Decisions, Decisions

Poor Wall Street. They have such a hard choice this election year.

Should they vote for the candidate they own who occasionally makes tsk-tsk noises about them in speeches and only delivers 99% of what they want, but who makes them feel like they've done something morally daring, even hip, by voting for a black dude, or should they put their weight behind the candidate they own who loudly proclaims their greatness in speeches and will be even more obliging in policy, but who may wear goofy underdrawers?

Decisions, decisions, decisions....

Anglachel

Occupation

oc·cu·pa·tion

[ok-yuh-pey-shuhn] noun

1. a person's usual or principal work or business, especially as a means of earning a living; vocation: Her occupation was dentistry.
2. any activity in which a person is engaged.
3. possession, settlement, or use of land or property.
4. the act of occupying.
5. the state of being occupied. 

Homework

There is a post brewing around here. Probably a couple of posts. Here's a little background reading for what is coming up.

Revolution 2.Oh Dear

Well, shit. I spend a month mourning a death in the family and all hell breaks loose around the world. That'll teach me to take a break.

Count me among the jaundiced observers of everything from the protests in Madison to the civil war in Libya.

 As someone who makes her living from creating and deploying large scale web-based collaboration sites and always thinking of new ways to incorporate differing communications modes into those sites, I'm distinctly unimpressed by the breathless rah-rah promotion of "social network" tools as some kind of key to a new kind of revolution. If you can Tweet it, they can track it.

Like, duh.

Voices in His Head

A member of my family is paranoid schizophrenic. As I read about Jared Loughner, I think of this relative. There are many points of congruence - the decent but incomplete education, a fascination with intellectual discourse, a seemingly coherent exterior, a deep core of paranoia.

A familiarity with firearms.

No Such Thing as an Innocent Leak

One of the problems with the hoo-hah surrounding the release of the State Dept. documents is that there has been little attempt from any quarter to distinguish the different effects resulting from the same acts. As long as everything is connected to everything else and thus is declared good/bad as a piece, we won't understand the real impact of this event.

Let's make one thing really clear - the documents have been released. They are not just on wikileaks. Every government with an internet connection has downloaded the complete set (Just in time for the holidays!), there are mirrors, copies, bit torrents, etc., available for anyone with a modicum of computer savvy, and there are now malware emails out there enticing the unwary into clicking on the link to get the documents and actually getting some lovely bit of malicious software instead. That's how you know you've arrived - you're famous enough to be used as spam-bait. No power can reverse this distribution of information. For good or ill, they are now part of the public discourse. What remains is to analyze what has been set in motion.

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.

Season's Greetings

Krugman smacks the Obama apologists:

After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?

On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.

So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of. 

Yup, this is what you voted for, Whole Foods Nation. This is the person you were warned about. You voted for a Reagan-adulating, Democrat-hating cipher who has taken the total mess bequeathed to the nation by Bush/Cheney and has made it worse. He is not even pretending to try to defend any interests, not even his own.

Instead, he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,” although he might as well have. 

Obama is not a Reaganite, no matter how much he enjoys fellating the corpse of the Gipper. If he really were a Reaganite, he'd know how to preserve and expand power.

I've written before that Obama lacks any sense of or taste for politics, and think I have his political philosophy identified, namely a very patrician Hoover-ish progressivism, but something Krugman wrote today made me have a very bad thought:

One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

I read this a little differently. What it looks like to me is Obama methodically reversing the desires of the people who voted for him, inverting every virtue and intention they projected on to him. If someone was trying to deconstruct the Democratic Party from the inside - betray its hopes, derail its changes, destroy its legacy - you couldn't ask for a better example.

Almost like an act of revenge.

I said in Primary Objective that Obama was not mortally unpopular with the base, but I'm having to rethink that claim much more quickly than I imagined given the way he has increased his pissing on the Democrats since the mid-term losses. If he has no loyalty to any part of the party and is eager to walk around with a big "Kick me" sign taped front and back, then it makes no sense for the party to follow him off the cliff. Krugman closes by saying, "It would be much easier, of course, for Democrats to draw a line if Mr. Obama would do his part. But all indications are that the party will have to look elsewhere for the leadership it needs."

I think the primary season has opened a few months early.

Anglachel

Foreign and Domestic

As I read various things about the wikileaks document dump, something becomes very clear. Many commenters don't or can't distinguish between domestic law and foreign policy.

First off, the laws that govern US citizens and others within our borders are specific to this geographical location. They may apply to our citizens outside our borders, but that is more complicated and will depend on where that person is - a military base, a consulate, during a diplomatic meeting, on personal vacation, etc. - and what that person is doing. Restrictions and penalties are higher for people serving the nation in an official capacity (military, diplomats, trade representatives, etc.) because they have to varying degrees the authority of the nation behind their actions.

Hostage Situation

I found myself in close to full agreement with The Shrill One's latest column today, The World as He Finds It.  I thought Krugman's observation that Obama negotiated everything "with himself" before trying to engage others was of a piece with Sean Wilentz's New Republic article about the failure of the Obama movement to achieve anything of worth.  As the Krug notes, echoing Wilentz (my emphasis):

Where Can I Piss?

As should be obvious to my regular readers, I'm an institutionalist. This goes directly back to my readings of Hannah Arendt and her analysis of political power. One of her lessons, one generally overlooked or underestimated, was about the purpose of institutions in government. Her discussion of two-sided nature of institutions - to act as a barrier against erosion of rights and protections and to be like a scaffold or a trellis to which power, an ephemeral quality of people acting in concert, could cling and thereby be preserved - tended to be dismissed in seminars as old school and an apologia for government authoritarian tendencies. Didn't she understand that power was in the street, in the movement, in the moment?

Oddly enough, the critics overlooked her agreement with them about sources of power - where else can it come from save "the street" (or in her terms, the public realm) because that is where you encounter unique yet equal others with whom the business of the polity is conducted? - and miss that she is answering the question "What do we do now?" once power has been generated and action is underway. My fellow students were often too caught up in their own struggles against institutions (restrictive family, crappy job, college administration, etc.) to appreciate the function of the structure in the domain of human affairs.

Primary Objective

I've been reading lots of yak-yak in the blogosphere about how there needs to be a primary challenge to Obama. OK, let's talk about that in some real terms. For shits and giggles, we'll toss in 3rd party/independent challenges, too. This gives us two different modes of challenge, one internal to a party and another intended to cut across institutional coalitions.

There are a few models of what an internal challenge can look like. The classic is a moderately powerful insider taking a run at an incumbent who is clearly failing or is perceived to be weak. In recent times, that gives us Teddy Kennedy's challenge to Carter, Bill Bradley's challenge to Gore, who, as Vice-President, was the default choice for the nomination on the Democratic side, and Ronald Reagan's 1976 challenge to Ford and Pat Buchanan's 1992 challenge to Bush I for the Republicans.

Taking the Lead

After reading a post on Corrente and having some email exchanges with Lambert (who deserves great thanks for his patience and reasonableness when confronted by crabby bloggers), I'm going to have to call bullshit on the claim that Girl Scouts are rejecting leadership because of endemic lying (and that this is a valid political stance) for a number of reasons. My reasons break into two sets: the structure of the argument itself is fatally flawed and the substance of the argument is tripe.

Let's talk about structure first.

Dance With Them Who Brung Ya

The saying goes that you should "dance with them who brung ya," a colloquial way of pointing out that you have substantive obligations towards those who brought you to whatever festive occasion you are attending.

The Democrats faced the penalty of failing to follow this advice in two ways in the midterms. The people who the Dems didn't want to be seen with in the last electoral round and who have been treated as expendable for the last two years, most crucially white, relatively affluent women, declined the invitation, either by outright defection to the opposition (notably those who are married) or by not voting at all (unmarried women). The party was also rejected by those who they courted assiduously two years ago - independent men and the "youth" vote - who decided to find another dance partner this time around.

From the LA Times, "Blacks, Latinos stick with shrinking Democratic base" (my emphasis throughout):

Democrats searching for good news amid the rubble of Tuesday's midterm election results can look to Latinos and African Americans, two groups of voters that stayed with the party in large numbers.

But that, in a sense, is like taking comfort in that fact that as your house is falling down around you, it isn't also on fire.

Against Conventional Wisdom Redux

On November 15, 2008, I posted an article Against Conventional Wisdom in which I laid out the reasons why Obama had some very good reasons to make a good faith offer of the Sec. of State position to Hillary. We all know how that turned out. As I re-read it tonight, two predictions stood out:

The Unwashed

I watch the current electoral folderol with mixed feelings. As for my local charade, I'm voting Yes for most Democrats (but not Jerry), Yes on legalizing pot, Yes on removing the 2/3 super majority vote to pass a state budget, No on most else, and a bothered No on Prop D in San Diego, which asks for a half cent sales tax increase, but only after the mayor has satisfied certain conditions for regulating the city budget, chief of which are union busting and outsourcing. The money gathered is not allocated for correcting any of the budget shortfalls, such as public safety staffing or reductions in public services, and is tied to a midnight pigs-at-the-trough deal with the state giving large sums of city money to a redevelopment agency that has some ethics problems with keeping track of the dough. Isn't Prop D the Stadium Initiative? is how one local small business person (runs a very nice restaurant in my neighborhood, in fact) discusses the proposition, which in this formulation manages to get cover for putting local people out of a job (the union-busting) and hand bags of cash to the local Republican-dominated developer elite who want their downtown taxpayer funded football stadium, damn it!

Back to the unease.

Of Hicks and Hacks

I was reminded by the Spousal Unit of a post by Brad DeLong a little over a year ago (Health Care Reform: Memories of 1994) that fits quite well with the themes I've been writing about. DeLong notes (my emphasis):

After President Clinton's 43 percent plurality victory in the presidential election of 1992, I worked as a spear carrier in the U.S. Treasury Department under Secretary Lloyd Bentsen. The plurality view in the Treasury Department throughout 1993 and up through the middle of 1994 regarding the health-care reform situation had six analytical pieces:

(1) There were not even 50 votes available in the U.S. Senate for any health-care reform bill sponsored by President Clinton. It did not matter what the bill included or how good the policy might be, because key Democratic senators placed a higher priority on teaching the hick from Arkansas that he was not their boss; they were determined to vote against it. Thus even though the Democrats had a majority in the Senate, they could not pass Clinton's bill—whatever it was—even if the Republicans did not filibuster it.

Plebian Acts

The Incomparable One, Bob Somerby, seems to be channeling my writings about the cultural Stevensonians all this week. He talks about the cultural blindness in The Fruits of Our Blinkered Elites:

“That a New Elite has emerged over the past 30 years is not really controversial,” Charles Murray wrote in Sunday’s Washington Post. “That its members differ from former elites is not controversial.” Murray went on to explain what this means; according to Murray, this “New Elite” differs from earlier elites in that its members earn their status through high performance in universities and then in graduate schools.

After that, they inter-marry—and breed. The process starts again.

Capital Expenditure

One of the most telling things George W. Bush is alleged to have said (I'm too lazy to look up the quote) was that if he had political capital, he was going to spend it. He said this as a comparison to his father's administration, which he believed lost political capital because it wouldn't spend it. ("Wouldn't be prudent!")

And, boy howdy, did he ever. He spent every last cent of political capital he gained from 9/11 to pursue his wars and cement his class's stranglehold on the nation's wealth - and pursuit of both happily coincided. Revolting as his actions were, he did what any strong, smart politician does, namely waste no opportunity in which to advance his interests, because at some point, you'll be out of power and you will no longer have those opportunities. That's what it means to spend capital. It is an investment in anticipated future returns, something that may begin as a debt but (through the miracle of compound interest and good borrowing terms) may turn into a very large asset indeed. If nothing else, your capital may get others to toss some of theirs into the kitty and then you can hold a "liquidity event" and cash out. The key here is using capital to raise more capital. It is an entrepreneurial mode and can fail catastrophically (see, LBJ, Vietnam) when a venture goes bad.

Of Reds, Racists and Rubes

One of the reasons I don't blog much anymore is that I said most of what I had to say between November of 2007 and the election the following November, when the general ideas I had about the state of the liberal mind in America came to life before my very eyes. Those 480 posts were me theorizing out loud. The over-arching theme was the fault line within the Democratic Party (which I had been haphazardly posting about since the previous electoral cycle in 2006, when the Lieberman debacle started to expose the fissure) that has only widened.

Accusations of racism, obsession with reducing political opponents to racists, and a reflexive lunge for racism as the true root of opposition to the Obama administration/ health care/organic produce/ insert issue of the week here looks and sounds like nothing so much as the Red-baiting tactics of McCarthy and Nixon back in the day. Just as that obsession (revived today under the "Socialist! epithet being attached to someone whose policies are well to the right of Tricky Dick's) had roots in both the pre-New Deal strength of labor and the danger of the "Commie" Russians and Chinese (usually confounded with the fascist Nazis), so, too, does the racism obsession have it's roots in slavery and segregation. As I discussed in The Whiteness of the Whale, reversal of the Democratic Party's traditional defense of racism became the defining characteristic of the party after Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act Act (about which LBJ said "I know the risks are great and we might lose the South, but those sorts of states may be lost anyway.").

As with the Right's use of anti-Communism, the Left's use of racism as a political trope to delegitimize opponents (to be distinguished from battling actual racism, which would entail relinquishing the historical privilege those liberal elites enjoy, just as actually abiding by true capitalist/free market ideology would wipe out the "socialism for the rich" advantages of the Right's elite) is sounding more like the crazy uncle than describing any reality I can observe.