Super Tuesday endorsement face-off
Obama: Actually, I Think We Can (hilzoy, "Obsidian Wings") --- A richly linked counterpoint to my own irritable "Yes, we can what?" question below: a focus on existential threats like avian flu and nonproliferation, more transparency in the White House, criminalizing deceptive election practices and voter intimidation, a seemingly innocuous government tech plan that might pay big dividends. Squint the right way, and this seems big; squint the wrong way, and it's small ball compared to universal health care now.

hilzoy also partly addresses the "bad bipartisanship issue" -- she provides examples of successful legislation, including the truly impressive videotaping law he got passed in Illinois. I say partly because that still leaves things like the Lieberman endorsement and similar political missteps (in my view), and the "too willing to echo right-wing memes" charge. But while I'm still leery of the adulation for Obama, there may be more of a basis to it than I've conceded.

Making the Case... for Hillary Clinton (Sean Wilentz, November 2007 interview in Newsweek) --- Wilentz argues that it takes someone who's lived through the political crossfires of the past forty years to make it in the White House, and that Obama, by contrast, is a kind of "Adlai Stevenson" candidate -- too proudly and consciously above the fray to get much done, or perhaps even get elected. "It's the end of age of Reagan, and you need a leader who can take us out of it." Re worries about Hillary's polarizing the electorate and energizing the Republicans,* he says that's a Republican head-fake: "Whenever Republicans tell us who they want us to nominate, we should nominate her. They're scared of her."

The "Theory of Change" Primary Mark Schmitt (The American Prospect) -- Schmitt sees the election a little differently:

This is not a primary about ideological differences, or electability, but rather one about a difference in candidates' implicit assumptions about the current circumstance and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track. [...]

The reason the conservative power structure has been so dangerous, and is especially dangerous in opposition, is that it can operate almost entirely on bad faith. It thrives on protest, complaint, fear: higher taxes, you won't be able to choose your doctor, liberals coddle terrorists, etc. One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows.

Election 2008: Who I am Supporting in the Democratic Primary (eRiposte, "TalkLeft") -- Written back when Edwards was still in the race, this is the most thoroughly researched and argued pro-Hillary blog post I've come across, even backing up a seemingly arguable assertion -- "I believe she is clearly the most electable of the three top candidates" -- with evidence of campaign missteps that may come back to haunt Obama. Regarding Iraq, eRiposte writes There is little "fundamental difference" between them on how they acted in Congress and how they would address Iraq and Iran going forward," and asserts that there is "reasonable doubt as to whether Sen. Obama would have voted against the 2002 Iraq resolution if he had been in the U.S. Senate at the time. Everything he has done in the U.S. Senate on Iraq has been almost 100% in lock-step with Sen. Clinton."

See also: NYCweboy (Clinton), Spencer Ackerman (Obama), lambert (Clinton), Chris Hayes (Obama).


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* That's not a hilzoy argument, to be clear.

NOTE: final links via posts by Ezra Klein, who links to more, and finds "An Elite Consensus for Obama." Klein himself is not endorsing anyone publicly.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |  

 
Worth reading -- Super Tuesday edition
Democratic Debate in Los Angeles --- I don't get cable, so this will have to do. By all accounts it was a civil debate, and judging by the transcript it was actually a fairly substantive one as well. However, Juan Cole ("Informed Comment") caught Hillary in a mistake about "Operation Desert Fox" -- Saddam had not kicked out the inspectors to cause the three-day bombing campaign in 1998. (Rather, as I recall, he had failed to grant them full access to sites they were to inspect.) I agree with Cole that Obama got the better of this part of the debate.

Clinton, Obama, Insurance (Paul Krugman, New York Times) --- Krugman continues to be skeptical of Obama:

...new estimates say that a plan resembling Mrs. Clinton’s would cover almost twice as many of those now uninsured as a plan resembling Mr. Obama’s — at only slightly higher cost. [...]

If Mr. Obama gets to the White House and tries to achieve universal coverage, he’ll find that it can’t be done without mandates — but if he tries to institute mandates, the enemies of reform will use his own words against him.

If you combine the economic analysis with these political realities, here’s what I think it says: If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.

The Boom was a Bust for Ordinary People (Barbara Ehrenreich in the Washington Post) ---

It begins to sound a bit naughty -- all this talk about the need to "stimulate" the economy, as if we were discussing how to make a porn film. I don't mean to trivialize our economic difficulties or the need for effective government intervention, but we have to face a disconcerting fact: For years now, that strange stimulus-crazed beast, the economy, has been going its own way, increasingly disconnected from the toils and troubles of ordinary Americans.

The Lessons of '94 (Ezra Klein, The American Prospect) --- Klein contends that what went wrong with the Clinton healthcare plan was that they took too long to create it (a recession was all but over by the time it was unveiled) and perhaps more importantly tried to create an exquisitely crafted, take it or leave it package, which a Congress full of egos as jumbo-sized as Bill's was quite happy to leave. The questions are, I suppose, is that really what happened, and does Hillary agree that's really what happened?

The Problem with Bill 2.0 (Josh Marshall, "Talking Points Memo") --- "...it's precisely because I'm looking forward to supporting her if she is the nominee that I hate seeing her being overshadowed by her spouse and having her husband bigfoot the process which diminishes her and makes me think her presidency could be a 4 year soap opera where Bill won't shut up and let her have a shot at doing the job."

The Commander in Chief at the Lowest Ebb (David Barron, Marty Lederman, Harvard Law Review, .PDF, about 1000 pages, OK, 116 pages) --- This is liable to be important both in the near term, as Bush asserts yet more powers to do whatever he likes, and in the longer term, as a new administration hopefully charts a new, more lawful and less dictatorial path for the executive branch. Lederman is a former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who contributes to the blog "Balkinization" -- and who I suspect might not mind joining a new Democratic administration.

I haven't read it all, but I've started it and that should count for something. The title is taken from Justice Jackson's 1952 Youngstown Sheet and Tube ruling, in which he held that executive branch discretion was at its lowest ebb when there were directly countervailing congressional statutes; thus, Truman couldn't nationalize steel mills for the Korean war effort. Barron and Lederman are concerned with whether there is now some kind of new justification for Bush claiming he could ignore congressional limitations on troop rotations and other defense-related expenditures in time of war. Their short answer appears to be "no." Their longer answer seems to be that "Commander in Chief" may ought to mean a good deal less than people these days think it means, something like "he who may delegate command decisions, but retains responsibility for them" rather than "he who may do anything he likes if he's president and there's a war on." However, readers should consult actual constitutional lawyers before acting on this summary.

A Health Law with Holes (Robert Kuttner, American Prospect) *--- Hmm. Using the Massachusetts "Commonwealth Connector" health insurance system as an example, Kuttner argues that Obama is right to oppose coercive mandates:

...the reform helps a great many uninsured but compounds a crisis that Dr. Marcia Angell, former executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, calls "coverage without care." As employers and insurers contain their costs by shifting them to individuals, more people find that their insurance fails to pay many expenses when they are sick. [...]

This idea of an individual mandate absent comprehensive reform - how to say this politely? - is nuts. It makes a social failure the problem of the individual. As Angell points out, "It gives the idea of government-sponsored universal coverage a bad name."

Selected del.icio.us link dumps: clinton_hillary, obama, democratic_party, mccain, gop, impeachment, iraq, healthcare


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* UPDATE, 2/5: The Massachusetts law was mentioned by many Maryland District 20 candidates in 2006 in discussing how or whether to fix "Fair Share Health Care," a plan mandating large corporate (read Wal-Mart, in immediate effect) healthcare expenditures equal to 8% of payroll.In comments, eRobin pointed to "Eye on MA," a column by Ezra Klein that essentially echoed Kuttner's reservations ("not my ideal. It's an individual mandate, which is better than an employer mandate, but worse than instituting government-sponsored health care"). posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:04:00 AM -- |  

 
The really important news on what is now truly a Super Tuesday
I may need to send Ron Paul a contribution. Some of his supporters have been saying John McCain is ineligible to be President because he was born in the Canal Zone, but while Article II of the Constitution seems to bear them out --"no person except a natural born Citizen... shall be eligible to the Office of President." -- it all depends on what 'natural-born citizen' means, doesn't it, says the Washington Post's Ron "Political Junkie" Rudin:

Some might define the term 'natural-born citizen' as one who was born on United States soil. But the First Congress, on March 26, 1790, approved an act that declared, 'The children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond sea, or outside the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural-born citizens of the United States.' That would seem to include McCain, whose parents were both citizens and whose father was a Navy officer stationed at the U.S. naval base in Panama at the time of John's birth in 1936.

Well waddayaknow. Not clear if it takes both parents being U.S. citizens, so that may take a little bit of litigation... And then: Thomas in 2012! (Hear all the T's? Alliteration. Plus I've already got my slogan: "Change I can believe in.") I have, like, twenty friends on Facebook, so this should be a cinch. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:02:00 AM -- |  

 
WashingtonPostUnfair.com
Advertisements like the one to the right have sprouted in the Metro Center subway station in downtown Washington. At issue is that the Washington Post is practicing some of what its op-ed royalists preach, by executing a grab for a Communications Workers of America (CWA) local pension fund. CWA Local 14201 has set up a WashingtonPostUnfair.com web site where they explain what's going on:

Right now, the production workers have a national pension plan administered jointly by a board of employer and union trustees. But the Post is now demanding the right to withdraw from that plan, as well as requesting the unilateral right to decide what to do with the money in the plan. That money has been diverted from the workers pay raises over the last 30 years. It belongs to the workers. That’s right - the Post is asking to take pension money that has been coming out of its workers’ paychecks.

The pension fund was almost entirely funded by withdrawals from workers paychecks over the years. Now I understand why the Washington Post likes to sound the alarm bell about Social Security -- raiding it is no more than they'd been planning themselves.

Wise guys and recent graduates of Econ 101 will probably think deep thoughts about the declining newspaper business to themselves, but Washington Post made $325 million in profits last year, and the management got itself a nice little "Incentive Compensation Plan" that was amended in 2005 "to increase (i) the maximum amount that can be given as an annual incentive compensation award to a participant in a given year, and (ii) the maximum payout of Performance Units at the end of an Award Cycle to a participant, in each case to $5 million."

Meanwhile, CWA workers haven't had a raise in 5 years -- and the Post hasn't even been willing to negotiate with them for four years. What are they hoping for? Your help :

Let the Post know you want them to treat their workers with fairness and respect. If you have five minutes to spare, can call the Post at (202) 334-6000. Ask to speak to CEO Don Graham. If you have one minute to spare, use the form below to send an email directly to the Post's Ombudsman. The Ombudsman serves as the readers' advocate; and attends to questions, comments and complaints about the paper.

The CWA aren't calling for a boycott of the Washington Post -- yet. On the other hand, why pay 50 cents for the Post when you can get the Washington Times for a quarter? They're virtually indistinguishable in every other way. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:59:00 PM -- |  

 
Neither of the above -- for now
With Edwards out, I've been looking for reasons to favor Obama over Clinton or vice versa. It appears to me by now that I'm being presented with a choice almost designed to cost me the maximum amount possible for my support.

Hillary has built a more progressive domestic agenda -- crucially, a truly universal health care plan, but also a better subprime crisis plan. But sadly, she's built that on the foundation of a vote she thought showed good judgment about Iraq back in 2002 that she still won't acknowledge was a mistake -- a mistake in judgment, at minimum, about the definitiveness and seriousness of the WMD case, and a mistake in judgment about the probity of those trying to sell that case. A mistake so serious it handed Bush a war costing thousands of American lives, on the order of a hundred-fold more Iraqi lives, largely guaranteeing his political wins in 2002 and 2004, and handing him numerous excuses to shred our Constitution. (A mistake, in all candor, that I made too. But I'm not running for president, let alone on an "experience" pitch.).

Barack, meanwhile, seems to be balancing off his early Iraq opposition with all manner of rhetoric and dog whistles designed to appease, mollify, and echo the right on Reagan, on Social Security, on religion, on health care, on an expanded military, on all those mortgage deadbeats, to name a few, and with politics so determinedly centrist he endorsed Lieberman over Lamont in '06, among others. And I realize this makes me a bit of a sourpuss, but I feel like I'm watching a remake of the "Pied Piper" story when I see videos like this. "Yes, we can," la la la. Yes we can what? Yes, we can has warm fuzzy feelings, a tear in our eye, a (comparatively) weak health care plan, and Joe Lieberman over for tea and crumpets once a week.

And yet -- here goes the inevitable caveat -- don't get me wrong. Either Obama or Hillary are miles better than any of the Republican alternatives -- especially on issues of executive power, if not on the equally fundamental one of how to punish overstepping power by impeachment. Both of them at least give lip service to turning towards diplomacy and consciously trying to restore our country's reputation overseas. Both seem to have decent plans about global warming, nuclear nonproliferation, and securing nuclear weapons -- the really existential issues they must tackle. I think either of them are likely to appoint better cabinet members and Supreme Court justices -- knock on wood -- than McCain or Romney. And while they give themselves wiggle room, more American troops will be out of Iraq sooner with either of them than with "hundred years" McCain or Romney. So come the fall campaign, I'll support either one on the phones, on the streets, in the fields, and on the beaches.

However, that will mainly be a choice against the Republican Party -- which has enabled and given its full-throated support to one of the worst, most unforgiveable presidents in history... perhaps the worst. Regardless of my reservations about the Democratic Party, the Republicans deserve to be annihilated at the polls for their role in the past eight years this November.

But that's not the choice I have next week.

And so, here in Maryland on February 12th, I'll be supporting... John Edwards. I don't care that he's not running any more. I don't care that "throws away" my vote by conventional reckoning. I do care that my primary vote means what I want it to mean, and not an endorsement of one of the surviving campaigns over the other -- when both have done their level best to make it mean no more than necessary. Call it a protest vote -- or call it a reminder vote: that both Clinton and Obama can do better.

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NOTES: "subprime crisis" -- The Nation, January 2008; "Reagan"-- YouTube video, January 2008; "religion" -- Paperwight's Fair Shot, July 2006; "health care" -- Ezra Klein, February 2008; "like this" -- YouTube video, February 2008; "securing nuclear weapons" -- Obama, April 2007. The other links lead to supporting posts on my "newsrack" blog.
UPDATES, 2/4: In fairness to Clinton, Obama, and their dedicated supporters, here's a more positive "it's hard to choose" assessment by Ezra Klein. Also "in fairness," Kevin Drum's explanation why he'll be pulling the lever for Obama -- it nearly convinced me to back Hillary in the primaries after all, see what you make of it. Yes, it's an election "fer chrissakes" -- that's when you don't burn our bridges to universal health care, not when you do demagogue mandates. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:30:00 PM -- |