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.

SURGERY

SURGERY

The surge has succeeded, so we've been told
By the right wing brave and the steadfast bold.
While the libs were all packing, to cut and run,
With the promise of elections yet to be won,
Persistent George and his neo-con friends
Preached a new beginning of never ends.

And now, months later, as violence abates,
Though he bested Hillary through 20 debates,
Barack and his buddies take a newer tack
With trips to the center, and then to Iraq.
There to be told, our effort's succeeding,
Insurgency's down, Al Qaeda is bleeding.

McCain may be losing but still remains close,
As the Washington pundits give us a dose
Of told you so tributes to the don't leave so fast,
Who looked to the future and forgot the past.
They talked about winning and now claim we are,
So John and his friends have hitched to their star.

But even Iraqis have learned to demand
A non-neo-con end in this quixotic land.
We can stay for a bit, until they are able,
Then we must get out, on Iraq's own timetable.
Though longer than most, and shorter than some,
The result is the same -- we still cut and run.

Will George and his buddies accept this result?
End the insanity, stop the tumult?
Or will they just soldier on, content to remain
Uninformed spectators in this neo-con game?
Afghanistan burns, the enemy waits,
For a new President of the United States.

FEELING OUR PAIN

FEELING OUR PAIN 

It's 11 pm and I am still at the office, pounding out a brief for a client. I have a job so I am not in a recession. But people don't pay as quickly, and some not at all, so I am in one afterall. 

The face of the American recession circa 2008 is not fear. 

It is doubt. 

This is bad for American rhetoric, not to mention American politics. FDR didn't win our hearts and minds all those years ago by proclaiming "We have nothing to fear but doubt itself." He went right for the recessionary jugular, then manifest -- naked, unbridled, stinging and crushing fear. 

Life may have been simpler then. My grandmother's reaction to the challenges of the Depression was to buy a 10 pound sack of potatoes and feed her family on it for two weeks. Her children -- my mother and aunt -- have recounted the story ever since. The way they tell it, it was . . .like . . . fun. Potato pancakes, mashed potatoes, french fried potatoes (this was before the war in Iraq and "freedom fries"), potato soup, baked potatoes, boiled potatoes. Never mind tales from ancient relatives recounting the Irish potato famine of the 19th century with brogues we youngsters could not understand. In our house, there was no potato famine. It was the '30s and potatoes were fun. 

My grandfather's reaction to the Depression was to get another job. He worked from 8 in the morning to 11 at night at least five days a week. Unlucky relatives who could not get one job, let alone two, slept on the living room floor, on mattresses rolled out each night especially for the occasion. I have never done that, at least not while I was sober, and I do not know anyone in the family these days who would willingly do it either. But then, that too was . . . fun. Again, the story telling experts -- mom and the aunt -- recount how there was always a contest among the kids to see who would get the living room mattress with the cousins. The unlucky losers had to go to sleep in . . .gasp(!). . . a bed. 

So here I am am, back at the computer, fashioning my own contest with economic challenge. Is it 10 pounds of potatoes? Or two jobs? Or mattresses on the living room floor? No. I am reduced to dunning clients, for the twentieth time. The calls have become rather boring. Every month I send a bill. Every month they do not pay it. Every month I call to remind them that the bill has been sent but not paid. Everyone is perfectly polite. No one says anything obvious, like "I haven't paid in six months cause I can't. Why don't you stop wasting the stamp?" I am polite too. Though a lawyer, I do not threaten to sue (that would be a very expensive stamp). I do not proclaim the great work we have done, or the utter unfairness of having an Ivy league pedigree in the face of the pedestrian challenge of collection. I do not even point out that at law school (Yale Law School, mind you), there was no course on collecting bills, or even on sending them. Yale was into the big issues (as we stared at pictures of Presidents and Supreme Court justices and various and sundry other legal notables). Collecting bills wasn't one of them. (Wags think that if the issue wasn't about the Constitution, law wasn't taught at the Yale Law School, but that subject is for another day.) 

Most of those to whom I speak are waiting for something big to happen. Like an easing up of the credit crunch. So they can borrow more money to pay the bills created with the money they previously borrowed. 

I am waiting for something big too. Something I'll be able to share with my grandchildren. Something gripping. Or memorable. Or funny. 

Like the 10 pound sack of potatoes. 

Or the living room mattress. 

But it's not there. It's just 11:30 pm now. 

Tomorrow I'll make another call.

CHANNELING NIXON

CHANNELING NIXON

In his life, President Richard Nixon was an expert at reinventing himself and presenting various "new Nixons."

With an uncanny appreciation for the fact that politics in the media age had devolved in large part to brand management, and that consumers can always be persuaded to attach new meaning to old brands, Nixon regularly performed the political equivalent. In forty or so years, his personna moved from anti-Communist truth teller putting Alger Hiss behind bars; to domestic watchdog pointing out "pink ladies" as an inveterate red baiter; to press hater in 1962 leaving the scene with a contemptible "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference"; to calm statesmen promising to "bring us together" in 1968 with a secret plan to end the war; to the last liberal President, creating the EPA and OSHA, and proposing what today would easily pass for national health insurance but which then was not good enough for the Democrats in Congress; to lawbreaker covering-up the 1972 bugging of the opposition party and then resigning for it; to unapologetic ex-President marooned on the Elba he called Casa Pacifica (his San Clemente, California home, to which he recurred following his ignominious resignation); to slightly apologetic ex-President ("I screwed up," as he told the Oxford Union some years after his 1974 resignation); to elder statesmen writing books on foreign policy in the '80s and '90s and offering sage advice to political suitors who made the trek to Saddle River, NJ, his last home.

In his life, there were many Nixons. And in his death, we have been blessed (or cursed as the case may be) with another.

Her name is Hillary Clinton.

More than anyone else in politics these days, Hillary Clinton is the new Nixon. The reality is paradoxical -- her first job after law school was working as an aide in Congress to those who were trying to impeach old tricky Dick, earnest in her bell bottoms and granny glasses as the authentic representative of lefty baby boomers coming of age. But the reality is also undeniable. Her Presidential campaign has marched out different versions of HRC at a rate that not even Nixon could manage in the space of a lifetime. Indeed, by my count, we have at least six to date.

Here they are:

1. Inevitable Hillary. Her campaign began with the premise that no one could beat her. She was a financial and political juggernaut, heir to what Democrats (especially those who vote in primaries) think of as the halcyon days of her husband's presidency, collector of the IOUs on favors she and Bill had handed out with abandon in three decades of workaholic political glad handing (and of the one gigantic IOU she gets from him as he does penance for his peccadilloes).

And it was all working.

Until Iowa.

2. Experienced Hillary. When Inevitable Hillary tanked, we got experienced Hillary. She was the co-President consulted on "all major decisions" made by Bill, a sort of uber-First Lady who didn't let the ribbon cutting and library tours interfere with involvement in the heavy lifting of policy formation, an expert on health care cut up by those killer Harry and Louise ads but who knows where the bodies are buried and won't fail twice, the co-author of Clintonian success never responsible for any of its failures.

This wasn't working in the week after Iowa.

So we got . . .

3. Emotional Hillary. Faced with defeat in New Hampshire, the iron lady of American politics momentarily shed her Lady Thatcher visage and. . . cried. Well, she didn't quite cry, but she choked up a lot. Crying on the eve of the New Hampshire primary is a mixed blessing. When voters thought Ed Muskie did it (he really didn't, it was just melting snow, but political brand management then wasn't what it is now), they skewered him. So Hillary's wasn't an all out tear jerker, not even close. Just the welling up of emotion as she professed her consuming passion for the issues and the notion that the Presidency really matters (which W more or less proves by negative inference).

Some say this won her New Hampshire.

But it couldn't get her through Super Tuesday, which was a draw. Nor could it re-fill her political bank account, which by then was tapped.

So we got . . .

4. Ruthless Hillary. Close cousin to her Thatcheresque twin, Ruthless Hillary does what is necessary to win. She cans Patti Solis Doyle, her loyal campaign manager of umpteen years, and brings back Maggie Williams, who doesn't lose. She lets Bill demean Barack's win in South Carolina, as he becomes the first "black" President to. . . race bait. She tells us that the votes in Florida and Michigan should count after all, and after she previously said they couldn't and wouldn't. She tells us caucuses don't really count (actually, she more or less tells us that anyplace she loses doesn't count, and then gets the media to buy into this fantasy by making her "win states" Barack's "must win" states). She lends herself $5 million "of my money". Well, it's really hers and Bill's together, a part of the dowry we give ex-Presidents to, I guess, make up for the below market salaries we pay them, without worrying about conflicts of interest as the ex takes lots of cash from those who use to listen for free and others who claim with a straight face that he knows something about business.

But not even ruthless was enough. Barack trotted out that string of eleven straight victories.

So we got. . .

5. Combat Hillary. This is the Hillary who braved sniper fire in Bosnia, the Commander in Chief who'll be able to take that 3 am phone call and calm the waters of this turbulent world as we all sleep the sleep of the well protected relieved that we did not entrust such awesome responsibility to the skinny guy with a silk tongue; the only one who can go mano a mano with the war hero as voters compare her "experience" to his and not just to some well crafted oration for God's sake.

Alas, Combat Hillary was not enough either, mostly because all the other Hillarys together still have left her behind the skinny guy in the delegate count. So we get . . .

6. Boilermaker Hillary. This is the Hillary who downs the shot and a beer with gusto in a working class bar in Pennsylvania, the "I'm on your side and he's not" girl with guts (and a much better bowling score), ready to junk NAFTA (this is one of Bill's ideas she won't take credit for) while the other guy sends his surrogates to Canada to tell them he doesn't really mean it, the regular gal (never mind the $100 plus million over the last eight years) who would never admit to eating arugula (or to counting calories in a chocolate factory), the candidate who, with a straight face (this is critical in brand management), tells us that Obama should have disowned his nutty pastor sooner because, while we "don't get to choose our families" (apparently husbands don't count, but who's noticing), we do "get to choose our preachers".

Nixon was never this creative. He usually stuck to one persona for every half decade or so. But he also lost two campaigns, the Presidency in 1960 (to the then "orator du jour" JFK) and the California gubernatorial election in 1962. Maybe he just wasn't in Hillary's league.

It's no wonder Barack can't beat her yet.

So far, he's had to run against two Clintons and six Hillarys.

Nixon would be proud.

GROUNDED IN QUAGMIRE

GROUNDED IN QUAGMIRE

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker returned from Iraq this week to report that "progress is real" in the post-surge world. So real, in fact, that we can't go surge-free any time soon. For, although "progress is real," it is also "fragile" and "reversible." Armed with this fragIle but reversible real progress, we are now advised to embrace a new policy of suspending troop withdrawals (part of what was promised post surge if only we agreed, pre-surge, to surge). The Washington surge gurus (McCain, Bush, the Washington Post editorial page, the GOP, and Joe Lieberman, among others) tell us that de-surging can only be embraced if "conditions on the ground" permit it.

They don't. 

So we must . . . surge forward, or on, or upward, or somewhere for the foreseeable future. 

The Washington Post editors claimed today that "the reduction in violence [in Iraq] had been so great as to be undeniable," and then skewered Obama and Clinton for having been surge-resistent pessimists when W initially proposed the idea. This is like screaming at the coach whose team is down by three touchdowns because he fails to hand out "Attaboys" to his team when they go eight and out as opposed to their usual four and out. The progress was undeniable. It was also probably irrelevant. 

Violence, for now, is down. Progress, however, is only undeniable because things were so bad to begin with. We are nowhere near the end state Bush and Cheney forecast in 2003, and we are never getting there. That is why they keep changing the goalposts. First it was to get rid of WMD. Then when we found none of that, it was freedom and democracy for Iraq. Now that neither of these is likely (at least not without the sort of pro-Iranian resuilts we cannot otherwise endorse), it's stability. Slowly, that is giving way to a Nixonian sort of "peace with honor," which is how politicians frame losing, and this will itself be followed by a Rambo-esque hunt for the felons who refused to let us win (because patriots like Bush and Cheney and McCain never lose, they just have victory taken from them by those who refuse to "stay the course"). 

I now realize that the politicians really did learn lessons from Vietnam, though not the ones we thought they had leaned. The first lesson is never predict victory. This is a precondition for ceaseless surging, otherwise known as all war all the time. But you have to be careful how you sell it, or you won't close the deal. You can't admit that you will have to be there "for 100 years" (as McCain found out the hard way). Rather, you have to embrace the second lesson, which is to predict "devastating consequences" in the event of troop pull outs. This, of course, is not a prediction of victory if we continue to fight. Rather, it is a prediction horrific chaos if we do not. Combined, the astute practitioner of these simple rules freezes the debate. He or she neither gets caught in a Westmorland-like "light at the end of the tunnel" expectation of success nor in a "hanging on the helicopters" picture of ignoble retreat. Instead, he or she gets to . . . surge. 

Lesson three is never look back. This lesson is particularly useful to policy makers, especially those who (like McCain and Bush and Lieberman, and . . . Hillary) really blew it at the start of the game. By focusing, as Ambassador Crocker put it yesterday, on "what will happen [rather] than what has happened," those who fail get to keep on keepin' on. 

 And no one else gets to call them on their mistakes. 

Lesson three is the holy grail for the ambitiously incompetent. It would be nice if even one of them -- McCain, Bush, Lieberman, anyone -- resigned given their utter failure in 2003 to vote for and implement the correct policy. In a parliamentary system, there would have been multiple no confidence votes. Here, however, we just get spin --about patriotism, or chaos, or quitting, or the future. Personal responsibility apparently is very important when it comes to sex or drugs. But totally irrelevant when it comes to war. 

The truth is that no one knows when the so-called "conditions on the ground" will change and permit the troops to come home. So, whether we admit it or not, we are making an open ended committment to stay in Iraq. This is the latest lie we are being told by those we elect to tell us the truth, especially when it comes to national security. But they haven't and they won't, and maybe now they can't.

People who lie to themselves often enough end up believing the lies. This is why lying is a bad habit -- it's not just the mendacity, it's what the mendacity does to you after you repeat it enough. An erstwhile friend of mine (and graduate of Yale Law School) ruined his career and his life by lying. But long before he went to jail for his lies, he had already lost his self respect, and mine, along with any influence he might have had over his colleagues. The possession and exercise of power (political, financial, or emotional) can mask that loss for a time. But not forever. And not in a way that ever matters. 

Here are the real "conditions on the ground" in Iraq: 

1. We do not know when we will be able to get out. Positing what has to happen tells you nothing about when it will happen. 

2. Our current President, and at least one of the individuals who may be our next President (McCain), have, as a matter of policy, refused to say when we will get out. 

3. Most of the elites in our society are not calling them on it, or on their past failures. 

4. Consequently, the failure continues. 

The condition on the ground? 

Halberstam said it best forty years ago.

It is a quagmire.

SPRING BREAK

SPRING BREAK 

It's spring in the northeast but it still feels like winter. Although the sun breaks through from time to time and reminds us of what is to come, the defining color is gray. Some birds are chirping but the vast majority are not here yet. So the mornings are still fairly quiet. When you take the dog out for a walk, the ground has the feel of a sponge rung once -- not entirely saturated but still wet. In Maine, they call this the mud season. It's a "tweener" time of year. We are caught between frost and fun, overcoats and jackets, long nights and long days. 

So maybe it makes sense that the Democrats don't have a presidential nominee yet. 

Barack can't win yet and Hillary won't quit yet. Some pundits lament the growing negativity of the campaigns, but I think they are playing with us. The pundits like this stuff. It fills air time. On the day after Easter, which is what today is, what would Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough have said if Carville hadn't compared Bill Richardson to Judas Iscariot? What would they have said last week, and the week before last, if Reverand Wright's rhetoric was not out there to be noticed? 

You pretty much know when campaigns have run out of issues to brief and town meetings to announce. It occurs when incendiary comments long a part of the public record are dusted off and You Tubed so as to appear to be new. The Wright comments which so engulfed the airwaves for the past weeks define that art. The Reverand made the comments shortly after 9/11, or a little less than seven years ago. Did they just become offensive? Or relevant to the kind of President Obama would be? Is it really the case that no one noticed them until now? 

The Wright stuff is perfect for the "tweener" season. It's of a piece with President Clinton's faux plea for a presidential contest between two nominees who both "love their country" (guess who he had in mind). Or Carville's Judas comments (made on Good Friday, in case all the Catholics in Pennsylvania weren't previously listening). Bored by their own wonkiness and realizing that going negative works even as they deny doing it, hell hath no fury greater than a candidate in a tight race. In fact, political handlers are the only people who embrace hell before their bosses are officially spurned. And at the end, the bosses -- that is, the actual candidates -- are too tired to stop them. 

That is where we are now. In between. East of our political Eden. Caught in a seasonal dust bowl where winners and losers both get dirty, but no one stops them. When this sort of thing goes on in school yards, adults intervene. But the political adults here are the remaining superdelegates, and their silence for the most part has been deafening. 

The "tweener" season never lasts. Gray becomes green. Sooner or later, that one bird sings a song in which others join. It is inevitable. So, Barack, rising in his great speech on race, and Governor Richardson, rising as his fellows remain seated, will not be alone for long. 

Even the Clintons will join them.

THE FOOTNOTE VOTE

THE FOOTNOTE VOTE 

She has lost men. She has lost women, She has lost blacks. She has lost yuppies. She has lost the college vote and the high school vote. She is losing the union vote. She is in trouble. 

But we now know that Hillary in fact does have a firewall. 

It is the footnote vote! 

For the past few weeks, Mrs. Clinton has repeated the charge that Barack Obama is something of a plagiarist. This is because he has repeated lines given him by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. The lines skewer those who claim Obama's speeches are "just words," with repeated invocations of some of the American republic's more famous bonne mots, followed by sarcastic questions that mockingly wonder whether these past clarion calls were just words as well. The riff works its magic as the audience hears Barack intone "'We hold those truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.' Just words? 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Just words? 'I have a dream'. Just words?" There is a kind of game, set and match quality to this oratory, as there is with most of what comes out of Obama's mouth, before crowds larger than anyone else's and more enthusiastic by an order of magnitude. 

Alas, however, the "just words" riff was not original to Barack. It was Gov. Patrick's. To the Clintonistas, it is irrlevant that Patrick is one of Obama's national co-chairs, or that he specifically suggested that Obama use the lines, or that Obama admits he perhaps should have credited Patrick for them at some point along the way, however that is done on the campaign trail. No, Barack the policy neophyte now turns out to be, so they say, less than the Demosthenes we had all supposed him to be. And since, so the argument continues, words are so much a part of his appeal, perhaps he is less . . . appealing. 

Obama has pilloried this contretemps as "silly" and he is right. But apart from being silly, the charges being levelled say a lot more about his critics than they do about him. Over the course of the past few decades, we have collectively allowed our politics to be reduced to a sort of least common denominator sport. In that arena, the subtext is that smart doesn't matter and eloquence is phony. The current President touted his regular guy quality and C+ college average as evidence that he was the better candidate in both 2000 and 2004, disqualifying in one pass anyone who excelled in school or gave a syntactically correct speech. Words were a currency to be debased, not embraced, as W winked and nodded his way through malaprops while the ostensibly effete Ivy Leaguers "misunderestimated" him. He didn't care whether "nuclear" came out as "nucular," so long as everyone knew the regular guy from Crawford would kill the SOBs and not worry much about the sensitivities intellectuals had about things like, say, torture. 

There is a sense in which Hillary is stealing a page from this book. No one -- not even Hillary -- believes Obama is a plagiarist. He was given a line by a supporter and used it. From time to time, she has done the same thing, as has everyone else who has ever run for office. Plagiarists steal words and claim them as their own. No one stole anything here. Deval Patrick willingly gave them away; much like the legions of speechwriters who craft the eloquence most of our politicians claim as their own. 

For Hillary, the Obama problem is not where the words come from, it's that the words are so good. She cannot attack them. So she has spent the better part of the last two weeks trying to undermine them. The "they are not his words" charge followed the "they are just words charge," and then was itself followed by her "why can't we be friends" caricature of a putatively naive Obama long on rhetoric and short on reality. The problem, however, is that Hillary is morphing into everyone she claims to oppose -- the master mocker himself is the current President Bush, who has made a career out of ranking out opponents (be they members of the media or suitors for the same job) for their brains and eloquence, and the GOP playbook this Fall, lacking a defensible record, will belittle Obama for his vocabulary and cadence because it won't be able to attack him for his plans and policies. 

 Et tu, Hillary? 

Hillary Clinton is a lot better than this and should rise to that level rather than sink to Rove's. The Presidential race is a political campaign, not the defense of an honors thesis. 

Footnotes don't matter.