REDS

REDS 

In the last week of this interminable Presidential campaign, the candidates are focusing entirely on seven erstwhile red states (Florida, Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia), all of which went for George W. Bush in 2004, and the red portions of one blue state (Pennsylvania). Ordinarily, this would be very good news for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. With the battle joined on territory the enemy must win to prevail, the odds are way too long that the GOP can come all the way back and steal victory from the jaws of defeat. 

But there are dissenters. 

The theory of the McCain campaign is that, at the eleventh hour and fifty ninth minute, the natural order will reassert itself; that most of these states will come home to the GOP; and that John McCain will be the nation's 44th president, albeit by a narrow margin and probably without a popular vote victory. The legion of pundits who thought otherwise will have serious egg on their face; the Democrats will psychologically implode given the enormity of their collapse; and a new corps of political consultants will take a bow, having demonstrated that the politics of fear and smear really works. You just have to believe. 

This is John McCain's dream. 

It would also be America's nightmare. 

To avoid it, I end this missive to all in favor of a simple message for the REDS. 

Don't do it. 

You are much better than the party you have been voting for, and you deserve much better than they have given. 

In 1980, Ronald Reagan famously asked: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Ask yourself the same question today. 

 Is your job more secure? Is your country? Is your retirement assured? Is your 401(k) worth more now than it was then? Can you afford to get sick? Are you even insured? Can you afford to send your kids to college? Are they in a school good enough to get them into the best college to which they can gain admittance? 

If your city or town is wracked or destroyed by a hurricane, will your government be there to help you? As your environment warms, is the government doing anything about it now? If you own a small business, or work for one, can the business get credit? If you declare bankruptcy, will it provide real relief, or will you still be saddled with that credit card debt, or those medical bills? Can you still afford the mortgage?

If you can't answer yes to way more than half these questions, there is no reason for you to elect John McCain and Sarah Palin. They call themselves mavericks. In fact, they are ventriloquists. And they think you are their dummies. 

After you have answered all those economic questions (and the single national security one), don't stop. 

Ask yourself if you know anyone who is pro-choice, or gay, or who lives in a "blue" state, or went to a good college? Do they go around praising the destruction of fetuses? Are they really anti-family? Just because they want their own? With someone they love? Are they all elitists? Have you ever seen a New Yorker get up and give his subway seat to a stranger who needed it? Did you know that all those elitists mobbed the hospitals on 9/11, donating so much blood that the hospitals had to stop accepting donations? 

If your kid got into Yale, would you tell her not to go because you were worried she'd become one of them? If she got straight A's there, would you tell her not to come home? Not to run for office in her home town because she had lost touch with her roots while studying in New Haven? 

Did you ever get a traffic ticket you knew was wrong? Did you fight it? In fighting it, did you think it wrong that the police had to actually prove you violated the law? Did you insist they do that? Were you a radical for doing so? Anti-American? Anti-cop? 

I know you are not a "socialist" and that McCain and Palin have tried to make this election something of a referendum on your aversion to that ideology. 

So here are a few more questions. 

Do you believe in socialism for banks? Or hedge funds? Or investors who purchased mortgage backed securities written on sub-prime loans that now have no value? McCain and Palin believe in all of this. Oh, I know, they don't call it socialism. But it is. They are willing to use your dollars to bail out the banks. They want to redistribute your wealth to the hedge fund operators or stock issuers who made the lousy bets. They think this will make it better for all of us over the long haul, and it probably will. If you agree, then you too may be a socialist. 

Just like McCain and Palin. 

When all is said and done, ask yourself if you think America is on the right track. I know 90% of you think she is not. (I know this because it is what you tell the pollsters when they ask. You don't walk away. Or refuse to answer their question. Or hide your views. Which, by the way, is what the McCain campaign says lots of you do when you are asked who you intend to vote for.) 

So . . . please . . . all of you out there in red America. All of you who know things are not going well. Who know we can do a lot better. Who know the whole promise of America is that tomorrow can be better than yesterday. 

Vote for Barack Obama. 

I promise you. 

He doesn't bite.

THE POPULIST MIRAGE

THE POPULIST MIRAGE 

She praises the "pro-America" parts of America. He turns an unlicensed tax delinquent into "Joe the Plumber." She touts a "you betcha" "doggone it" anti-intellectualism decrying the putative snob who "pals around with terrorists." He recasts his opponent as a socialist who wants to "redistribute wealth." She disdains the "gotcha" media who never actually "get it" in the real America beyond the beltway. He claims she is "absolutely" qualified to be Commander in Chief on day one by lambasting those who disagree as liberals who can't abide a pro-life woman from the tough tundra. 

Welcome to the Republican Presidential campaign, circa 2008. 

All populism all the time. 

If you are wondering what this has to do with the economy or Iraq, don't waste a lot of time working the question over. The answer is simple. 

Nothing. 

Back in law school, I read a book called "The Populist Moment". It was largely about the agrarian movement of the 1870s and 1880s. That movement was grass roots and creatively practical. With its democratic (small "d") participatory ethos and willingness to experiment with cooperatives and the inflationary bromide of free silver, it connected to people's lives. While it did not win a national following, and was fatally tainted in the old Confederacy by Jim Crow, it was in many respects a precursor to the first wave Progressivism of the early 20th century. In other words, it had some heft. 

The McCain version is not even a pale imitation. Exhibiting a weird lack of verisimilitude, it pretends we are still fighting Communists (hence the "socialism" charge)or the Weathermen (hence the Ayers brouhaha) or some citadel of left wing anti-American thought alive and well in the Ivy League (hence the anti-intellectualism). It rails against the media in the age of Fox, the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch, and right wing radio. It pretends to be under siege when its captains have been running the show for the last eight years and its ideology has been ascendant for the last thirty. 

And now, even some of the old GOP warhorses are calling them on it. 

Last week, Christopher Buckley endorsed Barack Obama and yesterday General Colin Powell did the same. Each endorsement was earth shattering for the GOP, albeit in different ways. 

The Buckley flight from the right was largely a cri de coeur from the grave of his father. Whatever William F. Buckley was, anti-intellectual was not one of them. He was very smart, and really liked very smart people. He would never drop a g or lapse into some uncharacteristic slang, and there was never a multi-syllabic word he would not use when a simpler alternative was available. Generations of would-be students have improved their SAT scores merely by listening to Buckley's diatribes on "Firing Line". He founded "National Review" as a rigorous intellectual alternative to the then available liberal offerings in "The New Republic" or "Nation". He thought conservatives were smarter, not just snarkier, and he was willing to try to prove it. He did not avoid debates. He loved them. 

Powell's endorsement was sadder. It had the feel of an apology. For the absence of WMD (without which, Powell candidly admitted, there would have been no Iraq war). For having given his Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to a man who turned out to be a dangerous bumbler. Perhaps for not having spoken up sooner. But finally, and unmistakably, for what the Republican Party has become -- a citadel of extremist pablum. He wondered why McCain kept telling us the election should not be about a "washed up terrorist" even as his party made millions of robo-calls linking Obama to Ayers. He questioned McCain's "erratic" approach to policy and stated point blank that Palin was not qualified to be Commander in Chief. He also said later in the day that he was still a Republican, more or less serving notice on the right-wing that it does not get to determine membership . 

Each in their own ways, the Buckley and Powell endorsements define the huge gulf between the GOP of today and . . . its past. Between the party of Palin and the party of not just Lincoln but also Reagan. In fact, perhaps the oddest feature of this years GOP spectacle is how much it does not have in common with the career of its putative hero. Like Bill Buckley, Reagan invariably thought it better to be governed by the first two hundred names in the Boston phone book rather than the Harvard faculty. But also like Bill Buckley, Reagan read voraciously, wrote large parts of his own speeches, and always debated (Bobby Kennedy called Reagan his toughest debate opponent ever). He was no dummy and did not pretend to be one or to appeal to one. In his America of individual responsibility and Horatio Alger possibility, the picture of progress was Lincoln under a tree reading a book. 

But that's all gone from this year's candidates. They have largely substituted insult for analysis, sass for smarts, and Rove's base for Reagan's coalition. Despite unbridled appeals to average folks, their words ring hollow. Everyone knows Communism died in 1989 and the Weatherman a decade and a half earlier; that neither a son of William Buckley nor an ex-General named Powell would endorse a share the wealth socialist or a "pal" of terrorists; and that labelling opponents as effete won't create economic recovery, fix the health care system, or send the kids to college. 

Here's another thing they know. 

Joe the Plumber isn't making 250k. 

This is not a moment. 

It's a mirage.

McCAIN FINDS HIS INNER JOE . . . McCARTHY, THAT IS

McCAIN FINDS HIS INNER JOE . . . McCARTHY, THAT IS 

He can't talk about the economy. It is tanking. He can't talk about "victory" in Iraq. Even the Generals on the ground won't use the word. He can't talk about his running mate. On that subject, everyone is talking about Tina Fey . . . or Katie Couric . . . or the backyard theory of foreign policy experience (if you can see a foreign country from your backyard, you have foreign policy experience). 

So now John McCain and his Veep to be have dusted off a leaf from Joe McCarthy's old playbook. They are smearing Obama as someone who "pals around with terrorists," in this case the aged but erstwhile Weatherman from the days of rage, Bill Ayers. 

The Weathermen were bad people and Bill Ayers, circa 1968, was a very bad guy. Bombs blew up. People died. Some, like Kathy Boudin, went to jail. And belonged there. Since then, Ayers has apparently reformed and become a professor of education, consulted by, of all people, the first Mayor Daley's (no friend of '60s radical's) son, the current Chicago Mayor. In that guise, Ayers happens to have been on a board on which Obama, for a time, also sat. The board helped distribute money donated by the Annenbergs, Reagan lovers to a man (and woman) who apparently had no trouble with the fact that this particular ex-Weatherman was on the board. 

But all that is not good enough for John McCain and Sarah Palin. Apparently, Barack has consorted with a domestic terrorist and should therefore lose the election, now less than thirty days away. 

The philosopher George Santayana once said that "Those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it." Would that were true. John McCain has studied enough history to now know very well that he is repeating it. And the history he is repeating has an ugly name. 

It is Joe McCarthy. 

In the '50s, McCarthy terrorized America's political discourse and politicians with his wild charges that everyone from the Chief of Staff of the Army to unnamed State Department employees to General Marshall was either a closet Communist or was coddling those who were. He eventually blew himself up on television (both with Edward R. Murrow's assistance, and all on his own in the famous Army/McCarthy hearings, where a nebishy Boston lawyer appropriately asked whether he had any sense of decency; as it turned out, he didn't). Not, however, before he had ruined more than a few lives, on his way to ruining his inebriated own. 

It is therefore more than a little sad that John McCain is now channeling his inner Joe McCarthy. And that his friends are not calling him on it. 

McCain's charge is as ludicrous as were McCarthy's, in fact even more so. Barack Obama was eight years old when the Weathermen were active. He has condemned their actions (as have we all). He did not put Ayers on any board. He doesn't "pal around" with Ayers. Whether Ayers is entitled to rehabilitate himself is a separate question, but it generally is the American way. Whether Ayers is still an extremist is also a separate question. But the answer is irrelevant to Obama's qualifications to be President, just as S & L swindler Charles Keating's subsequent rehabilitation is irrelevant to McCain's. In fact, the Keating case is more problematic for McCain than the Ayers case is for Obama. Unlike the eight year old Obama at school in Indonesia, McCain actually tried to help Keating by going to authorities and asking about their on-going investigation. The Arizona Senator was later reprimanded by the Senate for doing so and has said this was the low point of his career. 

But here's the bad news. 

McCain just went lower. 

And so have his supporters. 

I haven't heard anything from Joe Lieberman on this issue. One would think a "conscience of the Senate" quick to point out the moral failings of Bill Clinton in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal would have taken to the podium to upbraid his man on the illegitimacy of trotting out McCarthyesque smears. Maybe Lieberman will get around to saying something. But he should know that, when it comes to McCarthyism and the evil it creates, sooner is always better than later. 

The silence of Bush and Cheney also has been deafening. Ditto, that of the right wing radio echo chamber. I do not expect any of them to criticize McCain. Bush himself was silent as his seconds smeared McCain during the 2000 South Carolina primary with charges of fathering an illegitimate child. And Limbaugh et al. have been chomping at the bit for some time to smear Obama, and will gleefully do so from now until election day. 

The old John McCain would never truck with this sort of despicable gutter politics. In fact, he viscerally and aggressively deplored it. 

But that was then. 

And this is now. 

Johnny, we hardly knew ye.

THE DAY AFTER

THE DAY AFTER 

Here's the scary part.

Long after her "blame the media" campaign has ended . . . Long after everyone has forgotten her inarticulateness with Katie Couric and her "deer caught in the headlights" look with Charlie Gibson . . . Long after Russia's proximity to Alaska has ceased to be Exhibit A on the list of foreign policy credentials we seek in a chief executive . . . And long after Tiny Fey has stopped making us laugh with her spot on impersonations (some of which involve nothing more than repeating verbatim what was actually said) . . . 

Sarah Palin may have to do the job. 

In fact, in thirty-four days, she may have been voted into the job and two and a half months later, she may actually have it. 

And right now, from everything we know, she can't do it. 

Here's why. 

Ethics 

Governor Palin and Senator McCain have made wild charges that the questions posed to Palin and the manner of press inquiries have violated "journalistic ethics." In the last segment of her interview with Couric, Palin herself noted that she had a college degree in journalism and was surprised by the "ethics" of the profession's current members. McCain has reprised a version of this critique, accusing the media of lobbing "gotcha" questions at her, including Gibson's question on whether she agreed with the Bush doctrine and one oddly enough from a voter inquiring (the second time she was asked this) about her views on whether the US should cross the Pakistani border to attack terrorists without first clearing it with the government of Pakistan. Palin said we should, as has Obama. Because her answer is at odds with McCain's stated position, which appears to be that we shouldn't announce this as a policy beforehand, and McCain's criticism of Obama, who apparently has announced (along with Palin) that this will or should be the policy, Palin's answer means that either McCain and Palin are not on the same page or that Palin is unaware of the McCain position or disagrees with it (the latter of which she denies). 

None of this is "gotcha" journalism nor does any of it cross any ethical line. The Bush Doctrine has been the central organizing principal of this Administration's foreign policy post- 9/11. It holds that the risks are now too great not to act preemptively and that the US reserves the absolute right to do so. Ron Suskind has even written a book about this -- The One Percent Doctrine -- in which he documents its consequences, from the reserved right to a preemptive response in which the imminent threat is defined radically downward relative to current international law and tradition, to Guantanamo and torture. To not know what the doctrine is, to not be able to articulate it, and to not discuss it in a Presidential campaign in 2008 is not just a sign of ignorance. It's a sign of negligence. And it is coming from the second spot on a ticket whose principal stated rational for believing it is better suited to be in the Oval Office is its supposed superior command of the threats we face and the muscular response we must embrace. Someone who wants to be a heartbeat away from being Commander in Chief should be more than conversant on this subject. She (or he) should be eating and breathing it. Not wondering what it means when it is brought up. 

The Palin response on Pakistan highlights another (and greater) deficiency. Granted she was plucked from obscurity with neither the time nor apparently the inclination to learn all the nuances of her boss's views. But she has answered the same question the same way twice, and the second answer came well after McCain had clearly clarified his reason for opposing Obama on this issue, both earlier in the campaign and in their first debate. Was it too much to expect that Palin would be aware of this when the question was again posed to her? McCain excuses her answer because a voter asked the question in a pizza parlor, but if the press can't ask in a sit down interview and a voter can't ask whenever and wherever he gets the chance, and she can't get it right whoever asks, maybe the problem here is that McCain doesn't want questions asked of his Vice Presidential nominee. 

The ethical lapse here is not the media's, or the voters'. It belongs entirely to John McCain and Sarah Palin. Both have decided that attacking the press helps them and will fashion artificial charges of media excess or error whenever they can and regardless of the truth of the charge. There are many problems with this approach, not the least of which is that there is nothing new about it. Bush and Cheney have spent eight years doing the same thing. And the results for America have been universally bad -- no WMD, no "greeted as liberators," no "Mission Accomplished," no permanent success in Afghanistan (in fact a return to status quo ante), and now, not even an economic rescue plan as voters and the Congress treat W and Cheney as the two boys always crying wolf. Put simply, the McCain/Palin/Rove/Bush/Cheney playbook is exceedingly dangerous. 

 One would have hoped that the "Country First" types recognized this. 

 Extremism 

Lost in all the media bashing and SNL humor is the central fact that Palin is entirely out of touch with the vast majority of the country on a host of issues. She has been silent on all this but her record speaks volumes. She is anti-science and anti-choice. She is more pro-gun than Charlton Heston. She believes creationism and intelligent design deserve equal billing along with evolution in our country's classrooms. She thinks the "jury is still out" on global warming. And she thinks either that we can drill our way to energy self sufficiency or that an oil uber alles policy (with perhaps the trans-Alaska natural gas pipeline ten years hence) is the way to go when we think about alternatives. 

If part of what America has to do in facing the serious challenges that lie ahead is bring down the partisan temperature of the last eight years, a woman in the Executive Branch might have been just the ticket. But not this woman (and as an aside, not Hillary either; through no fault of her own, she is to partisanship what gasoline is to fire). Almost on its own, Palin's well documented extremism kills what was perhaps McCain's best claim to the Presidency, his every so often attempts at bipartisanship. It is wrong to vote against McCain merely because of his age. It is not at all wrong to vote against him on the assumption that he may not last and has in the meantime bequeathed a successor whose positions are to the other side of a Cracker Jacks box. 

Incompetence 

Then there is the basic question -- is Sarah Palin qualified to be President? Even a lot of conservatives are now saying the answer is "No." 

True Palin believers salivate at this claim, not knowing whether they should first trot out the rejoinder that those who hold it are inveterate sexists or table that for something more pedestrian, like "Bill Clinton was the Governor of a small state and that seems to have been fine for him." Neither works but that never stops them. 

The charge of incompetence, coming from those who utter it, is entirely gender neutral. I think she seriously lacks command of national issues, substitutes decisiveness and bravado for knowledge, and will therefore not be a competent chief executive of the United States. I thought the same thing about George W. Bush. Sex has nothing to do with it. Had Hillary won the Democratic nomination, the last thing anyone would have questioned is her issue command or knowledge. Had Obama wound his ways through the Democratic primaries exhibiting a Palinesque insouciance on things like the Bush Doctrine, the last thing he'd be doing now is running for President. And by the way, Bill Clinton knew the issues, all of them. He wasn't trumpeting his executive experience in Arkansas as a substitute for knowledge of the federal budget. 

Like I said above, Sarah Palin may get the job for which she is now campaigning. 

Then there is the day after. 

And none of us will be laughing.