Tag: presidential election

It is amazing to me how quickly we alter our expectations once we know the results, how fungeable our analysis can be depending on what kind of narrative we’re hoping to write.

If the numbers hold, then Hillary Clinton wins Pennsylvania by 10 percentage points — the minimum she needed to seem viable. It is either a big win for her or an expected win; Obama was supposed to lose, or he stumbled badly, etc.

Part of me wonders how much of this race has been dicated by the calendar. For the most part, every state has gone to the candidate who was expected to win that state, with Obama’s big February win streak tied mostly to the states that held those February primaries.

How might we have viewed the election if Ohio and South Carolina swapped places, for instance, or if some of his big states came after Pennsylvania? I suspect the roles would be reversed (and it is likely Obama would have been called on to get out).

I also wonder just how much McCain benefits from the prolonged race. Pennsylvania adds itself to the long list of states that set turnout records (Democrats have turned out about twice as many voters as the GOP) and I suspect that the energy surrounding this primary will infuse the Democratic campaign in the fall. Plus, McCain has yet to face the harsh light of the campaign this year, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Basically, the dynamics remain in flux.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
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The clearest way to explain my thoughts on empire and the unlikelihood that any of the major-party candidates will do anything to slow its growth is to quote Chris Floyd from his Empire Burlesque blog:

All indications continue to suggest that those who look to Obama to undo “the terrible damage done over the past eight years,” as Bruce Springsteen put it in his public endorsement of Obama last Friday, will be disappointed – especially as they watch Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other perpetrators of war crimes enjoy their comfortable, lucrative retirements in the years to come.

Basically, the Washington power structure is all too willing to allow the Bush cadre to fade peacefully into the sunset, to retire, as Floyd writes, with nice pensions and rich book deals without having to pay the price for their brazen destruction of the constitution and the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis.

It leaves progressives like me in a difficult position — do we vote for Obama knowing full well that he will disappoint us, or do we vote for someone like Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader and potentially shift enough electoral votes to John McCain?

We’ve been down this road before, and will likely head down it again. While some on the left blame Nader and his supporters for the 2000 election, claiming he siphoned off just enough votes to allow Bush to take Florida and the election despite Gore’s popular vote majority, the reality is that other factors — fraud, human error, Gore’s inept campaign, press bias — led to the Bush debacle.

But that doesn’t mean that, if enough voters back McKinney or Nader, it couldn’t swing the election to McCain. That’s what makes this such a tough call.

Chris Hedges is ready to walk away from the Democrats. During a radio interview on WHYY’s Radio Times, he expands on a theme he focused on in an op-ed in this weekend’s Philadelphia Inquirer. He writes that the American left has failed, that it has lost its nerve and

has been neutralized and rendered ineffectual as a political force because of its refusal to hold fast on core issues, from universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans, to the steadfast protection of workers’ rights, to an immediate withdrawal from the failed occupation of Iraq to a fight against a militarized economy that is hollowing the country out from the inside.

Let the politicians compromise. This is their job. It is not ours. If the left wants to regain influence in the nation’s political life, it must be willing to walk away from the Democratic Party, even if Barack Obama is the nominee, and back progressive, third-party candidates until the Democrats feel enough heat to adopt our agenda. We must be willing to say no. If not, we become slaves.

The left, he says, has forgotten a central lesson of its own history, that political change is “created by the building of movements.”

The object of a movement is not to achieve political power at any price. It is to create pressure and mobilize citizens around core issues of justice. It is to force politicians and parties to respond to our demands. It is about rewarding, through support and votes, those who champion progressive ideals and punishing those who refuse. And the current Democratic Party, as any worker in a former manufacturing town in Pennsylvania can tell you, has betrayed us.

And this has left the field to the corporations, what Hedges calls the “rise of a corporate state, and by that I mean a state that no longer works on behalf of its citizens but the corporations.” Progressives have allowed the Democrats to abandon their core because the Democrats know that progressives have nowhere to turn and are too afraid — especially after seven-plus years of Bush and Co. — to flee the party. Demcorats know that Progressives will vote for Obama in the general election, regardless of his votes on bankruptcy and other corporate reforms and his lack of anything more than rhetoric on the war. And they will vote for Clinton — should she win the nomination — despite her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion and her vote on Iran.

Obama and Clinton both will be better than McCain, but they will not challenge the corporate status quo. They will not challenge American exceptionalism. Their presidencies would be better, but only by several degrees. They are not reformers.

And we shouldn’t pretend that they are.

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

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Most of the analysis of last night’s presidential debate has focused on the first half, during which the moderators seemed to be targeting Sen. Barack Obama with some pretty harsh questions about his associations, while letting Sen. Hillary Clinton off relatively easily. (I didn’t see the debate, but have seen a load of clips and have read the transcript in The New York Times.)

Most of the news stories also focused on the first half — a segment that best can be described as “dog pile on the candidate” — leaving much of the real substance for political junkies to ferret out for ourselves. (Tom Shales, the TV critic for The Washington Post, hit it on the head when he said the debate “was another step downward for network news.”)

Consider it a disservice to voters, especially when you read this exchange on Iran, which makes it abundantly clear that this election will not offer a sea change in the American imperium, only a change in attitude and tone:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Obama, let’s stay in the region. Iran continues to pursue a nuclear option. Those weapons, if they got them, would probably pose the greatest threat to Israel. During the Cold War, it was the United States policy to extend deterrence to our NATO allies. An attack on Great Britain would be treated as if it were an attack on the United States. Should it be U.S. policy now to treat an Iranian attack on Israel as if it were an attack on the United States?

SEN. OBAMA: Well, our first step should be to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranians, and that has to be one of our top priorities. And I will make it one of our top priorities when I’m president of the United States.

I have said I will do whatever is required to prevent the Iranians from obtaining nuclear weapons. I believe that that includes direct talks with the Iranians where we are laying out very clearly for them, here are the issues that we find unacceptable, not only development of nuclear weapons but also funding terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as their anti-Israel rhetoric and threats towards Israel. I believe that we can offer them carrots and sticks, but we’ve got to directly engage and make absolutely clear to them what our posture is.

Now, my belief is that they should also know that I will take no options off the table when it comes to preventing them from using nuclear weapons or obtaining nuclear weapons, and that would include any threats directed at Israel or any of our allies in the region.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: So you would extend our deterrent to Israel?

SENATOR OBAMA: As I’ve said before, I think it is very important that Iran understands that an attack on Israel is an attack on our strongest ally in the region, one that we — one whose security we consider paramount, and that — that would be an act of aggression that we — that I would — that I would consider an attack that is unacceptable, and the United States would take appropriate action.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Clinton, would you?

SENATOR CLINTON: Well, in fact, George, I think that we should be looking to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel. Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United States, but I would do the same with other countries in the region.

You know, we are at a very dangerous point with Iran. The Bush policy has failed. Iran has not been deterred. They continue to try to not only obtain the fissile material for nuclear weapons but they are intent upon and using their efforts to intimidate the region and to have their way when it comes to the support of terrorism in Lebanon and elsewhere.

And I think that this is an opportunity, with skillful diplomacy, for the United States to go to the region and enlist the region in a security agreement vis-a-vis Iran. It would give us three tools we don’t now have.

Number one, we’ve got to begin diplomatic engagement with Iran, and we want the region and the world to understand how serious we are about it. And I would begin those discussions at a low level. I certainly would not meet with Ahmadinejad, because even again today he made light of 9/11 and said he’s not even sure it happened and that people actually died. He’s not someone who would have an opportunity to meet with me in the White House. But I would have a diplomatic process that would engage him.

And secondly, we’ve got to deter other countries from feeling that they have to acquire nuclear weapons. You can’t go to the Saudis or the Kuwaitis or UAE and others who have a legitimate concern about Iran and say: Well, don’t acquire these weapons to defend yourself unless you’re also willing to say we will provide a deterrent backup and we will let the Iranians know that, yes, an attack on Israel would trigger massive retaliation, but so would an attack on those countries that are willing to go under this security umbrella and forswear their own nuclear ambitions. And finally we cannot permit Iran to become a nuclear weapons power. And this administration has failed in our efforts to convince the rest of the world that that is a danger, not only to us and not just to Israel but to the region and beyond.

Therefore we have got to have this process that reaches out, beyond even who we would put under the security umbrella, to get the rest of the world on our side to try to impose the kind of sanctions and diplomatic efforts that might prevent this from occurring.

It sounds all well and good, until you consider that both candidates are speaking as though Israel and the United States are interchangeable and that, under a Clinton plan, a new security umbrella would apply not just to Israel but to much of the rest of the Middle East. A threat to Saudi Arabia or Egypt, for instance, would trigger a U.S. response. This is an expansion of the notion of self-defense that, while falling short of Bush’s doctrine of pre-emption, leaves the United States as the international “decider” — a role we have no right to play.

As for the wretched approach taken generally to the debate, I think Glenn Greenwald offers one of the more salient takes:

My favorite (unintentionally revealing) media commentary about the debate is from The Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut and Dan Balz, who devoted paragraph after paragraph to describing the substance-free “issues” that consumed most of the debate — Obama’s “remarks about small-town values, questions about his patriotism and the incendiary sermons of his former pastor . . . gaffes, missteps and past statements” — and, at the end of the article, they added:

The debate also touched on Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, taxes, the economy, guns and affirmative action.

It’s just not possible to express the wretched state of our establishment press better than that sentence does.

‘Nuff said.

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

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