Lincoln's lessons

It really is well past time to make T-N Coates a full-time columnist.

Obama has been much praised for the magnanimity he shows his opposition. But such empathy, unburdened by actual expectations, comes easy. More challenging is the work of coping with those who have the disagreeable habit of taking the president, and his talk of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” seriously. In that business, Obama would do well to understand that while democracy depends on intelligent compromise, it also depends on the ill-tempered gripers and groaners out in the street.

The Party of Lincoln, whatever its present designs, has not forgotten this.

D.F. Hippies and Vietnam Vets

This stuff just continues to piss me off.

In response to my earlier post on the troubled relationship between Dems and the military, a smart Democrat with some involvement in these issues e-mails:

I should say, though, this doesn't happen often but I actually disagree with you on the substance of the post, at least in part. I don't think the fundamental problem between Dems and the military is over policy, but rather at a much more emotional level. I think a lot of military people are under the impression that Democrats in general think they're a bunch of baby-killing Rambo assholes. I'm not a big fan of viewing everything in politics through the prism of Vietnam, but I think that legacy of how vets were treated by the left is very much still there. It's something that our generation just never had, but go back not too long ago and it was a tremendously powerful narrative.

It would be terrific if Ezra's "smart Democrat" could point to a few examples of how "vets were treated by the left" during the Vietnam era. I believe history shows -- as Ezra's first commenter points out -- that the left treated vets with a great deal of respect and, indeed, vets were leaders (and moral ballast) of the anti-war movement in the late 60s/early 70s. It was members of the VFW that spit on anti-war vets during those gleeful days.

It was Nixon who feared and plotted against a young, returning soldier named John Kerry, and it was the right who in 2004 ridiculed Kerry's service and genuine heroism during the war.

I realize the narrative is long-standing and powerful (and formed by the "Rambo" movies, in fact), but it doesn't help for "smart Democrats" to echo, rather than fight against it. Not very "smart" at all.

Groovy

I'm with Digby on this. Not only has McCain made the contrast between his years in captivity and...I dunno...free love... a central tenet of his campaign, it's the only tenet*.

ACCURACY Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, at whom this spot takes veiled swipes, was turning 6 years old during the “summer of love,” and cannot be counted as among those who protested or indulged while Mr. McCain suffered (unless playing with building blocks counts). Mr. McCain’s military service and the torture he endured in Vietnam are well established. Mr. McCain did indeed buck his party’s leadership in helping to draft new campaign finance regulations, though he and his supporters are now being accused of exploiting loopholes to compete with Mr. Obama, who has opted out of the campaign finance system. His moves against Congressional earmarks and wasteful government spending are well known. But Mr. McCain has more recently found new areas of agreement with President Bush and other party leaders, like pledging to make permanent the tax cuts he twice voted against and lifting a ban against offshore drilling that he once supported.

However, we can not question whether getting shot down is a qualification for president. That would be mean.

But the larger question is, will fighting the battles of the 1960s still resonate with undecided voters. Perhaps so; perhaps revulsion with the DFHs, the Panthers, and feminists burning their bras is still powerful. Or perhaps most people will just say, "WTF?"

The results of Nixonland are still with us. But the battles and events that led to our polarization are now so remote as to barely be remembered, if the voter was even born then. So, like Obama, they were unAmerican enough to have failed to be old enough to have been in Vietnam.

Or Woodstock.



* Oh, and fear.