Hank Kalet

Military matters

I won’t argue with Blue Texan’s point about John McCain’s hypocrisy, but I have to wonder whether progressives should be making the argument in this way — even if it is meant as tongue in cheek:

St. McCain is such a global test surrendermonkey Chamberlain appeaser.

There is the danger that someone might take you seriously and think the writer advocates cowboy diplimacy.

This approach, by Matthew Yglesias, addresses the central issue here, which is the notion of priorities and focus:

there’s more to life than being a prisoner of DC conventional wisdom — “McCain, like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney may have years of Washington experience” but they’ve all made “flawed judgments and as a consequence we’re less safe.” In a crucial point, Rice observed (emphasis added) that a McCain administration would be “very much a continuation and intensification of the failed Bush policy, remaining in Iraq indefinitely not investing adequately in Afghanistan.” According to Rice we need to “show that we have learned from our mistakes in Iraq and elsewhere and are prepared to cooperate and collaborate on the challenges we face,” namely al-Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, and climate change.

I know Steve Clemons has expressed some concerns that Team Obama may have a problematic unwillingness to set priorities in foreign policy, but I thought Rice was admirably clear here. The question of cooperation and the question of priorities goes hand-in-hand. When you’re willing to define what it is you think is really important, then the stage has been set for other countries to work with you. The kind of deterioration in America’s ability to cooperate with other countries that we’ve seen over the past seven years stems not just from “cowboy diplomacy” but from Bush’s grandiosity and lack of focus.

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I want to draw attention to a New Jersey blogger who has, I think, summed up the failures of the Clinton campaign and the apparent narcissism that fuels what is looking more and more like a lost cause.

Clinton, as Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast writes, has attempted to paint herself as something that she isn’t — a progressive — while at the same time being weighed down by her husband.

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I see her talk about creating good jobs at good wages, I want to shout at the TV, “Then why do you cozy up to the very companies that want to send those very jobs overseas?” She gives lip service to “retraining”, but says nothing about the nature of the jobs for which already highly skilled IT workers should “retrain.” Granted, she’s in a difficult position, because she either has to run on her words or run on her (and let’s face it, Bill’s) record. And for someone who refuses to ever admit that she was wrong, she has a long track record of supporting policies that she now repudiates on the stump without ever using the words “wrong” or “mistake.”

She adds this:

Clinton’s biggest problem is that the transformational nature of her candidacy is by definition muted by the inescapable fact that a Hillary Clinton presidency is not something entirely new, and it’s not uncharted territory. We’ve been here before. Assuming that the Obama Train continues its relentless roll into Denver and wraps things up by then, the irony of the Clinton candidacy will be that the first viable woman candidates’s aspirations were largely thwarted by the very husband whose own departing popularity ratings in 2000, after surviving eight years of Republican witch hunts, was still higher than George W. Bush’s have been for most of his presidency. Bill Clinton was supposed to be her biggest asset, and it seems he’s been her biggest liability, for all that people DO remember his presidency fondly. He’s become a liability because without the presidency and the ability to formulate policy as a backdrop, and when the campaign’s back is against the wall, all of Bill Clinton’s flaws have come to the fore — the “It’s all about me” narcissism. The need for attention and adulation. The relentlessness that’s no longer cloaked in a smile and a lower lip curled so fetchingly under his teeth.

Essentially, Clinton became the frontrunner early when she was the only one with serious name recognition and the party was still lost in a romantic lust for a successful past. Not that the past was all that great or that the party was all that healthy during the Clinton years, but Bill and Hillary were living in the White House and George W. Bush was not.

Once the campaign began and Barack Obama presented himself as an alternative that was looking ahead, her campaign started to crumble.

While there remains a possibility that she can rebound and win the nomination, the window is closing. And the smaller the opening becomes, the more of the old Clinton streetfighter attitude becomes apparent — as well as the sense of entitlement. Remember, the Clinton presidency was won built on the demise of the old Democratic coalition, one that made welfare reform a cause celebre and triangulation its chief philosophical attitude, making elements of the GOP Contract With America its own to maintain its grip on the White House.

I have no illusions about an Obama presidency. He’s already shown a willingness to tack right when he thinks it will be beneficial (his healthcare plan, for instance), but I like his energy and I think he probably has better progressive instincts than Hillary Clinton, more genuine progressive sensibilities, and is more likely to craft a larger coalition to get the right kinds of things done.

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McCain’s supposed advantage

John McCain, as Eugene Robinson says today, has “a big head start in the Fiesta of Forced Smiles — the post-primary, pre-convention phase of the presidential campaign in which former opponents and party elders pledge their support for the presumptive nominee in a photogenic show of unity.”

But that does not mean that McCain has a huge advantage over his as-yet-unnamed opponent.

That’s because, as Robinson says, he “intends to run on positions that most voters reject,” while tying himself to an increasingly irrelevent incumbent. McCain remains very much in favor of the Iraq War, a supporter of the long-war theory that could have us stuck in the desert sands indefinitely with little to gain.

E.J. Dionne Jr. points out how McCain’s thinking could have delitirious effects beyond Iraq and the Muslim world.

(O)ne of John McCain‘s favorite lines — his declaration that “the transcendent challenge of the 21st century is radical Islamic extremists,” or, as he sometimes says, “extremism” — could define the 2008 election.

Whether McCain is right or wrong matters to everything the United States will do in the coming years. It is incumbent upon McCain to explain what he really means by “transcendent challenge.”

Presumably, he’s saying that Islamic extremism is more important than everything else — the rise of China and India as global powers, growing resistance to American influence in Europe, the weakening of America’s global economic position, the disorder and poverty in large parts of Africa, the alienation of significant parts of Latin America from the United States. Is it in our national interest for all these issues to take a back seat to terrorism?

McCain makes his claim even stronger when he uses the phrase “21st century.” Does he mean that in the year 2100, Americans will look back and say that everything else that happened in the century paled in comparison with the war against terrorism?

I know people who answer yes, but the fact remains that terrorism is not an ideology and our battle with it has to be part of a larger, more comprehensive approach to the world. While Osama bin Laden makes for a nice poster boy for extremism, the inferno that has been blazing in Iraq — and in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, etc. — is a result of the power imbalance. Equalize the power — more democracy, of course (though, not by the barrel of a gun), but also more sharing of resources and a greater willingness on the part of the remaining great power to listen and cooperate — and you have a chance to neutralize the disaffection that results in car bombings.

Given this, one has to wonder whether McCain’s vaunted foreign policy credentials will offer a boost to his candidacy in November, or end up an albatross.

If he can’t make the foreign policy argument, his candidacy is dead. As Robinson points out, his thinking on our increasingly dour economic climate is …. well, let’s just say that his admission a while back that he knows little about economics sums things up.

Both candidates will enter the general election cycle with some baggage, and perhaps some bloody wounds, but they still have to be considered the favorites to win a four-year lease to the White House.

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Runner’s diary, Tuesday

Three miles today in 26:36, despite being dogged by a terrible cold that has my stomache woozy and my head in a fog. I have a lot of writing ahead of me, so I need to find a way to clear myself up (took some decongestant). No guarantee I’ll hit the treadmill tomorrow, though.

Music: a mix

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