She's buying a staircase to somewhere

Calling their bluff?

Did McConnell just offer to release the hostages?

This would be an astonishing turnaround and surely represents a combination of Obama's reminding the GOP that Social Security checks are a powerful thing and the business lobbyists' hair catching on fire.

Calling the mullahs' bluff

Not the least frustrating aspect of the last eight years has been the Bush/Cheney foreign policy which made our "enemies" stronger simply by dint of their being labeled "enemies." Tim Fernholz notes that, even with the prospect of a President Obama, the Iranian leadership's bluff may very well have been called.

Wha' happened?

Sorry for the paucity and insipidness of recent posts (and how many times have I started a post with, "Sorry for the paucity and insipidness of recent posts"?). I've been, by turns, inundated by office work and on vacation, inundated by yard work.

Last night, though, I was returning from the Stadium and the Yankees' tough loss to the Native Americans listening to Clinton's odd speech -- we didn't know the outcome of NC and Indiana at the time, and could divine nothing about the results from her speech, other than she didn't sound too victorious. I think Ezra sums it up best.

What surprised me about the speech, though, is that she didn't do more to elevate her own prestige before the party. Whether she's accepted a likely loss or is still hoping for an unexpected win, warm feelings from Obama's sections of the party would help her path to the nomination or her reintegration into everyday politics. She's got good speechwriters -- Bill Clinton included -- who could write her an elevating, healing address. But as of yet, they've not tried that approach. The thinking may be that she can give that speech at the convention, but I'm surprised that they're not even trying that strategy. She's too far behind, with too little time on the clock, to grind this victory out. Whether the strategy is to save face or actually change the math, it requires a speech considerably different than this one.

At one point, I thought she was declaring victory, the next conceding defeat. And I also thought, God, if she does manage to win, the level of oratory in the Fall could be deadly.

I don't think she -- or William Jefferson Clinton -- have come to terms with the fact that they now depend on Obama winning the general election to maintain any kind of leadership status in the party. If he loses, she will be seen as having been a major contributor to his lack of stature in the Fall by doing McCain's oppo-research in advance. The bitter taste will not long disappear, and she'll pay for it if she decides to run again in 2012.

The Rezko files

We've been reading these Rezko stories, which pop up like mushrooms after a rain storm, and I've yet to understand what Obama is supposed to have done that was improper.

But you can bet we'll be seeing ads in the fall about Obama's ties to a shady "slum lord."

How much did Keating cost American tax payers?

Obama panders -- to the villagers

Ok, any thoughts of supporting Obama in this primary are officially over.

Increasingly, Obama is talking about Clinton’s “character.” Granted, that’s an assessment by Bacon, not a quote from Obama. But when you say that someone is ducking, hedging, dodging and spinning a serious issue, you are, of course, critiquing her character. And that is the way your claims will be reported—especially since the candidate in question has the last name of Clinton.

Of course, Clinton really hasn’t been ducking or hedging or dodging or spinning this non-issue issue. In a recent Washington Post news report, she made a perfectly accurate statement about Social Security—a statement that is massively more accurate than the embarrassing blather Obama offered at the September 26 Dem debate. At that debate, the plutocrat tribune, Timothy Russert, pushed this non-issue back onto the table. Quite correctly, here’s what Clinton told the Post’s Anne Kornblut in the wake of that familiar performance:

KORNBLUT (10/10/07): Clinton offered insights into the governing priorities she would bring to the White House, speaking cautiously about extricating the nation from Iraq and urgently about health-care reform. She also said she will take no position on how to fix Social Security and made it clear she does not regard it as a front-burner issue.

"I do not believe it is in a crisis," she said of the retirement program.

“She will take no position” is, of course, Kornblut’s top-heavy spin. “I do not believe it is in a crisis” was Clinton’s actual statement—and her statement is perfectly accurate. Indeed, we would have though that all Democrats knew that—until that embarrassing debate. At that session, the plutocrat Russert continued trying to push this non-issue center stage, and Obama and Edwards embarrassed themselves, even reciting the tired old plutocrat line: College kids don’t even think they’ll ever get Social Security! Good God! Plutocrat “think tanks” have pimped that line for decades now, attempting to create a false sense of crisis. And there were Candidates Obama and Edwards, reciting their bogus cant for them (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 9/28/07).

Again, Clinton is right on this silly non-issue, as Democrats all seemed to know in 2005. But so what? Now, we read that Obama is going to push the issue as a referendum on Clinton’s bad character! And make no mistake: A plutocrat press corps will praise Obama for both parts of this approach. They’ll praise him for attacking Clinton’s character—a long-time, favorite focus of theirs. And they’ll praise him for pimping the “problem” of Social Security, as plutocrat think tanks have so long done—as they themselves did, without mercy, in their two-year-long War Against Gore.

Jesus H. Christ. Somerby's right of course. I recently had the opportunity to listen to Paul Krugman and meet him briefly in the book signing line (nice thing about NY Times events, the audience is so fucking old it's easy to be first in the book buying/signing line afterwards). He waxed eloquently on the 2005 victory that killed Bush's plan to privatize Social Security. I told Krugman that I thought he was being too sanguine and that I was sure the "social security is in a crisis" crowds weren't going away and we should be vigilant.

If Democrats are now using this phony "issue" to attack other Democrats, that fight is going to return sooner than even I'd expected.

Obama on crack

Via Bean, who share's Darrick Jackson's disappointment that Obama is reluctant to take a stand on reducing the disparity in sentencing for selling rock versus powder cocaine.

IT IS UNCLEAR if Barack Obama's caution precedes consensus or cave-in. Asked if he would eliminate discriminatory laws that punish crack cocaine possession so heavily that it would take 100 times more in powder cocaine for the same sentence, Obama started off by saying the law was a mistake. He talked about his record in the Illinois Senate.

"I want to point out that I fought provisions like this and in many cases voted against provisions like this, knowing the way they could be exploited politically," Obama told the Trotter Group of African-American newspaper columnists last week after addressing the National Association of Black Journalists. "I thought it was the right thing to do. Even though the politics of it was tough back in the '90s, as a state legislator I took some tough votes to make sure we didn't see the perpetration of these kinds of unjust laws."

[...]

A Tribune profile this spring on Obama found vacillation on what anecdotes merit capital punishment. He opposed expanding the death penalty for "gang activity" murders, saying it would serve as a "mechanism to target particular neighborhoods." But he voted to strengthen the penalty for particularly gruesome killings of elders or the physically or mentally challenged.

That vacillation became evident as he kept talking about crack-vs.-powder sentencing, which has come to symbolize racial injustice in criminal justice. He said that if he were to become president, he would support a commission to issue a report "that allows me to say that based on the expert evidence, this is not working and it's unfair and unjust. Then I would move legislation forward."

That was a puzzling statement because the US Sentencing Commission, created by Congress in 1984, has long said the system is not working and reaffirmed in April that the 100-to-1 ratio "significantly undermines" sentencing reform.

Obama asked if he could make a "broader" point. "Even if we fix this, if it was a 1-to-1 ratio, it's still a problem that folks are selling crack. It's still a problem that our young men are in a situation where they believe the only recourse for them is the drug trade. So there is a balancing act that has to be done in terms of, do we want to spend all our political capital on a very difficult issue that doesn't get at some of the underlying issues; whether we want to spend more of that political capital getting early childhood education in place, getting after-school programs in place, getting summer school programs in place."

Obama claimed, "I'm not suggesting it's an either/or but I'm suggesting that an even higher priority for me is getting young men and increasingly young women to stop getting involved in the drug trade in the first place. And that's going to require pretty heavy lifting. That's going to require some billions of dollars of expenditure that aren't there right now."

By asking an open question about spending "all our political capital" on eliminating the 100-to-1 ratio, that raises the possibility he will spend little or none on it. By talking about a "broader" prescription of early childhood school programs -- which means nothing to a 17-year-old in jail-- Obama risks flashing a losing card of being nonconfrontational.

I'm not so sure I share that view. For one thing, why is Obama being held to this higher standard? Because of his background, his acknowledged past use, or his racial identity? Are the same questions being put to Hillary? To Giuliani? To Romney? Almost certainly not.

And while the War on Drugs was -- until the war in Iraq came along -- one of the costliest, most misguided, and counterproductive efforts this country has been engaged in since the Vietnam War (I'm sensing a pattern there), openly opposing it isn't going to motivate any voters who aren't already supportive of a candidate's overall positions. And crack/powder sentencing disparity probably isn't on most voter's hot list of issues. It's not on mine, and I actually care about the issue (though I'm more interested in overall changes in how all non-violent drug crimes are handled and in federal sentencing guidelines in general).

As an aside, does anyone even smoke crack cocaine anymore?

But I digress. On the contrary, taking a stand will almost certainly end up being used by his opponents as a hammer to bash him over the head. I can hear Clinton claiming he's deaf to the problems of the inner city while the Republicans will show lurid commercials featuring the latest "Willie Horton" to engage the lizard brains of their base voters.

Obama's right to tread lightly there.

I am disappointed that in the current naive and hypocritical age in which we live, an open discussion of the effects of the War on Drugs on our society and globally is simply impossible among "serious" candidates for office.

Obama's foreign policy

She doesn't completely push him under the bus, but Obama's unofficial advisor*, Jessica Stern, sure didn't do him too many favors this morning.

*She was very quick to insist that while she has provided advice to Obama, she hasn't signed on to any campaign.

Deep stuff

This profile of Barack Obama by Larissa MacFarquhar is interesting in the picture it paints of a deeply contradictory figure, a politician who seems to not give too much of a damn what people -- especially the boys on the bus -- think of him; a guy who writes about how confused and angry he was growing up who would be unrecognizable to the people who knew the confident, peaceful man they knew by his 20s.

When Christopher Edley first met Obama, in law school, he decided that he would go far, because of his centeredness. Then when, later, he read Obama’s first book and saw how Obama had suspected and vivisected himself for so many years, he decided that he would go far because of that. “The capacity for self-reflection is in my experience invaluable for a candidate or a President,” he says. (Edley worked in the Carter and Clinton Administrations and for Dukakis’s campaign.) “It’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t been involved how tough a Presidential campaign is. When you spend day after day flying around the country in an aluminum tube at forty thousand feet, it’s the easiest thing in the world to lose yourself. And when every misstep becomes a thirty-six-hour media disaster there’s every reason to second-guess your instincts, so being sensitive to your strengths and weaknesses and having the courage to come to terms with them is helpful when you’re facing a crisis. I’ve seen candidates who, like a deer frozen in headlights, can’t find their way forward and have to be led around by staff. I’ve also seen candidates who, faced with adversity, turn into the stubbornest of mules and can’t adapt or adjust. Most candidates walk into the room asking everybody ‘How’m I doing? How’m I doing?,’ with no ability to look at themselves in the mirror. So the ability that Barack shows in the book to be brutally self-reflective—this is deep stuff.”

I'm with Duncan and Ezra (I think, but can't find a link) on this. It is way too early in the pre-primaries to pick a candidate, and certainly too early (and impossible) to base that pick on "electability." Despite what the pundits are always claiming, that voters are so booooored by it all, I think voters actually enjoy the races (the general campaign, in which the scripts are basically fixed in place, is a different matter). Certainly, you never hear anyone in Iowa or New Hampshire complaining about all of the attention lavished upon them at pot luck suppers and 4-H club meetings. The presidential primary season is long, but it should be instructive. In 2004 I initially scoffed at the Dean campaign, but was impressed by their understanding of the power of new media and later learned enough about Howard Dean to be impressed by him. I initially put my faith in John Kerry based on his "electability," but as I learned more about him, electability stopped entering into the equation, replaced by admiration.

So, at least for the next few months, I'll point to profiles like this one simply because the Democratic slate of candidates offers a bunch of people about whom I'd like to learn more. The Republicans? Not so much, as they seem for the most part to be a craven (yes, that's the facade of Yankee Stadium in the background), pandering, and pretty dull lot, though I'll be interested to hear their answers to some of these questions.