Kitchen Sink Employed In Last-Minute Smear Strategy

This is the final primal scream for John McCain and the right. After decades of feeling entitled to the levers of power, of shrugging off responsibility and accountability, they are having to deal with the consequences of the failed policies of the conservative era. So as a result, they are going heavily on the attack.

There are the new set of nasty robocalls, now being employed in McCain's home state of Arizona, where multiple polls have now shown the race to be close and where Obama is mounting a last-minute surge.

There's the latest deliberate misinterpretation of Obama's tax policies, pretending not to understand that "over $250,000 gets an increase" and "under $200,000 gets a cut" can both be right at the same time.

Obama has said throughout the campaign that families making less than $250,000 a year will not see a tax increase. Those making less than $200,000 will get a tax cut, he says. "If you make less than a quarter of a million dollars a year, you will not see a single dime of your taxes go up," Obama said during an October 7 presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee. "If you make $200,000 a year or less, your taxes will go down."

The campaign ad McCain refers to, titled "Defining Moment," does have a graphic appear on the screen that says, "Families making less than $200,000 get tax cut." Obama says, "If you have a job, pay taxes and make less than $200,000 a year, you'll get a tax cut," which is, again, consistent with the plan he has
laid out.

Biden was speaking Monday, October 27, in an interview with WNEP in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He said, "(An) $87 billion tax break doesn't need to go to people making an average of $1.4 million. It should go like it used to. It should go to middle class people — people making under $150,000 a year." Biden never says that tax breaks should "only" go to such people. The Obama campaign says he was merely using that figure as an example and that the statement does not represent a change in policy.

The Verdict: False. What McCain is doing here, in part, is comparing apples and oranges. He compares two different aspects of Obama's tax plan as if they were the same. And Biden never said people making less than $150,000 are the "only" people who would get a tax cut under Obama's policies.

There's the latest attack ads basically calling Obama a Marxist-Leninist committed to handing out "welfare," one of which is so rushed that it includes a misspelling and the other clearly spelling out the word "blacks" to answer the question, I assume, of where the money goes.

There's this latest crusade against the media, attacking the LA Times for publishing a story friendly to him several months ago that he apparently just noticed. And by the way, the attacks on Rashid Khalidi are ridiculous, especially considering that McCain and Khalidi have worked together:

Of course, Khalidi has been involved in Palestinian causes. McCarthy ought to ask John McCain about that, because McCain and Khalidi appear to have some joint interests, and that fact speaks very well of both of them. Indeed, the McCain–Khalidi connections are more substantial than the phony Obama–Khalidi connections McCarthy gussies up for his article. The Republican party’s congressionally funded international-networking organization, the International Republican Institute–long and ably chaired by John McCain and headed by McCain’s close friend, the capable Lorne Craner–has taken an interest in West Bank matters. IRI funded an ambitious project, called the Palestine Center, that Khalidi helped to support. Khalidi served on the Center’s board of directors. The goal of that project, shared by Khalidi and McCain, was the promotion of civic consciousness and engagement and the development of democratic values in the West Bank. Of course, McCarthy is not interested in looking too closely into the facts, because they would not serve his shrill partisan objectives.

And of course, at the end of the campaign we are getting the full Jeremiah.

The National Republican Trust PAC, which has been airing an ad attacking Barack Obama's association with Reverend Wright in three battleground states, has now put down for a national buy on five networks that will last from now through election day, a consultant with the group confirms to me.

The ad will run nationally on Fox, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC for the next five days, the consultant, Rick Wilson, says -- "all the way until election day."

The ad, which you can watch here, features the now-infamous footage of Wright's livelier sermons, and intones that Obama "never complained" about Wright "until he ran for President," adding that Obama is "too radical, too risky."

The Democratic Web presence has done a good job smacking down and ferreting out these attacks, but it seems like lately there are almost too many to chronicle. The conservative attack machine still has a pulse and they're still going to try and smear Barack Obama. We'll see if it works.

Yep, He Did Concede

After denying that they were giving up on states like Colorado and focusing on Pennsylvania, the McCain campaign essentially copped to it by reducing their ad buys in the Rocky Mountain State and four others:

Democrats who monitor advertising spending now put at five the number of states where Senator John McCain is reducing his advertising – New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Colorado, Maine and Minnesota.

In essence, Mr. McCain’s campaign has decided to spread the advertising time he bought for the upcoming week in those states over the next two final weeks.

While station managers in the affected states said they were not ruling out the possibility that Mr. McCain would pump money back in before election day, on Nov. 4, the move represents a stark reordering of priorities.

Democrats were predicting Mr. McCain would use the savings to increase his advertising in Pennsylvania and, possibly, Ohio and Florida, all of which have become that much more vital should Mr. McCain have to concede states like Colorado and Wisconsin.

This is probably happening because the RNC is pulling up stakes. They aren't stopping the creation of "hybrid" ads that they can help pay for because, as the McCain team spins it, they want the nominee to control message. He was doing so anyway. The RNC is going to try and hold the line and save the possibility for filibuster in the Senate.

As for why Pennsylvania and Iowa have become the final frontier for McCain, it's simple: they are at least an option:

*** McCain’s path to 270: So many pundits and analysts are wondering why McCain is continuing to push for Iowa and Pennsylvania, despite the daunting poll numbers in those two states. There are two reasons. First, he's run out of options. If you assume Colorado is gone and that Virginia is teetering, he has to find 270 EVs somewhere. Second, Iowa and Pennsylvania are two of the oldest states in the union, as far as the age of their populations. Both states have tons of seniors, and if McCain can turn things around again with seniors, he should see movement first in these two states. Simply put, the campaign doesn't have a lot of options; it's not worth attempting to hold states that get McCain to 250 or 260 electoral votes. The game is getting to 270, and Iowa and Pennsylvania may be his last hope at keeping a path to 270 alive.

That's pretty much it. They're more susceptible, it is likely, to the "experience" message, as well as any last-minute Jeremiah Wright sightings, as Nate Silver notes. But there's a big roadblock to this strategy: reality.

4,060,647
2,917,747
869,707

Those are the current numbers of registered and active Democrats, Republicans and independents in Pennsylvania. Democrats make up more than half the total -- 52 percent, in fact -- well outdistancing the Republican's 33 percent. Suppose that McCain were to split Pennsylvania's independents with Obama and win Republicans 92-8. He would need to carry 23-24 percent of Pennsylvania's Democrats to win the state; George Bush carried 15 percent.

As we reported yesterday, however, negative advertising does not seem to be a good strategy for winning over lapsed Democrats; on the contrary, Democratic solidarity has increased markedly in recent weeks, with Barack Obama now on target to win as much support among his party any Democratic nominee has in any recent election.

There's always the lawyer strategy, to delegitimize the election as somehow cooked up by ACORN, Bill Ayers and The Army of Nubians. And Pennsylvania not voting until Election Day means McCain is not in a huge hole as it stands right now. But I think we can be realistic about this. Hopefully Obama is pouring a lot of resources into the Keystone State, just in case. I know I'll be calling my family and telling them the election hinges on them.

Immolation

There's a story out today that the Presidential campaign has somehow "shifted back" to the economy because John McCain didn't run out last night and tell Barack Obama to his face that he was a Muslim terrorist. And the Politico got these very nice little quotes from McCain staffers that "proved" this.

After days of attempts to persuade voters that Obama’s ties to ‘60s radical Bill Ayers are a crucial character issue, McCain didn’t mention Ayers’ name during the 90 minutes of Tuesday’s forum. His top aides suggested afterward that, going forward, the candidate wouldn’t focus on the former domestic terrorist nor invoke the name of Obama’s controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Nicolle Wallace, a top McCain adviser, hinted McCain would not bring it up. “If asked about it, of course [he’ll talk about Ayers],” she said.

McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt all but said the controversial pastor remained off-limits.

“What Sen. McCain has said is that it’s not an issue he intends to talk about in the race,” said the aide, though he did note that Obama himself had called Wright 'fair game.'

But Schmidt did say without prompting: “You’ve not seen Sen. McCain advertise on [Wright]."

Apparently, the institutional memory of the Washington press corps has been erased. These things aren't meant to be frontal assaults - George H.W. Bush only brought up Willie Horton in a debate in 1988 after Dukakis approached the subject first. These things happen in the background, over email, through whisper campaigns, and once they're in the ether they don't need to be hyped again and again. It's "out there."

But McCain's campaign isn't as deft as those in the past, for a particular reason which I'll get to in a moment. As for the idea that the McCain campaign's given up on the character attacks, um, no:

ARLINGTON, VA -- Today, John M. Murtagh made the following statement on Barack Obama's relationship with William Ayers:

"When I was 9 years-old the Weather Underground, the terrorist group founded by Barack Obama's friend William Ayers, firebombed my house. Barack Obama has dismissed concerns about his relationship with Ayers by noting that he was only a child when Ayers was planting bombs at the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. But Ayers has never apologized for his crimes, he has reveled in them, expressing regret only for the fact that he didn't do more [...]

"Barack Obama may have been a child when William Ayers was plotting attacks against U.S. targets -- but I was one of those targets. Barack Obama's friend tried to kill my family."

John McCain has a problem. He isn't trusted by the base and so he must appeal to their darkest instincts, but every time he does so he turns off independents. Indeed, during the debate, every time he launched an attack, such as they were, the dials plummeted. But without his base he's sunk and he has no ground game, so attack he must. That's why Sarah Palin is taking the Agnew role and whipping crowds into a frenzy (and Joe Biden is right to call her on it), but McCain is backing away and hedging. That's why his campaign is taking tentative steps in the water with the Ayers and Rezko and Wright stuff but never full steps. They know they must take the campaign into the gutter, but every time they do they destroy this carefully cultivated "honorable" brand, which was never true in reality, but also the only way he could ever win in a down Republican year.

The further problem is that the tentative steps are ugly enough to provoke anger and distaste. And of course, these are ill-suited times for the Republican playbook of smear and fear. Heck, even the racists are undecided.

An Obama supporter, who canvassed for the candidate in the working-class, white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, sends over an account that, in various forms, I've heard a lot in recent weeks.

"What's crazy is this," he writes. "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are f***ing undecided. They would call him a n----r and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy."

I'm from Philly and I know Fishtown, and that rings very, very true.

The end result is that you get this lurching, haphazard, erratic campaign. Last night we saw the "compassionate conservative" asking for the government to buy out struggling mortgages (an idea that is far less than meets the eye - he would buy homes at full face value instead of what they're actually worth - a huge payoff to the banks). In the same breath, by the way, he calls for a spending freeze on all but the most vital programs. And by this morning, there are Ayers attacks and new ads calling Obama "secretive". There's no rhyme or reason to any of it because of the enormous self-generated bind, having to please the wingnuts and simultaneously cut them off, having to strike a populist tone and simultaneously please his corporate paymasters and lobbyist staff, having to play to win while every attack hurts his own image.

McCain is running a self-negating campaign.

Associates

The McCain campaign is headed directly into the gutter. Their Vice President is acquainting audiences with William Ayers, and their latest ad basically implicates Obama in murdering the troops:



(By the way, air-raiding and bombing civilians IS why Afghanistan is going so poorly.)

Even Reverend Wright is starting to get mentioned.

McCain's campaign desperately wants to turn the page on the economy, as if everyone's pockets will be magically filled with money over the next 30 days. The country remains in a serious crisis, and McCain is out there talking about random people like William Ayers.

Now THAT'S disrespectful.

But if you want to go down this road, fine. We can discuss Phil Gramm, for instance:

Gramm was always Wall Street's man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm's piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.

The CFMA also prohibited government regulation of the energy-trading market, which enabled Enron to nearly bankrupt the state of California before bankrupting itself.

The problem with this exercise, of course, is that Gramm's relationship to McCain is not comparable to the relationships that Ayers or Wright have with Obama. The idea that either Ayers or Wright would have any impact on the workings of an Obama administration is nonsensical. But Gramm and McCain do have an enduring political and economic alliance. McCain chaired Gramm's short-lived presidential campaign in 1996; Gramm is co-chair of McCain's current effort. McCain has not repudiated reports that Gramm is on the shortlist to become Treasury secretary if McCain is elected, even after Gramm labeled America "a nation of whiners."

And we can talk about Charles Keating.

The current economic crisis demands that we understand John McCain's attitudes about economic oversight and corporate influence in federal regulation. Nothing illustrates the danger of his approach more clearly than his central role in the savings and loan scandal of the late '80s and early '90s.

John McCain was accused of improperly aiding his political patron, Charles Keating, chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. The bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee launched investigations and formally reprimanded Senator McCain for his role in the scandal -- the first such Senator to receive a major party nomination for president.

At the heart of the scandal was Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which took advantage of deregulation in the 1980s to make risky investments with its depositors' money. McCain intervened on behalf of Charles Keating with federal regulators tasked with preventing banking fraud, and championed legislation to delay regulation of the savings and loan industry -- actions that allowed Keating to continue his fraud at an incredible cost to taxpayers.

When the savings and loan industry collapsed, Keating's failed company put taxpayers on the hook for $3.4 billion and more than 20,000 Americans lost their savings. John McCain was reprimanded by the bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee, but the ultimate cost of the crisis to American taxpayers reached more than $120 billion.

Unlike Ayers and Wright, Gramm and Keating have a DIRECT connection to the type of deregulation and free market fundamentalism that has led us to the current economic crisis. There is a through-line there that is undeniable, and you can easily see how McCain's Presidency would be guided by the same forces. Hell, Gramm could be the Treasury Secretary just given all those expansive powers.

You can see a long documentary on McCain and Keating at Keating Economics after noon ET today.

These are more serious times, but the Obama campaign can play the guilt by association game if that's where McCain wants to go.

Good Timing

Somebody knows how to pull off a news dump.

(CNN) — Barack Obama resigned Saturday from his Chicago church — where controversial sermons by his former pastor and other ministers had created repeated political headaches for the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination — his campaign confirmed.

The resignation comes days after the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a visiting Catholic priest, mocked Obama's Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, for crying in New Hampshire during the runup to the primary there.

I hope this starts to spell the demise of this messy marriage between religion and politics. So far we've had four pastors and one church renounced and rejected between the top two candidates. Maybe the rhetorical flourish of religion doesn't match with politics, and maybe we should keep rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and maybe the "your pastor is more radical than my pastor" stuff is extremely unhelpful and irrelevant at a time of soaring commodity prices, health care costs, multiple wars of occupation and a planet in peril. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea for Democrats to ape Republicans by wearing their religion on their sleeve. Maybe it's time to keep the two separate. Can we?

The Transitivity Of Blackness

New Poor Man comix.

We're Going To Win A House Race In Deep Red Louisiana Today

While the traditional media ping-pongs back and forth between Jeremiah Wright and Miley Cyrus, they're missing the fundamental political story of 2008: George Bush broke the Republican Party and nobody's going to be able to put it back together.

There is no way that a Democrat should have a chance in the 6th district of Louisiana. But Don Cazayoux has a nine-point lead over Woody Jenkins in the latest poll headed into today's special election. George Bush got 59% of the vote here in 2004. Today, we're going to flip this seat blue. Swing State Project will have the results tonight.

And that's not the only seat where we're seeing such a phenomenon. In MS-01, which is normally just as Republican, Travis Childers may be able to take that seat as well. The DCCC is putting a lot of money into that race, almost twice that of the Republicans, suggesting that it's very close.

There are no more Republican districts. George Bush is incredibly disliked and he's dragging down the whole party.

WASHINGTON - Sen. Barack Obama’s ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright could hurt his presidential hopes. So could his comment about “bitter” small-town America clinging to guns and religion. And Americans might question Sen. Hillary Clinton’s honesty and trustworthiness.

But according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, the bigger problem appears to be John McCain's ties to President Bush.

In the survey, 43 percent of registered voters say they have major concerns that McCain is too closely aligned with the current administration.

Got that? George Bush is the problem. I fully expect the traditional media to now ask questions every day whether McCain will disown or divorce Bush, how Bush and McCain are like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and how Bush's latest press appearance re-opened the McCain-Bush wound.

Oh wait, I don't expect that.

In fact, I don't expect them to notice that red Louisiana has turned against Republicans.

Wright, the Media, the Pentagon Pundits, and You

Well, my pal Digby has characterized my posts about the Rev. Wright situation as a defense of him. I don't know that I was defending him so much as I was attacking a system that forces tagential associates into the spotlight of the Presidential race, and then harps on them to the point that they become the only issue that matters. Current campaigns for President are played out on a metaphorical level, where the meaningless controversies that come up, about Rev. Wright, or Tuzla, or flag pins, or whatever, stand in for controversies and crises that a future President may face. And yet there is plenty enough material given by candidates - their record, their proposals, their vision for the country, etc. - that there's no need to construct this metaphorical cauldron. You can use tangible issues, things like the GI Bill or the gas tax holiday, to speak to character and how a candidate faces a challenge, etc. The problem is that the media is uncomfortable with policy. It pains me to even write that.

Of late, I've been talking a bit about the media's inability to report on policy in a judgmental manner. They know how to imply that Barack Obama has had bad friends, and Hillary Clinton tells lies, and John McCain -- well, they know how to doodle his initials inside a sparkly heart. What they don't know how to do, however, is say that one candidate's health plan, or housing plan, or economic agenda, is better than another candidate's. Which is why folks basically have to vote on grounds of flag pins and flip-flops -- they're not given much else in the way of analytical guidance [...]

When confronted by the fact that their coverage of politics is frequently trivial and annoying, many in the media argue that they only report that way because the voters make their decisions based on trivial and annoying issues. But there's no doubt that, with proper press coverage, the gas holiday could be one of those trivial and annoying issues that comes to stand-in for broader character failures or narratives or whatever. It's just that the media doesn't like to deal with policy.

And so, despite the very real challenges facing the nation, we end up talking about Rev. Wright. And here's where the traditional media gets incredibly selective. Because not every associate gets the kind of scrutiny that Wright does - only the ones who aren't Village members in good standing. Monsters who directed the overthrow of multiple governments, the bombing of entire nations, and the killing of innocents - those candidates who receive their endorsement don't have to answer for them. It's only those outside the cozy Washington establishment who are seen as "problems." And I agree with John Cole - Jeremiah Wright, or anyone for that matter, making COMMENTS is not the crucial information we need on which to base our decision for leader of the free world. I have to excerpt quite a bit because it's too good.

First and foremost, I guess I am no longer the delicate fainting flower that most other bloggers and media commenters are these days. I spent several years in the early days of this blog being all sorts of outraged about petty bullshit. I spent days calling Ted Rall an asshole (he still is, I think), days opining about what an asshole Michael Moore is, and so on. I got my panties all in a bunch about Ward Churchhill (also a dick), and stupid things Bill Maher may or may not have said, and so on.

And you know what? They may be assholes, or jerks, or whatever term you want to use, but they sure as hell didn’t run this economy into the ground. They aren’t responsible for turning a huge surplus into a several hundred billion dollar deficit. I have yet to read any memos from Barbra Streisand detailing how we should spy on American citizens.

And so it is with Jeremiah Wright. Is he a jerk? I don’t think there is any argument to be made that lately he hasn’t in fact been one big, giant, puckered asshole. His ego tour the past few days was all about him, but so what? I blame the media as much as I blame him. Is it an offensive notion that the government created aids? Absolutely, but I refuse to get all bent out of shape about it, because the government that tortures people and ran the Tuskegee experiment and wiretapped MLK for years opens itself up to crazy accusations like that.

So Jeremiah Wright has acted like a jackass the past few days, and he may have acted supremely selfishly by hurting Obama’s electoral chances. Regardless, he may be a flawed man, but that does not undo all the good he has done over the years. I don’t know of any bloggers with thirty years of service to the poor and the indigent. Get back to me when Chris Matthews feeds hungry people for three decades. And even with all his flaws, Jeremiah Wright did give us this quality bit of entertainment, and I have to admit to enjoying someone treat the media with the respect they deserve (which is to be mocked, have eyes rolled at them, and taunted as Wright did yesterday at the Press Club).

Maybe it is because I am totally and unrepentantly in the tank for Obama, but I just can’t get worked up over what his pastor said. Maybe it is because I am not religious, and I am used to religious people saying things that sound crazy. Or maybe I just refuse to spend any more time and energy getting worked up over and denouncing, distancing, and rejecting the wrong people- people who really don’t matter in the big scheme of things. If you have a memo from Jeremiah Wright to John Yoo showing how we should become a rogue nation, let me know. If you have pictures of Jeremiah Wright voting against the GI Bill, send it to me. If you have evidence of Jeremiah Wright training junior soldiers on the finer aspects of stacking and torturing naked Iraqi captives, pass them on.

Exactly.

Did Barack Obama do something he had to do, or else the media would never get up off his throat? Yes. Is it going to stop the bleeding? No. Absolutely not. The media controls this game, where they pretend to be shocked at some associate, demand repudiation, and then having received it, move the goalposts again and demand some extra repudiation. They decide when someone is noble and when someone is weak. They decide who's up and who's down. They decide who gets to appear on their airwaves and who gets blackballed based on their being criticized in a book.

So I'm not going to give them a break for playing their little "Thou must distance yourself" game. The media's deep corruption in the face of the Pentagon Pundit scandal has been completely exposed. The major news nets, some of whom continue to use these Pentagon pundits, have essentially put together a media blackout on this story, opting for Miley Cyrus coverage instead. When pressed and pressured, they acknowledge the story but defend their own analysts, lying all the way through it. This dodge is pathetic.

When the news media comes to terms with that, when they actually start understanding the consequences of their own reporting, then I'll apologize for "defending" Reverend Wright. Until then, forget it.

I Hate Our Presidential Media Culture

Well, Obama had to come out and blast his former pastor today, and he did it. It's kind of sad that it's come to this, where guilt by association and media pressure is so enormous that pounds and pounds of flesh have to be extracted.

Meanwhile, a stupid and unnecessary war goes on, and millions of people will probably lose their homes, and tens of millions around the world will go to bed tonight hungry, and we have a President who directs the Army Corps of Engineers to use wet newspapers to plug holes in the New Orleans floodwall, which is about as fitting a metaphor as there can be to how this Administration and the conservative movement over the last 30 years has insufficiently plugged holes in the gaps and challenges we face.

I don't feel any need to defend or denounce a guy like Rev. Wright. He has his own beliefs, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't. But he's a blip on the radar screen compared to what we need to do in America. Whether it's Rev. Wright or Ward Churchill or Some Guy With A Sign Somewhere, I'm not such a wilting flower that I think comments made by marginal people represents any grave threat to America or ought to merit any kind of response. I believe the First Amendment is strong enough to absorb any opinion, even dumb ones, even ones that (gasp!) criticize the country. It sickens me that the media is so pushed by conservative tropes that they insist these meaningless issues matter, and that they really believe comments - comments! - are more important than domestic or foreign policy.

Well, that's why we're in this ditch right now. And the media actually has to be held accountable for that.

Obama engaged in good politics today, but the system is what depresses me.

UPDATE: David Neiwert speaks for me.

The War On Wright

Well, the freakout over Rev. Wright today kind of caught me by surprise. Forgetting the fact that the Wright controversy did very little to Obama's chances in Pennsylvania, forgetting Obama's speech on race in America, forgetting that the revelation in Wright's weekend remarks was that the media misinterpreted practically everything he said, forgetting just about everything and taking the position that any appearance of the former Trinity Church pastor is simply incedniary regardless of content, the cable news was pretty much an uninterrupted parade of concern trolls warning that this independent individual's public appearances would be like death to Obama's presidential campaign. The Bill Moyers interview did not really have such an impact, but today's speech was at the National Press Club in Washington so it became real for the Village. He came to the center of THEIR universe, so of course the whole country was paying attention. Also, Wright went after the media, which offended them. So they were all too happy to give him hours of coverage today, and strictly on the terms of how any utterance of his would hurt Obama, not bothering to engage with the material in any way. The Clinton campaign is trying to move on because they don't have to do anything, as the media is carrying the ball for them, and also even they understand that propagating these stereotypes won't help any Democrats, including her, in the future.

Hardball was of particular note today. Tweety was breathing fire, jumping on these appearances, talking about how damaging they were without even really referring to them, asserting bluntly that Wright is now "the lead surrogate for the Obama campaign." He even brought on black minister Rev. Eugene Rivers, without of course mentioning that he's been working with George Bush for the past two terms and wants to be the new voice of the African-American community of faith (he got particularly incensed when Wright deemed the attack on him as "an attack on the black church" - that's of course his role to speak for all black people of faith).

After about 45 minutes of this, Ryan Lizza finally spoke up with a point that I've seen Ezra Klein make (can't find the link right now):

LIZZA: There should be a principle in these cases in this campaign. There is no guilt by association. This guy has one set of views, Obama has another set of views. If the views match up, then it's fair game. But the guy's been in politics since the mid-90s. He has a record in the State Senate in Illinois. He has a record in the US Senate. He's laid out an agenda as a presidential candidate. Where do his views match up with Jeremiah Wright's? And why as journalists are we confusing the two? It seems to me totally unfair that this guy is getting smeared with the views of someone just because he's his former pastor.

This whole time there's this shit-eating grin on Tweety's face, as if to say, "Oh, you dear boy." Tweety of course thinks Lizza is being naive, but he's making the very simple point that journalists shouldn't keep pretending Obama and Wright are somehow the same person given that they've charted vastly different visions and worldviews.

Then Tweety goes on to do just that, opening with one of his typically unintentionally hilarious moments:

MATTHEWS: Let me give you the proper way of putting it in literary terms. It's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde... who was the bad guy, Dr. Jekyll was the good guy, Mr. Hyde was the bad guy, right?

LIZZA: I'll trust you on that...

MATTHEWS: I think so.

Mr. Literary Allusion, Tweety is. Not that he knows anything ABOUT Jekyll and Hyde other than some snippet he saw on late-night cable after coming in from yet another cocktail party, but he's so urbane, no?

MATTHEWS: So every time you have a problem with Barack, because you don't really know him and he seems a little foreign to you, you think of him as both these guys. They're different faces of the same guy. Jeremiah Wright to a lot of people is Barack Obama. They've become the same Chicago character running for President. One is the good doctor, the other is the monster that shows up at night.

LIZZA: Look, I think there's a danger of that happening. But as journalists I think there's a responsibility to make it clear...

MATTHEWS: OK, carve it apart, separate the two. Try.

LIZZA: This guy went to a church. This guy is the pastor of that church. Now one of those guys is running for President and has laid out a vision that is radically different than anything his left-wing pastor had to say. Yes, it tells you something about who he is, it tells you something about the community where he came from. But it doesn't tell you anything, and nobody should confuse one with--

MATTHEWS: Do you think it might be hurting a good man like Mitt Romney and his family, and good members of the LDS Church, that they're being embarrassed by this breakaway group down in Texas in the last couple weeks? You don't think that story hurts Mitt Romney's chances of being on the ticket? Yes it does. So I'm saying, these associations, fair or unfair, birds of a feather, it's the way people think.

My favorite passage. "Fair or unfair." In other words, I know I'm talking bullshit, but this is my impression of what the unwashed masses think, so, you know, I'm going with it.

Jill Zuckman chimed in, calling Lizza "a little high-minded," Tweety went on to call "GOD DAMN AMERICA" one of the greatest quotes in history, and it went on from there. Lizza, of course, kept his Village standing by calling Wright a "doctrinaire left-winger." And then Matthews launched into his defense of his profession for continuing to harp on meaningless trivialities - it's apparently the Democrats' fault.

MATTHEWS: For years the Democratic politicians have been lambasting Republicans for hanging around with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. And now they're going after Pastor Hagee. This is the way politics is played, you get the guy's associates.

The difference, of course, is right inside Lizza's original comment - Falwell and Robertson's policy prescriptions did indeed "match up" with the conservative Republicans who associated with them, whereas in the case of Obama, he's charted his own policy course. There's also the fact that Falwell/Robertson associations never got more than a half-hour's worth of coverage on something like Hardball at all, and never without a spokesman rebutting anything negative (remember, Falwell guest-HOSTED Crossfire back in the day). Wright is some "character from Chicago" (there's an obvious racial component there) but Falwell and Robertson were media members in good standing.

AND, Lizza was of course talking about media responsibility, which is of course non-existent in this primary.

Matthews closed the discussion with this line:

Matthews: This is Hardball, we talk politics, Ryan.

Actually, I'd LIKE a show that talked politics. You talk nonsense and gossip about which people are mean to you and your friends. You decide who helps and hurts candidates and use that initial impression to color every future activity. You actually don't know a thing - or care - about politics. Or the people who would benefit from political discussion.

Rev. Wright is in an unwinnable situation, but I've noted throughout the year that anyone who gets that far under the skin of the traditional media is probably just fine.

Wright on Right (and Wrong)

I actually did catch most of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's interview with Bill Moyers over the weekend, and I found him to be articulate, with a deep knowledge of history and Scripture, whose message is really not as it is has been caricatured in the media (of course). Moyers took the time to give full context to the snippets of his sermons we were treated to for weeks on end, and it revealed some interesting results. For example, that "America's chickens are coming home to roost" line was not Wright's, but him quoting some "ambassador" on Fox News a few days after the 9-11 attacks. He was describing someone else's viewpoint, and it was ascribed to him, as if that were his immediate reaction to the fall of the Twin Towers. Wright also has as many harsh words to say about African-American men who fail to live up to their responsibilities as he does for selected actions of the government. He understands that when you love someone, you want them to do the right thing, and when they don't you express your disappointment or frustration to nudge them in the right direction. It's as true with a person as it is with a country, and that value of dissent is one value on which this country was built. So yes, Mr. Stephanopoulos, I think Rev. Wright loves this country as much as I do. And I think we both love it more than you.

Here is a very difficult but enlightening concept discussed on the program:

BILL MOYERS: Hermeneutic?

REVEREND WRIGHT: Hermeneutic is an interpretation, it's the window from which you're looking is your hermeneutic. And when you don't realize that I've been framed- this whole thing has been framed through this window, there's another world out here that I'm not looking at or taking into account, it gives you a perspective that-- that is-- that is informed by and limited by your hermeneutic. Dr. James Cone put it this way. The God of the people who riding on the decks of the slave ship is not the God of the people who are riding underneath the decks as slaves in chains. If the God you're praying to, "Bless our slavery" is not the God to whom these people are praying, saying, "God, get us out of slavery." And it's not like Notre Dame playing Michigan. You're saying flip a coin; hope God blesses the winning team, no. That the perception of God who allows slavery, who allows rape, who allows misogyny, who allows sodomy, who allows murder of a people, lynching, that's not the God of the people being lynched and sodomized and raped, and carried away into a foreign country. Same thing you find in Psalm 137. That those people who are carried away into slavery have a very different concept of what it means to be the people of God than the ones who carried them away.

BILL MOYERS: And they say, "How can we sing the song of the Lord of a foreign land?"

REVEREND WRIGHT: Correct.

BILL MOYERS: That chapter ends up with some very brutal words.

REVEREND WRIGHT: It does. And--

BILL MOYERS: You used them in one of your sermons--

REVEREND WRIGHT: Yes, I did. I was trying to show how people- how the anger- and we felt anger. I felt anger. I felt hurt. I felt pain. In fact, September 11th, I was in Newark. September 11th, I was trapped in Newark 'cause when they shut down the air system I couldn't get back to Chicago. September 11th, I looked out the window and saw the second plane hit from my hotel window. Alright, I had members who lost loved ones both at the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center. So, I know the pain. And I had to preach to them Sunday. I had to preach. They came to church wanting to know where is God in this. And so, I had to show them using that Psalm 137, how the people who were carried away into slavery were very angry, very bitter, moved and in their anger from wanting revenge against the armies that had carried them away to slavery, to the babies. That Psalm ends up sayin' "Let's kill the baby-let's bash their heads against the stone." So, now you move from revolt and revulsion as to what has happened to you, to you want revenge. You move from anger with the military to taking it out on the innocents. You wanna kill babies. That's what's going on in Psalm 137. And that's exactly where we are. We want revenge. They wanted revenge. God doesn't wanna leave you there, however. God wants redemption. God wants wholeness. And that's the context, the biblical context I used to try to get people sitting again, in that sanctuary on that Sunday following 9/11, who wanted to know where is God in this? What is God saying? What is God saying? Because I want revenge.

REVEREND WRIGHT: The people of faith have moved from the hatred of armed enemies, these soldiers who captured the king, those soldiers who slaughtered his son and put his eyes out, the soldiers who sacked the city, burned the towns, burned the temples, burned the towers, and moved from the hatred for armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents, the babies, the babies . "Blessed are they who dash your baby's brains against a rock." And that my beloved is a dangerous place to be. Yet, that is where the people of faith are in 551 BC and that is where far too many people of faith are in 2001 AD. We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents. We want revenge. We want paybacks and we don't care who gets hurt in the process.

This of course is why a Fox News anchor said on Sunday "I fell asleep midway through, Moyers blew it!" As Pastor Dan says, this is a stunning level of discourse for the soundbite culture to grasp, and one that's easy to rip from context. He's basically saying that we must pause at responding to a cycle of violence with more violence and try to determine the moral course, the one that offers redemption and wholeness, while acknowledging our imperfections and rushes of emotion. If you want Rev. Wright to stand in for Barack Obama, I would say this speaks extremely WELL of him. Pastor Dan gets this right:

One of the best things to happen to the media in the past twenty-five years was the emergence of conservative advocates who condensed the Christian faith to two simple talking points: abortion and homosexuality. It gave them a nice handle on the Christian story: churches comforted their flocks and sang nice songs on Christmas and Easter, and to the extent that they were political, they cared about these two issues and only these two issues. Everybody else was a dangerous radical.

It's the same story we keep hearing about any number of issues today. The corporate media has drawn the boundaries for acceptable discourse on religion with a decidedly conservative tilt. You can be against abortion and homosexuality, or you can be quiet about your political applications of your faith. Otherwise, you're part of the "fringe," and therefore suspect.

Wright threatens that consensus. He knows that the Bible has plenty to say about today's headlines, and he's not afraid to articulate it. As if that weren't bad enough, he's had the bad taste to teach the next president of the United States that Christianity might be relevant.

I'm not a Christian but I accept and embrace any religion that has a moral obligation to connect the faith to the issues of the day, to man's inhumanity to man, to the constant struggle for survival, to hope and justice and human rights. The Dobsons of the world use religion as a spear; Wright uses it as a clarion call. It's easily misunderstood.

Wright continued his public appearances by speaking at the Detroit NAACP and this morning at the National Press Club on the "invisibility" of black church traditions in mainstream American life. He could have been talking about the moral and spiritual center of religion.

People are going to continue to attack Obama on this issue, even, I see today, John McCain, who used some favorable interpretation of an Obama comment to get his licks in.

But McCain noted that Obama said on Sunday on Fox News that Wright was an issue, seemingly opening a door for McCain to connect the Democrat to his former pastor.

"I saw yesterday some additional comments that have been revealed by Pastor Wright, one of them comparing the United States Marine Corps with Roman Legionnaires who were responsible for the death of our Savior, I mean being involved in that. It's beyond belief..." McCain said.

"I can understand why Americans, when viewing these kinds of comments, are angry and upset," McCain said.

Jeremiah Wright was a Marine. His comment had nothing to do with the crucifixion and everything to do with America's role as a world superpower.

These are intentional misundertandings and discolorations. I'd like to believe that there is a simple power in Wright's point of view that can transcend his first impression created by the media but we all know that's not true. And yes this will be an issue until November. However, having heard his pastor I believe Obama has more wisdom and sense of justice than I previously thought possible in a Presidential candidate. In other words I found it to be a dog whistle for me.

UPDATE: I'm assuming that Atrios is referring to Wright:

There's this guy on my teevee talking about how our government supported Apartheid and the peasant-killing Contras using money gained by selling arms to Iran. Oh and 4000+ US troops died in Iraq over a lie.

What can be said about Wright is that he has a memory and he doesn't repaint our national picture by touching up the edges. His portrait is real and honest and informs the future. That's much too gray and shaded for the black-and-white robotic Republicans.

Uncomfortable Words vs. Stress Positions and Waterboarding... Hmm...

So Fourthbranch Cheney went there:

"I thought the controversy over Rev. Wright was remarkable," Cheney said. “I thought some of the things he said were absolutely appalling. And, you know, I haven't gotten into the business of trying to judge how Sen. Obama dealt with it, or didn't deal with it, but I really, I think -- like most Americans -- I was stunned at what the Reverend was preaching in his church and then putting up on his website.’"

Really, some of the things Wright said were appalling?

Hm.

OK. Can we talk about some of the thing you did, then?

Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned [...]

Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture.

"If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you'd see a correlation," the former intelligence official said. Those who attended the dozens of meetings agreed that "there'd need to be a legal opinion on the legality of these tactics" before using them on al-Qaida detainees, the former official said [...]

The former intelligence official described Cheney and the top national security officials as deeply immersed in developing the CIA's interrogation program during months of discussions over which methods should be used and when.

At times, CIA officers would demonstrate some of the tactics, or at least detail how they worked, to make sure the small group of "principals" fully understood what the al-Qaida detainees would undergo. The principals eventually authorized physical abuse such as slaps and pushes, sleep deprivation, or waterboarding. This technique involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning.

I don't think Jeremiah Wright has cornered the market on things that should make us APPALLED. In fact, I think Fourthbranch has far more real estate on that street.

By the way, the AP article makes it seem like Bush was blissfully ignorant of the whole "signing off on torture inside the White House" thing, except there are actual documents signed by Bush authorizing the practices. Here's a PDF of one of them. Not one of them is insulated from this horror.

Everything Will Be OK As Long As We Win

The news that Clinton went ballistic during a closed-door meeting with superdelegates at the CDP Convention, so much so that Art Torres had to apologize to one of them, and then walked onto the stage and told everyone to "chill out" and that the extended primary won't cause a rift in the party is pretty revealing. I believe Clinton DOESN'T think there will be a rift in the party - as long as Hillary is the nominee. And that internal logic must seem pretty iron-clad to him.

This is pretty much the same with Harold Ickes, who expressed to TPM yesterday that the party is "sturdier" than the "hand-wringers in Washington" think, and then went on to do some championship-level handwringing:

"Look what the Republicans did to a genuine war hero," Ickes said, in a reference to John Kerry.

"Super delegates have to take into account the strengths and weakness of both candidates and decide who would make the strongest candidate against what will undoubtedly be ferocious Republican attacks," Ickes continued. "I've had super delegates tell me that the Wright issue is a real issue for them."

In a reference to Wright's controversial views, Ickes continued: "Nobody thinks that Barack Obama harbors those thoughts. But that's not the issue. The issue is what Republicans [will do with them]...I think they're going to give him a very tough time."

I'm EXTREMELY tired of these two characteristics of Clinton-era Democratic politics: the Clintons putting themselves ahead of the party, and the constant defensive crouch. I actually heard a very similar idea in talking to a superdelegate who's committed for Clinton at the CDP. Rather than worrying about what the Republicans are going to do, how about confidently expressing what the Democrats are going to do in the general election? I suspect that the Clinton camp is capitalizing on a natural fear from Democratic leaders. But it's so depressing.

Republicans are not electoral wizards. Let me say that again. Republicans are not electoral wizards. Their last unequivocal electoral victory was 14 years ago. In 2006 Democrats took Congress by a bigger margin than the Republican Revolution ever had. In 2004 the spread was the lowest for an incumbent since Woodrow Wilson. 2002 was right after 9/11 and it was essentially a tie. We won in 2000 in Congress and the Presidency. We gained seats in 1998. We won in 1996 without much trouble.

To the extent that Democrats have blown elections, it's because they've been trash-talked into submission by internal fears of how Republicans will portray them. It's pointless and distracts from the offensive, politics of contrast strategy that is a proven winner for Democrats. I'm not worried that we're stepping out on a limb and choosing between a black man and a woman, either. As Yglesias eventually says, the fundamentals for Democrats are pretty strong so it's as good a time as any to break down barriers. I wanted Edwards but that wasn't for electability reasons but reasons of policy.

Republicans are in deep trouble and they know it. What can derail this is a weak, cautious, "what're they going to say about us?" approach that will reinforce the traditional message that Republicans use of Democrats as weak and cautious. When we are forceful and stand in contrast, we win. That's the bottom line.

Knock It Off

I'm on the record as saying that I have no problem with this Democratic primary trudging on until May or even June. But I'm not a superdelegate. And this seems to me like they'll shut it down if the Clintons continue with this nonsense.

At a time when Sen. Hillary Clinton is increasingly relying on superdelegates to vault her to the Democratic Party's nomination, a handful of undecided and pledged superdelegates are coming forward to say her campaign's tactics in recent weeks are doing more harm than good.

The Democratic Party insiders say they believe Clinton's direct attacks against Sen. Barack Obama in recent days are hurting the party and its chances in November, and also say it is showing a calculated, desperate-to-win side of Clinton that they dislike.

"In looking at the manner in which the candidates are campaigning, I think it would be best they focused their attention on the presumptive nominee and showed our party which one is better in campaigning against McCain," said Garry Shay, a California superdelegate, who announced his support for Clinton [...]

"I don't think anybody's saying 'step aside,' but 'stop with the garbage' is what people want to say," the delegate said. "Just chill a little bit."

As activists committed to the party, they said, they have been impressed by Obama's ability to bring new Democrats into the fold, and they worry that Clinton is threatening that.

"We like the fact that there is a candidate that has won so many states overwhelmingly," the delegate said. "We're feeling her advisors are leading her in a path that diminishes her as well as him." [...]

The final straw, though, were Clinton's comments Tuesday, when she said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright "would not have been my pastor." Several superdelegates saw it as a direct, personal attack on Obama.

"I think it's very dangerous for any candidate to constantly thrum on what they perceive as sensational criticisms of their opponent," said Debra Kozikowski, an uncommitted superdelegate from Massachusetts. "I would be more likely to respond positively to discussions of issues that effect Americans versus what might be perceived as character flaws." [...]

The delegates said there is little the party or its leaders can do to prevent the current back and forth. But some said they were increasingly in touch with Clinton campaign officials to say their support is in jeopardy.

"Uncommitted delegates can come out and say, 'If you don't stop this now, we won't vote for you,'" one uncommitted superdelegate said.

This is pretty much where I'm at. The fact of remaining in the race is not a problem at all. It's the style of campaigning, the "Tonya Harding strategy," that's the problem.

Kneecapping

I think Steve Benen has this right. Hillary Clinton's "Tuzla-gate," exaggerating her daring dive into Bosnia under sniper fire, is really hurting her campaign, her electability argument to the superdelegates, and her national security credentials. This is especially true because the exaggeration is not isolated; she's said the same lie on multiple occasions. So she had to change the conversation. And so here's how she changed it.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor made.
"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

Obama's lead in national polls has slipped since clips of the retired Rev. Jeremiah Wright began being played on national news programs. The uproar prompted Obama to give a wide-ranging speech on race in America a week ago. The Clinton campaign has refrained from getting involved in the controversy, but Clinton herself, responding to a question, denounced what she said was "hate speech."

"You know, I spoke out against Don Imus (who was fired from his radio and television shows after making racially insensitive remarks), saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that," Clinton said. "I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."

This is just low and dirty. As Benen says, for two weeks, Clinton stayed out of the Rev. Wright controversy. She watched Obama hit a home run with his speech on race relations, and she watched him maintain his prominence in the polls in North Carolina and catch up in Pennsylvania. The Bosnia incident has created a major honesty gap. So it was time to push the Wright story back into the news. That's really disgusting. And she continued this outside the editorial board in Pittsburgh:



Mike friggin' Huckabee had enough sense to put the Wright issue in context. Hillary's knee-jerk response is to fall back on reactionary ideas and attacks to sustain herself and her candidacy. This was most emblematic in her promotion of Alan GREENSPAN, of all people, to take part in a "foreclosure emergency group," because "he has a calming influence still to this day on Wall Street -- don't ask me why because I never understand what he's saying -- but nevertheless people respond to that Delphic oracle approach." The default is to fall back on these narrow elites, on reactionary ideas and on right-wing attacks, pursuing as one DNC official called it the Tonya Harding option.

I'm so over this and I think that the Democratic Party is over this.

Even Chris Wallace Gets The Blues

This is five of the best minutes of Fox News that I've ever seen. The friendly friends at Fox and Friends went on for two hours about a contextless off-the-cuff remark from Barack Obama, and Chris Wallace, apparently holding out for Obama to appear on his Sunday show, finally got fed up. Go watch the video, but here's some excerpts:

Hey listen, I love you guys but I want to take you to task if I may, respectfully, for a moment. I have been watching the show since 6:00 this morning when I got up, and it seems to me that two hours of Obama bashing on this typical white person remark is somewhat excessive and frankly I think you’re somewhat distorting what Obama had to say [...]

Far be it for me to be a spokesman for the Obama campaign, and I will tell you that they would laugh at that characterization, but you know, the fact is that after giving a speech on race earlier this week, on Tuesday, he gave a major speech on Iraq on Wednesday and a major speech on the economy yesterday. And so, I think they would say that in terms of deflecting attention away from the issues people really want to hear about, maybe it’s the media doing it, not Barack Obama.

It's like Plato's allegory of the cave, and Wallace broke his chains and stopped looking at the shadows and saw the truth. Crazy.

I think the dumber heads will prevail here, and the propagandists will continue to propagandize. But those who want the context of Rev. Wright's remarks can seek it out, which is at least new in the modern age. And as the Richardson endorsement suggests, the speech on race may have strengthened Obama's position, and those who disqualified him on the basis of the Wright flap were probably just looking for a reason not to vote for a black man anyway.

Acceptable v. Unacceptable

When you read this story, you have to play back in your mind the vision of Brian Ross getting the release of Hillary Clinton's personal First Lady schedule, flipping through his heavily dog-eared copy of the Starr Report, and studiously matching up dates. All the while approving the clip art of the semen-stained dress and Lewinsky, making sure it all fit in the frame, etc.

You could bust a guy for sexual deviancy just for the work it took to produce this swill.

Hillary Was in White House on "Stained Blue Dress" Day

Schedules Reviewed by ABC Show Hillary May Have Been in the White House When the Fateful Act Was Committed

Hillary Clinton spent the night in the White House on the day her husband had oral sex with Monica Lewinsky, and may have actually been in the White House when it happened, according to records of her schedule released today by the National Archives....

The public schedule for Sen. Clinton on Feb. 28, 1997, the day on which Lewinsky's infamous blue dress would become stained by the president, shows the first lady spent the morning and the night in the White House....

This is somehow a perfectly acceptable news item, possibly even acceptable enough for a broadcast story too. And yet coffins of American bodies coming home from an unnecessary war based on deception is too "offensive" for tender eyes.

I'll give you another example. Bill Maher said this about McCain on Hardball today:

you know, we are one terrorist attack away from john mccain i'm sure rising in the polls by ten points. because people think, oh, yeah, he is tougher. he is not tougher about the war. he's dumber about the war. he's dumb about the war because he thinks by keeping troops in the heart of the muslim world that's going to help the war on terror. that's exactly what started the war on terror. that's why bin laden was so angry at the u.s. because we had tloops in saudi arabia. we pulled them out after 9/11, by the way. of course we go right back in and plant them in the heart of the muslim world and build pizza huts. that is why young muslim men want to come here and blow themselves up and kill us. it is not about what happens in iraq. we need to get out of iraq not build bases there.

This is very true. But what of course is so ridiculous is that this is one of the quotes that, when broadly defined, got Rev. Wright in trouble. When it comes down to it, there's not much daylight between "We caused 9/11" and "bin Laden was angry at us about having bases in Saudi Arabia." I think Maher's analysis is correct, but it shouldn't be lost that he's allowed to say it.

The larger point about all this is how conservatives and in particular the media define acceptable discourse, and what will provoke outrage, or barely a twitter. When Janet Jackson shows a covered nipple, the world comes to an end. I saw about 20 minutes of Eliot Spitzer's prostitute's Girls Gone Wild video, played on an endless loop in the middle of the day today, and then we have this really putrid Brian Ross "investigative news article" literally peeping into someone else's bedroom. When Christian conservatives rewrite the words to "God Bless America" and sing it in front of Republican Presidential candidates, nobody in the media considers that to be a "problem" for the GOP because white religious nuts are SUPPOSED to be crazy, and therefore accepted. Black religious figures, on the other hand, when they step outside the bounds as defined in the media by, I don't know, "Sister Act," represent a threat to the Republic.



Now, Janet Folger, who put together that Values Voter Presidential Debate, where "Why should God Bless America" was sung from the stage, has endorsed John McCain. It's as easy to make the guilt-by-association argument with respect to him as it has been to Obama or Clinton's litany of associates. But nobody does.

This is about defining the discourse. And if it hurts Democrats, or anyone who seeks to challenge the status quo, for the most part the videotape rolls. If not it gets locked up. Funny how that works.

The Obama/Race Speech Aftermath

The reaction to Sen. Obama's speech on race has been generally very positive, and apparently the YouTube has been watched 1.25 million times. While I think in the 24-hour news era we tend to overemphasize the historical impact of these speeches (for example, Bill Clinton's speech on the day of the Million Man March has a lot of parallels and candid moments, and yet that speech has been lost to history, so let's hold up on the "instant classic" notion), clearly something is happening. The problem for Obama is that he's lost a significant amount of ground over the last week nationally in the Rev. Wright flap. I agree that I don't really know why I know who any politician's pastor is, and if it were a truism that one was politically damaged by any possible statement of whoever they are close to, nobody could ever run for public office. In a way that was one point of Obama's speech. But clearly he's been hurt, and any positives from the speech will just bring us back to pre-Wright levels. Which isn't horrible for Obama - pre-Wright he was doing pretty good - but it's not like the Presidency is his now after this speech.

Today Obama pivoted to Iraq, with a speech in North Carolina and a policy document (PDF) that highlights returning to prominence the war in Afghanistan, fighting Al Qaeda, and drying up support for terror through economic, education, diplomatic, and personal outreach initiatives. Obama also sets "the goal of a nuclear-free world," prioritizes securing loose nukes, mandates a clean energy future that will end resource wars for oil, and more. It's a really good document, and in some ways it parallels the Responsible Plan, although it neglects the role of elite media and executive power in representing the broken institutions that allowed us to get into war. The speech is generally pretty good as well.

In a perfect world, everyone would be YouTubing and passing around the Iraq speech, and debating the merits of the policy. But that's not where we are, and instead there's a lot of wonder as to whether or not the American people are intelligent enough to grasp that racial divides resist Americans of like backgrounds to come together and face common problems. I'll say this - I didn't expect such wisdom from Mike Huckabee:

HUCKABEE: [Obama] made the point, and I think it's a valid one, that you can't hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. You just can't. Whether it's me, whether it's Obama...anybody else. But he did distance himself from the very vitriolic statements.

Now, the second story. It's interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what Louis Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Reverend Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you'd say "Well, I didn't mean to say it quite like that."

JOE SCARBOROUGH: But, but, you never came close to saying five days after September 11th, that America deserved what it got. Or that the American government invented AIDS...

HUCKABEE: Not defending his statements.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Oh, I know you're not. I know you're not. I'm just wondering though, for a lot of people...Would you not guess that there are a lot of Independent voters in Arkansas that vote for Democrats sometimes, and vote for Republicans sometimes, that are sitting here wondering how Barack Obama's spiritual mentor would call the United States the USKKK?

HUCKABEE: I mean, those were outrageous statements, and nobody can defend the content of them.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: But what's the impact on voters in Arkansas? Swing voters.

HUCKABEE: I don't think we know. If this were October, I think it would have a dramatic impact. But it's not October. It's March. And I don't believe that by the time we get to October, this is gonna be the defining issue of the campaign, and the reason that people vote.

And one other thing I think we've gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say "That's a terrible statement!"...I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack -- and I'm gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who's gonna say something like this, but I'm just tellin' you -- we've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told "you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus..." And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Other than the fact that Falwell's statement was right out in the open, and because fundamentalist Christians are supposed to be intolerant and are therefore dismissed, there are different standards for black and white preachers, Huckabee is spot-on. And I'm willing to give the American people just a little bit more credit than the pessimists.

Race And The White House

I want to discuss Barack Obama's speech on race and politics, but first I want to say that I have a problem with these expected blog posts on expected speeches that the dynamics of 21st-century campaigns demand. This election has turned into some kind of bizarre series of rituals, like an season of Greek theater where everybody knows the plot and the audience is left to judge the work on the presentation. The parade of comment, counter-comment, conference call about comment, distancing from comment, and major speech incorporating remarks about comment is the real distraction in this campaign, diverting from a looming economic recession (a recession at BEST) and a tragic stalemate in Iraq. Rarely does anything good for the country come out of this exchange.

Furthermore, I'm sick and tired of this "action figure" conservatism where a bunch of stay-at-home bloggers decide for others what they should do in particular situations. "If I were Obama, I would have stood up during the sermon and fired a poison dart at Rev. Wright and talked about the need to cut the capital gains tax!" The imagined fantasies of these clowns resemble a Chuck Norris movie, when the realities involve far more Cheetos and nasal spray.

That out of the way, this speech by Obama, and I might as well embed the YouTube...



...does have value and merit, and actually stands alone as a beginning point, not an end to a controversy.

In answering the question "why didn't you leave the church, Sen. Obama?" he offers a different question. "Why are you looking at one speech and one church and one moment when the issue, what we've been facing for 230 years, is race in America?" The distraction that I mentioned at the top is what takes these questions about race off into cul-de-sacs, detours, and blind alleys. This speech is actually the first true conversation about race in America in this campaign. It's one that makes people uncomfortable and uneasy and hedging. I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood; have seen up-close bias in particularly the older generations of my family; have lived in Chicago, where you can be in the Loop and see all the African-Americans on one side of the subway headed south and all the white people headed north; and have engaged with the issue of race from at best a detached viewpoint. What I do believe, and what Sen. Obama remarked upon today, is this issue of distraction, which feeds biases on all sides and disables us from working together to come to terms with race and solve the problems people of all races share. I thought this was an important moment. Obama talks about white resentment and anger, which play on racial fears, and how these have been skillfully used to "forge the Reagan coalition," which is a pretty big admission for a political candidate.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years [...] But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union [...]

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That's a progressive critique of the class-based economy, wrapped in a larger critique of these ritualized resentments that keep everyone apart. I don't know or really care if it will work electorally; but it was vital that it is said on a big stage out loud. The "bring us together instead of drive us apart" thematic of the Obama campaign has been viewed by some as a kind of high Broderism, as a false sense that through bipartisanship people with different ideologies and beliefs can work in harmony and peace. That misunderstands things a bit, in my view. Obama is talking about bringing together those Americans who already share the same beliefs but have had wedges driven between them. There's nothing particularly novel about this concept but we've been so rightly skeptical of messages of unity that I think it's gotten muddled.

Conservatives are already firing up the wedges again in reaction to this speech. I heard Rush say that Obama has "now become a racial candidate," I guess because he said the word race. Their true nature is going to be coming out in this reaction; the fear, the anger, the desperation, the racism. Obama's speech is large and has a lot of nuance that won't play in soundbites. I don't really care to get into the politics of it, but I think we'll see in the ultimate result whether we're a nation that still pays attention to these petty concerns and wedges, or whether we can judge on the content of character.