Hillary is Not Going to Save Us

I've had private conversations on this point before on whether Hillary would run again for President. I have always said she would not. After the disastrous midterm elections, people who had dismissed her in 2008 began asking if she would, perhaps finally understanding the penalties of having been so wrong before. Today, myiq2xu has a post on The Confluence citing two news articles where HRC says pretty firmly that she's done with public service after the Secretary of State gig. Nope, Hillary is not going to save us, even if we ask nicely.

WKJM's Frustration

A friend sent me a link to a TPM editorial post by WKJM where the pool boy claims "Now, before saying anything else, let me say that there's never been a bigger fan of Bill Clinton's than me (though I had some wavering in 2008)." before launching into a totally bizarre put down of , well, you tell me (I'll provide the entire post so it is all in context):

A report surfaced today that Bill Clinton is frustrated as heck that the Dems can't manage to get a coherent or persuasive message together for the midterms. And he's even doing what he can to get together good talking points for candidates and stump in all the right places to help save the Democratic majorities even if the current leaders can't manage it themselves.

Now, before saying anything else, let me say that there's never been a bigger fan of Bill Clinton's than me (though I had some wavering in 2008). And I've never doubted his intuitive political skills, which make him -- whatever else you think of him -- one of the consummate, defining political players of the 20th century. And, as you've seen if you've read what I've written over the last three months, I've been distressed by the Democrats' inability or unwillingness to grasp hold of what winning political issues there are in such a rough climate.

Popular is as Popular Does

I laughed out loud at lunch today when I read this article in the LA Times, Clinton outshines Obama as campaign trail surrogate, poll finds:

According to a Gallup Poll released Tuesday, more voters of all political persuasions said they were more likely to back a candidate if Democrat Clinton campaigned for him or her, than if the campaigner were President Obama, who is fighting to keep Democrats in control of Congress.

The poll found that 53% of Democrats said Clinton’s personal endorsement would carry weight compared to 48% who said Obama’s would. On the negative side, 5% of Democrats said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate if Clinton campaigned, while 6% said they would be more hostile if it were Obama. The differences between those numbers translates into what the poll said was a net of 48 for Clinton and 42 for Obama.

Clinton and Obama fare less well with Republicans and independents but the former president, free of the burden of actually being in office and having to make tough decisions, again gets the edge. Neither Democrat carries much weight with either group, but Clinton is less hurtful by a ratio of about 2 to 1 among Republicans.

Among independents, 21% said they'd be more likely to vote for a candidate who was baked by Clinton compared to 12% who said the same about Obama.

Anatomy of a Dog Whistle

Back in July and August, Digby tried to show the world how she wasn’t a racist like the rest of her benighted family by finding racism in every over-parsed phrase uttered by anyone, Left or Right, that wasn’t an unqualified and glowing endorsement of The Precious. I talked about that in Barking up the Wrong Tree, and how the Republican attack was not on race but on qualifications – which is a more subtle and difficult to address attack on civil rights, equality and protection under the law – feeding into their Ward Connerly-led assault upon Affirmative Action (AFAC). I then followed up with four posts about Affirmative Action and the current political contest: Affirmation, Easy Come, Easy Go, Qualified Success, and Obvious Injuries of Class.

The overall message of those five posts in concert is simply this: trivializing the very real damage that racism and other modes of socio-economic oppression inflict on people by trying to turn unflattering snarks about a not-very-likeable candidate into the ravings of George Wallace as he bars the door leaves the playing field wide open for true racist dog whistles (and even racist brass bands) because it inures people to real calls to fight the invidious effects of racism. Racism becomes reduced in the political imagination to name-calling and who likes a sissy who can’t stand up for himself? The kinds of arguments that do substantial and long term harm to the population, such as the efforts to undermine AFAC, become difficult to talk about as what they are, racist dog whistles, because they don’t fit the name-calling mold. They are dog whistles because their treatment of race (and also of gender, class and sexuality) is oblique, well mixed with certain kinds of facts, but presenting a persistent theme: these undeserving people are unfairly helped by (the government/the Democrats/the ACLU/insert demonized liberal organization’s name here), distorting the natural order of things (the free market, God’s will, unfettered individualism, etc.) and keeping you from getting what is rightfully yours.

I have condemned the instrumental use of racism, misogyny and homophobia by Obamacans. Back in early June, I condemned the willingness of pro-Hillary supporters to deliberately take up the racist, ratfucking bullshit of the Right to spread smears about Michelle Obama, in Visceral Reactions. The epicenter for this type of assault was (and remains) No Quarter, run by a Republican (Hillary supporter or not) and very friendly to Republican interests. Recently, The Confluence has begun serving up the same ugly mix, which is why I have dropped it from my blog roll and will have nothing to do with PUMA. The current set of posts (no, I will not link to them) serves up a toxic brew ostensibly about the current financial market and Obama’s connections to it, but is actually little more than regurgitation of the Republican racist assault on equal opportunity lending. Anti-Obama sentiment opens up the flood gates to connect him, ACORN, and Franklin Raines to Fannie Mae, subprime loans and government involvement in lending generally. The argument (and the post) relies heavily on images of African American politicians, administrators and executives to make visually the claim that cannot be made verbally, recalling Lee Atwater’s infamous remarks about not being able to say racial slurs which inspires a new level of creativity to convey the message: those people are ripping you off again, taking what is yours for themselves.

I encourage people to read Mandos’ post, “Subprime lending and minorities,” on Corrente. Ignore his moronic bout of CDS in the last paragraph (and the pathetic excuse he offers to try to claim it’s not really CDS) and concentrate on the meat of the post itself where he offers a well-reasoned rebuttal to the claims of the Confluence post. What I am going to do in this post is talk about the politics behind the arguments, which I have addressed recently in Political Investment and in More Myth Debunking, this time focusing on the Republican war on the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Democrats need to understand that trying to use the Republicans’ arguments as weapons against their intra-party rivals do nothing except weaken the party for the inter-party battles. I am not interested in talking about the fecklessness of the Democratic leadership at the moment – there will be plenty of time for that in other posts – but in trying to show how using the dog whistles of the Right do not help our own candidates (no matter who you support) and merely serve to corrode the Democrats’ efficacy. It is, at heart, a Somerby argument that nominal allies are often our worst enemies.

The arguments themselves have a long history in the fever swamps of the Right. In the original versions, it was the Evil Bill Clinton forcing banks to loan money to those kinds of people with the CRA. It added insult to fantasized injury that a Friend of Bill’s (FOB) and one of those people (i.e., an African American), Franklin Raines, was made CEO of Fannie Mae. At the time, the subprime crisis hadn’t hit and the opposition to these two entities was about the restrictions they placed on the free market. Then, about this time last year, before Obama was the nominee and just as Wall Street was being forced to confront the great shitpile, a more sophisticated argument was pushed forward – that the subprime crisis was a result of the combination of the CRA forcing banks to make loans to minority and poor borrowers and that the GSEs (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) accelerated this phenomenon by buying up the toxic mortgages and encouraging more to be made. The sotto voce argument here was that the black man running Fannie Mae was purposefully doing this to advantage undeserving black borrowers. This smear was first anti-government, then anti-Clinton, then anti-black.

The root of the smear is the toxic combination of Republican racism and greed, instrumentalized via the Southern Strategy to rally white resentment to win political power to dismantle the regulatory state crafted in the New Deal. The CRA forced the banking industry to make loans in areas and to people they did not want to serve. Let’s be clear – the CRA did introduce more risk to the system to those who were already comfortable with how things were arranged, exactly in the way that giving “those people” rights as such was “risky” for the existing power structure. People continuously treated as outcasts by definition will not have the socio-economic markers of inclusion, such as wealth, education, the right kind of table manners, the preferred grammatical forms, and so forth. They are a risk because they are not part of the social slice where everyone plays by the power elites cultural norms. This is one reason why women as such are being cast as a political problem (and thus a political risk) this electoral season because they are viewed as not being willing to play by the cultural norms, and many are afraid they will vote along gender lines instead of “as they should.” The anxiety is due to the knowledge of discriminatory treatment and the fear of punitive backlash. But I digress.

Home ownership is a major (and in an era of stagnant and declining wages, often the only) way for a household to accumulate significant wealth for a reasonable investment. Inheriting my father-in-law’s house after he passed away almost 3 years ago allowed us to liquidate 20 years of wealth and put it in our pocket. That wealth gave us economic leverage we didn’t have before, which (given a normal economic situation) could be used to garner us a greater economic leg up than having to rely on just our own earnings. My parents were able to give a house (albeit an old and slightly dilapidated one) to one of my siblings, an immense transfer of wealth his public servant income could not have obtained. It is these generational wealth transfers that can make home ownership wealth engines. (Tangential comment - In the bubble market, people did not have to wait for inheritance. They could put little or nothing down, sit on the property for a relatively short period of time, and reap the kind of payback that ordinarily took one or two generations of property holding to get. Why the hell wouldn’t people want to risk getting in over their heads with a potential reward like that?)

In a normal, non-bubble, market, to build up generational wealth is no small feat, even for those inside the magic circle of social respectability. Wealth of one generation is closely tied to that of the preceding one, and if you have been systematically, legally and extra-legally barred from ordinary wealth accumulation through the way socio-economic resources are structured, then with each cycle of wealth generation, you fall that much further behind. The further behind you fall, the greater a “risk” you are to the institutions and individuals who have moved risk from their arenas of operation to yours. Redlining, denying credit, residential covenants refusing ownership to certain classes of individuals, are all examples of reallocating economic risk. It avoids risk which creates greater risk for those excluded from opportunities for safety. All of this connects to the anti-AFAC arguments through the trope of who is deserving of social rewards and benefits by refusing to acknowledge the patterns of deprivation and exclusion that render entire classes of people “too risky” to be given access to those rewards and benefits. They’ll just come in and trash the place.

What the CRA did more than anything was force financial institutions to take on the risks that had been created by their exclusionary practices. It also came with reporting requirements to allow oversight to ensure that investments and loans were real and not merely exploitative. For every risk that succeeded, the probability went up that subsequent risk taking in that arena would pay off. It was in the institutions’ long term interests to see that the risks paid off. The industry loathed both the enforced risk taking and even more the oversight that they saw as a camel’s nose under their insider practices tent. The racists simply saw advantages being provided to minorities and needed no other reason to oppose it. When Bill Clinton strengthened the Act in 1994, it enraged both sides, and the fury was ratcheted up when he made it part of GLBA.

I’m not going to go into the financial ups and downs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they are brought into the argument more to obfuscate it than to add substance. The malfeasance at Fannie and Freddie was done by their private sector managers engaging in the same kinds of questionable business practices that other such managers did in the crisis though on a scale the GSEs could only dream of. One of the best run downs on the GSE failures is here by Tanta of Calculated Risk (in an argument with Paul Krugman) , where she spares no sympathy for anyone. One of the reasons I appreciate Tanta so much as an economic analyst is because she is very aware of class arguments being brought in to try to rule out risk by ruling out the poor. (Also see this short article by Mark Thoma, economist at U of OR.) The point of objection by the Right to the GSEs is that they, along with FHA, provide money to “undeserving” people who are too poor or economically damaged goods, there for fleecing but not for advancement. As for who “those people” are, just look at the list in Taking Out the Trash. It’s not just the white trash that is being described – it’s all the undeserving and reviled in our society. The GSEs have been swept strongly into the current arguments because it allows people to talk loudly about Franklin Raines and use his picture all over the place. For the Left, he is a FOB, and so can be bashed for his Clinton connections. On the Right, he is an FOB and he’s black, so they get to engage in CDS and racism, plus tie him by race and political party to Obama. Just as I’m not particularly interested in discussing Democratic leadership failures, I am not interested in Raines’ very real management failures (and possible corruption) as the head of Fannie Mae. The current Republican interest with Raines has more to do with his color and connections to the Clintons, and how that can be exploited, than with his alleged corruption.

The argument is little more than this: banks are being forced by Democrats to loan to blacks who are such bad credit risks that they are bringing the entire housing sector down. In California and other Southwest markets, it is the blacks and the “illegals” in tandem doing this. Why are Democrats going along? Because, the Republicans claim, they are captive to black (and other reviled groups’) interests and allow themselves to be used by the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, the ACLU, ACORN, and any other group perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be minority dominated. When the accused organization in (I’m looking at you, ACORN) has a very questionable history, it gets easier to spread guilt by association. This is how Franklin Raines fits in – the (incompetent and undeserving) black CEO who ran Fannie Mae to enrich (undeserving) blacks and other low-life “sub-prime” flimflam artists.

Again, I am not making an argument that there is nothing to object to on the part of any of these actors. I am pointing out the manipulation of facts, coincidence, prejudice and ideology to create a racist dog whistle that advances the objective of dismantling the regulatory state. It appeals to the worst in the listener and reinforces those beliefs by wrapping it up in a half-baked argument about the secret corruption of those people, out to steal our vital fluids and sap our national vigor.

Kind of like the CDS the Right has been pushing for 20 years and which the Left has eagerly seized upon when it suits their intra-party infighting needs. In fact, the effectiveness of the Right’s racist arguments is increased by the way in which the Left will allow enormous amounts of lies to be spread as long as they see that someone named Clinton is being blamed. The pattern of racist attacks on Obama, attacks promoted by some on the Left, is comparable to the pattern of classist attacks on the Clintons, attacks promoted by most of the intellectual Left, attacks which were extended to Gore (as Bob Somerby has incomparably and exhaustively documented) by the Village and babbled approvingly by more than a few denizens of Left Blogistan.

CDS fractures the Left's attempts to combat the Movement Conservative assault on civil rights and social justice. The rightwing counts on the willingness of the Village and the Blogger Boyz to never resist an occasion to take a cheap swipe, just as Mandos did in his otherwise excellent post. BTD asked during the campaign if it was more important to the Obamacans to purge the Clintons from the party than to win the election. I think the answer is that they are more interested in purging what the Clintons culturally represent to them than to have an effective political party. They are viscerally opposed to what they think is present in these people (and the nature of the attack on Palin echoes the historic attacks on the Clintons from Left and Right) in much the same way as a significant portion of the Republican party cannot see a candidate like Obama – or Deval Patrick or Barbara Jordan or John Lewis or Carol Mosley Braun or Douglas Wilder or Stephanie Tubbs Jones, or for that matter Condi Rice or Colin Powell – without having their racism kick into overdrive. The CDS driven Left does not appear to notice that the attempt to quarantine all the “bad” effects of political decisions by the Democrats as somehow attributable to the actions of these two specific political actors and their never-quite-firmly-defined circle of unindicted co-conspirators (Obama himself having been one of that group in the not so distant past, along with Rahm Emmanuel, Joe Lieberman, all of the current Congressional leadership at one point or another, and quite a number of public intellectuals and their families, including Paul Krugman’s son) does not and cannot defend the Democrats from rightwing claims that they are failing, they are lying, they cannot be trusted to protect the nation, etc. nor does it encourage more progressive behavior from those who are alleged to be combating the deleterious effects of the 90s, as we are seeing in the FISA vote, the current rip-off fiasco, the abandonment of UHC, and so forth.

Thus we end up with the leading lights of Left Blogistan solemnly agreeing that the president who fought tooth and nail to secure vital loans to help create long-term wealth in minority communities is nothing but a racist, another faction of the Democrats grabbing everything the Republican ratfuckers are shoving their way to tar the people, policies and plans that the Clintons have promoted and defended against rightwing attacks in some misguided belief that this will hurt Obama with voters instead of reinforce the Obamacan claims that the Clintons are just racists like their Bunker and Bubba supporters, while the Right merrily spreads the lie that Bill and the Democrats created the mortgage meltdown by setting up a scam for the undeserving minorities and poor to steal money and houses through the GSEs and CRA.

This is the full anatomy of the rightwing dog whistles of the last half century: Stirring up visceral reactions with distortions of cultural stereotypes and ordinary politics, mixed well with personal smears and attributing the worst possible motives to unobjectionable acts, in order to divide opposition and mobilize resentment in the service of dismantling the legacy of the New Deal.

And it just keeps working.

Anglachel

PS - Yes, the reference to an economist's relative is ironic.

Political Investment

A significant portion of the American Left, reaching epidemic levels among the Blogger Boyz, is so deeply invested in blaming Bill Clinton for every real or imagined failure of liberal politics that they are undermining any attempt to accrue political capital for the causes they allegedly support.

They have bought so heavily into that stock that they now hold a portfolio without sufficient diversity to withstand turmoil in the political market, persistently holding on to toxic securities (because everyone knows it is all Bill Clinton’s fault, a fundamental that will never change, like ever-appreciating home prices), rather than sell off that non-performing asset and capitalize on a risky but promising situation, getting the Democrats back in control of the government.

Or, to eschew the over taxed metaphor, if Democrats would simply stop mindlessly repeating rightwing lies and the opportunistic misrepresentations of intra-party opponents, we might be able to get more power.

The current meme running around Left Blogistan that the entire mortgage crisis and the resulting meltdown we are now enduring is because Clinton sided with the Republicans to destroy the FDR era Glass-Steagall Act. Here is an example of exactly the kind of shallow analysis I see all over the blogs. One of my commenters, Potato Head, submitted this comment:

“While I did and do support Hillary, let's not whitewash her husband's role in this disaster, by signing, with no complaint, the legislation repealing Glass-Steagall that helped make this possible.

Bill Clinton's Role in the Mortgage Crisis

Contemporaneous account here.

Maybe, I remember at the time thinking, this isn't going to end well. Maybe Hillary had her own ideas about it, too. But I haven't seen any sign that she differed from Bill about it.”

The first link is to an article written in late 2007, and is simply a hit piece on Clinton. It has incorrect timelines, does not cite a single piece of objective factual reporting on Clinton’s role in the situation, and is heavily larded with innuendo and fundamental misunderstandings of what “subprime” means (more on that later). My favorite piece is a graph that shows the effect of Bill’s “repeal” of Glass-Steagall – two years before the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was signed. The second comment link is to a canned AP report repeated in the CNN politics section, where Ralph Nader is quoted as the Democratic voice on the matter. (Thanks, Ralph.) I read these articles (as I do all links embedded in comments) and thought they were woefully short on facts, and thus decided to not publish PH’s comment. I did post a reply saying why I wasn’t going to post the comment and pointing out an alternative view. I got this response:

“Anglachel:

As I said in my comment, I support Hillary, and in addition to the analysis (by a progressive, I might add), I added a link to a contemporary news account, one of many available I might add, through Google, that showed quite clearly that Bill Clinton did not oppose repeal of Glass-Steagal [sic], or sign it under duress. Nowhere did I say he was entirely at fault. I simply said that he contributed to the disaster. In the real world, things are complicated. I think that's a fair opinion to hold.

But let's say that one can voice an objection to this opinion. For some reason you seem to think that your readers should be spared having to confront evidence that complicates their worldview, and so have elected to frankly censor it.

I am not a troll, and came to your blog back in June because I shared the disgust with Obama's tactics and the liberal blogosphere that the rest of your readers feel. But I can't help but conclude that you really aren't interested in robust debate or diversity of views, any more than, say, DailyKos is. I find that sad. It will certainly make me think twice about bothering with this blog in the future. ”

(Note – I post both of PH’s comments in full so readers can see all of his/her argument without edits. I don’t care what PH says about me personally.) As I told someone recently, I don’t usually bother with commenters who try to hold comment thread arguments with me, but given the prevalence of this particular fallacy in the blogosphere and considering that is going to come bite the party in the ass big time very soon, I’m going to discuss the facts in context and with some attention to how CDS is putting Democrats in a bad position on this issue.

Let’s start by establishing some legislative facts about the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) of 1999 which is viewed as the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. For basic background, I started here at the Wikipedia entry and followed various links to research the issue. The key paragraph is this one, in the section titled “Congressional history of the Act”:

The bills were introduced in the Senate by Phil Gramm (R-TX) and in the House of Representatives by James Leach (R-IA). The bills were passed by a 54-44 vote along party lines with Republican support in the Senate[1] and by a 343-86 vote in the House of Representatives[2]. Nov 4, 1999: After passing both the Senate and House the bill was moved to a conference committee to work out the differences between the Senate and House versions. Democrats agreed to support the bill only after Republicans agreed to strengthen provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act and address certain privacy concerns.[3] The final bill resolving the differences was passed in the Senate 90-8-1 and in the House: 362-57-15. This veto proof legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on November 12, 1999. [4] The banking industry had been seeking the repeal of Glass-Steagall since at least the 1980s. In 1987 the Congressional Research Service prepared a report which explored the case for preserving Glass-Steagall and the case against preserving the act.[5]

Here are the key takeaways from that report:

1. The Republicans controlled the Congress.
2. There was a significant difference between the original Senate and House versions
3. The Senate was deeply divided on the original version on a 54-44 party line vote.
4. The House was not so divided on its version, voting 343-86, so many Democrats voted for it.
5. The bill went into Conference and it was the Conference Report version that was eventually approved, 90-8-1 in the Senate, basically erasing Democratic opposition, and 362-57-15 in the House, making some small gains in Democratic support.
6. It was a veto proof vote.
7. It was signed on November 1999. Bills of this complexity usually take several months to become effective and several years because the implementation needs to be worked out.

I’m going to step back for a moment from the reporting and talk about blogospheric reactions to the mortgage meltdown with how GLBA is being positioned by Left and Right. This is going to be a bit of a detour, but it will make sense later.

On the Left, I’ve seen several attempts to link McCain to Gramm in order to discredit McCain’s economic positions (a good move IMO), but one line of argument goes after GLBA, claiming that there were few differences between the original toxic Senate version and the Conference Report which produced the final legislation. The legislation was therefore fundamentally the same, Phil Gramm is the mastermind behind the subprime mortgage mess and that Bill Clinton is the enabler, not pushing back to keep this from passing. (I guess this is seen, as mentioned obliquely in PH’s first comment, as some sort of legitimate objection to Hillary, which would also come in as a pro-Obama stance.) This is wrong, as will be shown later in this post.

On the Right, they are more than happy to agree that the subprime mess is all Bill Clinton’s fault, but Phil Gramm is the thwarted hero, not the evil instigator. The problem is not with GLBA, but with Bill Clinton’s refusal to agree to roll back the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) as demanded by Gramm. This meant that the good, upstanding banking industry was forced to make bad subprime loans to minorities, the poor and in bad neighborhoods, which is the cause of the financial sector meltdown. The mortgage bubble was caused by the subprime mess which was caused by Clinton’s insistence on preserving the CRA.

And what is the Community Reinvestment Act that Gramm so frantically wanted to terminate? Back to Wikipedia as a starting point. This 1977 act, intended to fight back against redlining and discriminatory practices by banks against poor and minority neighborhoods and businesses, was updated by Bill Clinton in 1993/94, and which took effect in 1995. He expanded the number and size of loans available to small businesses, and to poor and minority home buyers. It had additional reporting and oversight provisions to ensure banks were complying with lending laws. Finally, he allowed CRA loans, including “subprime”, to be securitized as a way to encourage lending. The financial industry was all for securitization. What they objected to was the regulation of their loan practices:

Critics claim that government policy encouraged the development of the subprime debacle through legislation like the CRA, which in effect forces banks to lend to the same otherwise uncreditworthy consumers they are now being criticized for accepting. [6] [7] Defenders of CRA disagree, pointing out that half of all subprime loans were made by institutions that are not subject to CRA and another substantial share of subprime loans were made by subsidiaries of banks that do not fully come under CRA. They estimate that the substantial number of riskier loans banks were forced to accept by CRA were not enough to be a problem.[8]

There are two things to take away from this. First, the claim that the financial crisis is a result of subprime loans that banks were “forced” to make due to CDRA is a dubious one. No one forced any lender to throw all of their underwriting practices out the window. Second, as Tanta of Calculated Risk tirelessly reminds us the subprime crisis is nothing compared to the Alt-A and prime crisis entering the market now. If you have not had the delight of reading Tanta, here are four excellent posts about the fallacy of “subprime”:

• What is “Subprime”? (Long, fascinating uber-nerd post, a must read)
• We’re All Jumbo Subprime Now
• We’re All Subprime Now
• Subprime and Alt-A: The End of One Crisis and the Beginning of Another

In her post, “We’re All Subprime Now,” Tanta discusses borrowers who are upper middle income and are seeing their “prime” loans go down the toilet. It was her ending statement to this post that set off a huge amount of my own political thinking this year:

Is that, one wonders, what Mr. Doyle thinks is the difference between those subprime people and "us"? That while the subprime people hopelessly bungled their finances for selfish reasons, the prime people hopelessly bungled their finances for unselfish reasons?

I am tempted to say that the real difference between prime and subprime borrowers is that in the former case the denial lasts a lot longer.

Them and us; the bad people who should never have been given loans and us nice people who are just a little down on our luck. Yeah, I think you can see the theme.

To return to our argument, the debate about subprime loans is a red herring offered by Left and Right alike to try to pin blame for the current debacle on someone else. Unfortunately, the Left wants to pin it on a Democrat, moaning and groaning about how Bill didn’t even try to keep this horrible piece of legislation from getting through, and the Republicans are happy to agree. As Potato Head said, “While I did and do support Hillary, let's not whitewash her husband's role in this disaster, by signing, with no complaint, the legislation repealing Glass-Steagall that helped make this possible,” And “[linked to a] a contemporary news account, one of many available I might add, through Google, that showed quite clearly that Bill Clinton did not oppose repeal of Glass-Steagal [sic], or sign it under duress.”

Didn’t even try to oppose it? Didn’t complain? Didn’t sign under duress? Why don’t we go look at one of those contemporaneous reports and see what really happened? I turn not to a short AP-generated political piece, but to an in-depth write up by a New York Times financial reporter (the NYT being no particular friend of Bill Clinton), “ Agreement Reached on Overhaul of U.S. Financial System,” by Stephen Labaton. Here are key paragraphs, but I encourage everyone to click through ands read the whole thing, as it is very informative. My emphasis throughout:

The deal was announced about 2 A.M. after a compromise was reached over the measure's effect on lending rules for the disadvantaged, the source of months of partisan bickering between the White House and Senator Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican who heads the banking committee.

It concludes decades of attempts to rewrite banking laws to catch up with a marketplace that has already experienced broad consolidations and the rise of financial conglomerates offering bank and brokerage accounts as well as insurance. …

While the measure is likely to enjoy broad bipartisan support, it has also been criticized. Some lawmakers and privacy groups say the legislation does not adequately protect consumers and will allow financial companies to share and sell private information about customer accounts. Other critics worry about the further consolidation of the financial services industry. …

The breakthrough in Friday's legislation came in a backroom meeting at the Capitol soon after midnight, when a group of moderate Senate Democrats -- led by Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Charles E. Schumer of New York -- forced a compromise between Gramm and the White House over the legislation's effect on the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 anti-discrimination law intended to encourage lending to minorities and others historically denied access to credit.

Dodd, whose state is home to the nation's largest insurance companies, and Schumer, with strong ties to Wall Street, have long sought legislation to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act. Both men said in interviews Friday that they moved to strike a compromise after it became apparent that the legislation might be killed, as it was last year by Gramm, over the debate about the Community Reinvestment Act. …

But the White House found that provision unacceptable and had its own ideas about community lending. It wanted the legislation to prevent any bank with an unsatisfactory record of making loans to the disadvantaged from expanding into new areas, like insurance or securities. …

When Gramm's measure was defeated by one vote, it quickly became clear that there would be no law unless Gramm could get some Democrats to break from the White House.

But Administration officials had spent all day making sure that the Democrats remained solidly against the measure until their concerns about the Community Reinvestment Act could be worked out. …

So what do we see in this contemporaneous report? That the White House had been pushing back on this act for months. That certain Congressional Dems, Dodd and Schumer foremost, explicitly wanted to kill Glass-Steagall. That the White House fought them as well as Gramm on this issue. That the White House rallied Democrats to present a solid front to the measure, requiring that the CRA be protected, which some Congressional Dems were just as happy to toss out along with all other protections.

Think back to earlier in this article when I pointed out what the votes were for this Act. This bill was barely opposed by Congress except for the language in the Senate version to kill the CRA. When Gramm backed down on that, there was overwhelming support. The vote was veto-proof. If Clinton had vetoed it, with a Republican controlled Congress and a majority of Democrats behind it, he would have been very publically rebuked by his own party in the form of an over-ride. It would have given the Republicans another arrow for the “anti-business Democrats” quiver.

Now, remember back to the discussion about the CRA and how long it took after passage to make it effective. The GLBA, a far more complex act, was signed in November of 1999. In 2000, we were looking forward to Gore’s election. This Act would have been implemented under Gore’s supervision, the wonk to beat all wonks. Thus, when Bush took over in 2001, and an entirely new form of financial services industry was charging forward, there was no attempt or interest in providing substantive policies and regulations to prevent exploitation of its provisions. Nope, we were playing by Enron Rules. This Act is the Republicans’ baby, passed with the enthusiastic support of Congressional democrats who would not even have cared about the CRA provisions if Bill Clinton has not told them he would veto it without those protections.

Thus, GLBA was yet another episode in spineless Democrats capitulating to, oh, excuse me, acting in bipartisan accord with greed-head Republicans, and then blaming Clinton for signing what they strongly supported.

The point is not that it was a good or bad act for Clinton to sign. (After all, one of its authors is the enthusiastic Obama-supporting Republicans, Jim Leach. Repeat - GLBA was written by an Obama supporter.) The point is that the obsession with assigning all blame for Democratic failures, real or imagined, to Bill Clinton is a political failure that continues to pay dividends to the Right. Now is the time to be piling this stuff right on top of the Republicans, making it crystal clear that this shitpile is one of their making, crafted by them, overseen by them, encouraged by them, and now to be owned by them. You won’t do that by remaining invested in seeing Bill Clinton as the primary point of failure of Democratic policy and politics, and relegate the rest of the political actors, especially the opposition, into minor roles.

Do you really want to be arguing, this close to the election, that the mortgage meltdown is the Democrats’ fault?

Anglachel

Clinton Democrats

Poor Bill. He did have a hell of a hard act to follow with Hillary's glorious speech last night setting the bar so high, and I don't think the whole of his oratory was quite up to that pitch-perfect piece, but what we heard tonight was vintage Big Dog. I was glad to hear him reclaim the theme of Hope, which is authentically his, the condition of his birth, not copied and pinned to a sleeve. I was cheering along at home with his standing ovation, delighted by the delight he took in that reception. I roared and pounded the desk, "Yes! Yes! Yes!", as he mercilessly took down the Republicans point after point.

Some people said his heart wasn't in it when he was praising Obama. Maybe, maybe not. Bill sounded as sincere as any of the other speakers and was far more compelling because he came up with reasons that were more than just "vote for our nominee cuz he's so kewl." Name me one other political figure who has suffered such defamation and yet who can look any audience straight in the eye and unswervingly advocate for their opponent. The only person to match Bill is Hillary, and that is not a mistake.

Look at their speeches in the last 24 hours. They are a pair, just like the speakers, and they provide a profound lesson to Democrats.

Hillary's presentation was crisper, more on topic, much like the woman herself. As I said yesterday, she presented the political case for why we are Democrats. She looked at the identity "Democrat" with a clear eye and did not flinch away from making a claim that this was something worth fighting for. She defined a Democrat as someone who acts, who accepts duties and obligations, and who is not dissuaded by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. In the most glowing terms, Hillary explained why being a partisan was a good thing. To be a Democrat is to take upon oneself the identity of the outcast, the rejected, the oppressed, the disdained, to welcome the outrage of the well-off and comfortable, and never surrender to the demons of stupidity. Her performance showed how far the party leadership has fallen from their obligations to that duty, yet also saying, "It is still here, still possible, because I, too, am still here. Now is the time to act." It is not even a choice. No "or else," "you'd better," "last chance," or "you'll be sorry." They simply must lay down their obstinate opposition and be Democrats.

This is not, as some detractors and disappointed followers have said, weakness or capitulation. Anyone who thinks this has it exactly bass ackwards. The frantic machinations of the Obamacans show that they know who has the power to preserve them from their own follies. They need her in a way she does not, has never needed them. Their greatest fear is that she will not intervene.

Bill meandered a bit at the start, trying a little too hard to counter objections to Obama the person. He did a better job of this than anyone else I have heard speak except Hillary, but it was the wrong kind of cadence for this actor. I read an opinion piece recently (can't locate link) that said as long as the campaign is about Obama as a person, he will lose, because there is not much there to talk about. I'm going to resist the obvious snark line and shift the emphasis of that observation. If you are a Democrat, if a campaign is made small, individual, personal, reduced to the parts and proclivities that make up the candidate, you will lose. If you can be reduced to a cackling laugh, a misrepresented statement, a bad land deal, an awkward mannerism, you are toast. It is part of the overall Republican push to atomize people, needs, issues and interests, to reduce them to mere opinion or a personal failing, and thereby disguise the relationships of power that can help or hurt us. Bill's comparison of Obama to himself as the nominee was not just a generous gift to Obama, but a warning to the Democrats not to fall for the trap of morality politics that took out Gore and Kerry.

The change that came over the Big Dog in his speech is when he turned away from examination of the particular candidate and launched into his whirlwind indictment of Republican ineptitude and catastrophic governance. Bill Clinton laid out in no uncertain terms what the hell a Democrat does and how we affect the entire world for the better. This is why you are a Democrat! Not to make nice-nice with the extremist loons in the opposition, but to deliver the goods. Goods like increased wages and reduced inequality, real health care and fewer corporate profits, more security and less international resentment. Bill Clinton made clear that the subject of politics is exactly that - politics. Policy. Partisanship. Standing the fuck up for what you know is right and refusing to capitulate to the nervous nellies who can't think of anything except the fucking. Daring the bastards to shut down the govenemnt, or try to impeach you, and coming away the winner. Doing right by people and being the most loved president alive. Beating out most of the dead guys, too.

Watching the pair of them deliver the most powerful speeches of the convention was a one-two punch. They made the case for what it means to be a Democrat. The opposition to Bill and Hillary is not that they have failed, but that they are all too effective at building a party that can fight. They have demonstrated what the Democratic Party could be if it believes in itself and its core values.

The Republican nightmare is that their hate-drenched spell will wear off and the CDS afflicted fools on the Left will get over their idiocy and embrace the Clintons for what they are - the core of the Democratic Party. The psychotic flight from what these two have done to defend and rebuild a party steamrolled and demoralized by the Movement Conservatives denies the Democrats their own best legacy. If you are on Obama's side and you cut out the Clintons, you are carving out the heart of Democratic power. The roar that greeted both of them was not from a winnowed and managed crowd of loyalists. It was from whatever Democrat showed up. Why would you want to throw this away?

Hillary and Bill walk onto a stage and the energy goes through the roof. They are politically effective, which is why they are attacked so savagely by enemies from without and rivals from within. They speak to what it means to be a Democrat. They believe in this party in a way that the current leadership does not. The plea/threat for the Clintons to go all out for those who can barely stand to say the word "Democrat", let alone "partisan Democrat", betrays the the understanding that this is so.

The conflicted reaction to the Clintons from the Stevensonian elite has a few parts. One is just plain and simple jealousy, the kind that always attends successful people. Another, particularly for the younger crew who don't remember Reagan clearly, is that they have lived in a CDS saturated media market for most of their lives and it's difficult to think outside that narrative. Another is disappointment that they aren't Superman and Wonder Woman, and that they haven't lived up to their own ideals and expectations every day of their lives. The biggest part of it is fear that if you associate too closely with these people who are at the center of the unhinged hatred of a fanatical and violent opposition, you will also come under attack. Who would want to be treated that way? Why not stand by the sidelines and whistle while the attacks go on, rather than walk in and become a casualty? Better yet, why not try to placate the Right by joining the attacks and trying to be more reasonable than these stubborn hicks from Arkansas who keep insisting on things like gay rights and healthcare?

It's about time the party embraced its toughest, strongest best partisans. Be Clinton Democrats.

Anglachel

Obvious Injuries of Class

The convention is a snooze until Bill & Hill show up, so here is the fourth post in the Affirmative Action series. Actually, the mess that is the convention is a perfect opening to the post. Obama did not do the politically intelligent thing and ask with total seriousness (if no discernable ethusiasm) that Hillary be VP. Yes, I think she would have taken the job (more fully explained below) and I would have been obliged to vote for her. In his bungling of this, the most important decision a party nominee can make prior to actually being president (though I think, this year, given the sad-sack choices, we have to say they are running for the office of Preznit), Obama and his backers in the DNC show once again that they cannot hear what is being said directly to their faces and they do not see has been written large on every political screen since New Hampshire.

People don't give a fuck about race. Iraq isn't motivating them all that much, either, since it's obvious the question is not if but when we leave. They are scared to death of the brutal economic times ahead and they want someone to have some answers that will make their own lives more secure.

Is the campaign even talking abut this? Have they said anything concrete about helping ordinary Americnas get through the coming financial storm? Not according to Krugman or Somerby whose opinions I trust even if I don't want to hear what they say. Instead, we're getting week after week of whining about race and personal smears and impugning patriotism and who owns how many houses and whose more "in touch" with the middle class. Given the crap Biden has spewed about Obama in combination with his history of borderline racist and misogyistic remarks, it all sounds like the Obamacans are substituting their own guilty consciences for the opinion of the general public. They are so certain that the attacks will be on race and Obama's foreign/exotic presence that they appear to only be on the offensive for these kinds of arguments. They presume racism, xenophobia, accusations of elitism, questioning of patriotism. They are not wrong, because these are under attack as they are in every battle with the Republicans, but the expectations and responses are focused on these things to the exclusion of more dangerous inroads.

Also, these are the obsessions of the Stevensonian class. The power brokers of the party long ago hitched their wagons to race as the beast of burden that would pull them through to moral victory. They were on the side of the right and the good. The part of the party that would not align on this matter has been jettisoned, a necessary act that had to be done. But now the tunnel vision about race hasd become a political and cultural straight jacket. The race baiting of the campaign. Labeling Ohio voters "Archie Bunkers" for supporting Hillary. Belittling Pennsylvania voters who won't see themselves being delivered from their benighted lives by Obama. Dean's repeated references to Republicans as "the white party." The deafening howls that the only reason voters like me fail to vote for Obama is because we are racist.

The big question for me is how many Obamacans truly in their hearts believe that race explains everything in this campaign. That number is the measure of the vulnerability of the party.

The Republicans, who regard racsim as a strategic weapon and not as an evil to be eradicated, refuse to join the party. Why waste money and resources when the Democrats are doing the damage all on their own? They will, of course, throw in racist appeals before the end because they are Republicans, but they have a more effective approach for now. Where has Obama lost ground among Democratic voters? In the populations most endangered by the faltering economy and the long term erosion of socio-economic standing. He did not address what mattered most to them, which was their increasing vulnerability to the ordinary dangers of life - insurance, health care, retirement, wages, job security, housing. To fail to do this was what makes Obama come across as elitist.

The assault on AFAC by the Republicans is yet another example of how they use personalization and moralizing to turn an argument about institutions and government policy into one about personal benefit. The focus on the individual who is not hired or admitted is turned into a narrative of dark forces colluding to deprive a deserving, hard working person of their rightful place and giving it to some unqualified person, completely ignoring the larger cultural context of the program. When the college admissions process is gamed by elites to gain access to the most desireable institutions, then the broader argument becomes harder to defend.

Some have mistaken my earlier arguments about Obama and affirmative action to mean that I am attacking him from a Republican, anti-AFAC position, that I support people who make such arguments, or that I think this is a "valid" criticism of him.

No.

I'm not going to do their work for them, which is one reason I have remained silent on this topic for so long. There is a difference between saying that someone is not the best choice because he lacks experience and using false representations of affirmative action to smear a prominent Democrat in order to increase the efficacy of your campaign to destroy affirmative action.

I'm talking about the Democratic leadership's inability to understand how the simple facts of Obama's personal history combined with the blatent favortism and machinations of the DNC on his behalf is being used to effectively undermine the campaign and, more importantly, the liberal policies of the party. To respond "Racist!" when the charge is "Unqualified!" is stomping right into the sterotype of how Republicans say Democrats use AFAC - to place unqualified minorities into positions they have not earned, do not deserve and cannot perform. This is the real mesage behind the latest attack ad trying to use Hillary. It was not primarily about whether Hillary said Obama was not qualified (Like Republicans care about Hillary? Puh-leeze...), but about getting the optics in front of the viewers - white person who is really well prepared pushed aside for brown person who isn't. And with the Stevensonian fanaticism about race, they are providing all the wrong responses to this assault. The Republican campaign theme, now that Hillary is not on the ticket, is this: Look at the Democrats engaging in reverse discrimination with the office of the Presidency itself. If they will do this, they will stop at nothing to give your jobs away.

The problem is that the Democratic leadership have nothing to promote except Obama himself. They don't have policies that distinguish them from the Republicans (Sorry, we tried "I'm not Bush!" with Kerry. Didn't work out so well.), there is not a measure or cause Obama can claim as his own (AUMF is off the table with Biden as the VP), and the people most harmed by current conditions have been told that they are not wanted in Whole Foods Nation, that they are racist panhandlers at the door (Keep building that unity!).

Bill Clinton always talks about the powerful interests that try to keep us down. This is a child of the South, a man whose perceptions and convictions were forged in the middle of the battle against segregation. He was then, as he remains today, on the right side of the battle. When he talks about powerful interests, he is talking about the political and economic elites who purposefully set the poor, working and lower middle classes against each other over race in order to maintain their privilege. When the Big Dog advocates unity, it is to fight the divisions that keep people poor, disempowerd and vulnerable. He's talking about political unity to craft the policiy that will create and defend institutions that make people's lives materially better. This is unity for the sake of power.

Unity itself, taken as a good and a goal for its own sake, is powerless. It is the great High Broderistic wet-dream of perfect bipartisanship under God, party bosses indivisible, with lobbyists and cocktail weenies for all. It is ponies for everybody when what people really want is annual medical checkups and their privacy protected. "Unity or else" is a dead end because it does nothing for people. Which is why the Republicans and The Village like it. Keep the rabble in its place.

Unity for the sake of power has always been Bill's message, and now we see he was never alone with it as we listened to Hillary patiently discuss wonky topics with intent townspeople all across the country. If we do not unify for the sake of our goals, then those who profit from our disunity have won. That is what I see motivating Hillary's current campaigning, even as she is being assailed within her own party for daring to be an inspiring figure and unify voters in November. For the sake of her constituents, she will not yeild an inch to either the Republicans or the Obamacans' attempts to drive her out of public life.

The obvious injuries of class are being dismissed by the DNC and other Democratic power brokers this round, in a year when going to the policy left made perfect sense. The Republicans are eagerly pursuing the votes of those who feel injured on this count, but do so to fan the flames of resentment and division. The Stevensonian wing is all too enamored of its own moral superiority on race, too contemptuous of the Bubbas and the Bunkers, to make the slightest move to win back and thus defend this constituency.

At this point, I can no longer believe that it is just bad judgement, though stupidity is on full display. The rejection of Clinton Democrats is real. Why?

Anglachel

Radical Politics

As always, my thanks to the commenters who take my ideas in new and fascinating directions.

I realized that I had not made two points in yesterday's post, one about the strengths and weaknesses of the Truman strand as I had for the Stevensonians, and another about the needs of truly radical Democratic politics.

At its best, the Truman tradition respects the lives and choices of the common man, it measures a person's worth by the good that they do, values the common good and common sense, and insists that the proper role of government to enable her citizens to flourish without regard to station. At its worst, it is parochial and suspicious of outsiders, takes pride in ignorance of the world or the life of the mind, substitutes tradition for law, and uses the government to skim wealth and punish enemies.

The Stevensonian focus is on the structures and institutions that treat all men equally, regardless of origin. The Truman focus is on the texture of individual lives and the particularity that distinguishes us, sometimes to the detriment of the universality of law.

Truly radical Democratic politics requires both of these political modes to succeed, using each in measure to rein in the less commendable qualities of the other and to enable the power of both approaches to be marshalled for the benefit of the nation and the citizens. The men and women who provide the hands-on activism cannot make their victories persist without powerful institutions and entrenched, rational, defensible rules to resist anti-Democratic efforts to overturn these advances. This is another reason why the stereotypical image if "Lefty radical" does the Left disservice because is seeks disruption without alternatives and destruction without substance to go in its place. You can't just declare a people "free". You must also be willing to replace the previous oppression with something that will prevent its return. The easiest thing in the world to do is destroy. Just look at George W Bush, Ayers on a monumental scale, acting out his oedipal frustrations with Poppy on the entire world.

The reason why the Truman strand is the more fruitful for strengthening Democratic goals is not because it has some corner on morality or public virtue. Hardly. The quality that makes it fertile ground for something like the New Deal is because you can't keep anyone out who is willing to lend a hand. Will Roger's joke about not belonging to an organized political party, but to the Democrats, lovingly pokes fun at the dynamic chaos powering the operation, something that can sweep up just about anyone and put them to work - just like the WPA. When that power is channeled to do what is both legally defensible and politically right, it is a juggernaut. It has no interest in being exclusive. The antithesis of democrat is snob.

To riff on themes and claims from earlier comments, while Libertarianism is corrosive, it is not radical. There is little radical in yelling "Mine! Mine! Mine!" It has more in common with fantasies about survival of the fittest, but it can only occur in well regulated societies where complex institutions allow the deluded practitioner to believe he is some Ayn Randian hero as he drives down the right side of the public road, tunes in to public airwaves, drinks clean water from the municipal water system, turns on his stereo built in another country and made available due to complex trade treaties, massive investments in transportation and markets, and purchased using a common currancy, all powered by electric current off the utilities grid. It is parasitic and vanishes the moment there is real turmoil. It is, however, a convenient ideology for people in the upper income brackets to claim to try to avoid public obligations.

Radical is the Movement Conservatives who seek to reestablish blatent class rule, using the nation to serve the interests of a small oligarchic class. Liberatarians are too lazy to be that organized. My deep concern about Obama is not that he is some kind of stealth conservative or libertarian, but that he does not possess a sense of or dedication to true Democratic radicalism. I never get the impression that this politician is there to bring about anything substantive. In contrast, Hillary and Bill both insist that you must make the world a better place, you must have improved the lives of the people you serve.

For all of his elbow rubbing with people of questionable political beliefs, there is no evidence that Obama has been moved to a political (as opposed to a personal) cause. When Garry Wills had the temerity to compare Obama's speech about his pastor to Lincoln's address on slavery at the Cooper Union, I rolled my eyes and said, "So where's the beef?" Lincoln dedicated his entire political career to first containing and then eradicating slavery. It was his obsession, his driving passion, the goal for which he literally gave his life. What is it, exactly, that Sen. Obama would do with the power of the Presidency? I dare anyone to identify anything he will pursue that will transform the face of the nation.

The claim I am making is different than "he's just in it for the ego", and of greater import to the party and the country. Someone can have a towering ego, my dear old Big Dog heading the list, and yet have a purpose that makes something of that drive. Can anyone doubt that FDR was one self-centered bastard? But he had the political bug, that fascination with making the system work, of bringing about the impossible because you have been charged with enacting the public good and it is to that you will dedicate your soul and fortunes. Even evil old Tricky Dick was able to drag himself out his sewer of resentment and paranoia every so often and do things that were jaw droppingly audacious, like going to China.

One of Obama's speeches is revealing on this count. At a commemoration of the Selma March (I think, I'm not 100% on the specific event), he gave a speech on the Joshua Generation, of which he counted himself. It was a good speech and the only one I know of where he actually presented his view of Democratic politics as such. The parallel was between the era of MLK and Civil Rights (Moses) and our own times (Joshua), and how there remained some tasks for us, but that the great struggles and drama, the trials and dreadful passage, these were done and past and we merely inherited a fundamentally complete legacy. To us is left the role of epigone, the reduced follower of greater forbearers. The idea that the struggles of the mid-century were precursors of a longer fight, or that we had not so much a leagacy as a foundation on which to build, or perhaps that the works of giants like MLK and LBJ should stand as challenge to us, as they had been challenged by the works of FDR, to attempt even greater acts of Democratic radicalism, was not in evidence.

And this ties back to some of my original claims in Radical Chic. Obama obviously enjoys the cachet of hanging out with the "bad guys" and seeming tougher, angrier, cooler, more edgy than he really is. While I had originally described him as a left-centrist, I'm not sure there is enough presence of a political spark to earn him even that much credit as having made a deliberate political choice. I am struck by him as an accidental Democrat, one for whom it is convenient and comfortable to cruise along with the others in the pack, someone who at a policy meeting would say "Oh, and me too," to whatever the chief wonk had devised. The details don't matter because that's just not what makes him tick. You get the sense with Hillary that she really does read dense policy papers for the intrinsic fascination of this or that topic, swiftly followed by the question, "And how does this affect my country?"

Along with the porous, inclusive nature of theTruman mind-set, there is also another facet that makes radical Democrats what they are - the sense that a wrong must be righted, a failing must be corrected, an obligation must be met. This, I think, comes as strongly from the Stevensonian side, with its long roots back through progressivism into the bedrock of American political thought and motivation, the drive of those damn Yankees dumping tea in the harbor, as from the Jacksonian demands of honor brought in through the Truman faction. It is imperative that the Democrats do right by the public.

There is no imperative to Obama's politics.

Anglachel

It's Not About Race- It's About Judgment

I have sat and thought for some time about my own reaction to Rev. Wright and the larger controversy. It is mixed. I had heard about Wright before, when wingnuts tried to make hay out of an award the newsletter from Wright’s church had bestowed upon Louis Farrakhan. I did not poke very deeply into it, considering it nothing more than rightwing racist demagoguery. Farrakhan is a revolting person in many ways, but he is also a commanding one and is not to be dismissed out of hand. Giving him an award is not ipso facto agreement with everything he’s ever said. I condemned the smears and thought no more about them. With the videos that have come out, however, I have reconsidered that initial dismissal. An email exchange with another blogger and several conversations with the spousal unit have helped me sharpen my thought.

While the main focus in the MSM and most blogs has been on the race angle, this has served more to deflect attention away from more substantive issues, much in the way Obama has used race throughout his campaign, casting opponents, critics and even the voters as racists should they fail to capitulate to him. Obama, on paper, is little different than any of the other Democratic candidates, but his public acts continuously demonstrate the gap between his words and his deeds. With his months’ long accusations of racism upended by the incendiary bombast of his self-described father figure, we begin to see it is a tactic to deflect criticism about his lack of judgment. Not experience – judgment. His big speech about racism is another attempt by Obama to create a moral onus and place it upon those who call him into question. This time, it’s not working so well.

It simply is not the case that suddenly America, and particularly the Left, has turned into Trent Lott because Obama is running, nor is it the case that his poll numbers are dropping because the voters woke up and realized, by gosh, Martha, the guy’s black! People who would not have voted for him for President due to race have always held that position, and are far more likely to be found among the Republican “Democrats for a Day” crossovers than among rank and file Democrats.

Yes, there is a legacy of racial crime in the nation, starting well before slavery was enforced in the Constitution and continuing to this day. Bill Clinton made the case well when he spoke of Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March:

The rift we see before us that is tearing at the heart of America exists in spite of the remarkable progress black Americans have made in the last generation, since Martin Luther King swept America up in his dream, and President Johnson spoke so powerfully for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy in demanding that Congress guarantee full voting rights to blacks. The rift between blacks and whites exists still in a very special way in America, in spite of the fact that we have become much more racially and ethnically diverse, and that Hispanic Americans -- themselves no strangers to discrimination -- are now almost 10 percent of our national population.

The reasons for this divide are many. Some are rooted in the awful history and stubborn persistence of racism. Some are rooted in the different ways we experience the threats of modern life to personal security, family values, and strong communities. Some are rooted in the fact that we still haven't learned to talk frankly, to listen carefully, and to work together across racial lines.

…

The two worlds we see now each contain both truth and distortion. Both black and white Americans must face this, for honesty is the only gateway to the many acts of reconciliation that will unite our worlds at last into one America.

White America must understand and acknowledge the roots of black pain. It began with unequal treatment first in law and later in fact. African Americans indeed have lived too long with a justice system that in too many cases has been and continues to be less than just. The record of abuses extends from lynchings and trumped up charges to false arrests and police brutality. The tragedies of Emmett Till and Rodney King are bloody markers on the very same road.

Still today too many of our police officers play by the rules of the bad old days. It is beyond wrong when law-abiding black parents have to tell their law-abiding children to fear the police whose salaries are paid by their own taxes.

And blacks are right to think something is terribly wrong when African American men are many times more likely to be victims of homicide than any other group in this country; when there are more African American men in our corrections system than in our colleges; when almost one in three African American men in their 20s are either in jail, on parole or otherwise under the supervision of the criminal justice system -- nearly one in three. And that is a disproportionate percentage in comparison to the percentage of blacks who use drugs in our society. Now, I would like every white person here and in America to take a moment to think how he or she would feel if one in three white men were in similar circumstances.

And there is still unacceptable economic disparity between blacks and whites. It is so fashionable to talk today about African Americans as if they have been some sort of protected class. Many whites think blacks are getting more than their fair share in terms of jobs and promotions. That is not true. That is not true.

The truth is that African Americans still make on average about 60 percent of what white people do; that more than half of African American children live in poverty. And at the very time our young Americans need access to college more than ever before, black college enrollment is dropping in America.

One of the examples cited by Rev. Wright in the videos, the Tuskegee Experiment, is nothing less than a crime against humanity. I believe it to be as foul and inhumane as any war crime perpetuated in the 20th – or 21st – century. That it was done in a time of peace upon our own citizens should make all Americans hang their heads in shame. As Bill Clinton said in his formal apology on behalf of the nation for the wrongs inflicted upon these men:

The eight men who are survivors of the syphilis study at Tuskegee are a living link to a time not so very long ago that many Americans would prefer not to remember, but we dare not forget. It was a time when our nation failed to live up to its ideals, when our nation broke the trust with our people that is the very foundation of our democracy. It is not only in remembering that shameful past that we can make amends and repair our nation, but it is in remembering that past that we can build a better present and a better future. And without remembering it, we cannot make amends and we cannot go forward.

So today America does remember the hundreds of men used in research without their knowledge and consent. We remember them and their family members. Men who were poor and African American, without resources and with few alternatives, they believed they had found hope when they were offered free medical care by the United States Public Health Service. They were betrayed.

…

The United States government did something that was wrong -- deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens.

To the survivors, to the wives and family members, the children and the grandchildren, I say what you know: No power on Earth can give you back the lives lost, the pain suffered, the years of internal torment and anguish. What was done cannot be undone. But we can end the silence. We can stop turning our heads away. We can look at you in the eye and finally say on behalf of the American people, what the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry.

The American people are sorry -- for the loss, for the years of hurt. You did nothing wrong, but you were grievously wronged. I apologize and I am sorry that this apology has been so long in coming.

To Macon County, to Tuskegee, to the doctors who have been wrongly associated with the events there, you have our apology, as well. To our African American citizens, I am sorry that your federal government orchestrated a study so clearly racist. That can never be allowed to happen again. It is against everything our country stands for and what we must stand against is what it was.

So let us resolve to hold forever in our hearts and minds the memory of a time not long ago in Macon County, Alabama, so that we can always see how adrift we can become when the rights of any citizens are neglected, ignored and betrayed. And let us resolve here and now to move forward together.

The legacy of the study at Tuskegee has reached far and deep, in ways that hurt our progress and divide our nation. We cannot be one America when a whole segment of our nation has no trust in America. An apology is the first step, and we take it with a commitment to rebuild that broken trust. We can begin by making sure there is never again another episode like this one. We need to do more to ensure that medical research practices are sound and ethical, and that researchers work more closely with communities.

…

The people who ran the study at Tuskegee diminished the stature of man by abandoning the most basic ethical precepts. They forgot their pledge to heal and repair. They had the power to heal the survivors and all the others and they did not. Today, all we can do is apologize. But you have the power, for only you -- Mr. Shaw, the others who are here, the family members who are with us in Tuskegee -- only you have the power to forgive. Your presence here shows us that you have chosen a better path than your government did so long ago. You have not withheld the power to forgive. I hope today and tomorrow every American will remember your lesson and live by it.

I provided the long quotes from Bill Clinton both to present what the man has actually said and done on the matter of racism in America, and also to make clear from the start how Democrats have spoken about race in the recent past and what the tenor of that conversation has been.

Rev. Wright’s preaching on race is not wrong, for it is grounded in the reality of our nation’s acts towards the black population. It is harshly, unrelentingly right on the way in which racial privilege corrupts and destroys. It also is, however, profoundly lacking in judgment and moral suasion for those outside of Wright’s beloved community. It is adolescent in its resentment against the nation and spiteful in its refusal to admit of the complexity in the relations between races, classes and sexes. It lacks the basic insight (however stupidly put) of Obama’s attempt to explain his maternal grandmother’s thoughts and acts – that the world does not divide so neatly into the saved and the damned.

But it is not race that has so many people inflamed about the preacher’s words. Grant us the sense that God gave geese that most Democrats can see and understand the pernicious and unacceptable effects of racism. Most people I know acknowledge the validity of anger over the racist crimes of this nation, and show a willingness to accept some pretty inflammatory rhetoric on that subject.

What Wright said that has people like me angry is his radical and categorical condemnation of America as such and his hatefully personal derogation of the Clintons.

This man of God called upon his deity to damn the nation. This is what I condemn in the demagogic preachers of the Right, the arrogance and ruthlessness to use the name of God in vain, playing the bully to attract other bullies and cow their opponents. Then there is Wright’s glee in saying how 9/11 is God’s punishment upon the nation – chickens coming home to roost, which is what Malcolm X said upon the news of JFK’s assassination. How is this different than Falwell and Robertson? Wright, as with his like-minded counterparts on the Right, has reduced God to a thuggish enforcer. It is the voice of arrogance, too eager to dole out death and destruction upon his foes, as though God’s judgment is his to proclaim.

This isn’t a religious argument. It is a political one about legitimacy and the rule of law. Wright’s argument is that the nation has no claim upon him and those who follow him, it can place no boundaries that he will acknowledge as just, that its entire existence is illegitimate, and that there is nothing in it worth redemption. Even Lincoln’s terrifying invocation of a blow by the sword for every one inflicted by the lash found an end and a point at which the nation could redeem itself from its crimes. But, in Wright’s vision, the nation as such is damned and thus can be treated with contempt and scorn.

This is a position most of us wine track liberals (even those of us smart enough to eschew the kool-aide and stick with a nice vino verde) know very well, one of the hangovers from our Marxist infatuation days and dorm rooms plastered with posters of Che Guevara. It was so hip and cool (not to mention it pissed off our parents) to be moralistic about America, that terrible place of racist imperialism and oppression of the workers. We hung out in coffee shops and spouted off like Ward Churchill wannabes. We were the Jacobins all over again, except cooler.

It’s the voice of someone who has the same answer, no matter the question. It’s the voice of someone who has found their unified theory of life, the universe and everything, and they dare not relinquish it lest they lose themselves to the ambiguity of compassion – the willingness to put yourself in the place of another and allow your being to be changed. This is what offends me most deeply about Rev. Wright.

On a more practical level, it is also simple minded straight up anti-Americanism, and it’s going over like, if you will, a fart in church. It raises questions for me about Obama’s association with the former Weather Underground people who are unrepentant for murdering their countrymen. It makes me think that the refusal to wear a flag pin (something Bill Moyers has discussed in great detail) or to place a hand over his heart has less charitable explanations than I had heretofore allowed. It makes me think twice about the arrogance of the man, the way in which he publically disdains his opponent and thinks nothing of spreading calumny by calling the Clintons racists. It makes me wonder how he judges and where exactly his moral compass points.

Others on the Left are swift to assure us that they don’t think Obama subscribes to his pastor’s views. Me, I think he would not have remained in that congregation, especially given his political ambitions, had he not found Wright’s thought congenial and believed the words preached under that roof.

Anglachel

It's the Missed Opportunities, Stupid

Paul Krugman serves up a double helping of economics and politics in his NYT column today. Here are the key 'graphs:

Can the next president do anything to avoid that outcome [being the next Jimmy Carter]? In terms of straight economics, the answer is a clear yes.

To this day, it’s not clear what Mr. Carter could have done differently: stagflation is a problem with no good solutions. But weak spending is a treatable condition. A serious fiscal stimulus plan — one that emphasized public investment and aid to Americans in economic distress rather than across-the-board tax rebates, which many people won’t spend — could do a lot to ease the country’s economic pain.

Politically, however, it’s hard to see this happening.If the next president is a Republican, he will be captive to the doctrine that tax cuts are the answer to all problems, and therefore won’t seek an effective response to the economy’s troubles.

And even if the next president is a Democrat, any serious stimulus plan would face intense, ideologically motivated opposition in Congress. Will the next president be prepared to fight for an effective plan? Or will we end up with a compromise like the one Congressional Democrats agreed to this year, legislation that assuages conservative objections at the cost of undermining the plan’s effectiveness?

Until recently, I thought the biggest political struggle facing the next president was likely to be over health care reform. But right now it looks as if the first thing on the next administration’s plate will have to be dealing with a weak economy.

And if effective action isn’t forthcoming, the next president will suffer the fate of Jimmy Carter, who began his administration with words of uplift — “Let us create together a new national spirit of unity and trust” — and ended up delivering America into the hands of the hard right.

Don’t Rerun That ’70s Show

Line drive right into Golden Boy Barry's noggin. I noticed the phrase "And even if the next president is a Democrat," which sends me a strong message that Krugman doesn't believe a GE victory for the Democrat nominee is entirely certain in the way that the triumphalist A-List Blogger Boyz seem to think.

A Democratic president is going to have to fight tooth and nail to get anything passed. It is going to require an ability to take anything thrown her direction and deflect it while doggedly pursuing the policy objectives that will, when enacted, cement real gains for ordinary people.

The start and end of Obama's campaign all along has been I'm a more likeable person than Hillary, so help me beat that bitch. He has ridden Clinton Derangement Syndrome out of the starting gate, along the backstretch and into the far turn. Obama does this even as he himself has a pattern of political behavior more centrist and conciliatory than Big Dog at his worst and even as he has surrounded himself with former staffers and appointees of Bill's administration.

What the campaign lacks, however, and why it cannot achieve what Bill Clinton did, is an unswerving dedication to bettering the lives of ordinary people. It is trading on the most shallow of all political impulses (Oh, please, stop arguing about stuff and making me feel uncomfortable! Stop with the partisan bickering! Won't somebody think of the children?) and deliberately sidesteps the tough work of coalition building. Saying that you will seek common ground with the right - who wants no such thing - builds no coalition to promote progressive causes. It just gets you an inside track with David Broder and the Blogger Boyz who all want to become the next Tim Russert. Getting a bunch of college students with free time to swarm caucuses is not building a coalition, either, btw.

Building coalitions involves getting the support of people who aren't personally enthralled by your awesome awesomeness, but who are looking for advantageous political and economic deals.

Movement Conservatism has been thoroughly discredited by the Bush II administration, but that doesn't mean the liberal cause has an open road ahead of it. The radicals on the right are entrenched in government, they command popular media, and they have no compunction against using the most crude and visceral attacks they can conjure up to sway public opinion. To take back the nation, the Democrats are going to have to mount their own concerted attack, doing right by ordinary citizens and insisting on accountable, rational government. That means deploying effective policies despite the entrenched right wing hacks, appointing liberal judges, and getting significant legislation passed over determined opposition.

I know Hillary can do that. The Precious has yet to show he can talk about it, even when someone else writes it up for him.

Anglachel

Woof

Poor little Golden Boy Barry and his pathetic followers are all offended and disturbed (well, hell, the fact they are supporting Obama at all shows they have some mental issues, but I digress...) at how Bill Clinton is, ahem, inserting himself into the campaign. They are all atwitter over the Big Dog's sharp, on-target, effective attacks on both the media and The Golden One.

Get a grip.

Bill Clinton is doing exactly what he should be doing, which is being the Big Dog and taking on all opponents. He gives his candidate cover from attacks, keeps the other side off balance and prevents them from getting out an effective message. This is exactly what is needed to win. Anyone who has a true political bone in their body knows this. This is what Obama and Edwards would have to do to win. This is what Kerry failed to do. He didn't win.

Clinton is the most effective campaigner on the left since, well, Kennedy. How do we know this? He wins. Over and over. This is good for our side. In the general, he will run just as hard as Hillary (if we could harness their energy, we could power the West Coast and have enough left over for DC) and all of his formidable talents will have a single target - the Republican nominee. You think he's being rough on Golden Boy Barry? Folks, he's just warming up.

The mystery here is why won't the elite netroots left acknowledge this incredible weapon we have against the movement conservatives? It is more than he's supporting someone other than their favorite candidate. The answer is that they hate him as passionately as does the Right. Why? The usual explanations of he's a triangulator, he's not liberal, he cheated on his wife (Oh, please, and you little bastards don't sleep around? Gimme a break.), he's a "corporatist", etc. don't hold water, because all the public issues can be applied to the other candidates and the fucking around one is probably true, too.

I wrote a post two years ago called "Bubba" in which I try to explain Bill Clinton's deep popularity with ordinary Americans. Here are the key paragraphs, though there is much more to the post:

"Bubba"

You know, the biggest strike against Bill Clinton in the eyes of the left as well as the right is that he is southern white trash. This man, who can think circles around them and who has out-maneuvered, out-governed and out-charmed every politican of his era, they hate him as much as the right does, and for almost exactly the same reason. He makes them feel inadequate. He points out their own social and economic privileges, their own indulgent policy biases, and the ways in which they take so much of their success for granted....

He's a bubba.

A Rhodes scholar. A policy wonk to beat all other wonks. A well-read, well-traveled man. A workaholic. A sharp lawyer. A tireless advocate for social justice. An American success story who pulled himself out of poverty and obscurity by intelligence, ambition and hard work

Yeah, that's Bubba.

Ordinary Americans like Clinton a lot. His "Bubba" background makes him more appealing, less threatening. He's what they could have been if they had tried, and he is respectful of what they became, because he knows just how damn hard it is to try when you're down that far. This is the emotional connection that the netroots elitists either don't get or don't want to acknowledge. Why did Clinton succeed so well across the political spectrum.

Because he is Bubba.

This one fact offends the elite of the left (blogosphere, inner-sanctum, magazine publishers, etc.) no end, because, damn it, they have good ideas, too! They know what is best for all the Bubbas of the world. You know, the benighted sheeple who really don't understand what's good for them? The not-us who should know their place and stay there while we manage the world into a better place, eat sensible diets, and are culturally hip (or at least socio-economically powerful). The left elite is still angry at the compromises, the half-measures, the careful weighing of what was possible against what was likely, even when the flat-out success of this governance is shoved in their faces. Had Clinton governed the way the left elites wanted, he would have done as Bush is doing now - do as I say 'cuz I'm the Preznit.

Bubba

It is exactly his "Bubba" features that offend the elite opinion makers and all the upper-crusty Obamabots who can afford to have their candidate fail.

In computer programming, we have a snotty saying, "Fast, cheap, good. Pick two," which indicates that there is a negative relationship between these three elements. You can't have good and cheap unless you can wait for someone to do it in their spare time, and so forth. Bill Clinton is someone who broke the rule of threes for politicians. He's a policy wonk, immensely popular, and utterly pragmatic. If someone is two of those things, they are supposed to fail on the third, but Big Dog just won't do it.

I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which the hatred the elite left feels is because Clinton is an unapologetically lower class Southern white man, and possesses "teh Elvis." Cruicially, he is someone who doesn't feel a need to "pass" as one of them. He just flashes that big grin and gets to work, whether it is crafting public policy or effective campaign strategy. He is the walking talking embodiment of where the nation is moving - away from racism, away from parochial nativism, away from interest group divisiveness, towards effective government, and towards a more egalitarian society. He is the face of the Democratic majority.

Woof.

Anglachel