All Hope Is Gone

In the last week or so, I have basically lost all hope for this country.  It seems to me that Bush sent us on a path to absolute economic, environmental and political dissolution, and because of the psychosis of our country's right wing, the economic power of our corporate class (who are invested in turning us into a plutocracy), the media's either willing or ignorant complicity in the efforts of such people to derail us, and the various obstructionist hurdles in our (supposedly) democratic system of government, make it impossible for Obama to right our course.  And things will just get worse, and the right will regain power, because our people are too stupid to realize that it's the republicans that are still responsible for things not improving, and then we will get, I don't know, Speaker Boehner, and that way just lies the Apocalypse.

Summit

I think the best thing about this health care summit it that it forces the news media to start talking about the actual substance of the bill, and the wide-spread popularity of the of many of its provisions. Hopefully, once people realize how much they support it, it will be easier for the Democrats to finally pass it.

The Banana Republic of America

So, I haven't really been writing about politics lately, though I have been keeping abreast of it. And it's for a simple reason, I think, which is the torture debate, and my general sense that the people on my side just don't get whats going on.

It's not that I think torture is right, or that things like waterboarding and walling aren't torture. They are. It's not that I think that the last President's men and women are war criminals. They are. And in an ideal world they would stand trial for war crimes. But I don't think that Obama is wrong in wanting to "look forward."

Yes, it's intellectually incoherent. Not upholding the rule of law will have a deleterious effect on our system of justice. And however important Obama's agenda is to me and others, the impediments that prosecutions might place in front of it are no reason not to do the right thing.

It's just that I think that prosecutions might bee even more dangerous than not having them, because of the response that I forsee coming from them.

I remember reading an article years ago that made the basic argument that what happened to Clinton was payback for Nixon. Nixon is the only modern president, really the only president, period, who is unequivocally placed in the historical record as a criminal. And he was a Republican. There is just no correspnding stain to the Democrat's honor to equal what Nixon says about the Republican party, and impeaching Clinton was about trying to even that score. And though it didn't really work, the Republicans were obviously willing to that far, to get that dirty, in the name of settling a score that existed in their own heads.

So, what would happen if Obama tried the last administration for war crimes? What would that do? That has never happened before. Take a moment to think about how big a deal it would be to try a president for crimes. It's never happened before, and we have had some presidents who have done some bad things. Andrew Jackson was pretty much solely responsible for the Trail of Tears, and he's on the fucking twenty. To do so would be unprecedented, in a way, and the Republicans sense of agrievement would know no bounds.

And so there is no doubt in my mind that if Obama brought prosecutions against Bush, Cheney, or any of their underlings—just, righteous prsecutions—that the next Republican president wouldn't turn right around and start trying to find any excuse to bring charges up against Obama and various members of his adminstration. Holder. Clinton. Biden. Dawn Johnsen. Any joke of a reason they can find, they will take. I mean, can you imagine what Sarah Palin, that vindictive freak, would do, if she was our next president, and Obama had brougth charges against Bush officials? And given the precarious state of the economy, and the madness infesting the entire Republican party, that situation isn't as unimaginable as it should be.

And when the whole Banana Republic meme started up, I felt like, "I'm right." Some people think this is an absurd argument, after the Clinton impeachment, after the last eight years. And it is. But it isn't funny. Implicit in that line of (faulty) reasoning is a threat. "You want to play like that, ok, we'll play like that." It doesn't matter whether Obama is turning us into a Banana Republic or not, just that it gives them the excuse to start turning us into a Banana Republic. An excuse is all they need to become completely fascistic.

So while I think the prosecutiongs for the Bush administration is the "right thing to do," I don't know that I think Obama should do it, at least not any time soon. Because if the Democrats lose power in either branch of government anytime soon, America as we know it will quickly cease to exist. We will start to torture again. There will be endless surveillance of citizens and political opponents. People will start disppearing.

Given this argument only makes sense if you think the Republicans are evil. So if you don't think the major polical party that is arguing in favor of war crimes is evil, by all means continue pushing for investigations.

I value the rule of law. I think we should live in a system that is ruled by the law. But when one of the two major political parties doesn't actually beleive in the rule of law, I am not sure we can acutally have it. Writing that makes me feel ill.

God, I hate them so fucking much.

So maybe Obama is doing the right thing. Maybe he can has a plan. I don't know. And I don't know if following an ideal, in a particular case, is the right thing to do if following that ideal will lead to other's destroying it once and for all. I don't know if insisting on the ideal, no matter how noble, is the right thing to do with it will lead to the death of innocents. I don't know.

Faces of Government

You know what's something that I find interesting? Over the last few years, I had next to no idea who was in the Bush Administration. I knew that Rice was at state, but I probably couldn't have told you who Robert Gates was, and I didn't know who Hank Paulson was until the crisis hit. I knew that Gonzales made a mockery of justice, but who was the guy after him? He fainted once, didn't he? Card was CoS, John Yoo was some evil Justice flunky. Bolton was briefly at the UN. Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, David Addington, Doug Feith. I remember the names but not the jobs. Ari, Scott, Tony (RIP), and Dana were the press secretaries. Scott fucking hated his job and the people he worked with. Oh! And Karl Rove! How could I forget Rove. Maybe I just wanted to.

That's a lot of names, now that I look at it, but most of them are vile flunkies, I have next to no idea who was running any of the agencies.

Now I know that Clinton, Gates, and Geithner are at the Big Three. Arne Duncan at HUD. Sen. Salazar at Interior. Peter Orzag at OMB. Eric Holder is finally Attorney General. Steven Chu is at Energy. Shinseki at Veteran affairs, with Tammy Duckworth as his deputy. Jim Jones is NSA. Leon Panetta is head of the CIA. Susan Rice is Ambassodor to the UN. HHS is empty, but it was going to be Daschle. Commerce was supposed to be Richardson, then Gregg (guess we'll never know if my theory was correct). Ray LaHood is at Transportation, and is Republican. Hilda Solis is finally on track to be Labor Secretary. Gibbs is our lone press secretary, though Bill Burton is his deputy. The advisors are Sam Power, Larry Summers, Axelrod, Valerie Jarret, Jared Bernstein at the VPs office. Melody Barnes coordinates domestic policy. Cass Sunnstein is working at some shadowy shit I can't remember. Volcker is overseeing the economic advisory board. Ray Lynch is or will be deputy to Gates. Rahmbo is CoS. Reggie Love is still the man's personal assistent. The hotspot envoys are George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke. That's off the top of my head.

Now, maybe I am just more involved in paying attention to who's running what, but I think that it might actually be due to the way Obama is running things. In two ways. First, we hear about these people because they have actual responsbilities. They are trying to accomplish things. With Bush it didn't matter; none of them were meant to do their jobs anyways. Government doesn't work; why try. Who cares who they are, if they are just seat warmers? Now, these people have jobs to do, and if they are doing things, we hear about them.

Second, this is also part of Obama's promise to make government more open to the people. In order for it to be open, the people have to know who is running things. We should know who is running our government, and so there are press conferences to announce people. They are sworn in in public, with a nice speech to be with it (Favreau is head speechwriter!). They talk to the press and let people know what they are doing. In order for the people to be engaged, they need to be engaged. There needs to be faces to match with what is happening, or else government just becomes cold and distant. Faces give you someone to talk to, someone to follow, someone to get angry at, to write letters to. Maybe it gives you a team to root for. However it works, you can't have an active citizenry with an shadowy government, and you can't have a shadowy government if you know everyone's. Maybe it's just a product of the media environment, or maybe this is what change looks like.

Update: Shit, how did I forget Napolitano at Homeland Security?

Stimulus: not the be-all end-all

Lots and lots of people are complaining about how Obama has handled the negotiations over the Stimulus Package. Should he have started higher? Should he have been less accommodating of Republican concerns?

Hypothesis: Obama is using the Stimulus Package as a sort of test drive of sorts, about how to deal with negotiations with Republicans. I think the Stimulus Bill, in the long term, is not necessarily as central to his plans as one might be led to believe. It is not the sum total of the economic recovery project, but the first step. There is still healthcare. There is still Energy. There is EFCA. Hell, there are still the budgets for this year and last, where filibustering is much harder, and at some steps not even allowed. The second round of TARP hasn't even come out yet. There are a lot of opportunities for Obama to take action on the economy, and opportunities to use the economy to completely refashion the American political landscape. Now he knows how much good faith he can expect from Republicans (zero) and can make further moves with that in mind. How he makes use of that information, I have no idea. Well, it probably involves lots of speeches and organizing, more politesse than rancor, more mocking than demonizing. But those are scrap pieces, not an engine. I am curious how he plans to drive this thing.

He will let you down

It's really sad, and not a little bit irksome, to see Sullivan cling to some sympathetic murmurings from a chat with the Washington Post two or three weeks ago. Obama used to support Single Payer. At the New Hampshire debate, he said, roughly, that if he had his way, he would install a Single Payer system, but the politcal environment made that impossible, so best to work towards something else. Either he was lying wholecloth as an Illinois state pol about his values and policy predilections, holding his hidden conservatism in secret until he could strike out against the hostile forces that he chose as his home, or he has adapted his policy avocation towards more pragmatic—that is, achievable—goals as he has moved up the political ladder. Obviously I think the latter is the much more likely option, as in the first one, Obama is basically just a snake. Neither Sullivan nor I believe that, so thinking Obama didn't actually mean what he has said about Health Care in the past is silly.

Besides, it's quite obvious that what he has said in the past about entitlement reform was just laying the groundwork on a technocratic argument on Healthcare Reform. The present entitlement system is unsustainable; so is the private sector; so we need a massive overhaul. It's simply a way of sidestepping the ideological issues—concerns about left wing/right wing identity—that get in the way of making a Universal Healthcare System politically feasible. Making the issue technocratic and values based (no one should have to be fighting for claims while dying of cancer) is a way of circumventing those roadblocks. That Sullivan doesn't see this is kind of pathetic.

Besides, Obama is just not going to cut benefits. People won't want to lose what their parents already got. People who labor for a living, and don't just sitting around typing and reading, can not work much longer than they already having to. You can't work construction into your sixties. And hey! Look at all this populist anger lying around! Cutting benefits will just not sell. Obama knows this. He knows people are unhappy with the system even as it is now. He put a man having to work at Wal-Mart to pay his wife's medical bills in his infomercial.

I know its pleasant in some circles, to pretend that Obama is really some type of conservative, centrist, but that really isn't the case.

Update: ...And now here's Sullivan proving my first point for me.

Gregg, Commerce, and Healthcare Reform

There has been a lot of talk lately about why President Obama (neat) has decided to nominate Senator Gregg to be his Commerce Secretary, most of it somewhat confounded. The conventional wisdom at work seem to be that even though this will maybe make some votes easier in the Senate, since Gregg, a pretty reactionary Republican, will be replaced by a Republican moderate, maybe even a RINO, there is really no reason why Obama would want a Gregg at Commerce. Well, I think I have a answer, and the answer is healthcare.

As is being illustrated right now with the Stimulus Bill, and which was obvious during Bush's attempt to destroy—er, reform—Social Security, any big governmental change, politically, requires bipartisan support. This isn't just necessary to spread the blame around, although that is a factor, but also to make any change look moderate and essential. If people from both parties support a change, it must just be an obvious and necessary change in course, not a sharp turn into uncharted territory. As Neil will tell you, when Pelosi shut the House Dems out of any negotiations, refusing to give a counter-offer to the ideas Bush was floating around, the Republicans backed off and didn't move towards privatization. It was too risky an endeavor for a party to take on their own. The Wall Street Bailout wouldn't pass the House without bipartisan support; no party wanted to own a very unpopular move to give $700 billion to the people that had gotten us into the mess in the first place, even if inaction might have lead to a credit freeze that would have actually thrown us into a Great Depression. Now, Obama wants bipartisan support for his smuttily tagged Stimulus Package, since he doesn't want to spend another $700 to 800 Billion ($900 billion?) without some of that sweet, sweet bipartisan support. He won't get it; he might just get some votes for cloture and no votes for the actual bill. But the Stimulus Package is such a no-brainer necessity at this point that it doesn't really matter what votes they get, the Dems need to go through with it regardless. Still, that hurts Obama's bipartisan clout, and on something less one-time, more long-term change, like health care, bipartisan support will be even more necessary.

So, if Obama can't get bipartisan cover, he can just make some. Make it in-house. With Gregg at Commerce, he can talk about how his bipartisan administration is working on correcting the massive issue of healthcare, and he is including both sides of the aisle in the planning. And since Gregg is part of the administration, that means he de facto supports it, for the administration supports it, and is he not part of the administration? Healthcare reform immediately looks less radical. And it's pretty easy to include Gregg in this project. Commerce, I understand, has some vague responsibilities in terms of promoting business, and Obama for a long time has been talking about the negative effects of the healthcare crisis on businesses; small ones can't supply it and it's bankrupting big ones. If he can be persuaded to, Gregg could end up playing some kind of liaison role, talking up the benefits of supporting health care reform to businesses, pointing out how it will ease their bottom line, especially in tough times like these.

Will Gregg go along with this? The way I see it, once confirmed as Commerce Secretary, Gregg has basically three options: 1) be a kind of loyal opposition/opposing viewpoint within the administration, offering counterpoint to ideas put forth by the more liberal (read:all) members, while performing the tasks President Obama assigns him, 2) Not do his job, disobey orders, attempt to sabotage the effort and get fired, or 3) resign in principled opposition, in order to show how far left this healthcare project is.

If he goes with either of latter two, it's no biggie. This is the benefit of Gregg actually being fairly conservative. If he leaves, it's not exactly a canary-in-a-coalmine type moment. It's quite easy for the Obama administration to spin that as just principled opposition from the far-right, wish Gregg the best on his endeavors, blah blah blah. It's not like they have been rejected by a Snowe, Collins, or Specter here. And they still got a hard-right Republican out of office and leveled the playing field for the seat in 2010.

But I think Gregg will take the first option. Commerce is it for him. This is the last stop of his career, and he knows it. The Republicans will be pissed at him behind closed doors for diluting their brand and making his seat more vulnerable. New Hampshire is pretty blue now, and they will probably lose the seat in 2010, since it's questionable whether Gregg would even be able to hold it then, even with the weight of incumbency. So he probably can't rely on too much Republican largess after he leaves public service. Gregg wants a job that has a good chance of going past 2010, and he wants a nice capstone to his career, and that doesn't mean resigning when healthcare comes up. Healthcare is coming this year; Gregg isn't going to resign before he might have lost his seat in the Senate. He may try to follow option 2, and if he does it is up to Obama to put his foot down, which, given his last couple of speeches on the Stimulus, I think it can be assumed he will.

After that, I bet Gregg with settle into his role as counterpoint, and comfort himself for the little checks or advice he gives, and the influence and closeness to the halls of power that he has. And Obama will talk about his bipartisan effort to reform healthcare, and Gregg will stand behind him at speeches and clap, or sit at photo-op meetings with Summers and Biden and the Secretaries of Labor and HHS and Treasury and OMB, and smile.

Well worth keeping in mind for the next four years.

Awesome.

via (via).

Ecstatic

Ecstatic. I am just ecstatic. I just caught the tail-end of his speech. There were tears in my eyes. They might keep coming. I have not been this happy in so, so long.

Now I am crying.

I have waited four years for this. The moment is so large.

God, this is sad.

Madelyn Dunham passed away today. One day before. Sometimes, the universe is so unfair, it just seems spiteful.

Early voting.

I have voted for Barack Obama. It took about an hour, all told.

Stuck on my printer, within my line of sight, there is a sticker that says:

OBAMA
Democrat
U.S. SENATE

When I voted for the man four years ago, I already wanted this. But I never imagined it would come so soon.

Two Things

I did two interesting things today, one that felt really bad, and one that felt really good.

The first was the bad thing. Remember a while back when there was reports about how Walmart was screening videos decrying how, if Obama was elected, the fair pay act would allow unions to run rampant, and this would destroy not only poor little defenseless Wal-Mart, but America? Well, see, I work for "The Other Guy," and today I had to watch a video that was basically the same thing. Following in the standard, "the same as Wal-Mart, but classier" approach, it was just a incredibly distorted video about how unions are bad, and are evil businesses (Yes, businesses!) that ruin life for workers. The only reference to recent events was about "coming changes in our labor laws." So no direct references to the campaign or the candidates, just some anti-union propaganda before the election.

If I understood the the basic argument of the video, it was that unions are not able to make them pay you more, and joining them will break up the big happy corporate family that you belong to that pays you minimum wage. The guy across from me snortled and chuckled throughout at the videos epic failure, and at one point, to afraid to do anything overt, I just looked over, and we shared a look: the kind that says, "yeah, this is bullshit." Another guy and I shared a good laugh afterwards, as well. (Op! Just wanted to make sure there was none of those evil unions around the corner!" he said) My heart goes out to you both.

It made me feel bad. I like the work atmosphere there, but now I am going to trust the managers's there a little less.

The other thing was, after coming home and perusing the blogs to the wave of bullshit that has been rising since the Republinca Convention (and will hopefully soon crest), and just being disgusted and feeling helpless about the whole thing, I got a call out of the blue from the Local Obama campaign, asking if I wanted to volunteer. So I did. I spent two and a half hours today calling phone numbers of college students who didn't answer and talking vaguely about politics with the interns. In a way, it was an edifying esperiance, except I think all I managed to was to knock out some pages of people they would not need to call again.

A couple anecdotes, though, that I bring back to the blog world (Sir Charles, ari, are you reading this?): the PUMAs are very real, and Sarah Palin means something to them. All the interns seemed to have had encounters with women, even pro-choice women, who were voting for McCain-Palin, because they wanted a woman in office. One person was even told that "a vote for McCain is really a vote for Hillary." This was not funny to them. One person spent much time talking with pro-choice women, and trying to discuss things with a McCain supporter. Apparently, they don't like to bring up abortion over the phone (I asked, and then was forced to admit it was all outside my area of expertise), so they focus on McCain not supporting the Fair Pay Act. Many of us noted that we had encounter with enthusiastic 80-year-old Obama fans, of both sexes, and I wondered why it seemed to be more the 60 or 70 age group that was so pro-McCain. One woman opined that it's because that age group wasn't tuaght to be "rebellious" like the slightly younger ones were (read those quote-marks as signifying contempt).

But yeah, Pumas: a very real, and annoying phenomenon, people. The grunts have to deal with it day in and day out.

The Last Gasp of the Right

After reading the first little bit of this John Cole post, something occurred to me, a thought that I had had previously, but entirely forgotten about.

In the Democratic party, the base, the people who constitute the solid source of support and votes, are basically Good Democrats, normal citizens who aren't really all that involved in politics, but know which side their bread is buttered on, and show up to vote for them. Then there is the activist, politically inclined types, who are really into politics, and are always threatening to stay home or vote third party, and really claim to have no real oyalty to the Democratic Party itself (*cough*).

But in the Republican party it's basically the opposite, because the base is the Religious Right. That's where they get their votes, not from libertarians or free-market types. There's a huge chunk of the country that is basically votes on spreading an image Christianity across our apolitical culture. And like the far-left liberals, these people don't really care about the republican party itself, they want to republican party to start doing more of what they want, it doesn't, you know. And like the far-left liberals, they have no problem staying home or voting for a third party. They do not care about the party per se, they just care about what it has done for them lately. And in terms of distance from the American Center, the religious right is really just as extreme, if not more extreme, than more on the liberal left.

This basically explains the difference between the two parties, and their approaches to constituencies. The Democratic Part is always balancing between ignoring the left and doing some things in their favor, for the most part seeing how much they can just ignore them to gain swing voters without losing the election entirely by turning to many of the left away. So, the democrats often seem hesitant to embrace their left. Hence them almost never using the word abortion in ads. The right, on the other hand, can't afford to stick it to their fringe, because their fringe is their base. So that's why you get John McCain bending over backwards to court the religious right, because he automatically has no chance without them. I suspect that if John McCain had his druthers, he would be running the kind of moderate, idea-based campaign that he said he would. But the base hates him; he represents everything that they hate in the republican party, and there is an actual chance that they wouldn't show up to vote for him. So here he is turning himself into their ghoul, to protect their votes.

Personally I suspect that after this election the religious right will be done. Obama's triumph will prove once and for all that they are outside the mainstream, and are lethal to electoral success, and they Republican Party will soon dump them wholecloth, and start running on small-government libertarian and civil libertarians. It will be something like the party of Goldwater again. The Religious Right will go back to not caring about electoral politics, and slowly shrink as the combined forces of modernity and liberalism slowly tear their children out of the fold. These people are simply living in an outdated social model, one that cannot really exist in the first world, and the only reason it has been useful to these people—the sense of community, the social programs and daycare— is in dealing with the hardship caused by the party they have voted for. As those causes disappear, their children will drift away, seeing their parents' culture as not one they need to hold onto for themselves, and not worth preserving for posterity.

Biden II

The transcript from this video has been making the rounds as proof that Joe Biden is going to start putting his foot in his mouth. But having watched it, it has finally cured of any doubts I might have had about Obama's pick. The guy is hilarious! I mean, just insanely good sense of comic timing. Very very likable. And his openness and ease with a crowd....

I think this pick confirms what is fast becoming the iron rule of the campaign: Obama Is Better At This Than You. Anytime someone comes up with some criticism of a decision that the Obama campaign has made, they end up being proved wrong. These guys are just the best in the business. The rest of us, we should just sit back and enjoy the ride.

via.

Dreams

I am in the process of just tearing through Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father. It lacks the formality and diplomacy of The Audacity of Hope, so I think it gives you a better sesne of Obama as a writer.

His writing is a weird mix of master and novice. His descriptive skill is incredibly compact yet extremely vivid. Rarely does he not come up with the exactly the words and details to draw a picture in the minds eye, and when relating events, every phrase builds towards the scenes point. There is an ambiguity to his writing as well. Barack is much more of a shower than a teller. Scenes are often related, and though he often explains the effect some scenes had on him emotionally, like when Auma tells him about the fate of his father, other scenes receive no discussion and analysis. This actually, can often be aggravating. When A black Reverend tells him that his congregation won't work with Barack's organization because they don't want to work with some jews and Catholic churches, and besides the mayors black and he's friends with him, so why work with them now, You kind of want to know what this scene means, what it signifies of Obama, but he doesn't really say anything particular about it, just leaves you to draw your own conclusions.

On the novice front, Barack seems to have some difficulties maitaining the verisimultude of the memoir genre. The long passages of conversation are fine. You can just assume that he is recalling the broad outline of something that was once said, and he renders the character's voice acutely enough that we can buy that even if these are the exact words they said, they were in tis same voice. Besides this is just a nessesary convention to keep such writing interesting. But he has the tendency, expecially in earlier passages (you can feel him improving as the book goes on) on having the speaker state information that both characters know already, like in comic books with two old foes restate their entire origins to each other while fighting. It pulls you out when you know a character wouldn't say something like that. Also, remembrances prompted by other events are other framed as things he is thinking of at the time. I can accept that the conversations are somewhat the product of invention, because i can beleive you know the outline of it, or at least the gist. But expecting me to buy that you remember not your train of thought from several years ago is just asking to much of me, I think. It's a convention of narrative that I just can't buy as realistic.

Also, there is a fragmentary nature to the narrative, which is somewhat reminiscent of Joyce. The chapters, especially the earlier ones, jump over whole points of experience. To a degree, this is ok, since you can fill in a lot of details yourself. But sometimes it just seems fragmentary. Its hard to connect the anrgy, young, semi-militant black man of his first two years of college relates to the young boy growing up. It's kind of hard to figure how someone who relates to Malcolm X can reconcile that with being raised by entirely by white relations. Sometimes, his showing, not telling approach means he stops even showing. This would be eaiser to deal with, I think, if each of the chapters had a more cohesive whole, some kind of conclusion, but they don't They are more like breaks in the narrative. Cliffhangers. And then the narrative jumps ahead, and you are left wondering what the significance of the last chapter was. If he is going to encapsulate one period in his life, then he needs to give the capsule some sense of completelyness. The book lacks any degree of closure or conclusion. In a sense this is a good approach, because he keep reading, hoping for the various threads to come together by the end, but I am kind of doubting that Barack is going to pull this all together at the end, and make all the chapters retroactively fit into a concrete worldview. It's more like he is just offering up his experiances for perusal.

On that front though, the book is pretty devastating. The depiction of race relations in 1980's Chicago is just about the most depressing comment on the subject I have read. its just an endless series of ethnic rivalries, with all sides working against each other, making it impossible for anything to get better. I hope it's not still like that.

Which brings me to another point. This book is obviously not the work of someone who was planning on eventually running for president, or even really any political office. There's just too many details that people wouldn't want on the record, and no politician would want to be caught leaving such harsh depictions race relations. They certainly wouldn't structure an entire chapter around sitting up at 3 a.m. (heh) after a wild party, drunk and stoned and miserable. Or throw in all this cursing, including passages where he calls people motherfuckers. (There is a great novelty to thinking of the Eloquent Hopemonger saying "motherfucker." Is there an audiobook? Read by him? If so, I NEED it.)

And yet the book also makes me more trusting of him, because the image of him that emerges is very, very familiar. Take this passage:

In 1983, I decided to become a community organizer.

There wasn't much detail to the idea; I didn't know anyone making a living that way. When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.

That's what I'll do, I'll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change.

Sound familiar? That's Obama writing in 1995, before he ran for public office, about himself in 1983. He all but says "change from the bottom up." And he knows what he is thinking is slightly nuts; I am pretty sure that last sentence is a bit of self-deprecating irony. But he does it anyways. And now here is that guy, years later, running for the presidency, and he is espousing the exact same things. That's stunning. There is a dreamer running for president.

Biden

I found out about the Biden as VP announcement last night while up late, read more about it this morning, thought about it at work, and read some more about it when I got home (late). And I have to say, the more I think about it, the more I like it, and I think it's because I think a lot of the criticisms of it are wrong.

The main criticism seems to be that they think Biden is, as Kos put it, fills a gap: that Obama is covering a percieved criticism with the pick, either a lack of foreign policy experiance or an inability to attack his political opponents. Maybe Obama was thinking of these things, but I doubt it. I don't think the guy who won the Iraq Debate—when the leader of Iraq endorses your plan, you win—is looking for someone to bolster his foreign policy cred. I think that Obama actually went with Biden because he actually reinforces a lot of Obama's appeal.

The reasons are have supported Barack Obama are these: 1)He is the only politician who has articulated a version of America that I can belong to, the accepts and welcomes me. 2) He comes across not as a politician, as some weird amorphous creature that shifts form with every new round of polling data, but as an actual person for whom being a politician is simply his job. 3) While his political views are not as far to the left as I would like, they are far enough that I don't feel he is really on the other side, like I do with anyone in the DLC, and they represent a clear and present shift from present centrist opinion. 4) He has the mad political skills to actually get those policies enacted. Getting Obama's politicies in place is better than failing to get Kucinich's or Nader's in place. The perfect may be kept in mind, but always work for the possible.

With Biden, I feel he works to strengthen Obama's vision of America. Biden is a working-class kid who made it to the senate at an impossibly young age, and dealt with reams of personal tradgedy, yet worked through it all. He's actually kind of inspiring. And like Obama, he comes across as human, not a politician. Biden has been a senator so long the man is just completely comfortable in his skin. The guy you see on stage is not an act, and he doesn't try to put on airs or change his rhetoric to acomodate anyone. He is who he is, and that's good. If I am going to be putting the Button in someone's hands, or putting them heartbeat way from the Button, I would like to know them as a person a bit, becasue robots are scary. I don't have to like them, in fact it's very possible Biden is a huge asshole, I just have to know they aren't lying to me. Coming across as real, as an actual person, means coming across as someone who isn't lying, as someone who is honest. Biden seems to be honest. After Clinton and Bush, and Gore, who, god love him, couldn't keep those goddamn advisors off him enough, and only really flowered once he stopped giving a fuck and it was too late to get elected, I need that.

Concerning Biden on the issues, he seems to be pretty good. A couple of big disagreeances, but for the most part he seems to be a solid Good Democrat, and while I would of course like a Good Social Democrat, I am not feeling to greedy right now. The fourth point, eh, obviously Biden isn't the political phenom Obama is, but the guy is obviously a policy heavyweight, in a way Hilary Clinton can only wish she was, so even if he isn't a political phenom, the guy can run the show, which is really the VP's main qualification.

Edwards

So today during break at work, I find the channel, previously set to the awesome Batman Begins (goddamn I am loving those Nolan/Bale Batman movies these days) set to some news channel, reporting on the latest news, the Edwards controversy. I am still a little uncertain of all that has occurred, but I gleamed then, and gleamed later, that Edwards admitted to having an affair with the woman from the whole love child rumors, that he is denying that the baby is his, and that his family has known about it since 2006. Shit. As I said to my co-worker, I guess this means he's out of the running for vice president.

I have been kicking around a bit of the left blogosphere, and a couple of broad motifs are poping up. 1) Fuck Mickey Kaus (even though he was (generally) right about all this). 2) I feel sorry for Elizabeth. 3)Fuck Edwards, this was politically risky. 4) Fuck Elizabeth too, I can't beleive they ran a campaign knowing this was out there. 5)Goddamn, we dodged a bullet. 6) Various asscovering excuses for verbal assults on espousers of the rumor before it was confirmed.

Personally, in my own small petty way, I feel kind of vindicated in that, though my faith was often tempted, Obama was always my favorite of the Big Three in the Dem primary. Sure, it's probably just the Illinois bias that did it, but still, I picked not only the winning horse, but the right horse. Bill had to many shady business deals for Hillary to be viable, and if Edwards had been the nominee now, we would have been fucked for no reason. Somehow, we lucked out and got the super devoted family man. Seriously, for a bit of hubris, here, I will go all in (mark it!): There will never be a personaly scandal involving Barack Obama. The man simply cares to much about the concept of family. I read his book, trust me. My take is that Barack Obama, because of his own upbringing, and because, I think, he was conditioned to approahc situations as a kind of objective, analytical observer, places unquantifiable value on his family unit as a source of identity. It's the value of the impossible dream. I think Barack Obama thought he would never get a stable, "normal" life, and so he feels incredibly blessed that he was able to get one. Watch that father's day speech. The man really really cares, on an almost primordial level, about his role as the father in his family. And hell, Michelle? The accumulation of anecdotal evidence I have come across leads me incontroveribly to the conclusion that those two are just incredibly protective of one another. I just don't see anything coming between them. They are a team.

But then, I thought John and Elizabeth were a team. And maybe they are. But still, this completely changes the understanding of the dynamic at work. We are no longer dealing with two faithful soulmates. So what are we dealing with? The quality was changed.

And I think the anger, or sense of betrayal, in the blogs is right. Whether or not it is fair, adultery is something that must be factored into politics, and the hiding of it is dangerous, and can effect the lives of other people. Whether it is fair or not, had this come out now , it would had lost the election, and that makes it irresponsible. Sure, it's a double standard for democrats. But if you want to be a democrat, that doesn't mean you can have affairs. It's that nature of the Game that you can't. Complaining about it at this point is like plaing chess and complaining that White always gets to go first. Of course white gets to got first! That's the rules asshole. If you don't like it, don't play black! Me, I like to play black. I like getting something to react to right off the bat. I like the limitations. But if you don't, you are playing the wrong game. Go play something else. And for God's sake, don't play something that might fuck up my life when you lose.

Slightly less disapointed.

Thanks Nathan Newman!

Sigh.

You know, I always kind of figured that I would eventually become disillusioned, and my youthful idealism and hope in a better future would be crushed. But I didn't think that it would happen so quickly.

Rhetorical Iconography

I just watched the Obama Father's Day speech. I thought the Jesus bits at the end felt tacked on, mostly there because he was in a church. So, in that sense, a little discordant as literature.

I have decided to refer to such invocations of Jesus as "rhetorical iconography." It seems like there is this tendency among the religious, or those in the habit of making arguments that they try to evoke as religious, to just stick a reference to having faith in Jesus Christ as making everything all better, and why this is so is left unsaid. The speaker/writer is not really trying to explain the importance of Jesus, or how mechanism by which faith and Jesus beings about positive developments, they are simply throwing in the reference. It's a representative rhetorical flourish meant to be considered and meditated on by the audience, in much the way an icon was meant to be studied on, as if through it's consideration some truth of the depicted would dawn upon the viewer.

Now, there is probably a good reason the reference can just be tacked in there, which is that the audience as already heard all of the reasons for why they should trust in Jesus, so why said it again? But that's actually what icons are for. You look at them, and meditate on your relation to the which is pictured; it requires some understanding of the images meaning in order for the truth to emerge from it. Since I haven't internalized these reasons, these evocations always leave me cold. They don't tell me why faith in Jesus will (supposedly) help me, and as a result I just think "whatever, man."

I wonder if I should be feeling alienated that Obama seems to think that faith, and faith in Jesus, is so important, such an edifying way of living and succeeding in life, but I figure, that's just his bag. All people have some shit that they think is the the way to be, the way to do things, whether that's Veganism, Christianity, being a swinger, hippy, "traditional" family member, gay clubber, raver, anarchist, objectivist.... People all have this tendency to form some silly tribe that bolsters their particular view of How One Should Live. Obama's is no different, and his thing happens to involve Jesus. Not really something to get bent out of shape about.

Still, I hope he keeps that kind of talk in the Church. If he starts talking like that at those huge rallies, I might have to reconsider my position.