Tag Archives: politics

A very good friend of mine who it appears would prefer to remain somewhat anonymous has begun blogging over at Voice of Reason as of late Friday. Of course I’ve added him to my blog roll.

In the hubbub years after 9/11 we used to occasionally threaten to blog together on political topics but never did. You know, jobs, family and all. I finally broke the deadlock myself when I moved to Dallas and had something to talk about that wasn’t politics. Not sure what finally got my friend to whip out his electronic pen, but I could not agree more with his opening post, The Architect.

As I noted here in one of my few political posts (where I was admittedly very wrong about the Democratic nominee but not the country’s impending choice of party), I was absolutely stunned the morning after the 2004 presidential election when Karl Rove was nattering about a “permanent Republican majority.” Here we were with an election decided by a tiny fraction of the vote in one swing state where a sitting president in a time of war was opposed by a very weak candidate and he’s swaggering like it was some huge victory?

Remember W going on and on about how he had accumulated political capital and planned to spend it? Right… How’d that go for ya George? He was immediately handed his head by a disinterested congress when it came to entitlements reform and subsequently had what has to be one of the worst four year runs for a president since Andrew Johnson. Quite an accomplishment! Listen to one historian’s account of Johnson’s personality and see if it sounds at all familiar…

“As Senator Charles Sumner shrewdly said, “the President himself is his own worst counselor, as he is his own worst defender.” Johnson acted in accordance with his nature. He had intellectual force but it worked in a groove. Obstinate rather than firm it undoubtedly seemed to him that following counsel and making concessions were a display of weakness… His pride of opinion, his desire to beat, blinded him to the real welfare of the South and of the whole country.”

Great job guys! Way to go!

Well, the degree to which Rove and Bush were standing on feet of clay was partially revealed in 2006 and fully laid bare a couple of weeks ago. Hubris is usually jarring to observe, but in the long view their completely out-of-touch view of the American political landscape is nothing less than breathtaking.

It is a great disservice to the average American’s understanding of the world that so few of us know much about the history of Europe leading up to the First World War. At no time in recent years has this fact felt more important to me than it does now. Russia’s invasion of Georgia has given me the awful feeling that we are witnessing an ominous repetition of history.

Here in America we view the threat of mass conflict largely through the lens of the Second World War, with its archetype aggressor, Adolf Hitler standing as a pure symbol of evil unleashed. Hitler now personifies aggression and the inevitability of war for generations of Americans. For that reason I think we don’t see today’s less obvious risks to the peace when we ought to. The next great war might very well arrive unheralded by a new monster of Hitler’s stature. They often do.

Right before the outbreak of the First World War, Europe and America were in the midst of what is now referred to as The Gilded Age. Victorian Europe was a place of unprecedented wealth and peace. While had experienced smaller wars during the 1800′s, by the turn of the 19th century the continent had not known major warfare since Napoleon’s defeat nearly 100 years earlier. So it was that in the early 1900′s many Europeans believed that the building tensions between Germany, France, England, Austria, Russia and “lesser powers” were unlikely to explode into a large-scale war. They believed this in part because it had been so long since a major conflict involving all of the continent’s countries had occurred. They believed that they were in a “new era” where skillful diplomacy made such things impossible. They also thought that such a large scale conflict would totally devastate the fantastic wealth that Europe had come to enjoy because of the long peace – in other words, a large and devastating war just wasn’t rational.

They were wrong on the first count, and right on the second one. Large scale conflict was entirely possible as the outbreak of war so clearly demonstrated in 1914, and the magnitude of that conflict did indeed impoverish Europe very thoroughly. So much so, in fact, that Europe was radically transformed. In just a few years it went from the now romanticized and ornate vestiges of old monarchies and nobilities to the era of Stalin, Hitler, Mousillini, Franco and the twin specters of communism and fascism. World War Two and the Cold War were the direct descendants of the First World War’s chaos. Humanity lost not only decades of peace and progress as a result, but gave birth to technology that leaves us within reach of nuclear Armageddon to this very day.

It has now been 63 years since the end of the Second World War, and we have not seen a conflict of that magnitude since. Many of us now think that such a conflagration is impossible owing to the globalization of the world’s economy – such a war is not in anyone’s interest, the thinking goes. We also believe it because the apocalyptic weapons that we now possess can make war so suddenly and completely devastating that it could easily end civilization, and perhaps even extinguish humanity outright. We could be right on both counts, and still completely wrong in the belief that large scale war is now impossible. We were wrong once before, after all.

And now Russia invades Georgia. Today’s news makes it sound as though Russia may be pulling back from the brink, and we can only hope that is true. Many on the world stage are starting to realize that this conflict is far more than an old ethnic and territorial quarrel. It is about Russia’s aching desire to once again dominate it’s old empire, and it’s greedy eye on control of central Asia’s energy exports. Russia has done all that it can to re-assert dominance over the territory it lost when the wall came down, and Vladimir Putin does nothing to hide his grief at the collapse of the old Soviet order. Russia’s real motives were laid bare not just by the appeals of Georgia’s president over the weekend, but the revelation that it is Putin who is actually controlling the operations of Russia’s military, not Russia’s president.

Vladimir Putin is no Adolf Hitler, and any comparisons between the two are not only dead wrong, but badly misguided. Underneath his sharp business suit, however, Putin very much resembles another old nemesis of a peaceful Europe. That nemesis was Otto Von Bismarck, Imperial Germany’s chancellor and the architect it’s long path toward the First World War. Bismarck believed in nothing if not an assertive and powerful Germany, and like Putin he ruled the nation from behind the scenes. Kaiser Wilhelm, for the most part, provided ceremonial endorsement of Bismarck’s wishes. Bismarck in turn supported a strong monarchical institution – he was an old-school autocrat who powerfully distrusted democratic governance in any form. He spent much of his career and constantly seeking to render Germany’s elected Reichstag powerless, and he largely succeeded. When the Reichstag once stood in the way of his plans to confront Austria, he famously said: “Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided… but by iron and blood.” You can be sure that Vladimir Putin feels exactly the same way. No man alive has done more to undermine Russia’s progress toward representative government than Putin, and no man stands more firmly as a symbol of Russian might for might’s sake.

Let’s just hope that another of Bismarck’s sentiments does not spring to life once more. When a member of the German General Staff once spoke to him about the growing possibility of a large-scale war with France, Bismarck said “I will not live to see the world war, but you will, and it will start in the East.”

Meet the new boss – same as the old boss.

I own two relics of that seemingly ancient conflict, the one which started in the east with cavalry on horseback and ended in the west with machine gun emplacements, trenches, chemical warfare and aerial bombardment. One of them is an artillery shell casing my great grandfather brought back from France after the shooting had stopped. It was hammered into a flower vase with the word “Verdun” artistically beaten into relief midway up. The second is his campaign history, an elaborate leather bound book with a sort of corporate diary of his army unit. It is complete with some pretty bleak photos and day-by-day accounts of the war.

Here’s hoping that long from now I have descendants with no such relics from our generation.

Well. It’s time for some harsh judgments on my predictions. With Super Fat Tuesday behind us, what have we got?

It looks like McCain is a lock for the Republican nomination as I predicted here, but Hillary’s lead over Obama this morning is way smaller than I thought it would be with only 79 more than Obama as of this morning. That’s only 79 out of 2,025 delegates that go to the Democratic National Convention. Call it what it is – a tie. Moreover, in yesterday’s contests Hillary won only 8 more delegates than Obama – that’s 8 delegates out of 990 decided yesterday. Talk about about a close race.

This past Saturday I predicted that yesterday’s votes would seal it for Hillary and that was clearly wrong. It looks like it could be a battle royal from here on out – maybe all of the way to Denver this August. If Hillary doesn’t get the nomination then clearly she can’t be the next president as I predicted. Furthermore, Obamamania has apparently succeeded in cracking through the demographic barriers that I thought would stop it yesterday when I wrote about his prospects here.

I’m glad that I’m already done with my predictions for this year! I’m going to leave it to the pros from this point forward. I can’t wait to read what Michael Barone has to say about the results yesterday. His analysis is always very insightful.

In another note, a spike in my blog traffic this morning was driven by a link from the Wall Street Journal of all places. I have no illusions that some wise old editor picked out my thoughts from the infinite blogosphere – I’m sure it was some sort of blog scraping robot. But it’s still kind of cool.

Last Friday a good friend of mine for the past 22 years called me to see if I could rush to a television, turn on Fox and watch Ann Coulter rip on John McCain. I couldn’t do that at the office, but I finally took a minute to find it on YouTube this morning.

I know of no pen more poisonous than Coulter’s – part satirist, part bomb thrower, part intellectual and all doctrinaire conservative. I’ve grown tired of Ann over the years as I can’t see how her style will ever do anything to unite Americans. Calling into question the intelligence and morals of your political opponents is no way to engage people in debate. Anyway, say what you will about her manners – I’ve never seen any source that’s done a good job of debunking her on matters of fact (though Al Franken would say otherwise). In the video below you can get a taste for just how divided the Republican base is during this primary season. As I argued here, I continue to believe that this will spell doom for Republican ambitions this fall.

The conservative awakening that is backing Romney by attacking McCain is too negative, too little and too late to make a difference for the Republicans in November. It is never too late to divide allies from one another however, and that is precisely what continues to happen as we make our way through this primary season. Win or lose, what kind of shape will that leave Republicans in after election day?

By the way, if you are a Democrat reading this with glee, I urge you to reconsider your attitude. Strong, principled parties can disagree but in the end will produce better results than weak and cynical ones will. Look no further than our national debt, our steadfast refusal to face reality in the coming years on Social Security and our manifold other crises to see my point. I doubt that the Founding Fathers figured out how to give birth to our country by calling each other names in Philadelphia that summer so long ago, and they had some really divisive issues at that time. Take slavery as just one example! How far we’ve fallen since then.

Could some one turn down the volume so we can hear each other? Please?

Come Wednesday I think you’ll be seeing many more people making their calls on how they think the great contest will end this November. I could do that too but it would be a lot less risky and hardly any sport compared to calling it right now.

The truth is that I have believed that Hillary will be the winner in 2008 since the mid-term election cycle of 2006. The opinion of congress, the president and Republicans in general had fallen so low for reasons both deserved and undeserved that I felt there was little to no chance that the next president would come from anywhere other than the Democratic party. I still feel that way, and although I thought there was some question as to whether Hillary would be the Democrats’ nominee at that time my uncertainty had faded by late last year. Obama has had a good run, but as I described earlier here, I don’t think the remaining primaries will do it for him. Florida was only the first evidence of my thesis. I believe that Tuesday will seal it for Hillary.

What then? As I’ve said before here, McCain is very likely to be the Republican nominee. Although free market and free speech conservatives are having fits over this, I believe the weakness of their sharply divided party will soon leave them with a stark choice. Back McCain for all you are worth or resign yourself to a second Clinton presidency.

Ironically, I don’t think their choice will matter. Regardless of whether they manage to muster a show of enthusiasm for their candidate, they will lose. Their hearts won’t be in it, and too many of their countrymen are against them. Every erg of fervor available to Republicans was spent in 2004 hanging on to the presidency against John Kerry, and even then only a small percentage of the vote in Ohio saved their cause. More on that in a minute.

Hillary will not coast into office. As is made plenty evident here and elsewhere, the Democratic party faithful have nearly as many misgivings about her as the Republicans have about McCain. My take on it is that the landscape of American politics and circumstance will occasionally yield the Clintons enough supporters to satisfy their ambitions, but their brand of politics nonetheless leaves them with few allies and no friends. They will successfully brass knuckle Hillary to the top of the pile in the primaries and then their party members will face the same choice that Republicans face – grudgingly line up behind your nominee or accept certain governance by your anathema.

In today’s political reality, a contest held between the nominees that each party is reluctantly left with provides the Democrats a decided edge over Republicans. Since the year 2000, Republicans have been compromised by a combination of historic circumstances their own bad choices. The combination has been disastrous.

A presidency and a congress simultaneously led by Republicans has left their party a smoking wreck. Bush has governed not like a Republican, but a Frankenstein combination of historic Democrats – Williams Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Lyndon Johnson. The unlikely combination of the disputed 2000 election and bizarre post 9/11 politics of the past seven years kept “W” from being burned alive by his own party. Had Bush not been so loathed by the left in those heated circumstances the Republicans would have turned on him in his first term. Instead, the Republican-led congress found it easier to forfeit the principles of their party in domestic matters than to fight Democrats on every front. They’ve acquiesced to growth in spending, growth in government and growth in debt. This failure of principle has left them so weak and broken, so without credibility or cause, so confused about their own identity that I believe it will take them a generation, a catastrophe of Democratic making or both to recover anything resembling their ascendant strength in the 1980s and 1990s.

I doubt that I will ever forget my astonishment on the day after the 2004 election when I listened to the commentary made by Bush and Karl Rove. From my point of view we had a sitting president during a time of war that had barely survived an election against an extremely weak opponent. What might have been a landslide victory for a better president was instead an electoral squeaker that was very nearly his second contested victory. Despite this, Bush’s so-called “architect” was blathering about a “permanent Republican majority.” Bush himself was making statements about how the results showed a clear accumulation of political capital that he planned to “spend.” I was stunned. These people were clearly delusional. Two years later the mid-term elections proved that the Republican party had not accumulated capital at all, but was instead operating its politics in much they same way that it was running the US Treasury. They were not accumulating political capital, but political debt. Four years on and it is obvious that they they are now bankrupt. I’ve heard that bankruptcy takes 7-10 years to clear off of your credit report.

Get ready to say “President Clinton” again.

Tipping points are funny things. The people that can see them coming consistently are as gifted as they are rare. More so than me, for example. Just a week ago I had commented over at the arc of time that I was pretty sure Romney would not take South Carolina and that an open convention for the Republicans was probable. Though I didn’t say it out loud at the time I thought it very possible that Huckabee would take my native state and leave the field wide open going into February. After only a week of additional data I’m prepared to reverse my guess at an open convention and add my second prediction regarding final outcomes in 2008 to the first one that I made here.

With McCain’s victory last Saturday and a couple of news items from this week I’m now convinced that the Republican convention will open with a clearly mandated nominee, and that nominee will probably be John McCain. There are four reasons for this. They are Huckabee, Thompson, Romney and Giuliani.

Although Huckabee has a few delegates at this point he has about the same chances at the nomination as I’ve got at being the first man on Mars. This is lower than you might think because I don’t even want to go there. Contrary to the beliefs of many, Republicans are not all evangelicals that see their party as the Party of God. Many of them, in fact, are closet Libertarians that tolerate their born again brothers in ranks for the sole reason that they have nowhere else to go. They won’t line up alongside the socialists forming a core constituency of the modern Democratic party and they view the “outed” Libertarians as loony birds. These people will not vote for Huckabee under any circumstances, and although there are many other factors that would hold Huckabee back, this by itself locks him out for certain. If Huckabee can’t take South Carolina he sure won’t take many other states.

With Thompson’s post South Carolina announcement of his withdrawal, his chances at the nomination are now only slightly better than Huckabee’s. The more important signal sent here, however, is the last best hopes of the remaining Reagan coalition have been disconnected from life support. The economic and social conservatives that Reagan so effectively united have been cloven apart by Bush over the past eight years and are being kept that way by Huckabee now. Thompson would have done at least a little better were this not true. This bodes poorly for Romney, who sometimes tries to morph into delivering a similar message. That accounts for his limited success thus far, but I think morphing is a fatal problem for Romney. Republicans are inherently suspicious of a man from Massachusetts to start with, and they are very aggrieved with their party’s establishment – Romney looks that part. Also, my sense is that Romney’s veiled yet clear departure into economic populism with auto workers in Michigan is the kind of move that will win some ground at the cost of the nomination. There are more than a few Republicans and Independents that will look sideways at a candidate that appears “nuanced.” Is he Reagan or Roosevelt? Who knows? Does Romney?

Rudy, meanwhile, has thus far executed the riskiest strategy for a real contender that modern politics has ever seen. With the news Monday that McCain is out-polling him in New York and Wednesday that he’s doing the same in California, that strategy appears clearly doomed. I think Rudy would have had a much harder time winning over Huckabee voters than McCain or even Romney anyway.

So, I think McCain probably takes it. I’m not saying that this won’t have its twists and turns or that it won’t be close – Romney looks strong in Florida I hear – but I think it’s McCain. My thoughts with regard to what that means for the White House next January will be coming up soon.

When generations collide at the intersection of Hip and Clueless, some interesting things can be found in the bits of wreckage left on the pavement. Earlier this week I wrote about how Obama won’t get the Democratic nomination here, and discussed at some length why the broadband youth that have helped propel him from ignominy to viability won’t carry him the distance. What can be funny to watch is failed attempts to even get as far as Obama has already.

Candidates – weak and strong – have woken to the power of Web 2.0 in all of it’s blogging and social networking glory. Whether to reach their base or expand it, many are using these new Internet platforms as their latest tool in the hard work of campaigning. Any tool that can be used can be misused however, and just because you can figure out how to upload to YouTube, make a zippy looking blog or an interesting FaceBook profile does not mean that you are going to connect with anyone. Particularly not with people that you couldn’t connect with through other mediums or in person.

Take this kind of catchy though mostly meaningless campaign video from Mike Gravel’s utterly failed run in the 2008 Democratic nomination race. Who is Mike Gravel? Well, that’s kind of my point. Have a look.

This was apparently the product of a contest that a Gravel supporter sponsored to promote his campaign. $25,000 to the winner, and I presume this one took the Benjamins.

Everyone has witnessed or experienced those really awkward moments when an older person tries to communicate with a younger person by “speaking their language”, you know, when a parent says something like “What’s up dude” to their teenager. The result of course is that said teenager feels violated in a particularly unique way, no communication happens and the grownup is left baffled. I think Mike Gravel may have accomplished just that dynamic here.

Our grandparents and their parents came of age across a span of decades in which media were by definition proper nouns – there was nothing really personal about their media. They grew up saying “the papers”, “the movies”, “the radio” and, finally, “the television”. It’s easy to understand, but still funny, when they date themselves so obviously by saying things like “the computer”. A younger person would say “my computer” or something else entirely depending on what they were doing with “the computer”. The Onion captured this funny quirk of generations in their piece on Google a while back.

Anybody want to bet that Mike Gravel called it “The YouTube” before one of his young staffers corrected him?

I’m going to go ahead and make one of my 2008 election predictions here. Obama will not get the Democratic nomination. After winning Iowa, Obama’s campaign adopted the slogan “Yes We Can”, presumably as a rallying cry for current and would be supporters in the face of the daunting task of derailing the Clinton machine (though I’m sure the stated reasons for that slogan have nothing to do with that). Despite that enthusiasm there are several problems with the prospects for an Obama nomination. The most important ones lie in things that can’t be changed by any campaign – demographics and life habits.

The same forces that lifted up Howard Dean early in 2004 have been at work for Obama in 2008. The New Hampshire primary opened my eyes to that and yesterday the Dallas Morning News had two articles that underscored the point. In “Online and involved” and “More going online for political news” Karen Brooks at the Morning News’ Austin Bureau did a good job of laying out how young people are engaging in the political process not by pointing their remote controls, but by pointing their browsers and flipping open their phones.

The numbers are pretty telling. Essentially the point boils down to this – a large and growing segment of the population is not looking to broadcast media for political information, but is instead looking online. Nowhere is this more obvious that the huge shift among the young in media preference. Which brings us back to Obama.

Obamamania and the hype that the Deanie Babies generated to propel Howard Dean early on have this young, Internet-savvy demographic as a key point in common. That new force in the primary electorate amplified the signal that the young voter has always sent – don’t give us a bunch of establishment crap. Furthermore, it has done so early in the process – far earlier than any outsider could have swayed the mainstream media in prior years. The Obama Girl got the word out for Obama via YouTube quickly and cheaply. His email campaigns and communications on MySpace and Facebook are far faster and more efficient than door-to-door shoe leather and direct mail campaigning. It gave Hillary a black eye in Iowa, but it won’t last. As the campaign inevitably goes further among the broader electorate, it leaves the influence of broadband youth and heads squarely into a comparatively more dial-up demographic. YouTube and Facebook might as well not exist in that world, and the voting records will show it.

No, to really make a difference it will take this new phenomenon more time. The percentage of the population using new media to communicate downstream and up will have to get large enough and old enough to ignite the lasting attention of the large and old broadcast media. At that point the young and connected will have a greater effect on the content that everyone else sees each day and their reach will exceed their grasp. It’s going to happen – just not this year. Howard Dean was a portent. Obama shows the trend – and he got really close this time.

How close? Well, put it this way – the average bear would have given up Hillary for dead (right or wrong) had she lost New Hampshire. Obama would have gone from being an interesting phenomenon to a “force” that would have gotten lots more coverage in TV and radio than he already has. That could have tipped it, but it wasn’t to be. Michael Barone, one of the best political analysts this country has ever seen, noted that Obama was ahead in the college towns of New Hampshire but fell behind to Hillary as the urban and poor vote (such that it is there in New Hampshire) swung the balance. There’s a lot more of Hillary’s demographic than Obama’s in the remaining states with large delegate counts and it’s a long way to November.

Obama is a Cinderella Man, and that kind of fighter has to win every match on the way to the title. Lose one and the spell is broken. He lost one, and while he might win some others he won’t win the nomination. Not this year anyway.

One of the reasons I struggled so long to find something worthy as the primary subject of a blog was that I had my original anchor topic cut out from under me. As I described in my original post, it wasn’t until my relocation here to Dallas that I had a new one.

I was going to blog primarily about politics. While I might still post on some political topics from time-to-time, politics won’t be a focus. I find it cathartic to explain why, though I’ll sheepishly admit that it results in a very long post.

There are two problems with focusing on politics. The first is obvious – it’s damned hard to offer something original in that arena and much harder still to draw an audience. There’s just so much competing content out there. Without an audience you can’t hope to make a difference, and without that why bother sounding off? The second problem is closely related, less obvious and more intractable. Some background is in order.

My interest in blogging about politics was the simple culmination of a decade-long trend. After graduating college politics slowly became a hobby. At first I tracked parties, issues and players in the same way that many people follow leagues, teams and players. But I found that the average person I discussed and debated with was often just as well informed as I was. Gradually that changed.

Over the years I went a layer deeper. I read up enough on history and philosophy that I believe I gained a lot more context on current events and the forces behind them than the average person. To continue the sports analogy, it wasn’t really about teams and players any more. It was about the rules of the game everyone plays under to prevent chaos on the field. It was about what the laws of physics would do to the ball regardless of how well the players behaved or how much we liked them. With that change of perspective it wasn’t long before I became a very effective debater. Of course I wasn’t alone in this track of personal development. Some of my best friends read the same books and followed the same sources that I did. We each challenged the others’ thinking and improved together. Unfortunately, the country at large was heading in the other direction.

I don’t suggest that there was once a golden age when political discussion was purely a genteel and civil affair, but by the time of Bill Clinton’s second term I think things had become nasty in a way that they hadn’t been before. I’m sure that earlier generations of politicians and voters called each other names from time-to-time, but I’m also sure that they didn’t regularly compare each other to Nazis. By the late 90′s that sort of thing was becoming pretty regular, and it went downhill from there. First there was the deep bitterness over the contested presidential election of 2000. Then there was 9/11 and it’s ongoing aftermath. What might have united us has instead served to divide us against one another so much that it might exceed everything in our history except the Civil War. Meanwhile we’ve got some very real problems that aren’t being solved.

The teams are no longer out to win the game. They are only out to see to it that the other team loses. In fact, neither side will even trust the other to play by the rules any longer. We hold each other in such low regard that we’ve gone from being opponents to being enemies. There’s a difference. Enemies don’t engage in dialog and resolve their differences over matters of principle. They demonize each other and shoot to kill. Think about it honestly – how long do many of you Republicans or Democrats out there think you could carry on a meaty discussion with your opponents before one of you escalated into raised voices and personal attacks? See? We’ve gone past the point of entertaining philosophical questions or the relevance of history. Drawing an audience at all is hard enough, but who’s interested in a politics as a form of the Jerry Springer show as their reward after doing so? Not me.

Although I didn’t consciously realize it for some time, deep down inside I think I knew that blogging about politics had slowly become a choice of irrelevancies. The best possible case had become either preaching to a large and raucous choir or shouting at a long and stony wall. By early 2006 something deep inside me, something way below the realm of conscious thought had realized this. There was no longer any hope of learning from opponents or changing minds. So I didn’t blog but I couldn’t say why.

At least not until I made trip to Shanghai last January. But that, as Alton Brown might say, is the subject of another post.