Newsweek has the first post-convention poll and it reflects--surprise--a small bounce. Now who would have guessed that?

Coming out of the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Sen. John Kerry now holds a seven-point lead over President George W. Bush (49 percent to 42 percent) in a three-way race with independent Ralph Nader (3 percent), according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll The poll was taken over two nights, both before and after Kerry's acceptance speech. Respondents who were queried after Kerry's Thursday night speech gave the Democrat a ten-point lead over Bush. Three weeks ago, Kerry’s lead was three points.

Kerry’s four-point "bounce" is the smallest in the history of the NEWSWEEK poll.

Now Ed Gillespie, having argued for two weeks that the Dems would get a 10-point bounce, will claim victory. The convention a catastrophic failure. Kerry's campaign in tatters. The question is--will the press bite? Stay tuned.

[Update. According to a USA Today/Gallup Poll, Kerry actually lost ground, falling four points behind Bush. It's the first time in Gallup's 32-year history that a candidate got a reverse bounce. Polling was done Friday and Saturday and is continuing today.

The Rasmussen tracking poll puts Kerry up by four--after he'd been tracking about 2 points ahead for the past week. In other words, a tiny bounce--and possibly nothing more than an outlier.]

One of the central foreign-policy issues of the presidential campaign is sure to be the issue of pre-emption. Specifically, under what circumstances it is appropriate for the United States to use force against a foe that has yet to attack this country directly. The contrast between John Kerry and President Bush on this question could hardly be more stark.

This argument has the appearance of greater sanity, but only marginally so--and it's a testament to the deeply delusional nature of the right that they don't see this. The argument is twofold: Kerry's a waffler and you just can't trust him not to "Carter" a foreign policy problem. (Okay, so far so good--factually and verifiably wrong, but we haven't violated any laws of sanity.) The second argument is that you can trust Bush. And now we fall into a psychotic break.
To be fair, a good many of the Bush team realize that you have to play the cards you're dealt, and they've been dealt very bad cards. They obviously can't stand on Bush's record, so they have to make Kerry's look worse. But the loony right actually believe that Bush has the winning hand on this one. They believe 1) the justification to invade Iraq was valid, 2) the invasion and occupation have been a marvelous success, and 3) Iraq is now well on the road to functioning democracy. Clearly, with people like that, there's no arguing.

And from the left's perspective, it little matters. A ball of slime, whether it is hurled by a lunatic or a cynical plutocrat, is still a ball of slime.

First reactions from around the blogosphere...

Kerry: energetic, optimistic and persuasive ... And our next president. (Atrios)

Not a stem-winder -- and Kerry would have been foolish to try. But a solid speech. And I thought he hit all the right points -- with the right emotional tenor. In a way, sitting in the hall and watching the back of Kerry's head most of the time is no way to judge how it appeared on TV. But that's my snap judgment.   (Josh)

But after watching the section on Kerry's tour of duty in Vietnam, and listening to the testimony of the man whose life he saved under fire, I'm wondering if the conservative attack dogs will still have the stones to speak of Kerry's "so-called" heroics in Vietnam. (Billmon)

Update: Stunning. He did it. I didn't think he could, not after Obama and Clinton and Edwards and Cleland. But he did it. He gave the perfect speech for this moment, for this race, for this crowd. He couldn't rely on his charisma and so he instead told the country where it needed to go. He couldn't do flash so he did substance...and he did it. There's nothing I can say beyond that...I'm sorry...I just don't have the words for it.  I'm inspired. I'd forgot what this felt like. (Ezra, Pandagon)

My take: not bad, but not a slam dunk killer either. Some of the notes it hit were pretty good, a few were oddly off key, and the second half had a bit of a laundry list quality to it. Overall, though, it was at the high end of workmanlike and did what it had to do.  (Kevin Drum)

I think he absolutely nailed it. If you didn't know John Kerry before tonight, the impression you got was of a tough, fighting Democrat who is taking the battle right to George W. Bush. He pulled no punches and he gave no quarter. And I think he tapped into something that people of all political persuasion are experiencing --- the deeply felt need to feel a sense of pride in this country again.  And it sure sounded to me like he told everybody to play nice all week so that he could go for the jugular. (Digby)

What's the over/under on the number of wingnut pundits that will compare Kerry snatching Vanessa's hamster from a watery grave to his saving the life of his comrade in Vietnam? (eRobin)

Kerry is here. He's pumped. He's happy. Check out his face. The crowd is wild. Everyone is on their feet shouting "Kerry, Kerry, Kerry." The bloggers are all typing fast and furious now. (TalkLeft)

"I will be a commander-in-chief who will never mislead us into war. I will have a vice president who will not conduct secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws. And I will appoint an attorney-general who actually upholds the constitution of the United States."

--John Kerry, acceptance speech at the Democratic convention

Holy crap.  Who saw that coming?  The convention has been so on-message, the speakers so well chosen, that I was hoping Kerry would come in and deliver a serviceable speech.  A speech that would be remembered in the context of the unity and optimism of an energized party.  No one's going to remember any of that--they're going to remember Kerry and his stunning speech.

Throughout the convention, the Kerry camp made sure everyone kept their gloves on.  Who guessed that was because he intended to take them off?  He went through Bush's attacks and one by one he answered them directly.  The signature event from his biography was in turning a gunboat straight into fire and charging the attacker.  With this speech, he turned the boat--the one we're all in--and charged Bush.  Remarkable.

I flipped around and Tom Brokaw declared it an amazing speech.  On CBS, Bob Shieffer called it a success.  On PBS, even David Brooks felt it put the GOP behind the eight-ball.  "They might not be able to go on the attack," he said (to paraphrase).  The only whingers were Air America, whom I'm listening to now, who are giving tepid praise at best.  It's not clear that they didn't expect Howard Dean to actually make the acceptance.

If John Kerry can't win now--when he is in the majority on every policy and is facing draft-dodging layabout whose life and presidency is with corruption, incompetence, and failure--I'm moving to Canada.

I promise I'll continue to exercise restraint on things like this, but I couldn't pass up this headline (give that writer a raise!):

Bush's search for clean Cuban hookers goes awry

(Thanks IR/SM, et al)

Both Americas had the chance to watch the "two Americas" speech last night.  Did they tune in?  I can't find the numbers for Wednesday, but there's evidence that viewers are interested in the convention.  They tuned in to cable and PBS on Tuesday when the broadcast networks chose to run repeats of--what was it, Who Wants to Marry My Pig-Ugly Brother?

The Public Broadcasting Service pulled in an unexpected horde of viewers on Tuesday, about 3 million, up from 2.5 million for Monday night and about a million more than its normal audience, for three hours of prime-time convention coverage.

The viewing totals also increased at the three all-news cable channels on Tuesday night, most likely thanks to viewers who might have otherwise watched one of the network channels. For the night, CNN again had the most viewers, 2.362 million, just ahead of Fox News, which had 2.340 million. MSNBC also showed an impressive jump with 1.4 million.

Americans interested in politics--imagine. American democracy may not be dead yet.

Finding Their Voice

There is a discontinuity in Bizarro World.  Not much of one, of course, emanating as it does from Boston.  Still, practitioners of the postmodern political arts have noticed a subtle change in the force.  Peering into their television screens, they watch the festivities at the convention, and all looks well.  They consult their instruments of threat detection, they consult each other, they check again.  Nothing.  And yet ... a disturbance.

Example.  Last night, after Teresa Heinz Kerry finished a speech that visibly moved an audience to tears, David Brooks, perplexed, told Jim Lehrer that it wasn't very personal.  She was his wife, why didn't she tell something personal about her husband?  Like Laura Bush would have done.  It started strong, but then sort of trailed off there.  I could see him tapping his Dean-o-meter for seismic activity: nothing.

Yet what we're observing is a bedrock change in the Democratic Party.  For the first time since Ronald Reagan snatched away their working class, the Dems have again found their voice.  For the past two days, literally every speech I've heard (I missed Al's due to a phone call from my dad) has been about the forgotten values of the Democratic Party: freedom, unity, diversity, well-being, hope.  The poor righties, who have dictated the terms of the debate for 24 years, don't know what the hell they're talking about.  It's like they're speaking Portugese.  (Okay, Teresa did speak a little Portugese.)

The Republicans pulled off an amazing Orwellian feat under Reagan--they appropriated the language and morality of liberalism and perverted it.  Now giving money to the rich helped the poor, removing civil liberties ensured citizens' rights, ensuring whites didn't lose their advantage was civil rights, and empowering corporations was good for workers and consumers.  They used the same objectives, but they argued that the moral way to achieve them wasn't bankrupt liberalism--that unholy devilchild of the enlightenment--but through proper, narrowly-interpreted Protestant doctrine. 

So for 24 years we've watched as the Dems cast about for a language that communicated actual liberal values but conformed to the ruling orthodoxy's moral code.  It led, unfortunately and improbably, to Clinton asserting that "the era of big government is over" and his dismantling of key provisions of the progressive great society reforms.  (Welfare, sure, but what about the deregulated FCC, the federal giveaways to corporations, the poorly-crafted NAFTA, the problems on Wall Street?) 

The language they're using is populist liberalism.  Not the doublespeak divisive populism of George Bush's "uniting not dividing" but an actual confidence in the power of the people.  It was the font of reform in the 1930s, when America was confronted by economic hardships and external threats, and the Dems seem to be unpacking it once again (with relish and delight).

Howard Dean: "America’s greatness rests on far more than the power of our arms. Our greatness is also measured by our goodness, it’s in the capacity of our minds and of our hearts, and it’s in the strength of our democracy. "

Barack Obama: "It is that fundamental belief, it is that fundamental belief, I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one."

Teresa Heinz Kerry: "For many generations of people around this globe, that is what America has represented. A symbol of hope, a beacon brightly lit by the optimism of its people--people coming from all over the world. Americans believed that they could know all there is to know, build all there is to build, break down any barrier, tear down any wall. We sent men to the moon, and when that was not far enough, we sent Galileo to Jupiter, we sent Cassini to Saturn, and Hubble to touch the very edges of the universe in the very dawn of time. Americans showed the world what can happen when people believe in amazing possibilities."

For Democrats, it's a return to honest, direct politics.  This is what we've always believed, this has been the heart of the platform since Jefferson's era.  Al Gore couldn't spark the base because no one was really sure if he was commited to this vision of politics or, under pressure from the Orwellians, he'd turn to quasi-GOP Clintonian liberalism.  Now they're speaking directly, and the message is enormously effective.  So effective that they don't even have to mention Bush to indict him and his bankrupt policies.  The righties like David Brooks, whose instruments are calibrated to detect exploitable liberal policy or direct assaults on the President, have been left scratching their heads.  What's that crazy African going on about now?

Dems though, are starting to ignore the David Brooks.  If he can't see what's happening in front of him, it's because the confusion of Bizarro World still clouds his faculties.  His instruments are attuned to doublespeak, and so he can't hear the Democrats, who are speaking directly and guilelessly--truth to power, as Teresa said.  And anyway, they're not speaking to the David Brooks.  They're speaking to the country.  By the time he figures out how effective the truth is, it will be too late.

Duncan, aka Atrios (yeah, that one), via Talk Left

If anyone had a right to be aggrieved over the last presidential election, it was former Vice President Al Gore. He won the popular vote nationwide, but a 5-4 Supreme Court decision stopped the counting of Florida's disputed ballots and effectively handed Bush the White House. But appearing Monday night to an affectionate ovation, Gore urged Democrats to channel their anger over the 2000 election into support for Kerry and Edwards. Without ever saying I-told-you-so or mentioning Bush by name, Gore made clear his sense of vindication in a speech laced with humor.  (LA Times)

While Gore leavened his remarks with humor, another voice from the Democratic past made no effort to soften his criticism of Bush. Former president Jimmy Carter, who on other occasions has made clear his contemptuous feelings for Bush, said that the president's policies represent an abrupt break from historical tradition. He recalled serving as a naval officer under Democrat Harry S. Truman and Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, when Americans were sure that the country's leaders "would not put our soldiers and sailors in harm's way by initiating wars of choice unless America's vital interests were in danger."  (Washington Post)

Right and Far Right

Selections from the National Review
Is Al Gore bitter? Yikes! ... His face and body looked grim and angry. They must have wished they could have omitted him entirely.... What a nasty piece of work Jimmy Carter is. ... Things have come to a pretty pass when Hillary Clinton is the first sober, sensible voice of the evening. ...  OK, I’ll admit it. That was a good speech [by Clinton].   (Frum)    

If Al Gore had matched his pitch to the moment as perfectly in 2000 as he did tonight, he would be running for reelection today.  (Ponnuru)

The speech itself was harsh, unreasonable, and pure Jimmy Carter. His themes were a) that Bush was a quasi-deserter, b) that he is an "extremist," c) that he is a warmonger, and d) that he is a liar. Mayor Koch wrote a book about Mayor Giuliani called "Nasty Man." I think of that phrase when studying Jimmy Carter.  (Nordlinger)

But when Carter wasn't being unintentionally self-satirical, he was being his old squalid self.  (Hayward)

Washington Times
Bill Clinton accused President Bush of wasting the advances of his eight years as president in a rousing opening-night speech to the Democratic National Convention yesterday, urging the election of Sen. John Kerry to restore his legacy....  The Kerry campaign said the theme was the "Kerry-Edwards plan for America's future," but yesterday's lineup was heavy on the party's elder statesmen, including former President Jimmy Carter and former Vice President Al Gore, who focused on the past.  (link)

He also resists speaking publicly about the incident that won him the Silver Star, but his surviving crewmates have told how, when they were ambushed by a Vietcong guerrilla firing rockets from the riverbank, Kerry made an instantaneous decision that evasive action was impossible, turned his boat directly into the fire, beached it, and leaped ashore, to the astonishment of the man with the rocket launcher, who popped up from his spider hole and fled. Kerry chased him and killed him. Navy men were not supposed to leave their ships during combat, and before recommending Kerry for the medal his commanding officer quipped that he wasn’t sure whether he shouldn’t court-martial him instead.

Reading Brinkley’s book, one wonders why Kerry’s campaign does not make more of another occasion when Kerry was sharply reprimanded for having stepped ashore. On a narrow tributary of the Duong Keo River, he and his crew came upon what looked like a deserted village. Then someone thought he saw a man running away. There was no response to a call for surrender, and Kerry took his gun and went to have a look. As he approached, forty-two Vietnamese—women, children, and old men—appeared with empty hands raised. They were in desperate shape, hungry and sick, and although Kerry received radio instructions to leave them and get on with the business of killing enemy combatants, he herded the villagers onto boats and took them to the nearest American base to receive food and medical care. "For an afternoon," he told Brinkley, "it felt good to really be helping the Vietnamese instead of destroying their villages."

Philip Gourevitch, 7/26 New Yorker

If their guy had either of these items on his bio, Bush supporters would fall down in ecstatic displays of rapture. Good to make them aware that our guy has both.

Immediacy The virtue of blogs is that they respond more quickly than any medium (other than TV--which only covers 2% of news).

Interconnectivity Blogs are also unique because, instead of working only with the network of their own reporters and bureaus, bloggers sift through the entire mediascape for news. Together, it forms a kind of "community brain" of information.

Interactivity Through this interconnectivity emerges a dialogue between bloggers; with comments, you include another dimension--now readers are joining the discussion with bloggers.

Individuality In a completely standardized, corporatized world, the human voice has been lost. Blogs restore that with their own brand of individuality.

Advocacy In the mainstream press, there's no place for advocacy. You've got advertisers to please on the one hand, and the (mostly outdated) notion of objectivity on the other. But blogs can be vibrant advocates for their interests. Taken together, a network of bloggers can have a profound organizing effect--witness the Howard Dean phenomenon.

In Oregon, we are blessed with an enormously rich blogging community. A site called ORblogs catalogues Oregon bloggers--currently there are 262 listed. More importantly, they've started to evolve. A blogger who goes by the modest handle "the one true B!x" is a full-time reporter for his site Portland Communique. He doesn't just comment on the news, he reports it and occasionally scoops the mainstream press. Over the past year, his site has become a must-read for Portland pols and reporters.

When we launched BlueOregon, we hoped it would become "the water cooler around which progressive Oregonians will gather to share news, commentary, and gossip." (Credit to co-founder Kari Chisholm for that fine langauge.) Although it's a group blog, we're really hoping to start a virtual community center. We've assembled bloggers, politicians, activists, and regular citizens (and even a poet!) to try to start a dialogue that maximizes the characteristics of the medium.

In the late 1970s, conservatives gathered around coffeepots in the basements of Baptist churches and started building connections. They were very far from the beltway, and their political stirrings were unsophisticated. They collected fives and tens and put people on school boards and county commissions. Four years ago they elected a President, and in 2002 they retained both houses of Congress. Depending on the election this year, conservatives may finally secure a rock-solid majority on the Supreme Court. All of this happened because of successful organization.

In the next couple years, the blog medium will begin to solidify. Either they will be yet another sorta interesting--but ultimately failed--internet application (remember how Rocket Books were going to change the world?), or they will emerge as something distinct and necessary. Given the current media landscape, here's one person who's really hoping for the latter.

I mention this because Rick Perlstein of the Village Voice sent me a link to his article, The Church of Bush.  (Why do some papers put their headlines in caps and others not?  Hmmm...)  Let's see: major newspaper (check), great article (check).  Oh, and the topic revolves around Oregonians.  A trifecta!

Actually, forget all that business--it really is a fascinating article.  Perlstein came to our fair state and spent some quality time with activist righties.  This is their story.

Ponytailed Larry, who wears the stripes of a former marine gunnery sergeant on his floppy hat, bursts into laughter; it's too obvious to take seriously. "Honesty. Truth. Integrity," he says upon recovering. "I don't think there's any difference between the governor of Texas and the president of the United States."

Gingerly, I offer one difference: The governor ran for president on a platform of balanced budgets, then ran the federal budget straight into the red.

Responds Larry (of the first president since James Garfield with a Congress compliant enough never to issue a single veto): "Well, it's interesting that we blame the person who happens to be president for the deficit. As if he has any control over thelegislature of the United States."

Larry's wife, Tami Mars, the Republican congressional nominee for Oregon's third district, proposes a Divine Right of Eight-Year Terms: "Let the man finish what he started. Instead of switching out his leadership—because that's what the terrorists are expecting."

Larry is asked what he thinks of Bush's budget cuts for troops in the field. He's not with Bush on everything: "I hope he reverses himself on that."

I note that he already has, due to Democratic pressure.

Faced with an existential impossibility—giving the Democrats credit for anything—he retreats into a retort I'll hear again and again tonight: Nobody's perfect. "I don't think we're going to find a situation in which we find a person with which we're 100 percent comfortable."

Perlstein chalks it up to a religious-like faith in Dubya certain righties have.  It's a filter that allows only the hagiographic to shine through.  I think he's partly right, but to play the behavior card, I'd go back to a book I was hot on about a year ago: The Authoritarian Specter, by Bob Altemeyer.  Based on studies he's conducted over 30 years, Altemeyer has defined a psychological behavior he calls "right-wing authoritarian."  Listen to see if you can find any resonances to what Perlstein describes.

Compared with others, authoritarians have not spent much time examining evidence, thinking critically, reaching independent conclusions, and seeing whether their conclusions mesh with the other things they believe. Instead, they have largely accepted what they were told by the authorities in their lives, which leaves them with time for other things, but which also leaves them underpracticed in thinking for themselves.

[T]hey usually learned which ideas are bad in the same way they learned which ones are good--from the authorities in their lives. [Authoritarians] therefore have more trouble identifying falsehoods on their own because they are not as preapared to think critically.

Blind faith and authoritarian behavior--a bad combo. 

College students, even at Yale, live enveloped by uncertainty. What should I do with my life? What really matters? Hill seemed to them a man who in the course of years had figured it all out. He was an austere but commanding presence in their lives.

After he goes all tingly describing the affect the Great Man has had on the great young minds of the Ivy League, he poses this Very Serious Question: "Why aren't there more scholars, like Hill, Gaddis and Kennedy, who teach students to be generalists, to see the great connections?"

Psst, hey Dave, here's a hot tip. There are places where you can learn life's great connections. In fact, there's even a name for such a thing: the liberal arts. 

They are more than twice as likely to see things headed down the wrong track as compared to voters overall.... They give President Bush a net NEGATIVE image rating.... John Kerry holds a slight net POSITIVE image rating.... Clearly, if these undecided voters were leaning any harder against the door of the Kerry camp, they would crash right through it.

That's the part Kevin catches, but he ignores the more interesting analysis--of what Lizza calls the "approval-gap voters."

Fabrizio [the GOP pollster] calls this difference the "approval gap." In his 19-state poll the percentage of people who approve of the job Bush is doing but say they will vote for Kerry is 8.6 percent.

Approval-gap voters, by contrast, are the true equivocators. They are both pro-Bush and pro-Kerry. They just happen to be a little more pro-Kerry. They have a net favorable opinion of Bush (48 percent favorable to 30 percent unfavorable), but an even higher net favorable opinion of Kerry (54 percent favorable to 15 percent unfavorable).

Based on the analysis of these two groups, Fabrizio's counter-intuitive advice to the Bush team is to forget about the undecided voters--who are really just future Kerry supporters--and to concetrate on the approval-gap voters, many of whom say they are voting for Kerry but are actually still open to Bush. "Focusing on 'approval gap' voters versus undecided voters," he argues, "will yield a better return on investment" because "'approval gap' voters aren't predisposed against the President personally"--as the undecided voters are--and they "are less pessimistic about the direction of the country."

Ah, it's all clear to me now.

The "Girlie-Men" Gaffe

"They cannot have the guts to come out there in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you. I want to represent those special interests: the unions, the trial lawyers'…. I call them girlie men. They should get back to the table, and they should finish the budget."

--Arnold Schwarzenegger, Saturday

It's not possible for politicians to avoid saying stupid things from time to time, and here Arnold offers up a beaut.  Never mind the possible implications--homophobia, misogyny--the politics alone are idiotic.  A puerile assault on a person's manhood (even if a quarter of the targets aren't men)--not exactly a Kasparov-like move.  Now Arnold's going to be doing damage control for a week and has just handed the PR power back to the opposition. 

But what about the implications?  Dems are playing the homophobe and sexism card and demanding a retraction that the Governor says will not be forthcoming.  I have no doubt he's a sexist and a cultural homophobe (muscleheads must eschew the swishy), but this gaffe points to neither.  Rather, it's a peak into Arnold's hidden propensity toward autocracy that may just be coming out.  Arnold is a competitive guy, and he's competitive in the solo mode of bodybuilding.  His two previous careers both accentuated the cult of the individual.  From Mr. Universe, he went on to become the Terminator and Hollywood's best-paid man.  Although filmmaking is a team effort, Arnold didn't have to share the limelight.  The press described his movies as Arnold movies, and he got all the credit.

In Cali, things were looking good for six months or so.  Through the honeymoon period, Arnold was afforded a number of successes.  The legislature played along and the press wrote the same kind of stories they wrote about Arnie the actor--it was the Arnold show; he got all the credit. 

Of course, in a state where funding measures have to be passed by two-thirds votes, no one man is going to run the show.  The "girlie man" comment was a slip of the lip.  It didn't reveal an inner gay-basher or sexist, however. (Inner sexist?  Isn't he pretty much out of that closet?)  It revealed his inner autocrat.  Just what Californians wanted, right?

________________
Update:  From today's Sacramento Bee:

Arnold Schwarzenegger's fierce desire not only to succeed but to dominate made him the globe's most renowned bodybuilder and action movie star, and that same obsession with winning also placed him in California's governorship.

California's seriously unbalanced state budget, however, is rapidly becoming an indelible black mark on Schwarzenegger's winning record. The man who believed that he could overcome any obstacle by sheer force of will has collided with the issue that was the most important factor in the recall of predecessor Gray Davis.

Time for the Knock-Out

Yesterday on Meet the Press, there were three discussions.  The first was a discussion with Senator Robert Byrd about whether George W. Bush a despot? The second was whether Bush left the US unsafe?  And the third was campaign analysis that led with ... whether John Kerry is a flip-flopper. 

It's fairly typical.  Nearly everything's going wrong for the White House, so after reporting the news, the media, beholden to its own bizarre definition of "objective," goes the the "negative" story about Kerry--Bush's talking point that he's wishy-washy.  Bush's administration has become a PR campaign to steer the press away from the signature policies of his administration.  We get gay marriage, not Iraq.  We get identity theft, not jobs.  Hell, things are so bad the press has indulged in speculation, to the White House's great annoyance, that Bush is going to dump Cheney from the ticket. 

The problem is, Kerry's playing into his hand.  Clearly, he needs to have a full slate of policy initiatives.  But his message should be this: Bush always talks priorities.  Fine.  Here's his priorities.  In economics, he favors the wealthy over the poor.  He favors big business over small business.  In the war on terror, he favors invasion over security.  In foreign policy, he favors unilateralism over collaboration. 

But Kerry, instead of going Rove on the White House, is batting back Bush's feeble thrusts.  He defends himself on flip-flopping, he argues values, he changes the subject when Bush brings up gay marriage.  Why on earth is Bush setting the discussion?  Forget values for a month or two.  Start hammering Bush where it really hurts--his supposed "successes."  That's the most vicious attack of all.

R. I. P.

The Oregon Blog
January 16, 2003 - July 18, 2004

Read the eulogy.

Blue Oregon, Blue Oregon...

Blue Oregon

The Politics of Race

Another election year, another opportunity to kick the race football around.  Yesterday John Kerry spent the afternoon telling Bush--via the NAACP--neener, neener: "I will be a president who truly is a uniter, not one who seeks to divide our nation by race, riches or any other label. I will be a president who shares the values of people of all colors who get up and go to work every day, try to raise their families in dignity and want to leave this world a better place for their children. I will be a president who when he is invited into your home, will always say yes." Bush, never one to let a blow go unreturned, called the venerable civil rights organization "incivil" and "intolerant." 

Politicians have long understood that race is a whole lot easier to exploit than address. 

This year, Dems get a pass.  Bush received an all-time low of just 9% of the black vote in 2000, and he's been alienating that 9% ever since.  As the NAACP speech yesterday showed, all Kerry has to do is show up.  He won't be forced to talk race overtly, and the divisions that have split the country (particularly the South) since the civil rights era will be put aside this year.  Of course, that means he won't have to address race, either.

Even Bush, who in another year might be looking down the barrel of a "race problem," gets a pass.  For the past month he's been feeding the base nothing but red meat, and his rebuke of the NAACP can be seen as a backhanded way of playing to the "states' rights" crowd.  Who knows what Bush's personal views on race are--politically it's a clear choice.  For a guy teetering on the brink of elective catastrophe, the last thing he needs to do is cozy up to a black constituency whom he's spent four years screwing.  Better to give a wink and a nod to the good ol' boys down south.

But if race is politically clear-cut this year, it conceals an intractable problem at the heart of politics.  There is, of course, the ostensible conflict--racism itself.  But more subtle conflicts, often commingled with distal conflicts like economics and education, are the where the real trouble lies.

Overt racism is no longer the central problem.  We've come a long way from the time when a majority of Americans thought the races were biologically distinct, when brutal racism was justified by the belief in superior genes.  What exists now is the residue of that old hatred, a kind of belligerent racism to spite the facts.  Where race is used as a justification for policy, it's more likely to be a cultural rather than biological argument.  When blacks perform more poorly than whites in schools, for example, this is evidence of a lazy culture, not inferior genes. 

Things get really hairy when race forms a subsidiary issue to a larger problem--education, say.  Both parties co-opt race to bolster their own ideological stand on the issue.  In the new millennium, the GOP has suddenly (though not quite admirably) become color-blind.  They don't consider race when discussing education and then call it a virtue--never mind that black and Latino children lag behind whites in k-12 education, score lower on college boards, and attend college in smaller percentages.  The Democrats, meanwhile, use these same statistics to argue for stronger support of public schools--never mind that many public schools are a disaster and black interest in school vouchers is growing.  It's an example of how politicians use race as a football--which has the perverse effect of avoiding dealing with race directly. 

2004 is shaping up to be another year of race football.  With the war, terrorism, and the economy, it just won't move to the front burner.  It will get discussed, if at all, in support for other arguments.  Kerry, for example, might point out that not only are most of the people fighting Bush's war poor, they're disproportionately black.  But that argument, while true, is exactly the kind of argument that ignores the larger issues in American society.  America's white population is steadily declining--it is projected to be only 53% at midcentury--which means that issues of race aren't going to go away, they'll get more pronounced.  At some point, we're actually going to have to actually talk about it.  Directly.

If we map out U.S. military responses since the end of the cold war, we find an overwhelming concentration of activity in the regions of the world that are excluded from globalization’s growing Core--namely the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia.

--Esquire, March 2003

The resulting map contains countries with absolutely nothing in common with each other. So what about the other half, the part where violence is rare?

Once again, these countries look quite different politically. What they had in common was a de facto "rule set." They all accepted the freedoms and limitations that come with interconnectivity--economic and otherwise. India is a democracy, but it has a caste system that offends equality-minded Americans. Likewise, our loose morals and libertine ways offend Indians. But a larger rule set is in place that allows us to interact. We accept that the interconnectivity of markets, the effects of satellite broadcasts, the internet and so on will bring us challenges to our cultural norm. The rule set allows us to interact even if we don't perfectly agree. (And the result is we both become more like the other--another consequence we're willing to accept.)

But in the violent regions of the world, countries reject these rule sets. They function by different rules and demand that any integration is done on the terms of their own rule set.

The Non-Integrating Gap
According to Barnett, the principal characteristic of the non-integrating Gap (hereafter Gap) is not religion or politics, but disconnectedness.

To be disconnected in this world is to be kept isolated, deprived, repressed, and uneducated. For young women, it means being kept--quite literally in many instances--barefoot and pregnant. For young men, it means being kept ignorant and bored and malleable. For the masses, being disconnected means a lack of choice and scarce access to ideas, capital, travel, entertainment, and love ones overseas.

--The Pentagon's New Map

As a result of this disconnectivity, life in the Gap is characterized by a number of conditions. Poverty - of 118 countries with incomes less than $3,000, 109 are in the Gap. Poor leadership and oppression - of 48 countries listed by Freedom House as "not free," 45 are in the Gap. Only one in ten Gap states has a stable rotation of leaders. Violence and disease - all of the countries with median ages of less than 20 are located in the Gap; all countries with median ages of 35 or more are in the functioning Core. Life expectancy is low, and crime and war high. Disconnection - communications within the Gap (independent media, internet) are far lower than in the Core.


I think Barnett has hit on a killer app here. It doesn't address individual conflicts or offer guidance on a case-by-case level. Viewing the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lens of the Gap doesn't suggest a course of action. But it is useful in pulling it out of the quagmire of culture, history, and religion--the blinders that have prevented solutions for 50 years. In fact, looking around the globe, using this lens has the same effect of changing the discussion from explosive political rhetoric and directing it toward larger and less volitile possibilities.

The real test is, having diagnosed the problem, can we come up with effective, long-term solutions? Tune in tomorrow for a discussion.

We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder, and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take.

To translate: in a screeching panic we bombed the hell out a a guy we didn't like because he might have eventually tried to find weapons that he might have considered using against us--or conceivably giving them to other guys we don't like who presumably also wanted weapons...which they might have also been interested in using against us. It's the new definition of "imminent threat."

However, while this is indeed a nice storyline to report, I don't think it's the central one. The more important passage came earlier in the speech, where Bush reaffirmed the neocon doctrine of foreign policy:

To overcome the dangers of our time, America is also taking a new approach in the world. We're determined to challenge new threats, not ignore them, or simply wait for future tragedy. We're helping to build a hopeful future in hopeless places, instead of allowing troubled regions to remain in despair and explode in violence. Our goal is a lasting, democratic peace, in which free nations are free from the threat of sudden terror.... First, we are defending the peace by taking the fight to the enemy.

The ill-fated neocon dream that the US can enforce an (admittedly perverse) "freedom" on all nations (the freedom to buy McDonald's burgers and shop at Wal-Mart) that led to the debacle of Iraq is still firmly in place. While all serious adults (Nader left to Kissinger right) have looked at the situation and realized the gross naivete of this line of thinking, it is still Bush's policy. It allows Bush to continue to trumpet the fictional "peace" and "democracy" the US brought Iraq. It allows him to read these lines with blissful lack of irony: "The ideals we stand for have a power of their own. The appeal of justice and liberty, in the end, is greater than the appeal of hatred and tyranny in any form." Who knows, maybe he's keeping the policy just so he won't lose this particular line of rhetoric.

I don't know if the media's going to pick up on this or not. Surely we won't see the headline I used for this post. I'd settle for "Bush to Continue Neocon Agenda of Intervention." Seems unlikely though, doesn't it? I guess that's why God invented blogs.

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More

Dan Froomkin has a long article reviewing the media reaction to Bush's speech. I was wrong. Two articles had critical headlines: "Bush again tries to link Saddam, al-Qaida" from Knight-Ridder and "Bush asserts pre-emptive strikes policy" from the Financial Times.

American counterterrorism officials, citing what they call "alarming" intelligence about a possible Qaeda strike inside the United States this fall, are reviewing a proposal that could allow for the postponement of the November presidential election in the event of such an attack, NEWSWEEK has learned.

The Bushies are apparently sufficiently alarmed by a Madrid-like October Surprise that they're considering scrapping democracy, apparently, to save it. Fortunately, no such provision for unilaterally establishing a dictatorship currently exists in US law (fancy that). Congress must therefore create it, which will no doubt scare the crap out of GOP legislators.

I think we're a long way from having this become a serious possibility, but it's an instructive lesson in what the White House means by "values." Whatever they may be--traditional, conservative, laissez-faire, monarchal--they are definitely not democratic.

[Update: Everyone in the blogosphere's talking about this one. A sampling.

Tom Maguire says it's a decent idea, then changes his mind: "However, a commenter has a much better point - we are expecting Iraqis to stand up to terror and vote, Americans can darn well do the same."

Jesse says it doesn't matter when we vote, but how: "Of course, it would also help if various parties, such as those expunging felons in Florida and those helping Nader get on ballots in swing states, actually cared about democracy per se rather than how it can be twisted and manipulated to get Bush in office at any cost."

Billmon starts down the same line of thought as Tom, but takes a left turn and ends up at the Constitution: "[T]he history of the U.S. Constitution can be divided into three periods, each of precisely 72 years. The first began with the Philadelphia convention and ended with the firing on Ft. Sumter, which rung down the curtain on the aristocratic republic the founders had created. The second period stretched from Ft. Sumter to FDR's Hundred Days, and the peaceful revolution that created the modern welfare state. The third will take us to 2005, and the inauguration of the next president - assuming there's an election to be followed by that inauguration."]