John Edwards and the Case of the Implied Covenant

Alternate title: I Hate It When Mickey Kaus Can Say “I Told You So.”

When we first met John Edwards, he was already a self-made man, if a rather one-dimensional one. He was a brilliantly successful lawyer with a lovely family but no political or civic commitments to speak of. (Prior to the 1990s it’s not clear that Edwards voted in public elections, that’s how little engaged he was.)

Then his oldest son died in an auto accident, and that was supposed to be the conversion experience, the awakening to a broader horizon, a higher plane. Also a forging experience, a trial by fire: if a man can endure having to identify his son’s body at the morgue, he can endure anything. So John would make his mark in national politics. It was his mission, to honor Wade’s memory and strike a blow against the chaos and oblivion that Wade’s death represented.

He made it to the U.S. Senate in 1998, his first time out, hardly breaking a sweat except for injecting a few millions from his own fortune into the campaign. Truth be told, Lauch Faircloth was a lousy opponent. Faircloth would never have beaten Terry Sanford in ’92 except for Sanford’s poor health and (as Democratic pols noted closely) Sanford’s vote against the first Gulf War.

John fit the Bill Clinton profile rather well: charm and a Southern drawl combined with a progressive sensibility and obvious campaigning skills, the gifts of oratory and empathy, of “feeling their pain.” He lacked Clinton’s lifelong fervor for politics, but his talent rivaled Clinton’s; observers spoke of Edwards in similarly glowing terms. Plus he seemed to correct some of Clinton’s flaws. He certainly had the picture-perfect family life and marriage, with Elizabeth in some ways an improved version of Hillary: equally smart and less abrasive. Later, in his post-2004 makeover, Edwards would make economic populism and poverty reduction his hallmarks. He would also recant his 2002 vote to authorize Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Each of these moves seemed to respond to the most often-heard gripes from the left about the record of Bill Clinton and by this time Hillary Clinton as well.

Being a Senator was a drag for John. No slight intended—it seems to be a confining place for many talented and restless pols, especially liberals. So in the 2004 cycle he tested the presidential waters, made a decent showing, wound up as Kerry’s running mate. John got mixed reviews for his work as the VP nominee, but a bright spot (to me at least) was the performance of Elizabeth: bright, telegenic, but always a support and complement to John, never stealing the spotlight in a harmful way. (A definite contrast from Teresa Heinz Kerry.)

The Democratic ticket lost, and in the meantime Edwards had relinquished his Senate seat. So there he was in early 2005, gainfully unemployed as a Presidential Candidate in Waiting. In the midst of this pirouette came the initial diagnosis of Elizabeth Edwards’s cancer. John withdrew from public life in view of Elizabeth’s health crisis, but the assumption (or hope) was that the hiatus was temporary. Indeed, within about a year John was back in the news, and Elizabeth’s cancer had been integrated into his political bio. He was newly concerned about health care reform, newly attuned to the insecurities of American families. His second presidential bid was soon green-lighted.

In the 2008 cycle, Elizabeth was hands-down the most appealing thing John had going for him. His young family and the special partnership he and Elizabeth had were foregrounded; she was as visible a presence on the hustings as the demands of her treatment and the family would allow. Her 2007 cancer recurrence was merely a bump in the road. The couple was so forthcoming, even bold and in your face, in disclosing details of Elizabeth’s medical struggles. His supporters had a special affection for the family, and felt they had an intimate understanding of life in the Edwards household. This was all by design.

None of this stands up to the revelation of Edwards’s affair with Rielle Hunter. His reputation and political persona are in tatters. The domestic tableau, the family solidarity with Elizabeth in her cancer fight, the image of John and Elizabeth as perfectly meshed gears in both public and private life: those images are ruined. The noble mission of service to the public good, of a rendezvous with destiny, doesn’t jibe with a rendezvous with Ms. Hunter: flatterer, thrill-seeker, professional hanger-on, above all a bit of a flake. And the Bill Clinton parallels are heartbreaking for the unlearned lessons, uncorrected flaws. Besides the womanizing, there are the legalistic denials of the National Enquirer story, and the hush-money payments engineered by Edwards’s fixer Fred Baron. The last part doesn’t out-Nixon Nixon but it just might out-Clinton Clinton.

I’m not entirely sure why I come down hard on Edwards when I spent a lot of time defending Bill Clinton in Monicagate. It would be better if our politicians’ consensual sex lives didn’t impact their career trajectories, but given the Web and round-the-clock cable and tabloid journalism, it’s hard to picture a time when Francois Mitterrand standards will be in effect in the U.S. And none of our current crop of pols has really challenged the tabloid standards. Part of my disappointment with Edwards is that, more than most, he made his marriage and family part of his campaign resume`. Even Bill and Hillary weren’t joined at the hip quite like John and Elizabeth. As Hanna Rosin puts it, you live by the confessional culture, you might die by it.

I don’t quite know what to do with the “recklessness” charge, that John E. was putting the Democratic Party in unthinkable jeopardy by pursuing the nomination with this time bomb in his back pocket. This underestimates the basic psychological defect of all presidential hopefuls, who consider themselves Men or Women of Destiny.

I sure do want to win this year, though. Many would say I failed to recognize the threat posed by G.W. Bush in 2000, but at least the U.S. was in basically sound health at that time, versus a shockingly degraded condition right now. I’m willing to compromise on principles such as candidates’ privacy, and ideals such as public campaign finance, to help the cause of Obama and the Democrats in November. And I really hate that the Edwards scandal has revived alternate history scenarios that fuel the outrage of the Hillary dead-enders.

As usual, there are other, better writers making my points more effectively. Slate’s XX Factor blog has had some lively reflections from various angles. See also Pastor Dan at Street Prophets on the implied covenant between leaders and followers.

Entitled Mediocrity, a.k.a. The Dubya Administration

William Deresiewicz has an article in The American Scholar, "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education," that is getting some well-deserved play recently. I suppose it's reminiscent of David Brooks's "The Organization Kid" from 2001, but the 2008 version adds a fitting post-Enron, post-G.W. Bush perspective.

Deresiewicz writes from his recent experience teaching Ivy League students, and comments on the social and emotional constraints they operate under: fear, careerism, conformity. The Ivies exalt a specialized type of intelligence, the analytical, at the expense of other intelligences. As has been remarked elsewhere, getting admitted is for some students the hardest thing about the Yale or Harvard experience, and once you're in, it's tempting to go with the flow and not make waves.

Deresiewicz observes that Ivy Leaguers have a lot more of a safety net than State College kids, and this carries over into a public, adult sense of entitlement that is corrosive to American life.

For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America . The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.

Proletarian fuck-ups lead to jail time, bankruptcy, or some other kind of socio-economic annihilation, with overtones of shame. When a CEO raids a pension fund, or a government official fixes a contract or squelches an intelligence report, banishment is short; the luckless party bounces back with shocking quickness. People marveled when Michael Brown, good old Brownie, fired in disgrace as the head of FEMA, was soon hired back as a consultant apparently to "analyze" his own failure. The case of Alberto Gonzalez, who is having trouble finding work in his post-Attorney General phase, is notable for being an exception. Of course, Gonzalez's social background is hardly the stuff of secret societies or horse shows.

One possible response to Deresiewicz is to roll the eyes at the the self-pitying elite angle, the "poor, poor me, having to serve on the faculty of Yale and Columbia" angle. And this is my partial response, when Deresiewicz extols "the opportunity not to be rich," and complains of difficulty conversing with the plumber who comes to his house to do a repair. The best part of the piece, though, may be his reflections on the purpose of intellectual life as opposed to a career.

Since the idea of the intellectual emerged in the 18th century, it has had, at its core, a commitment to social transformation. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile. It means foreswearing your allegiance, in lonely freedom, to God, to country, and to Yale. It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage. “I am not afraid to make a mistake,” Stephen Dedalus says, “even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity, too.”

I've rarely seen that though encapsulated so well. I'm currently reading David Halberstam's The Powers That Be, which provokes thoughts on the "liberal bias" of journalism and the arts. (Halberstam writes of Henry Luce: "Why, he often wondered aloud, were all the talented writers liberals?") I get impatient with the David Horowitz - Michael Medved argument, that academia or the media is a liberal enclave due to some conspiracy, instead of due to a quasi-natural sorting process. Liberals are overrepresented on campuses and newsrooms the same way, and for similar underlying reasons, that conservatives are overrepresented on Wall Street. What marks the intellectual is the social commitment, the desire for communal progress and uplift, and such a commitment coincides with liberalism much more closely than with conservatism. An oversimplification, but a useful, fundamentally true one.

It was good and timely for me to read this article, as a parent. The eldest daughter and I are coming off a rough school year, her eighth grade year. To make a long story short, she brought home some lousy report cards, and I browbeat her about it. It's not that I expect her to be an Ivy Leaguer, she would be the first in her family if she became one, but I have definitely subscribed to the school of thought that says, Make the best grades possible and maximize the "quality" of the college you get into.

Much of this is midlife projection on my part. While I feel I lucked out in the college-admissions racket, getting into a better college than I probably deserved to, I also wish I had been savvier and more focused in my student days and seized more opportunities. I see 20-somethings eclipsing me and I find myself envious, which is a personal problem, not one to be dumped on my kid. She really does have a good mind, creative and idiosyncratic and daring, and I certainly don't want to fence it in. The best school, the best job, the best life for her are ones I can't even picture yet.

Hacks and wonks

(The news about George Carlin's death, strangely enough, reminded of this post I wanted to make.)

It tickles me to learn that Nate Silver, a top sabermetrician (aka baseball stats nerd) whom I’ve been reading for several years now in Baseball Prospectus, is making a name as a politics blogger. I’d been thinking, hmm, where have I heard that name before? Newsweek magazine clued me in.

I could go on at stultifying length on the lessons of baseball analysis that can be applied to other walks of life. Trying to be brief: There are these rarified arenas of society that are daydream fuel for great swaths of Americans, especially men. Politics is one, sports is another, financial markets are a third I’m sure--supremely competitive, highly remunerative, high-profile businesses. Among those who actually succeed, who ascend to the highest levels of these fields, the effect of egos and status is often to create a bubble of privilege and self-congratulation, the corrosive arrogance of insiderdom.

Yet all of these fields are quite amenable to wonkery, that is, understandable to any interested lay person with brains and diligence. (Also, a little training in the use of statistics never hurt.)

It's all too tempting to divide the political universe into two groups, Hacks and Wonks. To be sure, hacks and wonks are mutually dependent, and arguably the greatest political figures combine the best of hack and wonk. But the last generation or so of American politics, the Dubya years especially, have been marked by a rising tide of empty hackdom. Maybe it's just that television is an inherently hackish medium, and the Net is inherently wonkish. Anyway, it's high time for wonks with DIY attitude to push aside the more hackish hacks. Is that clear enough?

A longtime hero of mine, or maybe anti-hero is a better term, is Bill James, the baseball writer and patron saint of sabermetrics, a guy from the sticks with no qualifications or pedigree in baseball (or journalism either), who, beginning in the late 1970s, transformed the baseball business with the patient, persistent application of logic and evidence. It helped that he took a certain gusto in puncturing myths and pretensions. For me the example of Bill James looms in the background when I survey the blogosphere. Baseball was a relatively easy nut to crack (for many years now, reams of data about it have been published in each day's newspaper) but the proliferation of information in the Internet Age is causing many inside rackets to bust open. It can be a beautiful thing.

George Carlin, 1937-2008

I can't claim to have been a big fan. I never owned any of his albums or books. He was one of those show-biz figures I liked and enjoyed bumping into, on the Tonight Show or where have you. Truthfully, I'll have a similar feeling of sadness when Cheech and/or Chong passes away, though I recognize that Carlin was a more important figure.

I liked knowing he was around, and I rooted for him in his public struggles with substance abuse. Actually, one of my stronger memories of him, and I don't know if this was a stand-up bit or something I read in an interview with him, is his description of the allure of the rituals of drug use: getting out the paraphernalia, cutting up the cocaine or et. al. I was never a heavy drug user, but that resonated with me, that there were a number of things besides the high that reinforce people's behavior with drugs.

The other thing I remember best about Carlin was his routine comparing baseball and football. As well as being funny, it was precisely on target, and it opened a little window into the American psyche. I'm more of a sports fan than a aficionado of stand-up comedy, but here is where Carlin's wide ranging observations intersected with my parochial interests and rang my bell. I bet a lot of casual comedy fans were similarly touched, maybe shaken up, by George Carlin.

Hillary to pack it in?

Reports are that Hillary Clinton is going to suspend her campaign after the polls close this evening in Montana and South Dakota.

This Jeff Greenfield piece from this afternoon, looking back on the Clinton-Obama clash, declares that Hillary got caught in a time warp. I agree, but I would describe the time warp quite differently. To Greenfield, it has to do with convention fights: since 1984, the political class has figured out that convention fights are to be avoided at all costs. That's why the superdels are refusing to swing Hillary's way during her late charge. Defying the pledged delegate math would guarantee the dreaded primetime free-for-all in Denver.

Well, sure. But: To me the point is less that we would have a floor fight at the convention, than that the aggrieved party would be the Netroots. Sorry, I don't like that word, but substitute the word of your liking for the youngish Web-wired Democratic enthusiasts whose dollars have propelled Obama and whose spirit and attitude animate his campaign. The race evolved into one where Clinton represented the pre-Netroots era (fat cat donors, old media, hawkishness for its own sake) while Obama represents the Netroots era (lots of small donors, hip to new media, multilateralism). The Netroots is where the greatest energy is. It's arguable which side is the better bet for a win in 2008, maybe it's a toss-up, but the Netroots side holds a chance at a political transformation to last a decade or more.

So: No Pissing Off the Netroots.

I may have to eat these words, but my hope is that in the end, the long Democratic campaign will not have damaged Obama, but may turn out to have helped him. He and Hillary have been at center stage all spring, both have shown impressive mettle, even chutzpah, and John McCain (maybe due to lack of ready cash) has been a bit on the sidelines. The national conversation has been about the Democrats; they will have an opportunity to define the election; the fundamentals are much in their favor.

I could well be wrong; Clinton's wins in big states like OH and PA showed Obama's vulnerability. (Give Clinton credit, she really did put on a late charge, and in a circa-1984 environment, the momentum shift would have mattered.) And the protests at the Rules Committee meeting on Saturday (where the Florida-Michigan half-vote compromise was passed) were disturbing, and listening to NPR's Diane Rehm Show on Monday morning confirmed, despite my incredulity, that there are in fact people who compare the Florida-Michigan deal to the 3/5ths compromise of the antebellum era, and who swear they will defect to McCain over the shafting Senator Clinton got.

My view of the Florida-Michigan fight is reflected here. Clinton's position was absurd. The essential problem is that Clinton and her camp did not behave honorably. There was a handshake deal among all the candidates over how to handle Florida and Michigan. When it became advantageous to welsh on the deal, the Clintons welshed. Next time lawyers and contracts will have to be involved on the front end. This is the dark side of the Baby Huey in-it-to-win-it ethos that the Clintons have.

Hillary partisans threatening to defect to McCain? I think we have to run that risk. Balance that against the adrenaline shot the GOP would get if they were running against Hillary, plus the risk of the Netroots and African-Americans sitting it out in November.

See Josh Marshall about Bill Clinton and his time warp. Also, Michelle Cottle sympathizes with the denizens of Hillaryland this evening.

He Had an Idea, An Awful Idea

I'm trying to write something for Le Chapeau Haut--you know, the East African edition of that cyber-rag I usually write for--and I have a thought, that I can't use for the 'Chap', but need to get out of my system.

I've had trouble knowing what to say about Obama v. Clinton, partly out of fear of giving offense some way, but probably more out of fear of being flat wrong. The real losers have been been the commentators and analysts, of various stripes: the pollsters whose stats have been wide of the mark, the consultants who cleave to 1996-vintage CW, those in both parties and the media who were hungry to identify frontrunners, who scrutinized the money race as of late 2007 thinking it would be decisive, or who expected some avalanche of post-New Hampshire momentum toward one candidate to wipe the others off the map. So many people have been so wrong so often, including us jackleg bloggers, partly since so few of us have perspectives that reach back before Al Gore invented the Intertubes. Neither the D nor the R race has resembled any other in recent years.

Yet, and I'm thinking now of the D side, as much as the race has defied predictions, and as weary and brittle as we've all become, people nonetheless are hardened in their declarations of What Ought to Happen. No one seems humbled to the point of altering their attitude, to one of openness to new dawns, of surrender, of simply watching what happens with a frank refusal to anticipate the outcome. Hell, many are eager and willing to jigger the rules to bring about the desired outcome, democracy and legitimacy be damned.

Hmm, now I'm bent way over and my bias is showing. How embarrassing. Despite all of the above, I remain hopeful for the future of progressivism, and like a right rank fool I am going to make a prediction: that we will look back on Obama-Clinton 2008 as a turning point, an invigorating tonic in our politics. As long, slow, drawn-out, enervating, and inconclusive as the last few months have been in the Democratic campaign, the storyline has stubbornly refused to be superficial, in spite of the diligent labors of the many highly-paid professionals whose jobs are to keep American politics superficial and dumbed-down. Race, class, gender, and religion have all cropped up, and to a remarkable degree we've discussed them like adults. (Even the arguments about Democratic Party rules and superdelegates and so on, while often self-serving and sometimes infuriating, have not been superficial, I submit; they go to what kind of party we should be.)

And the discussion is going to continue for five more months, and beyond. This election is not going to be Swift Boated, not by some provocateur who tosses a bomb then flees with his motives and bank accounts unexamined. Bushism and its aftermath have made us hungry for a serious campaign.

Political commentators like to use poker as a metaphor, as in "playing the race card." But far from being a game of poker, politics this year has felt like a chess match. No player has been able to lay down a hot-button issue then decisively sweep all the chips off the table. Instead, when issues come up or are deployed, they have lingered on the game board. They interact, they exert their different properties and valences, their actualities and potentialities, and observers get to mull them over at leisure along with the contestants themselves.

Links for the day

Rebecca Solnit, “Men Explain Things to Me.” I forwarded this to my wife. I’m debating if we should show it to my teenage daughter as a warning or if it would depress her too much. There is a guy we know who would not accept that water is wet if a woman was giving him the information.


Rick Perlstein, “The Myths of McGovern.” Via Ezra Klein. Pertinent in light of yesterday’s discussion in TNR and elsewhere: John Judis says the PA Primary casts grave McGovernesque doubts on Obama’s electability. Others (and I am with them) wonder why 1972 is so often dredged up for comparison. Fun fact: One time in 1984 I saw George McGovern eating lunch in the same restaurant I was in. You may touch me, don’t be afraid.

Colson Whitehead, “Visible Man.” Funny and sad.

Shades of 1968

Three things I came across today while misusing my time and my employer's bandwidth:

Paul Auster, "The Accidental Rebel" (NYT) -- Auster recalls his involvement in the 1968 Columbia University student strike, whose 40th anniversary is this week.

Alexander Linklater's portrait of Christopher Hitchens (Prospect UK). A well-done and highly sympathetic profile of the professional contrarian.

(Though even this sympathetic article, like all articles about Hitchens, alludes to his heavy drinking; Linklater describes him as a functioning alcoholic. When I've criticized Hitchens I have tried not to say anything about his reputation for boozing, it doesn't seem fair or terribly relevant, but Hitchens must approve of this description.)

Brian Morton, "The 'New' New Left" (Dissent) -- Morton praises a group of bloggers that includes most of my favorites (Eric Alterman, Josh Marshall, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein) as representing a renaissance of liberal thought and commentary.

Morton makes an observation about the youngish crop of left bloggers:

By saying they're ambitious, I mean that most of these writers share a politics that is interested in deep-going social reform—you could say it's a social-democratic politics, although few of them would use that term. (As far as I can tell, they have absolutely no interest in socialist thought, which, in my opinion, is a good thing. At any rate, I can't see that any of them has been hobbled intellectually because of a lack of opinions about Bukharin.)

Because most of these writers came of political age after the end of the Cold War, they're not afraid of being red-baited, and this fearlessness in some curious fashion makes them freer to mount radical critiques of U. S. policy than older generations of writers grouped around Dissent and schooled in the socialist tradition. It is odd, but refreshing, to see the emergence of young liberals who are blunter in their critiques of capitalist political and social arrangements than an older generation of democratic socialists could allow themselves to be.

Ezra Klein concurs, and extends the observation to Clinton and Obama: since Obama came of age in the post-hippie era, he is free from the need that Clinton often feels to self-consciously distance herself from the trappings of hippiedom.




From Paul Auster's account, the trappings of hippiedom were all he was really interested in, but he got swept up in a collective mania for student protest: "I went because I was crazy, crazy with the poison of Vietnam in my lungs." He was one of the hundreds of students who seized and occupied Columbia buildings for a week. In the end they were arrested and roughed up by the cops. "But no regrets. I was proud to have done my bit for the cause. Both crazy and proud."

Auster concludes:

I hesitate to draw any comparisons with the present — and therefore will not end this memory-piece with the word “Iraq.” I am 61 now, but my thinking has not changed much since that year of fire and blood, and as I sit alone in this room with a pen in my hand, I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever.

It's fascinating, the haunted ambivalence, even erasure with which he invokes Iraq and our contemporary situation. Certainly, comparisons with the present can be overdrawn. Crazy and proud, though, is a familiar combination today. Many partisans now seem proud even to go down in defeat, roughed up and bleeding. Instead of fights with the cops, we have Internet flame wars.

I really do recommend the Hitchens article, and I speak as someone who's spent the last decade feeling angry toward and betrayed by the man. Hitchens is someone else formed by 1968, for better or worse. The political traumas of his era intersected with his personal life in some complicated ways. I bet if I tried I could shoot a few holes in Linklater's account, but I don't feel like it. I feel a renewed sympathy for him, and feel that if I can "reconcile" with Christopher Hitchens I can reconcile a lot of things with a number of people. One of my daughters has declared that politics is just something that grown-ups use to make themselves seem smart. That remark really irked me at the time, which is a sure sign that it has a lot of truth. Politics, or political argument, is at one level a prissy parlor game, and however hard we try to hone our skills at it, we'll lose on some days. Every day, extremely bright people with understandable motivations, maneuver themselves into ridiculous rhetorical positions.

Which reminds me of Obama and Clinton. How tired I am of them! How dreary the flame wars they inspire have grown! But they won't go away, at least not for several weeks. Their next round of entrenched warfare is going to be here in North Carolina, and I feel like collateral damage already. A while back I was excited at the prospect of our primary being more than an afterthought, but it also feels like something less than a real election, more like an upcoming production of amateur dinner theatre, promising several overwrought and hackneyed performances, and an ending you can see coming a mile off.

Texahio

Ice and snow in Ohio today. Which campaign has superior traction in harsh winter conditions? Who are the hardier foul-weather voters, Feminazis for Clinton or Trustifarians for Obama? What does it mean, WHAT DOES IT MEAN???

Another pendulum swing, this time in Clinton's direction. (So many have assumed that the inexorable lean in the last few days of a primary has been toward Obama; it doesn't seem to be the case this time.) I'm not morally troubled by Obama's Canuck scandal, the "Austan Goolsbee in Ottawa with the phone call" affair. But I suppose it has taken some of the sheen off of him. It turns out Obama is a politician, not a breed apart. Let's see how he deals with the problem on a politician's terms.

Clinton sounds shrill and desperate lately, to me, but the polls don't agree. It seems as though people simply want this race to be prolonged, whichever candidate they prefer. Maybe they find it entertaining, or maybe they want the eventual nominee to have been really put through the wringer, to really have earned it.

Music and Movements

The Revealer linked to an article, entitled "One Nation Under Elvis," and the teaser copy hinted that it was one of those pieces arguing that country music is misunderstood, that it's really a voice for progressivism. I girded my loins for battle; a Steve Earle here or there may complicate the picture, but he doesn't really outweigh the scores of Toby Keiths and Lee Greenwoods singing on country airwaves.

That teaser didn't begin to do justice to the article, though. I love this piece, and I will remember Rebecca Solnit and Orion magazine. Solnit starts with a story of a group of environmental activists who walk into a bar frequented by lumberjacks, and the scorn and intolerance evidenced between the two groups over the issue of what music to play on the jukebox, Dolly Parton or Bob Marley. "It was not a great movement-building exercise. How far were you going to get with a community when you couldn't stand their music or even be diplomatic about it?" That's the peg for a really sharp analysis of the split in the environmental movement, between the coastal political elites advocating for environmental reform, and the white working class of the great American interior who bear the brunt of the environmental abuses that need reforming.

Admittedly I can be a bit of a Southern chavinist at times, but Solnit echoes an observation of mine: For Northeastern or California liberals to demonize white Southerners categorically, is sometimes a self-justifying move: "Racism is pervasive. The pretense that it belongs solely to poor people who talk slow lets the rest of us off the hook."

Here is her account of the origins (and unintended outcomes) of genteel environmentalism:

The environmental movement’s founding father, John Muir, was himself a Wisconsin farm boy, and he did not so much flee the farm for the wilderness as invent wilderness as a counter-image to the farm on which his brutal father nearly worked him to death. Muir worked later as a shepherd and lumber-miller in the Sierra Nevada and much later married into an orchard-owning family, but he didn’t have much to say about work, and what little he did say wasn’t positive. The wilderness he sought was solitary, pure, and set apart from human society, corporeal sustenance, and human toil—which is why he had to forget about the Indians who were still subsisting on the land there. This apartness and forgetting so beautifully codified in Ansel Adams’s wilderness photographs has shaped the vision of much of the environmental movement since them.

The Sierra Club, which Muir cofounded with a group of University of California professors in 1892, saw nature as not where one lived or worked but where one vacationed. And traditional American environmentalism still largely imagines nature as vacationland and as wilderness, ignoring the working landscapes and agricultural lands, whose beauties and meanings are widely celebrated in European art. More recently, as environmentalists have found themselves dealing with more systemic problems—pesticides, acid rain—they’ve begun to shed the sense that the rural and urban, human and wild, are separate in ecological terms, but that awareness has done little to actually connect rural and urban people and issues.

Today, rural citizens see themselves in an unappreciated, fast-shrinking middle zone between wilderness and development (even though agriculture is often the best bulwark against sprawl). In many ways, rural culture is dying, and that seems to push many rural people into near-paranoia. During the water-scarcity crises in the Klamath River region on the California–Oregon border, farmers spoke of “rural cleansing” and seemed to believe that environmentalists wanted to empty out the countryside. Some of them do. Rural life, other than sentimental fantasies of an idyllic past, cowboy fetishism, or the pseudo-ruralism of people who live in rustic-looking settings but commute to work in the white-collar economy, is largely invisible to most of us most of the time. It’s true that agriculture and wilderness are often in competition—the farmers of the Klamath Basin are competing with salmon for water. But if rural culture and rural life were positive values also being defended, the negotiations might go better.

Solnit finds reasons for hope in the racial and cultural eclecticism of the post Baby Boom generation, and the potential of global warming and sustainability to unite us under a broad perspective. From her closing paragraph:

The anti-environmentalist right has shot itself in both feet in the past few years, losing credibility and constituency, and a smart and fast-moving left could make hay out of this, to mix a few fairly rural metaphors. It would mean giving up vindication for victory—that is, giving up on triumphing over the wickedness of one’s enemies and looking at them as unrecruited allies instead.

I can't help myself: Right now, that sounds like an Obama campaign ad.

What Yglesias said

Boo-ya. Shazam, even.

Domestically, the Republican Party rests on the idea that government can only do harm, never good. Put them in office, put the anti-government party in control of the government, they are in a position to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. Vandalism. Drowning the baby in the bathwater.

On national security, the GOP runs on fear, so bad things happening (terrorism or war being waged on us or our allies) is good for them.

These are the stakes in 2008. We’ve arrived at a diseased, decadent place in our politics where the Republican Party has little to no incentive to make good things happen. Having a conservative party is inevitable, and having that party be healthy and responsible is desirable, but right now, for America's sake, the GOP needs a good solid period of wilderness exile.

Who's a maverick and who ain't

Last night the New York Times posted a story about John McCain’s relationship with lobbyists, notably a female telecommunications lobbyist who was seen in his company a lot circa 1999, the first time McCain ran for President.

The above seems like a weak summary of a 3000-word story, but really, there’s not that much more substance to it. A number of observers have remarked how odd the story is on the page, as a news story. It talks around two issues: whether McCain had an affair with this lady, and whether McCain’s sense of his own integrity matches up to his actions relative to political money. But it’s a lot of smoke, not much fire.

The inside-the-Beltway, inside-baseball aspects of it are of most interest to me. The story reflects a self-consciousness on the Times’ part about its and the press’s role in creating the image of McCain the Maverick; there’s an impetus, if not to contradict, at least to complexify McCain and address the media’s complicity in his rise. (See also Ryan Lizza’s recent New Yorker profile of McCain.) A sidebar to today’s controversy is that The New Republic has a story about the debate within the Times’ offices whether to print the McCain + lobbyists story or not -- they’d been working on it for well over two months. The McCain campaign says that the TNR’s reporting forced the Times’ hand, which rings plausible to me. TNR’s Gabriel Sherman says the story seemed dead just a couple of weeks ago, and Times managing editor Bill Keller basically dared Sherman to write the meta-story to a story the Times killed. This all could be the result of a game of chicken gone amusingly wrong.

About the sex angle, I don’t care and would just as soon not know if McCain had this affair or not, but GOP primary voters might not feel the same, and the Romney campaign, for one, was intensely interested in whether or when a McCain adultery story would hit. The ethics angle is more troubling, but a recap of McCain’s career as a so-called reformer is not especially timely. The timing is important, and it may have worked out ideally from McCain’s vantage: too late to affect the primary season, too early to affect the general election.

I almost, *almost*, feel sorry for the NYT. Buffeted by wingnut invective on one side, the challenge of the Internet on another, the legacy of Judy Miller, Jeff Gerth, et. al. on another, the Grey Lady really doesn’t know which end is up a lot of the time. I’ll be interested to see if the story has any lasting impact, and if so, whether the impact is positive or negative for McCain. Claiming to be the victim of a jihad by the New York Times may be just the thing to unify the Republican base behind him.

I suppose it will be a good thing if today marks a break in the fawning treatment that John McCain usually gets in the political press. Far from being a saint, McCain is vain, ill-tempered, has a warped view of foreign policy, and should never be given unsupervised access to nuclear weapons. A curious thing, though, is that I have enjoyed getting this more complex and nuanced view of McCain. I started to write “I like him more,” but that’s not exactly right. I’ll never vote for him, and I imagine I’d find him a blowhard. Ryan Lizza writes how hungry McCain is for human contact – he’s a people person, which the great majority of war heroes and conservative politicians are not, and I’d wager that combination accounts for 90% of the seductive effect he has on reporters; take away the POW experience and they’d find him to be a blowhard too. But McCain’s had an amazing life, he has undeniable wit and charm, and there is something compelling and maybe tragic in his elevation of values like honor and courage in the arena of Washington politics. Being a maverick, or just being perceived that way, in a job (GOP Senator) that brutally punishes mavericks, paradoxically gave him room to operate. After a poor start to his 2008 campaign, he caught a series of lucky breaks and “stumbled” (Ryan Lizza’s word) to the head of a party in crisis.

I don’t mean that McCain’s honor or integrity are unimpeachable; his actions fail to measure up to his words. The main thing to say is he doesn’t deserve the reputation of a maverick reformer; his ethical behavior as described in the Times story is merely run-of-the-mill for a US Senator. I remember the Keating 5 scandal better than most people; I had a job during the Bush 41 years that required me to bone up on the savings and loan meltdown. The Times story doesn’t mention it, but the media should make more of the fact that McCain’s campaign is not going to follow the “McCain-Feingold” campaign finance rules. For all this, I still find McCain somewhat sympathetic, if flawed. His self-righteousness and self-regard just give him a notable blind spot. As others have observed, McCain is not a good ass-kisser or vote-panderer. Also, the outrage I might otherwise feel about McCain’s alleged influence-peddling is tempered by the knowledge that he’s not a particularly good fund-raiser – his campaign was flat broke a few months ago, he’s had to scale back his operations substantially (a less luxurious Straight Talk Express, for one thing), and some of his campaign staff are working without pay (though the NYT spins this as an ethically sketchy gift-in-kind). He’s not Machiavellian, he’s just an egotist; he’s never surprised when people do him favors.

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I wanted a writing exercise, otherwise I’d have outsourced all McCain-and-the-media commentary to Eric Alterman here.

Here, however, is an example of Dr. Alterman’s puffed-up and wrongheaded views about popular music. It just so happens that I’ve been listening both to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Sweethearts of the Rodeo recently. Frankly, Sweethearts is a straight country record, and a fairly mediocre one. There’s not a thing about it that is more innovative than what Johnny Cash and others had done earlier in the 60s. It just happens to have been made by noted long-haired drug-taking hippie types. Gram Parsons is overrated, and Alterman has been taken in by the hype. Whereas on Everybody Knows Neil Young is doing something distinctive and new. People remember “Cinnamon Girl” and “Down By The River,” which are rock numbers, but the title track and “The Losing End” are closer to alt-country than the Byrds were. Experts may differ and so on, but Alterman is wrong to dismiss EKTIN’s importance so cavalierly.

Take Some Prisoners

A media diary for February 12.

Listened to an NPR story on the drive to work this morning, about the Mitt Romney campaign and the impact it may have on the Mormon Church. The reporter, Howard Berkes, interviewed a couple of Mormon women in Virginia who were phone-canvassing for Romney and were surprised by the anti-Mormon sentiment they encountered, which they don’t often encounter in everyday life. Mormons have mostly flown under the radar in recent years, but the Romney campaign exposed them to some unpleasant commentary, and the church is examining itself in response.

I thought it somewhat interesting -– my objection to Romney wasn’t that he was a Mormon per se, but then again I’m an avowed anti-Republican so would have objected to him in any case. If one of the Udall family made a run at the Democratic presidential prize, would I have misgivings? Good question. Frankly, the very fact of this report, that Mormons are so PR-conscious and eager to assimilate, is reassuring to me. (But how does image-consciousness jibe with those proselytizing kids on bicycles?) GOP primary voters, an evangelical-leaning group, have big problems with the LDS, some of them characterizing it as a cult. I wouldn’t go that far, but it is curious if Romney volunteers number a lot of Mormons (not a claim Berkes makes directly, but it is implied).

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Let it be recorded that on this date, I agreed with Christopher Hitchens and Anne Applebaum –- The Archbishop of Canterbury messed up by advocating a “plural jurisdiction” in the UK that would accommodate some aspects of sharia law. I’m generally tolerant of religious pluralism, and I don’t favor the US’s policy toward the Mideast whose goal seems to be to “convert” Muslims, if not to Christianity than at least to Western-style democracy. But Muslims who emigrate to the US or western Europe should have to follow western legal norms. (My sense is that the majority are willing to follow those norms, and in fact those norms are part of their reason for emigrating.) I would allow for some civil contracts or disputes, like sharia mortgages, to be handled apart from the courts if both parties agree, but subject to the courts’ authority if parties cannot agree. But criminal law is criminal law. And internationally, I want western norms to apply. International law and Islamic fundamentalism will inevitably collide sometimes, and there should be sanctions against societies that practice honor killings, genital mutilation, and other forms of official misogyny.

In my personal (probably half-assed) theology, equality before the law is linked to monotheism. My attraction to God is all wrapped up in the notion of God’s love and regard being available to every person without prejudice, like inalienable human rights. And the reason to prefer one god to several gods is the notion of a unitary, impartial divine justice or authority.

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Well, just to show the world hasn’t gone all topsy-turvy, I disagree with this Slate writer, a Berkeley-educated but LA-nurtured “liberal contrarian” who thinks there’s nothing wrong with saying that Chelsea Clinton is being “pimped out.” I don’t think “pimped out” has been rendered an innocuous phrase in the culture; it has a more specific and darker connotation than “pimp my ride” or whatever. There’s too much history of the Clintons being described in weird psychosexual terms, and Chelsea has been subjected to that as well as her parents. Remember “Janet Reno is Chelsea’s father”? Enough is enough. I understand that Hillary kind of wants to have it both ways with Chelsea, but look, lots of campaigns use family members as silent stage props. There’s no record of John McCain being said to “pimp out” his wife or children. I was sometimes a little uncomfortable with the John Edwards campaign’s uses of Elizabeth Edwards, but there was never a suggestion that she was a helpless pawn or in some kind of sexual thrall to her husband.

(That said, is Hillary’s campaign trying to turn the David Shuster brainfart to its advantage? Could be.)

Emotions are high in the Clinton-Obama race, as Obama has pulled slightly ahead in the delegate count, way ahead in the fundraising tally. Some of the blogosphere's energy and attention have been focused on the New York Times's op-ed stable: Paul Krugman, who seems to have an extreme animus against Obama, and Frank Rich, who returns the favor against Hillary. (We expect lame-ass armchair head-shrinking from Maureen Dowd, but hold Krugman and Rich to a little higher standard.) Rob at LG&M offers this discussion of the internet fury, and the worthiest sentiment there is from commenter Righteous Bubba: "I favor a take-some-prisoners approach." That's right, take some prisoners, because you may have to sue for a brokered peace in a short while. We all (almost all) say "Of course I'll support whoever turns out to be the nominee," but that disclaimer is often given in a perfunctory way, a la "... the express written consent of the Commissioner of Baseball." About 49% of us, effectively, are going to have to live up to that half-conscious promise.

Again, I'm for Obama, so discount this if you want, but in my view Hillary's campaign is the one that has been pushing the envelope in terms of campaign tactics. This stuff about the Florida and Michigan delegates is a little ominous; it foretells an ugly lawyerly struggle for the nomination extending deep into the summer and inviting appalling Karl Rove comparisons. I observed once, somewhere, that I have faith in Bill Clinton's party loyalty; that for all his ego and ambition, I don't think he will do anything to torpedo the Democrats in November. Some people say Hillary is the more ruthless competitor of the two of them.

High human drama. Hey, in spite of what Atrios says, maybe it will all come down to North Carolina, for once in Tar Heels' lives.

Fear of Flying, 2008

Atrios calls our attention this morning to these twinned Washington Post opinion columns by novelists Michael Chabon and Erica Jong. It’s a tense time in Democratland, this Super Tuesday eve, and things may get a lot more tense right after Super Tuesday. Atrios is pleading with us not to fall into the trap, which Jong and Chabon fall into, of believing that those who disagree with us are suffering from a character deficiency.

Jong’s tone is more-of-sadness-than-anger, but even without violent rhetorical lurches she manages to tie herself in knots. It’s not every writer who would endorse Hillary Clinton (as candidate) and Noam Chomsky (as a far-sighted political sage) in the same column. To square that circle, Jong has to cut Hillary a huge break: “Since she is a woman, she has to show she’s ready to be commander in chief.” Thus Hillary’s votes on Iraq and Iran don’t count against her.

Yet somehow Barack Obama’s not even being in the Senate during the 2002-2003 run-up to Iraq does count against him. Jong makes the astonishing argument that since (1) Colin Powell was a token African-American in the Bush Administration, and (2) Obama is obviously a token black as well (?!), therefore (3) Obama would have been taken in by Powell’s mendacious claims about Saddam’s WMDs. Jong writes, “I have nothing against [Obama] except his inexperience. Many black voters agree. They understand tokenism and condescension.” I’m sure “some of Jong’s best friends” would agree (and would understand condescension!), but “many black voters” are increasingly pro-Obama. It's been in all the papers, Erica.

Chabon, in the Post’s deliberate side-by-side arrangement, endorses Obama. Chabon does strike an off-putting note of exasperation with the “excuses” he hears people make for not being on the Obama bandwagon. And I would dispute somewhat his notion that We The People are to blame for our predicament in 2008, for putting Dubya into office and allowing our politics to be degraded. (So many things Bush has brought us — the DOJ scandals, warrantless wiretapping, Blackwater — were really never put to the public for our approval.) But Chabon writes about hope versus fear in the American electorate, echoing Obama’s quasi-religious rhetoric of transcendence and redemption, in a way that rings true to me. Best line: “[W]e can aspire as a nation to be more than merely secure or predominant.”

Yesterday I bumped into a neighbor of mine, a very decent and thoughtful guy. We were standing on a sidewalk having a semi-deep conversation about marriage and child-rearing and the complexity of modern life, and at a pause to catch our breath, he joked, “We have solved all the world’s problems here! What have we missed?” “War and peace!” I joked back, but to my surprise he actually gave me his thoughts on the subject. He is, in his own description, a moderate Democrat who has sometimes voted Republican, and he’s not sure what he’s going to do this election. He related something I didn’t know about him, that he gave up a job that he loved soon after the 9/11 attacks, because the job required frequent air travel, and he and his family were too worried about his safety. He’s pleased that the US removed Saddam Hussein, but very troubled that we haven’t caught Bin Laden. He hears the president of Iran spout crazy Holocaust revisionism, and feels that the US has to adopt a tough posture against that crazy Islamist state. He seems to value experience and gravitas in a political candidate. At the same time, he is not blind to the ineptitude of the Bush White House. I suspect my “moderate Democrat” friend will turn out to be a McCain Democrat, but he seems to be hovering somewhere over the turf Hillary Clinton has staked out on foreign policy, and not very near Obama’s turf.

I had a couple of partial responses to my friend: one being that Iran’s political system is complicated and diffuse, and Ahmadinejad cannot enact every crazy thought that enters his head. But I don’t dismiss the unsettling effect of 9/11, or the fear of a new terrorist attack. And I respect (and hopefully share) the humility my neighbor shows, in the face of ominous foreign policy questions whose answers are murky.

Still, I come down on the side of hope, which in Michael Chabon's schema, as well as the calculus of the present primary season, is the side of Obama. I'll strive to be humble and open-minded, and to trust the nominating process (which, thankfully, has delivered rough justice so far). If it comes to it, with the help of my budding feminist daughters, I'll support Hillary. But I think she's in a troubling state of denial about Bushism and is clearly pushing a politics of fear. Maybe my position comes down to “the valiant taste of death but once.” I'm less afraid of terrorism than outraged by torture and lies and all the rest. I prefer not to be preoccupied with my physical safety at the expense of my principles. Decency and tolerance are not luxuries.

Con

The advertised title of the lecture was “Faith-Based Initiatives: Role and Efficacy in a Civil Society.” That seemed interesting and unbiased enough to me, so I devoted a long lunch hour to walking across Duke campus and attending.

It didn’t take long for me to start feeling like a sucker. Even before the speaker got to the heart of his topic, the names he dropped made me a little queasy. He reminded us that he is newly on the faculty at Baylor University, which requires a profession of faith in Christ from all its faculty hires. He boasted of the support his research center has gotten from the John Templeton Foundation and the Heritage Foundation. All of this was by way of his PowerPoint presentation, the first 20 minutes of which was an infomercial for his center and its director, his boss—not what I expect from this academic lecture series I’ve been attending for a couple of years now.

The speaker is a criminologist, and the real content of his talk was not faith-based initiatives in general, but one in particular: a faith-based prison launched in Texas by Charles Colson’s outfit, Prison Fellowship. (Colson was described as a well-known Christian leader and prison evangelist. Full stop.) Our guest related the story that Colson had applied to 11 states with this proposal and been turned down 11 times, before he found his Promised Land in Texas in the late 1990s, and his champion in the person of Governor George W. Bush. Dubya of course was interested—the themes of faith-based governance and compassionate conservatism which would propel him to the White House may have begun to form in his not-inquisitive but acquisitive little brain--and in effect said to Colson, “Where have you been all my life?”

That’s a verbatim quote of our speaker’s joke. It was just a throwaway line, I don’t think the guy put any thought behind it, but I had to laugh out loud, a little too loud for the social situation, at the image of George W. Bush warmly greeting Charles Colson, saying “Where have you been all my life?” Dubya was probably pretty coked out during Watergate, so it’s understandable he might not have recognized Colson (though would it have killed him to ask Poppy?). But sometimes two guys just have an instant connection.

Anyway, the research our speaker presented was on Colson’s prison program and its relationship to recidivism rates. He talked around the issue a lot, about the difficulties of his study, inmates dropping out or being paroled early, the absence of quality control in the services provided. His data was really limited to one bar graph, which showed a small differential in re-arrest and re-conviction for Colson’s group, and nothing about statistical significance.

Speaker Guy alluded to the objection that there may have been selection bias: that men who enrolled in Prison Fellowship are inclined to go to Bible studies and also inclined not to re-offend, and the services themselves may not have made much difference. He tried to defuse that objection by saying he interviewed wardens and chaplains, who assured him that the prisoners who chose to go into the Colson program weren’t more devout, they were just cynically trying to get more privileges. That’s not terribly rigorous or convincing. It looks to me like there is probably a selection bias at work: There might be correlation, but not necessarily causation.

It turns out that this research study has a checkered history that the speaker didn’t divulge. I did a little Googling when I got back to the office. Colson’s Texas prison is one of the early success stories in the faith-based initiatives movement, one of its crown jewels. This 2003 Slate article by Mark Kleiman, however, throws cold water on the so-called success. Kleiman accuses evaluators of cherry-picking the data in order to show positive effects on recidivism. I believe the presentation I heard has been refined since 2003 (our guest complained of having to include in his sample even those who were early dropouts, which seems to address one’s of Kleiman’s objections) but I don’t know exactly how.

These prisoners, it appears to me, were being relatively showered with resources: Bible studies, life skills training, mentoring that carried over from incarceration to re-entry, and other stuff. Sure it did some good! What I’d like to know is, what was the effect of the faith-based nature of the services? Is it better to get inmates to participate in Bible study than in Oprah’s Book Club? Is it better to get inmates connected with a church on the outside, than it would be to get them connected with a softball league? Education and positive social bonds would seem to help keep crime down, regardless of any religious content.

In talking about all the complicating factors our guy all but admitted that some churches and mentors in the program don’t know what they’re doing. (There’s an inherent problem when your volunteer service-providers live in Katy and Sugar Land, and your clients live in Houston’s Fifth Ward. Some mentors were happy to go to meetings in the prison, but didn’t want to meet their mentees in the ‘hood for aftercare.) Showering money upon people who didn’t know what they were doing: sounds the George W. Bush M.O. to me. Another comment that strikes me as funny in retrospect: in the infomercial part of his talk, the speaker alluded to a grant his center had to study culture and values in China, but said that there were sensitive issues in the work and that he didn’t want to comment on it in a setting where he was being tape-recorded. Always respect the power of electronic surveillance.

New Hampshire Hangover

I’m disoriented. I was getting used to the idea, excited even, that Barack Obama would be my presidential nominee. I was feeling comfortable with Hillary Clinton’s highest office being Senator from New York (not too shabby, right?). I was braced for a discussion of what Clinton would do from a hopeless position—would she lash out in a way that damaged Obama for the general election? Despite the cackling from certain corners on the right, I was even comfortable anticipating a sort of goodbye to the national stage by Hillary and Bill, a stage curtain falling on the notion of a Clinton Dynasty.

What happened yesterday in the Democratic primary was pretty astonishing. None of the campaigns expected a Hillary win, not even Hillary’s, not even on the day of the voting. None of the polls or pundits called it right. And all I can figure is, the key turning point was Hillary’s show of emotion two days ago. Markos is right on target here. Hillary is my least favorite of the Democratic aspirants because of her platform, but personality-wise I like her, as a woman candidate I like her (I have school-age daughters, and they are truly excited about the prospect of a woman president, and that shit matters to the parents of young girls), and when she is unfairly attacked on grounds of her gender and personality, I want to come to her aid.

In terms of my political preferences, I’m disappointed by the NH result. I’ve concluded that my positive feelings about Hillary Clinton are rooted in feeling sorry for her. She checked her own ambitions for the sake of her husband, and got publicly humiliated by the Lewinsky scandal for her trouble. Her post-2000 political career is kind of a consolation prize, in my eyes, and that is not a basis for choosing a President. Being a Senator is a hell of a fine consolation prize, but to be the champion of American progressivism in the post-Bush era, I want the best progressive politician. Hillary isn’t it. Bill used to be it but isn’t anymore. They are fighting the last war.

I think Hillary took the wrong lessons from Bill’s tenure in the White House. If she was reprising Bill’s 1992 campaign, I’d be excited. (In fact, I think I’d even be excited if she were fighting a 1998-99 vintage campaign and raging against the vast right-wing conspiracy. She’d probably lose, but I’d be cheering for her.) But she is peddling a 1996 brand of defensive, timid, small-bore, technocratic politics, that is loath to buck the forces of big corporate money, and that thinks presidential saber-rattling is a winning national security strategy for a Democrat.

But I can't help but feel happy for her today. Maybe I'm naive and she's the cold calculating tear-summoning vixen of Dick Scaife's fever dreams, but I think the few days after Iowa were maybe the low point of Hillary Clinton's life, and that last night was the greatest night of her life. That's kind of neat. And I’m trying to trust this process, this chain of events. I’m trying to be open to the idea that a long hard-fought primary season is a good thing. The huge Democratic turnouts in Iowa and New Hampshire are really encouraging signs for next fall. I hope the Dems can keep the excitement going, and that we end up with a candidate who's been thoroughly and fairly vetted, and whom we're all behind.

Watch Your Step When Boarding

The primary season is heating up—as in, the Democratic nominee may be decided in two days. It felt like the primaries would take forever, yet suddenly on one side (the only side that matters! please Lord) they may be over in a flash. And I might ought to say something about what has happened in Iowa and is about to happen in New Hampshire. But first, a brief aside.

I am really interested in the reflections of 20-something lefty blogger-reporters (like Ezra Klein here and here, and Chris Hayes here and here, and Dana Goldstein here and here) who are being sent out on the campaign trail to file daily dispatches like regular Boys and Girls On The Bus.

(At this point I deleted a graf about why I think I identify with these youngsters. Let’s just say, I have idiosyncratic and fairly pathetic reasons. Oh to be young again, and have a different job…)

It's the stock in trade of bloggers to spray piss and vinegar at mainstream political reporters. Now some of these bloggers (and blog-fueled publications like the American Prospect) are putting their money where their mouth is, trying to do a better job at the function they have largely deplored.

I think they are doing fine. They are helping to highlight the fundamental problems, if not outright absurdity, of our primary system. (Ms. Goldstein's account of being mistaken for the person in charge of an Iowa caucus precinct is amusing and on-point.) Maybe I'm more tuned in somehow, but I don't remember as much talk in past years of how disorganized and in some ways undemocratic (small d) the caucus protocol is, and how it has monstrously outgrown its modest founding purpose.

What's more, the young turks are also giving some glimpses, from the newly-inside, of what the working existence of campaign correspondents is like. Some blog commenters seem hypervigilant for signs of their heroes' selling out to The Man, yet Chris Hayes especially has some sharp and sympathetic observations about the pack psychology of the press pool, and the practical problems or constraints that tempt reporters to focus on trivia and/or run with their cynical preconceptions.

Another brief note: uncharacteristically for me, I tuned in to MSNBC for awhile Saturday night to watch Tim Russert and his crew of old-guard journos opine from New Hampshire. I have never heard TV pundits talk so much about accusations that the media were skewing electoral outcomes. In retrospect, it was probably in response to desperate protests from the Hillary Clinton camp. The talking heads weren't quite copping to the charge, but they were acknowledging that it was out there.

Off The Reservation

In today's Washington Post, Eugene Robinson takes on Hillary's Bill problem: specifically, that Bill doesn't stay "on message" when he's campaigning on Hillary's behalf, and can't stop talking about himself in general. The implication is that Bill is a dubious asset as a campaigner and would be a unique problem if Hillary won the White House.

Personally, I take for granted that First Gentleman Bill would be unlike any presidential spouse we've known, that he would demolish the old-fashioned role that Laura Bush inhabits (I imagine her despising it), and good riddance to it. But I'm sure Bill gives campaign staffers agita at a grocery store in Iowa.

The Matt Bai piece I blogged about yesterday touched on the issue of "message discipline."
Hillary strives for tight discipline, whereas Bill is an improviser. Once I read a quote about George W. Bush, from someone who knew Bush in his Texas days (maybe from Karl Rove), that marveled at his message discipline--Bush was an amazingly talented politician, in this person's view, because whatever the question he was posed, he could drag the discussion back to the day's approved talking point(s). At some point, this virtue becomes a shortcoming: in a White House press conference or other venue where the questions are pointed and the issues are weighty, "message discipline" looks more like clumsily, slavishly, even stupidly parroting the same few stock phrases over and over. But I give Bush a little grudging credit for his parsing skills: in the recent saga of the Iran NIE (Iran is nowhere near being the rogue nuclear state of song and story) it was pointed out that in midstream Dubya began speaking not of the mullahs getting a bomb but of "acquiring the knowledge necessary" to have a bomb. You might not have noticed the shift in wording in real time, but it looms large in retrospect. So the man is capable of subtle shifts in phrasing, when his political carcass (or a felony charge) is on the line.

On the other hand, a Bill Clinton's improvising skill can serve to salvage the day's message, not just fuzz it up. I've forgotten some of the details, but there was a major televised speech during which Bill's teleprompter malfunctioned, and he didn't miss a beat. He understood his topic on the level of themes and ideas, not stock phrases.

Message discipline is what a politician needs if s/he lacks intellectual integrity. So you see why it's so highly sought after.

Media diary, December 19

Because I was running late this morning, I was in the car to hear part of BBC World Service on public radio. The program is celebrating its 75th anniversary and has been rebroadcasting clips from its early days. Today a BBC producer commented on what she learned from combing the audio archives. During the Second World War, BBC broadcasts were important not just to the British people but to the French Resistance movement across the Channel--for instance, BBC carried speeches and announcements by De Gaulle, in French. The letter V was a symbol of anti-Nazi resistance: I knew about Churchill often flashing the V for Victory hand sign, but also, French residents under occupation chalked V's onto sidewalks and buildings. In addition, BBC began tacking on, as an intro or outro, a short musical phrase played on a tympani: bip-bip-bip-bummm, bip-bip-bip-bummm. Dot dot dot dash--the letter V in Morse code.

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Reflecting on the developing rivalry between Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, Slate posted a piece today about tensions between the LDS Church and the Southern Baptist Convention since about 1980. I was intrigued to learn that Mormons have converted a lot of Baptists and made serious inroads in heavily Baptists areas like Atlanta and Dallas. Evangelicals respect people who offer a testimony, and those clean-cut young Mormon missionaries certainly qualify.

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Matt Bai has written a piece for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, dated December 23 but pre-posted on the Web, about Bill and Hillary Clinton--his past, her present and future, and their relationship to the Democratic Party.

It's worth a read. Bill Clinton is much more present and prominent in the article than Hillary; Bai interviewed Bill a few times for his recent book, and draws on that material. (Bai and Bill scheduled an interview more recently, but Hillary's campaign quashed it, and Hillary would not be interviewed herself.) I would have placed the emphasis in different places, but Bai engages a lot of the relevant issues for a party searching for a new identity.

Certainly, the legacy of Bill's presidency has a complicated relationship to Hillary's presidential prospects. Bai's notion is that among rank and file Democrats, Bill is personally very popular, but "Clintonism" (expressed both in his founding work with the DLC and in his White House tenure) is not universally popular in left circles. There's some truth there, but Bai overlooks the need for Hillary to stand on her own feet, regardless of Bill's continued popularity or lack of it. Bai quotes poll data that Bill's record reflects well on Hillary among voters. I had a "no duh" response to that: Hillary's political existence depends on Bill; it's not that he benefits her, it's that she wouldn't exist without him. The dilemma for Hillary's campaign is not just how to show him to best advantage, it's how heavily to deploy him in public.

Another of Bai's guiding theses is that Hillary's campaign is a referendum on Clintonism. I'm not so sure. I'm overwhelmingly conscious of the 2008 election as being a referendum on Bushism, and so are many rank-and-file Democrats, and we evaluate the contenders for their potential to defeat Bushism at the polls and in Washington over the next quadrennium.

I plead guilty to not appreciating what we had with Clinton-Gore when we had it; I made gruff Naderite noises in '96 after welfare reform, and in 2000 when the legacy of Clintonism seemed merely the effort to be all things to all people. Seven years later, I long for a government that is competent, innovative, fiscally responsible at home, morally responsible abroad--that respects the rule of law and balances ideology with merit and fairness. Clinton-Gore did a solid job of providing that kind of government. Moreover, they deserve a lot of credit for accurately diagnosing the American condition in the 1990s: most notably, the shift to a post-industrial information-based economy.

Yet I have trouble giving all that much credit to Clintonism as a philosophy of governing.
Bai discusses Clintonism as both a philosophy and as an electoral strategy. Both Clintons would attest that the former is irrelevant without the latter. Bai concedes that the Clinton style of campaigning was probably the only way to win in 1992, to exorcise the ghosts of liberals past, but he also seems to agree with Al From: "Just as Franklin Roosevelt saved capitalism by dealing with its excesses, Clinton saved progressive governance, and he saved progressive governance all over the world."

Maybe I came of age too late to understand properly, but I don't see much cause to regret the "overreaches" of liberal policy in the 60s and 70s. Did the Dems go astray in ensuring civil rights? Did they go too far in pressing the interests of women and environmentalists and labor unions? On the whole, I don't believe so. They got caught up in a culture war that was bigger than they were, and they suffered a backlash on civil rights, which perhaps they could have countered better but which in the long run was worth suffering for the sake of racial justice. (Even knowing what we know about the tenures of Nixon and Reagan and the Bushes, which of us would go back in time and BLOCK the Civil Rights Act?)

The Democrats' problem is more one of image and public perception. I'll concede that they may have been too closely identified with the poor rather than the middle class, a hangover from FDR and the New Deal when the country faced starvation and homelessness. Adjusting to postwar economic growth, Clinton helped the party change the frame, away from protection against poverty, toward access to opportunity. But mainly, due to the old internal party machinery (which is a different thing than the policies), the Democratic Party gave us an excess of dry, humorless technocrats as candidates. In an aside, Bai mocks Dennis Kucinich as having been "teleported straight from 1972." My main perception of Kucinich is he's a mousy little guy, reminiscent of Mondale and Dukakis and other also-rans, who lack that ineffable "want to have a beer with him" quality that Bush supposedly has in spades. I don't mock Kucinich for lacking that, I weep for myself and our politics that we place so much weight on that.

Bill Clinton has that charisma, and thank God he's also brilliant and an insanely hard worker. But the hallmark of his governance (Bai reminds me of the term) was triangulation: co-opting an issue near and dear to the Republicans (welfare, for example), acknowledging the problem, then proposing a more moderate and humane fix than the Goopers were offering. That may be a sound strategy much of the time, but not all the time. It strikes me reading this article that triangulation is probably an apt term for what Hillary has tried to do as a Senator regarding Bush's foreign policy: acknowledge his assumptions about Iraq's and Iran's treachery, and HOPE that he would act soundly and proportionately, although she had no leverage. The most charitable read on her votes is that she was suckered. Triangulation isn't appropriate when the other side doesn't play fair. It isn't compatible with being the principled opposition.

I wonder how old Bai is. It's worth being reminded that political renewal comes in constant cyclical waves, always with young people chafing at the assumptions of their elders. Today's insurgents will be tomorrow's establishment: From and his DLC still perceive themselves as the gatecrashers that they were in their heyday.

"A laundry bin full of jock straps at Shea"

I’ve been meaning to finish a couple of posts on politics and media and other serious respectable topics, but here’s an easy post to write: reaction to the George Mitchell report on steroids in baseball.

It bugs me a little bit, the increasingly undeniable evidence that a lot of top-flight players were juicing. Which makes me examine my assumptions: Why at this late date do I expect fine athletes to be persons of fine character? Why care about the purity of baseball statistics, when I don’t care about the purity of the exchange value of the dollar or anything else measured with numbers? To be shocked by Mitchell’s report is a sucker’s response. Ballplayers have always cheated one way or another, and if anything the incentives to cheat are rising as the amount of money at stake is rising. The margin between being an average player and a slightly above-average player, between being a bench player and a starter, or a setup reliever and a closer—these distinctions of apparent quality are not large; they are well within the margin of luck. But they also might be worth $10 million at contract time.

One thing that strikes me about the list of players is how many journeyman players there are on it. The typical steroid-taking player isn’t Barry Bonds, on a Promethean quest for immortality. It’s more someone like Todd Hundley, trying to manage injuries, trying for one breakout 40-homer season that will boost his status in the sport.

Another thing that strikes me: Without doing a rigorous analysis, a lot of players on the list are the sons of former big league players: Bonds, Hundley, Jerry Hairston Jr., David and Mike Bell, David Segui, Gary Matthews Jr. Bret Boone isn’t on the Mitchell list but has been named in steroid rumors. Jeremy Giambi has an older brother, Jason, also on the list, and Gary Sheffield has an older cousin, Dwight Gooden, who was a big league star. Maybe this doesn’t mean anything, but it might mean that the better connected a player was, the more exposure he’d had to the culture of pro baseball from an early age, the more likely he was to seek a strategic advantage through chemistry. In other words, the drugs work. Savvier players were more likely to use them.

I sure would feel better about baseball’s future if George Mitchell was in charge of the sport full-time, instead of Bud Selig. The wisest thing George Mitchell said yesterday was that he hoped the commissioner would not seek to punish every player named in the report. If anything, I wish Mitchell had said it more emphatically. The best use of this report (and Mitchell's vision for it, I'm sure) would be as part of a South Africa style truth and reconciliation process, speaking the truth and clearing the air, without meting penalties for infractions committed perhaps nine years ago and which were effectively condoned at the time. For his part, Selig immediately asserted his authority to punish them all, saying they would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

So one wonders whether the point of the exercise is to address the steroid problem or to make a show of toughness and improve public relations. I feel a sense of resignation about the problem, because of the incentives to dope, and because the doping athletes and trainers are always two steps ahead of the enforcers. Human growth hormone is a drug of current choice, largely because there is no effective test to detect it. Selig touted a plan for baseball to partner with pro football to develop a test of HGH. Of course, as I heard a radio host point out last night, this was a way for Selig to spread the blame—to remind people that other sports have this issue too. The NFL is probably seething to have its name read out at the press conference.

I don’t want this controversy to linger. I want MLB to put up a duly diligent and unbiased detection system, as a roadblock, but recognize that the problem won’t disappear overnight. Give amnesty to players who doped in the past. Sanction but don’t ban or demonize future violators.

And put Bonds, McGwire, and Clemens in the Hall of Fame. The 90s and early 2000s were the steroid era; let’s face it, perhaps regret it, but let’s don’t willfully forget those who excelled according to the standards and conditions of their era.

Ezra Klein posted briefly yesterday about this story, expressing bemusement that, in light of a long distinguished career, George Mitchell is getting so much attention for digging dirt about baseball players. A commenter at Ezra’s wrote:

George Mitchell is Exhibit A in why you should never stay in your current job out of loyalty to your co-workers when you are offered a promotion.

Bill Clinton was going to make Mitchell a Supreme Court justice and instead he stayed in the Senate to shepherd throught the Clinton health care plan.

Fast forward a few years, Steven Breyer is a Supreme Court justice and George Mitchell is poking around in a laundry bin full of jock straps at Shea. And I still don't have health care.

Nicely played Mr. Breyer. D'oh, Mr. Mitchell.

(Bringing it back around to policy and law at the end. Yay me!)

Long Cool Woman

What I learned about The Hollies in the last two days, while shirking my adult responsibilities:

"Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress" is a staple of oldies radio, and over the years it has made an impression on me as a song with a really good sound, only partially counteracted by really stupid lyrics. Recently some friends and I have been brainstorming a list of songs of the genus "Good Sound, Stupid Lyrics," which put me in mind of LCWIABD and sent me on a quest to the library in search of a Hollies disc.

I was surprised to discover that the Hollies rate this 3-disc retrospective. I didn't know much about the band beyond the fact that they gave Graham Nash his start, but they were responsible for a number of familiar hits in the 60s: "On A Carousel," "Bus Stop," "Carrie-Anne," "Look Through Any Window," and the unforgettable period piece "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother," to name just a few.

I read up on the Hollies a little bit, on Wikipedia and in the liner notes to this 3-disc box, and got caught up. They were a work-a-day pop band who had some successes but also their share of trials: personnel changes, struggles with labels and management (particularly a lazy unimaginative producer named Ron Richards), competition over songs and songwriting credits. They had a bruising encounter with the Beatles; they did a cover of "If I Needed Someone" only to have George Harrison badmouth their version in public. They tried to evolve from moptops into hippies, the related frustrations driving Graham Nash from the band and toward a California dream. In the interims between bass players, they had future notables John Paul Jones, Jack Bruce, and Klaus Voormann play on their records. Elton John played piano on "He Ain't Heavy." The liner notes are too flattering to the band, the way liner notes tend to be, but the lads come off as down to earth and realistic about their status as relatively lowly conscripts in the British Invasion. (One of the band's singles was blocked from the top of the UK charts by The Archies's "Sugar Sugar." The drummer remarks, "We needed that Number One hit more than they did. They were drawings, after all, we were real!")

"Long Cool Woman" has a somewhat complicated backstory, as befits a long cool woman. From Wikipedia:

[Allan] Clarke, devastated by the departure of his friend of more than 20 years [i.e. Nash], had been locked into the group identity for nearly all of his adult life, and now felt the urge to step out on his own. The group was beginning work on a new album, which Clarke would do with them, after which he would begin work on his own career and his own recordings, independent of the band. Ironically, the new album was to benefit from Clarke's plans for a solo career, but the group's ability to take advantage of its unexpected success was to be sorely tested. While recording the album, titled Distant Light, Clarke turned up with a song that was to be added to the record: a throwaway, co-authored by Clarke, Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway, titled Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress (Eder, 1996^[1]).

Recorded on a day when producer Ron Richards was absent [emphasis mine], the album gave Clarke a rare chance to show off his guitar skills. The problem was that Clarke had not intended it to be released on a Hollies album, but as a record of his own. However, a couple of members of the group did play on it and he was forced to include it on Distant Light. This, in turn, led to an open breach between Clarke and the rest of the group, once they learned that he intended to do a solo recording. Clarke was issued an ultimatum, that he either remain with The Hollies or pursue a solo career, but not both.

In a 1973 interview with Melody Maker, Clarke states (Eder, 1996^[2])

They thought that when I became successful, I'd leave them anyway, so they just shortened the agony by forcing me to do one thing or the other. It was silly, really, because I wouldn't have left the group.

Long Cool Woman came out as a single after a modest slide in the early '70s. The song was a Creedence Clearwater Revival style million record selling rocker that made #2 in the States in 1972; suddenly, this became the group's new signature tune, saturating the airwaves in the United States. However, Clarke was already gone, being strangely replaced by Swedish star Mikael Rickfors, who attempted to overcome language barriers. The new Hollies yielded the minor hit The Baby; however, Rickfors could sing in English but not speak it fluently, which created problems that were never fully resolved (Biography, 2002).

Much to Clarke's disappointment The Hollies were offered their first major US tour due to the success of Long Cool Woman, a song which Clarke considered to be his. The new Hollies line-up toured the US and for the first time received a major push in that country, appearing on the major music TV shows of the day. The personnel changes meant that the band had to re-invent their style somewhat, switching instruments and lead vocals on various songs. While a very interesting period for the band, the overall cohesive nature of The Hollies sound was somewhat damaged and the tour was not a big success with audiences.

*

Clarke rejoined after just a couple of years away; eventually even Nash re-upped for a reunion tour and album.

Reorientation

Butterflies & Wheels pointed me to this Comment Is Free post by Theo Hobson. A good shot by the theist side in the spitball match with Big Atheism ™ . I don’t want to really want to dwell on the spitball match, but the post includes a useful definition of prayer:

… The believer does not pray in order to try to influence God's will. Instead, he's trying to influence his own will, to make it conform to his worldview. Prayer is essentially a matter of saying "Help me, God, to be what I should be". The believer acknowledges a conflict between what he is naturally inclined to be, and what he feels he should strive to be. …

Also, the believer reminds himself of the worldview he subscribes to. In the case of Christianity, he re-states his belief in the coming of God's kingdom, which is a sort of utopian hope that all will be well. And he acknowledges his own fallibility, the fact that he is part of the problem, in need of radical reform, dangerously prone to evil. And he acknowledges that everything is dependent on God, that he is the absolute authority.

A lot of Christians will object to a description of faith as “a sort of utopian hope.” It resonates with me, though. In the tug-of-war between faith and doubt, one makes a hopeful resolution to live as if the religious teachings are true.

Somewhere I came across a comment that two sentiments always appropriate in a prayer are Help Me and Thank You. Indeed, those may be THE two sentiments appropriate for prayer. I have a friend who is studying the theology of gratitude, and she defines it as reorientation. The point is not to make God do anything, it is to change our attitude toward the reality that we have to accept and make the best of.

"No Separation of Politics and Ethics"

This is a great manifesto of religious progressivism by Tom Perriello, Democratic candidate for Congress in Virginia's Fifth District.

It is worth noting a third group that I do not consider part of the movement – pundits who say values voters are a reason for Dems to run to the middle and quote the Bible more. This argument is morally and strategically bankrupt. My argument earlier this week was for conviction politics over poll-driven politics both because the former is a better way to win and a better way to make a difference once we win. Far from endorsing centrism, the vast majority of progressive faith organizers I know are furious with Dems for not being progressive enough on poverty, health care, living wage, FISA, torture, the War, climate change, and other issues. ... The work of people in this spirit is not new. From abolition to worker's rights to civil rights, this version of the religious left has been a leader in American progressivism since our founding.

Perriello cites the role of theologians who signed a letter decrying Alberto Gonzalez's AG nomination, on anti-torture grounds, as breaking the logjam for progressives who were afraid to oppose Gonzalez due to his Latino heritage. I particularly like the fact that Perriello disconnects the Religious Left from "centrism."

Another snippet:

One woman was defending me last night by telling a couple of the critics to give me a break since I was trying to win in a religious Southern district. I sincerely appreciate the solidarity, but let me be clear that this is not a strategy for winning elections. These are my convictions. I genuinely believe that a culture of instant gratification is part of what enables a bomb-first foreign policy, torture, and a Wal-Mart economy. It is my faith that makes me more likely to oppose torture in all its forms than to get into a pragmatic debate about whether it helps or hurts our national security.

I have one reservation about Perriello's candidacy, and that reservation led me to scour TPM and Perriello's own website and Google, looking for his position on abortion. He never states that position clearly, which says something in itself. By his associations I infer that Perriello is not strongly pro-choice. He may be somewhere in the neighborhood of Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, who disapproves of abortion-on-demand, but isn't a full-on woman-hating pregnancy enforcer; for instance, Casey favors the availability of the morning-after pill. But the point of Perriello's career as an activist has been to define the Religious Left broadly, as concerned with social justice issues, including a "consistent ethic of life" which presumably includes reducing unwanted pregnancies as well as opposing capital punishment.

Perriello wants to address issues of "private" behavior such as consumer culture and pop culture, which are going to be hard to advance in some quarters of the Democratic Party. I'm willing to hear him out (stay tuned for a post on sustainability and anti-globalism--coming sometime in the month of November, I promise!) but it will get some liberals' anti-religion guard up.

That said, I'm rooting like hell for Tom Perriello, because I know his district (I'm heading up there for the long Thanksgiving weekend) and I was really pissed at the GOP incumbent there, Virgil Goode, who demagogued on the election of Keith Ellison, the first-ever Muslim member of Congress, in 2006.