Tag: Barack Obama

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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Questions on the environment

John McCain is considered to be a Republican with a strong environmental record. Both Democrats are, as well. This, as The Nation points out, creates the potential that we could have a useful conversation on the topic.

An easy place to start would be with the California emissions plan, which requires a waiver from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The Bush-run agency has refused to issue the waiver. What would the candidates do? Would McCain, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton tell the EPA to grant California its exemption — and by extension, grant similar extensions to the dozen or so other states waiting to find out the fate of the California plan? (Obama and Clinton both told the California League of Conservation Voters they support California; McCain did not answer the group’s survey, but he did endorse the California plan during the GOP California debate — though it was on federalist grounds that allowed him also to endorse Louisiana’s right to drill off its coast.)

The answer to this question would go a long way toward understanding which of these candidates would actually move the country forward on the issue. McCain, for intance, has a lifetime score of 26 percent from the League of Conservation Voters, with a 2005 score of 43 percent and a 2006 score of 29 percent. Obama’s lifetime score is 96 percent (95 percent in 2005 and 100 percent in 2006) and Clinton’s is 90 percent (95 percent and 71 percent).

Depending on how the political press plays this, McCain’s reputation as an environmental-friendly candidate could neutralize the environment as an issue in November. Reputation, however, is meaningless. What has he actually done and what does he actually say? And what the records of the other remaining candidates? How do they compare?

This raises a larger question of narrative and the roles in which the press cast candidates. It is not the meddia’s responsibility to pigeonhole those running, but to explode the myths the candidates use to sell themselves, to force them to do more than use vague words like “maverick,” “change” and “experience.”

John McCain may indeed be a maverick, but within what context? And does that make him an environmentalist? I’m hoping we’ll get some answers between now and November and, assuming we do, I think it will become eminently clear which of these candidates is greenest.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
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The center cannot hold

Over the summer, I tried to read Barrack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope. I abandoned the effort about two chapters in, frustrated by the book’s seeming conflation of stepping away from partisan thinking with an aggressive refusal to stake out strong positions based on a core philosophy or ideology. Sen. Obama, in his book and in his campaign, has confused the willingess to and necessity of breaking with party orthodoxy with a need to avoid ideology altogether.

It is why, though I liked some of what he has said as a candidate and viewed his youth as a plus, I just can’t see myself getting behind his candidacy during the primaries.

Paul Krugman, in today’s New York Times, offers the latest in what has been a long line of what I will call Obama triangulations that leave him sounding like the Clintons — a soulless politician, lacking a philosophical core.

Krugman raises questions not only about Obama’s flawed health care plan — universal coverage it is not — but about his defense of it and his attacks on his opponents:

Mr. Obama, then, is wrong on policy. Worse yet, the words he uses to defend his position make him sound like Rudy Giuliani inveighing against “socialized medicine”: he doesn’t want the government to “force” people to have insurance, to “penalize” people who don’t participate.

I recently castigated Mr. Obama for adopting right-wing talking points about a Social Security “crisis.” Now he’s echoing right-wing talking points on health care.

What seems to have happened is that Mr. Obama’s caution, his reluctance to stake out a clearly partisan position, led him to propose a relatively weak, incomplete health care plan. Although he declared, in his speech announcing the plan, that “my plan begins by covering every American,” it didn’t — and he shied away from doing what was necessary to make his claim true.

Now, in the effort to defend his plan’s weakness, he’s attacking his Democratic opponents from the right — and in so doing giving aid and comfort to the enemies of reform.

It is a troubling tendency that, I suspect, will haunt him thorughout this campaign and could result in the kind of flawed presidency — should he win the White House — that we witnessed during the Clinton years.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.