USA Presidential Politics - 2008

[Jacko]

Clinton goes from inevitable nominee to on the ropes

That last part is a pretty ironic look at things...

Hillary Rodham Clinton began her presidential quest armed with talent, tenacity, fame, money, connections and a team that knew how to win.

...................

Clinton had one big problem out of the gate: 40 percent or more of Americans said they'd never vote for her. She was too polarizing. It's love her or hate her.

................................

White men, blue-collar workers, socially conservative Democrats — however you slice the electorate, she brought many of those people to her side, over time, and took the edge off the Hillary haters.

................................

Then Obama's halo fell in some mud. She fiercely exploited his missteps, criticized him in ways sure to delight Republican ad writers in the fall and — lest anyone miss the alpha female point — downed some beer at a bar and chased it with a shot of the hard stuff.

She was still, by all appearances, in it to win it. Burp.

..........................................

By then, Obama was the one seen struggling, still wrestling with the Wright fallout and his broader problem with some whites.

And so expectations rose for Clinton to win Indiana handily and close in on Obama in North Carolina.

It didn't happen.

In a twisted way, the Wright matter may have been the worst thing that could have happened to Hillary Clinton.

[RonH]

Even though I walked the streets of Indy and knock on doors for Hillary, I am now ready to cast my vote to whom ever can get my airfare knock down for my trips to PDC. Airfare from Indy is now running at almost $500 pp,rt. Its because of taxes. So lets get rid of the tax so we can all go to PDC and have a great time. (BTW, I'M NOT TOO MUCH OF A SORE LOSER )

[ryberg]

So, did anybody already know/realize (forgive me if I missed mention of it here) that the Democratic nominee for the presidency is slated to address the convention this summer in Denver on the 45th anniversary of MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech?

Steve

[pslucky]

Originally Posted by ryberg

So, did anybody already know/realize (forgive me if I missed mention of it here) that the Democratic nominee for the presidency is slated to address the convention this summer in Denver on the 45th anniversary of MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech?

Steve

That's cool!

[ryberg]

It could be one of those very rare moments to be remembered much farther on.

It will need to be a rather good speech, I think. I would not want to be given the daunting task of writing or delivering it.

Steve

[pslucky]

Originally Posted by ryberg

It could be one of those very rare moments to be remembered much farther on.

It will need to be a rather good speech, I think. I would not want to be given the daunting task of writing or delivering it.

Steve

I know what you mean. I almost want to pinch myself when I think about being as close as we are to making presidential history. And I was feeling that way when Clinton was still a viable candidate too. As long as the Democratic candidate takes office this election, I'll be so excited to be witnessing history in the making.

You know what I mean? Some history we've seen has been so bad. Space Shuttle Challenger, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina. etc. The list goes on and on. So it's nice to be here for what is sure to be a positive historic event. I just can't wait.

[ryberg]

Frank Rich has been reading Jacko, evidently, based on his latest column here:

The reason that politicians and the press have gotten so much so wrong is that we keep forgetting what year it is. Only if we reboot to 2008 will the long march to November start making sense . . .

This is not 1988, when a Democratic liberal from Massachusetts of modest political skills could be easily clobbered by racist ads and an incumbent vice president running for the Gipper’s third term. This is not the 1998 midterms, when the Teflon Clintons triumphed over impeachment. This is not 2004, when another Democrat from Massachusetts did for windsurfing what the previous model did for tanks.

Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It’s why some prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco to his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.

The year 2008 is far more complex — and exhilarating — than the old templates would have us believe...

Half a second -- maybe he's been reading me! Because that strikes me as sounding a lot like (drum roll) a paradigm shift he's talking about, there.

Mr. Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it. Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest political decision he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb ones too). The second smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don’t know yet if he’s the man who can make the moment — and won’t know unless he gets to the White House...

Yeah, but, you know, what about the demographic problem, Frank, and key states like, say, OH?

But this isn’t 2004, and the fixation on that one demographic in the Clinton-Obama contest has obscured the big picture. The rise in black voters and young voters of all races in Democratic primaries is re-weighting the electorate. Look, for instance, at Ohio, the crucial swing state that Mr. Kerry lost by 119,000 votes four years ago. This year black voters accounted for 18 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters, up from 14 percent in 2004, an increase of some 230,000 voters out of an overall turnout leap of roughly a million. Voters under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters) accounted for 16 percent, up from 9 in 2004. Those younger Ohio voters even showed up in larger numbers than the perennially reliable over-65 crowd.

Sure, sure, but you know, politics as usual and that famed Republican attack machine will get him... right???

. . . it’s even better news that so many pundits and Republicans bitterly cling to the delusion that the Karl Rove playbook of Swift-boating and race-baiting can work as it did four and eight years ago. You can’t surf to a right-wing blog or Fox News without someone beating up on Mr. Wright or the other predictable conservative piñata, Michelle Obama.

This may help rally the anti-Obama vote. But that contingent will be more than offset in November by mobilized young voters, blacks and women, among them many Clinton-supporting Democrats (and independents and Republicans) unlikely to entertain a G.O.P. candidate with a perfect record of voting against abortion rights. Even a safe Republican Congressional seat in Louisiana fell to a Democrat last weekend, despite a campaign by his opponent that invoked Mr. Obama as a bogeyman...

Gee...

Sounds good!!!

Steve

[Daddy B]

Originally Posted by ryberg

It could be one of those very rare moments to be remembered much farther on.

It will need to be a rather good speech, I think. I would not want to be given the daunting task of writing or delivering it.

Steve

Funny you should say that, coz I declined the offer but put forward your name.


Ooops...

[Just Lucky]

I watched the Charley Rose show last night. He had Bernard-Henri Levy and Umberto Eco on. It was an interesting show. Unfortunately the video is not on line as of yet.

A conversation with Bernard-Henri Levy & Umberto Eco - Charlie Rose

Anyhow, it caused me to look up this piece Eco wrote in '95. I think it is important to look at as we try to keep the Presidential race in perspective.

In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it. * * *
1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but is was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths indulgently accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages -- in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little-known religions of Asia.
This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice;" such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and although they seem to say different or incompatible things, they all are nevertheless alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.
As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.
Both Fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.
Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering's fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.
In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.
Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.
6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.
That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.
7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.
This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the United States, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson's The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.
8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.
Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such "final solutions" implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.
10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.
Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people in the world, the members or the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.
11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero.
In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was Viva la Muerte ("Long Live Death!"). In nonfascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.
12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.
This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons -- doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.
13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.
In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view -- one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten" parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.
Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.
* * *
Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

[Sol]

Interesting post, Just Lucky. Thank you.

[ryberg]

Well, this answers my question.

They note at that link (click on the image) that there are 2 more for Obama today (even staid CNN now reports him as having the lead), and note that the Idaho party chairman is slated to announce his endorsement for Obama this afternoon, leading to the question,

Will we see a repeat of Friday's 11 superdelegate endorsements?

Rep. Tom Allen of Maine gives a glimpse of down-ticket perspective in his comments:

Allen said he believes that both Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton are “supremely qualified to be president.”

“I have been friends for a very long time with former President Clinton and Senator Clinton. I respect their service to our nation. Hillary Clinton has run a vigorous campaign and has attracted a passionate following in Maine and around the country. She loves this country and is a true leader. For her service, I am grateful,” he said.

“Most of the primary voters across the nation have now spoken. It is time to bring a graceful end to the primary campaign. We now need to unify the Democratic Party and focus on electing Senator Obama and a working majority in the United States Senate. That is how we can change the direction of the country.

“I am running for the U.S. Senate because I believe Maine should lead the change this country needs. I share important priorities with Barack Obama: universal health care, reining in gas and food prices, greater independence from foreign oil, bringing our troops safely home from Iraq, creating jobs and strengthening the middle class.”

Hawaii super Dolly Strazar comments:

As a Democratic National Committeewoman, I have felt it my duty to let this unique presidential campaign process play out, one that has reached across the country and engaged millions of Americans in expressing their preference for a Democratic nominee before expressing my preference as a superdelegate. I am now convinced that it is time to pull together behind a single candidate who has the backing of a growing number of Americans . I therefore announce my wholehearted endorsement of Senator Barack Obama.

I have had and still do have the utmost respect for Senator Hillary Clinton and the positive and uplifting force that both of the Clintons have been in Hawaii. It excites me, however, to enter active campaigning for a son of Hawaii who learned the lessons of "getting along" that so dominate the values of the people of the fiftieth state. I am convinced that these values of inclusiveness and respect for differences that we take for granted in Hawaii are part of what has made our America a nation based on freedom, equality, justice and the pursuit of happiness. I further believe that these values will serve to unify our country and lead us to victory in November.

The will of Democrats in Hawaii was expressed loudly and clearly in February and I am proud to see that that same vision has been reflected throughout the country in Democratic support for Senator Obama.

Steve

[Sol]

It doesn't surprise me that the Idaho superdelegate will endorse Obama. Obama is very well-supported here.

[Jacko]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Plouffe, BarackObama.com [mailto:info@barackobama.com]
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008 4:48 PM
To: Jacko
Subject: Big news


Jacko --

Big news today: for the first time since this campaign began, Barack Obama has taken the lead among superdelegates.

We've won more elected delegates, more states, and more votes than Senator Clinton. But until yesterday we trailed among Governors, Members of Congress, and Democratic Party leaders -- the so-called "superdelegates" who have a vote in the nominating process.

As it stands, we have 281 superdelegates who have committed to cast their convention votes for us. That includes 23 since last Tuesday's elections, and 3 who switched their support from Senator Clinton.

We have just 150 delegates to go before Barack Obama clinches the nomination.

But Senator Clinton intends to compete vigorously in the remaining contests; at the same time we face increasing attacks from Senator McCain and the Republican attack machine.


Given the long history the Clintons have with the Democratic Party, it's no surprise Senator Clinton maintained her superdelegate lead for so long.

But right now it's clear that the Democratic Party is uniting around Barack's candidacy.

Here's what a few superdelegates who recently changed their support had to say:

"After careful consideration, I have reached the conclusion that Barack Obama can best bring about the change that our country so desperately wants and needs."


- Rep. Donald Payne (NJ-10)
"He has shown he can connect with Democrats, Republicans and independents across this country."


- Kevin Rodriquez (VI)
"It's time to come together as a party and support Sen. Obama and prepare for a victory against John McCain in November."

[ryberg]

Well that one from Idaho plus another from the governor of Hawaii have now come in.

Looks to me like even if Clinton ends up with a 40-point win in WV, she'll still be farther behind than she was after Tuesday night, the way Obama is picking up several superdelegates every day.

It is interesting in light of this to consider the heartfelt declarations of residents in such states that they want their state to count...

Steve

[ryberg]

Republican William S Cohen just said that it would be a big mistake for Republicans to try to play Wright like Willie Horton or to try to blame Obama just because Hamas says something about him, because it won't work as strategy and because we are better than that as a country.



Steve