COUNTRY LAST

COUNTRY LAST

John McCain went to the podium early yesterday to claim credit for having convinced House Republicans to vote for the rescue (aka bailout) bill. 

Oops! 

Which about sums up the McCain candidacy, and why we must at all costs avoid a McCain Presidency. 

He is the "Oops" candidate. Sarah Palin was supposed to rescue McCain from certain defeat but now seems to be doing everything she can to bring it about. McCain himself is supposed to be the adult voice of experience and command but instead turns out to be a car wreck in progress haphazardly moving from one side of the road to the other. 

The reality is there are so many holes in the dyke we call John McCain's presidential campaign that they long ago ran out of fingers to plug them with. Two of McCain's top aides are this week holed up in Sedona, Arizona with Gov. Palin cramming her with information to prepare for Thursday's Vice-Presidential debate with Joe Biden. The bad news is she has so much to learn, there is no way she can do it by Thursday. The good news is expectations for her performance are so low that more or less standing at the podium for 90 minutes will be counted as a success. Meanwhile, back on the trail, the presidential candidate himself careens from one stated position to another (generally opposite) one, more or less in the space of a news cycle. He ludicrously blames Obama for the failure of the bailout and then says we must stop the partisanship. One day the economic fundamentals are good; the next we are in a crisis. In the morning he has saved the rescue plan by convincing House Republicans to vote for it; in the afternoon, Speaker Pelosi has convinced them otherwise apparently because she wasn't nice enough. 

His campaign motto is "Country First" and everywhere he goes, his rallies are festooned with signs saying that and speeches lauding his patriotic bona fides. It seems that only John McCain sacrifices political ambition for patriotic duty. But in fact it's a lie. Every move this past week has been about politics. The faux campaign suspension that never occurred. The hands on leadership pose which was no more than some phone calls and a speech to the GOP caucus, neither of which pushed the ball over the goal line. The "I won't debate until this is solved", which then became the "enough progress has been made for me to debate". The debate itself, where the only thing repeated more than "Senator Obama does not understand" was McCain's visceral condescension. Finally, yesterday's premature claim of bail out success (gotta win the news cycle and beat the other guy to the punch). 

 Here's the worst part. 

 He is bad at this. 

Nothing promised in the last week was even remotely delivered. Not the votes. Certainly not the economic rescue plan. Not the civil campaign he promised when this began (but has consistently abandoned as his numbers have tanked) or the bipartisanship he continues to demand of others while studiously avoiding himself. Not the judgment to pick lieutenants actually up to the jobs they might hold. 

 If McCain runs the country even half as badly as he is running his campaign, we are in big trouble. His first "Hail Mary" was Sarah Palin. The bloom was off that rose in about two weeks. His second one was the no debate pledge. That was punctured in about two days. What's the McCain plan here? A full Novena? 

 John McCain is a war hero who, from time to time, but far less than he or his supporters claim, reaches across the aisle. But he is tempermentally unsuited for the the job of President. He shoots from the hip. He is erratic. For all his courage, he lacks judgment, whether it's the judgment to know when a war should not be started or the judgment to know when a particular Governor should not be promoted or the judgment to know when all the votes have not been counted. And while he may not suffer from what we Catholics call the sin of pride, he suffers from its close cousin -- condescension. That's why he often loses it. It's not defensible passion. It's indefensible arrogance. 

And it is not the arrogance of a George W. Bush or a Sarah Palin. They think they are always getting one over on you.

John McCain thinks he's better than you.

FUNDAMENTALIST

FUNDAMENTALIST 

For weeks, we were treated to the new McCain, a sort of pseudo-populist wrapping himself in a real one from Alaska. 

As this unrecognizable imitation of his former honorable self, the senior Senator from Arizona threw caution (and conscience) to the wind, spinning out Rovian lies that Obama wanted to teach sex education to kindergartners, increase everyone's taxes, and insult pols who wore lipstick. His running mate, who is much better at this, stood by his side, creating the crowds McCain could never get on his own while pretending (like George W.) that decisiveness is an effective substitute for knowledge. 

Then they ran into reality. 

Lehman Brothers went belly up, Merrill Lynch sold itself for a song to avoid the same fate, the DOW plunged, and in the space of forty eight hours, the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve redefined schizophrenia, first promising they would never bail out AIG and then proceeding to . . .bail out AIG. Indeed, in that peculiar form of Communism for the rich that seems to have been invented here, AIG (like Bear Stearns before it, but, alas, unlike Lehman) was deemed "too big to fail". So you and I will assume the risk, and write another chapter in the apparently endless American quest to privatize gains while we socialize losses. 

McCain's reaction to this dizzying array of events was to appear . . . well, dizzy.

First he told us that the "fundamentals" of the American economy are sound, which refutes itself. Attacked, he then claimed that the "fundamentals" to which he was referring were America's workers, which refutes the English language. A little later, his spokesperson announced that McCain had (Gore-like) invented the Blackberry, which refutes reality (assuming one applies the same standard used with Gore).

Resuming command, John took a new approach, saying we need a "9/11-type commission" to investigate the causes of the current financial meltdown. Not for nothin', I guess this is because the Administration and McCain himself had listened so intently to that committee's recommendations that they think a reprise would be good. Around this time, Hewlitt-Packard's ex-CEO (and McCain supporter) Carli Fiorina weighed in with the announcment that neither McCain nor Palin were qualified to run HP (which makes it very clear why he did not chose her for VP). And finally, McCain bemoaned greed on Wall Street (a first for a conservative) and amended his past to come out for increased regulation as the solution to the problem. 

In Congress, before members or Senators have their remarks printed in the Congressional Record, they get to submit new or different remarks under the guise of "revising and extending" what they actually said. McCain is now raising that to new heights, effectively asking us to "revise and extend" his entire anti-regulatory political career. Resembling a balloon losing air more than a politician engaged in the usual spin, the GOP's standard bearer has now variously staked his economic "plan" on ground occupied by denial, dissemblance, delusion, despair and dishonesty, roughly in that order. 

The truth is he has no plan. That is why he has trumpeted a faux-populism, accented by Palin's scary but real version of the cultural variety. For years, the GOP has convinced voters that, in Ben Wattenberg's words, "values matter most." So long as life is protected, gays are excluded, evangelism is institutionalized and moral relativists are excoriated even as they are imitated, the old GOP of rich fat cats had their economic way with tax cuts and de-regulation. The GOP base may have seen its wages and benefits go down, but at least the party of God was keeping the San Francisco liberals in their place (which is roughly one California earthquake from falling off the country). 

All that is now changing. What happens when you gut the regulatory state and invite more risk is that profiteers . . . take more risk. Sooner or later, however, risk matters, and later has now arrived. This, as we learned this week, is bad news for Bear and Lehman and Merrill and AIG. 

But it is really bad news for the rest of us. Bear and AIG and Fannie and Freddie were too big to fail, so now they haven't. 

 As for you and me, it's a different story. 

 In the GOP world, we're too small to save.

POLITICAL MAKE-UP

POLITICAL MAKE-UP

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, "Here they go again."

Late this past Spring, I wrote an email to a friend in Atlanta about the 2008 Presidential election. I said, and this is a direct quote, "McCain really cannot put lipstick on the pig they have created." Last November, I indicted the entire GOP in the same terms. In a blog titled "Back to the Future," I said, and again this is a direct quote, with "the current state of the union, they really have no story to tell, at least not one that can put lipstick on the pig they have created." 

Wow! 

I have now learned that I was attacking Sarah Palin. That I "insulted" her. That my comments were "disgusting." It really can't be the "lipstick" part. Afterall, she has described herself, to accolades all around, as a "pit bull in lipstick." So, I guess it was the p-word that really was over the top. 

In any case, thank God the Republcans have educated me. 

Up 'til now, I was just another hopeless liberal wedded to the intolerant culture of political correctness, too much in thrall to the "fact based" elitist media to fight a war to its someday over the rainbow winning end, too taken by "the Golden One's" soaring rhetoric to recognize a real man when he is running for President. An Ivy League educated lawyer, I was a poster boy for all that was wrong with America, in love with jury trials (and Roe v. Wade, for God's sake), a guy who actually thought Bill Clinton might even . . . have done a good job. 

But apparently, that wasn't the half of it. Now, I am also a sexist trafficing in "schoolyard insults." 

All thanks to my love affair with a metaphor.

According to their latest putatively logical syllogism, since Governor Palin is "the only one of the Presidential or Vice Presidential candidates who wears lipstick," those who claim the GOP's all show and no go campaign is simply an attempt to put "lipstick on a pig" are by definition insulting her. I know they were attacking Obama, who yesterday embraced the "lipstick on a pig" metaphor in describing the McCain campaign, and I swear I didn't give him the line (I've never even met the guy). But these GOP spinmeisters are serious people, at least they tell me they are, so I assume they weren't simply launching a spurious ad hominem at Barack. They wouldn't do that. They must have a point. Sarah Palin must really have been insulted. And though I do not presume to believe that she ever read my November blog (I never met her either, and she was way too busy these last two years getting those earmarks for Alaska, and telling us to make sure our Iraq war policy was right with God, and defending creationism, to focus on the musings of a hopeless liberal), or that she ever saw the email to my Atlanta friend (unless, thanks to the Patriot Act, Bush has seen it and passed it on to her), the undeniable fact is that I uttered these insulting words . . . twice. And if she had been listening, she would have been insulted. And in any case, I was being insulting. 

 And now that I know how insulting I have been, and how insulting Barack has been, I realize there really is no end to this veritable plague of metaphorical sexism now sweeping the country. 

We just didn't realize how bad things were. Or how many insults, over the years, have been levelled at this erstwhile hockey mom.

Take Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example.  At the 2004 GOP Convention, he brought the house down with his defense of the Bush economic policy, telling those who would bemoan it not to be "economic girlie men." Of course, since Sarah Palin is the only current "Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate" who is a girl, the Terminator must have been insulting her. Maria better set Arnold straight, right away, or he'll be off the McCain Inaugural Ball list. 

Then there was Richard Armitage, a former Deputy Secretary of State. Years ago, in defending the Iraq war before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, some of the Senators had the temerity to point out that Armitage had been among those in the '80s who befriended Saddam Hussein. Dick, however, was a stand up guy. He admitted it, saying that "his skirt" was not clean on Iraq. Uh oh! Last I checked, Palin is the only current "Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate" who wears skirts. Wasn't it pretty slimy of the Deputy Secretary to insult her for his mistakes? But who am I to talk. And Barack better not mention it either.

Of course, the news gets even worse for the Democrats. Guess who was the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Armitage levelled his insult at Wasilla, Alaska's then Mayor. You got it. None other than Joe Biden. And he did not take Armitage to task at all, didn't even so much as utter a "You don't really mean to say it that way, do you Dick?" friendly admonishment. Nope. Biden simply let the comment slide. Said nothing. And then, to add insult to injury, Biden actually complimented Armitage for his frankness, told him the country would be a lot better off if there were more honest folks like him, folks (I guess) willing to admit their skirts weren't clean either (even if they don't wear skirts, and Sarah Palin does). 

Oh boy! This could really turn the election. I think Obama should apologize. Immediately. And he should do it with Michelle at his side, wearing one of those stern looks Michelle gets when Barack doesn't take out the garbage, or otherwise acts like the insulting, disgusting guy the GOP says he is. 

And after he says he's sorry, he has to clarify what he meant by the "lipstick on a pig" comment. He needs to tell America that, from now on, "lipstick on a pig" is a clause that will never pass over his lips again. Not once. Instead, from now on, he will tell America that McCain is simply trying to put lipstick on a war that should not have been started, or . . . lipstick on a recession that is killing the middle class, or. . . lipstick on a right wing Supreme Court that is one vote away from gutting the right to choose, or. . . lipstick on a government that can't deliver emergency aid to New Orleans, or . . . lipstick on a health insurance system that works only if you don't get sick. 

There, that should do it. 

And Governor Palin, once again, I'm sorry.

CULTURE WARRIOR

CULTURE WARRIOR 

I have enlisted in the culture war. 

I resisted this choice for three decades. I thought politics was about issues more than personalities, about the economy and peace and war more than testosterone and ego and Rambo, about progress more than resentment, about community more than cultural combat. I thought the Civil War had made us one nation rather than a collection of individual states, that the great war between the states had turned the United States into an "is" when it had previously been an "are". I thought the almost century long struggle for civil rights would redeem the promise of both Jefferson's Declaration and Lincoln's Second Inaugural, that all could be equal and that, in the wake of the fight, the combatants might exhibit charity for all. 

I was wrong. 

John McCain went to St. Paul last week and thinks he bought a ticket to the White House named Sarah Palin. If he wins this election, it will be for the same reasons Nixon won in 1968, and Bush II was able to steal it in 2000. They call it organizing the base. That sounds better than organizing extremists. But it comes down to the same thing. Sarah Palin is just the new face, the new bottle into which the extreme right wingers have poured their old culture war wine, an anti-science, anti-choice, anti-gay, abstinence only, gun-toting "pit bull with lipstick" who rails against federal earmarks in a state that could not survive without them. 

If you plopped down on the planet for the first time last week and watched the Republican Convention, you could never have guessed that they were the people running the show for the last eight years. Speaker after speaker sang the same song -- vote for McCain-Palin and throw the bums out. Someone forgot to remind them. They are the bums. 

This was a convention at war with itself . . . and much of its party's past. Record federal deficets? Throw the bums out and cut spending. From the crowd that did the spending. Corruption in government? Throw the bums out and reform. From the party that gave birth to Jack Abramoff and turned K Street GOP only lobbyists into a fourth branch of government. A government that can't deliver basic services like emergency aid in a hurricane? Throw the bums out. From the same people who sold your government to private contractors, let New Orleans drown, and pretended they had fixed things during Hurrican Gustav when the real hero there was God (the storm was simply a lot weaker than predicted) and the levies are still not big enough to withstand anything worse. 

They did this with a straight face. And no small amount of personal insult. Mocking Obama, Palin claimed that Mayors are like "community organizers", "only they have actual responsibilities". Some Mayors do. She, however, wasn't one of them. Her town of Wasilla, Alaska was run on a day to day basis by a manager. That allowed Sarah the time to go to Washington to get her federal earmarks. Or to study up on global warming, on which she says "the jury is still out". 

The other former Mayor -- Rudy -- was, of course, even better at outright snottiness. That's because it is part of his DNA. One of Rudy's New York City predecessors wrote a book about him called "Nasty Man". And in St. Paul, Rudy did not disappoint. When he took to the podium and assumed his "I'm the Chairman of the Board and two guys have given me their resumes to be CEO" stance, he noted that Obama was a "community organizer" with that "are you kiddin' me" "fuhgeddaboutit" tone that only New Yorkers can pull off. Thus, to a guy raised by a single mom, who became the editor of the Harvard Law Review, navigated the shoals of Chicago politics to become a Senator at 43, and just wrested his party's Presidential nomination from a machine, Rudy gave the finger. 

The Republicans in St. Paul never told us what they would do. They just told us who they are. Every speaker mentioned McCain's imprisonmment in Vietnam and lauded their war hero, which I guess is nice coming from a crowd that doesn't particularly respect war heroes if they come from the other party. Just ask John Kerry. Governor Palin told us she was just a "hockey mom" who turned down that bridge to nowhere. But we now know that "she was actually for the bridge before she was against it", which again is OK with them so long as you are not John Kerry. 

Taxes and terrorism also took their (repeated) turns at the podium. In case anyone had forgotten 9/11, there was a long 9/11 video, not that they would ever politicize such a "We are all Americans" tragic day. The pit bull in lipstick told us Barack wants to "forfeit" in Iraq. Does this mean we declare the mission accomplished and radically draw down our troop strength immediately, even if the war has not been won and the enemy is reconstituting itself? Just like Bush and John McCain did in Afghanistan? I don't know. Sarah left that part out. On taxes, she claimed Barack would not "tax you" but would "tax business", which for the GOP is not a difference. Of course, what Obama said was that he would lower middle class taxes and raise the rates that the wealthy pay. Oh well. 

I particularly liked Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson. Romney claimed there must be change from a liberal government to a conservative one. Maybe he was talking about Norway or Sweden. Thompson sounded like he was forever trying to clear his throat. Which is what happens when the speech you are giving rails against the "Beltway insiders" club, of which you for many years were a card carrying member.

None of this bothered the guns, gays and God crowd. They have been saved. Sarah Palin is 44. Were she to run for President at McCain's age, she would be doing so in 2036. She will be around for awhile. She is their kind of extremist. Right down to trying to fire the town librarian who wouldn't get rid of the books she found offensive. Or the state public safety commissioner who wouldn't fire her ex-brother in law. Pit bull in lipstick? Perhaps. But what she really turns out to be is a my-way-or-the-highway culture warrior, a sort of Bush II in a skirt. An extremist on choice, gays and sex education who calls herself a reformer even as she abuses power, Sarah Palin will fit in perfectly with the peculiar family the GOP has now become, born of the marriage between intolerant evangelical fundamentalism on the one hand and a corporatist K street on the other. She has the same views on execitive power as George W. Bush -- it's hers to abuse, especially if she thinks God is on her side (and she always does). She is also getting quickly up to speed on the GOP art of hunkering down in the face of legislative investigation. In her case, these views and this apporach have caused problems only for a town librarian, a relative, and their various supporters. In Bush's? Well, we didn't hear anything about that at their convention either. 

Some people think Sarah Palin was McCain's best decision. I think it was his worst. This self-proclaimed country-first maverick has catapaulted onto the national scene, perhaps for the next thirty years, an extreme right wing culture warrior. I have seen this movie before and it has a bad ending. Back alley abortions. Torture. Sky-rocketing teen pregnancy rates. International disdain. Crippling deficets. Anti-gay prejudice. Saturday night specials. Dead cops. Bad schools. No health care. And no security. 

The right wing is right about one thing. 

This is war. 

Sign me up.