4:30 a.m. Eastern. I will not be up that late. I'll check up on it again before work tomorrow.

Chuck Todd explains that the huge leads that Clinton is showing now isn't indicative because the major urban centers are almost completely uncounted. Also, Houston remains mainly uncounted in Texas. Obama's going to get a lift out of that, but we'll see if it's enough.

Ugh.

John McCain is apparently using "Johnny B. Goode" as his campaign song. I cannot emphasize my eye-roll enough.

Boondoggle

It looks like this stuff in Texas is going to hit the fan in a big way:

There's too much confusion and disinformation in the air to know what to believe and which side's doing what, but the reports we're getting from on the ground in Texas sound pretty wild: doors getting shut early with various folks locked out, various kinds of gaming of the process.

I will not make any references to There Will Be Blood. I will just insinuate the reference, like I just did.

Rats & the Sinking Ship

Howard Fineman just indicated that if Hillary wins Ohio but loses Texas, some senior staffers want out.

The Fix

This report of the Clinton campaign trying to rig the Texas caucus appears to be gaining traction. Apparently she's on an "emergency conference call" talking to lawyers about it. I wasn't sure, from the MSNBC chatter, whether that's to defend her or try to pin it on Obama.

UPDATE: She's saying the Obama camp was the one doing it. Obama is taking the fight to her, though, even on her own conference call.

Rampant Speculation

It's looking, from the early results, that Clinton will take Ohio and Obama will take Texas. Everyone I'm talking to is asking me if Clinton will force this to the convention. The answer is I don't know. If Obama keeps the delegate count close or even in Ohio, takes Texas, and then announces 50 new superdelegates tomorrow, she's in trouble. That's when I think a lot more superdelegates will start moving, and she'll get pushed to move out by the elders. If she keeps the delegate count even in the states that vote today, those requests for a bow-out will have a lot less impact.

The math is still against her. The question is whether she's determined to get this now, or whether she's patient and is willing to help achieve unity within the party. I think she's smart and I hope that will lead to the latter, but I fear that her temperament may lead her to the former.

Huckleberry

I heard this little fly buzzing around, and I kept trying to swat it. Then I realized it was Mike Huckabee, and he was announcing that he would be conceding his defeat tomorrow. Then I squished him, because that's old news and I don't care. He's going to bow out, and Dubya will endorse McCain.

Footsoldiers

Once again, Barack Obama proves that his campaign has better presence and follow-through. He's got workers in precincts figuring out ways to get extra ballots when they're needed, even when the election board isn't being responsive.

Rumors

There's a rumor that Barack Obama has been holding back the announcements of support from a small army of superdelegates, as well as stellar fundraising numbers, until after tonight. The question is whether it will be the salt in the wound from tonight, or whether it'll be damage control to immediately change the focus of the discussion in the media.

Delegate Math and the Richardson endorsement

Regardless of what you think of Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Joe Scarborough, Chuck Todd's dedication to detail in delegate math is good enough reason to stick with MSNBC over anyone else. The man is a genius. As he points out, even if Hillary Clinton wins Ohio in the popular votes, she can still lose in terms of delegates.

Howard Fineman reports that Bill Richardson will endorse Obama if he wins both TX and OH, but if Clinton wins them, it's still wide open. If it's a split, he thinks the party leaders will encourage her to bow out.

[Update: Todd is going over the Texas math again, and how easily Clinton could lose on delegates. Obama chose where he was going to campaign. He's just run a smarter campaign than she has. Other than the Canada/NAFTA debacle, the Obama camp has run his campaign without any serious errors. Hillary's still talking about how unfair caucuses are. Don't argue the rules, beat the rules.]

Vermont.

In MSNBC's tradition of instantaneously projecting a winner, they have called Vermont for Obama.

MSNBC vs. Kerry

Olbermann & Matthews are talking to Kerry. If Kerry had been this passionate and direct when he was running for president, he'd be running for re-election right now. He's got his talking points dead on, he's got all the numbers, he's got all the reasons Obama should be president. I never liked him so much.

All Night Long (Covering the Primaries with Lionel Richie)

Thanks to the generous efforts of Matt and John over at Laurie's, I'm actually home tonight to follow the election returns tonight, so expect a flurry of entries tonight. I've got a plate full of shawerma from Sultan's, a bottle of delicious Chicago-brewed beer (312), and a raincoat to protect me from Chris Matthews' flying spittle. I'll be hitting refresh on a number of different websites with regularity bordering on compulsive, and hopefully provide you with a running commentary that you will likely not want to read tomorrow morning because all you really cared about was the numbers at the end of the night. Deal with it.

Minutiae

I've been doing a lot more long-form posts lately, but since everyone seems to be circling like buzzards over what's going to happen with the elections today, and since I'm so determined not to make any predictions right now, it seems like as good a time as any to dig into the minor stuff that I flagged earlier but never posted.

• Remember that episode of The Simpsons where the Krusty doll was trying to kill Homer? No longer quite so fictional. Elmo doesn't have a "good/evil" switch. The question is, does this make that episode more funny, or less?
  
  
• Gary Gygax, one of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, has died. I never got into role-playing, but a few years ago a friend of mine made a case (succinctly reiterated in that post) for role-playing as one of the best outlets for creativity around, since you can essentially create your own reality. It was fairly convincing at the time, but we both had a few drinks under our belts, and I suspect that might have made me a bit easier to persuade.
  
  
• A very thoughtful post on libraries, freedom of information, sex offenders, the overpopulation of prisons, and the legalization of marijuana. Surprisingly, those seemingly diverse issues come together in a strikingly thoughtful ethical discussion. Thanks to Anna for sharing.
  
  
• Reason tipped me off to a spectacular quotation from William F. Buckley, articulating very clearly why he's so far above and beyond some of the dunces that call themselves his followers.
  

  "Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great."

  
  For as staunch of a liberal as I am, I acknowledge the place that conservatism has in the political discussion, and I value the creativity inspired by amicable disagreement. There needs to be a conservative movement to make sure the baby stays where it is when we dump the bathwater. But Buckley realized that you have to listen to your opponents, otherwise it's not a debate, no one learns anything and everyone who has to abide by the decisions of the bullheaded fools making them loses. Of course, as Harry Reid taught us, willingness to listen to your opponents is not the same as taking orders from them. Why does he still have a job?
  
  
• If this is what job training is like in Salt Lake City, I am really glad Mitt Romney won't be president. I'm alright with filling out a W-2 and giving a copy of my driver's license when I'm hired somewhere, but I don't want that to be accompanied by any bamboo under my fingernails.
  
  
• Don't blame outsourcing for the economy. Blame the war in Iraq.
  
  
• The Mukasey Paradox: A president can do no wrong.
  

Telecom Immunity

If you don't like the idea of people you don't know, who work zealously for an administration hellbent on little else aside from attaining power, listening to your telephone conversations, you absolutely must read this article. I know I've touted the Dan Froomkin before, but this one is important. He breaks down, point by point, the Administration's argument for giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies who surrendered private data without a warrant. Because it's important, I'll give you the ten cent summary:

Bush's case for telecom immunity:

1) We told them it was legal, and they helped us out because we said we needed it as a matter of national security. It wouldn't be fair to hold them responsible because we told them it was legal.

2) Lawsuits will inevitably lead to disclosure of information about the program that needs to be kept secret from the enemy.

3) If we don't protect them from breaking the law to help us in the past, they won't break the law to help us in the future.


Counterpoint:

1) The suits in question specify that the plaintiffs will only seek damages if it is determined that the surveillance was conducted on "millions of people, not just communications involving terrorism suspects overseas." If anyone remembers the Specter-Whitehouse amendment to the FISA bill a few weeks ago, it suggested that since the government did assure the telecoms that what they were doing was legal, the government should take their place as the defendant.

2) Long before story was broken, terrorists were likely expecting that their phones were being tapped. The real question is the scope of people who aren't terrorists whose phones were being tapped. Furthermore, any evidence that must clearly be kept secret can be kept out of the public record.

3) If we don't protect them from breaking the law to help the government in the past, it means that they will only turn over information legally, with a warrant to do so.

Re-voting in Florida

Florida's governor, Charlie Crist, is now suggesting that Florida may have a new Democratic primary, if the Democratic National Committee can be persuaded to seat the delegates from this second primary. Now, I personally think this would be a great idea. I never liked the idea of stripping states of delegates, particularly states as important in the general election as Michigan and Florida. But this announcement, coming the day before the extremely important primaries in Texas and Ohio, from a governor who endorsed McCain (and may have already been offered the VP slot) is highly suspicious.

On a purely innocent level, this works out well for Crist because he's doing a service for democracy, and it serves to put him in a positive light in the eyes of Democratic voters in his state. Everybody wins, right?

On the other hand, this would be a brilliant play from the McCain campaign. If Florida gets to vote again, a lot of the significance of the Texas and Ohio primaries wears off. Even if Clinton loses, she still has a good shot in Florida and could potentially make up a lot of ground there. If that happens, the Democratic primary, and all the intra-party bickering that comes with it, can be extended for months, making the party look disorganized and taking both Hillary and Obama down as they continue to tear into each other's records. McCain then gets to focus on making himself look good, while the Democrats do all the dirty work for him. Furthermore, if Clinton can manage to come back and take the nomination, McCain gets a more favorable match-up. Polls are showing (and I know it's really early) that Obama would run a lot stronger against McCain than Clinton would. It has frequently been said that Clinton would discourage a lot of Democrats from taking the time to vote, and would significantly mobilize Republicans just to vote against her. With Obama as a nominee, independents shift Democratic. With Clinton as the nominee, they go to McCain, which is pretty vital since his base doesn't like him much.

If Crist pulls this off, then he just earned his meal ticket as John McCain's running mate.

The Polls

Tomorrow is considered by many people (myself included) to be a make-or-break day for the Democratic presidential candidates. New poll data is coming out every fifteen minutes, and everyone is trying to forecast what's going to happen tomorrow. So you don't have to sort through dozens upon dozens of polls, I'll boil all the fat off and tell you what we know:



Nothing. We know nothing. Don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Unless one of the candidates sprouts horns and a tail and starts eating babies live on CNN, we won't know anything definitive until the votes are actually cast and counted.

Hearsay and Conjecture

Before I reveal my doubts here, I am going to offer an entirely charitable and completely speculative take on what I suspect happened between Obama aide Austan Goolsbee and his friend at the Canadian consulate. I have no evidence to back up any of this:

Barack Obama has been offering a decent amount of tough talk about NAFTA and inadequate protections for American workers and the environment, and wanting to renegotiate. Goolsbee, wanting to be diplomatic and assuage any Canadian fears that they were about to get screwed, assured him that while Obama would want to renegotiate NAFTA, he would be seeking a mutually beneficial solution, and not strong-arming Canada into something that would be detrimental to their interests. Obama is not a muscle sort of guy. His history indicates that he strives to say all the right things so that everyone leaves happy. Are the things Obama is saying on the campaign trail about worker protections true? Yes. Is Obama so singularly focused on this that he'll fleece the Canadians? No. There is always more nuance* in actual policy execution than in campaign rhetoric, and that's all Goolsbee was trying to communicate.

Ambinder has a similar analysis here.

On the other hand, if the stories as reported are indeed accurate, it would not be the first time that a presidential candidate has meddled in foreign affairs in order to provide for conditions favorable to their victory in the election. It is not impossible, and despite my oft-professed admiration for Senator Obama, I won't rule it out. If that is the case, it was a colossally stupid maneuver and if Obama is as smart as I think he is, Goolsbee will probably be rifling through classified ads with a highlighter before voting begins on Tuesday morning.


*The notable exception to this rule is our current president, whose "nuance" is more in line with that of Chairman Mao: "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." While Bush's evasions of any sort of responsibility for his actions have given new meaning to the word finesse, the actions (in domestic policy as well as foreign) themselves are about as subtle as getting pistol-whipped, and the man has no interest whatsoever in cushioning the blow for anyone who may disagree with him.