After the Future

Wright a Resentful Egomaniac? 2

New Republic's Noam Scheiber quotes from David Mendell's Obama biography to explain why Obama joined Wright's church in the first place :

Wright earned bachelor's and master's degrees in sacred music from Howard University and initially pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School before interrupting his studies to minister full-time. His intellectualism and black militancy put him at odds with some Baptist ministers around Chicago, with whom he often sparred publicly, and he finally accepted a position at Trinity. ...

Wright remains a maverick among Chicago's vast assortment of black preachers. He will question Scripture when he feels it forsakes common sense; he is an ardent foe of mandatory school prayer; and he is a staunch advocate for homosexual rights, which is almost unheard-of among African-American ministers. Gay and lesbian couples, with hands clasped, can be spotted in Trinity's pews each Sunday. Even if some blacks consider Wright's church serving only the bourgeois set, his ministry attracts a broad cross section of Chicago's black community. Obama first noticed the church because Wright had placed a "Free Africa" sign out front to protest continuing apartheid. The liberal, Columbia-educated Obama was attracted to Wright's cerebral and inclusive nature, as opposed to the more socially conservative and less educated ministers around Chicago. Wright developed into a counselor and mentor to Obama as Obama sought to understand the power of Christianity in the lives of black Americans, and as he grappled with the complex vagaries of Chicago's black political scene. "Trying to hold a conversation with a guy like Barack, and him trying to hold a conversation with some ministers, it's like you are dating someone and she wants to talk to you about Rosie and what she saw on Oprah, and that's it," Wright explained. "But here I was, able to stay with him lockstep as we moved from topic to topic. . . . He felt comfortable asking me questions that were postmodern, post-Enlightenment and that college-educated and graduate school-trained people wrestle with when it comes to the faith. We talked about race and politics. I was not threatened by those questions." ...

But more than that, Trinity's less doctrinal approach to the Bible intrigued and attracted Obama. "Faith to him is how he sees the human condition," Wright said. "Faith to him is not . . . litmus test, mouth-spouting, quoting Scripture. It's what you do with your life, how you live your life. That's far more important than beating someone over the head with Scripture that says women shouldn't wear pants or if you drink, you're going to hell. That's just not who Barack is."

Makes sense to me, and connects better with the Wright we all saw on the Moyer's show. Negative comments following Scheiber's post are the thing that drive me nuts about this whole episode. The key is to understand that the political is not the religious. They influence one another, but both are completely different forms of discourse. That seems to be a hard concept for so many people to grasp.

Wright a Resentful Egomaniac? (Updated)

Is this a style controversy or a substance controversy?  I see it as the first, but it's being played in the media as if it's the second.

I'm no expert in African-American Christianity, but I think that Wright is right when he says that this controversy is not primarily about Obama or him; it's about the Black Church.  Of course it's about Obama, but it wouldn't be a controversy if the style and tradition of Black preaching was not perceived so negatively by the media and white Americans who are uncomfortable with its emotional and often hyperbolic style.  Wright's sermons are being treated as if they were political speech, and they simply are not.  It's religious speech. It's a prophetic style of speech in a Black idiom. I think that is the point Wright is trying to make when he says that he must speak as a minister of the Church and Obama must speak as a politician.  I don't see that as a put down of Obama, but rather as simply an attempt to distinguish between the two types of speech.

So is Wright throwing Obama under the bus as Olbermann and his Obama-sympathetic crew seem to think?  Is Wright an egomaniac envious of Obama's prominence and is now seeking to push his way back into the limelight that Obama's campaign pushed him out of?  I don't see it--at least not in the clips being shown of his appearances in the last couple of days.

Is what Wright is saying the problem or that he has chosen not to crawl under a rock until after the election? What has he said that is so awful? I didn't hear it. If someone else did, tell me. So I could be wrong about all this, but I don't see it.

***

UPDATE: Apparently political realities are coercing Obama to disassociate himself from Wright. Here's what he said, if you haven't read it yet:

The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago. His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church.

They certainly don't portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I might not know him as well as I thought, either.

I think it has more to do with whom Wright is playing to.  Dana Milbank sets the stage:

Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks ("God damn America") and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.

In front of 30 television cameras, Wright's audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama's vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio's April Ryan, confirmed that Wright's security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

Wright suggested that Obama was insincere in distancing himself from his pastor. "He didn't distance himself," Wright announced. "He had to distance himself, because he's a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American."

Explaining further, Wright said friends had written to him and said, "We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected." The minister continued: "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."

I would defend my earlier comments that this is more about style than substance.  But it's also clear that part of the substance of Wright's remarks is grounded in deeply felt anger. We can argue whether or not the anger is understandable or justified, but it's not arguable that Obama cannot allow himself to be associated with it.  It destroys the whole premise of his campaign.

 

Garry Wills on Lincoln, Obama, & Race

Jeremiah Wright was Obama's John Brown. Lincoln had to dissociate himself from the fiery and divisive Brown. He did so, and called attempts to link him with Brown "malicious slander." But some thought that he did not go far enough in denouncing Brown. Lincoln did not call him a fanatic or insult those who sympathized with him. He said Brown's attempt was "absurd" because it could not work. The reason he was so circumspect is not far to seek. Though he said no Republican was officially connected with Brown's raid, many Republican sympathizers favored Brown, including such respectable figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, the particular hero of Lincoln's own law partner, William Herndon, was the Unitarian minister and reformer Theodore Parker, who secretly helped fund Brown. Lincoln had carefully avoided contact with Parker, an outspoken abolitionist. But he clearly knew and liked his work, especially his often used formula for democracy—government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Lincoln's political responsibility was not to inveigh against abolitionists, but to take the practical steps possible toward opposing slavery. In this situation, he pleaded with each side in the dispute to respect the good faith of the other side and work toward acts that would be both in accord with the Constitution (as it then existed) and respectful of the moral objections of those opposing slavery. As Lincoln would not denounce those sympathizing with Brown, Obama did not reject the black community that felt a sympathy (though not an agreement) with Reverend Wright. This was especially important to some blacks because Wright's main message was that blacks should achieve their own goals without begging for a handout from whites. Obama, who had seen the results of this message in his community organizing, rightly said that this is a particularly American approach:

It means taking full responsibility for our own lives—by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American—and, yes, conservative—notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright's sermons.

It is clear that Reverend Wright's church, which was fully supported by the United Church of Christ's white national leadership, was much more than the wild statements of its former pastor. Some suggested that any decent person would storm out of a church that had known such a pastor. But many decent persons, and not only blacks, had refused to do just that—and such people were also being denounced. Martin Marty, the respected church historian at the University of Chicago, had often attended Wright's services and found inspiration there. In some ways, Marty is to Jeremiah Wright what Emerson was to John Brown. Read more.

I hope I'm not proved to be a victim of my own wishful thinking on this, and I may very well be, but I think that Obama, like Lincoln, has qualities that will enable him to repel these kinds of small-minded attacks. No candidate is without vulnerabilities, but some are more easily branded by their vulnerabilities because there really isn't much about them to counterbalance those vulnerabilities. Kerry and Dukakis were decent people unfairly treated, but they didn't have enough personal soul power or whatever you want to call it to repel the slime that was slung at them, so it stuck.   It was true of the 2000 vintage Gore as well; he might be a different candidate today.  I'm not sure about that.  Bill Clinton is a complex, talented politician, but in the end there isn't really much more to him than his prodigious appetites.

Someting else drives Obama, and while he may only by the skin of his teeth win the election, I think he will in the end win in November, and if he gets eight years, he just might be the one to get us back to our better selves.

Jeremiah Wright on Moyers' Show

I don't know if it will make a difference, but Moyers' interview with Jeremiah Wright on his show Friday provided a refreshing alternative to the kind of treatment this decent and deeply Christian man has been getting and will continue to get at the hands of political hatchet men.  I hope it will be watched at least by most of the Democratic superdelegates. This is not a man to be feared; if we had a sane political culture, he would be embraced.  And to me it's not surprising that someone as sane a Obama would be drawn into the faith by such a man as Jeremiah Wright. This is one of those honest men who has made a significant difference.

I don't think watching the interview changed my opinion of Wright; it confirmed what I suspected was true of him. I didn't take offense at his remarks. His "goddamn America" was a condemnation of the government, not of the American people, and as the interview points out, Wright was pointing out that the behavior of the American government, like unjust governments throughout history, requires such condemnation. Anybody who questions that such condemnation is beyond the authority of the pulpit simply does not understand the three-thousand-year-old prophetic tradition. And if there ever was an American government worthy of such condemnation, it is this one.

That kind of prophetic style is something, quite frankly, we need more of from the nation's pulpits because Americans aren't going to find out about the truth from the mainstream media, which has its own vested interest in keeping Americans in state of denial and forgetfulness about its government's crimes. But nothing from the pulpit will be taken seriously by anyone unless it rings true, unless it has real moral authority. And that moral authority comes from those who have been willing to pay a price by the kinds of lives they have lived.

It comes from experience and a level of thoughtfulness about that experience. It doesn't come from inhabiting an ecclesiastical role or mouthing ecclesiastical talking points. It comes out of deep conviction intelligently expressed. Wright has lived that kind of thoughtful life, and he has earned the right to be heard and to be taken seriously. It's to Obama's credit that he has done so.

Pennsylvania (Updates 1-2)

This is getting to a point of pure facetiousness--looks like she's just going to make it into double digits. Now she'll get the money she needs to keep this going. It's as if the election gods really are playing a joke on us. And so it continues to go on and on and on. It's a great win for the forces that seek to keep us stuck in the mud. It's as if we simply don't have the collective will to break free.

Listen, it all boils down to something very simple. It's in part about race, but more fundamentally half the electorate  votes for the familiar and what seems safe and the other half votes for the future which for the first group is less comfortable because less sure. Pennsylvania has spoken about what it wants. It could have ended this drama by voting for Obama, but it  chose to prolong the agony. So be it. The rest of us have to endure the consequences.

UPDATE 2:  David Corn has it right:

During the Monica Lewinsky scandal--when many pundits and Clinton foes predicted Bill Clinton's demise--the Clintons learned a valuable lesson: sometimes you just have to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving ahead, paying no heed to those who say you have no choice but to quit. They had their party--most of it--behind them during those days. And now Hillary Clinton, with significant voter support, is plodding ahead, stuck with a strategy that at this point leaves her only the nuclear option of nullifying Obama's primary and caucus victories. But, she can reason, if I am not dead, then I'm still alive--and still have a chance. Politically speaking, she is somewhere between dead and alive. The undead? The next primaries may nudge her closer to one of those poles. And, once again, they may not be decisive. But as of now, amid the glow of her Pennsylvania victory, it's up to Hillary Clinton to decide at what point might rest the bitter end.

Can he superdelegates please put her out of her misery?  It would have been easier if her win were only 5-8 points.  Nevertheless. 

But the superdelegates are afraid that though they shoot her, they cannot kill her, so why risk facing the wrath of the undead which will be wreaked on them who did not stand by her.

UPDATE 2: From Sullivan.  It's all about brand loyalty:

This rings true to me:

Almost all working class folks have about the same knowledge of politics as you and I have about cars.  Which is to say, on one level, quite a lot, but it's not what they devote their lives to understanding.  So, as we do in the case of cars, they turn to other mechanisms, such as brand loyalty, to make their decisions.

What they know about Clinton is that she was a part of the Administration that spent eight years talking about issues that were important to them and presiding over an era of peace and prosperity. So what they are going on here is familiarity and positive experiences, the same thing that I do when I buy only Japanese cars.  This is a perfectly reasonable way of going about doing things even if I might make a mistake and select a very high quality Japanese car (Hillary in this analogy) instead of a surprisingly better this year in spite of lack of experience American car (Obama).  They are not are suckers who are fooled by Hillary's Crown Royal shot (perhaps if it had been JD) or whether Obama's "bitter" comment represents the totality of his views any more than I am a sucker who is fooled (or influenced at all) by television advertisements for cars.

I found out that a friend supported Clinton last night. I was stunned. I asked him why. He said he liked the 1990s, they were good times, he'd like them back. That was it. He had no real feelings about Obama, but he knew the Clinton name and associated it with good times. I pushed further. That was it. He's a man who isn't too interested in politics but knew enough to back the familiar. It may be that simple.

I think it is that simple. There are two corollaries: First, new loyalties can be formed. The Obama brand is one that I think will come to be accepted and valued. Second, Obama has this problem only in relation to Clinton. McCain may have been around for a long time, but he does not have the Clinton brand equity.

Tom Frank on Bittergate

Apparently Tom Frank is going to have a Wednesday column in the Wall Street Journal starting May 14.  I thought this piece in the WSJ was pretty interesting.  Closing paragraph:

If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don't care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I'll fly the plane myself.

So say we all.

Redbaiting's Return? (Updated)

Looks like it. Kristol and Lieberman want you to believe Obama's a Marxist, and Hillary's newest ploy is to argue that Obama will be crucified by the GOP in the general when it starts exploiting his association with 70s radicals Wm. Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

We knew this kind of thing was coming. We knew that the entrenched powers and interests will pull out all the stops to prevent someone coming into power who is serious about changing the rules by which the entrenched remain entrenched. And it should be clear that many, many Democrats are as complicit in that structure of power and privilege as the Republicans are.  And they dislike what Obama represents as much as the GOP does--and so Hillary is their girl.

Since the stakes are so very high, they will do whatever it takes to prevent Obama from being elected. And so now the strategy is simply to paint Obama as the candidate of the hard left. Hillary's strategy is transparent in this regard.  Her being behind this whole Ayers thing and her comments yesterday about MoveOn are designed to paint Obama as George McGovern deja vu. She wants the superdelegates to believe that she is the only choice if they don't want the disaster of 1972 again.   

I've resisted indulging in any anti-Hillary screeds here. I've said simply that I don't want her to be the Democratic nominee because she really is old school when we need new school.  I've said I don't like her militarism and don't trust her to effect the kinds of foreign policy changes that we need to recover from the Bush idiocies.  And I've said that I would vote for her if she were the candidate.  I'm not sure I could now. I've long thought of her and Bill as Republican Lite politicians, but she has come to embody everything that is most loathsome about Republican Heavy. 

I did not at first give any credence to the idea that she wanted McCain to win this year so she could run again in 2012, but I'm beginning to think there may be something to it.  She probably feels more comfortable with what McCain represents than with what Obama does. Neither she nor McCain really want the basic system of power and privilege to change. That system defines political reality as they understand it, and both understand that world, are comfortable with it, and have succeeded playing by its rules. They don't see that anything is fundamentally wrong, and think it's naive to think it could be changed, anyway.  Hillary and McCain are both anti-change candidates.

But I doubt that this redbaiting strategy is going to work well enough to turn things around for Clinton's candidacy.  And there's an advantage in this business about Ayers and Dohrn coming out now rather than in the Fall.  It gives the Obama campaign time to develop a defense and counterattack, and I think the Obama group gets it in a way the Kerry group didn't. This campaign will not allow Obama to be framed.

Rather than be afraid of the big, bad red-baiting Republicans we should remember that they have a profoundly flawed candidate, and I trust the Obama/Axelrod/Plouffe team to develop an effective strategy to insure McCain's defeat that will significantly contrast with Kerry's inept attempt to defeat the even more profoundly flawed Bush. And I trust a majority of Americans to be disgusted with this kind of thing. Nevertheless, the sooner Obama can be done with Clinton the better.  She needs to be sidelined as soon as possible.

***

UPDATE: To reinforce the point about Hillary's entrenchment as the anti-change candidate, I just saw this Michael Savage quote over at Sullivan's:

Hillary, I know what to expect from her, which is eight horrible years, but I'm not so sure she's still a Leninist. Her husband has made so much money in so many different capitalist ways that I actually think they've matured and become good Americans. [laughs] No, there's a paradoxical statement I've just made. In other words, I think the Clintons probably started out as far-leftist characters in their early years, but they've been around so long in the power structure and now, finally, they've been allowed to make so much money and they've circulated with the rich for so long that I think she's a safe bet. In fact, there's an argument to be made that she might be a safer bet than McCain in that regard.

Read the Media Matters piece on Savage which quotes him as saying that if Hillary wins the election,

"you're gonna get more of the lesbian-feminist propaganda thrown in your face than with [Sen. John] McCain, but other than that, it's gonna be almost the same exact -- the same exact administration."

It might be something of an exaggeration--McCain isn't likely to do much about healthcare, for instance--but given a little wiggle room for political hyperbole, it's probably more right than wrong.  Anyway Obama is the real threat, not Hillary--he's an Afro-Leninist.

The idea of Bill and Hillary being far leftists in their youth is laughable, but it's probably true that they were more idealistic than they are now. It wouldn't surprise me if Bill and Hillary look at Obama and see something of their lost past. But the difference between the idealism of Bill and Hillary then and the idealism of Obama now is that power always drove them--that's the one thing that hasn't changed.  I'm not saying that Obama isn't ambitious; it's just that something else drives that ambition, and it seems more resistant to the kind of corruption that has so obviously infected the two Clintons.

Obama is not pure. He has to play the game, and he will have to make compromises, and he will be soiled by it. But so far, at least, he hasn't become identified with the game. On the other hand the game defines Bill and Hillary--they have little identity outside of it. In the end the game might destroy Obama, but so he has resisted being absorbed into it or spat out by it.  He's in the game, but not of the game.

Quotes of the Day: Digby, Berube (Updated: & Marshall)

The important thing to realize is that these themes have been completely internalized by the villagers. They really don't even question it anymore, it's completely natural to them. When you see George Stephanopoulos essentially explain that Democratic voters are choosing between an flaccid, unpatriotic "metrosexual" and a lying, delusional succubus, and it's simply his job to help them sort that out, you know that he's completely lost touch with what people actually need politics and government for. Digby.

***

Things would actually be simpler if the American commentariat was composed merely of corporate shills. Instead, it's composed also of pathological, Chris Matthewsian misogynists, rabid foaming Glenn Becks, Tim Russert the Terrible Trivium, and, of course, David "Red Man Tobacco and Pabst Blue Ribbon" Brooks, who loved last night's debate and warns us today, no whining about the media.

Well, Blue Ribbon, ol' boy, this isn't a whine. Think of it instead as a barbaric yawp. When you write, "We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall," we know you're telling the truth, because you'll be around in the fall telling us precisely how important these things are. After all, as you note, we should "remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis."

Hold the phone, Red Man--did you say "expose Michael Dukakis"? As what, pray tell? As the flag-burning, hemp-wearing, Amerikkka-hating card-carrying member of the ACLU he really was? I seem to recall 1988 as the year George H. W. Bush was exposed as a craven slimeball who would use the phrase "card-carrying member of the ACLU" as an epithet. But then, I don't read the newspapers.

The point is that we are not dealing merely with a "corporate" media. That would be bad enough. We are dealing instead with a deeply decadent and deeply entrenched class of courtiers in the late stages of Bloated Beltway Media Empire, one of whose pastimes is chattering on about the folkways of the salt of the earth (bowling, shots-and-beer, guns, God). The level of chattering is directly proportional to the decadence of the commentator, which is why you hear so much about small-town values from people who last caught glimpses of my neighbors when they watched the opening thirty minutes of Deer Hunter in their suite at the Willard Hotel. The appropriate text for our situation is not so much Manufacturing Consent as the film Ridicule. Not a great movie, by any means, but a reasonable approximation of a situation in which we can find lunatics like Glenn Beck and congenital liars like William Kristol among our most powerful courtiers. Berube

***

...it occurred to me that we have now crossed an important threshold where the Republican operative cadre has sufficiently disciplined and trained the press (and more than a few Democrats) that their own role may simply be redundant.

Think about it. Organized campaigns of falsehoods, distortions and smears used to be something most people thought of as a bad thing, if not something that's ever been too far removed from American politics. Now, however, members of the prestige press appear to see it not as a matter of guilty slumming but rather a positive journalistic obligation to engage in their own organized campaign of falsehood, distortion and smear on the reasoning that it anticipates the eventual one to be mounted by Republicans. In other words, we've gotten past the debatable rationale that journalists have no choice but to cover smears and distortions once they're floated into the mainstream debate to thinking that journalists need to seek out and air smears and distortions on the grounds of electability, as though the mid-summer GOP Swiftboating was another de facto part of the election process like primaries, conventions and debates. Marshall

Pennsylvania Debate

Our liberal media at work.  What else is there to say?  Let's hope the voters in PA send a message next week that they are sick of this kind of petty nonsense.

UPDATE: And let's hope there are no more of these so-called debates. They serve no purpose except to expose the presumptive Dem candidate to cheap shots from these corporate media hacks.

What positive reason can there be to have another?  Obama can't cancel, but Dean should either work out new groundrules or just cancel any other debates that might be scheduled.

Obama's So-Called Gaffe III

Greenwald hits on the key to my vehement resistance to faulting Obama for his San Francisco comments: To accept the criticism of elitism accepts the premise that it should matter. This is a completely bogus narrative that the right has used to define Democratic candidates at least since the time of Dukakis. I have no illusions that it is a factor and that Obama made himself vulnerable, but it's the narrative that needs to be blamed, not Obama's relatively minor slip-up in word choice. This Democrats-as-elitists narrative must be rejected root and branch. No quarter should be given--not an inch:

So Barack Obama now takes his place on the ignoble path tread by every other Democratic candidate before him: as an effete, elitist, out-of-touch loser -- just like Mike Dukakis and John Kerry, and just like Al Gore and (when she was leading in the polls) Hillary Clinton. Conversely, the GOP leaders are stalwart and amiable though heroic Men of the People. . . .

By all rights, John McCain -- leading proponent of one of the most unpopular wars ever and tied at the hip to one of the most unpopular administrations in modern American history -- should be 20 points behind in the polls, at least. But he isn't. He is typically tied or even sometimes ahead. Why? Because the Cult of Personality constructed around him -- just as was true for George Bush -- remains largely unchallenged, while the right-wing/media monster demolishes the personality and character of the Democratic candidates. Until that changes, it doesn't matter how enthusiastically voters embrace the position papers of Democrats. The Right will continue to dominate our national elections irrespective of how vehement Americans reject their political positions and ideology, because these vapid themes predominate instead. Drudge Rules the Media World. Ignoring that reality or wishing it weren't so doesn't make it go away. . . .

Only in Media World could an individual who grew up in a poor and/or single-parent home with purely self-made accomplishments (Obama, John Edwards) be an out-of-touch "elitist" while individuals who live in extravagant wealth earned by others (George W. Bush, McCain) be Regular Folk in touch with heartland lifestyles and values. As Atrios noted today, even Howie Kurtz understands the bizarre spectacle of watching coddled media stars decree who is an "elitist" and who is in touch with Common Values:

It's mildly amusing to watch cable hosts with multimillion-dollar salaries wring their hands over how Obama can't possibly relate to the struggling masses. When was the last time most of these people had a shot and a beer in a bar, or visited a small town unless it was to make a highly paid speech? It's a small irony of this "out of touch" debate that upper-echelon journalists with wardrobe allowances or kids in fancy private schools get to pose as the folks who are in touch with the great American working class.

I am more optimistic than Greenwald that this kind of thing is less effective now than it has been in previous election cycles, and the early polling from PA and IN suggests that this ridiculously cynical play on Clinton's and McCain's part hasn't affected the majority Mainstreeters who have enough sense to see through it. We won't know until the votes come in, but I think that we might be so used to the demagogues getting their way on this that we underestimate the resiliency of a candidate who has real substance.

I don't think he's going to win in PA because the structural fundamentals don't favor him, but I don't think he'll do worse because of this episode. And in the general, we all have to do what we can to strenuously reject this absurd elitism argument.  It needs to be ridiculed and repudiated whenever it rears its ugly head.

Obama's So-Called Gaffe II (Updated)

It's a gaffe only in the sense of letting slip a truth most people think to radioactive to state in public.  From Mahablog:

It always amuses me when upper-class people with power and privilege start screeching about “elitism.” Today all manner of political, media and blogging elites — people with advanced degrees who’ve never been to a tractor pull in their lives — are snorting about elitism because Barack Obama said something that anyone with a real redneck background knows to be true — working-class, small-town whites feel left behind, bitter and frustrated.

This remark allegedly is an insult to working-class, small-town whites in Pennsylvania. I have a different perspective. Granted, my background is southern Missouri small-town working-class white, rather than Pennsylvania small-town working-class white, and there are subtle cultural distinctions between the two. While I may have kinfolk in half the trailer parks in the Ozarks, I admit that doesn’t qualify me to speak for Pennsylvanians. But over the past forty or so years small-town, working-class white America has been living through the shared experience of diminishing opportunity combined with increasing financial instability.

In community after community, the old factory or mining jobs that sustained the local economy are gone. Forty years ago, young folks left high school, signed on to jobs that paid Union-obtained wages and benefits, and looked forward to all the trappings of American middle-class affluence — homes, new cars, trips to Disney World. Now the bright young people move away to cities, and those who remain in the small towns sustain themselves — barely — by flipping hamburgers or cashiering at Wal-Mart. Read more.

UPDATE: From someone who was at the San Francisco fundraiser:

At the end of Obama's remarks standing between two rooms of guests -- the fourth appearance in California after traveling earlier in the day from Montana -- a questioner asked, "some of us are going to Pennsylvania to campaign for you. What should we be telling the voters we encounter?"

Obama's response to the questioner was that there are many, many different sections in Pennsylvania comprised of a range of racial, geographic, class, and economic groupings from Appalachia to Philadelphia. So there was not one thing to say to such diverse constituencies in Pennsylvania. But having said that, Obama went on say that his campaign staff in Pennsylvania could provide the questioner (an imminent Pennsylvania volunteer) with all the talking points he needed. But Obama cautioned that such talking points were really not what should be stressed with Pennsylvania voters.

Instead he urged the volunteer to tell Pennsylvania voters he encountered that Obama's campaign is about something more than programs and talking points. It was at this point that Obama began to talk about addressing the bitter feelings that many in some rural communities in Pennsylvania have about being brushed aside in the wake of the global economy. Senator Obama appeared to theorize, perhaps improvidently given the coverage this week, that some of the people in those communities take refuge in political concerns about guns, religion and immigration. But what has not so far been reported is that those statements preceded and were joined with additional observations that black youth in urban areas are told they are no longer "relevant" in the global economy and, feeling marginalized, they engage in destructive behavior. Unlike the week's commentators who have seized upon the remarks about "bitter feelings" in some depressed communities in Pennsylvania, I gleaned a different meaning from the entire answer. . . .

The response that followed sounded unscripted, in the moment, as if he were really trying to answer a question with intelligent conversation that explained more about what was going on in the Pennsylvania communities than what was germane to his political agenda. I had never heard him or any politician ever give such insightful, analytical responses. The statements were neither didactic nor contrived to convince. They were simply hypotheses (not unlike the kind made by de Tocqueville three centuries ago ) offered by an observer familiar with American communities. And that kind of thoughtfulness was quite unexpected in the middle of a political event. In my view, the way he answered the question was more important than the sociological accuracy or the cause and effect hypotheses contained in the answer. It was a moment of authenticity demonstrating informed intelligence, and the speaker's desire to have the audience join him in a deeper understanding of American politics.  Read more.

There's a mind at work here; he's not some robopol.

Obama's So-Called Gaffe

Common sense doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what I think or you think.  It matters how it plays in the media. The folks at CNN can sometimes surprise you. This time they get it right:

Here's Obama's defense of comments.  Again I think he handles it in exactly the right way.  He refuses to let Clinton and McCain to frame him, and he does an effective job of turning the tables:

h/t Balloon Juice

I really like the way Obama refuses to be put on defense and pushes back.  He refuses to let the idiots have their way.

It's Not about Yoo; It's about Us

Greenwald makes the point about our all being responsible for the torture culture more forcefully and concisely than I did in my last post:

. . . there is something deeply misleading -- disturbingly self-justifying -- about the stampede to depict John Yoo as some kind of singular, isolated aberration. It's redolent of the scapegoating of Lynndie England and her low-level Abu Ghraib colleagues for what was official government policy. The responsibility for the torture regime does not rest with John Yoo or even just isolated Bush officials. It's far more collective than that.

As a country, we have repeatedly endorsed what John Yoo enabled. In addition to abolishing habeas corpus, the 2006 Military Commissions Act (.pdf) "insulated government officials from liability for many of the violations of the War Crimes Act they might have committed during the period prior to 2006," as Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin put it. It also vested vast discretion with the President to determine what constitutes "torture." Nonetheless, it was passed by an overwhelming Congressional majority, with substantial bipartisan support, without even a filibuster being attempted, and with the blessing of alleged "torture opponent" John McCain. It still has not been even partially repealed.

As a country, then, our democratic institutions -- without much outcry -- literally amended the War Crimes Act, retroactively, to declare that those who violated it, those who committed war crimes, would be free from investigation or prosecution. The Abu Ghraib scandal was disclosed in early 2004 and George Bush was re-elected. Accounts of systematic abuse at Guantanamo and elsewhere were known before then as well.

Directing moral outrage uniquely at John Yoo and demanding that he be removed from Berkeley, while highly understandable in one sense, poses the danger that this broader responsibility will be obscured and that real accountability need not take place. If we don't have the political will to prosecute our highest political officials for war crimes or even remove them from office -- and we unquestionably did not and do not -- how can we simultaneously insist that John Yoo is beyond the pale? For better or worse, what John Yoo did, while revolting and radical, was within what became -- and still is -- the American political mainstream in the years after the 9/11 attacks.

This is a democracy, and so we are all complicit until we find a way to dismantle it and repudiate those who promoted it and even now defend its necessity. At some point somebody needs to do an in-depth article about the genesis and passage of the MCA. I want the legislators who voted for it to defend their vote in print.  I want to know how many of them, especially the Democrats that voted for it,  really understood the implications of what they did and how many understood the bill at all. 

I mean Sherrod Brown, for gawdsakes, voted for it. He's supposed to be one of the good guys. Brown admitted he was wrong, but you get the feeling that these people don't consider the implications of what they do at all, except as to how it will affect them in the next election. They voted for the MCA not because they thought a minute about what it contained, but because not to vote for it would make them look weak on terror.

The Torture Culture

The American people are not its government, but if the American people don't at some point make the strongest statement to repudiate the policies of these "Bathists" like Cheney who have shaped and implemented Bush administration torture policy, they become co-responsible.  The precedents have to be undone, and the only way I can think to do it is by putting the architects of American torture policy on trial for war crimes.

Obama, I'm sure, doesn't want to go there. It will be hard for him to square it in the public imagination with his main priority to build unity and bipartisanship. [Update: He says he will if there is willful criminality.] The GOP culture is all about bitch-slapping its opposition; the Democrats have shown that they are all too willing to be slapped around.  Even if a Obama decided to go after these GOP Bathists, he probably would not be supported by the Pelosi/Reid crowd and the the Clinton DLC types.

Bill Clinton showed the way when he let sleeping dogs lie when it came to following up on the crimes of the Reagan/Bush 1 administration's complicity with Iran Contra and the the release of the American hostages on Reagan's inauguration day. Now he's best buds with Bush the elder. Anybody who's half awake knows what happened during the Reagan-Bush years and is outraged, but because Clinton did not flush it out, the mentality continued to fester and to retain legitimacy, and it's that same mentality that brought us the Iraq debacle.

There were all kinds of debate even among liberals about the legitimacy of taking out a bad guy like Saddam.  If we could do it in Yugoslavia, why not in Iraq?  Leave aside the abstract moral questions about preemptive war, etc.-- the biggest reason the Iraq War should have been opposed was because of the mentality of the people who were its architects. We knew who they were.  This was not an abstract moral question; it was a question of trusting these people and their crazy ideas about American power. Again, anybody who knows been in the least bit awake in the last thirty years knows the stupidity, the brutishness, and horror that this mentality produces. You didn't have to be a genius to  predict what the outcome in Iraq was likely to be; you just had to know a little bit about history and the mentality of people like Rumsfeld and Cheney who have been around since the Nixon administration. Honestly, can anybody really be surprised?

The Cheney mentality is what must be flushed out into the open and soundly repudiated once and for all.The point is that you can't just pretend that it's normal or that it's one legitimate point of view that should be part of the debate.  No.  The Republicans infected with the Cheney mentality are the American Bathists, and they must be delegitimized and marginalized once and for all. You  cannot move forward so long as the people infected with this illness still remain in the bureaucracy, and their mentality is legitimated by its spokesmen in Congress. As they did during the Clinton years, they will bide their time waiting for their opportunity to return to power.

John Yoo vs. Matthew Diaz

What's the matter with a country that rewards the former and punishes the latter.  Diaz's story takes your breath away, and makes you ask: What has become of us?

Matthew Diaz served his country as a staff judge advocate at Guantánamo. He watched a shameless assault on America’s Constitution and commitment to the rule of law carried out by the Bush Administration. He watched the introduction of a system of cruel torture and abuse. He watched the shaming of the nation’s uniformed services, with their proud traditions that formed the very basis of the standards of humanitarian law, now torn asunder through the lawless acts of the Executive. Matthew Diaz found himself in a precarious position—as a uniformed officer, he was bound to follow his command. As a licensed and qualified attorney, he was bound to uphold the law. And these things were indubitably at odds.
Diaz was charged, tried and convicted for disclosing “secrets.” For the Bush Administration, any information which would be politically embarrassing or harmful to it is routinely classified “secret.” In this fashion the Administration believes it can use criminal sanctions against those who disclose information it believes will be politically damaging. The list of detainees at Guantánamo, which by law was required to be disclosed, was classified as “secret.” . . .

Diaz spent six months in prison and left it bankrupt and without a job. In addition to his sentence, the Pentagon is working aggressively to have Diaz stripped of his law license so he will not be able to practice his profession. The Bush Administration has sought to criminalize, humiliate and destroy Diaz. Its motivation could not be clearer: Diaz struck a blow for the rule of law. And nothing could be more threatening to the Bush Administration than this.

What could possibly motivate a man like Lt. Commander Diaz?  To me he's like that Chinese guy facing down the tank in Tiannemen. Read the whole story here.