Amerika

Here are some videos of recent McCain/Palin rallies. Look at the kind of hatred and anger they're appealing to and fomenting. Look at the kind of know-nothing, us vs. them, violent passions they stoke. Even as their supporters rant "traitor!" and "socialist!" and "terrorist!" and "off with his head!" and "kill him!" and other such slander and exhortations to violence, neither McCain nor Palin ever once admonishes anyone to cool down, these are *Americans* we're denouncing and threatening to murder.

Think about that for a moment. Not just the calumny of "terrorist" and "traitor" and the rest, but death threats, as well. Against a sitting United States senator and candidate for president. A fellow American. And not a word of protest from McCain or Palin.

A few questions:

What does it say about a party when it is attracts supporters like these?

What does it say about a candidate when he or she repeatedly encourages supporters like these?

Can McCain and Palin control the passions they're stoking? Or is it more likely that such passions, stoked, will lead to real violence?

If fascism comes to America, how will it sound? What will it look like? What will be its slogans?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjxzmaXAg9E



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT8OFncxEkc



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itEucdhf4Us

Why Do the Palins Hate America?

Imagine the reaction if Michelle Obama had belonged to a political party that advocated secession from America, a party whose founder ranted, "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government... And I won't be buried under their damn flag... I'm not an American... I've got no use for America or her damned institutions." And imagine if Barack Obama had attended that party's conventions, even after swearing his oath of office to uphold the Constitution.

But wait, this has nothing to do with the Obamas -- it's all about the Palins! For seven years, Todd Palin was a member of this party -- the "Alaska Independence Party" -- and Sarah Palin repeatedly attended its annual conventions, even after she had been sworn in as Alaska's governor. The quotes above are from the party's founder, Joe Vogler. So where are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Peggy Noonan, the ardent defenders of America from the radicals who hate our freedoms and attack our values?

Maybe these patriotic pundits just haven't heard about the Palins and their connection to the Alaska Independence Party? Because if they knew, I'm sure they'd be upset. I hope someone will tell them so they can expose the Palins for the America-hating radicals they are -- terrorist appeasers who pal around with people who despise our country and hate our freedoms!

Please cut and paste or otherwise forward this message to every patriotic, country-first, red-blooded American you know -- I'm sure they'd want to know that the Palins have been palling around with people who hate America so much they want Alaska to be a separate country.

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/10/palins_attack_on_obamas_patrio.php

The VP Debate

Okay, just got done watching the vice presidential debate. A few thoughts.

As with last week's presidential debate, the main thing to remember in determining who won and who lost is that this whole thing was aimed at that small proportion of voters who are still undecided. Anyone who wasn't going to be swayed one way or the other (and that includes me) was, or at least should have been, irrelevant to the two campaigns. Keeping that in mind, we need to ask: What were the candidates' objectives for the evening? Were those objectives the right ones? And to what extent did the candidates achieve their objectives?

Let's start with Governor Palin. Given her recent disastrous interviews with Charlie Gibson and especially Katie Couric, and accompanying calls from prominent conservatives that she is embarrassingly unqualified and should step aside for the good of the party, Palin's primary objective was simply to come across as coherent and minimally credible. By the extraordinarily low standards set by her recent performances, I think she achieved this objective. But scrambling merely to avoid disaster doesn't leave much room to get anything positive done (does this sound familiar? Think treasury bailout...).

To put it another way: another "When Putin rears his head" moment, and the McCain campaign would have been dead and buried (as things stand, as I've argued before, I think the McCain campaign is merely dead). She didn't have one of those, and so managed to avoid catastrophe. So far, so good.

(Here are all the recent interview highlights, BTW, courtesy of TPM)



Her second, related objective, was to seem "presidential." That is, if you were undecided, would you come away from the debate believing Palin is ready to be president? Could you comfortably imagine her as president? Palin's objective was to get undecideds to answer these questions "yes." Did she?

I don't think so. Here's why.

When Palin went out of her way to correctly pronounce the names of foreign leaders like Achmadinejad and Kim Jung Il, it was in support of the "win undecideds by seeming presidential" objective, and was smart. But she spent far more time saying things like "Darn right, Joe six pack, soccer moms, I'm gonna speak directly to the voters, kinda, you may not like the way I answer questions, I'm from Wasilla, you know, bless their hearts, and I've been campaigning for like five weeks, doggonit, talkin' and wantin' and doin,' I want to speak to the American people without the filter of the mainstream media," and other such folksie, awe shucks, down-home, regular-girl verbal mannerisms and anti-condescending liberal elitist asides. None of which was in the least presidential. So what was it all about?

The "awe shucks" stuff was intended to fire up the base. And I imagine it did. The problem is, the base already believes she's their kind of gal and is going to vote for her because of it. So this second objective -- fire up the base -- was at best wasteful, because the base is already in the bag. They were baiting a hook for a fish that's already caught. The only thing that matters then, again, is how did "awe shucks" play to the undecideds?

Of course I could be wrong or I could be projecting, but I don't think the regular-girl schtick brings in the undecideds. Here, the low expectations she had created with her recent interview disasters worked against her. The essential problem is that Palin has set expectations so low that even if she exceeds them, people will still recognize it's not enough. Acting like a regular gal doesn't change that dynamic; it worsens it.

My sense is that at this point, outside the base, people don't believe Palin knows anything about foreign policy, the economy, or other national issues. I doubt they believe she's even given such outside-Alaska issues any thought. All of which made even her successful answers seem like well-executed rote recitations. As for the balance of her oratory, it was mostly repeated invocations of the evils of greed and corruption, promises to put the American people first, and lots of "John McCain is a maverick, a maverick, a maverick, the consummate maverick, we're a team of mavericks, John McCain takes on his own party, he does what's right for the American people, he'll take on his own party, he's ruffled feathers, John McCain knows how to win a war, he will know how to win a war, he will, he will...". In the absence of any substance, in the context of the expectations she's set, combined with the awe-shucks schtick and what felt to me like an overly chirpy, slightly manic persona, I think undecideds will come away feeling she was evasive, unclear, and unready. All of which is ultimately testimony to John McCain's judgment, or lack of it, in picking her to begin with.

Along these lines, her claim that "your plan for Iraq is a white flag of surrender" was red meat for the base. But did undecideds buy it? It also sounded a lot like the worst of George Bush, which played to the Obama campaign's objective of making McCain "more of the same." Were there any undecideds who felt that Palin even has the basis for such an opinion? Before being invited to be next in line for the presidency, Palin claimed only to have heard about the "surge" in Iraq on the news. Everything else she knows, she's learned in the last few weeks. Given the recency of her familiarity with these issues, Palin's chirpy confidence carries the whiff of a true believer. Again, I think undecideds will come away deciding the country has endured quite enough of that.

Also, "government isn't the solution, government is the problem" is the wrong message when the economy is cratering. It's dissonant with the galactic bailout her running mate supposedly suspended his campaign to try to support. People uninterested in such subtleties are already voting for McCain/Palin. People who distrust slogans unsupported by facts will now be more inclined to vote otherwise.

So again, Palin was given two mutually inconsistent objectives: bring in the undecideds, fire up the base. Worse, the McCain campaign clearly gave greater weight to the second one. You could see this in their choice of summation, which essentially came down to "freedom isn't free" and "the mainstream media is in the tank for the liberals." Who was that aimed at? Who found it persuasive?

Okay, now Senator Biden. His objective was simply to seem more presidential than Palin. Doing so required only that he demonstrate a greater command of substance and more gravitas, and avoid seeming to talk down to Palin lest he alienate women or otherwise win Palin a sympathy vote. For voters who've heard Biden can be a gasbag, he would get bonus points by being brief and down to earth. These weren't difficult objectives to achieve, and I'd say he achieved them handily through his command of the subject matter and calm, confident manner. The Obama campaign made a very smart move in directing Biden to go after McCain the way Biden did: doing so was calculated to diminish the top of the McCain/Palin ticket, of course, but more importantly, it implicitly emphasized that Biden is McCain's peer and equal. By contrast, again, when Palin delivered her "white flag of surrender" line, I can't imagine anyone outside the base felt she had any basis for her opinion.

There were a few small slips. Biden referred to himself as Joe Biden three times. To me, people who refer to themselves in the third person are as weird as people who whistle in public, and his doing so did tend to reinforce the gasbag hypothesis. He also had a tendency to use too many numbers and percentages. Doing so demonstrated a mastery of detail, I suppose, but sometimes the blizzard of numbers seemed to obscure the more fundamental point he was trying to make. My biggest disappointment was his failure to respond when Palin pointed out he once said he'd be honored to run with John McCain. This was a perfect opening for what I've argued should be one of the central narratives of the Obama campaign: What's happened to John McCain? Biden could have said, "I did say that, and I meant it. But something's happened to John since then. He's not the same man we all knew and admired in the senate." But in hindsight and from the sidelines, it's easy to come up with minor points like these. For purposes of analyzing whether Biden achieved his objectives, they're barely relevant.

I liked it when Biden attacked back on Palin's "maverick" perseveration. It exposed one of the key differences between them: Palin (like McCain) seems to believe that claims without evidence are credible. Outside the base, they're not. Biden responded with evidence. Doing so demonstrated his command of substance, and exposed her as a millimeter-deep lightweight glued to catch-phrases and talking points.

Needless to say, all of this is snap-judgment stuff. I think when the pundits weigh in and start dissecting Palin's various lies, mistakes, and distortions (Obama voted 93 times to raise taxes, voted against funding the troops, etc.), the initial sense that she's not ready will harden.

A thought about the moderator and rules of debate: would anything have been different if instead of Gwen Ifill, they had used a computer to flash the questions on a screen? If the answer is "no different" (and I think it is) -- that is, if the moderator's value-add is no more than reading questions off a pile of cards -- we might conclude that the rules were lame, or the moderator was useless, or both.

Overall, I think the best anyone could say for Palin is that she exceeded the stunningly low expectations her recent performances have established. I can't imagine that a material number of undecideds watched this debate and decided based on it to vote for McCain/Palin (I can, however, easily imagine it picking up some undecideds for Obama/Biden). So the best you can say is that Palin avoided making things much worse for her ticket. Which is another way of saying that in November, Barack Obama will be elected president.

The Debate

Thanks for all the messages asking me what I thought of the debate. There's a ton of excellent coverage out there already, and I don't want to repeat the commentary you can find at The Daily Dish, Talking Points Memo, Eunomia, and lots of other places. So I'll offer just a few thoughts on matters I haven't seen touched on elsewhere.

I guess the first thing everyone wonders is, "Who won?" I'd have to give the evening to Obama, though not by a lot. My reasoning: Obama had to show that he was "presidential." I think he did. McCain, especially after the preceding week of bizarre drama queen antics, had to show he wasn't having some sort of a meltdown. I think he did. So both achieved their objectives, but Obama's objective was the weightier of the two because it's more likely to move the undecided middle, which at this point is all that really matters. McCain also had to demonstrate that he was vastly superior to Obama on foreign policy. Personally, I think Obama did better here, but even if you think McCain had the edge, foreign policy is supposed to be McCain's bread and butter, so an edge isn't enough.

I think McCain's refusal, or inability to make eye contact with Obama even once is going to hurt him a lot. Mostly people are interpreting his refusal to look at his opponent as contempt. That's a charitable interpretation, and regardless, not one that would attract undecideds to the candidate engaging in it. In fact, my take is that McCain was afraid to look at Obama -- afraid that if he did so, his emotions (fear, anger, whatever) would kick in and knock him off his game. However you want to interpret McCain's failure to make eye contact (or even to glance left at where Obama was standing), it's not going to bring undecideds his way, and will likely alienate many. Similarly, his constant "What Senator Obama doesn't understand" and related refrains must have felt good to him and will please people who plan to vote for him anyway, but likely came across at best as undignified and arrogant to undecideds.

McCain also had a tendency to say, "Trust me, I'll..." or "I promise, I'll...". After eight years of George Bush and in midst of an economic crisis, "Trust me" is a terrible way, indeed, a terrible phrase, to try to move the middle.

Substantively, I would have been disappointed if my expectations weren't already so low. If you think about the substantive differences that were aired, they were tiny compared to the possibilities. Both candidates seem to agree that Georgia and other former satellite countries should be admitted to NATO. Their differences over how and when are important, but not as important as the whole question of what NATO is for at this point, and the costs and benefits of admitting a country like Georgia. Similarly, they both agree that we should be free to make incursions into Pakistan, presumably without any word from Congress, and differ only on whether it's okay to say so out loud. Take a step back and you'll see that this is a hell of a small policy difference compared to, say, should the president be able to direct secret, unauthorized wars in the first place? And can clandestine wars not backed by overt policy even succeed regardless? Etc.

At one point Jim Lehrer asked the candidates if the current economic crisis would affect the way they would "rule" the country once elected. Given the Bush Administration's creeping monarchism, I would have liked one of the candidates to correct Lehrer on his odd diction. Neither did.

The biggest reason I think the evening was Obama's rather than McCain's comes back to brand. McCain was clearly at pains to bolster his Experience brand by emphasizing how long he's been around, how many foreign leaders he's known, how many countries he's visited, how many issues he's been involved with. All of which is fine and under the right circumstances could be advantageous. But as I've written before with regard to Hillary Clinton, this is the wrong marketplace into which to try to introduce a product branded as "Experience." McCain's people realize this, and as I wrote a few days ago, they're trying to respond to marketplace conditions by changing McCain's brand to "Change/Reform." But Change/Reform and Experience are dissonant brand claims, and McCain's own debate efforts undercut his effort to modify the brand. In this regard and in others, McCain is faced with the same conundrum, and making the same mistakes, that Clinton made during the primary. Here's what I wrote about Clinton's branding efforts back in January. The whole post applies equally to McCain today, but here's the main idea:

Part of what makes a brand powerful is internal consistency -- that is, consistency between the elements of the message, and between the message and the underlying product. Inconsistency, that is, dissonance, weakens a brand. In other words, for a brand to have power, its various elements must organically cohere. Volvo stands for safety. How would Volvo fare if the company attempted to include in its brand the idea of speed, handling, and thrills? Not well, because thrills and safety don't easily fit together in the consumer's mind. Reliability, on the other hand, is something that does cohere with safety, and therefore, conceptually, Volvo would have little trouble expanding its brand to make it mean reliability along with safety. But because Volvos are not, in fact, reliable, the extension wouldn't work -- there would be a disconnect between the brand and the underlying product...

But other things aren't equal, and experience isn't always the better brand to run on even when the claim to it is strong (note that George Bush Sr., the candidate of experience, was defeated by the young, inexperienced Bill Clinton in 1992). There's also the question of the suitability of "experience" and "change" as brands in the current market. And here, even if Clinton were the very embodiment of experience, she has the wrong brand for 2008.

"Experience" connotes establishment, status quo, the past -- not concepts likely to be favored in a market that has seen five years of catastrophic war in Iraq; the epic incompetence of the response to Katrina; a plummeting dollar; a nine trillion dollar national debt; etc. "Experience" suggests you might be part of the problems people now want fixed. By contrast, all the associations of "change" as embodied by Obama -- freshness, excitement, the new, the future -- suggest the product in question, rather than being part of the problems of the past, will instead be the agent for solving them.

Clinton has realized her "experience" brand is not nearly as well suited for the current market as Obama's "change" brand, and has therefore been attempting to make "change" a part of her brand, as well. You can see the results in her final pre-caucus Iowa television commercial. Note how many times she talks about how she'll be "ready on day one" -- to make "a new beginning." The message (which Bill Clinton has been broadcasting, as well), is that only the candidate with experience can bring about change. Logically, there's nothing wrong with this argument. But brands aren't driven by logic. They're driven by emotion, by unconscious associations, and the implicit question in the mind of voters ("if she's so experienced, why is she only getting around to changing things now?") cannot be satisfactorily answered by logic. In other words, "experience" and "change" are not elements that cohere under a unified, powerful brand. (For a hilarious take on the ultimate in Clinton rebranding, click here.)

At the same time, McCain's primary, and original, brand claim -- experience -- has been badly damaged by his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Here's just one of her recent performances:


Watch CBS Videos Online

(BTW, that claim about trade missions? Another... let's call it another falsehood.)

True, Obama has undercut his own core brand of Change by selecting Joe Biden, a six-term senator whose brand -- longevity, insider, experience -- is dissonant with Obama's. But my sense is that it's easier to yoke "experience" in the service of "change" than it is to do the reverse. Also, no matter who he adds to the ticket, Obama just looks and sounds like change (whether he actually represents such a thing is of course a separate matter). McCain, no matter who he adds, looks as though he's been around forever. Once again, in this marketplace, even if McCain hadn't done so much to dilute and distort his brand, he'd have the tougher sell. I think his debate strategy has made it tougher.

Brain Dead

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

--Mark Twain

If you're part of the McCain team, here's what you're thinking.

You didn't know anything substantive about Palin before she was selected (why would you? She wasn't vetted). You meet her. You quickly realize she's bereft of even minimal acquaintance with defense, foreign policy, the economy, climate issues, domestic concerns, or any other area in which a president needs a firm grounding. You realize you can't let her out in public unscripted because she's so unready that a disaster is certain.

Your first response, therefore, is Oh, shit.

(Before denying anything in the above paragraph, you need to explain why, if Palin could exceed or even barely meet the press's and public's increasingly modest expectations, McCain's people won't take off the gag. That they're willing to pay a price for gagging her demonstrates they know removing the gag would be worse. Watch the Letterman clip below. He asks the eminently common sense question: even if McCain himself can't multitask and it made sense for him to suspend his campaign in response to the current economic crisis as he claims, why can't his vice presidential running mate campaign in his stead? If the quarterback can't play, where's the second string?).

You fight panic. You force yourself to think... think, damn it! And you realize -- hey, you don't need to make her an actual expert on any of those tough presidential subjects (and thank God for that, because true expertise in any, let alone all of these areas would be impossible in the time and circumstances available). What you need to do instead is just train her to seem like an expert. Sure, sure, you think, feeling better now, feeling like there's hope. It's like the difference between being a real martial artist, and being able to realistically bust out a few moves in front of the cameras on a movie set. Not that the second one is easy, but it's nothing compared to the first. That's the way to look at it -- she doesn't have to be an expert; she just has to play one on TV.

You're nodding now. Positive self talk. You can do this. This can be done. It's not like you have to pull it off for two years or anything. The election's on November 4, for God's sake... that's right around the corner. Look how long Bush and company kept the war in Iraq going by continually announcing new six-month milestones. If they can do that for six years, surely you can do this for six weeks.

But you're going to have to let her out at some point. No getting around that. Eventually, people are going to start asking what you're hiding, what you're afraid of. Whether you're running a campaign worthy of Vladimir Putin, whether this mystery candidate is really the Manchurian Candidate.

Panic starts to rise again. You beat it back. You grab a pencil and paper. Write it down, come up with a method. Plan the work, work the plan. Don't panic. Think. You can do it. The plan looks like this:

1. Push back "eventually" as long as possible. Inject as many smears about Obama's patriotism and as much bullshit about lipstick and kindergarten sex education as you can to obscure what you're really up to. Sure, McCain will take heat for turning the "Straight Talk Express" into the Bullshit Express, for sullying his alleged honor and integrity, but better that be the campaign narrative than incontrovertible proof that he selected a cipher to be a 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

2. Hide her. Force feed her everything she needs to know to avoid making a catastrophic mistake when she's finally allowed to open her mouth. Remember, you don't have to turn her into an expert, just someone who plays one on TV. Just enough to avoid that catastrophic mistake.

3. The preceding two points reinforce each other. The longer you hide her, the more you can improve her acting skills and the less the public expects. When "eventually" finally happens, you push her out in front of the press and public. At this point, you've been hiding her so long everyone's expecting her to be as vacuous as the icy void of space. Instead, she gets through her talking points without a major gaffe. The narrative then becomes, "She's not as clueless as we were expecting." You shrug and say, "What was the big deal? Told you we had nothing to hide."

Lower expectations dramatically, bone up her acting skills... with a whole lot of luck, you can get the two to cross on a graph. In the meantime, it's the political high-wire act of the century. But hey, they don't pay you the big bucks for nothing.

For a variety of reasons, it won't work.

First, there's the difficulty, noted above, of bringing someone like Palin up to speed even as a pretend-expert.

Second, there's the hostility the McCain camp is engendering even in the supine mainstream media. When you've been in the tank for your buddy John McCain as long as the MSM has, and he then repeatedly ignores your gentle hints that his statements are, shall we say, at odds with the factual record, making you look like co-opted, unappreciated fools, and he then turns on his erstwhile best buds and accuses them of not even being journalists, the backlash from the erstwhile best buds is going to get downright personal. And without the press to enable it, the narrative you're desperately trying to create -- "she's better than you thought!" -- won't take root outside the rightwing blogosphere.

Then there's the economy, the wars, Katrina, the whole Republican brand...

But wait, there's still more. Choosing Palin destroyed one of the ventricles of McCain's brand: his claim to experience. You can't build a brand on experience and then select a neophyte like Palin to be your understudy. So what McCain and Palin are now trying to do, fundamentally, is build a new brand, about Change and Reform, in under two months. This is a hell of a hard thing to do -- dot bombs in Silicon Valley spent millions on just such efforts, and I'm not aware of any that succeeded. And here, the task is particularly daunting because the packaging in which McCain and Palin are attempting to wrap themselves is so at odds with the facts of the underlying product (more on political brand dissonance here). John McCain not only looks like the establishment, this son and grandson of admirals and quarter-century-in-congress-and-the-senate politician is the establishment. Meanwhile, every one of Palin's claim to be a reformer, from "thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere to selling the plane on eBay to firing the governor's cook to taking a paycut to believing in transparency in government has been proven false.

So abruptly changing the McCain brand from Experience to Change/Reform is as difficult a maneuver as Volvo suddenly abandoning "safety" in favor of "speed." A change like that is damn near impossible under any circumstances. When the underlying product doesn't support -- and in fact contradicts -- the new brand direction, sales will be a disaster. As the writing on the wall becomes increasingly clear, you might even see management begin to indulge in increasingly bizarre and desperate gambits: contradicting themselves again and again on the health of the company (or of the economy); more lying, even on trivial matters; lashing out at shareholders who criticize their plans (or at the press); trying to postpone or cancel shareholder meetings (or to hide from reporters); or suspend a campaign; or cancel debates; or run from TV appearances). Anything to avoid, or just delay, the inevitable rendezvous with reality.

Speculation: what we're seeing now is not just the wheels coming off the McCain campaign following serial collisions with the real world. McCain's recent pleas to suspend the campaign and cancel debates are evidence that the candidate's age is showing. Members of the media (before concluding McCain was just using them) used to laud McCain's remarkable vigor. But even if he was vigorous during the primary, at some point the relentless pace and grinding duration of a presidential campaign will take their toll. McCain's people know if he has even one senior moment, or one of the intemperate outbursts for which he's known, during a debate, all hope will be lost. I think they've been seeing more of such moments in private, and are now trying to find a way to get him some rest before he gets lost in public. And I'm not the only one wondering. Here's George Will and company; here's David Letterman's scathing mockery.





A significant percentage of the country will vote for McCain and Palin no matter what. Likewise, a significant percentage for Obama and Biden. The independent middle only needs to move a little one way or the other to swing the election. By definition, that middle is considerate. The more time they have to consider the monumental bullshitter that John McCain has become, and how frighteningly unready his understudy is, the more independents will break for Obama.

As with Obama's race with Clinton, when the general election ends in November, people will look back and realize it had been over for a long time already. What we're seeing now is the McCain campaign's fingers continuing to twitch long after the brain has died.

The Palin Doctrine

Sarah Palin's ignorance of foreign policy is remarkable not just in itself, but also for the way, along with her candidacy, it continues to expose the naked hypocrisy that characterizes so much of what the Republican party has allowed itself to become.

If you've watched the single interview the McCain team has dared to let her give in the two weeks since she was nominated, you've seen the following exchange:

Gibson: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?
Palin: In what respect, Charlie?
Gibson: What do you interpret it to be?
Palin: His worldview?

Palin has been justifiably slammed for not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is, and the unprincipled right has rallied to her defense by claiming there's so much ambiguity in the Bush Doctrine, so many versions, so many interpretations and elements and addenda and visions and revisions, that obviously Palin was just giving a careful, thoughtful response. It's all bullshit, of course, and Glenn Greenwald has a great series of videos and transcripts of the people who just before being blinded by the impenetrable opaqueness of the Bush Doctrine all agreed on exactly what it meant.

(By the way, what could be said about a doctrine so ambiguous that even its cheerleaders profess not to understand what it means? You'd think a latent sense of personal dignity would prevent Republicans from advancing excuses as lame as their latest, but you would be mistaken.)

Now, admittedly, doctrines are simply policies. But if you call it a policy, it won't get named after you or your political heroes (who would remember The Monroe Policy?), so self-important presidents and their sycophantic cheerleaders in the press like to puff ordinary policies up into heroically grand Doctrines. Okay, fine. But this is what makes Palin's interview the more appalling: it's clear that not only does she not know what the Bush Doctrine is, she doesn't know what a presidential doctrine is, period.

Think about it. Yes, if it were true that Palin were an expert on the Bush Doctrine who was just giving a careful, nuanced response, she would have asked something like, "Which aspect, Charlie?" (with a few specifics thrown in to alleviate any suspicions that she's a foreign policy neophyte, alleviating such ridiculous suspicions being one of the key objectives of the interview). But even if she didn't know diddly about the Bush Doctrine, a nodding acquaintance with the concept of presidential concepts generally would have steered her away from her non-sequitur of a fishing expedition. After all, no one with even a clue about what a presidential doctrine is would respond to a question like Gibson's with a query about the worldview of the president in question.

Imagine this exchange:

Gibson: Do you agree with the Monroe Doctrine?
Palin: In what respect, Charlie?
Gibson: What do you interpret it to be?
Palin: His worldview?

Right, Palin's question makes no sense there, either. Nor would it have made sense had Gibson asked her about the Carter Doctrine, the Reagan Doctrine, or about whether she thought it was silly and self-important for presidents to have "doctrines" named after them in the first place. It wouldn't have made sense because Palin doesn't know anything about the entire subject.

So maybe instead of being tutored by Joe Lieberman and company, Palin should be watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail:



Of course, none of this will matter to the people who are packaging Palin as a foreign policy expert because Alaska is near Russia, and it won't matter to the people who want to believe in the "Sarah is Experienced" myth. We used to call this kind of attitude willful ignorance. I think we can now just call it the Palin Doctrine.

P.S. I've received several emails from people complaining about my use of the word "bullshit" because they find it offensive. I understand your point and appreciate the feedback, but I think on this issue reasonable people can differ. It's true there are many other words that also describe the McCain/Palin campaign: lies, deception, distortion, dishonesty, untruth, etc., but nothing quite captures the heart of their campaign like bullshit, so I'll go on using the term. And while I commend these commenters for caring enough to share their thoughts with me, I can't help but wonder: have you expressed some outrage too at the purveyors of the bullshit, and not just at the people who are reporting it?

Obama Eats Special Needs Children!

James Taranto has an article in today's Wall Street Journal in which he professes outrage at anyone who would suggest John McCain picked Sarah Palin because she was walked the pro-life walk (as, indeed, she has). The article is worth a read: Taranto distorts the meaning of some of the quotes he uses in a way that's reminiscent of the recent McCain camp excrescences on lipstick and sex education, then whips himself into a fit of righteous indignity:

This is worse than tasteless or even unhinged. It is depraved. It represents an inversion of any reasonable conception of right and wrong, including liberal conceptions.

Holy hyperbole, Batman! But is it really so outlandish and offensive to suggest that McCain picked Palin because of her pro-life credentials?

This is a candidate who has barely set foot outside the country, who has never met a foreign leader, who had never evinced even a rudimentary understanding of or even interest in foreign policy. Her national security credentials are so lacking that her supporters have had to resort to novel theories about the sources of her expertise, such as that she is a national security expert because Alaska is near Russia, or that she has learned foreign policy "by osmosis" because Russian missiles would pass over Alaska on their way to the continental United States. Even McCain can't come up with a coherent defense of his candidate's foreign policy or national security credentials (although he does manage to come up with two #1 issues facing America. For John McCain, nothing is impossible). Watch this painful video and see.



And here's Governor Palin's first interview since being nominated, where, after two weeks of cramming on national security issues, she doesn't even know what The Bush Doctrine is.



(If you're a principled conservative, if you care about national security, how can you accept this? Seriously.)

The humiliating attempts of Palin's supporters notwithstanding, it's simply impossible to believe that McCain chose Palin for her national security credentials. We know he didn't pick her for that.

How about executive experience? The McCain team has tried to focus more on this one because the national security case is so laughable. And it's true that Palin has been a mayor and is now a governor, so she is not entirely lacking in executive experience. But even if you believe that being mayor of a town of 9000 and serving for a year and half as governor of a state of 600,000 is adequate experience to prepare you to be President of the United States, can you really argue it's enough to outweigh the total lack of foreign policy or national security credibility? If McCain wanted meaningful executive experience -- especially the kind that would outweigh the foreign policy deficit -- he had an almost limitless list of candidates who have far more executive experience than Palin.

So we know McCain didn't pick Palin for her national security acumen, which is nonexistent, or for her executive experience, which is slight. And those seem like two pretty key categories to check off for a potential Commander-in-Chief.

So... why did he pick her?

As I've argued before, there are two reasons: (i) to attract disaffected Hillary supporters and women for whom gender is a key consideration in a candidate; and (ii) to fire up the base. Palin's gender was calculated to achieve objective #1. Objective #2 is achieved by Palin's pro-life stance, the integrity of which is proven by her decision to bear a Down's Syndrome child (to her credit -- on this, she seems no hypocrite. Pork barrel spending and reform, not so much).

So of course McCain chose Palin in large part because of her decision to have her Down's Syndrome baby. Her decision served the substantive objective of firing up the base, and even better, today Republicans are able to use the baby, as Taranto does, to inject another dose of bullshit into the news cycle and make sure everyone is talking about the baby, rather than about Governor Palin's utter lack of qualifications to be Commander-in-Chief. The strategy is: "We'll talk about the baby by saying it's outrageous and offensive to talk about the baby."

So get ready for the next wave of McCain accusations, calculated to dominate two or three more days of news and drown out McCain's and Palin's dreadful recent performances. It'll go something like this: "Obama Slimes Trig Palin and Other Special Needs Children!" And rather than press this obvious -- and winning -- point, that of course McCain picked her because of the baby, she's substantively embarrassingly unqualified, Democrats will apologize, as indeed they already, reflexively, are.

Republicans are very good at this game. Democrats, it seems, just aren't. Some thoughts on why in another post.

McCain's Honor

What's that quote, sometimes attributed to Twain, other times to Churchill? "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." Well, it looks like the truth is belatedly catching up to McCain and Palin on their nonstop "she stopped the bridge to nowhere, she sold the plane on eBay, she fired the governor's mansion cook" attempts to create a hockey mom, reformer, just-folks persona that rests on a tissue of lies.

No, she didn't kill the bridge to nowhere; no, she didn't return the money for the bridge -- she kept it; no, she didn't sell the plane on eBay, and took a loss when she sold it otherwise; no, she didn't fire the governor mansion cook, just let him go during the summer, when she wasn't there anyway; no, she didn't put Wasilla's fiscal house in order, she increased the town's debt; no, she didn't oppose earmarks, she took in more earmark money per capita than any other governor in the United States.

It'll be interesting to see whether the facts carry the day. So often, people will just go on believing what they want to. What's that other Churchill line? "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened."

Here are a few links to the facts:

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh090808.shtml

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/215092.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3DZZNZFxeI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfLDjmKfigw





Many more articles and links on Talking Points Memo.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

-- Barry

Suicide by Palin

On November 5, when the votes are in and Obama has won, pundits will look back and see what all the bizarreness and hysteria are occluding now: John McCain lost the election when he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate.

McCain's strategists hoped choosing Palin would accomplish two objectives: bring in more women, and fire up the theocrat base. The first objective will fail. The second will succeed, but only in a "the operation was a success but the patient died" sense.

Objective 1: bring in more women. The number of women who would vote for someone with Palin's views on reproductive rights (let alone her scant experience) -- that is, who, as The Daily Show put it, who would put gynecology over ideology -- is small. To suggest otherwise, as the McCain campaign implicitly has in making its pick, presupposes that there are significant numbers of women who are even more gullible than men. There aren't.



Also, the few women who might vote for McCain only because his running mate is female have to be balanced against the voters McCain will have lost by his choice. Among the lost will be voters (many of them women) appalled by the cynicism of the move, by Palin's obvious lack of readiness for the job, and by the recklessness McCain has demonstrated in his failure to vet his pick.

Objective 2: fire up the Christianist base. From what I've read in the news and judging from some of the mail I've been receiving, I think this objective will probably be achieved. But again, you have to balance the gains you make in firing up the base against the potential voters you drive to Obama by adopting this strategy. The rally-the-base strategy worked in the last two elections. After eight years of disastrous Republican incompetence, the base won't be enough. You need the independents, too -- that is, the very voters who are thoughtful enough to correctly evaluate a choice like this for what it really is.

If this is all so obvious, you might ask, why did McCain's team adopt a strategy that's sure to fail?

Two reasons, I would say: inertia, and the fear of looking stupid.

When I was competing in wrestling and judo, I learned that you have to be careful about relying too much on a particular money move (there are exceptions, like Japanese Olympic judo heavyweight Gold Medalist Yasuhiro Yamashita, but even there Yamashita had three money moves, each of which complemented the other two, and countering one would by design set you up for one of the others. Plus, Yamashita was abnormally talented. But I digress). If you get known for a signature move, your opponents will work hard to figure out a way to counter it. Then, when you go up against such an opponent and your money move doesn't work, it takes a while for your brain to accept that the surefire thing isn't working anymore and you have to do something else. Eventually, you'll catch on, but there's resistance, and in the meantime you'll probably lose the match.

Now, multiply that resistance across an entire entrenched bureaucracy, and you start to get an idea of how hard it is for an organization to abandon techniques that have worked in the past, even when all the signs indicate that the current contest is different.

Compounding the inertia factor is the fear of looking stupid. I think fear of looking stupid is one of the most powerful motivators in human behavior. It explains why people are willing to do conventional things even in the face of plentiful evidence that the thing in question is a mistake. Because if you buy gold at $1000 an ounce and it tanks, you can always hide behind the fig leaf of, "Well gosh, everyone was doing it! So sure it was a mistake, but at least it wasn't a stupid one!" Whereas if you fail doing something original or otherwise daring, you'll be open to charges of, "What were you thinking? No one's ever done that -- why didn't you do what's tried and trued? What are you, stupid?"

Fear of looking stupid has two components. The first, described above, is largely unconscious and emotional. The second is conscious and calculated. If you're a McCain or RNC staffer and you know the tried-and-true approach is going to fail this time, what are your incentives for trying to adapt? You're apt to lose against the higher-ups, anyway, who are gripped by inertia. And even if you prevail organizationally but your daring new strategy doesn't win the election (highly probable, given the fundamentals of this race), people will hit you with the, "What are you, stupid?" charge, which will damage your career prospects. Whereas, if you lose the election doing what's always worked before, you won't look stupid, you can blame the brutal 2008 election fundamentals, and you'll have a job working for the Republican nominee in 2012.

So the Republicans have by reflex adopted a fire-up-the-theocrat-base; spiced it up with an attempt to lure women sufficiently gullible or gender-obsessed to vote against their ideological and common sense interests; and undergirded it with the usual tribalist, culture war appeals we saw in most of the Republican convention speeches. I almost can't blame them -- not just because, after all, the bullshit has worked before, but because the Democrats are still so inept in combating it. At least the Dems can rely on outsiders like The New Yorker.

For me, probably the most fascinating aspect of McCain's pick (aside from watching Republican heads explode as they try to defend it) has been watching the way the glandular right has fallen in love with her. In fact, I received an email from a guy the other day who proclaimed, "I love Sarah Palin!" I wrote back that it must be love at first sight. And these are the same people who accuse the left of surrendering their judgment on Obama, of falling in love, of believing Obama is The One, blah blah blah...



Let's assume too that Sarah Palin, because of her looks, her religious views, her personality, or whatever, seems like your kind of person and you really, really like her, or even love her. I don't understand how you get from there to "and therefore she should be next-in-line for the presidency." In what other field do people make decisions this way? "...and therefore she should operate on my child." "...and therefore he should run a billion-dollar company." "...and therefore she should repair my car."

"and therefore she should be next-in-line for the presidency." And the people saying it call themselves "conservative!" It amazes me.

The good news is, she won't be.

Rebranding McCain

Apologies to all for being away so long. If you haven't heard, back in May, my family and I made a sudden decision to move to Tokyo for the year, which led to a distracting three months of preparations. We've been here now for two weeks, are mostly settled in, and are loving life in this overwhelming, crazy, wonderful city.

I've been meaning to offer some thoughts on where John McCain is most vulnerable to being rebranded, but I think that exercise might have been rendered academic now that McCain has chosen to commit Suicide By Palin. Still, branding and politics are two subjects that interest me mightily, and their intersection even more so. So here are a few observations.

I've finally finished watching the major speeches from the Democratic convention. I think the Dems mostly did a good job. Like Glenn Greenwald, I would have liked to see more about the current administration's radicalism and contempt for the Constitution. I also would have liked to see a more subtle and systematic attempt to rebrand McCain.

For me, a brand is the emotional connection a consumer feels with a product or service (for some earlier thoughts on the subject with regard to Clinton and Obama, check out Brand, Market Adoption, and President Obama). Brand is what the product stands for; it's why a consumer wants to be associated with the product.

What's McCain's brand? I think you can sum it up in a few phrases. War hero. National security expert. Straight-talking maverick. (Bear in mind that for the moment we're talking about brand, and not the extent to which the brand is supported or contradicted by the underlying product). Given that McCain's marketing team wants consumers to buy their product for the presidency, I'd call McCain's brand strong and appropriate to the task at hand. The challenge for the Democrats, therefore, is to change the brand. The question is, how.

Once a brand is established in the consumer's mind, it's difficult to change it in the absence of a change in the underlying product. Some brands can be extended in certain directions; the trick lies in knowing which brands can be extended and in what ways. As a general matter, you can't turn a brand into something entirely new. You have to build on, and subtly shift, something you already have. Even a relatively logical change -- and one supported by the product's name -- like Amazon's shift from online bookseller to online general merchandise shopping mall, was difficult and took a lot of time and effort.

So the Democrats would be ill-advised to try to take on McCain's brand head-on. What they need to do instead is to work with the brand as it currently exists in consumers' minds and then subtly reshape it. Republicans are generally good at this game. Look at what they've tried to do in rebranding Obama as a "celebrity." Obama's brand involves a rare kind of political charisma, and rather than deny that charisma, the Republican marketing machine has tried to shift the way consumers look at it. The pitch isn't, "He's not charismatic," which no one would accept; it's "Sure, he's charismatic -- he's a celebrity,after all, like Paris Hilton, who BTW isn't qualified to be president" (although I have to say, Paris is a lot more articulate than McCain, and marketing-savvy, too).

I think the way to rebrand McCain is first to not argue about the current brand. People who believe McCain is a national security expert because he can keep a straight face while uttering helium-filled platitudes like "I'll follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell" and "I'll be Hamas's worst nightmare" and "We are all Georgians now," while ignoring his belief that even in retrospect invading Iraq was a good idea, along with his proven inability, for example, to distinguish Shia from Sunni, or locate the borders of Pakistan or Iraq, or know that Czechoslovakia hasn't been a country since 1992, won't be persuaded by the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Similarly, people who believe McCain is a straight-talking maverick despite his reversals on Iraq, torture, abortion, tax cuts, offshore drilling, the religious right -- in fact, can you come up with a topic on which McCain has been consistent? -- are already letting the brand blind them to the facts, so pointing out the facts will be of limited utility. Nor is there any reason to hope that people who believe being shot down and held as a POW in itself qualifies a candidate to be Commander-in-Chief and insulates that candidate from questions about his qualifications are amenable to an alteration in their underlying worldview.

(On the convincibility continuum, people who continue to believe McCain is serious about national security -- that he puts "Country First" -- even in the face of his pick for vice president, are near clinical. The Wall Street Journal's attempts to justify the choice were particularly entertaining. They praised it as "a daring pick because Mrs. Palin has never faced national scrutiny and hasn't had to deal with foreign policy." Hasn't had to deal with it! Meaning, she might be an absolute expert on the subject; she just hasn't had the opportunity to demonstrate her awesome abilities. It's like calling a used car "pre-owned" -- sure it was owned, but maybe it wasn't ever driven? And this was great, too: "We suspect her record of fighting the status quo was uppermost in John McCain's decision." The woman part? Total accident! Fox and Cindy McCain have argued for Palin's foreign policy credibility because "Alaska is close to Russia," and no, I am not making this up. And here's a hilarious parody of right-wing attempts to justify this unjustifiable choice.).

What the Democrats need to do is accept all the premises of McCain's brand -- but then to ask, "What happened? McCain was all those things, and we loved him for it. But he's changed. He's not the man he once was."

Notice how small is the disagreement inherent in this pitch. It doesn't deny adherents to McCain's brand their fundamental belief; instead, it accepts and agrees with that belief. It's therefore able to get past defenses and open up a small question, a question which comes across as fair and reasonable given the overall broad agreement on which the question rests. "What happened to him?"

The only Democrat I saw do anything like this at the convention was John Kerry, who repeatedly contrasted Senator McCain and Candidate McCain. The contrast was useful, but I think it could have been more effective. It needed to be hammered home by more speakers, and consistently employed in service of the question: "What happened to John McCain?"

Once McCain brand loyalists accept that something has changed, they can start to see him more for what he really is (or, if you think I'm being too partisan, they can see him in the way the Democrats want him to be seen rather than in the way he wants to be seen). The emotional distance for such changed perceptions is short. It's not, "I was all wrong about McCain;" it's, "I was right about McCain... but he's changed." And that small shift would be enough. What matters for an election (or for the success of any product) isn't what the brand was; what matters is what the brand is on the day people are making up their minds about buying it.

"He's not the man he once was" is also obvious code for, "At 72 -- and 76, if he serves a full term -- McCain is too old." Democrats will be called on their use of this code. This would be desirable. It would be a backdoor way of creating nonstop coverage of McCain's age, in the guise of "Are Democrats playing the age card?":

Television Pseudo-Journalist: "You said, 'What's happened to John McCain? He's not the man he was.' Isn't this code for 'McCain is too old?'"

Democratic Spokesman: "No, it's not. Whether a man who would be 76 if he serves one full term is too old for the job is for the American people to decide. It's a comment instead on what happened to a once-principled politician. After all, John McCain was against torture before he was for it, he was against tax cuts for the rich before he was for them, he called theocrats 'agents of intolerance' before embracing them, etc. John McCain has made more misstatements, leveled more outright falsehoods, and changed his positions on more issues in less time than any politician in recent memory, and the American people have a right to know why. Is he just pandering? What does he really believe? What could we expect of him if he were to become president?"

In the midst of this kind of coverage, McCain's ongoing misstatements would have a framework in which they could be understood: "He's a national security expert, so if he's making mistakes on such fundamental points, it can only mean that he's slipping. Can we risk putting someone of such declining capacity in the White House?"

No, we can't.

I'm not a Democrat, and I'm not otherwise comfortable with the notion of the Democrats gaining a simultaneous lock on Congress, the Senate, and the Presidency. But if they're going to become a serious party again, the Republicans need a near-death experience. If you care about the party -- and about the country -- help provide that experience in November.

Safety First; The Constitution Second

If you're a regular reader of HOTM, you know where I stand on the recently enacted FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which grants the government broad new domestic eavesdropping powers and immunizes telecoms from previous felonies (wouldn't it be great if retroactive immunity from felonies were available to all of us? Tragically, you and I don't donate enough to politicians to qualify. But we can always hope).

Reading the transcript of the signing ceremony, I was struck by some of President Bush's rhetoric. The president said, "The bill I sign today will help us meet our most solemn responsibility: to stop new attacks and to protect our people." And he reiterated: "Protecting America from another attack is the most important responsibility of the federal government -- the most solemn obligation that a President undertakes."

What's odd about these statements is that they're at odds with the Constitution itself. Article 2, Section 1 provides, "Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, [the President] shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:--'I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.'" Apparently, the framers thought the one thing so in need of protection that they required it to be called out explicitly in an oath is the Constitution. They didn't see fit to have the president swear an oath to defend the country, the currency, or anything else -- just the Constitution. For someone who purports to be a "judicial conservative", Bush's reordering of Constitutional priorities are odd.

True, Article 4, Section 4 provides, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence." But there's nothing in the language of the Constitution providing that any of these responsibilities is "most solemn" or "most important." Those priorities are external inventions, and certainly not in keeping with a notion that we ought to interpret the Constitution based on its own clear language.

So we're left with a question: why would a president who purports to be a judicial conservative claim his most solemn obligation is to prevent attacks on the nation, when the Constitution itself clearly provides otherwise? If the president's reordering of priorities is correct, does it not follow that he might be impelled to protect America at the cost of the Constitution? Do we really want to empower any president, Democrat or Republican, with such a convenient rationalization?

The right is fond of pointing out that freedom isn't free. And certainly it isn't: likely it can only exist and be preserved in the presence of certain dangers (then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld himself pointed out that "Freedom is untidy.") Many of these dangers could be eliminated by a totalitarian government, just as we could dramatically reduce crime by eliminating Due Process and the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Would the trade-off be worth it?

What concerns me most is that President Bush's stated priorities -- Safety First, the Constitution Second -- might accurately reflect the current priorities of a significant number of Americans. If our culture comes to prize safety above all else, we'll gradually cash in our freedoms attempting to buy our safety. If that's really the way we've come to view the world, maybe McCain advisor Phil Graham had a point when he recently described Americans as "whiners" and victims."

Liberty is our precious inheritance. We can marshal it wisely, or we can place it in blind trust, where, predictably, it will be lost.

Obama Caves on Warrantless Surveillance and Telecom Amnesty

As an Obama supporter, I have to say the Senator massively disappointed me today with his craven capitulation on warrantless surveillance and amnesty for law-breaking telecoms. His vote was a betrayal of numerous campaign promises. I had thought more of him and feel naive now for having believed him earlier.

If you value the Fourth Amendment more than Senator Obama seems to, here's a link to Strange Bedfellows, a new organization dedicated to preventing unchecked government power and preserving the Fourth Amendment. I've already signed up.

John McCain: The Communist Choice?

Hmmm... earlier today, John McCain's former North Vietnamese communist jailer went on the record with his support for McCain, saying he considers McCain an "old friend" and asserting that he would vote for McCain for president if he could. Isn't McCain's communist support something we should consider in determining his fitness for office? Might not his communist support be evidence that he's some kind of fifth columnist?

Obviously (I hope obviously) the title of this piece and the argument above are intended to be ridiculous. But by the bizarre inferences the right has trotted out about Hamas and Obama, my title and argument are entirely coherent. If I'm correct in thinking McCain's communist support isn't going to be a major play on Fox news, it's reasonable to ask why.

Of course, we know why: Fox's purpose isn't journalism; it's support of a political party. Fair enough. But for people with integrity, questioning these inconsistencies is a useful way to expose bias -- not just in others, but in ourselves. So if you're someone who believed a purportedly kind word from a Hamas member was damning to Obama, you should ask yourself why a similar comment by a Vietnamese communist about McCain would be irrelevant.

And if you loathe what President Bush has done to the Fourth Amendment with his illegal, warrantless surveillance program, ask how you can give Obama a pass for breaking previous campaign promises and capitulating to Republican efforts to legalize warrantless surveillance and offer amnesty to telecoms that have previously broken the law. Do you adhere to party, or to principle? Questions like these are a decent way to start finding out.

This is Conviction?

Today's Wall Street Journal features an op-ed by AEI resident scholar Michael Ledeen called Iran and the Problem of Evil. The op-ed contains one severe logical fallacy and one weird omission, each unfortunately representative of much of the current state of thought and argument on the right.

First, the logical fallacy. Ledeen lays out his premises thusly: (1), right up until World War II, the west was in denial about the obvious threat of fascism; (2) today, "The world is simmering in the familiar rhetoric and actions of movements and regimes – from Hezbollah and al Qaeda to the Iranian Khomeinists and the Saudi Wahhabis – who swear to destroy us and others like us" (and later he mentions Syria, Egypt, and "European and American mosques," as well); and (3) we are in denial about the nature of these movements and regimes as we were about the nature of the Nazis. Then finally, two thirds into the article, Ledeen arrives at his thesis statement:

This is not merely a philosophical issue, for to accept the threat to us means – short of a policy of national suicide – acting against it. As it did in the 20th century, it means war.

Even if one accepts Ledeen's premises, how does it logically follow that the only way to deal with the movements and regimes he mentions is by going to war with them? Does the United States really have no other policy tools at its disposal? National suicide or war and nothing else? Holy artificial either/or constructs, Batman!

I've written before about this kind of binary thinking -- once in the context of rightist thinking about "The Terrorists;" another time, in the context of rightist arguments for torture. But the notion that the only way of dealing with a country like Iran, with its basket-case economy and GDP about the size of Finland's, is to go to war with Iran as we once did against Germany, dramatically expands the size and opacity of the blinders the right insists on wearing when it ventures to look out at the world.

But the logical gap in Ledeen's argument is so vast that even he can't avoid it. Because -- and here is the weird omission -- he never actually comes out and says what he means. Here's his concluding paragraph:

Then, as now, the initiative lies with the enemies of the West. Even today, when we are engaged on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is little apparent recognition that we are under attack by a familiar sort of enemy, and great reluctance to act accordingly. This time, ignorance cannot be claimed as an excuse. If we are defeated, it will be because of failure of will, not lack of understanding. As, indeed, was almost the case with our near-defeat in the 1940s.

Huh? Why argue that al Qaeda, Egypt, Hezbollah, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and European and American mosques are like the Nazis, that as with the Nazis, we have to accept that the existence of these movements and regimes forces us to choose between suicide and war... and then shy away from what obviously, logically (if you can call it that) comes next: a call for a declaration of war?

I don't mean the question rhetorically. Is Ledeen afraid of being called a warmonger? Does he recognize what he's actually agitating for, and at the last moment shy away from it? Is he carried away by his rhetoric and blind to its actual implications?

I've said before that if you want to argue for torture, argue for it -- but don't hide from your own argument by using doublespeak like "aggressive interrogation" or "enhanced interrogation" or whatever. Call it what it is and explain why it's necessary. Similarly, if you think America needs to go to war with much of the Islamic world as we once went to war with the Nazis and fascists, have the clarity (and guts) to make your argument forthrightly. Otherwise, we're faced with the sad spectacle of a man who thinks he's issuing a courageous call but who in fact lacks the courage of his ostensible convictions.

Hillary's Exit

With some reluctance, I offer a few thoughts on Hillary's defeat, particularly on the notion that she deserves to be, and that Obama should make her, the Democratic vice presidential candidate.

I'm reluctant because Hillary as vice presidential candidate and as vice president is such a self-evidently bad idea that sensible people know it simply will not happen. So I find myself in the slightly weird position of discussing something that in my mind is being discussed only because it's being discussed, like Paris Hilton being famous for being famous.

Okay. Let's first dispense with the idea that Clinton "deserves" the vice presidency. This is ridiculous for so many reasons, not the least of which is that the same Clinton backers who argued (when it was convenient to do so) that superdelegates should be free to follow nothing other than the dictates of their consciences in selecting a presidential candidate now argue that the presidential candidate must surrender that very same freedom when selecting his running mate. I suppose this kind of inconsistency is to be expected from supporters whose approach to politics is flexible enough for them to agree one day that Florida and Michigan would be excluded from the election, and later to find such an exclusion is a moral outrage worthy of a Zimbabwean stolen election on the next; flexible enough, indeed, for them to agree at the beginning of the race that the winner would be determined by delegates won, only to find popular vote counts more significant when the previously agreed-upon rules proved a loss for their candidate. But still.

The irony is, the notion that Hillary deserves the vice presidency is insulting to Hillary. From the beginning, she had a choice: run a relatively positive campaign -- the kind, say, that Mike Huckabee ran on the Republican side, or that John Edwards ran in 2004, or the kind that Edwards, Dodd, and Richardson ran this time -- to position herself as a sensible choice for VP. Instead, Hillary chose to run and all or nothing campaign, doing everything she could do destroy Obama -- including practically urging voters who wouldn't back her to at least back McCain. If her strategy had succeeded, she would have been the Democratic nominee today. But the risk was that if her strategy failed, she would have made herself unsuitable for the #2 slot. As indeed she has: McCain is already using video of Hillary saying, "I've passed the commander-in-chief threshold, Senator McCain has passed the commander-in-chief threshold, Senator Obama has a speech he made in 2002" in his latest campaign ads (although it's encouraging to watch McCain adopt the exact same campaign tactics that have just proven fruitless for the Clintons). Regardless of what you think of her strategy, at least we can respect Clinton enough to acknowledge that she was aware of the consequences of her approach and selected it knowingly. To suggest at this point instead that she should be awarded a prize she deliberately forfeited is to treat an autonomous adult as a spoiled child.

Equally ridiculous, and insulting to Hillary, is the notion that Obama should help her retire her $30 million campaign debt, which includes $11 million the Clintons personally lent to the campaign. The Clintons, their donors, and their lenders all made adult, autonomous, conscious decisions to invest in her campaign the way they did. Why should outsiders have to bail them out? Bear in mind that the Clintons' personal fortune is estimated at about $60 million. Am I the only one who wonders why a politician who professes to care so deeply about the disenfranchised, the invisible, the little people whose votes for her are the same as prayers, is now going to happily stick all those little people with the bill for what since February has been little more than a vanity project? The predictable reply: you're right, it's not fair, but it has to be done to assuage Hillary and get her fundraisers onside. Fair enough, but then let's call this exercise what it really is: extortion.

Look, Hillary could have campaigned in such a way that her proposal to Obama would have been, "Make me your vice president because I'll help you." Instead, her proposal is, "Make me your vice president or I'll hurt you." Even if her implicit threat were credible, Obama would have no choice but to refuse her, lest the next Republican campaign narrative would become (and not without merit), "If he can't handle Hillary, how's he going to handle Ahmadinejad?"

More ironic still is the moniker people attach to the idea of an Obama/Hillary team: they like to call it a "unity ticket." Remember, for the last five months, Hillary has been analyzed mostly through the prism of the Democratic primary. Under these circumstances, it's easy to forget her astonishingly high general election negatives. When a candidate has negatives as high as Hillary's, the only thing she'd be unifying is the Republican party.

Hillary supporters will argue nonetheless that she offers benefits: she can deliver older white women and rural whites, demographics Obama has had trouble attracting. Let's assume this is true. The next question is, is there another candidate who can deliver a similar benefit without simultaneously galvanizing Republicans, alienating independents, undercutting Obama's core message of change, and making Obama look weak by virtue of selecting her?

Pretty hard to believe the answer to that one is no.

Many of her supporters are angry right now. Wouldn't putting Hillary on the ticket mollify them? Maybe... but again, the question is, can the same objective be achieved at lower cost?

The general election is five months away. That's a long time for anger and bitterness to dissipate and for rationality to prevail. Rationality in this case meaning Obama's 100% positive rating from Planned Parenthood, his endorsement by NARAL, his overall policy positions being close to Hillary's. Contrasted with McCain's recent speechifying on conservative judicial appointments (much of it obscured by the dramatic coverage of the Democratic primary) and his record on judicial nominations. Women who are angry today will have to face a question in November: do they want to support, whether by commission or omission, the overturning of Roe v Wade? Do they want their daughters to lose control of their reproductive rights?

The only question at this point is how Obama will finesse Hillary's implicit threats and detach her from her supporters. I don't think any of this is terribly difficult.

First, praise Clinton lavishly. This has been ongoing.

Second, make it known that Clinton is on the shortlist (though in fact, for all the reasons above, she will not be seriously considered). Promise to vet her just as the other candidates will and should be vetted. Leak problems discovered with the opaque and disreputable sources of the Clintons' wealth and the Clinton Foundation's fundraising, with rumors of Bill's behavior, with Hillary's seeming inability to control Bill on the campaign trail, and with Bill's refusal to allow adequate scrutiny of his finances (think of this as the "Blame Bill" strategy).

Third, note that given Hillary's stated passions, indeed, her most recent political raison d'etre, it would be a waste of her talents to take a job that has been famously compared to a bucket of warm piss. She could make a much more important contribution spearheading healthcare reform. How could she turn down such an opportunity? She's explicitly said she's not particularly interested in the vice presidency and that she wants healthcare for every American. Sure, this is all a bluff, but Obama is now in a good position to call.

And fourth, after easing Hillary aside, relentlessly hammer home what McCain means for the Supreme Court and women's rights.

For a long time, Hillary's overall approach has been to threaten punishment if she doesn't get what she wants. This is why she has been so eager to whip her supporters into an unjustified rage, why she encouraged the notion that whites wouldn't vote for Obama, and most of all why she refused to concede on Tuesday even after Obama had achieved a numerical lock on the nomination. The last threat in her arsenal is the threat to disrupt the convention in August and prevent the Democrats from focusing on the general for another two critical months. But with the primaries over and no more excuses for superdelegates not to decide, I think she's realized that any further threats of punishment would force the party to move en masse to crush and humiliate her. Thus her announcement that on Saturday she will indeed acknowledge reality and belatedly concede.

That concession will not cause, but rather instead merely accelerate the inevitable end of the Clintons. Obama will continue to finesse Hillary in all the ways described above. He'll select an appropriate vice president. He'll beat McCain, a remarkably weak, pandering, flip-flopping candidate, in the fall. At which point, the Clintons will have lost all their power to punish.

So it's ridiculous, as well as insulting to Hillary, to suggest that she "deserves" it. Substantively, she makes no sense. Outside the lunatic fringe that always exists and is never ultimately relevant, her supporters will come around in the fall. So now: can we please stop talking about Hillary? The Clinton era is over.

Those Crazy Conservative Activists Again

Yesterday's California Supreme Court ruling, relying on the California state constitution to find unconstitutional the exclusion of gays from the California institution of marriage, is already being (predictably) misunderstood and mischaracterized. For an excellent summary of the opinion and a debunking of the fallacious attacks against it, check out Glenn Greenwald.

Probably the most common charge being leveled against the California court is that its judges were "activist," and thwarted the will of the people, or usurped the role of the legislature, or both. I find these vague charges of judicial activism tiresome: they're raised only when courts reach outcomes the people howling "Activists!" don't like. And the "Activist!" charges ignore the excruciatingly obvious, fundamental fact that when a court in a democracy interprets a constitution, the court is *supposed to* overturn laws enacted by the people or their representatives if those laws violate the constitution. The will of the people, or the laws of the legislature, prevail in a democracy subject to the constitution. So if you don't want "activist" judges overturning popular laws, you might as well get rid of the constitution itself, which is designed and intended precisely to place limits on how the people and the legislature can express their wills.

If the point above doesn't make sense to you, think of how the Supreme Court Justices in Brown v Board of Education overturned the "separate but equal" segregated educational framework that had been enacted with popular backing by the duly elected representatives of so many southern states. If you want to argue that courts shouldn't as a matter of principal overturn laws they find violative of their constitutions, you should be prepared to argue that the Brown court, too, exceeded its authority.

In fact, anyone who wants to argue that gay marriage should be left to individual states (and remember, the California ruling was by a state court, pursuant to a state constitution, and binding only in California), you should be prepared to argue too that Brown was wrongly decided -- that "separate but equal" education did not violate the Constitution's 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws and should have been a matter for individual states to decide for themselves. I don't see how you can rationally argue that "separate but equal" education was unconstitutional and was rightly struck down by a court as such, but that "separate but equal" marriage (or no gay marriage at all) is constitutional and should be left to states to decide.

You might have surmised by now that I'm not impressed by the notion that gays should be able to form "civil unions" equivalent in all ways but name to marriage (this was key to the California court's finding -- that there is, after all, a great deal in a name). I'd be equally impressed by the notion that blacks should be permitted to attend institutions of higher education as long as the institutions they were permitted to attend were not called "colleges" or "universities."

Here's a little thought experiment to clarify things. Today's Wall Street Journal has an entirely predictable editorial, "Gay Marriage Returns," lamenting the California court's ruling. Let's see how the editorial reads if we replace references to "gay marriage" throughout with references to "black-white intermarriage," instead. If you can distinguish the rights of blacks and whites to marry each other from the rights of gays to marry each other, I'd like to hear the argument (and note that the California court cited Perez v Sharp, where in 1948 the California court struck down black-white marriage bans on 14th Amendment equal protection grounds).

Just when the news was filling with stories about a Republican Party gasping for air, along comes the California Supreme Court's 4-3 decision yesterday legislating black-white intermarriage. The GOP certainly hasn't done anything to deserve such luck...

California's Supreme Court is not the law of the land, but its 4-3 ruling, titled "In re Marriage Cases" for six consolidated appeals, explicitly told both the state's voters and its elected legislature to get lost. Back in 2000, California voters by 61% approved a proposition asserting that the state could only recognize a "marriage" between a white man and a white woman or a black man and black woman...

While the popular spin on these black-white intermarriage rulings holds that this is an all-or-nothing war between Democrats and Republicans, nothing could be further from the truth. Absent an occasional burst of judicial fiat such as this, the American people have been conducting an admirable exercise in democratic discovery about black-white intermarriage.

While 27 states have passed constitutional amendments banning black-white intermarriage, reflecting what opinion polls show to be overwhelming public sentiment, most Americans do not want the U.S. Constitution amended to prohibit black-white intermarriage. Back in 2004, some 52% of Bush voters favored black-white unions stopping short of a "marriage" designation. This was also Mr. Bush's position.

In other words, the American people, rather than simply shunning the desire of some blacks and whites to marry each other, are clearly willing to take up the matter and work it through their legislatures. California's legislature has passed bills twice to authorize black-white intermarriage; both were vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. If California can find a Governor willing to sign off, so be it. It is preposterous, though, to let four judges decide this for a state of more than 36 million diverse individuals.

Most of all, the black community wants social acceptance. It should look to what flowed from Roe v. Wade: unending bitterness. A wiser course in 21st-century America is to trust the democratic process.

If you don't think denying gays access to marriage denies them equal protection of the laws, you must also think such a denial would be constitutional with regard to blacks or other minorities. Do you?

Ultimately, opponents of gay marriage seek to legislate based not on logic, but on the peculiarities of their own preferences. They're guided not by the consistent application of law, but by the fickle idiosyncrasies of their own taste. Rather than reaching outcomes through the application of principle, they seek to conjure principles to support outcomes at which they have already comfortably arrived. And, with the usual unintended irony, they then accuse their opponents of "judicial activism." If it weren't so sad, it would be hilarious.