Archive for October 13, 2008

What Would Henry Higgins Say?

After eight years with a President who can’t pronounce anything foreign, we now hear the far-right inferring, from Barack Obama’s amazing ability to pronounce “Pakistan” correctly, that he’s Muslim.

For the Last Time, We Are NOT Rome.

While I normally hold Maureen Dowd of The New York Times in high regard, I cannot go along with her latest assessment of American culture, which alleges that, “like Rome,” we Americans have become a “self-indulgent society,” and now face the consequences of squandering imperial wealth on frivolity. Wrong. The invocation of Rome as a cautionary tale is easily drawn and easily popularized, but hard to do right: Maureen Dowd’s latest variation on the theme, more than most, is tired, amateurish, and squarely wrong.

My contention rests not on the moral lesson: that we should take our nation and its resources more seriously seems the obvious national lesson we all should have learned from the Bush presidency. America deserves better than a folsky avatar of the common man, and modern America certain needs better. To toy with lesser men & women in the Oval Office is the height of self-indulgence, and it ought to be avoided. To be fair, Dowd’s article talks more about economic frivolity, but frivolity of leadership seems to be the more dangerous route… but I digress.

Where Dowd goes astray is in drawing a parallel between America’s financial decadence, and the moral/economic decadence that she contends slew might Rome. Not since Victorian England, and its Plutarchian obsession with the morality of history, have serious historians advanced the theory that moral decadence or a lack of discipline alone felled Rome. The never-ending search for where and why Rome “fell” discounts the fact that it was never particularly secure. While its economic policy of taxing the towns into poverty to support the Eternal City didn’t help, the empire post-Vespasian was in a permanent state of decay. Rome “fell” long before it Fell: it just took 300 years for a serious military challenger to emerge to give the western empire the last nudge into oblivion. Against such a dismal picture – the feeble empire dying slowly by the centuries, always waiting for the final blow – there’s precious little for America to learn from Rome’s example.

Except this. Rome may have avoided the killing blow for another half-century or so, but for its contemptible treatment of Visigothic refugees, who in Rome’s twilight came to the empire after being promised food and land in return for work, but got only disdain, racism, torture, and deliberate starvation at the hands of their “benefactor.” The Visigothic revolt at Adrianople, the subsequent major military defeat of Rome’s weakened, mercenary-swollen armies, and Alaric’s successful march on Rome in 410 C.E. (the first in nearly a millenium) were eminently predictable, and eminently avoidable. It is a foolish empire that creates her own enemies.

Sound familiar? Here the comparison does not go so far astray.

Fivethirtyeight.com Reports: Severe Risk of Campaign Stunts

Calling today a turning point (but we’ve heard that before) McCain plans to turn the page on his failing campaign by delivering a new message of… dare I say… hope.  Per Fivethirtyeight, there’s good reason to think that a major “reboot” and drastic action is in order… but for a major course change to work, it can’t be perceived as a stunt. McCain’s Virginia Beach rally, though (as of 11:41 AM), doesn’t look that different – crowds screaming “Nobama,” etc., we’ve seen it before – except that Palin looks sad. Interesting.

Sarah Palin: Culture Warrior (Redux)

Sarah Palin’s frantic efforts to reignite the culture war continue apace. Her latest attempt to assassinate the archduke comes in the form of some tough – and ridiculous – words on abortion:

A vote for Barack Obama is a vote for activist courts that will continue to smother the open and democratic debate that we deserve and that we need on this issue of life. Obama is a politician who has long since left behind even the middle ground on the issue of life.

Aside from the old canard about “activist judges,” Sarah Palin is flat-out wrong about who occupies the “middle ground” on abortion. Palin (who opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest) finds herself in a very vocal minority: barely 10% of Americans share her views on abortion. If Obama “long since left the middle ground” on abortion, Sarah (can I call you Sarah?) has never been on it. Like everything about Sarah, her position on abortion is only appealing until you learn what it is.

It’s true that the line she draws is one of the more principled arguments against abortion; by refusing to condition the value of “life” on its genesis in or out of a lawful act, Palin is at least intellectually honest. But she’s still wrong, and out of touch with the vast majority of Americans. The GOP’s official position – extend due process and equal protection rights to fetuses – is even more ridiculous and off-base. Counterintuitively, it’s actually the Democrats in general, and Barack Obama in particular, who are in step with public opinion on abortion. Whatever can be said for Roe v. Wade, it seems to strike a balance palatable to most Americans, if they’re actually willing to go beyond catchphrases (“abortion on demand omg!”) and learn the moderate compromise position that Roe strikes.

That said, Palin is half-right on her solution to the abortion issue. Abortion has defined American politics for nearly thirty years, and galvanized the religious right behind the Republican Party, propelling them to victory, in at least two presidential elections. It’s ignited and re-ignited the culture wars more times than can be counted, and served as the primary battleground. If putting this thing to the electorate could even potentially defuse the matter, it might be time to start engineering the democratic solution that Sarah Palin says we need (and deserve!).

If abortion is finally ripe for democratic determination, though, the state-by-state solution continuously pushed by McCain and Palin is precisely not the way to go about it. Devolving the issue entirely to the states makes little sense unless Roe is overruled and a small corner of federal constitutional law is obliterated along with it (the latter of which simply won’t happen): if a federal right still existed, even arguably, any state law would have to protect the abortion right at or above the federal level, or face continuous litigation. Make no mistake: the McCain/Palin plan for abortion explicitly contemplates the death of Roe and the remaking of American constitutional law in the religious right’s own graven image.

More importantly, though, a state-by-state solution would accomplish nobody’s policy goals: it’s Solomon’s baby, a “compromise” that leaves everyone angry, without accomplishing a damn thing. For those of us on the left, it would unfairly burden women living in conservative states. For the right, a state-by-state solution wouldn’t accomplish their most important goal – decreasing abortion – because it would just change where the abortions take place.  Women do have cars, you know. And for the patriots among us, both left and right, a state-by-state solution would likely entrench the red state/blue state divide by adding abortion to the list of culturally distinct factors, intensifying and not abating the culture wars. The McCain/Palin “let the states decide” solution is affirmatively worse than what we have now, any way you cut it.

Alternately, a federally legislated solution ((General federal legislation would be valid pursuant to the Commerce Clause – women traveling to states to get favorable medical treatment for abortion procedures is an issue “between” rather than “among” the states – and tied grants would be valid under tax & spend authority. Federal law already significantly regulations abortion; the federalism issue isn’t a problem.)) is both workable and, again for those of us on the left, likely to end well, giving America the “closure” it wants in the abortion arena while preserving important freedoms. A federal solution would require a national dialogue on the issue, and force the point that, at least according to the polls, we have more in common on the abortion issue than the Republicans would like you to think. We Democrats would likely have to settle for a third-term ban and reasonable second-term regulations, as allowed under the Roe framework… but it’s better than what we’ve got now. And it’s certainly better than anything Sarah Palin has come up with.

P.S. Just because I use “PunditKitchen” lolpictures doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven them.

Lowering Expectations: ur doin it wrong

Somebody get this man a campaign manager? In the runup to their final presidential debate, John McCain has vowed to “whip” Obama’s “you-know-what.” Poor word choice, for one… and a bad tactical decision, for two. McCain’s low poll numbers could have been used to create almost Palin-level expectations prior to his debate Wednesday, but McCain’s having nothing of it, billing his optimism as “straight talk.” If, by “straight talk” he means “talk against the historical record and all objective indicators,” then that’s right. As ex-Bush managers, “The Caucus,” and “Fivethirtyeight” all agree, this election is out of McCain’s hands. His last hope is the fact that polls have, in the past, inflated candidates’ odds when race is an issue… but that factor is offset by pollsters’ inability to count voters who only have cell-phones, who are overwhelmingly young & vote Democratic.