Archive for September 3, 2008

Palin Was Good. Now Donate.

Whatever the shortcomings of her ideas, Sarah Palin’s rhetoric is good. Now’s not the time for fear. It’s time to donate. Can you spare your morning iced chai? I’ll spare a week’s.

Liveblogging Sarah

If you’ve been listening to the past half hour of the Republican National Convention, you heard Giuliani claim to be a member of “the party of Lincoln” (in name only), desperately point to Sarah Palin to avoid being labeled the party of the past (setting aside her gender & age, let’s look at her ideas, for once), claim that the Democrats say Palin’s unqualified because she can’t spare the time while raising her children (straw man?), and say that the Democrats are afraid of talking about Islamic terorrism, for fear of offending someone (straw man, again?). So much failure in so little time. Can Sarah Palin top it? We’ll see.

Final update: our theme for the night was rhetoric versus experience… from a speaker who’s more rhetoric than experience herself. That said, she did fantastically. Incomparably better than Giuliani. She attempted to parlay her inexperience into anti-elitism – she’s not thoroughly unqualified, she’s a “Washington Outsider” – before pushing John McCain’s record over Obama’s, glossing over herself. If Palin is to be successful in this election, this is how she’ll do it: as a mouthpiece for otherwise unpalatable, unsuccessful, failed ideologies. She’s gone a long way to repairing the media’s attacks on her, which means we’ll have to meet her on her ideas… which shouldn’t be difficult, actually.

Immediate spin: Wolf Blitzer approves, but notes that the speech was “carefully written.” CNN notes, correctly, that Palin made countless attacks on Obama, even trivializing his community organizing work. She’s carefully scripted, and well delivered, but a little weak on her policy, still. Biden will have to tread carefully.

Notable failure: she took a clear shot at terrorist detention & habeas concerns, in contravention of her running mate’s position in favor of the same… at least, he was against Guantanamo until the election cycle began…

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Picking Palin: “Gimmicky.” Don’t Trust Me – Ask the GOP

Caught on tape, and reported at The Huffington Post, the GOP’s own pundits think the Palin pick is a disaster. Mike Murphy: “You know what’s really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism, and this is cynical.”

Bristol Palin & Straw Men

This is the danger of broaching the issue of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy: that no matter what Barack Obama says – and he did loudly command his supporters not to politicize the issue – Palin will be cast as persecuted, allowing the media to tilt at straw men Democrats. CNN commenter Martin & I agree, at least, that Palin’s “Babygate 2″ does properly underline the importance of bipartisan work on reducing teen pregnancies.

Phyllis Schlafly, Michelle Malkin, the Sudden Relevance of Affirmative Action to the GOP, and the Culture Wars

Ladies and gentlemen… this is your new, “changed” Republican Party: pundits and has-been extremists. Who better to signal a break from the past than Phyllis Schlafly, a woman who, rather than simply standing athwart history and yelling “stop!”, has stood athwart history and commanded it to return to an idyllic past that never existed, a time when women cared for their men and men, in turn, beat their women. For such an odious “agent of intolerance” to have a role in modern mainstream politics, in a party pretending to offer “change,” is simply laughable in the extreme. Schlafly obviously thinks she owns the Republican Party, and that modern Republicans are willing to give her the time of day just proves her right. Any party beholden to the rampant antifeminism, racism, and gay-baiting that together make Schlafly the feisty little ball of hate she is does not deserve a single vote in America.

So we’re all on the same page, Schlafly is the woman who believes that gay men & women are just confused (despite her son’s homosexuality), thinks that creationism is the *only* responsible science on origins, wants women (except her) to stay in the kitchen, and regards civil rights as a slap in the face to Christianity. Oh! And, she’s apparently a valued Republican.

Schlafly – and her “surprise guest,” Michelle Malkin (further proof that the Republican Party is held hostage to the lunatic fringe) – took the chance to excoriate the mainstream media for daring to question Sarah Palin, and the “elitism card” made it out of the deck early:

“I hope she says, ‘There are a lot of people who say I don’t have the right experience to be president. To those people, I say, you’re right, I don’t have a lot of experience in picking up the phone and raising a lot of money from really wealthy people,’ or in eating at fancy restaurants in Manhattan or Washington, D.C.

Ahh, yes, the culture wars: the only reason Palin’s unqualified is because she’s not a latte-sipping liberal. A handy way of getting your audience to look the other way while you delicately dodge a serious question. Kind of like blaming media accusations of Palin’s inexperience on sexism (one, two). News for you, Schlafly & Malkin: (1) it’s not sexist to call an unqualified woman unqualified – it’s sexist to demand that an unqualified woman be called qualified, and, (2) it’s not “elitist” to demand that candidates for federal office want their former constituents to remain in the union. Contra Malkin’s talking point, it’s not that Palin’s unqualified because she’s a conservative; it’s that you think the only reason she is qualified is because she’s a conservative.

If anyone out there had any doubts that the Republican Party was still in the control of the far-far-far right, please let Phyllis Schlafly disabuse you of that delusion. The only “change” people like Phyllis Schlafly have in mind is the Rapture… and you and I aren’t invited.

Apotheosis

“You’ve changed.” This from The Economist, the international business community’s newspaper of record, to our Senator McCain. As they rightly point out, if we get a President McCain in November, we have good cause to doubt which McCain we’ll get – the McCain of 2000, or the McCain of the summer of 2008 – and good cause, as well, to despair at the thought of a maverick so willing to cast away that noble label where convenient. If Senator McCain has lost himself somewhere along the way in this season, the question is… why?

To be fair, the election has not been kind to McCain. Of course, elections rarely are. Gaffes are magnified and unfairly used as if they represent the rule and not the exception. As The Economist says of the notorious Shia/Sunni fumble, “[a]ny journalist who has spent time with him knows he knows the difference.” No matter how we may portray McCain today, there is much to admire in him, and I apologize for the “electoral license” I, and my compatriots, have taken and will continue to take when discussing his persona (nothing personal). Because of this abiding respect, I am not willing to go so far as to suggest that McCain, himself, has changed.

Rather, the source of McCain’s slide into becoming “just another Republican” lies in a problem I identified back in July: presidential politics, and especially Republican presidential politics, are not amenable to mavericks, and do not admit nice guys. For John McCain, the fault (dear Brutus) is not in himself, but in his stars.

The Republican Party has not moved on from its Rovian roots. They’ve just gotten themselves a candidate that suggests they have. As McCain’s staffers fairly admit, for the Republicans, “this election is not about issues.” We know; we’ve been watching your ads. The election is apparently about character attacks, and to a dangerous degree, one so opposed to McCain’s personality as to betray his own history by hiring Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina politico whose baseless smears against McCain in 2000 destroyed his primary campaign and ushered in the era of Karl Rove. I cannot believe that McCain could so forget himself as to forgive this scoundrel. No; this, along with his running mate selection (or rather, the running mate selection he did not make), proves that McCain is not his own man. Like a good kid caught up in the wrong crowd, McCain has been subsumed by the Republican institution he needs to get elected.

Of course, if McCain is not solely to blame for his slide into negativism, he remains culpable to the extent that he is now inseparable from his failed political party. The maverick is still there, deep down, but we can’t expect to see that side of him emerge as long as he remains involved in presidential politics. Sadly, his only redemption is in defeat: as a Senator, McCain can be his own man again. But McCain as a Republican President would be no different than McCain as a Republican presidential candidate: utterly owned by the hateful, far-right, Rovian wing of the Party that he made his name opposing. May it be a mark of enduring shame for the Republican Party that McCain was too good for them to allow him to run as himself.

Sarah Palin & Censorship

Conservatives toss around the word “censorship” like it’s going out of style. In fact, though, it’s not; to their candidates, censorship is uniquely in style. Time reports Palin, as mayor of her city of 5,000, sought to ban books from the library, and reacted with shocking hostility when her iron will was not acceded to (a common theme of hers). Hardly an isolated incident in the story of a candidate built on wedge/culture war issues, this ought to evoke memories of George Bush at his zenith… and is that something we want to deal with, again?

You’re Stealing Our Line!!

Although the storm rages around Sarah Palin, the GOP has stood staunchly behind their vice presidential nominee, while she’s laid low. In fact, not a single chink has appeared in their supportive armo-

…awww. From no less an authority than McCain’s own campaign manager. Someone buy up on Intrade… among other news, Obama’s going to be on the O’Reilly Factor (good way to steal convention airtime), and someone at the Alaskan Independence Party is lying. Either Palin was a member of the secessionist party, or she wasn’t. Well, one thing’s for sure: her husband was.

In any event, we had the line first.