Where the Shadows Lie

Figuring out what ails a political party is more difficult than saying what is wrong with a candidate. Individual candidates succeed or fail on things specific to them, and can be brought low by idiosyncrasies that have nothing to do with politics. Parties succeed or fail because of what they represent, both the constituencies whose interests they defend and the political philosophies that guide their political acts. When I described the Democratic Party as aimless, it is due to the lack of clarity on these two points. When examining the actions and rhetoric of the Deaniac faction, I’m left really, truly wondering if they do not want to be a party at all.

So much of what I have written in this blog, reaching back to the earliest posts has been, at base, trying to identify what the Democrats stand for. In the beginning, it seemed so obvious that Democrats were “not them,” not the party of preventive war, torture, crony capitalism, dissolution of civil rights, and dismantling of the regulatory state. The longer I lived in the blogosphere (I haven’t owned a TV in 20 years.), the less certain I become of that belief. The fracture of the party this year into Obamacans and Clinton Democrats, a split that numerically favors the latter while the former retains control of key intersections of power, has spurred most of my writing for the last year, trying to comprehend how we got to this point.

Running like a dark band through Democratic politics is the shadow of Reagan. The Reagan resurgence after the crimes of Nixon, when we on the Left thought we had finally beaten back the McCarthyist tactics of Ole’ Tricky Dick, did something deeply damaging to Democrats. I remember my parents’ reactions to Reagan’s victory. Grim, tight lipped, a sense that we needed to hunker down. We had lived in Reagan’s California and we knew what he was like. Reagan’s occupation of the White House demoralized them. It seemed nothing less than the repudiation of all the promise, all the sacrifice, of the previous two decades. He ran and won on the explicit pledge to undo all the labors of the Left back through FDR. What we as a nation had come to think of as right – social justice, civil rights, economic opportunity, egalitarianism – had been declared the enemy of all things American. No more equivocation that Democrats were “like” Communists, the Enemy; we were reviled as an equally reprehensible foe of real America. And the Democratic Party leadership, full of its incessant self-critique and distaste for power, allowed as to how that was probably true to a certain degree. To this day, a significant portion of the power brokers in the party cannot free themselves of the hypnotic lies of Reagan.

Reagan’s initial win might not have been so ground-changing were it not for the self-defeating response of the Democrats. I’m also convinced that the assassination attempt on Reagan gained his policies sympathy that should only have been extended to the person. Stepping back for a longer view, the weakness that Reagan exploited, using the groundwork laid by the Movement Conservatives and the Nixonian neocons, was the dismantling of our own apartheid state. The Civil Rights Act was the only ethical choice for the nation and had to be done by the Democrats as repudiation of what was irretrievable wrong in our party. Nothing less would have sufficed. It had to be done and both the nation and the party are better for it, but it set in motion the multi-decade fracture and reformation of the party.

What marked the Democrats so badly, made unbearably clear with Reagan’s victory, was the abandonment of the party by long-term constituencies, first and foremost the foundational group, the heirs of the planter and plantation class of the Old South. The old Democratic coalition, never an easy accommodation in the best of times, didn’t just come apart. Large portions defected, whether over belief or due to political expedience, to the opposition, fueling the resentment based politics of the Movement Conservatives. At first, the defections could be explained as simply white Southern racists trying to hold on to their privileges, and this was mostly right. And then came Reagan and the phenomenon of the Reagan Democrat.

With Reagan, plain politics about Southern whites receded and culture arguments came to the fore. Bunkers joined Bubbas in their abandonment of the Democratic Party, and the intelligentsia of the Left began to talk about values and a culture rooted in ignorance, bigotry and working class parochialism. Never mind that, as Bartels and Krugman have written, the defections from the Democratic Party were greater the higher the socio-economic status of the voter, the Democratic leadership became convinced that it was those no-account blue collar people who were killing their Stevensonian dreams. (We, of course, will set aside the uncomfortable fact that Stevenson himself was not exactly big on promoting Civil Rights.) Since Reagan, the Democratic leadership has wavered back and forth between those who want to bring the politics back to bread and butter issues, which means addressing working class needs and interests, and those who want to create a coalition that does not rely on white working class votes. We saw those two perspectives battle it out in the primaries this year. The latter group, not just party officials, but also the intelligentsia that formulates the political philosophy and the echo chamber that shouts its approval, is running a campaign on little more than class resentment against former Democratic constituencies. (White) Race is elided with (working) class to create the ultimate clash of culture – to make racist demons out of people asking to have their material interests defended.

It is no less than the mobilization of resentment of the socio-economic winners against the losers. How dare you not keep us in power, when we have done so little for you and promise to do even less? That the group quickest to hurl accusations of racism and party disloyalty against the working class is also the one most likely to have benefitted from white privilege and to have bolted the party in the past doesn’t make a dent in their cultural critique. The erudite denizens of Whole Foods Nation are angry at the ungrateful wretches who won’t bow to the superiority of the creative class, and they have no interest in even trying to appeal to the Clinton Democrats. Gauging from the rhetoric of this season, from Donna Brazile down to the trolls in my comments, the Democratic Party is determined to rid itself of those constituencies they see as traitors to the cause. They are willing to walk away from social justice as “losing” electoral propositions, things like women’s rights, gay rights, privacy rights, and the like. Instead, we see a great faith in “choice”, especially market-driven choices, and promotion of faith. They do not want to spend political capital on anything that might risk energizing the mythic base of Reagan. The Obamacan assault on what they imagine to be their political opponents because of confusion between cultural identity and political constituency, came out in their attacks on Hillary not so much as the figure that would bring out that base in opposition, but exactly because she would appeal to that base on both cultural and economic grounds. She and her supporters had to be turned into racists to avoid discussing the economics interests Obama did not deign to address.

Thus the electoral strategy of the current party leadership appears to be keep the yahoos down on the farm and secure the hegemony of Whole Foods Nation. This is even more a cultural split than a class division. There is no context to the Obama message until the convention forced one on him, quickly abandoned in favor of assaulting Gov. Palin for her culture crimes. On the class and culture front, I look at the appeals to education (not like those hicks) and to muddled religiosity (half New Age, half non-denominational mega-church) (Which, if you’ve ever seen “Ramtha” in action, you’ll realize are not that far apart...) and above all the appeals to bipartisanship as attempts to peel away the old Rockefeller Republicans from their party.

To cut to the chase, the push in 2004 for a “Unity Party” has been realized with Howard Dean delivering the Democratic Party into the hands of the High Broderists who value unity for unity’s sake more than any other political cause or virtue. They don’t even want to claim to be part of their party, hoping people will forget and just vote for those nice clean, articulate fellas. This is part of internalizing the Reagan assault on the legitimacy of the Democratic Party as such. Psychologically, to them, the Democratic Party is the remnants of the uneducated, racist, white South and rust-belt north, who vote for Bubbas like Clinton and reject above-partisanship technocrats and idealists like Bill Bradley, John Kerry, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas and Howard Dean himself. The nerve of them people! And thus, this year, we have the Unity Democrats, non-partisan to the end.

The dark underbelly of this move is the presumption that the people who have been told their interests must wait will always be there for the Democrats because we have nowhere else to go. Specifically, this means African Americans, women voters and GLBT voters. Republican policies and objectives are deemed so awful to us that we will not defect or sit out, no matter how dismissive or unresponsive the Unity Democrats are to our interests. This is the unspoken presumption about Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie argument, that the party can safely abandon “the South” and pursue new constituencies in the West (read Hispanics, white Independents and Moderate white Republicans) because the captive Democrats of those regions can always be counted on to defend the gerrymandered districts and are too few and far between to bother with in national elections. They count on population loss over time in Pennsylvania and Ohio to remove those states from importance in the electoral map. Finally, replace Blacks with Hispanics as the minority to cater to as they are growing in number at a faster rate and are better able to advance into the professional ranks via education and passing as “white”. That’s the final keystone in the arch supporting the bridge into the United future – ditch defense of the minority that caused the Democrats so much grief in the first place, be rid of their ungrateful presence and embarrassing, “pathological” culture, and celebrate those who can pass as one of us and will give us a pass on that messy race stuff. After all, what are they going to do, vote Republican?

The focus of the Unity Democrats is on the winners of the economic realignment, those who managed to win a place in the white collar upper-middle class. People like my family and my husband’s, who leveraged the affluence of the post-war era to vault from being immigrants and farmers to being professionals in various government bureaucracies, law, finance, and new, white collar industries like high tech and bio-tech. The other part is to minimize the damage the losers of that realignment can inflict, which mostly means refusing to commit to policies and plans that will defend their interests. Or even their lives. Obama’s campaign is not about social goods and resources, but about cultural markers of class inclusion, such as your level of education, where you shop, whether you live in urban or rural environments, etc. He has difficulty addressing the failures of an economic system contiguous with his own class and which is deeply invested in his candidacy, and I don’t just mean the campaign contributions. He is the exemplar of a mode of life that, while not as unreachable as that of Bush’s base, is still out of reach of those who do not have the education, acculturation and business contacts to climb up that economic ladder.

The ultimate shadow of Reagan is that you don’t win by defending losers, only by securing the interests of the winners. That is the dark heart beating in the chest of the Unity Democrats. They are done with the losers.

Anglachel

That's Our Joe

From Charles Lemos' By the Fault, a wonderfully cringe inducing statement by Joe Biden:

The Republican party and some of the blogs and others on the far right, are trying very hard to paint a picture of this man, they’re trying the best as they can to mischaracterize who he is and what he stands for.

All this stuff about how different Barack Obama is, they’re not just used to somebody really smart. They’re just not used to somebody who’s really well educated. They just don’t know quite how to handle it. Cause if he’s as smart as Barack is he must not be from my neighborhood.

Yup, Obama's just too smart for you small town yokels to understand. You under edumacated people can't handle smart people. You mean like my paternal relatives who are wheat farmers in the wilds of South Dakota, with every kid a college graduate, all homes wired for Internet, and who can talk at length about the chemical composition of the soil? Those kind of small town people?

This is another data point in my thinking about where Howard Dean is trying to take the party.

Anglachel

Losing My Religion

Arthur has a new post up linking to the new campaign merchandise rolled out by the Obama campaign today. My reaction to all of this is mixed. The Left has been far too facile in its rejection of faith (as Arthur does in the rant that ends the post), which provides the Republicans too much manuevering room in that arena. The attempts to reach out and be inclusive about faith, however, are worse than the original sin, indulging in vacuous pandering and (worse to my mind) reinforcing the American practice of religion as a fashion statement. There doesn't seem to be any recognition that blasting Palin for her faith while selling bumper stickers linking voting for Obama with being an Xtian is the actual expression of hypocrisy.

I look back wryly at posts I made two years ago in defense of Obama, when he was under attacks from the netroots sites that now sing his praises like choirs of angels. They attacked him because he had made a speech about the relationship of religion and public life, pointing to it as sign of his retrograde beliefs and sneering at his DLC connections. Their attacks were also, frankly, racist. It seems that Obama read the reviews and has reimagined himself quite thoroughly.

The attacks on Obama over his speech on religion were of the same temper and in the same mode as the attacks upon Hillary in support of him this year. I discussed these attacks in depth in this post, Adopting the Frames of the Right, where I tried to talk about how the violence of the attacks upon those who are not seen as part of our tribe alienates people who would otherwise be on your side, such as my father. Indeed, as a result of the speech Obama gave, my father decided on him as a candidate and (as far as I know) still supports him. I still think Obama's speech is a good one and for the right reasons, even as he himself has sold that vision short.

Ed Kilgore went into greater detail than I did in analyzing the speech, picking up on elements that I, a secular humanist, overlooked. What struck me most Kilgore's analysis was how thinking about modes of religion can help us think more clearly about modes of politics. I wrote then:

The danger of the rules-bound left is, as I said in an earlier post, that they will not acknowledge that people are divided on progressive issues and consider their religious teachings valid guides for political decisions. I think my father is a great example. I also have friends in a very strict Christian family who are mostly liberal, but who are under enormous social pressure from family and church to conform. Lots and lots of love for toeing the line, lots of ostracism for not. These are people who do require some strong outreach because they will be outcasts.

The anti-religious faction will not or cannot understand the courage it takes to defy the beloved community. Read the Salon article. Understand that this is not religious behavior, per say, but the actions of tradition bound communities for securing order, obedience and stability. ...

This post took on particular resonance as I was reading it immediately after having read the Salon piece. The point that Kilgore (and Obama) make about the danger of "prophetic" activism is both subtle and unsettling, because it is a two edged sword. It warns against the prophetic mode of rule, which is not always a religious stance. If you are a humanist, you understand that the structures of religion are human patterns of thought and interaction, and that secular instiutions and movements too can be afflicted by this mode of power.

As with the fundamentalists who thunder about the certainty of fire and brimstone for those who stray from the path of righteousness, the message about the dangers of conceptual certainty appear to be going right over the heads of the most agitated critics of Obama's speech.

Perhaps Obama should listen to his own words more often. Maybe we all need to watch Pan's Labyrinth and ponder the lure of obedience when wrapped up with desire for belonging and fear of being singled out.

But in response to Arthur's challenge that people send in definitions of God that stand up to analysis, I keep thinking back to my father and his faith which I do not understand but I most certainly perceive as something integral to this person whom I love so deeply. I can only point to Garry Wills' Christ Among the Partisans as an oppositional view, that any attempt to conceptualize this mythic and historical figure from a political perspective (see also Kilgore's arguments), whether from the Left or the Right, whether to praise faith in God or to debunk it, simply uses the wrong language for the argument. Christ-as-Nietzsche, in Wills' forumulation, strikes me as about right, which is probably why, when Obama recast himself as a political messiah, I could not support him as a candidate.

To be political means to lose one's religion, to set it aside and live in the mundane and mortal world upon its terms and for the rewards it offers.

Anglachel

Unmentionables

Still working on the party post. It's slow going.

When I got home this evening, there were two fundraising letters in the mailbox. One was for Obama and contained letters from Obama and Biden. The other was for the RNC and had a letter from McCain. In each, the letters totalled 4 pages, there was a donation coupon and a reply envelope, so approximately the same amount of junk per packet.

In the RNC sending, the Republican Party and the RNC are mentioned 24 times in the letter and another 12 times on the donation coupon. In addition, the letter mentions Democrats 7 times, 4 of which use the locution "Obama Democrats" anf three of which juxtapose "liberal" with "Democrat".

In the Obama sending, there is no mention of the Democratic Party, the DNC (except possibly a small code with the letters "DNC" as part of the code at the edge of the payment coupon), or of Obama and/or Biden's political affiliation. The word "Republican" is used once, on the last page of the letter.

Why is the head of my party, the party nominee for the presidency, not even mentioning the party in his fundraising letters?

When did being a Democrat count as something unmentionable?

Anglachel

PS - In response to the unhinged Obamacan who instantly commented that my possession of a McCain fundraising letter proves I am in the tank for McCain, the previous owner of my house was a Republican and is still on the mailing lists. Thus, I get all the junk mail from both parties. Oh lucky me.

Turn Tables

I'm working on the party post which is proving difficult to pull together, so I thought I'd toss out something I said to the spousal unit while we were making dinner.

The problem with the Obamacan response to Palin is that it did nothing to bring the debate back to Democratic friendly ground. It wallowed in cultural class resentment. A more sophisticated response would have been personally sweet-as-pie to the entire Palin family while blasting holes in the Republican platform. Something like:

Bristol is expecting? Our best wishes for a healthy pregnancy and a safe delivery. By the way, how does Ms. Palin get her health insurance? Through her mother's coverage? That should be good coverage, considering all the great care Gov. Plain must have received while carrying a special needs child. What are the Republicans doing to ensure that all American mothers-to-be get the prenatal care they need? What is their stand on health insurance for all just as good as what Gov. Palin can provide to her family?

Oh, Ms. Palin is getting married to her child's father? Our congratulations to the young couple for their upcoming nuptials and bundle of joy. Being a young couple starting a new family is a very scary proposition in these bad economic times. What can Republicans offer young families trying to get established in careers, buy a house, start their family, and so forth? Aren't young couples facing reduced prospects compared to their parents? Reduced funding for education, a deregulated market that allowed insane toxic mortages to be made, reduced job opportunities for blue and pink collar workers, especially those new to the labor market. The Republicans have ruined a previously strong economy, and this hurts young families.

And after Ms. Palin has her baby, will she be continuing her education? Will she be employed outside the home? These are crucial needs that young families struggle to fill. Child care, women completing college degrees, flexible workplaces, paternal as well as maternal leaves - these are all things that can mean the difference between a comfortable life and a struggle to put food on the table. Just what are the Republican plans to provide these goods and services?

Lather, rinse, repeat. It's really not that hard to be both nice and politically tough. Of course, it's a lot easier to do if you actually defended women's rights, UHC, strengthening education, expanding workplace programs to be family friendly, subsidizing child care and so forth.

If you run on a platform of vague and generically liberal propositions, you rob yourself of tools to use to your advantage when specific situations arise.

Anglachel

Commenters, Chill Out

Seriously, some of you need to get back on your meds.

Threatening me will not make your candidate win or the other side lose. Trust me on that one. Neither will writing up 2,000 word essays on why so-and-so is the salvation of the nation. Nor trying to convince me of the righteousness of your cause. Efforts to shame me by invoking Hillary (whether to support Obama or to support McCain) only piss me off. In short, trying to affect the outcome of the race by applying pressure to a cranky political theorist is a losing proposition.

If you try to do anything like that, you are not paying attention to what I write.

I'm not discussing who to vote for, or even if anyone should vote. I don't give a hoot in hell what you do in the voting booth. Follow your bliss, but don't lie to yourself about why you're doing it.

The only thing that matters to me is describing what I see and trying to analyze why it is happening. Such as the continued success of the Republicans at the polls despite being the party of Abu Ghraib. The continued failure of the Democrats to achieve sustained electoral success. The violent misogyny that has a stranglehold on the Left. Abandonment of the working class by all sides. The Democrats' embrace of the rhetoric of the Right. The "Progressive Blogosphere" and its willing capitulation to the MSM. The problem of collective action in a modern political system. And so forth.

So anyone who wants to rail at me for supporting the bad guy can save their breath and go hang out at the sites still invested in the horserace.

Anglachel

Pan's Labyrinth

I watched Pan's Labyrinth last night. Anything that mixes fantasy and politics is of interest to me. It was much more violent than I had thought it would be, but it made sense within the context of the film.

The movie's main theme was obedience to authority and the violence that will result when that condition is the primary virtue of the society. Ofelia is always put in the position of breaking her promise of obedience (an equivocal promise in regards to the Captain, a meaningful promise in regards to the faun) and both realms treat her with violence for her transgressions. The acts of her mother and of Mercedes, the housekeeper, all fall within the human realm and offer a more straightforwardly political perspective on the dangers of obedience.

It is a very timely movie.

Anglachel

In Reagan's Shadow

Watching precipitous drop on Democratic popularity in the polls - from the anonymous Democrat to the presidential nominee - leaves me shaking my head at the sheer ineptitude of the people allegedly in charge of the operation. But even more it makes me want to take a long, hard look at why, in a political year that favors the Democrats more than any year since the FDR era, victory is being thrown away.

I'm with Pat Lang for the most part, though I'm much more critical of Obama than he is, probably because I have no investment in the candidate. I think he over-emphasizes racism as a point of resistance to Obama, but his evaluation of McCain and Palin are painfully accurate. They are, singly and together, disasters. Unlike other bloggers and a number of commenters on this blog, I think McCain is a revolting politician, a man of bad temper, questionable ethics, and reprehensible positions. Palin is worse. They are bad for the nation, not because of their marriages and family lives, knowledge of the internet, age or religion, but because their world views are fearful, ignorant and destructive. Their philosophy of government is authoritarian, no matter the window dressing of fighting corruption. I can admire their personal drive and dedication without thereby declaring their political objectives to be anything but inhumane. I can decry derogatory attacks on them on account of their gender, age, sociological backgrounds, etc., yet remain opposed to their political intensions. That the systems they work within force them into more moderate paths is the virtue of the institutions created to defend liberal democracy, not some insight into their alleged hidden moderate beliefs. They are talented politicians, after all, and know how to seem when in the public eye.

I can do this with a single phrase - They are Republicans and I oppose what the Republican Party, through its words and its deeds, stands for. That should be the first and last thing out of the mouth of every Democrat, yet is the formulation you just don't hear from Obama or the DNC. It's all about Hope™, Change™, and Bi/Postpartisan™ yadda-yadda. No one needs to explain to me or millions of other Democrats that the political opposition are, well, opponents; what requires explanation is how and why our own party has made itself into a different kind of opponent, one that is ineffectual against the Republicans but manages to insult and alienate its own constituencies with breathtaking precision.

I think there are two issues to examine, Obama's failure as a Democratic candidate and the aimlessness of the Democratic Party. The latter is the larger problem, without which the former would not exist. At root, neither are able to escape Reagan's shadow. This post I will focus on Obama, and save examining the party for the next round.

Obama has explicitly modeled himself on the popular backwards-looking image of Reagan - the positive, constructive, above-party guy who did spectacle well and inspired people to support him with a flash of his smile and the thrill of his oratory. He cites Reagan as an exemplar of the mode of politics he wants to engage in - telegenic, above the fray, sweeping political change and ignoring the critics. Even if he had not been trying so hard to dismiss Bill Clinton in order to minimize Hillary, Obama would still have been engaged in Reagan worship. Thus, the entire packaging of himself as a movement, swallowing hook line and sinker the hagiography of Saint Ronnie.

Charles Krauthammer is a hack and writes some of the most despicable commentary in American politics, but he wrote something truthful on Friday. He talked about the packaging of Obama (my emphasis throughout):

But Palin is not just a problem for Obama. She is also a symptom of what ails him. Before Palin, Obama was the ultimate celebrity candidate. For no presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great. Which is why McCain's Paris Hilton ads struck such a nerve. Obama's meteoric rise was based not on issues ... but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.

The unease at the Denver convention, the feeling of buyer's remorse, was the Democrats' realization that the arc of Obama's celebrity had peaked -- and had now entered a period of its steepest decline. That Palin could so instantly steal the celebrity spotlight is a reflection of that decline.

[Krauthammer discusses key speeches by Obama, then says] The problem is that Obama began believing in his own magical powers -- the chants, the swoons, the "we are the ones" self-infatuation. Like Ronald Reagan, he was leading a movement, but one entirely driven by personality. Reagan's revolution was rooted in concrete political ideas (supply-side economics, welfare-state deregulation, national strength) that transcended one man. For Obama's movement, the man is the transcendence.

Which gave the Obama campaign a cult-like tinge. With every primary and every repetition of the high-flown, self-referential rhetoric, the campaign's insubstantiality became clear. By the time it was repeated yet again on the night of the last primary (#3), the tropes were tired and flat. To top himself, Obama had to reach. Hence his triumphal declaration that history would note that night, his victory, his ascension, as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

Clang. But Obama heard only the cheers of the invited crowd. Not yet seeing how the pseudo-messianism was wearing thin, he did Berlin (#4) and finally jumped the shark. That grandiloquent proclamation of universalist puffery popped the bubble. The grandiosity had become bizarre.

Obama's Altitude Sickness

The Berlin speech was meant to invoke memories of JFK, but even more so of Reagan, to try to make a claim in images that could not be done in words - I'm just like the Great Communicator and you should respond to me in a comparable way.

Krauthammer points to the reason why Reagan, who was not nearly as popular as his idolators would have you believe, was able to so thoroughly dominate the political sphere. He had a foundation. He was a hard-line ideologue who had honed his political talents for decades and who was backed by what is still one of the best funded, most ideologically compact and politically determined groups in current Western politics - the Movement Conservatives. Regardless of what liberals may think of Reagan's political objectives (that they were crack-pot, inhumane, self-destructive, anti-American, etc.), Reagan offered something concrete to every constituency who supported him. Conservative judical appointments and breaking the barriers between church and state for the theocons, pumping up not just the military but the necessity of US hegemonic power for the neocons, deregulation and supply-side economics for the rest of the cons and crooks in the corporate suites. And he delivered. Even when he was forced to make strategic retreats, the rhetoric did not abate and the overall objectives were never abandoned. He was relentless in pusuit of his vision of how the world should be.

The backing from the Movement Conservatives is important. No matter how charismatic this actor, he was the head of a movement that preceded him and had an independent existence apart from him. It's still with us today. Reagan became the embodiment of this operation, not the operation itself. The Obama campaign's exuberant highs were based on nothing more than a cult of personality, which was at base little more than the frantic wish of his supporters to see themselves an ennobled by their support of him. The attacks aimed at his opponents - personal, vituperative, slanderous - probably tell us more about the insides of his supporters' heads than anything else, places awash in guilt over their very real racism, glee at being able to openly express their deep seated misogyny, accompanied by a big dollop of class resentment. Obama's own exhortation that his supporters should not think of themselves as anything but "Obamacans" is as clear a statement of the movement as anything else I've seen. The alpha and the omega of the campaign is the adulation of the man at the center.

It inverts the power structure that put Reagan where he was and put the nation on the road to disaster. An established, well-funded national operation that controlled major propaganda outlets, deliberately tapping into resentment and fear about changing socio-political institutions and structures, and has as its goal infesting the entire government from President to dog-catcher with its anti-democratic minions, selected a 100% loyal and massively effective partisan to be its face and drum up popular support. I'm sorry, but the Chicago Combine at its greatest expanse of powers, even if backed with every penny George Soros & Co. have ever earned, cannot compare.

When I look at the collapse of Obama, the Movie! (a fall well under way during the primaries), what I see is the level of support an ordinary Democrat might garner in a ho-hum year. The One, The Precious, is gone. Palin robbed him of the celebrity, the quality of being shiny and new, and what we see is Obama as an unadorned Democrat. His high points now are when the actual heroes of the party, Bill & Hillary, come out and offer reasons for us to vote as Democrats for the ticket.

The proper Democratic figure to compare to Reagan is Bill Clinton, particularly as Bill is actually more popular than Reagan with the general public. He did this by copying Reagan's substance, which was to identify constituencies and fight for them, and letting the style chips fall where they did. It helps that Big Dog is one of the most talented political speakers alive, able to convey complex political realities in direct, simple language, but oratory alone can be upstaged. He is beyond the shadow of Reagan because of his focus on what Reagan championed and how to push through liberal counter-measures in a way that doused the fires of resentment. His success was limited because he did not have the party and movement apparatus at his disposal that Reagan commanded and because the Right targeted him (quite correctly) as a very dangerous opponent.

Oddly enough, with the loss of celebrity, Obama ends up being the generic Democrat from central casting, promoted by a party actively jettisoning everything that makes it distinct. We have no signature issues for the campaign, only hopey-changey, we're not Bush (which worked so well for Kerry, as I remember...), don't vote for the guy who's stupid and out of touch (which worked so well for Carter, Mondale, Dukakis and Gore, as I remember...), we're all to blame for this Washington gridlock because Washington is the problem, etc., etc. There is nothing that looks, sounds or feels uniquely Democratic.

They are still running against the shadow of Reagan.

Anglachel

Electoral College Ranges and Distributions

Last week, the simulation map on 270 to Win was overwhelmingly favoring Obama based on the available polls. They warned that it would be a week before meaningful data would appear there, and they were right. I've been playing with the maps this evening (not wanting to run into any more stories about barnyard beasts or cosmetics) and have saved out six different maps showing narrow victories for each side, medium victories and large victories. The simulator itself currently reflects a 55% probability of an Obama win, with a median of 272 electoral votes. What I think the below maps illustrate is how little has to change for significant results.

(Click on images for larger versions)

Large Democratic win: 320 D/ 218 R. The key here is sweeping the upper Midwest plus picking up Florida. Colorado and New Mexico are not necessary to the scenario, but would likely be present if the win was this big. This was always the optimistic map for Dems. I think Iowa would go blue in a scenario like this and probably Nevada, too.

Medium Democratic win: 295 D/243 R. Colorado and Ohio go by the wayside, but Florida is salvaged. I actually think those combinations would be flipped in this scenario, but I also have doubts that Virginia would go Dem while Wisconsin went Republican. Flip those as well and you'll have roughly the same EC outcome.

Narrow Democratic win: 272 D/266 R. And I think the closest to a likely win this round, and is the result most likely in the simulator. Colorado and Florida go red, as does Ohio, while the party barely holds on to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Washington. Note that New Hampshire, Nevada and South Dakota could each be a deal breaker in this scenario. I think the party needs to be prepared for a solid red South.

Narrow Republican victory: 268 D/270 R. What is interesting in the simulator is that this scenario was far less likely than the bigger Republican wins. They lose by small margins but win by large ones. In this, the Dems retain all of the Midwest except Indiana, but the Republicans lose Ohio and Colorado, keep Florida, and pick up New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Minnesota and Washington. These are plausible pick ups. I think it more likely that they would keep Ohio and lose Minnesota, but they would need then either keep Washington or snag back Colorado. Note - compare this map and the narrow Dem victory one to the current map on electoral-vote.com. It has the same EC breakdown as this one, but has Washington and Minnesota in the Demo column, and Ohio, New Mexico and New Hampshire in the Republican one.

Medium Republican win: 250 D/288 R. I think this the most plausible winning scenario for Republicans. The West stays solidly blue, Colorado and New Mexico are blue but the south stays red and McCain squeezes out narrow victories in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. This is why the "Appalachian" vote matters. I doubt South Dakota would stay blue.

Large Republican win: 219 D/319 R. The key to this is winning the upper Midwest. Minnesota and Washington could easily be flipped in this scenario for much the same result. Can McCain take all of the intermountain West? I think it possible, though they would not be easy pickups. The simulator shows Washington going red more easily than Colorado, for example.

I find all of these combinations well within plausible expectations. For me, simply looking at maps and shifts, a bare handful of states will determine the EC, but the particular combination that will do so varies greatly. The focus tends to be on the larger battleground states, but undecided small states may suddenly shift and provide the 1-3 EC margin.

Visit 270 to Win and use the simulator to see the changing possibilities based on probabilities.

Anglachel

Apprehension

The polls are rattling nerves up and down the Democratic ladder as Obama and Biden turn a “No way to lose!” election year into a “How are we going to win?” nail biter. They are apprehensive of how the race is shaping up. For a look at the polls as they roll out, be sure to check out Charles Lemos' By the Fault. I find the polls fascinating but still too much under the influence of the conventions. What they look like this time next week will be more telling for the final outcome.

Some trends in the polls answer questions I raised in the SUSA poll post. The questions I had were mostly about the undecideds. Who are they? Well, they tend to be white in numbers, Hispanic in proportion, female, lower income, older, and from the Midwest. The SUSA poll did not ask who they had supported (if anyone) in the primaries, so we don’t know how previous loyalties map onto this. (If any pollsters are reading this blog, that would be a very good data point to track, hint, hint.)They are swing state voters and they are showing signs of being willing to defect to McCain. What we are seeing now is the defection game I discussed back in May, Percentage, Preferences and Defections, Oh My! The campaign that is most effective in wooing defections to their side in the Midwest and in the border state area will win the election.

The emphasis currently is on the poll numbers, but the political question is not that people break one way or the other, for this candidate over that one, but why they are doing so. Unless you know why someone is resolving to vote X instead of Y, you cannot address their concerns and win over their vote. You must apprehend what matters to them. A recent article in the BBC by Joe Bageant on being a redneck gets to the heart of the apprehension divide in Democrats:

As to having our delicate beer-sodden feelings protected from the term redneck; well, I appreciate the effort, though I highly suspect that the best way to hide snobbishness is to pose as protector of any class of folks you cannot bear. Thus we are being protected by the very people who look down on us - educated urban progressives. …

The term redneck indicates a lifestyle and culture that can be found in every state in our union. The essentials of redneck culture were brought to America by what we call the Scots Irish, after first being shipped to the Ulster Plantation, where our, uh, remarkable cultural legacy can still be seen every 12 July in Ireland.

Read the whole article; it is short and more sophisticated than its folksy veneer would have you think. Kind of like the rednecks it describes. This article resonates well with this one, Obama and the Closing of the American Dream, in the online journal n + 1. This article presents an interesting and I think correct view on the apprehensive feelings of America’s blue-collar and pink-collar classes towards the usual Democratic candidate – someone they do not apprehend to be one of them (my emphasis throughout):

This classless universality—the hope that every American citizen, through free labor, could enjoy middle-class respectability, economic freedom, and the intellectual benefits of education—lay at the core of the dreams championed by farmers, small-business owners, and factory workers. In the nineteenth century, such universal rhetoric coexisted with the practical exclusion of blacks and women, who were considered to be beneath citizenship. Crucially, however, there was nothing intrinsic to farming, wage earning, or entrepreneurship that required the permanent separation of these groups from the promise of social respectability. Today, one can and should hope for an American dream that truly includes all Americans, and which recognizes and respects all the different types of labor the country needs. This would fulfill the promise of nineteenth-century aspirations.

Instead we have been left with the professional ideal, which values only certain types of work and thus implicitly disdains the rest. It is an inherently exclusive ideal, structured around a divide between those engaged in high-status work and those confined to task execution. The political theorist Iris Marion Young writes, "Today equal opportunity has come to mean only that no one is barred from entering competition for a relatively few privileged positions." The idea of exclusivity is a necessary structural feature of professionalization. As a model for society, however, it validates an economic and cultural divide between those with meaningful access to social respectability and the vast majority of Americans, who remain consigned to low status and low-income employment.
…

From 1932 until 1968, the Democratic Party rested on two descriptions of American life—the American dream as embodied by the rural farmer and the industrial worker. It gained sustenance from a respect for these accounts of middle-class achievement, economic independence, and democratic inclusion. Today's party, however, has given up on establishing new forms of solidarity for nonprofessional citizens. All it has to offer is a lose-lose proposition: join the competition for professional status and cultural privilege at a severe disadvantage, or don't join it at all. The party holds on to the social programs of the past, but in ever more truncated form. It presents a politics of consensus while ignoring the fact of basic division.

This profound shift in the fabric of ordinary life, away from conditions that would support blue-collar affluence and towards a highly competitive situation of symbolic analysts and information workers has been happening since the rise of the professional middle class in the early 1900s, but has increased in speed and scope since the 1960s. As I discussed in Easy Come, Easy Go, the GI Bill helped both to hasten that shift and to help certain groups of people escape it. The people who have been mocked by the Obamacans and by the MSM – bitter, dead-enders, clinging to outré emblems of the declining classes, Bunkers and Bubbas – are those who now are undecided about what to do with their votes come November. These are people who have traditionally voted Democrat and are willing to do so again. They are Clinton Democrats, which is not merely people who vote for Bill or Hillary, but people with cultural and economic interests to defend. If their economic needs are not met, then they will vote on culture, which is how the republicans keep winning narrow victories. They are the rednecks of Bageant’s article and the people being told to engage in a fight against tremendous odds, or get out of the way.

Bill Clinton’s simple formulation “people who work hard and play by the rules,” resonates with this constituency because it appeals to their cultural values in the right way, and it captures their main complaint against the socio-economic gotcha they are now facing – we did what we were told to do, and we’re being left behind. If you work with your hands for a living, working hard takes on a different feel than the 9-5 cubicle rat race. It is hard to be on your feet all day, always moving and doing physical things, like digging stuff up, constructing things, assembling things, moving stuff. Pink collar jobs may not require the brute force, but they are still taxing – retail, restaurants, health care. People who work hard want things done by the rules. They see the irony of the rock star singing “Money for nothing and your chicks for free,” from the perspective of an appliance delivery guy.

These voters are apprehensive about someone who doesn’t seem to be on their side. They will come out to vote for someone who defends their interests as they understand them, which may not be the way that the current DNC leadership views their interests. What the polls reflect is their current opinion, subject to change but less so with each passing day, of what is most in their interest, and it is more than economics or even national security. It is about culture, class and respect. It is about appeals that are not overtly antagonistic towards them. When the Democratic campaign is about ditching the former loyalists, those loyalists begin to wonder just what they are loyal to and whether their loyalty will be better rewarded elsewhere.

The misapprehension of Clinton Democrats by the Obamacans would be funny were it not so self-defeating. Bitter knitters? In that one phrase, the current Democratic leadership insults the demographic that is going to decide the election – older women in traditional jobs and roles whose important pastimes include creative handiwork, such as knitting, sewing, crocheting, spinning, weaving, quilting and other practical crafts. As someone who cannot do any of these things to save her life, I am in awe of the women (and men) who do this. This would also encompass the men and women formerly employed in the textile industry where their skilled labor has been rendered obsolete by the disappearance of the mills. What someone (thank you, Rahm) may think of as some fringe or marginal hobby practiced by a few deranged Hillary holdouts actually goes to the heart of the loss of the blue collar middle class and the increasing divide between not so much as the haves and have nots, as those with a chance at affluence and those who are “confined to task execution.” Not just current riches but the possibility of gaining them in the future.

This cognitive disconnect among the best and the brightest is almost as severe as their misapprehension of themselves. Arthur Silber, who writes things that make me squirm and want to object (and that’s a good thing), is an unrelenting critic of progressive self-misapprehension. Read here on the conceits about racism, misogyny and “anti-war” that the Obamacan progs like to attribute to themselves, not comprehending the depths of their mendacity about how they benefit from racial privilege, gender bias, and the kind of cultural and economic divide that guarantees bodies for the war machine without threat of a draft that might pull the denizens of Whole Foods Nation into the conflagration.

These two instances of apprehension – failing to apprehend political reality leading to formerly loyal partisans feeling apprehensive about what the leadership is doing – are unforced errors on the Democratic side. McCain may have capitalized on them with the selection of Palin, but she merely illuminates the already existing split.

Undecided voters defecting to the Republicans is a symptom of the political incompetence of our current party leaders. Once the debacle is over, they should be apprehended and tossed out on their ears.

Anglachel

Glossary

I've been using acronyms that are befuddling people. Here's a glossary. If there are others (or references you just can't figure out) let me know.

MSM - Main Stream Media. Not sure of the origin. Hit my consciousness sometime in the first Bush II term.

PB 0.5/1.0/2.0 - Progressive Blogosphere [version number]. The first upsurge of progressive blogs is the 1.0, now downgraded to 0.5, version. Their capitulation to the MSM has led to the question WKJM? And also to attempts to found PB 2.0. See Corrente for discussions on getting 2.0 up and running.

SCLM - So Called Liberal Media. Origin is from Eric Alterman of Altercation. See his books on the topic.

WKJM - Who (whoever) Kidnapped Josh Marshall. Origin is the Incomparable Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler who was trying to figure out why the previous thoughtful and rational Josh Marshall, founder of Talking Points Memo, had turned into a pewling, lying shill.

Update - Corrente has an extensive glossary here. Reading it over, I realize that my vocabulary is in need of expansion.

Anglachel

Darling is as Darling Does

I'm going to start with a proposition, that the only real darlings in the media are the media whores themselves, and that their opinion is that it is all about them. It's about who they talk to and who they are seen with and who gets into whose funeral and who is king of the world because he's the arbiter of who gets to be Preznit. What most concerns them is their appearance to the world - hip, cool, yet achingly authentic and straight-talking, summoning moral outrage over the terrible people who don't pay attention to them.

They all secretly (or not so secretly) think they are, personally and directly, the inheritor of Murrow, Cronkite and Woodward & Bernstein. (Even Woodward thinks this, missing the irony that he is not himself, if he ever was.) Their delusion is that they are the defenders of the public weal, and from that conceit a thousand fetid flowers bloom. They like candidates who make them feel like they are on the cusp of history. They worshipped Ronald Reagan because he was a spectacle, the visual personification of their own fantasies about themselves.

This is the mainstream media. The Movement Conservative media understands that what they are here to do is stay in power by any means necessary. They are the ones who set the political agenda on the public ariwaves, seeding the stories as they salt the political earth. They help Republican candidates work the refs.

I noted a few days ago the NYT story about McCain cutting off his old media buddies, which got him attention that he needed. [Note - following sentence rewritten to be readable English.] Now, via Shakesville's Mustang Bobby, the McCain campaign is shoving back on the media again, demanding that Palin be treated with deference by the press, and having her refuse to talk to the press if they won't capitulate to the campaign's demands. And it's working. The Republicans are, once again, kicking the shit out of the press, calling out legitimate bad treatment, like the invasive questioning about Bristol Palin, but quickly expanding it to cover all treatment.

The Incomparable Bob Somerby goes into detail on the way in which the flat-out lies by Palin - lies he could rebut with a small amount of research - are being allowed to cruise right through, such as the total horseshit that she "sold" Murkowski's jet on eBay. He then points out the difference between how Palin is being treated and what has been done to Democrats (my emphasis):

For the record, the “luxury jet” was 23 years old—and it doesn’t seem to have been all that luxurious (more below). But no: Palin didn’t “sell” the jet on eBay—and she didn’t make a profit. Indeed, she lost money for the state of Alaska when she tried to sell the jet on eBay—a procedure that had long been the norm when the state sold its assets.

In short, the eBay story is basically bogus, like the tale of the Bridge to Nowhere. But these stories exist for an obvious reason; they exist to define Palin as “a woman with a lot of guts”—with a ton of hockey-mom savvy. These stories are effective politics—but then too, they’re basically lies.

That brings us back to our basic question: Why can Republicans tell such tales? For two solid years during Campaign 2000, the press corps invented such embellished tales, then pretended that Gore had said them. They then savaged Gore for his vast dishonesty. How can Palin herself pimp such tales, with barely a peep from the “press?”

And this is why arguments about what Democrat will be trashed less than the others is a crappy way to pick a nominee. The press has a narrative about Democrats - they lie, they are morally corrupt, they are cosmopolitan hillbillies, elitist hicks who don't understand heartland, working class values the way we inside the Beltway, Boston-to-DC corridor Villagers do.

If you want to know how the SCLM got the way it is, look at the way WKJM prostituted himself and his reputation (rightly earned by taking on Trent Lott, and by setting up a protest to prevent SS privitization) for the opportunity at those awful, monstrous, racist Clintons and be patted on the head by the Village for helping take out the trash. WKJM is like a little Woodward & Bernstein, flush with his fame at exposing and helping bring down someone high and mighty.

Somerby's point, the one the Blogger Boyz don't want to hear because it interferes with their vision of themselves as the culmination of the great muckraking tradition (stuck as they are in their Cliff Notes version of Hegelian dialectics), when they are in fact mere pool boys at the parties thrown by the Jackie Treehorn's of the media, is that this same media is simply, thoroughly, incorrigibly corrupt. These people are also cowards, quickly coming to heel when the Republicans snap their fingers and threaten to send the naughty reporters off to put the stories to bed without any gossip, free lunches or insider scoops.

The DNC and PB 1.0 willingly colluded with the media to tear down other Democrats, trying to be on the right side of the media by getting on the wrong side of liberal politics. The damage inflicted on their own side in this electoral round will, like the broadsides against Gore, come back to haunt the party for years.

Anglachel

(I completely rewrote the sentence about the push back on the press that I originally read in a post by Mustang Bobby. I apologize for the original mangled mess.)

Creepy Crawly

No, I'm not talking about Dick Cheney.

Cool Flash site where you get to play with a spider. I love the entrance it makes.

Play With Spider

Anglachel

Fortune is a Woman

Looking at the presidential campaign, the one element that leaps off the page is the horribly compromised position of the so-called "progressive" Left with regards to women. Make no mistake - both Left and Right have been deploying disgusting arguments, narratives and imagery about women and their "place" in politics and society. The Right is still firmly on the wrong side of civil rights for women. As I have watched over the last 12 months, what I see is that the Left has engaged in crude and direct misogynistic attacks on particular women, while the Right has made a more subtle and strategic use of femininity in the public sphere. They have ended up reinforcing their standard arguments about women while the progressives have grossly undermined their own claims, though perhaps they have finally exposed their true beliefs.

In both cases, the two sides have put forward arguments about female sexuality and maternal conduct. The Right has additionally served up attacks on Democratic candidates that utilize social constructs of masculinity and femininity to keep the campaign focused on personalities and avoid issues.

The Left blogosphere thas treated three prominent women, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin, with varying degrees of contempt and levels of demonization. Each woman has been the subject of a slightly different kind of attack.

The brutal assaults on Hillary are taken almost word for word from the Right Wing Noise Machine and are no more true coming from the Left. She has been treated the worst and continues to be impugned and badgered at every turn. Key to her demonization is the attempt to desexualize her. Her looks are derided, from her age to her fashion sense, her sexuality is a subject of speculation, her emotional availability and empathy is dismissed (cold, heartless, calculating, castrating, etc.), and the result is not a masculine figure, but an inhuman one. She is also cast as a bad mother, someone who pimps out her child, refuses to properly surrender her life to the cause of Obama, and overall fail to prevent young men with dumb ideas from getting themselves into trouble. If she had been a good (sexually available, enticing and submissive) wife, her husband would not have strayed and she would have kept her house in order. When she is compared to Grendel's mother (and I don't think the columnist meant the Angelina Jolie version), the demonization is complete. She is denied both sexual agency and maternal impulse, and ecomes a mythologcal creature like Medusa or a Harpy. Reducing her this way makes it possible to igore her as a political actor and a public servant.

Also in the progressive blogophere, though in a complicated way tied up with points of congruence with the Right due to Republican drift, are slanders against Michelle Obama. These attacks focus on her role as wife and her ostensibly illegitimate participation in the campaign. I also see her as a target of racism that cannot be expressed directly towards Barack Obama. I have read any number of allegations, all leading back to "anonymous" (i.e., non-existant) sources in the campaign that it was Michelle Obama's decision to not allow Hillary to be VP. I have no idea what Michelle's input on the VP selection was, and I assume that she is a highly trusted counselor to her husband, just as Hillary obviously is to Bill (and vice-versa), but I doubt she was the only person who said no to that choice, assuming she even said no. Michelle is getting the Lady Macbeth treatment, cast as the scheming woman who drives her husband over the edge and into villany. Given the opposition of the current DNC leadership to all things Clinton, making Michelle the fall guy (gal?) for Barack's decision smells to high heaven - someone is gladly trading in character attacks on her to get themselves off the decision hook.

Something that may not be as obvious is the way in which Michelle is being domesticated and disciplined into the role of good First Lady. It is ironic, given Barack's own snotty comments about Hillary's years in that position, which was part of the misogynistic puts downs and trivializations of his opponent. But Michelle herself is going through a very public "taming of the shrew" process to tone down her sex appeal, limit her statements (whether you agree with her or not, it's better to have outspoken women than the alternative), play up her helpmeet status and generally craft a very pure maternal image. The crafting ends up being a criticism of Hillary, a capitulation to Republican standards of public wives, and a loss of an opportunity to change the rulesl for how to cover political spouses. I keep thinking of the petty sniping at Dr. Dean, the missus, who simply went on with her medical practice rather than be arm candy for Dr. Dean, the blowhard.

Palin is simply getting shit on as a trashy woman who is indulging herself and needs to get home and feed the kids. Unlike Hillary, whose sexuality is regarded as perverse/non-existant, or Michelle, who is presented as properly domesticated, controlled and presentable, the narrative about Sarah is a slut out of control. Too fecund, too careless, too sexually available. The beauty queen who won't stop breeding. This is used to question her maternal qualifications, from whether she has too many kids , to whether all the kids are hers to whether she is properly caring for her children. The juxtapostion of (pre-fall) Edwards and Obama with their young children as above paternal reproach throws a spotlight on the double-standard applied to Palin and other female politicians. The claim that her politics legitimize questioning her on these grounds doesn't pass the sniff test. The anti-McCain elements in the Republican Party were also willing to advance these arguments, but have fallen conspicuoulsy silent in the face of Palin's convention success.

In all of these cases, what we see is direct and crude deployment of standard misogynistic tropes that women have battled whenever they enter the public sphere as actors in their own right rather than accountrements to male actors. What is happening on the Right with respect to Barack Obama is also misogynistic, but at one remove. Obama is being portrayed as feminine, effete rather than effeminate, but still occupying a degraded and unmanly position. The celebrity he enjoys, according to Republican ads, is not that of George Clooney and Brad Pitt, but of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. He is purposefully compared to Palin as much to say "You're not even as tough/strong/capable as a girl!" as any other reason. The comparisons to Hillary coming from the Right give them a two-fer - focus on the mannish Hillary and the feminized Obama. Michelle as Lady Macbeth is not just imagery to degrade her but also to signal his impotence in the face of a tough female.

This is more of the same of what has been thrown at Democratic candidates for the last two presidential cycles. It does not just augment the usual tropes of weakness; it exposes the foundations of that attack which is misogyny itelf. To quote Machiavelli:

For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.

In the Republican mind, the candidate is a male hero striving to shape feminine Fortune to his will, and those who will not do ths are females to be likewise dominated, the "girly-men" Ah-nold sneered at in 2004. Thus, the female "blonde bimbo" celebrity imagery is of a piece with the attacks on Gore, a man who was "practically lactating". These are no longer opponents to contest with; they are feminine objects to be kept under, beaten and ill-used.

This is an argument of the Right, of conservatives and of fundamentalists, that to be female is to be of a lesser class of humanity than males. From this basic proposition, the rest follows. There is room in the world view for an exceptional woman, just as there is room for the exceptional Jew or the exceptional Black, but the socio-economic location of this class of beings is below, subservient and docile.

The "progressive" blogosphere has exposed its own fundamentalist tendencies this electoral cycle, wielding misogyny like a sledge hammer to achieve its political goals. To try to claim innocence on this count is insulting to the readers' intelligence. The Blogger Boyz (and the women frantically trying to prove they are really just Girlz so they can stay in the club) have damaged the campaigns of every female Democratic candidate, legitimizing use of misogynist tropes. The reproductive history of our women candidates is now fair game. In performing this violence against female candidates and public figures, they have validated its continued use by the Right and have cast into doubt their progressive claims. (And here's a clue: The answer to Palin is not that she is a hypocrite but that the Democratic approach allows her family the freedom to make exactly the choices they did, while allowing others to decide differently. Treat her particular choice as one of many valid choices.)

It is one reason why I reject the lable "progressive" for myself and state clearly what I am - a liberal. I do this in the same way and for the same reason that I say I am a feminist.

My fortune is as a woman.

Anglachel

Willie Brown on Palin

Willie Brown is one of the most experienced politicians in the country, though he may not be well known outside of California. He is why we have term limits . His political sense is second to none. This is what he said in his San Francisco Chronicle post today about Gov. Palin:

The Democrats are in trouble. Sarah Palin has totally changed the dynamics of this campaign.

Period.

Palin's speech to the GOP National Convention on Wednesday has set it up so that the Republicans are now on offense and Democrats are on defense. And we don't do well on defense.

Suddenly, Palin and John McCain are the mavericks and Barack Obama and Joe Biden are the status quo, in a year when you don't want to be seen as defending the status quo.

From taxes to oil drilling, Democrats are now going to have to start explaining their positions.

Whenever you start having to explain things, you're on defense.

I actually went back and watched Palin's speech a second time. I didn't go to sleep until 1:30 a.m. I had to make sure I got the lines right.

Her timing was exquisite. She didn't linger with applause, but instead launched into line after line of attack, slipping the knives in with every smile and joke.

And she delivered it like she was just BS-ing on the street with the meter maid.

She didn't have to prove she was "of the people." She really is the people.

There is one thing she should have done: announced when her 17-year-old daughter and the teenage father of the girl's unborn child are getting married and invited all of us to the wedding. It should be like Sunday at church.

As for Palin herself, she is going to be very, very effective on the campaign trail, especially if McCain's people can figure out how to gently keep her from getting into confrontations with the press.

If she can answer questions like she handled herself at the convention, Palin will turn out to be the most interesting person in all of politics, and the press will treat her like they treated Obama when he was first discovered.

And remember, the Palin bandwagon needs to roll for only two months.

Palin floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee

First off, I note that this is how you evaluate a political opponent. He has taken careful inventory of everything she brings to the table and is looking at her the way, say, an undecided voter would. He isn't looking to criticize her but to defeat her, which is something different than having the right policies.

The next point is what he starts the commentary with - that this is trouble for the Democrats. He can say this because he has evaluated what is in front of him the way a voter would, and then stepped back to put that into the context of Democratic strategy.

Why is this trouble? Because Democrats are on the defensive. The Republican ticket has made a bold move because that is their only strategy for winning, and it looks like it paid off. The boldness is not just picking this VP, but in grabbing away the Democratic messages and forcing the Dems to have to explain what their change is, why they are hope, just how they're going to deal with the energy crisis, etc.

Willie Brown said something I've been thinking the last few days, that Palin is like nothing so much as Obama himself at this time last year, a fresh new face that the press finds endlessly fascinating. Unlike Obama, she only has to keep that presentation going for nine more weeks and one debate where Biden is already hamstrung due to the rabid response of the Obamacans.

This is one of the reasons why I think any state that is tepidly blue is in danger of flipping. Palin doesn't have to be a great or even decent VP; she only has to be an effective campaigner from now through election day.

Anglachel