Catch-2008

November 20, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Cold War, Economic issues, Election 2008, Entertainment, Humor, Nixon Administration figures, Obama administration, Sarah Palin, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Erica Heller is a New Yorker in her fifties.  In her twenties and thirties she worked in advertising. Then she dropped out of the field and wrote a novel, Splinters - a natural thing to do when one is the daughter of the late Joseph Heller, author of Something Happened, God Knows, Good As Gold, and that all-time bestselling antiwar novel Catch-22. 

Splinters was published in 1990 and, unlike most of her father’s books, was not well-received; Publishers Weekly called it “pretentious and self-indulgent.”  So Ms. Heller went back to advertising, where she remains.  Recently she began blogging on The Huffington Post.  Just before election day, she wrote there that her father - who, she acknowledged, never voted in any election in his life, because he was, by his own admission, “anti-political” - would surely have trooped down to the booth, were he still living, to choose Sen. Barack Obama. 

 (That strikes me as doubtful. Heller, a very shrewd fellow as his many interviews attest, would have likely foreseen that doing so would help bring about the situation this week where Dr. Henry Kissinger, the target of innumerable venomous barbs in Good As Gold, expressed his support for the President-elect’s choosing Sen. Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State.)

This week, Ms. Heller, perhaps like many another writer with an Amazon sales ranking in the low seven digits, is on the warpath about the book deals being rumored for Gov. Sarah Palin and secured by Joe the Plumber.  She seems convinced that S. J. Wurzelbacher is receiving a fortune from a small press for his book.  In fact, what Joe is earning is probably just a shade above the $1000 or so her dad got for what was then Catch-18 nearly a half-century ago, and far below the advances for every other book he wrote. 

 Ms Heller also fulminates about the $7 million that’s being tossed around where the Palin book is concerned, bemoaning all the trees that will fall to make it.  Well, President Clinton was paid considerably better for his memoirs.  And a lot of trees fell to get it to the stores.  And, most strikingly of all, that rather soporific tome was edited by none other than Robert Gottlieb, the brilliant editor who helped make Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 a classic.  (I should point out Mr. Gottlieb always has my admiration.  Imagine being in one’s late seventies and fielding 3 am calls from the man who remains the First Night Owl, not to mention trying to get Robert Caro to finish those last thousand pages of his LBJ saga.)

Most bizarre of all is an aside where Ms. Heller reminisces about the good old days when Catch-22 is published and in which the series Mad Men is set.  She reminds us that back when Roger Maris was earning his asterisk, gas was 33 cents a gallon and stamps were four cents.  Well, guess what?  If her liberal idols in Congress and the White House can’t figure out how to get us out of the recession and deflation sets in, prices may drop to those levels again.  The difference will be that you won’t see too many people wearing clothes as good as the ones in Mad Men.  On the bright side, there will be plenty of free grass, growing up from the sidewalks, and in some places from the floorboards.

Speaking of Robert Gottlieb, time for me to tell my favorite story about his many quirks.  A friend of mine - we’ll call him Hank, because his first name’s the same as Gottlieb’s - was in the early ’60s an up-and-coming editor, as Gottlieb was.  One day he got a call from his colleague.  “Come over for lunch,” quoth young Bob.  His habit, then as now, was always to eat a sandwich at his own desk at Simon & Schuster (and, later, Knopf), so Hank stopped at an Italian deli, got some antipasto, and proceeded to S&S’s offices.

This particular afternoon, incidentally, was a day or two after JFK’s speech announcing the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba.  Things were pretty weird in Manhattan all around. Even so, Hank was a bit surprised, when he arrived at Bob’s office, to find it unoccupied.  Assuming that the editor was in the restroom, he waited a while in the hallway.  Then he asked Gottlieb’s secretary where he was.  “In there - he hasn’t left all day,” she replied.

So Hank stepped in and approached his friend’s desk.  There came a whisper - from under it. “That you, Hank?”  Hank stepped around and found Gottlieb crouched underneath, sandwich in hand. “I talked to my shrink this morning - he sounded kinda worried,” Bob said by way of explanation. “There’s some space here - sit down.” So Hank squeezed in and took out the antipasto.  “Just a second,” said Bob. He then emerged from the desk, went to the window, lowered the blinds, and got back under.  Thus suitably protected from the threat of The Big One - in an office in the midsection of a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan - the two young editors dined and chatted as usual.

Ah, those wild, crazy days of Mad Men.

Reaching For The Fifteenth And A Half Minute Of Fame

November 20, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

Joe the Plumber has signed a book deal. The book is clearly intended to be a serious literary effort — as indicated by the currently requisite colon in its title: Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream

Having written off, so to speak, the option of dealing with one of the big publishers, the book will be the second tome from a fledgling Texas outfit called PearlGate.

The author told The New York Times that he could have gone with a larger publisher, “But they don’t need help. They are already rich. So that’s spreading the wealth to me.”

As New York Magazine’s‘ “Daily Intel” blog notes, “The book will be published December 1, an amazingly quick turnaround time, which indicates that probably Joe the Plumber doesn’t have a problem spreading the wealth to China, either.”

Pen to Paper (or Finger to Keyboard)

November 19, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Bush Administration, Election 2008, First Ladies, Media, Presidents, Sarah Palin, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Ted Stevens conceded defeat in his bid for re-election to the Senate today, strengthening the Democratic hand in the upper chamber but at least saving the GOP elders some embarrassment.  This eliminates the prospect, at least immediately, that Gov. Sarah Palin, as speculated by some earlier this month, might appoint herself to the seat (if Stevens had won and then resigned to avoid expulsion), leave the statehouse in Juneau, and bring Todd and the young’uns down to teach Georgetowners about the virtues of moose chili.

But her other options, as the days go by until 2012, remain plentiful.  The book business, according to a Yahoo News article, is thoroughly agog about the idea of a Palin-penned book.  The article quotes several agents and editors as suggesting that the bidding might go up to $7 million and beyond - just a million less than Sen. Hillary Clinton received for her autobiography Living HIstory, which was merely about spending eight years as First Lady.  ($7 million might seem like a lot, but Tina Fey just got $6 million for agreeing to write a book which, very likely, will partly be about impersonating Sarah Palin, so why shouldn’t the real McCoy cost a tad more?)

The article also discusses the prospects for the post-White House memoirs of President and Mrs. Bush.  One book-biz veteran states that the President, given his present unpopularity, should wait for a while to seek a deal for his memoirs, on the assumption that publishers now would assume the book wouldn’t sell and would offer a smaller advance.  It’s hard to say if that line of reasoning holds water.  Jimmy Carter left office in 1981 with a popularity rating not much higher than Dubya’s and immediately managed to score a very sizable advance from Bantam for his memoirs Keeping Faith. But then again, he was a Democrat, as are most book editors.  But the sources quoted in the article believe that Laura Bush’s autobiography would attract offers comparable to what Hillary received in 2001.  That often is the case with First Ladies; Lady Bird Johnson’s A White House Diary sold considerably better than her husband’s The Vantage Point, and Nancy Reagan’s My Turn left her spouse’s An American Life completely in the dust at the cash registers.

The article doesn’t discuss how other figures in the Bush White House will fare on the literary scene. My guess is that Condoleeza Rice and Henry Paulson’s memoirs will be the ones most in demand.

58 And Counting

November 18, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Obama administration, Republican Party | Leave a Comment 

From Alaska tonight comes word that with all but a handful of ballots counted Mark Begich appears to have defeated Sen. Ted Stevens by less than a percentage point.  Thus ends Stevens’ 40 years in the Senate, the longest period served by a Republican, which saw him usually re-elected by large majorities but concluded with his felony conviction and the threat of expulsion from the chamber (now a moot point, it would seem).

And so the Democrats, counting independent Sens. Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman (who was today reprimanded, after a fashion, for campaigning with Sen. John McCain, but kept his committee chairmanship), have 58 votes.  Two remain to achieve a filibuster-proof majority and bring about the rebirth of the Great Society, the New Deal redux, or at least a second wind for the New Frontier.  (And if the Dems come up one short, is anyone up for the return of the New Foundation? For an explanation Google “Jimmy Carter,” “1979,” and “State Of The Union.”)

In Minnesota, the minions of Al Franken, somewhere between St. Cloud and Hibbing, perhaps carefully cradle the box numbered 13, which contains several hundred ballots cast by Mia L. Frankin,  M. E. Alfranken,  etc, as well as the dreaded deleted scenes from Stuart Saves His Family. In Georgia, during the next few weeks until Saxbe Chambliss faces a runoff vote, we’ll see an avalanche of ads and a lot of crossed fingers as Democratic bigwigs from Macon to Athens, and up in Washington, hope that GOP voters are just too exhausted and dispirited to show up at the polls.

And, meanwhile, the question lingers: will Sen. Hillary Clinton go to Foggy Bottom or stay put? Today came some vague reports that the junior senator from New York might decline the chance.  I’m inclined to think she’ll remain where she is.  William Jennings Bryan comes to mind.  It was unlikely that the “Boy Orator of the Platte” would be renominated after he lost his third presidential run in 1908, but when Woodrow Wilson made him Secretary of State in 1913, it was a signal that at the age of 53 he had risen to the status of Statesman and left the cares and travails of electoral politics behind.  I doubt Hillary wants to run a similar risk.

60 is the Magic Number

November 16, 2008 by Jonathan C. Movroydis | Filed Under Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

The Democrats won’t stop campaigning till they get it:

Democrats also have an excellent opportunity to pick up a Georgia Senate seat if President-elect Obama decides it’s vital for his party to win the December 2 runoff between GOP incumbent Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin. With a snap of Mr. Obama’s fingers, money and resources from Team Obama’s vaunted organization would pour in. Dispirited Republicans might well stay home, allowing Democrats to capture the seat much as Republicans took a Georgia Senate seat in a similar 1992 runoff. “We’re a long way away from having the resources we need to match the Democrats,” Senator Chambliss told reporters.

Then there’s Minnesota, where GOP Senator Norm Coleman’s lead over comedian Al Franken has just dwindled to 206 votes even before a statewide recount begins next week. Republicans fear that Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, an ally of the activist group ACORN, will attempt to put his thumb on the scale during the process.

If bad breaks occur in all of these races, Democrats will win the important strategic and psychological prize of 60 seats, and Republicans will have lost 15 Senate seats in just two election cycles — a modern record.

Just Asking

November 15, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

Those considering speaking truth to power during the new administration might want to consider the consequences —as revealed in today’s Akron Beacon Journal— of merely asking power a question:

The election is over, but the Joe the Plumber case is not.

Ohio Inspector General Tom Charles said his office is now looking at a half-dozen agencies that accessed state records on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.

The Beacon Journal has learned that, in addition to the Department of Job and Family Services, two other state offices — the Ohio Department of Taxation and Ohio Attorney General Nancy Rogers — conducted database searches of Joe the Plumber.

Before becoming Ohio’s AG, Ms. Rogers was the Dean of Ohio State University’s Law School.

Did a Social Fundamentalist Almost Save McCain?

November 14, 2008 by Jonathan C. Movroydis | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008, Sarah Palin | Leave a Comment 

Kyle Anne-Shriver counters the claim that Gov. Sarah Palin repulsed voters:

This is not a minority opinion. When Rasmussen conducted detailed exit polling among Republicans, they found that a full 69% of respondents thought Sarah Palin helped — not hurt — McCain. Governor Palin has not garnered the status as America’s most highly regarded, most popular governor for nothing.

The Land of At Least 10,519 Lakes

November 13, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

For many  years Minnesota has been known as The Land of 10,000 Lakes.  But at the rate votes in the recent Senate race are still being “discovered” —519 have so far miraculously surfaced post facto— it must be expected that new lakes can’t be far behind.

And the votes do have something in common with Minnesota’s lakes — they’re fishy.  They have been seriously out of proportion with other votes in other contests, and they have all favored Al Franken.  Thanks to these “found” votes, incumbent Norm Coleman’s 725 vote lead (out of almost 2.9 million cast) has now shrunk to 239.  As John R. Lott of the University of Maryland puts it:

Corrections were posted in other races, but they were only a fraction of those for the Senate race. The Senate gains for Franken were 2.2 times the gain from corrections for Barack Obama, 2.7 times the gain Democrats got across all Minnesota congressional races and 5.6 times the net loss that Democrats suffered for all state House races.

In total, the 519 net pro-Franken corrections were greater than the total changes for all precincts in the state for the presidential race, all congressional races and all state House races combined.

But it isn’t only the size of the corrections that make these changes so surprising. The majority of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4,130 precincts. Almost half the gain (248 votes) occurred in one precinct: Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior, a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama got 64 percent of the vote.

No other race had any changes in its vote total in that precinct. That single precinct’s corrections produced a much larger net swing in votes than occurred for all the precincts in the state for the presidential, congressional or state House races.

The actual recount, which will be ripe for abuse in its own ways, doesn’t even begin until next Friday.

The Republican Wilderness: Four Years - or Forty?

November 13, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Culture, Election 2008, Election 2012, History, Political Philosophy, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

The Grand Old Party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, & Ronald Reagan, has entered the proverbial wilderness. It moves from the box seats to the cheap seats, or better - to mix the metaphor a bit – the backbenches.

How Republicans handle this exile, and just how long the era lasts, will depend largely on what is done with and in the wilderness.

The idea of a wilderness period as a picture of exile is actually much older than American politics, or even anything from our ancestors across the pond. It is a concept dating back to Biblical history and the frustrations and wanderings of the ancient children of Israel. Poised to enter the “Promised Land” of abundance and fulfillment following centuries of bondage and privation, and in the wake of the clearly providential exodus led by Moses, that generation fell tragically short.

They missed their rendezvous with destiny.

Entering the wilderness – a place, but also a process - they lived out a forty-year reminder of what had left been behind, while also grieving the loss of a compelling future. They had allowed short-term frustration to short-circuit long-held principles and dreams.

And the Lord told them in the book of Deuteronomy that the reason for the wilderness was, “to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart.” In other words, the wilderness for them was a divinely ordained “time out” – the kind of thing my dad would do when he sent me to my room to “think about” what I had done (when it was really all my brother’s fault).

The wilderness was a time for purging and preparing. Attitudes, habits, and ambitions had to be dealt with, and priorities revisited and clarified. The duration of the wilderness depended on how well the lessons were learned. In that ancient case, a journey that should have taken no more than a year became a forty-year generational failure.

And something that was lost, forgotten, or just misplaced, desperately needed to be found.

As the Republican Party moves into its own desert of exile for a while, it is time for reflection. It needs to figure out what it really stands for and what it can offer the nation the next time it is called upon to lead. How it manages in the wilderness will determine whether it will come back in four years, or forty - if at all.

That another such time will come is, of course, almost inevitable – not just because of very real concerns about the capacity of recent victors to translate historically flawed policies into real success, but because of the inherent cycles of politics. What happened on November 4th was due nearly as much to the tendency of politics and history to repeat themselves and the public’s tendency to soon tire of anyone on center stage, as it was a mandate for real “yes, we can” change.

Writing in the book, In the Arena: A Memoir of Defeat and Renewal, the late and former president Richard Nixon dedicated a chapter to the phenomenon of the wilderness. He knew a thing or two about the ups and downs and ins and outs of political life. The period between his loss in the governor’s race in 1962 and the winning of the White House in 1968, is a textbook case of how to come back from the kind of defeat that tempts opponents to write someone off permanently.

Nixon mentioned something described by Arnold Toynbee in his, Study of History, described as “the phenomenon of withdrawal…a disengagement and temporary withdrawal of the creative personality from his social milieu and his subsequent return to the same milieu transfigured in a new capacity with new powers.” Throughout history, great leaders demonstrated this. Certainly Nixon did and clearly identified with others who went through deep valleys.

In the 1991 movie, City Slickers, Billy Crystal and his best friends head out west looking for adventure. Crystal’s wife in the film wanted him to, while moving cattle from point A to B, along the way find something. Something he had lost. Something he needed to recover. His smile. The movie ended happily with said smile finding its way back to Billy’s face.

For the Republicans, they do not need to find something as insignificant as a group smile. Rather, they should be looking for something much more vital if they are to have a real shot at coming back from this wilderness.

The key to this is found in another place where the ancient scriptures mention a wilderness. We learn about this from the writings of the prophet Isaiah, when in the 40th chapter of his book we come across the vital phrase, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”

No doubt Winston Churchill, another frequent wilderness wanderer, identified with this little phrase during his years as a political has-been in the 1930s. He had no power, no position, and no prospects.

But he found his “voice” – and began to warn his countrymen about Hitler and dangers to come. Later, when he once again found himself in forced exile, having been voted out of office in the Labor sweep just a couple of months after the victory had been won in Europe, he found his “voice” again. This time he did not speak in the House of Commons, but rather in the gymnasium of a small college in the American mid-west. From that unlikely pulpit in the wilderness he cried out about an “iron curtain.”

The Republicans have clearly found the wilderness. Now they need to find their voice.

The GOP needs to figure out what it wants to be if and when it grows back up. Are ideas like limited government, the free market, and at least an interest in understanding the relationship between the morality of personal responsibility and self-discipline and the ills of the larger culture – now officially gone forever?

The word paradigm comes from the Greek language and the word paradeigma. It basically means a perception, or frame of reference – a lens through which to interpret reality. Author Steven Covey in his book, The Eighth Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (hint: the eighth habit is “finding your voice”), insists that “if you want to make minor incremental changes and improvements, work on practices, behavior or attitude. But if you want to make significant, quantum improvements, work on paradigms.”

The time for tweaking is past. As the nation readies itself to enter a new era of “bold experimentation” under an activist Obama administration, it is time for the party now finding itself in the political wilderness to find what it has lost. By definition, something lost is not something new – it is something once possessed.

Republicans can find their voice during the wilderness period, but to do so will require a willingness to have the wisdom and humility to make a paradigm shift, one that surely involves a quantum journey back to the future. The must find what once worked – and has been lost.

And if anyone thinks that the idea of going to the past to find something that will resonate in the future is not politically feasible, please remember this: America just elected a guy who advocates policies and programs that failed 75 years ago.

The Campaigning Ends, The Governing Begins.2

November 13, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Election 2008, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

As reported in today’s Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama, who vowed during his campaign that lobbyists “won’t find a job in my White House,” said through a spokesman yesterday that he would allow lobbyists on his transition team as long as they work on issues unrelated to their earlier jobs.

Apparently in the Obama Administration it will be possible to be a little bit pregnant.

Radicals And Redhots

November 12, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

Today, as he does every day, Jonathan Movroydis has found and linked many of the most interesting journalism of the last 24 hours.  Among them is Camile Paglia’s monthly column in Salon.

As usual, this is an omnibus affair covering a variety of topics and a multitude of sins.  (This considers, among other things, the reason the media trashed Sarah Palin, and the respect owed to Yma Sumac; there is, remarkably, no mention of Madonna.)  

I was particularly interested by the Paglian take on the Obama-Ayers controversy.  Remember that?  Think back to the presidential campaign — there were some questions asked about Senator Obama’s putative connections with this radical dude who lived down the street in Chicago.  I’m sure you remember it.

Ms. Paglia, who is very happy with the election results, is still objective enough to realize that her candidate was cut some serious slack by a complacent (and compliant) media.  Her research led her to a conclusion that Nixonians have learned long since: that in radical couples, the wife is usually the redhot.  

Pursuing the truth about Ayers, I recently rented the 2002 documentary “The Weather Underground,” from Netflix. It was riveting. Although the film seems to waver between ominous exposé and blatant whitewash, the full extent of the group’s bombing campaign is dramatically demonstrated. It’s not for everyone: The film uses gratuitous cutaways of horrifying carnage, from the Vietnam War to the Manson murders (such as Sharon Tate’s smiling corpse, bathed in blood). But the news footage of the Greenwich Village townhouse destroyed in 1970 by bomb-making gone wrong in the basement still has enormous impact. Standing in the chaotic street, actor Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door, seems like Everyman at the apocalypse.

Ayers comes off in the film as a vapid, slightly dopey, chronic juvenile with stunted powers of ethical reasoning. The real revelation is his wife, Bernardine Dohrn (who evidently worked at the same large Chicago law firm as Michelle Obama in the mid-1990s). Of course I had heard of Dohrn — hers was one of the most notorious names of our baby-boom generation — and I knew her black-and-white police mug shot. But I had never seen footage of her speaking or interacting with others. Well, it’s pretty obvious who wears the pants in that family!

The mystery of Bernardine Dohrn: How could such a personable, attractive, well-educated young woman end up saying such things at a 1969 political rally as this (omitted in the film) about the Manson murders: “Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach. Wild!” And how could Dohrn have so ruthlessly pursued a decade-long crusade of hatred and terrorism against innocent American citizens and both private and public property?

“The Weather Underground” never searches for answers, but it does show Dohrn, then and now, as a poised, articulate woman of extremely high intelligence and surprising inwardness. The audio extra of her reading the collective’s first public communiqué (”Revolutionary violence is the only way”) is chilling. But the tumultuous footage of her 1980 surrender to federal authorities is a knockout. Mesmerized, I ran the clip six or seven times of her seated at a lawyer’s table while reading her still defiant statement. The sober scene — with Dohrn hyper-alert in a handsome turtleneck and tweedy jacket — was tailor-made for Jane Fonda in her “Klute” period, androgynous shag. Only illegalities by federal investigators prevented Dohrn from being put away on ice for a long, long time.

Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

Ms. Dohrn was a vital part —perhaps the vital part— of the Ayers-Obama story that was successfully finessed.  She is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and the Director of Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center.  

Obama: Keep Joe In The Tent

November 11, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Middle East, Republican Party | 3 Comments 

During the presidential campaign this fall no appearance at a rally or fundraiser by Sen. John McCain was complete without Sen. Joe Lieberman (reportedly the Arizonan’s first choice for running-mate before he was persuaded to keep the selection within GOP ranks) introducing him.  As a result, a number of people in the print media and the blogosphere began to wonder if Lieberman, who won his most recent election as an independent in 2006, would be allowed to keep caucusing with the Democrats after the election.

But in recent days it has become evident that even if Al Franken prevails in the recount of the Minnesota Senate race, the Democrats are going to need the votes of both Senate independents (the other being Bernie Sanders of Vermont) if they are going to stand a chance of wooing some Republican in the fashion that James Jeffords was in 2001 so that a filibuster-proof majority can be put together.  Yesterday Senate majority leader Harry Reid explained that he and his colleagues saw no problem with Lieberman staying in the caucus and today, President-elect Obama also made some comments indicating that the status quo should be maintained. But at what point, as the Obama administration’s Mideast policy develops, could the Connecticut senator start to have second thoughts?

They Shouldn’t Have Tried So Hard

November 11, 2008 by Jonathan C. Movroydis | Filed Under Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

VDH explains that Obama voters and Prop. 8 supporters had all they needed for victory in California. When they went for the juggernaut, it backfired:

Here in California what was the ‘No on Prop 8′ gay lobby thinking, when the Obama registration drives in California brought in thousands of new voters–that they were really all UC Santa Cruz undergrads or absent-minded professors who forgot to register? Did they really think all those evil white Mormons and Church of Christ throngs in California would overwhelm them at the polls? In truth, each new Obama minority voter registered was a de facto vote against gay marriage.

The Campaigning Ends, The Governing Begins

November 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Election 2008, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

As reported today in Congressional Quarterly:

Here’s some change that supporters of President-elect Obama may not want to see: all of the policy commitments on specific issues have been removed from his transition Web site.

On Nov. 7, global health advocates noticed that some of the details of Obama’s “fight global poverty” statement had been removed. Specifically, the site no longer promised to fully fund debt cancellation for the world’s poorest countries or provide the full U.S. contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Activists already were concerned, since boosting foreign aid was the one thing Obama mentioned during the campaign when asked what proposals he’d have to scale back due to the faltering economy.

By this morning, all of the issue-specific pages on the transition site had been removed from the agenda section. In its place, a statement that mentioned details but provided none at all: “The Obama Administration has a comprehensive and detailed agenda to carry out its policies.” 

Talk About Unintended Consequences

November 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

In what should may be the final nail in the coffin of public financing (ironically, a coffin of his own devising), Senator McCain’s campaign is about to be sideswiped by an encounter with the FEC — one that will be spared the far-more-vulnerable-under-scrutiny Obama campaign.

As Politico reports today:

The Federal Election Commission is unlikely to conduct a potentially embarrassing audit of how Barack Obama raised and spent his presidential campaign’s record-shattering windfall, despite allegations of questionable donations and accounting that had the McCain campaign crying foul.

Adding insult to injury for Republicans: The FEC is obligated to complete a rigorous audit of McCain’s campaign coffers, which will take months, if not years, and cost McCain millions of dollars to defend.

Obama is expected to escape that level of scrutiny mostly because he declined an $84 million public grant for his campaign that automatically triggers an audit and because the sheer volume of cash he raised and spent minimizes the significance of his errors.

McCain, on the other hand, accepted the $84 million in taxpayer money, which not only barred him from raising or spending more – allowing Obama to fund many times more ads and ground operations – but also will keep his lawyers busy for a couple years explaining how every penny was spent.

Campaign Cliff Notes

November 10, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

The helpful folks over at the Daily Beast have prepared a crib sheet for “Secrets of the 2008 Campaign” — Newsweek’s seven chapter 50K word epic of oxen gored, scores settled, and 2012 knives sharpened about the 2008 presidential campaign just past. (It’s much better than Newsweek’s own shorter summary.

The major scoops have already been well mined:

• Gov. Palin’s towel-clad strut in front of campaign aides
• the cyber-attack on both campaigns
• the list of all the negative commercials the McCainers decided were too ugly to air

Lest any scoop go unturned, the Beasters serve up a chapter-by-chapter account.  Here’s the concentrated skinny from  Chapter 3, “Bubba Unleashed”:

Always eager to play the victim card, Bill Clinton kept with him an 81-page list of atrocities that had been done to Hillary. Clinton told Donna Brazile, “If Barack Obama is nominated, it will be the worst denigration of public service.” Brazile responded: “Why are you so angry?”

It was with Hillary’s blessing that Bill went to South Carolina, the place where he fatefully compared the Obama campaign to Jesse Jackson’s. (The Clintons lobbied Jackson to forgive them publicly, but Jackson declined.) Caroline Kennedy would later endorse Obama in The New York Times. Newsweek reveals that despite the pleas of staffers, Hillary never called Caroline to lock up her endorsement.

A rare mistake from the disciplined Team Obama: Despite orders from Obama and Axelrod to find every speech Rev. Jeremiah Wright had delivered, no one on the staff did the job. The campaign watched “God damn America” on the news with everyone else. After Obama delivered his race speech in Philadelphia, he walked backstage to find his entire staff in tears. Obama, however, was unmoved—the speech was “solid,” he said, nothing more.

Please Let It Go, Andrew

November 10, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Election 2008, Hackosphere, Sarah Palin | Leave a Comment 

Andrew Sullivan notes that Gov. Palin has exasperatedly proclaimed herself the true mother of her beloved child. He played a role in keeping alive the malicious lie that she was not. For goodness’ sake, let it go!

52-46 Is “Overwhelming”; 52-48, Not So Much

November 9, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Domestic issues, Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

What Part Of “Overwhelming Electoral Defeat” Does The GOP Not Understand?
by Jonathan Chait

Is A 52-48 Vote Really Enough To Prove That The Courts Overstepped On Gay Marriage?
by Richard Just and Jeffrey Rosen

Oh What A Night

November 9, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Barack Obama, Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

More photos here of the Obama and Biden families and staff on election night.

The New Day Dawns

November 9, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Culture, Election 2008, Entertainment, Media, Music, Public Opinion | Leave a Comment 

Polymathic musician, performer, songwriter, entrepreneur, designer, artist, activist, videomaker, etc., and Black Eyed Peas member will.i.am has produced a post-election video of a song he wrote : “It’s A New Day”. It premiered on Oprah’s show (as soon all things will that don’t already) on Friday.

This time the cast of thousands has been winnowed down to a happy few (including Fergie, Kanye West, and Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick).   Presumably that’s a function of availability on short notice; where is Ryan Philippe when you really need him?

His earlier videos — “Yes We Can” and ”We Are The Ones“— played no small part in reaching, inspiring, and activating young voters.  (And the former inspired and inspired parody: ”No, You Can’t“.)

If only on the principle that nothing succeeds like success, the new video demands respect.  And because it’s the shape of things to come it requires attention.

Keeping The Lies Alive

November 8, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Election 2008, Hackosphere, Political Philosophy, Sarah Palin | 3 Comments 

Andrew Sullivan continues to associate himself and his Atlantic Monthly Group-owned web site with the most effective libel of the 2008 campaign: That Sarah Palin is not the mother of her son Trig:

And there will surely be, over time, substantiation of all these charges - “silk boxer shorts”! “I’m pregnant!” - or not.

It was an inexcusable and fateful lapse of ethics, so Sullivan has a personal reason for doing whatever he can to bury Palin. It’s always interesting to plumb how people use both facts and lies for purposes that have nothing to do with truth — for instance, those around McCain who’ve leaked prejudicial details about her performance.

Since no one can persuasively blame McCain’s six-point loss on his VP choice, Palin’s critics must have another motive for scapegoating her. As with all liars and leakers, you can’t know the motives until you’ve seen the faces. Call it the Deep Throat rule. Now that we know it was Mark Felt, we know that the man who helped bring down President Nixon wasn’t a person of conscience but an FBI official who’d been spurned for promotion and whose own penchant for illegality doomed the prosecution of William Ayers. As a result, Watergate looks a lot different.

So too with the anti-Palin leakers. We don’t know who they are, but we can make a good guess about their motives. Presumably many if not most of those around Sen. McCain were not the fall’s culture warriors but the winter and spring’s moderates and mavericks. When it came to the choice of Palin, these advisers would either have opposed it or held their noses.

Since Nov. 4, the GOP has been without a leader. Neither McCain nor any of those whom he defeated automatically qualifies. The leading candidate is Palin — the new Reagan, some say, a social issues conservative, anti-elitist, attractive, young.

Imagine how appalled moderate McCainites would be at the idea that their own campaign had produced this monster of politics. And so they’re doing what they can to tear her down. But what if they’re telling the truth about her? Not possible. The relevant truth is not in what she did; it’s in what they’re doing. Know only the lie or leak, then be fooled. Know the liar, then know the motive, and begin to know the truth.

DSPQ

November 8, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under DSPQ, Election 2008, News media | Leave a Comment 

Deborah Howell, the Washington Post’s ombusdman, has been making a list and checking it twice and, in tomorrow’s paper, she reports on what she found.  The headline tells the story: “An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage”.  Who’d have thunk it?

Among the conclusions:

The count was lopsided, with 1,295 horse-race stories and 594 issues stories. The Post was deficient in stories that reported more than the two candidates trading jabs; readers needed articles, going back to the primaries, comparing their positions with outside experts’ views. There were no broad stories on energy or science policy, and there were few on religion issues.

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces (58) about McCain than there were about Obama (32), and Obama got the editorial board’s endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.

Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain.

Our survey results are comparable to figures for the national news media from a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It found that from June 9, when Clinton dropped out of the race, until Nov. 2, 66 percent of the campaign stories were about Obama compared with 53 percent for McCain; some stories featured both. The project also calculated that in that time, 57 percent of the stories were about the horse race and 13 percent were about issues.

…Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama’s acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

No doubt some slack should be cut because the horse race aspects of this campaign were particularly exciting  (not least during the highly contested primaries), and because the historic nature of the Obama candidacy was a story in and of itself.  And Ms. Howell makes the case for cutting said slack.

But the media’s shameless and shameful abdication of its hitherto much vaunted prerogative and responsibility of fearless and favorless coverage will end up being one of the most significant outcomes of the 2008 election.

Last Press Conference/First Press Conference

November 7, 2008 by David Emig | Filed Under Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

I found it fascinating that on the 46th anniversary of RNs "last press conference", the Governor of Alaska gave her first national press conference without handlers. Something else that I found interesting was that while both press conferences protrayed the media as villian — one press conference (RNs) thought there was too little press coverage "…if they are against a candidate, give him the shaft, but also recognize, if they give him the shaft, put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says now and then." And the other thought that there was too much press coverage. Or perhaps the wrong kind of press coverage.

Link: FoxNews.com: Palin Aide Calls Anonymous Charges Sickening

What Cost The GOP The Election?

November 7, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Economic issues, Election 2008, Republican Party, Sarah Palin | 1 Comment 

As the Obama era gets underway, fingers are being pointed in all directions as Republicans ponder what happened.  Allow me to direct my digit at Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson.

In the last weeks, as it became clear that some kind of miracle was needed to save Sen. John McCain’s run for the White House, I started to wonder why it was that one was required.  The cause was clearly the economic crisis, and the event that triggered it, as Charles Krauthammer noted this morning, was the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers after Paulson refused to bail out the banking firm in mid-September.  Former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein, who has observed and commented on decades of economic ups and downs, has repeatedly stated that Paulson’s move was a bizarre and ill-thought move - “a roll of the dice that came out snake eyes.”  Like me, he doesn’t understand how the Treasury Department could bail out Bear Stearns last spring, a move that averted recession for a few months, and then let Lehman (and, it turned out, many other financial institutions) go over the abyss. 

What’s especially in my mind now is what might have been. At the end of October it turned out that new housing sales, following a 13% slump in August, had actually risen 2.7% in September.  If this indeed is an indication the housing market had hit bottom and was undergoing a resurgence at the time Paulson pulled the plug on Lehman, then it stands to reason that had he kept the company out of bankruptcy, then AIG, Merrill and the rest would have remained intact for at least the remainder of the year.  The Christmas increase in retail sales would have kept confidence going this fall, as it did last year when there was talk of a major downturn. 

And what all this would have meant is that McCain might have stayed at the level in the polls where he was in early September and could have built on that.  It’s true that by Inauguration Day, an institution as shaky as Washington Mutual might have been causing jitters, but by then it could have been the concern of a McCain administration and not an Obama one.   But instead the stock market tanked this week in a way not seen since 1987 and President-elect Obama is the one holding the press conference today.  Whatever we see in the next two years, Paulsen bears a gigantic share of the responsibility in bringing it about.

(I should mention that Andrew Sullivan, as might be expected, does not share this view and is positive that the tide began to turn against McCain when Katie Couric interviewed Gov. Sarah Palin almost 10 days before Lehman went under. And he presents some poll charts to buttress the argument. But I would say the county-by-county maps of election results that appeared in Thursday’s Washington Post disproves that.  Those maps show that this year Obama improved over Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 performance in hundreds of counties in the Midwest and Rust Belt gravely affected by the economic crisis, and that McCain improved over President Bush’s 2004 results in nearly the entire states of Arkansas and Oklahoma and across the Appalachians.  What appealed to voters in these Republican-leaning areas?  A lot of it surely had to do with Gov. Palin and her bedrock conservative views.)

Yeah Right

November 7, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Election 2008, Media | Leave a Comment 

Oprah famously (is there anything that she says or does that isn’t by definition “famously”) made a cameo appearance in the crowd at Grant Park the other night.  

The TV cameras were constantly cutting away to her perfectly made up face and its smorgasbord of rapt expressions as the program unfolded and the President Elect appeared.  

As Jon Stewart snarkily observed (is there anything that he doesn’t observe snarkily), Oprah “had actually purchased this white man to lean on during the speech”.  

In fact, Ms. Winfrey claims she had no idea who the dude was —she charmingly referred to him yesterday as “Mr. Man” and claimed that he was just a back in the crowd.

After a “search” to find “Mr. Man” and put a name to him, the two finally met face to face on The Oprah Winfrey Show this afternoon.  His name turns out to be Mr. Sam Perry — an Obama communications director and fundraiser for Silicon Valley.

Now I happen to like Oprah.  A lot.  But take it from me: nothing —nothing— she does is unthought, unplanned, or unproduced.  (Nor, given the magnitude of her stardom and the extent of her empire, should one expect it to be.) 

If anyone really believes that Oprah Winfrey just happened to be in the second rank of supporters because she showed up late and it was first come first stand and that (a) she accepted this situation and (b) nobody moved her up front, and  (c) the TV cameras were really lucky that they were able to shoot her at such a flattering angle, I have some prime swampland property in which they will undoubtedly be interested.  

Obama’s Dilemma: Being Left in a Center-Right Nation

November 7, 2008 by Jonathan C. Movroydis | Filed Under Election 2008, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

When Barack Obama was surging to victory, Charles Krauthammer noted last October on FNC’s Special Report panel that based on our economic downturn, the sentiment of the electorate, and the Republican’s potential Congressional drubbing, Democratic super majorities and a Pres. Barack Obama were going to cause our country to experience a drastic realignment. But as Kimberley Strassel argues at the Wall Street Journal, Democrats have a Congress who won’t have veto cover for unpopular and special interest backed measures (ie: the elimination of secret ballots, irrational timetables for Iraq) and will finally have a man ready to take all the responsibility that goes with the authority of the Oval Office. Unless Rahm Emanuel can apply his Congressional portfolio to turn some heads on Capitol Hill and has some of those proverbial aggressive tactics up his sleeve, he won’t be able to overcome or mollify the wave of disappointment as a Pres. Obama