Neurotic Democrat

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2008-09-15T11:28:00.002-04:00

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Why I Like John McCain

2008-09-11T10:41:00.014-04:00

I know. Some of you are probably wondering if my blog has been overtaken by GOP hackers.

But, following the lead of our candidates -- who are appearing together today, in a spirit of solidarity on the seventh anniversary of 9/11 -- I've decided to take this moment as an opportunity, and put partisanship aside.

Thousands of people died on that day seven years ago, and multiple thousands have died since -- Americans and Iraqis alike -- because of it, and most of us would agree that something precious -- something that has to do with our optimism and hope for a better world -- was snatched from every single one of us on 9/11. A pause is appropriate, and, frankly, welcome.

First, a story. My friend in Chicago, who I mentioned in Right Tactics, Wrong Strategy, actually reminded me of this a few months back:

I first met John McCain when I was a cub reporter, working for Congressional Quarterly's Web site, and for CQ's Congressional Monitor -- a daily recap of Hill activity -- back in the mid 90's. I was assigned to cover Senate floor votes, which meant that I had access to a small room, just off the Senate floor, that lawmakers generally walked through after voting.

One day, I was working on a story on deadline, when John McCain came off the floor and into that room. I was relatively new -- I'd never met him before -- and I wanted to get his perspective for my piece.

Excuse me, I said. Senator McCain?

I introduced myself, explaining what I was working on. He said he would be glad to help me. Only, just as we started speaking, a staffer corralled him. The Senator told me he needed to talk with this staffer, and would be right back to continue our discussion.

I stood, waiting, looking over my notes. Just as the Senator was finishing up a few feet away, two other reporters approached him -- from the New York Times and Washington Post -- seeking interviews. I have to say, my memory of them is that they were self-important and pompous, though, that may be colored by the years.

In any event, what I remember clearly, is Sen. McCain's response to them: I've promised Josh an exclusive interview, he said. I'll be with you in a moment.

He didn't really owe me an exclusive. He was just being kind. And he was saying that rank -- pecking order -- meant less to him than what was right. Even if it meant he wouldn't get his name in the papers of record the next day. And I have to say, it meant more to me than a hundred Senator interviews.

I really liked Senator McCain -- and for a long time, I imagined that he might be the first Republican I could vote for.

I like that he bucked his party and reached across party lines to work with Ted Kennedy, a hated figure to many on the Right, on immigration reform, advancing the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship for 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. (It was never acted on, and Republicans ultimately prevented a compromise bill from coming to a vote.)

I like that he again scorned his party -- and went against his own political interests -- reaching across party lines to work with Russ Feingold, another progressive lion of the Senate, to pass the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which attempted to curtail soft money in campaigns and thwart issue ads.

I love that he led the Gang of 14 -- the bipartisan group of Senators that stopped Republican Bill Frist from using the so called "nuclear option," which would have let Republicans cut off Democratic filibusters by a majority vote -- preventing the Democratic minority from exercising its constitutional prerogative to block Bush court appointees. (Effectively, the nuclear option would have meant that Republicans could ignore years of accepted Senate procedure and, for the first time in history, run roughshod over the Democrats -- by taking away their right to filibuster. It was a reprehensible stone cold political play that Democrats had never threatened to use on their stonewalling Republican peers, when the GOP was in the minority.)

I like that McCain did eventually criticize the conduct of the Iraq war, when Bush was still stoically pretending nothing was wrong. (Though I disagree strongly with McCain's judgments that got us into the fight in the first place. See again: Right Tactics, Wrong Strategy.) I'm also very thankful that against a strong political tide, McCain pushed for the surge in Iraq, which has vastly improved the situation on the ground, and made Obama's exit strategy much more actionable.

Having said all this, I should add that I sincerely hope this convinces none of you to vote for John McCain.

The truth is, the John McCain that I felt I knew, even up to a few years ago, is not the John McCain I see running for president today. I don't recognize the Senator who showed me that kindness all those years ago in the Senator who angrily attacks Obama as an un-American opportunist, who puts political ambition over country; the Senator who let his running mate's acceptance speech be used as a crude cudgel against community organizers; the Senator who ignored a Wall St. Journal reporter's question because he didn't like the article she'd written the day before. I don't recognize that John McCain in the Senator who, when it was time to make his first big decision, reached out not to the middle -- not toward me -- but to a running mate who is further to the right on most social issues than even our current Administration.

While I admire his working with Kennedy on immigration, I truly wish he hadn't retreated, in the face of right wing pressures within his own party, to his current position, which is, essentially: First, build a wall along the Tex-Mex border. And while I sincerely appreciate his work with the Gang of 14 and campaign finance reform, those aren't the issues that get me up in the morning these days: I want a president who understood from the start that the Iraq War was a mistake, and understands the pressing imperative of restoring America as a respected global leader; a president who believes that in this time of great economic hardship, environmental degradation, over-reliance on fossil fuels, and educational decline vis-a-vis the rest of the world, that government can play an important, sensible -- fiscally responsible -- role in lifting people up. And, yes -- a president who can inspire us to take personal responsibility and lift ourselves and our communities up, as well.

So I remain a committed, unwavering, passionate supporter of Barack Obama.

But I also think that it's crucial, as this campaign's last 54 days wind down, that we -- not just our candidates -- find ways to reach out to people who disagree with us and talk to them. Really hear them. Try to understand why it is they hold the views they do; what motivates them to support their candidate. I've done this a bit more in the last week, and heard interesting takes from people I disagree with, but respect and admire. Just last night, on a conference call with some friends, a Republican friend of mine who served in the military in Saudi Arabia told me that while America must never torture, he feels frustrated by people who don't recognize that we can be at a disadvantage, in the battlefield, because we hold ourselves to a much higher standard than the terrorists we are fighting. And he reiterated that at the end of the day, the world and the Middle East are much better off without Saddam Hussein.

My friend and I did not agree on everything. Hearing him out, though, reminded me again that there are serious, well-intentioned, critical-thinkers on both sides of the political divide. You forget this sometimes when your insides are boiling, watching the latest attack ad, or watching pundits shout at each other on CNN.

If I truly want our leadership to get beyond the hyperpartisanship of the last eight years, I need to be able to do the same thing with that family across the street that just put the "John McCain" sign up on their lawn.

I remember, after 9-11, when the planes first started flying again. The security lines at BWI airport were farcical -- they stretched the entire length of the terminal. I was nervous as hell. We all were. But I had fallen in love with an amazing woman who lived in Boston -- I lived in Washington, DC -- and I was not going to be kept away. I remember, distinctly, sitting on a Southwest flight, wondering what I would do if a terrorist stood up, at 30,000 feet, with a boxcutter in hand. I was heartened by the big dude in front of me, who didn't have the look of a terrorist. Nice to know he'd be on my side.

And then the pilot came on the PA. And he asked us to look to our left, and look to our right, and introduce ourselves to our row mates. Shake hands. Tell them something about us. You might be surprised at what you learn, he said, and we laughed -- and then we did exactly as he said. The tension was relieved. We got to know one another a bit. We took off on time.

So, take this day. If you're on Obama supporter and there is something you admire in McCain, post it on this blog. And if you are a McCain supporter but find something compelling in Obama, share it with us. Think about those weeks, just after 9-11, when instead of focusing instantly, reflexively on our differences, no matter how small, we looked deeper and found that really -- who knew? -- we all have so very much in common.

MY OBAMA MINUTE: Was more like 3 and a half hours yesterday. I had lunch with a friend, who is helping me organize the Jewish community here for Obama. Then my mother-in-law and I went to Obama headquarters, and from there to Akron University, where we spent 90 minutes registering voters. We didn't ask whether they were Obama or McCain -- though our hope, of course, is that the university is Obama's natural demographic. Moveon.org had been registering folks on campus all day -- many of the folks we asked had been asked a number of times already -- but we were still able to register five people to vote. You might say: Only five people. Or, you might just as well point out, as Judaism teaches, that each one is the whole world.

GUEST BLOG: Obama Addresses Education in America

2008-09-09T17:17:00.004-04:00

My wife and I attended Obama’s address this morning at Stebbins High School in Riverside, OH, just outside of Dayton. It had been a thunderously rainy night but the skies cleared just in time for the early arrivals and only a few stray drops misted the crowd while we waited to go through security.

Waiting in line we met another couple and began to discuss the current state of affairs. Joe is a retired research physicist who noted that his family had had to move when Dayton initiated its first urban renewal project and that he had benefitted from public education and from the much lower cost of higher education when he was young and when one could much more easily get government assistance. Jan is a retired high school teacher who, after volunteering for an Obama event was asked (and agreed) to be a team leader.

The event was held in the high school gym, with bleachers and seats on the first floor and additional seating above. The first to greet us was a young man whose name I could not hear but who is a Field Organizer for the campaign. He noted that he was from a Chilean family of seven; he and his siblings all attended public schools and public colleges and were very grateful that this country provides such opportunities to those willing to work hard. He was followed by a parent of a high school student who spoke about the importance of being involved in one’s children's education, to read to them when they are young, to see to it that they do their homework as they get older, and to support their other endeavors. He finished by saying that he had been a registered Republican until the primary and that it was his son who convinced him to look closely at Obama’s policies and who was responsible for his conversion. He noted, with pride I believe, that parental involvement is a two way street - parents and kids all benefit from it.

Senator Obama was greeted with loud applause and shouts of “Yes we can!” He opened by saying that his daughters had just started school this past week and recounted that when he’d asked a 5th grade teacher what to expect this year for Malia, she replied “Boys.” He countered that he was relieved that his running for president meant that the girls each had Secret Service protection.

He then spoke for about 30 minutes, touching on the problems with the state of education in America. He highlighted the reason that change is needed: the country’s long term security is at risk if we don’t take full advantage of the potential of every individual. He said that criticizing the “No Child Left Behind” law is not an education policy, that he agreed with its goals but not its implementation and not the failure to finance it fully. He said that children and teachers all lose when so much time has to be spent teaching to the test that creativity and imagination can not be sparked to their fullest, including having to drop music and art from the curriculum to accommodate mind numbing (my words) drills. The Senator addressed the risks we face if we continue to fail to teach all students the science and math skills they need to succeed, either at higher education or at high skill jobs. He said that it is in America’s heritage to lead the world in scientific innovation but that we will lose that lead if China and India turn out more math and science Ph.D.’s than we do.

Obama then laid out his plans, including bringing 30,000 highly skilled new teachers a year into America’s classrooms where they are most needed, whether in inner cities or in underserved rural areas, by giving grants or other aid in exchange for a promise of service in these schools. He made it very clear that responsibility for the success of any educational program is shared among students, teachers, parents, and government. He wants to introduce technology into schools so that parents can see, on a daily basis, if their child was in school, if he or she turned in that day’s homework and how their child did on quizzes or tests. He said that accountability should extend to teachers and that their performance should be measured in ways that are worked out within each district between the teachers and the school board so that they are relevant and meaningful. He emphasized, in an audience he knew to have a large complement of educators, that teachers who underperformed should be given help to improve, and that if they didn’t improve they should be removed from the classroom. And these words were greeted with loud applause.

Senator Obama differentiated himself from Senator McCain in his emphasis on early childhood education, noting that children who have benefited from quality preschool programs do better in school, are much less likely to fall below grade level, and are much more likely to graduate from high school and to attend college. And for any lower or middle class child who does attend college he wants to implement a $4,000 tax credit (fully refundable, meaning - as I understand it - that if the child or family does not pay enough in taxes to get the full credit, they would be reimbursed the rest).

What I took away from this speech is that Barack Obama recognizes the shortcomings in American public education and that he has a clear view of what needs to be done to address the problems. Right at the beginning of his speech he noted that every candidate for president promises to improve education, recalling that in 2000 Bush said he wanted to be known as ‘The Education President’ yet the numbers have gotten worse for high school graduation rates and dropout rates. In my mind he clearly wants all students to have the best education possible and is willing to commit government resources to it.

...And my commitment for Obama involves working with a committee to set up an early October fundraiser here in Dayton focusing on healthcare issues, hosting an Obama Field Organizer until the election, and doing whatever she asks me to do for the campaign. What are you doing?

That Sinking Feeling

2008-09-08T10:17:00.015-04:00

What, exactly, was that that just hit us?

I'm thinking bus. But a bus, we would have seen coming.

Just over a week ago, I left Denver, inspired, euphoric, feeling that we were on the verge of truly meaningful change. We had just nominated -- I saw it with my own eyes! -- a black, progressive-minded, tough-as-nails candidate along with his running mate, perhaps the preeminent foreign policy expert in Washington, today. All week in Denver, the ticket spoke of restoring economic justice by lifting up the middle class, reaching out to the world to mend our tattered coalitions, ending the debacle of the Iraq war; they spoke of making climate change a national priority, and of investing in -- not just paying lip service to -- alternative fuel, to begin weaning ourselves off of our dependence on foreign oil. The party had come together. (Remember when that was the story?)

Today, I wake up in a terrifying new world. The ticket that promised above all else to fight special interest earmarks and drill baby drill, with a VP candidate whose foreign policy expertise boils down to "governs a state close to Russia," finds itself with an 11 point post-convention surge (compared to Obama's 3), and still rising. McCain leads 50-46 in the latest Gallup poll among registered voters, and -- are you sitting down? -- 54-44 among likely voters.

Sure, sure -- he may yet come down a peg from this bounce. But I'm the Neurotic Democrat -- what concerns me more is how I feel.

I meet once a week to study with a magnificent Chabad rabbi -- a self-described single issue voter (Israel) who supports McCain. We differ politically, but love to talk politics. All summer long he assured me -- in that calming way that only a Chabad rabbi can -- that McCain couldn't win because he didn't have his base. I was heartened, along the way, by polls that showed a major enthusiasm gap, with Democrats wild for Obama, and Republicans lukewarm on McCain. This morning's polls now show Republicans just as enthusiastic as Democrats, thanks largely to Palin. Last time I met my rabbi he was ebullient.

I know it's crazy -- this is politics, hardball politics; there are no entitlements -- but I feel cheated. And compared to where I was when I woke up Friday morning in Denver, deflated. The advantage that we had been building, bit by bit, from the grassroots up, for the last 19 months, has been wiped out, as MacDuff would say, "at one fell swoop."

(By the way -- even Sarah Palin sensed that advantage. An incredible piece in the latest New Yorker quotes Palin -- prior to being tapped as McCain's running mate, speaking admiringly of how Obama had been turning red Alaska purple. "Obama's doing just fine in polls up here, which is kind of wigging people out, because they're saying, 'This hasn't happened for decades that in polls the [Democratic candidate] is doing just fine.' To me, that's indicative, too. It's the no-more-status-quo, it's change.")

Does anyone have the sense that I'm not the only dispirited Dem today? That Obama, too, was knocked on his keister by McCain over the last seven days?

It's in his language. Remarking in Terre Haute Indiana on Palin's earmarks flip-flops, he said: "Come on! Words mean something. You can't just make stuff up."

An exclamation point in the Times. Come on! That, to me, reads like frustration, more than exhortation. Because the truth is, you can. Make stuff up. The Republicans just did. And, far from being punished by voters, they've been handsomely rewarded.

For me, it's not just the convention, it's a steady drip ... drip ... drip seemingly everywhere I look that has me reeling.

Perhaps at no moment did I more think, We could actually win this thing, then the night Barack Obama claimed the nomination, before thousands of cheering supporters in Minneapolis. Moments later, McCain appeared, angry and sullen, as the Times put it, countering "with a lackluster speech in a half-empty hall, posed in front of a pea-green screen that became fodder for late-night comedy." I wondered, at the time, if that would be McCain's Nixon debate moment. But there the two candidates were yesterday, on p. 1 of the Times, Obama speaking to what looks like a few dozen folks, standing on some hay in a barn; McCain and Palin literally swamped by thousands at an airport rally in Colorado Springs. Images matter.
Obama went on the O'Reilly factor Thursday, and, on Stephanopoulos's show yesterday, and, while more than holding his own substantively, let himself get interrupted, repeatedly, by a couple of disrespectful windbags. Bearing matters. (It was incredible, by the way, to see O'Reilly deftly undermine Obama, positing in rather ho-hum fashion that Obama's initial opposition to the war was right and declaring him "perspicacious" -- thereby taking it away from him as an issue -- before going on to grill him relentlessly about his opposition to the Surge -- as if that tactical decision was far more important than the original strategic one to invade Iraq. Obama's opposition to the war should be issue No. 1 on the commander-in-chief question. See yesterday's post: "Right Tactics, Wrong Strategy.")
Obama is having difficulty "connecting" to the middle class (despite the fact that his tax policy would reduce taxes on the middle class). In William Kristol's column today (he tries, but he can barely contain his glee at the turn this election has taken), he describes a scene in 1990 when, as mayor, Sarah Palin presided over a wedding at Wal-Mart. ("It was so sweet," she told the Anchorage Daily News. "It was so Wasilla.") Kristol concludes: "A Wasilla Wal-Mart Mom a heartbeat away? I suspect most voters will say, No problem. and some -- perhaps a decisive number -- will say, It's about time." In coming to this conclusion, he doesn't mention any of her policy proposals. Did I mention image matters?
Little things. The Times has a big article today about Palin and motherhood, detailing her last pregnancy. There's a picture inside with her and her husband, holding the baby and a baby shower cake. Her husband, Todd, is wearing a shirt that says "F. Atlee Dodge Aircraft Services, Anchorage, Alaksa," with a picture of a dented-up biplane. All I could think when I saw it was: Obama bowled a gutter ball. Image. Matters.
Remember that book of lies "The Obama Nation"? Just because it's slipped from the headlines doesn't mean it's gone. I checked the Best Seller list yesterday, and Corsi's book is safely ensconced at No. 1 for the fourth-straight week, with David Fredoso's book, "The Case Against Barack Obama," sitting pretty at No. 6. I notice no book that will be in every airport in America this week that similarly sets out as its premise to destroy John McCain.
The Times had a great, but depressing, article Sunday about how the McCain campaign has changed since Steve Schmidt took over. Schmidt is the guy who pushed to get Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in the attack ads; it was Schmidt who pushed hard to mock Obama's convention setting as the "Temple of Obama"; he approved all of the scathing GOP convention speeches. He centralized McCain's war room. Here is the frightening nub: "Junior aides work shifts across 24 hours, scouring news outlets for tidbits with the potential to embarrass Mr. Obama through circulation to bloggers, the Drudge Report, cable news and newspapers." Not the potential to make a thoughtful point about an issue. The potential to embarrass Obama.

I wonder if this latest flap came from one of those junior aides.

I heard about it this morning, after dropping my son off for preschool. A right wing talk radio host (hey -- we need to hear what the other guys are saying, right?) was merrily talking up what he called "possibly the greatest Freudian slip" of all time. Apparently, on Stephanopoulos's show yesterday, Obama had slipped up and referred to "my Muslim faith" instead of "my Christian faith." This, the host noted, on the heels of Obama's "57 states" comment. Remember, the host said -- there are 57 Islamic states. His point was clear: Given Obama's latest slip, maybe it's not a "smear" afterall; maybe there is something to this a secret radical Muslim stuff.

Now, I'm an educated voter on this topic. I know Obama's a Christian, and has been smeared, relentlessly, as a Muslim, by those trying to make him seem strange and scary. Here is the truly scary -- and embarrassing -- part. There was a part of me, for a split second, that allowed myself to hear what this host was saying as truth. (Did that happen to any of you, reading the paragraph above?) It was an emotional response, not a reasoned one. At the same time I knew, intellectually, that Obama must have just slipped up, there was something compelling, something that appealed directly to my fear instincts, in the way the host tied the two together.

So I went home, weary, feeling down, and looked it up.

In fact -- in truth -- Obama did not slip up. Stefanopoulos did. Here is the relevant part of the transcript:

SEN OBAMA: You're absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith, and you're absolutely right that that has not come -
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Your Christian faith.
SEN. OBAMA: My Christian faith - well, what I'm saying is -
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Connections, right.
SEN. OBAMA: - that he hasn't suggested that I'm a Muslim, and I think that his campaign upper echelons haven't either. What I think is fair to say is that coming out of the Republican camp, there have been efforts to suggest that perhaps I'm not what who I say I am when it comes to my faith, something which I find deeply offensive, and that has been going on for a pretty long time.

Obama said exactly what he meant to say. Stephanopoulos interrupted him -- incorrectly inserting words into Obama's mouth, making it seem as if Obama had slipped up. Obama immediately corrected the record, which you see if you watch the video: "What I'm saying is that he hasn't suggest that I'm a Muslim."

Which is exactly what he said. It would have been wrong had he said, as Stefanopoulos wanted him to: "John McCain has not talked about my Christian faith"; Obama was giving McCain credit for not smearing him. Anyone -- anyone -- who is even the slightest bit fair-minded will see this, immediately, upon watching the tape.

And yet, within a day, it's insidiously portrayed as a Freudian slip all over right wing radio.

(For the record, I also looked up the 57 states thing. Obama was exhausted when he made that comment -- he clearly meant to say 47 states. And there are actually 60 Muslim states in the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Snopes debunks the whole thing fairly effectively.)

What's so instructive -- and terrifying -- to me about this is that for an instant this morning, I fell for it. An educated, passionate Obama supporter, who has dedicated his entire summer to debunking this very rumor. How many voters who listened to that show this morning will actually take the time to go watch the video and find the truth for themselves, as I did?

I started this day -- this blog -- feeling like Tony Romo under 750 pounds of Cleveland Browns linemen. But as so often happens through the writing process, something happened on the way from there to here -- and I am finishing angry. Flat-out furious that once again, our guy is being worked through a shredder -- at the GOP convention, in best selling books, on the Internet and right wing radio -- and we're letting it happen. Every one of us.

A few days ago, I blogged about Jewish Values and Going Negative. In it, I spoke about the conflict I was feeling between the Jewish prohibition against speaking negatively against someone -- even when what you say is true -- and the notion that we are prohibited from standing idly by while the blood of our fellow is shed.

Team McCain and the right wing radio/blogosphere have just done me an enormous personal favor. I'm no longer conflicted. We have 57 days to punch them, straight in the mouth, with everything we've got.

Sen. Obama, if I could speak to you directly for a moment. This is a bad day. A tough, hard, bitter day. But you need to look no further than your own running mate for advice on where to go from here. As Joe Biden put it in his vice presidential acceptance speech: "My dad, who fell on hard times, always told me, though, 'Champ, when you get knocked down, get up. Get up.'"

Get up, champ. Get up. Millions of us have your back.

MY OBAMA MINUTE: Went with my mother-in-law to volunteer with the Obama campaign ... am continuing to organize local Jewish folks as Team Leaders for Obama ...

ND KUDOS: Go to our left coast cousin, who has registered to vote in her first presidential election, has volunteered with the Tallahassee Florida Democratic Party, and will be hosting an Obama Night in her neighborhood in three weeks!

Right Tactics, Wrong Strategy

2008-09-07T22:48:00.016-04:00

Every four years, the Republicans run for president in an alternate reality, and win.

Someone explain this to me. According to the latest CNN poll, 64 percent of Americans currently oppose the war in Iraq. According to an ABC poll, 72 percent of Americans -- including many Democrats -- believe McCain would make a good commander-in-chief. That same poll found only 48 percent felt Obama would make a good commander-in-chief. It also found respondents were evenly split between supporting Obama's plans for getting out of Iraq, and McCain's for staying in.

It seems to me that the best way to assess fitness for commander-in-chief is to look at how McCain and Obama have approached the Iraq war. Here are some basics:

We invaded Iraq March 19, 2003. On April 9, we toppled the Saddam statue. On May 1, Bush stood on the aircraft carrier in front of the Mission Accomplished banner, declaring: "My fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

As Frank Rich argues in his column today, McCain's pick of Sarah Palin as VP is very reminiscent of his early support for the Iraq War:

We’ve already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 — even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam’s W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn’t until months after “Mission Accomplished” that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.

I did a little research, just to be more specific, and found this Salon article, which details McCain's ardent support not only for the war -- but for the original war plan. ("I have no qualms about our strategic plans," he told the Hartford Courant in a March 5 article, [14 days] before the invasion. "I thought we were very successful in Afghanistan.")

It wasn't until August 29, 2003, after the U.N. headquarters was bombed, that McCain told NPR: "we need more troops," adding: "When I say more troops, we need a lot more of certain skills, such as civil affairs capability, military police. We need more linguists."

In other words, to put a finer point on Rich's point, McCain made the first tentative criticism of the war plan five months after the invasion.

Here is how Salon puts it:

To buy into the McCain-knows-best version of the Iraq war, you have to ignore a lot of history. McCain was among the most aggressive proponents of a preemptive strike against Saddam Hussein, cosponsoring the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. He also expressed full faith in the way it would be executed -- a war plan conceived and executed by Rumsfeld.
He did call for more troops in Iraq sooner than some, but later than others who made the same argument before the first shots were even fired. And McCain's support for Rumsfeld only evaporated over time, as it became painfully clear that the war in Iraq was going south.
Bert Rockman, the head of the political science department at Purdue University, said McCain's commander-in-chief argument is tarnished because he advocated "the right tactics and the wrong strategy."

Putting aside the fact that, at the very start, he didn't even have the right tactics ("Our technology, particularly air-to-ground technology, is vastly improved," McCain told CNN's Larry King on Dec. 9, 2002. "I don't think you're going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw, nor the length of the buildup, obviously, that we had back in 1991."), this seems to me an accurate and irrefutable description of McCain's fitness for commander-in-chief. Let's flash forward and give him the Surge (I know -- it's not that simple, given the lack of political reconciliation -- but violence is way down, and even Obama just said the Surge was wildly successful, so for the sake of argument ..) Right tactics, wrong strategy.

Now, here is what Barack Obama said on Oct. 2, 2002, in part, about the Iraq war. (If you haven't yet read the speech, it's worth clicking through):

Now let me be clear - I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the middle east, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

It goes on -- and gets even better; thoroughly prescient. For the record, here, four months later, just a month before the start of the war, is what might have been McCain's rejoinder to Obama:

"As Vice President Cheney has said of those who argue that containment and deterrence are working, the argument comes down to this: Yes, Saddam is as dangerous as we say he is," McCain said in a saber-rattling speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Feb. 13, 2003. "We just need to let him get stronger before we do anything about it," he added sarcastically.

Could the record be any more clear that Obama had the right strategy?

In the alternate political reality in which we now live, McCain is credited with pushing the Surge, at great political peril; he gets away with blurring his early record, saying that he called for more troops and opposed Rumsfeld. He has never once been forced by Fox 5 to admit -- as Obama was Thursday regarding his stance on the Surge -- that he was flat-out wrong in his persistent advocacy for the Iraq war; flat-out wrong in his tactical approach.

A friend of mine -- a doctor, who lives in Chicago -- said to me the other day, effectively: the war's over; we are moving ahead; it's not an issue any more. His point was, for forward-looking people, the difference between McCain and Obama on Iraq is not that great: both will get us out, sooner or later. Maybe my friend is in tune with what most people are thinking on this one.

To me, though, this wrinkle in time thinking is incomprehensible.

I'm not easily stamped as a bleeding heart anti-war lefty. I'm pretty upset at Moveon.org, still, for their callous and petty name-calling of Gen. Petraeus. But I insist on examining the record when determining for myself whether Obama or McCain is more fit to be commander-in-chief. After eight years of bluster and sabre-rattling from the Oval Office, eight years that has left our country adrift at home and strained our alliances the world over, nothing could be more relevant; nothing, more important.

Obama had the right strategy. He advocated his strategy at a time when few people were willing to stand up and say they opposed the war -- it seemed like a great political risk at the time. So lump me in with the 48 percent.

Obama is exactly the kind of commander-in-chief this country desperately needs.

MY OBAMA MINUTE: Today, I emailed a friend here in Akron -- the start of my efforts to organize the local Jewish community for Obama.

ND KUDOS: Go to loyal, for his first dailykos diary, about Palin's descision to run for VP with a Down's baby at home, which, last time I checked, had 32 responses! ... and to my cousin for registering voters outside Target in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a crucial swing state! ... and to my other cousin, for heading up Obama efforts outside Philly, in another crucial swing state! ... and to barbara w, for spending time at the Obama phone bank this weekend ... and to barbara w's family, for circulating all those pro-Obama emails! Keep letting us know what you are doing! ... And keep fighting the good fight!

One Minute a Day

2008-09-06T20:53:00.007-04:00

It's fitting, I think, that the Torah portion for today was Shoftim, which includes, in its first graf, one of the most important exhortations in Jewish thought: "Justice, justice, you shall pursue."

My Torah includes this Midrash, or explication, of the phrase:

"The term 'pursue' carries strong connotations of effort, eagerness," A.J. Heschel taught. "This implies more than merely respecting or following justice,' we must actively pursue it."

It goes on to quote the Sages: "This command also means to 'pursue justice justly,' for just goals can never be achieved by unjust means; the worthiest of goals will be rendered less worthy if we have to compromise justice to achieve it."

This brings us back, again, to the topic of "Jewish Values and Going Negative." (See post.) I continued to struggle with this. Just this morning, my mother-in-law mentioned to me that Team McCain has launched an ad in Detroit, picturing Obama next to the just indicted mayor. It's an obvious smear -- guilt by association -- in a crucial swing state for Obama. My first thought was: Let's run an ad with McCain and Jack Keating. Or McCain and Abramoff. (See, for instance, this connection.) Then, I thought: Do that, and Obama-Wright ads can't be far behind. But we could counter with a Palin-Buchanan spot! Or Palin and the Alaska Independence Party! Although, surely, wall-to-wall Obama-Rezko would follow.

Maybe this is the wisdom of the Sages.

My Uncle Jon is right, though -- we can't fight with one hand behind our back. But I truly believe that something in Obama's high road approach is resonating in this time of hyperpartisanship. We know negative works; but so far, at least, Obama seems to have found a formula to combat it -- a mixture of rapid response, claiming the moral high ground, and running issue-based contrast ads.

Which brings me to my post yesterday -- we are part of that response. Here is what I am advocating:

Thank god for my sister, who, today -- depressed in the aftershock of this GOP convention -- emailed me a Buddhist saying that she has on her wall, in her apartment in New York City: "He who says it cannot be done should get out of the way of the person doing it."
We have 60 days until the election. I know it seems daunting to think about getting out and pitching in. But look -- when I was in graduate school for writing at Johns Hopkins, a teacher of mine gave me a trick to get us going: Don't think about writing every day -- that may seem too hard -- just start out with 30 minutes a day, and go from there. Later in my career, a teacher at the Iowa Writers' Workshop went even further, saying: Write for one minute a day. That's it. You'll see, he said -- it will turn into more.
Start there. Take one minute a day, for the next 60 days, and do something for this cause. Send an email to a wavering friend or family member. Send the Obama campaign $5 through the Web. Put a bumpersticker on your car, a button on your shirt, a lawn sign in front of your house. Do something -- no matter how small -- every day for the next two months. It will matter. And it will add up!

I wanted to reiterate that today, because I think it's so important. It's so easy to feel we are too busy, and can't make a difference. But in the Internet age, everything we do can be viral. And one minute a day is doable. Post in response to a blog, or post on a local newspaper blog. Write in to this blog, and suggest creative ways that people can make good use of their minute.

To that end, I took a few minutes today to write a letter to the editor to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I know from my newspaper days that whether or not your letter gets published, it has an impact, because publications tend to run letters that represent the letters they receive. So, for example -- if they get 50 pro Obama letters and 10 pro McCain, they may shoot to run 4 or 5 pro Obama letters and one pro McCain. In that way, we can have an impact, even if no one sees what we write.

You can also, of course, post your letter on this blog!

Here's the letter I emailed to the Plain Dealer:

In your editorial Saturday ("McCain looks to the future"), you characterize John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin for vice president as "bold," noting that she is "relatively unknown and untested."

Isn't it also reckless? Especially given John McCain's previous insistence on the importance of foreign policy experience?
You note that McCain is looking to the future with this pick. But you might also have pointed out that by picking a staunch social conservative who opposes abortion rights even in cases of incest and rape, he is looking primarily to his right-wing base.
McCain, you conclude, while short on policy specifics thus far, has two months to prove "he can chart a course that leads from a disappointing presidency to a more prosperous future." But he's already had 26 years in Washington to chart that course.
It's time for a real change.

McCain's Israel Omission

2008-09-05T14:03:00.016-04:00

A party convention speech is an important thing. It gives us a sense of a candidate's priorities. So what are we to make of the fact that, after allowing his convention to be used as a platform to batter Barack Obama on Israel (see, for example, Rudy Giuliani's speech), John McCain took to the stage on the most important political night of his life and didn't mention Israel, even once?

More than 4,400 words, by my count, and no mention of the Jewish State.

I know McCain supports Israel. And I suppose I might be feeling more charitable -- more willing to overlook his unfortunate omission -- were it not for groups like the Republican Jewish Coalition, which consistently seeks to use Israel as a wedge issue against Democrats. (Its home page states: "A Risky Choice Just Got Riskier: Obama-Biden," claiming the Democrats have a poor record on Israel; it features articles like "Why Sarah Palin Will Likely Be Better For Israel Than Joe Biden.") Likely? They do this, despite the fact that it's ultimately detrimental to Israel, the very cause they espouse. (As even AIPAC notes, the best thing for Israel is strong, bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress.)

Unlike McCain, Obama did choose to mention the Jewish State during his moment in the international spotlight. (My wife was the one who pointed this out to me -- it meant something to her.)

"You don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in 80 countries by occupying Iraq," he said. "You don't protect Israel and deter Iran just by talking tough in Washington. You can't truly stand up for Georgia when you've strained our oldest alliances. If John McCain wants to follow George Bush with more tough talk and bad strategy, that is his choice, but that is not the change that America needs."

Indeed, in his speech, McCain was all too happy to talk tough.

"We have dealt a serious blow to Al Qaida in recent years, but they're not defeated, and they'll strike us again, if they can," he said. "Iran remains the chief state sponsor of terrorism and is on the path to acquiring nuclear weapons."

Obama, of course, talked tough on Iran, too. He said:

"I will end this war in Iraq responsibly and finish the fight against Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. I will rebuild our military to meet future conflicts, but I will also renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Russian aggression. I will build new partnerships to defeat the threats of the 21st century: terrorism and nuclear proliferation, poverty and genocide, climate change and disease."

I'm a writer -- a words guy. Words matter, especially when they are spoken by presidential candidates. Listen to the difference in their approaches.

McCain speaks in a language of fear, warning of imminent attacks. (See yesterday's post: "A Tale of Two Speeches") Obama speaks of partnerships and building up our military strength. He criticizes Bush's strategic decision to attack Iran. He presents an argument: By that action, we have neglected the true fight against terrorist networks in 80 countries across the globe. He speaks of deterring Iran (rather than bomb, bomb, bomb ... bomb, bomb b, bombing it), protecting Israel. I looked it up -- it means: "to defend or guard from attack, invasion, loss, annoyance, insult, etc.; cover or shield from injury or danger."

He made this pledge on a world stage before 42 million people.

McCain, apparently, didn't feel the need to mention it.

Now, I know McCain supports Israel. But he also picked Sarah Palin, as his running mate.

A recent Jewish Telegraphic Agency article includes these startling grafs:

Republicans have been scouring the archives to uncover evidence of Palin’s outreach to Jews and to Israel.
Her single substantive act is signing a resolution in June marking 60 years of Alaska-Israel relations, launched improbably in 1948 when Alaska Airlines helped shepherd thousands of Yemeni Jews to Israel. However, she did not initiate the legislation: Its major mover was John Harris, the speaker of the Alaska House.
The paucity of material led the Republican Jewish Coalition to tout the appearance of a small Israeli flag propped against a window of the state Capitol in an online video in which Palin touts the virtues of hiking Juneau.

The best the RJC can do, in terms of her Israel record, is a small Israeli flag in an online video? And yet they are not only okay with this -- they are pushing Palin, hard, on the Jewish community? This, after months criticizing Obama for his supposedly thin Israel resume?

Look, I'm nothing if not a Neurotic Democrat. I understand that rational and electable are two very different things. Do I need more proof than the AP article today, indicating that in the latest polling, Palin is more popular than Obama or McCain, with a 58 percent favorability rating? For picking her, McCain's favorability ratings jumped 12 percent. About 51 percent believe reporters are deliberately trying to hurt Palin. Her numbers are better than Bidens'. And Friday mornings' numbers already see the start of a McCain bounce that could totally wipe out Obama's.

Thank god for my sister, who, today -- depressed in the aftershock of this GOP convention -- emailed me a Buddhist saying that she has on her wall, in her apartment in New York City: "He who says it cannot be done should get out of the way of the person doing it."

We have 60 days until the election. I know it seems daunting to think about getting out and pitching in. But look -- when I was in graduate school for writing at Johns Hopkins, a teacher of mine gave me a trick to get us going: Don't think about writing every day -- that may seem too hard -- just start out with 30 minutes a day, and go from there. Later in my career, a teacher at the Iowa Writers' Workshop went even further, saying: Write for one minute a day. That's it. You'll see, he said -- it will turn into more.

Start there. Take one minute a day, for the next 60 days, and do something for this cause. Send an email to a wavering friend or family member. Send the Obama campaign $5 through the Web. Put a bumpersticker on your car, a button on your shirt, a lawn sign in front of your house. Do something -- no matter how small -- every day for the next two months. It will matter. And it will add up!

In his acceptance speech last night, John McCain said: "My friends, if you find faults with our country, make it a better one. If you're disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them ... Fight for what's right for our country. Fight for the ideals and
character of a free people."

John McCain -- you can bet your bottom dollar we will.

Shabbat Shalom.

A Tale of Two Speeches

2008-09-04T14:28:00.038-04:00

There were two important speeches given Wednesday night. One, by GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, in St. Paul, Minnesota. The other, by Susannah Heschel, professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth, daughter of the late rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Palin gave her speech before thousands of enthusiastic Republicans at the Xcel Center; millions more watched on TV. Heschel spoke before about 150 people -- albeit, an overflow crowd -- in a lecture hall at the American Jewish Archives, on the campus of Hebrew Union College (HUC), the Reform Jewish seminary in Cincinnati, OH.

The Heschel talk was organized by U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, to honor A.J. Heschel, on the occasion of his centennial birthday year. Heschel, who died in 1972, taught Bible at HUC from 1940 to 1946.

For my money, the nation would have benefited more from Heschel's speech in prime time.

First, a word about Heschel's father. A.J. Heschel authored more than a dozen books, including "God in Search of Man," one of the most compelling books on spirituality I've read. "On the certainty of ultimate meaning we stake our very lives," Heschel writes, one of his many powerful insights. "In every judgment we make, in every act we perform, we assume that the world is meaningful."

Heschel was, as his biographer, Edward K. Kaplan writes, "a poet, theologian, biblical scholar, interpreter of Jewish tradition, and voice for social conscience." He argued, in his writings, for a "spiritual audacity," rooted not in rote ritualistic observance, but in "an awareness of the transcendent worth of the universe." He marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, asked the Pope to change the Vatican's stance on converting all Jews, and was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.

He spoke truth to power.

"America has been enticed be her own might," he told Fellowship magazine in 1966. "There is nothing so vile as the arrogance of the military mind. Of all the plagues with which the world is cursed, of every ill, militarism is the worst: the assumption that war is an answer to human problems."

Susannah Heschel began her speech, almost from the first words, steeped in emotion."Hebrew Union College saved my father's life," she said. (The Nazis had deported Heschel from Berlin to Poland; he would likely have perished in the Holocaust had not HUC president Julius Morgenstern successfully lobbied the U.S. State Department for a visa on Heschel's behalf.)

Her father was lonely when he first arrived in Cincinnati, an outsider. But he had grown up in a world of Hasidic Jews where "it was forbidden to despair." She spoke of him going to buy stamps at the local Post Office, and politely saying "thank you" to the clerk, who replied: "You are welcome." Her father, still learning English, took it literally -- it meant so much to him -- he never forgot the kindness.

"The opposite of good is not evil," she said, channelling her father. "The opposite of good is indifference."

"My father could never separate religion and politics," she said. "You can't be a religious person and be disengaged politically."

Her father met MLK in 1963, in Chicago, and they had an "instant closeness." A black preacher from the south, and a pious Jew from Poland. "It should tell us something about the ridiculous identity politics that we have today," Heschel said.

In Chicago, Heschel said: "Few of us realize that racism is man's greatest threat to man. It's a maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason. A maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking."

When her father marched with King in Selma, shortly after Bloody Sunday (See blog: "The Bridge That Led to the Stadium"), she wasn't sure if she'd ever see him alive again. When he returned, he told her that while marching with King for civil rights, it felt as if his "legs were praying." "That's what it meant to be political," Susannah Heschel said.

She spoke of the famous photograph of her father marching with King (See below; Heschel is second from right.) It's an image that is now very common in the Jewish world. Many people tell her how much it means to them. But, Heschel said: "we can't take this iconoclast and make him into an icon. That photograph should be a challenge."

So what is that challenge? There are many, she said -- and racism, which her father called "eye disease," remains chief among them. Imagine, she said, there are people in this country, still, who would "not vote for a brilliant person due to the color of his skin."

"I think we have today in this country a yearning for redemption ... We have a yearning to be freed from corruption, free of bias, free of mean-spiritedness ... We were inspired by my father, by Martin Luther King, because we want to live like them. We are held back sometimes, by fear."

"We ask ourselves," she said, "Do we really want health care for all people, or just ourselves?"

She spoke of other issues: voters disenfranchised in some states by voter registration laws designed to keep minorities and the elderly away; war and destruction in Iraq; torture here at home. She said "the central teaching of Judaism is compassion," adding "justice is the means of our redemption."

Afterwards, I approached Heschel, and asked her to expand on her political views, specifically, the Jewish community's response to Barack Obama. She immediately mentioned a New York Times article, from May ("As Obama Heads to Florida, Many of its Jews Have Doubts"). Here's a sample quote:

“The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of his attitude towards Israel,” [Shirley Weitz], 83, said, lingering over brunch.

“They’re going to vote for McCain,” she said.

Ruth Grossman, 80, agreed with her friend’s conclusion, but not her reasoning.

“They’ll pick on the minister thing, they’ll pick on the wife, but the major issue is color,” she said, quietly fingering a coffee cup. Ms. Grossman said she was thinking of voting for Mr. Obama, who is leading in the delegate count for the nomination, as was Ms. Weitz.

But Ms. Grossman does not tell the neighbors. “I keep my mouth shut,” she said.

"I think my father would have been appalled and horrified by these remarks," Susannah Heschel told me, "and by the idea that people will not vote for someone brilliant, thoughtful, with the right policies, who is trustworthy -- and they wouldn't vote for him due to the color of his skin."

I asked her whether she thought Sarah Palin should be held accountable by Jews for wearing a Pat Buchanan pin in1999. Palin is downplaying the event; Buchanan, who is anathema to so many Jews, says she was a supporter:

Palin wrote to the AP that her presence at the rally and her wearing a Buchanan button were merely ways to welcome Buchanan to Wasilla, not endorsements of his candidacy.

But that's not quite how Buchanan remembers it.

Buchanan told Chris Matthews yesterday that Palin "was a brigader in 1996 as was her husband, Chris, they were at a fundraiser for me, she's a terrific gal, she's a rebel reformer."

Even if we were to assume she was not endorsing his candidacy, Heschel said: "She wore the pin!"

"If you put it on, and you want to be a politician -- you better be careful about what pin you are going to wear. It's not a joke. It means something."

When the event was over, I drove from Cincinnati to Dayton, to spend the night at my uncle Jon's. We watched Sarah Palin's speech together.

"Americans expect us to go to Washington for the right reason and not just to mingle with the right people," Palin said, adding: "The right reason is to challenge the status quo, to serve the common good, and to leave this nation better than we found it."

Which part, I wondered, of the Bush-Cheney status quo did she intend to challenge? What would she have done differently these last eight years? If elected, which policies would she work to change? What, exactly, did she mean by "common good"?

Again and again, Palin appealed to fear. She kicked up fear on energy and gas prices, speaking of "the threat that Iran might seek to cut off nearly a fifth of the world's oil supply," adding that "terrorists might strike again" at a facility in Saudi Arabia, and "Venezuela might shut off its oil discoveries." Obama, she said, wants "to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world."

"Terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay," she said. "He wants to meet them without preconditions."

"Al Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America," she said. "And he's worried someone won't read them their rights."

(Each time she made a new alarming claim about Obama, my uncle, sitting on a reclining chair in Dayton, said: "That's a lie!")

"My fellow citizens," she said, "the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery. This world of threats and dangers -- it's not just a community and it doesn't need an organizer."

I couldn't help but think, as I listened, to Susannah Heschel's clarion call -- her warnings about leaders who sow fear -- just a few hours before.

"Some politicians are mendacious and lie to us," she said. "And sometimes we play along. We want to be deceived by them; we want to believe the lie ... We say, I don't want to take responsibility for what's new."

In our conversation she'd told me: "We have to realize, this election can't be transformed into an election about images and emotions. It's about issues, very important ones. We shouldn't allow ourselves to be manipulated ... They're trying to get us not to think about policy -- about the environment, Iraq -- and instead, to respond to images."

As she was finishing her talk, Heschel said: "I ask ... How can we keep (my father) alive as a contemporary challenge?"

There's one more big speech to go tonight in the Republican National Convention. We can start by not giving in to our fears.

The Politics of Palin

2008-09-02T14:44:00.000-04:00

These are trying times for the Neurotic Democrat. I don't do well with speed-of-light political change.

By Sunday, I was fairly sure McCain had taken the single step that could unite his base, peel off disaffected Clinton voters, and win himself the election.

And then came noon, Monday. I was at a park, in Akron, watching my 19-month-old delight in some little gnat-like bug that had landed on his slide, when I got the call from my mother-in-law about Palin's daughter's baby.

Kennedy's assassination. Man landing on the Moon. Challenger disaster. 9-11. There I was on the playground, with another "where were you when" moment unfolding, right before my eyes.

I quick phoned my uncle, one of the smartest political prognosticators, and perhaps the most relentlessly optimistic Democrat and Rutgers fan, that I know. Let it be said -- a full day before Intrade began taking bets that Sarah Palin would have to withdraw her candidacy -- my uncle put the odds at roughly 30 percent. When he told me this, I was standing near some small shrubs, many with spider webs and reddish berries, a moment I will surely never forget, as long as I live.

As the day progressed, the Category 5 Neurosis I had been suffering as McCain successfully turned Gustav into a leadership moment, began subsiding. I mean -- the hockey mom's daughter is pregnant? Surely that will at least present a challenge to the ticket's image, right? Still, I assumed it would be a rather low level Internet story. One that certainly wouldn't punch through the night of the would-be GOP convention.

Last night, just before watching a Tivoed recording of my beloved Scarlet Knights vs. Fresno State, I logged onto Huffington Post, to find a full on, screaming headline: "What Did He Know and When Did He Know it?" above a picture of McCain and Palin. Among the headlines:

-- A top GOP governor was already fielding questions about whether she would withdraw
-- Palin was once a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, which, as part of its plank, has pushed for a vote on whether Alaska should secede.
-- She was almost recalled, as mayor, in 1996, for firing the police chief and library director, who did not support her.
-- She'd hired an attorney to defend her for allegedly firing her public safety director, who had refused to fire the cop that was going through a bitter divorce from Palin's sister.
-- Oh ... and did I mention her daughter was pregnant.

And that wasn't all of them.

I quickly clicked over to the New York Times, assuming, still, that the story wouldn't have crossed over, only to find this article, which notes that Palin herself conceived her first child out of wedlock, and includes these grafs:

Aides to Mr. McCain said they had a team on the ground in Alaska now to look more thoroughly into Ms. Palin’s background. A Republican with ties to the campaign said the team assigned to vet Ms. Palin in Alaska had not arrived there until Thursday, a day before Mr. McCain stunned the political world with his vice-presidential choice. The campaign was still calling Republican operatives as late as Sunday night asking them to go to Alaska to deal with the unexpected candidacy of Ms. Palin.

Although the McCain campaign said that Mr. McCain had known about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy before he asked her mother to join him on the ticket and that he did not consider it disqualifying, top aides were vague on Monday about how and when he had learned of the pregnancy, and from whom.

When I read this article, I was sitting on my rug, leaning against the blue couch, talking to my mother-in-law (the one person I know who is more neurotic about Obama's chances than me), with my computer balanced on one of those cushioned-wood lap thingies. I had just placed the remote control on the ottoman. I will never, ever forget it.

I awoke this morning to a world gone crazy. Palin was topic number one on NPR. A caller on the Diane Rehm show noted that the Washington Post was reporting that Palin, who, at her first rally, pitched herself, like McCain, as a warrior against earmarks -- indeed, she had opposed the "bridge to nowhere" -- had in fact hired a lobbying firm to secure $27 million in federal funds for Wasilla, a town of 6,700, when she was mayor. And the GOP officials on her show were on the defensive, big time, about her daughter's pregnancy, given Palin's own support for teaching abstinence only in schools.

There I was, in my kitchen, defrosting a bagel, brewing a pot of coffee. The weather outside was lovely, low humidity, 67-degrees under sunny blue skies. A day like many others we've had in Akron this summer, except for its unforgetable-ness.

When I got to my desk, I couldn't help myself. I followed some of the links that friends had sent. I checked out some of the more salacious stuff for myself. I must confess that I clicked on a link featuring Palin, being interviewed by DJs for an Alaska radio show: When the DJ's describe one of Palin's political opponents, a cancer survivor, as a "cancer" and a "bitch," Palin laughs, and then invites them for a visit. As soon as I finished reading this tabloid tripe, I immediately went to wash my hands. I swear it. Thank the good lord Yom Kippur is just around the bend.

I now see that Huff Post as an entire page dedicated to breaking Palin news. ("Some News is So Big, It Needs It's Own Page.")

This issue, it seems to me, should be about:

1. Whether McCain fully vetted her, and ...
2. If he did -- and he says he did -- How could he have not foreseen the distraction that this would cause? I mean, his surrogates have been after Obama for months, for failing once to put his hand over his heart, and for not wearing an American flag lapel pin at all times during the primary; and he picks as a VP a woman who was a member of a party that wants a vote on whether or not Alaska should secede? What does THAT say about McCain's judgment, and fitness for the highest office?

We've had a gut-level, look-into-Putin's-eyes-and-see-his-soul decision maker in the Oval Office for eight long years, thank you very much.

And yet, the Neurotic Democrat in me is feeling absurdly jittery about all this. We've never seen a media onslaught like the one we are witnessing now. Even Diane Rhem, on her show this morning, was so indignant, bordering on self-righteous, when pressing a McCain backer to answer how well abstinence-only works, in the Palin family, given news of the pregnancy. It was unseemly. If I were Obama, I'd be nervous.

It's fair, in my view, for the media to plunge in with two feet -- McCain has picked for his VP a woman that few people outside Alaska know. Her record is fair game. But no one can control this Internet mania. And Republicans are masters at playing the victim as the press piles on. Particularly the left-wing blogosphere. You can bet Team McCain will double-down, all-in, at it's convention tonight, tomorrow and Thursday. If they are keeping Palin on the ticket, what choice do they have?

Will voters be able to separate the relevant from the irrelevant? Will they be able to focus on policy differences? Will they hold this media firing squad against Obama, despite the fact that Obama has said, emphatically, that the pregnancy issue is a family matter, and the press should "back off." (In the same statement, he noted that his mother had him when she was 18, too.)

[After writing this post, I logged on to check email. The top AP headline was: "McCain camp: Obama Spreading 'Smears' About Palin." Check out the story for yourself -- nowhere in it does it say that Obama, himself, is spreading anything at all. In fact -- if you look at the last line -- it says exactly the opposite.]

Don't be surprised if McCain comes out of this week ahead in the polls. I was talking a bit about this in the doctor's office this afternoon, where we had taken our 19-month old for his checkup, when the doctor, an Obama supporter, asked: Who was it who said, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people"?

I can say with absolute certainty, I'll always remember exactly where I was when he said it.

Obama: Wrong Response to Palin

2008-09-01T00:53:00.000-04:00

Following up on my post yesterday, about my problem with McCain's pick of Sarah Palin: I'm concerned Obama's counterpunch may be all wrong.

This article by Michael Kinsley in Slate echoes what I was saying yesterday. ("We Have to Bend It" http://neuroticdemocrat.blogspot.com/2008/08/we-have-to-bend-it.html ). The real issue with McCain's VP pick isn't her lack of experience -- it's that for months, all we've been hearing from him is that in these dangerous times, experience (and particularly foreign policy experience) is what matters, most.

Here's the article: http://www.slate.com/id/2199029/ ...

Here are the most relevant six grafs, in brackets [ .... ]. The italics are mine. I reprint in full, because he makes the point well:

[It seems like just yesterday that the Republican Party was complaining about Barack Obama's lack of foreign-policy "experience." As a matter of fact, as I write (on Friday, Aug. 29) it actually was just yesterday. Even now, the Republican National Committee's main anti-Obama website has the witty address www.notready08.com. The contrast in experience, especially foreign-policy experience, between McCain and Obama was supposed to be the central focus of McCain's campaign.

But that's so five minutes ago, before Sarah Palin. Already, conservative pundits are coming up with creative explanations for McCain's choice of a vice presidential running mate with essentially no foreign policy experience. First prize so far goes to Michael Barone, who notes on the U.S. News & World Report blog that, "Alaska is the only state with a border with Russia. And it is the only state with territory, in the Aleutian Islands, occupied by the enemy in World War II." I think we need to know what Sarah Palin has done, in her year and change as governor of Alaska, to protect the freedom of the Aleutian Islands, before deciding how many foreign policy experience credits she deserves on their account.

The official response to the question of experience emerged within hours and is only slightly more plausible: She may not have foreign policy experience, but -unlike Obama, Joe Biden or even John McCain-she has had executive experience. Why, before her stint as governor of Alaska, population 670,000, she was mayor of a town of 9,000. Remember when the Republicans mocked Bill Clinton for being governor of a "small state"? That would be Arkansas, population 2.8 million. As it happens, 670,000 is the population of metropolitan Little Rock.

The whole "experience" debate is silly. Under our system of government, there is only one job that gives you both executive and foreign policy experience, and that's the one McCain and Obama are running for. Nevertheless, it's a hardy perennial: If your opponent is a governor, you accuse him of lacking foreign policy experience. If he or she is a member of Congress, you say this person has never run anything. And if, by any chance, your opponent has done both, you say that he or she is a "professional politician." When Republicans aren't complaining about someone's lack of experience, they are calling for term limits.

That's why the important point about Palin's lack of experience isn't about Palin. It's about McCain. And the question is not how his choice of Palin might complicate his ability to use the "experience" issue, or whether he will have to drop experience as an issue. It's not even about the proper role of experience as an issue. In fact, it's not about experience at all. It's about honesty. The question should be whether McCain—and all the other Republicans who have been going on for months about Obama's dangerous lack of foreign policy experience—ever meant a word of it. And the answer is apparently not. Many conservative pundits woke up this very morning fully prepared to harp on Obama's alleged lack of experience for months more. Now they face the choice of either executing a Communist-style U-turn ("Experience? Feh! Who needs it?") or trying to keep a straight face while touting the importance of having been mayor of a town of 9,000 if you later find yourself president of a nation of 300 million.

We all know that modern political campaigns choose their issues from the cafeteria line, after market-testing them, and then having them professionally framed. Rarely, though, are we offered such a clear and unarguable example. How could anyone truly believe that Barack Obama's background and job history are inadequate experience for a president, and simultaneously believe that Sarah Palin's background and job history are perfectly adequate? It's possible to believe one or the other. But both? Simply not possible. John McCain has been—what's the word?—lying. And so have all the pundits who rushed to defend McCain's choice.]

Now, I find this article from TheHill.com, which obtained a leaked memo, indicating how Obama plans to respond to the pick: http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/obama-camp-plans-palin-talking-points-2008-08-30.html According to the article, the campaign is going to argue that "John McCain's decision for a running mate signaled that he is beholden to the right wing of the Republican Party and putting politics ahead of judgment."

The article concludes by quoting the leaked memo:

"What does it say that he knuckled under to the right-wing of his party, who angrily threatened to veto McCain’s preferred candidates, Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, for their pro-choice views?," the memo reads. "What does it say that, in order to satisfy the right, he hastily selected someone he barely knew-and had only met once – to serve a heartbeat away from the presidency?"

The answer to the first question, judging by the random sample of independent-minded folks I spoke with at a wedding in Severance Hall, downtown Cleveland tonight, is: It says he's conservative, which we already knew, and, it says he's a smart politician, because it's electrified his base. The answer to the second, according to some of the same folks, is: She can learn at the knee of a foreign policy master for four years, and she'll be fine. And anyway -- she has more "executive" experience than Obama's ever had.

That's why the Obama campaign should be asking a different question: "What does it say about John McCain that for months, he's argued that foreign policy experience is essential for the next president -- is perhaps the most essential thing -- and then he picks someone for VP with absolutely none?"

At the wedding tonight, I pointed out to a rabbi that it's completely hypocritical. As Kinsley says, it's a lie. The rabbi, who knows people, said that the people he knows really don't care about hypocrisy. They expect it from their politicians.

If that's true, then it's all just a hall of mirrors.

Thank God for the rollicking, spinning hora that followed dinner. There's something about that centrifuge of dance motion that focuses the mind on the beauty and power of young, just-out-of-the-gate love. Not even a day of stomach-churning politics can corrupt that.

We Have to Bend It

2008-08-30T21:07:00.000-04:00

One thousand four hundred miles later, when my plane touched down in Cleveland, someone near the front said: "Fired Up!" There was a pause, and then a handful of people said: "Ready to Go!" A world away from the convention, the call and refrain started up again. And that's how we made our way into the airport.

I knew, even before I got on the plane, about Sarah Palin. My wife called to tell me, just as I was boarding in Denver. The consensus on the plane seemed to be: Huh? I have to admit, my first reaction was: We just won this thing. After bashing Obama on experience for two months, McCain picks a VP with under two years governing a state with a smaller population than the city of Austin, Texas? She had been elected governor with 110,000 votes; Obama had 90,000 people at his convention speech.

It wasn't until my mother-in-law called, later in the night, that I started to sense something amiss. She owns a business here in Akron, and she has a good pulse of the people in this swing state -- and she was worried. By moring, with these New York Times headlines ("ALASKAN IS McCAIN'S CHOICE; FIRST WOMAN ON G.O.P. TICKET," "A Surprise Pick; First Term Governor, Social Conservative and Mother of 5"; "An Outsider Who Charms"; "A Bold Choice, With Risks") -- I was, too.

NeuroticDemocrat that I am, I quickly sized up McCain and deduced that he was nothing short of a genius. After an early career of spurning the religious right, and a later career of kowtowing to it, he had in one fell swoop locked up -- and most importantly -- thoroughly energized the GOP base. (He's already raised $7 million in the day since the announcement). This, I thought, neutralizes Obama's biggest assest -- the passion gap. Not only that, but McCain laid claim (some say) to the change mantle, and did it in a way that will appeal -- if not to Hillary voters -- than to the one democraphic (white, working class women) that Obama has the toughest time reaching. Her biggest liability -- inexperience -- is one that we can't point out, effectively, given Obama's weakness on the issue (and he's at the top of the ticket). And while Biden should be able to roll her in the VP debate, expectations are absolutely everything in these affairs -- Palin wins by not losing, and Biden loses, big time, if he's perceived as even the slightest bit sexist or condescending.

For a few hours -- on the heels of one of the most compelling, meaningful displays I'd ever witnessed in my life -- I seriously considered changing the name of this blog to DepressedDemocrat.com. I envisioned Obama's ten-point convention bounce evaporating overnight (I'm not sure it hasn't). And we had this thing locked up! I glanced forlornly out our playroom window at the McCain sign recently put up in our neighbor's yard, and knew, in a whole new way, that what my mother had always tried to teach me was utterly, depressingly true: Life, it turns out, isn't fair.

It took me awhile to come around. What finally did it was a discussion with my aunt and uncle in Dayton. They were not simply undeterred -- my uncle was going to an Obama rally near Columbus this afternoon, and my aunt was preparing to volunteer, locally. My uncle pointed out that, historically, VP has very little impact on the presidential race. And, gaining a second wind, I told him that, according to a Rutgers study, gender voting historically mirrors party, not gender. (Democratic women tend to vote Democratic, regardless of whether the Republican is a woman, and vice versa.) Furthermore, I said (I was on a roll), this election is going to turn on the economy -- everyone knows that -- and Palin brings McCain nothing on economics. (Think: He could have picked Carly Fiorino or Meg Whitman.) At best, she brings a rep as an ethical crusader. But McCain already has that rep. He doesn't need it reinforced.

All politics is guesswork though. One thing I've learned over the course of this election -- and I mean this -- is that right now, nobody knows who will win.

Have you peeled yourself up off the floor?

It's true. Even (especially) the pollsters. Nobody, in fact, has any clue at all.

This was brought home to me in dramatic fashion two weeks ago -- the media foaming at the mouth about who Obama would pick as his running mate had reached a fevered pitch -- when a very well-connected friend of mine pulled me aside to tell me that he'd received a call from a Congressman, who told him that he'd been approached by the Obama camp just that day about his interest in the VP slot. It was a serious entreaty, late in the game. What struck me most was that the congressman himself was totally shocked by it -- he himself had no idea he was even in consideration, let alone on anyone's shortlist -- and he had never been mentioned in a single publication anywhere as a possible Obama running mate. (And with all that frothing about who McCain would pick -- think of all the words of conjecture -- did anyone anywhere seriously give Palin a shot?)

So I'm going to leave the politics behind for a moment, and discuss two things that I think are substantive here, as opposed to stylistic (see post: Jewish Values and Going Negative).

1. I think people are missing the boat on the "experience" question. Democrats so far have focused on McCain's lack of judgment in making this choice, which is certainly fair. The pundits seem to be stuck on the genius of the political move -- i.e., that Obama and his camp can't question Palin's inexperience, without reminding everyone of his own. Dan Schnur writes in the NY Times today: "By Monday morning, assume that every Republican in the country who believed that experience was important will no longer think so, and that every Democrat who didn’t think it was a big deal will now decide it is absolutely critical." No, Dan -- that's not what we will decide. We have always been comfortable, more or less, with Obama's experience. Eighteen million of us voted for him. We will, however, understand that McCain's selection of Palin is hypocritical.

Here is what McCain said June 3, from the Times:

“You will hear from my opponent’s campaign in every speech, every interview, every press release that I’m running for President Bush’s third term,” he said, trying to pre-empt one of the central Democratic strategies of tying Mr. McCain to the unpopular president. “You will hear every policy of the president described as the Bush-McCain policy. Why does Senator Obama believe it’s so important to repeat that idea over and over again? Because he knows it’s very difficult to get Americans to believe something they know is false. So he tries to drum it into your minds by constantly repeating it rather than debate honestly the very different directions he and I would take the country.”

“But the American people didn’t get to know me yesterday, as they are just getting to know Senator Obama,” Mr. McCain said.

As they are just getting to know Obama, dripping with condescension.

Here is what McCain said yesterday, about Palin: "She's not from these parts, and she's not from Washington, but when you get to know her, you're going to be as impressed as I am."

Putting aside the fact that, according to most reports, he had only met her twice (how well could he know her?), and putting aside the fact that America in fact is not just getting to know Obama (he came into the public eye in a major way four years ago, with his convention speech; he has two books on the best seller list, one of which gives his life story, and the other outlines his political philsophy; and he has been running for president in a 24-7 news cycle for 20 months), my question for him would be: "Sen. McCain -- why is it suddenly okay to have someone a hearbeat from the oval office who America needs to 'get to know'?"

The Republican National Committee has launched a Web site, notready08.com, mocking Obama on his experience. "A mile high, an inch deep." The McCain campaign has made every attempt to paint Obama as inexperienced as foreign policy, drawing contrasts between the two candidates at each turn. For McCain to now pick as a running mate someone with decidely less foreign policy experience than Obama, suggests either that he was lying to us before, when he said it was critically important, or, more likely, that he is being a hypocrite: If I need someone with no foreign policy experience to energize my base and give me a shot to win this election, then it's perfectly fine. Is it a risk to America Sen. McCain, or isn't it?

I heard one GOP pundit say yesterday on CNN that most doctors say McCain has at least four years in him, and, after learning at the foot of a master foreign policy wizard for those years, Palin will have plenty of experience. Puh-leeze. What happened to the importance of "Ready on Day 1"? (It was Hillary's slogan initially, but the McCain boosters greedily adopted it.) This suggests to me a new slogan that perhaps the McCain-Palin folks want to employ: Ready on Day 1,460. (Take it -- it's yours. No patent pending.)

2. For months, the McCain camp has argued that Obama is no friend of Israel. They have said, over and over, that the only criterion for friendship with Israel is action, and voting record, over years of service. Pretty words of support, they said, won't cut it. Obama, for his running mate, picked a self-described Zionist. A few hours after the selection of Palin, I spoke to the head of a major Jewish organization. He said that his organization had done a Google search of "Palin" and "Israel" -- and gotten no hits. Zero. Which means that should McCain die in office, we will have a president with no real track-record of support for the Jewish State at all. Two days ago, that was all that mattered to my Israel-first friends. A few minutes ago, my wife emailed on of those folks, asking about her take on Palin. This is a woman who lives and dies for Israel. She wrote back: "I like her."

I hope to have more on the Israel issue later this week.

I have more to say, but it's getting late, so I'll just say this. My cousin, an Obama organizer in Philly, told me today that in response to Palin's selection, more volunteers than ever before have been pouring into his office, offering to help. Another cousin, a feminist who lives in Ann Arbor -- who has never really had an interest in politics or this election -- now finds herself exercised and insluted by McCain's pick (her parents tell me).

By day's end, I've realized that instead of being all NeuroticDemocraty on this one, I can do something. I can act. I've been planning on continuing my involvement in this campaign at the strategic level -- 30,000-feet -- for instance, organizing drives targeting the Jewish community in swing states. (I've been doing this for some time, mainly behind the scenes.) Before I got off the phone with my aunt, she said: "Let me know about your organizing activities in Akron."

I hadn't been planning on getting involved locally. Thanks to Palin -- no more. I'm going to the local office first thing Tuesday morning.

I can't control the pundits and the venting and the polls. But I can roll up my sleeves and get to work. We all can. And I'd urge you -- in response to this cynical, hypocritical play -- to do the same. Join up. Help out. And then come to this blog and write about your experiences. Tell us who you meet, what they say, how you respond. Tell us what it's like out there in the trenches.

Obama is fond of quoting Martin Luther King, who said: "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice."

People -- we have to bend it.

The Bridge that Led to the Stadium

2008-08-29T02:41:00.000-04:00

I'm the NeuroticDemocrat. I picked this nom de guerre not just to be funny, but because it felt like an accurate description of my mental state this election. I'll wake up on a Sunday morning and read Frank Rich and feel vindicated, and calm about Obama's prospects -- almost as if the whole electorate had read Frank Rich -- and then I'll catch a glimpse of a daily poll on a ticker, indicating the race tightening, and my stomach will tighten. I might check my inbox and find some new ridiculous Obama smear, and feel even worse. Then, at night, I might watch Jon Stewart, Tivoed from Friday, and the universe would fall back in place again.

If you've been reading the blog you know -- this week has been no different. And Thursday -- Day Four of the Democratic National Convention -- might well be exhibit A.

We arrived at Mile High Stadium early, around 2:10 local time, and, after waiting about an hour to get through security, we found great club level seats, section 300, with a straight-on view of the stage.

I'd made the mistake of glancing at the New York Times before leaving my hotel, and watching a few minutes of CNN, so I knew that Republicans had already picked up on a description in a Reuters article, and were mocking the stage as “Obamopolis.” I'd heard Amy Holmes have a good guffaw over the fact that, after all the Democrats crying foul about the Obama celebrity ads, Brittany Spears' set designer had in fact help design the stage. I knew, from the lead Times article, that the Obama folks -- even at that late hour -- were still working furiously to get things right: reducing the echo, making Obama seem part of the crowd, instead of high above it.

I'd been worried about the stadium venue for some time. When it was first announced, I wondered: What if it rains. After the GOP (smartly, to be sure), skewered Obama's celebrity, I thought: aren't we playing right into their hands?

Sitting in section 300, I did what the NeuroticDemocrat does best. I worried. I worried for half a day because so many seats, in the sections across from us, were not filled. Why weren't they filled? Were there still people in line outside? I peered across the fifty-yard line not though my own lens, but through Amy Holmes'. I saw the ticker running across the bottom of the CNN screen: Obama fails to fill stadium.

And then there were the columns. They did look pretty gaudy. I think the Obama folks were going for White House -- not the Acropolis -- but still, didn't that, too, play into our opponents’ hands? And the sound -- it was terrible. At one point, someone was speaking, and we couldn't hear a thing. I imaged speaker after speaking, inaudible. The night seemed to be coming on too quickly. I kept checking my watch, and looking across the field. Where are all the people? Let them in.

You wouldn't have known it, looking at me. Maybe because even as I worried, I was thinking about something else. I was thinking about what it was like, being in Denver this week, amidst Democrats of all colors, all ethnicities, all sexual-orientations, from all over the country. I imagine that Denver -- most cities, for that matter -- has never before seen such a rich tableau. And I was thinking about all the people who have come to the stage in support of Obama-Biden, and the many, many folks I'd met, all here for a common purpose, sharing a common goal.

In this regard, today was the week in microcosm.

On my way into the city, I met Nasir, my cab driver, who came to America 14 years ago from Djibouti. He told me about how his friends had phoned him Monday, from East Africa, when they heard a rumor that someone had tried to assassinate Obama (three men had been arrested, though police say they never posed a serious threat). They had heard the news even before Nasir, who was busily driving his cab around Denver. "They are following so close with this election," he said. "A lot of people in the world want change in America, too. They have that same hope."

In the Starbucks, inside the Hyatt Regency, the barista asked a customer what her shirt said.

"Yes We Can Bitches," she said.

The barista laughed. "I like it."

Waiting for the bus to take us to the stadium, a volunteer beseeched us: "People -- please -- hold on to your credentials with your life. People are walking up and tearing them off the lanyards."

A group of delegates from Colorado walked up, and, since there was no real line, stood near the front. Someone asked them to move to the back. "That's fine, we're Democrats," said one woman, with twin donkey images etched on the lenses of her sunglasses. "It's okay. Though I'll never go to the back of the bus. I fought too many years to get to the front."

She raised both hands and slapped another woman ten. "No way, no how, no McCain," the other woman said. It was Hillary Clinton's line. In Denver, all week, it was our mantra.

On the bus, to the stadium, the woman I sat next to told me about the text she had received the night before, from her friend, about Bill Clinton, which said simply: "I like him again."

I was thinking about all these people, sitting in that stadium, as it slowly, slowly began to fill. Rodees setting up for Cheryl Crowe had their friends snap pictures of themselves on stage. One of the end zone sections worked to strike up a wave. On the floor, beach balls bounced from one delegation to the next. And then, up on the giant jumbotron, the Obama campaign posted a message, asking people to text in their comments. Before too long, there was a new kind of ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screens -- message after message from people in the stadium, sometimes just a name and a city.

Raina South Bronx Dream Realized ...
Carole Duncanville, Texas ...
Erica and Klint Tulsa Oklahoma ...
I believe in our country ...
Alison Fargo, ND ...

Bill Richardson brought it. Then Gore. Then Susan Eisenhower, who told America that Obama has the "energy, and more importantly the temperament," to be president. Then came the military generals, and Joe Biden.

And then Roy Gross, a Teamster from Michigan, took the stage -- and the NeuroticDemocrat thought: uh oh, here we go with the ordinary people, the oldest political cliche in the book. Only, these people were anything but ordinary. They were fiery and feisty and brave, unafraid to speak truth to power. And they seemed to be speaking, at least partly, off the cuff.

Monica Early of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio said that she had received an email with all kinds of claims about Barack Obama. When she took it upon herself to check out its claims, she found them false. "I am grateful for that email that tried to scare me," she said. "It brought me here, an ordinary citizen inspired by a leader who told me I can make a difference."

They took the stage, one after another, and told it like they saw it. "Hello, I'm Pam, from Pittsboro, North Carolina," said Pamela Cash-Roper. She told us her story, about how she and her husband had lost health insurance, and then said that she'd been a lifelong Republican -- voted for Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Bush. "But I can't afford four more years.”

When Barney Smith of Marion, Indiana stood up and said: "We need a president who puts Barney Smith before Smith Barney," 75,000 people began chanting -- Bar-ney, Bar-ney, Bar-ney -- as if we'd known the guy all our lives.

Your gonna be the greatest prez ever!!! I'm so proud of you. Ciera ...
Obama-Biden 08 YES WE CAN Dayton, Ohio ...
Rebecca, Silver Spring, Md ...
Native American in S. Arizona supports Obama ...

"This is better than a ballgame," said the man a few seats away from me, his dreadlocks tied up in a neat ponytail.

Durbin came on. Then the movie. Obama spoke about how his Mom used to get him up at 4:30 in the morning for his lessons. "If I grumbled, she’d say: 'This is no picnic for me either, buster.' "

The movie ended and Obama came out. You know what he said and how he said it. If you're like me, you thought his words were eloquent, substantive, and transformative. We cheered him. Drowned him out. Time and again, we started cheering before he finished a sentence, and he kept talking, and we kept cheering, even though were couldn't exactly be sure what he'd said. What struck me, though, was less the raucous cheering than the quiet that always followed. 75,000 people, and we hung on his every word. At one point, we heard voices from the skybox above us, and the person was shushed into silence. I put my notebook down, and stopped taking notes.

After the speech, hundreds of us gathered at a DNC party, at the club level of the stadium. Then, thoroughly spent, I left the stadium, found a bus to take me back into town.

On the bus, it was more of the same. Delegates of all stripes, from all over America.

"I'm from Alabama," said one. "Birmingham."

"Huntsville," said another, reaching out his hand.

A delegate from Texas spoke up. Asked a question about a Birmingham politician.

"That was Selma," a woman said.

"Selma, Birmingham, same difference," the Texas delegate said, to laughter.

"I'm from Selma -- historic Selma," the woman said, a new fire in her eyes. "It was Selma -- that bridge -- that got us into this stadium."

I had a vague sense of the bridge she was talking about, but I wasn't totally sure. So when I got back to my hotel room, I looked it up. It was the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for Edmund Winston Pettus, a confederate brigadier general. The bridge was the site of Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, when armed police officers attacked peaceful civil rights demonstrators.

Just a few hours post convention, and already, I'd taken a few steps across a bridge of my own.

I started writing this blog, in part to help me synthesize all that went on around me this week. And in part, to give friends, family, and colleagues who couldn’t be here a unique perspective on the goings on.

Indeed, something happens when you’re here. Something I’m not sure you get, watching on TV at home. You get the community. You get Nasir and Raina. Carole and Rebecca. Pam Cash-Roper and Barney Smith. Sitting through speech after speech after speech for four days running, you get bored, and then you get something else that’s much bigger. You get that you’re not alone. You knew it before, of course. But being here, you come to know it and feel it in a different way. My sense is, knowing this, feeling it, will make it a little bit easier to shoulder through the dips in the polls; to weather the GOP onslaught that’s coming at us next week; to be a bit more steadfast.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to keep this blog going. So keep checking in every now and then. That will help, too.

A few weeks before the Ohio primary, I was invited to attend a small meeting between Barack Obama and Jewish leaders in northeast Ohio. After the meeting, I sent out an email blast, strongly defending Obama’s stance on Israel. It went viral. Mostly, people who responded to me were thankful that I’d shared my views. For months after, however, I also got scathing emails – usually unsigned – accusing me of crimes against my family, my people. That’s partly why I decided, when starting this blog, to post as NeuroticDemocrat instead of using my name. I wasn’t exactly sure I wanted to take more heat for my views.

It was at the DNC party after the convention when I realized something had turned. About an hour into the party, Barack Obama made a surprise appearance, with his wife, and Joe Biden and his wife. “I’m a little speechless,” he began, standing on a stage a few feet away. He spoke about ten minutes to a few hundred supporters. Before leaving, he said: “We’ve got lots of work to do.”

For me, if I’ve learned anything this week, I’ve learned that the work starts with standing up for what you believe in, and, like the people on that bridge in Selma, having the courage of your convictions.

I’m Josh Rolnick, of Akron, Ohio. And I support this message.

Jewish Values and Going Negative

2008-08-28T13:24:00.000-04:00

One of the things I have struggled most with throughout this primary campaign is how to square Obama's obvious desire to run a positive, issue-oriented campaign, with the countervailing need in modern day politics to "go negative." It's something I've thought about more and more as the McCain campaign has taken the gloves off -- going after Obama for being an elitist, for being a celebrity; running ads featuring dark images of terrorists with shady voiceovers about Iran, then insinuating that Obama feels Iran is only a "tiny" threat; starting a Web site dedicated to the fact that Obama is "not ready" to be president; using some of Hillary Clinton's own footage for a 3 a.m. ad of their own. Some of these ads may be "fair" -- certainly, a candidate's readiness to be president is an issue -- but there can be no disputing that all of them are "negative." And can there be any doubt, especially if Obama is in the lead, that we will see Rev. Wright ads in the future?

I sat in on a focus group a few months back that was extremely eye-opening. A moderator was asking a group of Jewish swing voters questions about Barack Obama and John McCain -- I watched from the other side of a one-way window, along with a few pollsters. (They knew we were there.) The moderator read a dozen verifiable, true positive statements about Obama. Then the moderator read a dozen verifiable, true negative statements about McCain. When responding to the positive statements (things like: Barack Obama has proposed a $1,000 tax cut for the Middle Class; Barack Obama says the security of Israel is sacrosanct, and he has the support of the American Israel Public Affairs Council), the voters were not uniformly impressed; many questioned the veracity of the statements. When responding to the negative stuff (things like: McCain has said he doesn't know much about the economy; McCain has said he could envision a long-term presence in Iraq, much like what we have in Korea and Japan), the group got totally riled up. Angry. Indignant. Frankly, I did, too. The message I took home with me was a disappointing one: Going negative works. And it works, well.

Yesterday, the National Jewish Democratic Council hosted a square table discussion at the Convention Center downtown, focusing on "Practicing Politics With Jewish Values." The room was packed to overflowing -- in part because it was held next door to the room where Hillary Clinton had just addressed her delegates -- many of whom filtered in after Hillary finished speaking.

I was particularly moved by the arguments made by Steve Rabinowitz, a kippah-wearing veteran of dozens of political campaigns, and former Bill Clinton White House aide, who currently runs the media messaging firm, Rabinowitz/Dorf Communications.

"I'm about very aggressive politics," he began. He went on to say that he sees two kinds of acceptable messages -- positive, and what he called "contrast" ads, where candidates drawn distinctions between themselves and their opponents.

He noted that Judaism prohibits Lashon Harah -- or evil speech against someone else -- citing Leviticus 19:16: "Do not deal basely with your countrymen." Maimonides, he said, has an even tougher standard: you can't tear down your opponent even if what you say is true. The very next line in Leviticus, though, has been interpreted by the sages to mean that we are not to "standy idly by" if the blood of our contrymen is being spilled.

"We have allowance for this in the text," Rabinowitz said, "so we can both be aggressive political campaigners and not feel we are violating our Jewish ethics at the same time."

"For me -- Obama's political and intellectual blood is being spilled." (In particular, participants spoke of the smears against Obama -- that he is a Muslim, for instance, who attended a radical madrassa as a youth.)

After the event, I went up to Rabinowitz and asked him to expound on his argument. Where, I asked, is the line in "contrast" advertising. He said, without hesitation: the personal attack. Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Fathers, teaches that "a controversy for heaven's sake has lasting value, while a controvery not for heaven's sake will not endure." "Heaven's sake," in this case, is a controversy about Torah or law -- substance, as opposed to style.

"For me," he said, it means "I can't attack McCain on his age or his temperament, his mental competence, his wealth, his personal-life." But on the issues -- like how to best support Israel -- contrast ads are fair game.

Certainly, though, the McCain side has already hit Obama on his personal life -- noting that he has an aquaintance who was once a member of the Weather Underground, for example, or painting him as a Harvard elitist. This, I said, even as McCain has seven houses, and flies around the country in his wife's corporate jet. I have to admit, I said -- I've felt damn good when Biden has hit McCain for his wealth and extravagent, 30,000-foot life style.

"The biggest sin in politics is hyprocrisy," Rabinowtiz said. "Corruption is bad, but hypocrisy is worse. It you are corrupt, and you campaigned against corruption -- it's worse." (Eliot Spitzer comes to mind.)

"Is pointing out that someone is a hypocrite a personal attack -- even if it's true?" he asked. "That's what I'm still conflicted about."

"Defending Obama is no problem," he said. "Counter-attacking -- that's the dilemma."

I suppose if I'm looking for something definitive, I'm in the wrong religion.

I have to say, though, that I was struck by the fact that we were having this conversation at all at the Democratic National Convention. Dan Shapiro, one of Barack Obama's top liasions to the Jewish community, was in the room for the conversation. After listening to the discussion, he noted the value of "intellectual inquiry"; the value in "acknowledging the gaps in one's knowledge"; the value of "intellectual curiosity" for leadership.

I left with the sense that the Obama campaign will, and should, continue to hold itself to a higher standard --even as it pushes and questions the boundaries -- as this campaign moves into its next phase. The campaign will not -- it can not -- stand idly by. It will draw contrasts, big time.

This work begins in earnest in just a few hours.

Barack Obama is Ready to Lead America

2008-08-28T03:16:00.000-04:00

It's 1:17 a.m., and I'm just back from the Pepsi Center, where Barack Obama was nominated to be president, and Joe Biden, vice president. I'm tired, in one way, but in another, more awake then I've felt in a long time.

Today, there was something in the air downtown. An excitement that started building early in the day. You could sense it. It was as if the history of the moment -- the formal nomination of the first black man for president of the United States -- was, at last, eclipsing the cynicism.

Outside the convention center, for several blocks, vendors were doing a brisk trade in Obama merchandise, surrounded by masses of delegates and tourists and gawkers. They sold Obama playing cards with Bush and McCain as the jokers. "Yes We Can" umbrellas. T-shirts with images of Obama's face and slogan after slogan: "Run DNC," "McCan't 2008," "Barack The Vote." Someone shook a tambourine. Someone else sold flashing novelties, beads, hats, and flags. Dozens of folks wore stickers that read: "Make Out Not War."

There was a police presence, leading into the arena, like nothing I've ever seen. Columns of black-clad officers, guns ready, visors raised, standing in the streets, and on black SWAT trucks, ready, word had it, to block thousands of protestors from disturbing the proceedings. Weaving between them, rushing the arena, I felt my heart beat kick up a notch.

I arrived just as Melissa Etheridge was singing her God Bless America medley, which included verses from The Times They are a Changing, Give Peace a Chance, and Born in the USA. Rep. Patrick Murphy, an Iraq war vet, declared: "It is time for Barack Obama," then left the stage to the chorus of "Eye of the Tiger," Rocky Balboa's old anthem.

You just had this sense -- a sense that the Democrats were going to bring it; a sense that all the naysayers were about to be proven wrong. On Monday, we were criticized for not going after McCain hard enough, for "wasting" the day. On Tuesday, when we picked apart McCain -- did not the governor of Montana seem to love every minute he spent chewing out McCain for his nonexistent energy policy? -- we were criticized because Hillary did not exactly say that Obama was "ready" to lead. And today, all the newspaper reports assured us, Clinton was coming into the whole affair angry that he had been asked to speak about foreign affairs. Come to think of it, we were told, he was still furious at Obama, at how he was treated during the campaign. Watch out, we were assured -- because a jilted, angry Clinton will never stay on message.

I don't know. Maybe we didn't believe the hype. Maybe we knew Clinton well enough, after all those years fighting for us -- and fighting against the right-wing that claims superiority in this country -- to know that he would not let Obama down; that he would not let us down. Maybe that's why, when he finally took the stage, we cheered him as if we would never get another chance to cheer him or anyone else, ever again. Maybe we wanted to thank him -- 20,000 of us, on this, Barack Obama's night. To let him know that we don't always buy what we are force-fed on TV. "Stop it," he said -- trying his best to quiet us. "Stop." Be we wouldn't. Every single person stood. Everyone of us waved an American flag. "Settle down," he said, "we gotta get this game started." But we wouldn't. I don't know how long it went on. It felt like a few minutes, the affection the pouring down from the highest bleachers even as it rose from the floor, rolling like thunder. We were telling him something he already knew -- that our country has been hijacked, and that he could help us get it back.

And help, he did. "Last night, Hillary told us in no uncertain terms that she is going to do everything she can to elect Barack Obama," he said. "That makes two of us. Actually -- that makes 18 million of us."

What? Where was the ambiguity? The thinly-veiled disdain?

"Everything I have done as president ... has convinced me that Barack Obama is the man for this job."

"A long, hard primary tested and strengthened him. And in his first presidential decision" -- selecting Joe Biden as VP -- "he hit it out of the park ... Barack Obama is ready to lead America."

"Most important of all," he said, "Barack Obama knows America can not be strong abroad unless we are strong at home ... People around the world have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power."

More wild cheers, and the spontaneous refrain: Yes we can ... Yes we can ... Yes we can.

"Yes you can," Clinton said. "But first you have to elect him."

"The Republicans said I was too young and too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief," he said. "Sound familar?"

And then he finished, and U2's "Beatiful Day" struck up, and the camera flashed to Hillary and Chelsea, standing, cheering with the rest of us.

It's truly been amazing, being here for all of this. And blogging about it each day afterwards has helped me come to terms with what it all means. Yesterday morning, I wrote about how our best politicians teach us to be brave. As Bill Clinton showed tonight, they teach us something else, too -- something that has to do with the incredible power of burying the hatchet. Of forgiveness, and moving on. We think of our politicians as selfish and egocentric and cynical. Hypocrites, who would do anything for power. But think about the example they set for us when they put personal animosity and rancor aside, and publicly embrace those who have hurt them and cost them the most. Even when it runs against their own interests.

It's healing and unifying and cathartic. Everything they promised us it wouldn't be.

Hillary, Obama, Unity

2008-08-27T14:35:00.000-04:00

There's so much that I could say about what happened in Denver yesterday.

I could write about the protestors outside the barricade that rings the Pepsi Center. Mainly anti-choice folks. There weren't that many of them, frankly, but what they lacked in numbers, they made up for in shock value. Scrawled in chalk on the sidewalks that we all had to step on to get into our convention were colorful little slogans like: "Obama Murders Babies" and "Obama for Infanticide" and "Obama is Killing the Black Race." There were people with giant plackards showing photographs of aborted late-term babies -- body parts, mangled, bloody baby faces. (I'd seen a truck driving around town earlier with even bigger pictures of the same.) One of the National Jewish Democratic Council staff members that I'm here with had to avert her eyes as we passed -- which I suppose is the point. The fact that Obama -- while pro-choice -- favors restrictions on the kinds of late-term procedures these demonstrators were depicting, did not figure prominently in their messaging.

I could write about the even smaller contingent of John McCain supporters who tried to give me a McCain sticker as I walked toward the convention hall. "You got the wrong guy," I said.

I could write about how the NeuroticDemocrat felt, getting up this morning, after watching two days of barnburning, powerful speeches in a packed arena, given by people who love this country and want to make it more perfect, only to find that in the latest Gallup tracking, McCain has edged ahead of Obama for the first time, 46-44.

I could write about my mother-in-law, who just called me -- her voice, clearly pained -- asking what the situation on the ground was like, with the Hillary supporters. Or my friend, who emailed me, distressed, after watching CNN interview two Hillary supporters, unmoved by her speech last night. "Hillary has handled this whole thing with great dignity," he wrote. But he just couldn't understand her intransigent supporters, one of whom, he wrote, said that "Obama hasn’t asked for her vote yet and she won’t give it to him until he (and his supporters) effectively start showing Hillary the respect that she deserves. This woman felt personally mistreated (she referenced the hate mail that she expected to receive following this interview) by Obama supporters, and essentially her non-vote for Obama is sort of her idea of retribution for all the nasty things that happened to her on the campaign trail."

I could write about how an NJDC board member told me that at a breakfast with Hillary supporters yesterday morning, many were clearly still upset, angry, feeling un-charitable. Or how I have felt, watching all the unseemly, distasteful attempts by Republicans to inject themselves into the fray, hosting a "Happy Hour for Hillary" here Monday night, indicating how they felt Obama had dissed Hillary by passing her over for VP. (These very same Republicans, like Rudy Giuliani, who have made careers out of bashing Hillary and tearing down her feminist supporters. Why isn't the media pointing this out?)

But that's not want I want to write about. What I want to write about is how I felt, leaving the Pepsi Center last night, moments after Hillary Clinton finished her historic speech. Watching her, I couldn't help but think about the person behind the politician. Here was a woman who had lost the very thing she had been fighting for, the thing she wanted most in life, to a rival who, by most accounts, she doesn't like very much. And there she stood, giving him a full-throated endorsement -- doing absolutely everything in her power to mend the divisions in the party, to soothe her own supporters, urging them, with every fiber of her being, to get behind Barack Obama. "You haven't worked so hard over the last 18 months, or endured the last eight years, to suffer through more failed leadership," she said. "No way. No how. No McCain."

Here was a woman putting the causes she has dedicated her life to -- universal health care, equal pay for equal work, a woman's right to choose -- high above her own crushed personal ambitions. I kept thinking, as I watched: This was supposed to be her night.

She was funny ("To the sisters of the traveling pantsuits"), cutting (it's no coincidence McCain and Bush will be together next week in the "Twin Cities"), personal and emotional (putting her hand over her heart when speaking about her desire for "a health care plan that covers every single American"). But most of all, she was imploring, insistent, firm -- more than a plea to her supporters -- a demand: "These are the reasons I ran for president, and these are the reasons I support Barack Obama." This is why you should, too.

I have been an Obama supporter since it was cold. I know there were plenty of pragmatic political reasons Hillary gave the speech she did last night. But what I kept thinking about was her, her courage, in soldiering on, despite such immense personal setback.

It was the same thing that Ted Kenney had done, the night before -- arriving in the Hall -- the Denver Post reported this morning, straight from the University of Colorado Hospital, where he was being treated for a "debilitating bout of kidney stones." "With less than two hours to go before he was supposed to take the stage, Kennedy -- sitting unnoticeded in a room at the University of Colorado Hospital -- told his wife, Victoria, and doctors that he wanted to go to the Pepsi Center and deliver the speech," the paper reported. "One concession to the kidney stones: The speech he gave was about 10 minutes, roughly half the length of an earlier draft."

It was the same thing Al Gore did, eight years ago, when, after winning more votes than anyone in history, he finally conceeded the presidency to Bush. "As for the battle that ends tonight, I do believe, as my father once said, that defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out," Gore said. I cried when he said it. Then I wrote it down on a piece of paper, folded it, and put it in my wallet. It's still there today, but, more importantly, it's in my heart.

Walking out of the Pepsi Center last night, I wasn't thinking about Clinton's supporters, who still insist on giving interviews to CNN about why they support McCain. I wasn't thinking about all the disunity that apparently swirls around this convention, none of which you even sense, sitting in the convention hall.

I was simply feeling thankful -- for Hillary Clinton. I was feeling the kind of deep gratitude that is all to rare in life. I was feeling that because of her words -- and her deeds -- I would be better able to face down my own defeats; to move forward despite my own ample fears.

Standing on a stairwell jam-packed with Democrats, clutching signs to their chests that read "Hillary" and "Obama" and "Unity," I jotted these words in my notebook: "Our best politicians teach us how to be brave."

The GOP may yet steal this election, sowing fear and disharmony. But they can never take our courage away.

He Doesn't Believe It Anyway

2008-08-26T15:18:00.000-04:00

Perhaps the most striking, and under-reported, comments of first day of the convention yesterday came not in the Pepsi Center, but a few hours earlier, at the Colorado Convention Center, Korbel Room. That's where the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) hosted an open-to-the public event, before roughly 130 people, analyzing the 2008 Jewish vote.

The main thrust: Most polls show Obama winning 60 to 62 pecent of the Jewish vote nationally, to McCain's 32 percent. A striking number when you consider that Clinton took 80 percent of the Jewish vote in 1992 and 1996 -- though, according to an April Gallup Poll, Obama was drawing only four percent less than Hillary Clinton, who was at 66 percent.

The reason, according to Richard Baehr -- chief political correspondent of the American Thinker and the only avowed McCain supporter on a panel of four -- has less to do with Obama than with the fact that many Jews like John McCain. "McCain is doing better because he's McCain," Baehr said, nothing that his brand, particularly in the Jewish community, remains strong.

(There was some strong dissention on this point from the audience. Florida State Sen. Steve Geller, the minority leader, whose district is in Broward County, and State Sen. Nan Rich, whose district is in Broward and Dade, said that when they speak to Jews in South Florida, it's not McCain that Jews trumpet -- it's fear of Obama, and the Rev. Wright connection.)

You could sense a frustration building in the largely Jewish audience. McCain, who vows to try and overturn Roe v. Wade, and said at Saddleback Church that life begins at conception, has a strong "brand" in the reliably progressive Jewish community? McCain, who has said that the United States is a "Christian nation," and that he would feel more comfortable with a Christian president, has a strong brand among Jews? McCain, who has appeared at the reactionary Christian colleges he once shunned, and who has gone out of his way to court the religious right, is viewed by one-third of Jews in a positive light?

"He's just not as scary to certain people as a lot of other Republicans," asserted panelist Stu Rothenberg, editor and publisher of the Rothenberg Political Report.

"He doesn't wake up in the morning thinking about how he can advance the agenda of the religious right," Baehr said, adding that what he thinks about, first and foremost, is national security.

Finally, a member of the NJDC board seemed to burst. Why is it, he asked, that the media is giving McCain a free ride on his staunch right-wing views.

Oh how I wish we could scroll the answers on the CNN ticker for a few days.

"Most journalists know John McCain pretty well," Rothenberg said. "And we know he doesn't care about social issues. He cares only about national security and foreign policy. He doesn't even care about the economy very much. So we give him a free pass."

"Journalists are not inclined to beat up McCain" on these issues, he added. "We think most of the stuff he's saying, he doesn't believe anyway."

Oh, really? The Fourth Estate has decided to play God on this one? Why is it that the press did not similarly conclude that Obama didn't really believe what he was saying on NAFTA, during the Ohio primary, and instead skewered him for days? (I mean come on -- they had the smoking gun on that one -- the Obama aide who allegedly told the Canadians that Obama was just paying lip service to the unions.) How come the press didn't really believe Obama when he said -- completely out of character -- that when some voters get bitter, they turn to God and guns -- and in turn pilloried him, costing him dearly in the Pennsylvania primary. (I mean, all you have to do is read Audacity of Hope to know he is a deeply spiritual, God-fearing Christian who firmly believes in our right to bear arms.)

He doesn't believe it anyway. Is it me with Obama-blinders on, or is this one of the most startling, chutzpahdik comments imaginable? An admission -- by one of the Fourth Estate's most prominent -- that he and others like him perceive a John McCain wink on little issues like, I don't know, a woman's right to choose, contraception, separation of church and state, and so on, and have therefore made a conscious choice not to dwell on his comments, no matter how egregious or out of the mainstream. Is it any wonder that 32 percent of the Jewish electorate supports John McCain?

By the way: Near the end of the session, Baehr said that he doesn't expect McCain to pick a pro-choice running mate like Tom Ridge or Joe Lieberman. He called McCain's dropping of those names a "head fake." "It's a win both ways," Baehr explained, adding that it "looks like" McCain is "open-minded" -- "and then they wind up picking someone more predictable, like a Romney."

It's an interesting angle on calculated political deception. Don't expect the mainstream media to write about it any time soon.

That is Why I Love This Country

2008-08-26T01:52:00.000-04:00

The best thing about being in the Pepsi Center for the first day of the Democratic National Convention is that you are in a Zone of Silence. That is -- you have no idea what the pundits think. All you have at your disposal are your own thoughts, your own feelings, your own judgments. Instead of thinking what David Gergen tells you to think, you get to decide what to think, yourself. Almost entirely.

Things impressed me today that I'm fairly sure would not have impressed The Best Political Team on Television. Like, for instance, the roughly 500 volunteers in green shirts stationed at all the garbage bins leading up to the arena, to help people sort their trash into three buckets: recycling, composte, and garbage. So, for instance, when I handed over my Starbucks cup, they put the cup holder and cup in the composte bin, and the plastic top in recycling; only a small piece of chocolate went into the trash. Their goal is that less than 10 percent of the trash generated at the convention should go to landfills. Having volunteers stationed at the bins makes that possible. I spent about five minutes getting the story from one of the volunteers, and the whole time, Wolf Blitzer was nowhere in sight.

I was impressed, today, by what felt like a near total Democratic takeover of an entire city. It was kind of like showing up at one of the first round sites for an NCAA tournament game, except that everyone you meet is rooting for your team.

And I was impressed by Denver's humor. The Shag Lounge, on 15th Street, was featuring Discobama 2008. La Boheme Gentelman's Caberet, across from the Convention Center, promised "The Sexiest Democrats Inside," noting, further down its marquee: "Who ever heard of a nice piece of elephant?" That one took me a minute.

I was a bit nervous, heading into the hall. Earlier in the day, at an event that focused on the Jewish vote, Republican Richard Baehr, the chief political correspondent for American Thinker, had blasted Obama for giving Jimmy Carter a prime time speaking spot. Given Carter's third rail status in the Jewish community -- and given Obama's troubles attracting Jewish support -- why, Baehr wanted to know, would Obama give Carter such a plum role on the first day of the convention?

It turns out Obama handled the situation just about perfectly. Carter appeared in a video, specifically focused on Katrina and the aftermath. He then walked out on stage with his wife, waved to the crowd, and walked off stage. In this way, Obama honored one of two living past Democratic presidents -- without giving him the stage. "Yes, Mr. President, you can come, but you can't say anything," said the NJDC board member sitting next to me.

Jesse Jackson Jr. was the first to really bring it. He envisioned Martin Luther King looking down from heaven, and noting that "This is the first political convention in history to take place within site of a mountaintop." He was followed shortly thereafter by Caroline Kennedy, there to introduce the film that introduced her Uncle Ted. It was incredible to see the hall erupt in cheers at Ted Kennedy stumping on film. "Government can function for the common man," Kennedy said. We can "get healthcare for all Americans," he said. "It is time now for a new generation of leadership -- it is time for Barack Obama."

Everything changed -- in the hall, in the convention, possibly in the country -- the moment Ted Kennedy, striken with a brain tumor, walked out on stage. When Kennedy said -- "I pledge that I will be there next January, on the floor of the U.S. Sen ..." -- we cut him off in mid-sentence, drowning him out with cheers: Kennedy ... Kennedy ... Kennedy. He was pledging to be nothing more than alive, and if he could make such a promse -- well, then, every one of us could do the same. And if we could do that, we could do anything. We could elect a black man president of the United States of America.

With Obama, Kennedy said, "we will break the old gridlock." Every American will have "decent, quality health care." "Barack Obama will close the book on the old politics of race, gender, group against group, and straight against gay." "This November," he said, his voice straining, "the torch will be passed again, to a new generation of Americans." And then he stopped, and the band struck up "You're Still the One." Those around me, without benefit of prompting from Candy Crowley, declared the moment nothing short of amazing. Inspirational. It felt like Obama's promise had been renewed.

The lull that followed was all the more stark because of what had come before. Chicago City Clerk Miguel del Valle. Iowan Candi Schmieder as an "American Voice." Jerry Kellman, who gave Obama his job as a community organizer. Sen. Tom Harken, of Iowa, introducing Republican former Congressman Jim Leach, and then Leach, excoriating his own party for failing to deliver on its own historic promises. "Little is riskier to the national interest than more of the same," Leach said. It was dry, though. In the hall, I found myself hoping this segment had not been televised.

The main thing that struck me, during Sen. Claire McCaskill's speech, was that the Democrats really hadn't gone after McCain in any kind of sustained way. McCaskill did speak about the "risk" of John McCain and the same old GOP policies. I wondered, though, if it was enough.

And then Michelle Obama's brother, Craig Robinson, took the stage -- to cheers of "OSU ... OSU ... OSU." (Only later did I learn he was the head basketball coach at Oregon State.) Craig spoke about his little sister with great tenderness and affection. The line that stuck with me was when he said that Michelle was always talking to him about "who was getting picked on in school." She worried about them, he said. She wanted to help.

When Michelle Obama finally spoke, the silence was louder than any I'd ever heard. How many people -- 20,000? -- and each of us, completely absorbed by her words. "Your word is your bond," she said. "You treat people with dignity and repsect even if you don't know them, even if you don't agree with them." As her speech built, she seemed to get more colloquial, starting every third sentence with "You see ..." -- but the impact was startling. It was as if she were getting this story out because she absolutely had to, purging something insider herself in the process, willing us to understand her in a new way. "We have an obligation to fight for the world as it sould be," she said. And we can, in America, she said, adding: "That is why I love this country."

I don't think I've ever seen an ovation quite like the one that followed. You could sense the gratitude, the relief -- Michelle Obama had finally told her story, answering her critics. "That's how we raise them in Illinois," a woman told me, with evident pride.

The moments that followed, with Obama speaking to his daughters and wife via video from Missouri, were wonderful political theater. The older girl wiping a tear away at the sight of her dad. The younger one jubilant, precocious, facing her father's face on screen (not the camera that was, presumably, sending her image back to him), stealing the show in a rush of joyful words. Obama, happy, relaxed, joking, teasing his wife. A private moment with the whole world watching.

I don't know why it hit me the way it did -- maybe because I was in Denver, at the convention, and my own sons and wife were an hour away, in Boulder -- and, in all the convention hoopla, I'd barely seen them in the previous two days. I'd missed their trip that afternoon to the Construction Museum and Butterfly Pavilion, and I knew they'd be leaving Colorado the following morning, while I stayed for the remainer of the convention. It was a moment of triumph, and yet a part of me was empathizing with Obama. Her moment was his moment, and they were half a country apart.

Later that night, in the ESPN Zone, at a party hosted by the Ohio delegation, my zone of silence was rudely pierced. I saw -- on the muted TV on the wall -- the words scroll across the screen, beneath Anderson Cooper: "GOP Response: Dems Waste First Night of Convention." And: "Did Dems Let Bush Off Too Easy?"

It was more than enough to shake the NeuroticDemocrat, to make me wonder about everything I'd just witnessed.

On the ride home to Boulder, I phoned my hotel, to make sure they were holding a room for me for the following day. The clerk, Pierre, told me he would hold my room -- if I could get him credentials for the convention hall. I laughed. I knew I couldn't. But we got to talking. I asked if he'd watched the convention. He had. "Kennedy and Obama -- they just blew it up," he said. "I never cried before, watching anyone speak. But I had tears in my eyes, watching them."

"It was incredible," I told him. "When Michelle Obama spoke, you could have heard a pin drop."

It's now five hours since the convention let out, and I still don't know how the world took it. I just know how Pierre took it.

Thanks, buddy, for letting me check in.

The View From Golda's Balcony

2008-08-25T00:09:00.000-04:00

Driving into downtown Denver today, you could sense the excitement building. I drove past a billboard with a drawing of a red, white, and blue donkey on the left, and a Prius on the right. Beneath the donkey it said: "Delegates: 4,439 Strong." Beneath the Toyota it said: "Prius: 1,000,000 Strong." Something tells me the message will find a receptive audience this week.

I was in Denver tonight for a private screening of the film Golda's Balcony, hosted by the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC). The movie was shown at a church, next to the Golda Meir house, on the Auraria Campus downtown. First, some history: Meir was born in Russia and, to avoid pogroms, emigrated to Milwaukee, but after 8th grade, her parents told her should could not go to high school -- she would have to work in the family store -- so she packed a bag and ran away -- to Denver -- to live with her sister and brother-in-law. She stayed for two years, attending North High School, meeting Jewish intellectuals, many of whom were in Denver being treated for tuberculosis. It was the start of her Zionist journey. I found two dollars on the sidewalk outside the house, and slipped it in a glass box, near the front, as a donation. The latest CNN poll on Sunday showed the race in a dead heat. Obama-Biden needs all the karma it can get.

There were about 150 people at the screening. I'd seen the play on Broadway, and been extremely moved. The movie, starring Valerie Harper (of "Rhoda" fame), employed some of the same devices: Harper, as Meir, narrating her story directly, speaking to the audience. In the film, still shots flashed behind Meir -- images that reinforced the dialouge. (For instance, when Meir spoke about the Holocaust, horrifying images of the camps flashed behind her.) Harper played all parts -- including Meir's husband, and her war cabinet. It was jarring, at first -- so different from what we are used to seeing in film. But the story was so compelling, you quickly forgot the devices, and were simply absorbed by the tale.

The most gripping part of the film dramatizes Meir's handling of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Arab armies launched the surprise attack against Israel. Meir is told by Moshe Dayan and other generals, after the first day of fighting, that the Golan front is collapsing -- Israel is down to only a few tanks -- and they are dangerously short of supplies on the Egyptian front. At some point, Meir recognizes, it's no longer a question of maintaining hold of the Sinai: Israel is on the verge of crumbling before the Arab onslaught.

She sits in her office, chain-smoking, unable to eat, unable to sleep. The Zionist vision she has been advancing all of her life -- a political response to the Holocaust, addressing the need for a safe refuge that would allow the ingathering of Jews from around the world -- is slipping away. And Meir, as prime minister, is overseeing its demise. She picks up the phone again and again, pushing her aid to get Henry Kissinger on the line -- to tell President Nixon that Israel needs planes and tanks and supplies to fight back. That its very existence is at stake. Kissinger, it seems, was hard to get on the phone.

At this point, Meir begins another narrative. The story of how Israel found uranium in the Negev, and began working to build a nuclear bomb, miles beneath the desert. How Israel told the world it was building a "desalination plant." And how she stood, on an underground platform high above it all -- monitoring the development of nuclear warheads. She was there so often, the technicians started calling it "Golda's Balcony."

Now, with the Arab armies advancing, Meir had a choice: arm the fighter jets with the nuclear-tipped weapons, or do nothing, and see Israel and all its Jews forced into the sea. "To save the world you created," muses Meir, agonizing over her options, "how many worlds are you entilted to destroy?" She makes the decision to arm the planes, and orders her aid to call Kissinger, to tell him: I have authorized our pilots to hit the "Arab military headquarters" -- her euphemism for Cairo and Damascus.

I'm sitting there, in this soaring church, and something inside me is churning. Not just because of what happened to Israel 25-years ago, not just because of Meir's despair, but, I realize, because of a point my father-in-law has made to me, over the course of this campaign. The one thing, he says, that many pro-Israel, Obama-leaning Jews fear about Barack Obama is this: How will he react, at 3 a.m., if he gets the call that Iran has launched a nuclear (or other) attack on Israel? Would he, in that split second, make the decision to use whatever means necessary -- military and otherwise -- to defend the Jewish state? Obama is a peacemaker, my father-in-law said, a wonderful trait -- a trait he shares -- but what would that mean, when push came to shove, for the Jewish state in a desperate moment of survival?

In 1973, with the threat of a Mideast nuclear war looming, Kissinger finally sent help. Israel received word that planes, tanks, and munitions were on the way, and unloaded on the Egyptians with everything it had. Ariel Sharon crossed the Suez, out-flanking the Egyptian army from behind. It's not a stretch to say the state had been saved by her decision. And yet watching this movie, you can see that making the choice nearly killed her. After it was all over, Kissinger told Meir: "You blackmailed me." Meir responded: "Only blackmail?"

Meir had something in her, something to do with her dedication to her life's cause, that most of us don't have. It cost her her marriage, her husband. At one point, with her daughter and grandkids in a kibbutz near the Egyptian border, Meir talks about how she knew there was a chance that war would break out the next morning, and her daughter's kibbutz would be overrun. She didn't tell her daughter what she knew, though. When war did break out, her daughter demanded to know why her mother hadn't warned her of the danger ahead of time. Meir said: "I couldn't tell everybody -- How could I tell you?"

After the movie, Harper -- in attendance for the screening -- took the stage and received a powerful, extended standing ovation. "Thank you, Denver, for what you did in shaping this magnificent woman, our Golda Meir," she said.

Following a q-and-a, in a square outside the Golda Meir House, the NJDC hosted an event, honoring Jewish members of Congress. Among those present were Rep. Henry Waxman (Calif.), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (New York), Sen. Carl Levin (Michigan), and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (New Jersey).

"There's no difference between the candidates on Israel," Sen. Levin said. "They're both strong supporters of Israel." The key to Israel's security, he said, is to "reach out and pull in allies -- and there's no one better to do that than Barack Obama."

"Barack Obama is a fine friend of Israel," said Rep. Nadler. "So is John McCain. So is George Bush, for that matter." Nadler said, however, that Bush's policies have made Israel less safe, by empowering Iran. Then, alluding to the movie we had just seen, he said: "The biggest threat to Israel is Iran. And Barack Obama will follow policies that will avoid two years from now having two choices" -- as Meir had -- "One: Do Nothing; Two: Attack Iran." The latter choice, he said, would be "catastrophic" for Israel -- because Iran would launch 40,000 missiles at Israel from Lebanon. The only way to deal with Iran, he said, is with "very big sticks, and big carrots: If you behave, if you give up your nuclear weapons and ... stop funding Hezbollah, we'll be very nice to you."

Essentially, the Congressmen were making the case that by restoring America as a respected world leader, building strong coalitions with allies, and confronting Iran with strength -- negotiations backed by the threat of military action -- it would force Iran to climb down from its nuclear ledge. Obama would succeed where Bush has failed -- containing Iran -- and thus he would avoid the 3 a.m. phone call that my father-in-law posited.

Standing just a few yards away from the house where Golda Meir's Zionist path began, I couldn't help but think that Meir, herself, would put her faith in the peacemaker, ahead of the warrior. Meir, as Golda's Balcony shows over and over again, had a peacmaker's mentality. Each and every Jewish soldiers' death anguished her. But she was equally anguished by the fact that Jewish young men were put in a position where they had to kill.

Inscribed on a plaque, on the wall of the home where Golda once served tea to Jewish intellectuals, is the following quote from Meir: "A leader who doesn't stutter before he sends his nation into battle, is not fit to be a leader."

Barack Obama would stutter at 3 a.m. That's exactly the point.

And that's why I am voting for him.

The AP Hatchet Job

2008-08-23T13:25:00.001-04:00

Feeling bouyant about Obama's choice for VP, I log on to my email account this morning, to see a string of Associated Press headlines and articles slamming Obama:

Analysis: Is Obama Ready for the World's Toughest Job?
Analysis: Biden Pick Shows Lack of Confidence
Biden Pick Draws Democratic Praise, GOP Criticism

Bam! Bam! Bam! As Springsteen sings: shot between the eyes!

And some of you wonder why I post as The NeuroticDemocrat?

(Compare this to how the NY Times objectively portrayed the day's news in the headline: "Obama Adds Foreign Expertise to the Ticket," subhead: "Selection of Biden Puts an Emphasis on Experience")

I know the AP has a long history of abusing Obama in this race, but this trifecta is worth commenting on.

The first article, by Christopher Wills http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080823/ap_on_el_pr/obama_ready_to_lead, begins this way:

"SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - Americans picking a president usually turn to people who have run states or armies. The biggest thing Barack Obama has ever run is his own presidential campaign.
The 47-year-old Illinois senator is asking voters to look beyond his thin resume and conclude that he has the wisdom and toughness to be president. The economy, terrorism, health care — he hopes voters will trust him with all that and more.
That's a lot to ask for someone who just a few years ago was an obscure member of the Illinois Legislature."

Questions for Chris: What's the biggest thing John McCain has run? Isn't it conventional wisdom in this country that the presidential campaign you run actually does say something important about the candidate? (Witness the Atlantic Monthly's reporting about how the Clinton candidacy imploded in a tsunami of mismanagement -- which seems to me like perhaps one of the most compelling arguments against her for president.) When has Obama described his own resume as "thin," as you suggest here? And what about it, exactly, is "thin"? Does the community organizing not count? Does his experience as a lawyer, and as a teacher of constitutional law, not count? Does his experience as a state legislator not count? Would you have used the same adjective, in a news analysis, to describe George Bush's military resume vis-a-vis John Kerry's, four years ago? What is your evidence that Obama was "obscure" in the legislature?

And that headline, "Is Obama Ready for the World's Toughest Job?" -- Couldn't that have been ripped directly from the McCain attack machine? Isn't one of their constant refrains: "Is he ready?" The AP's raising it this way emphatically suggests the answer to anyone who is even moderately paying attention: No. He's not ready. (A different writer, who is not pro-McCain, might write a story headlined, for example: "Has Obama's Unique Experience Readied Him for the Presidency?" It could still probe the same themes, but without shredding Obama before the dateline is written.) This was a gift, on what should be one of Obama's days in the spotlight, to the McCain campaign.

Now to the other headline, over the article by Ron Fournier: "Analysis: Biden Pick Shows Lack of Confidence." http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080823/ap_on_el_pr/veepstakes_analysis

Here is the key graf: "The picks say something profound about Obama: For all his self-confidence, the 47-year-old Illinois senator worried that he couldn't beat Republican John McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Biden selection is the next logistical step in an Obama campaign that has become more negative — a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image."

Questions for Ron: Why doesn't the pick say something about the fact that McCain has unleashed a blisteringly string of negative attacks, which runs counter to McCain's image, and that Obama showed good judment and political smarts in picking someone (unlike, say, John Edwards four years ago, or Lieberman eight years ago) who is willing, capable, and adept and fighting back? How does an editor possibly conclude for a headline, even from what you write here, that the pick shows a "lack of confidence"? Could you look at this pick of Biden -- a strong, seasoned foreign policy veteran with years of experience -- and conclude that the pick is illustrative of Obama's supreme confidence: That he is not afraid to have as his right-hand-man one of the titans of foreign affairs. Doesn't it require confidence to invite this kind of heft into your administration? Doesn't it say that Obama is not afraid to be pushed and prodded and challenged? And, taking a step back -- isn't it exactly that kind of challenging that, over time, will lead to better policy-making? Better decisions? Isn't the lack of this kind of back-and-forth one of the biggest reasons that the Bush administration has been such an abject failure? (Even, it seems, in the eyes of John McCain.) Isn't it possible, Ron, that choosing a person who has in fact criticized Obama before, as a running mate, is an expression self-confidence, rather than evidence of its absence?

Reasonable people could have different answers to this question. My point is simply that in asserting these headlines, helping to shape how people receive this pick, on this day, is loaded and slanted and inherently biased in favor of McCain. Let's see what the AP headlines are when McCain makes his pick. Something tells me they won't be nearly as cutting.

There is so much more to say today, but my family is waiting for me at the Pearl St. Mall in downtown Boulder, so I'll just touch on the highlights.

I ended my CNN boycott to watch the day's political news unfold. That didn' t last long. One thing that struck me about the narrative the press is going to push this week is the "Snubbed Clinton" line. Today she was snubbed because she wasn't vetted for VP. And she and Bill were snubbed because Obama didn't call to seek their counsel. I have to say, I have been tremendously impressed with Hillary Clinton, herself, in all of this -- her grace in complimenting Obama's choice, today, and in complimenting Obama. Surely, that was not easy. Indeed, the way she is acquitting herself in all of this makes me feel better and better about her as a presidential candidate in the future, should she ever run again. But the way these nameless supporters of hers are carrying on, behind the scenes -- leaking their frustration anonymously to CNN -- in a way that only serves to undermine the Obama-Biden ticket: It's a shanda. A disgrace. I have a three-year-old who behaves better when he doesn't get what he wants. It's some of the same reckless, near-sighted, ugly behavior that doomed the Clinton campaign from the start.

Speaking of my three-year-old: I need to go find him on Pearl St.

I feel an uptick, today. I feel something shifting for Obama. Something not even the AP, in its infinite wisdom, can crush.

Rocky Mountain Low

2008-08-22T02:24:00.001-04:00

Not a good two days for the NeuroticDemocrat.

Started yesterday morning reading, in the Times, that Obama voted against a "Born Alive" bill while in the Illinois Legislature. Anti-abortion advocates were demanding he account for this vote. (An almost identical bill in the U.S. Congress drew wide bipartisan support.) Obama said that in Illinois, it had been paired with another bill that would have criminalized certain abortion procedures. Bill sponsors dispute that. I finished reading the story with a kind of a muddled feeling. I would have had a few followup questions for Obama, starting with: Where do you stand on the bill today? The NeuroticDemocrat has no trouble envisioning the ads this October, skewering Obama for wanting to kill live-born aborted fetuses.

It was a travel day yesterday, as my family left Cleveland for Denver. Mostly, on the trip, I played Shark Attack with my three-and-a-half year old, while my one-and-a-half-year-old climbed over chairs and turned the overhead light on and off over and over, refusing to take his nap. We had a fantastic afternoon in Boulder, the boys running up and down Pearl St., finishing the day at the farmer's market, where the kids found musical heaven in a woman with a bongo drum and an assortment of kid-friendly instruments.

Then came the call from my grandmother, who convinced me, in no time, that Obama has been completely ineffective in his communication strategy, allowing himself to be constantly placed on the defensive by GOP attacks. She noted that Obama was only up one point in the latest poll she had seen.

Today, we spent some time walking around downtown Denver. There are plenty of stores selling Democratic/Obama gear and apparel, though not as many as I would have imagined. One store is selling a shirt with a drawing of Hillary Clinton on it, above the words: "I support Obama." Later in the day, I received an email from a friend, a McCain supporter in Chicago, who told me McCain was up five points in one poll. This, after spending the afternoon in the car with two Denver locals -- both Obama supporters -- who implored me to help them make the case for Obama to their Jewish friends, who remain skeptical. Among their chief concerns: Obama's judgment in staying in Rev. Wright's church for 20 years, and his "flip-flopping" on the issues.

Just before heading to bed, I read an email from a buddy of mine -- a banker from Charlotte, North Carolina -- who says he is "looking to vote for Obama but is so unexcited about that prospect." He made a few criticisms of Obama. He doesn't think Obama's spending plan is fiscally responsible, and he didn't like his answer, at Saddleback Church, when asked to name a "gut-wrenching" decision he'd made in his life (Obama's answer: His decision to oppose the war in Iraq). My friend concluding with this: "*what won him the democratic nomination when he was on a roll was his voice of change / hope / a 'reinvented america' that competes globally and is fair to its citizens --- dude, this is absent in his current campaign and why he is slipping... it also nicely countered the first 2 items above which are weak points he won't overcome..."

I would argue that McCain, with his proposal to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, is the more fiscally irresponsible -- but a Republican like McCain isn't easily tagged that way. I agree with my friend, though, about Obama's answer to the "gut-wrenching" question. McCain's answer (his decision to STAY IN the Vietnamese POW camp, when offered the chance to leave, so as not to hand the enemy a propoganda victory) was much better. It's astounding to me that Obama couldn't come up with something better, too -- he needs to dig deeper, on the personal front, to connect. Think of the people you know and love. Who among them would say that their most gut-wrenching decision was a political stance?

My most gut-wrenching decisions have had to do with the people I love most -- decisions revolving around family conflict; decisions that I spent a great deal of time ruminating on, seeking the counsel, sometimes over a number of conversations, of those I know and love. My decision, when I was 22, to leave America for the first time -- and to quit a great job I had at a newspaper that I loved -- to live in Israel for a year -- that was gut-wrenching. My decision to leave another job four years later, as a reporter for a wire-service, to devote my life to writing fiction -- that was gut-wrenching. Decisions about who to love and who not to love, and what to tell your three-year-old when he asks you what happened to his great-grandfather, who'd recently passed away: these are gut-wrenching, each in their own way.

I know that Obama has faced these, and tougher. I've read his books. Look at the sections in "The Audacity of Hope," when he talks about what it's like being away from his daughters on the campaign trail, or how he feels, speaking to them about death. I know he is real and compassionate and filled with the kind of empathy we want and desperately need in a president.

Why he gave the answer he did, at this stage in the presidential campaign -- that's beyond me.

My Education Regarding Mr. Brooks

2008-08-19T08:42:00.001-04:00

It's 8:42 a.m, and, already, this neurotic Democrat has heartburn.
The specific source is David Brooks' column in the NY Times, which confounds me. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/opinion/19brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
In the column, Brooks argues that McCain essentially tried to run an upstanding, maverick, different-style campaign -- "free of circus antics" -- but he was essentially thwarted by the media and events.
McCain started out with a kibbutzing, free-wheeling style with his reporters on his campaign bus, but because "25-year-old reporters" dared to blog about "every odd comment" of a presidential candidate, he had to stop doing that. (How dare they write about the things a candidate for president says, to reporters, on his campaign bus! How dare the people who disagree with those comments voice their opinions in the public sphere!)
McCain started out with the kind of "improvised campaign events he'd used his entire career," but he was thwarted, essentially because he couldn't "penetrate through the national clutter." (IE, he chose a less genuine campaign approach -- but it's not his fault! The media wasn't writing enough about the genuine McCain! It's Obama's fault! Obama is making McCain un-spontaneous!)
McCain tried "going places other Republicans don't go," but he wasn't able to get any traction. (Should he suddenly be hailed for making a pit-stop in New Orleans, when, as Frank Rich reported Sunday, he was not at all quick to take up the cause in the aftermath of the Hurricane? Should we stop everything and laud the man who wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent for visiting impoverished areas of the South?)
McCain "started with grand ideas about breaking the mold of modern politics," inviting Obama to tour the country with him in join town meetings, but Obama vetoed the idea. (Why should Obama leap to fulfill McCain's self-serving political vision of how the debates should be run? McCain picked the forum most appealling and beneficial to him. Is Brooks so naive as to assume that McCain proposed this format in the interest of "breaking the mold" rather than, partly or mostly, in the interest of gaining on Obama in the polls?)
Here's the key graf: "McCain and his advisers have been compelled to adjust to the hostile environment around them. They have been compelled, at least in their telling, to abandon the campaign they had hoped to run. Now they are running a much more conventional race, the kind McCain himself used to ridicule."
And whose fault is this? Obama's, of course! It's Obama's fault that McCain "now attacks Obama daily." He was getting all the press!
I used to admire and respect David Brooks, even though I didn't always agree with him. I felt he was an honest broker, who would criticize Democrats as well as Republicans who derserved it. He's lost me in this election, though, and this column is a good example of the reason why. Brooks is all about personal, individual responsibility. Yet in this column, he lets McCain off the hook, emotionally, for every last one of his transgressions -- transgressions, by the way, that undermine McCain's central claim that he is the dignified, high-minded, man of character in the race -- because, in the end, as Brooks puts it about McCain's attacks: "It is working."
"A long-shot candidacy now seems entirely plausible."
Can you get more Machiavellian than this? David Brooks -- where is your honor?
Brooks, in his closing graf, holds out hope not that McCain's vicious tone will change during the election, but that, once he's elected, he will miraculously be able to govern as if he had run the style of campaign he'd pledged to run. But, as the Atlantic Monthly's election coverage points out this month -- exactly the opposite is true. If he spends the next 3 months attacking Obama daily, tearing him apart, he might win, but there's no way he'll be able to govern. He's be scorned by the 49 percent of the electorate that didn't vote for him, and outright despised by millions -- and likely facing a Congress with even stronger Democratic majorities.
But he'll be in the White House! Oh Happy Day!
The inescapable message of Brooks' column is that, while it's sad, so sad, McCain has been forced into the gutter. If David Brooks isn't going to hold his candidate to a higher standard; if he's going to be okay with the Paris Hilton celebrity ads, and the Corsi books, and the torrent of self-righteousness that McCain is spewing (Yesterday, McCain told a group of vets at the VFW convention in Orlando: "Both candidates in this election pledge to end this war and bring our troops home. The great difference -- the great difference -- is that I intend to win it first."), then we can forget the next four years, too.
The good news is, since I began writing this post, we have moved 39 minutes closer to election day.

The End is Near

2008-08-18T22:42:00.000-04:00

I have been feeling a certain dread about Barack Obama's political prospects since David Brook's column in the New York Times last week, "Where's the Landslide?", which sought to explain why Obama is not up 20 or so points in the national polls. The dread was compounded by the recent article in the Times quoting Democrats, including Ohio Gov. Strickland, saying that Obama needed to do much more to put a fine point on his message about change. I have felt queasy as I've watched Obama's lead evaporating. I have sworn to myself that I would only check the poll updates on Realclearpolitics once every two or so weeks, so as not to be swept up in the daily August polling madness, which everyone I trust tells me doesn't matter one iota anyway.
I was feeling pretty good about Obama yesterday, though, in part because I had just read the Atlantic Monthly's Election issue coverage -- which was so clear-eyed, and so non-hysterical, it made me momentarily believe one could be both passionate about politics and at the same time, clear-eyed and non-hysterical (more on this coverage, later). Also, I had the good fortune of reading Frank Rich's column in the Sunday Times, on a morning flight from Newark to Cleveland.
Rich seemed to be taking Brooks on directly when he wrote: "It seems almost churlish to look at some actual facts. No presidential candidate was breaking the 50 percent mark in mid-August polls in 2004 or 2000. Obama’s average lead of three to four points is marginally larger than both John Kerry’s and Al Gore’s leads then (each was winning by one point in Gallup surveys). Obama is also ahead of Ronald Reagan in mid-August 1980 (40 percent to Jimmy Carter’s 46). At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral votes in current toss-up states and still lose the election."
For a moment, at 30,000 feet, I felt that I could actually breathe again. All was not quite lost for the Democrats in mid-August. Here was a reputable source, albeit a liberal one, implying that Barack Obama may yet have a chance to win the presidency on August 17!
Rich continued:
"So why isn’t Obama romping? The obvious answer — and both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press bear responsibility for it — is that the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is. ... McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after 'Mission Accomplished.' By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.
McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet."
All was not lost! The press would soon start to cover "The Real McCain." He would be unmasked.
Things started to turn for me, though, shortly after I got home, when first my mother-in-law, and then my rabbi, started worrying me with reports about how Obama had been received at Saddleback Church. Not well, by the press, they told me. But, as my rabbi put it, he thought Obama was so good -- so thoughtful and considerate -- and McCain was so snappy and ideological -- that my rabbi was, for the first time, going to go downtown and join the Obama campaign, if behind the scenes.
By evening, I was flush with a new corona of worry, as TalkingPointsMemo reported, in a one line post, that McCain had drawn even with Obama in the polls, in Ohio. This sent me reeling. Reeling. Could it really be true? A quick search of Realclearpolitics.com confirmed my worst fears. Obama had fallen behind McCain in all the swing states that matter.
Things only got worse when I awoke this morning and read Paul Krugman's column, "It's the Economy Stupor," arguing that Obama was failing at achieving his landslide because he has failed to get traction on economic issues. Krugman was astonished at Obama's flatness when he gave his big economic speech in St. Petersburg. Krugman noted that Obama goes out of his way to avoid "scoring political points" on the economy. "Obama surrogates have shown a similar inclination to go for the capillaries rather than the jugular," he wrote, later adding: "All this makes a stark contrast with the campaign of the last Democrat to make it to the White House." Which of couse was Clinton, with "It's the Economy, Stupid." Krugman got me thinking (which, lately, is saying something in and of itself) -- it's true that Obama hasn't really grabbed the mantle of economic reform; he's tried, but he certainly hasn't succeded. And that should be a no-brainer. How could he even cede one inch of territory on the economy to McCain, who has said he knows little about the subject?
By mid-day today, I'd received an email from a friend that included this line: "As you know, amazingly, incredibly, logic-defyingly, depressingly, the race has tightened to a dead heat. Just typing that makes me want to scream. I have plenty of issues with Obama but I sure as hell don't want to see a McCain administration, it's unthinkable, it's the end."
I turned on CNN tonight in time to see Larry King interviewing two people I'd never seen before, and couldn't pick out of a lineup, opining on the Saddleback Church appearances. The pro-Obama person was struggling to put a positive gloss on things, admitting, thoughtfully (like the candidate himself), that it hadn't been Obama's best day; the pro-McCain person was relentlessly putting his foe on the defensive. The pro-McCain person derided as siliness the notion that McCain hadn't been in a cone of silence. (Obama was questioned first; McCain was supposed to be in a soundproof Green room; turns out he was in his limo, on his way over, as Obama was being questioned.) And then Rick Warren, the pastor, came on, and said, essentially, he didn't know McCain was in the limo, instead of in the "cone of silence," but that basically, McCain couldn't have heard the questions Obama was being asked, because the Secret Service would have reported it. (Since when is it likely that the Secret Service would step up and volunteer information to an obsequious press corps that would make the person they are guarding look like a liar and a cheat?) And then Warren argued that McCain himself SAID he didn't hear anything, and he had to take him at his word. Really? Why?
After saying he could never vote for an atheist (because atheists arrogantly assume we can make it in this world without a little help) for president, Warren then went on to talk about the precious moments during the interview when John McCain actually teared up. Three times! So much for a neutral interviewer. Apparently, he looked into John McCain's eyes, and saw his soul.
I vowed, at that moment, that I would never, ever again watch CNN. Never. I'm over it. I'm done. They can spew their maddening punditry into the electosphere without me.
And I vowed I would do something with my anguish and constantly in-flux election dread.
This blog is, in part, my response.
It's August 19th. 78 days until the election.
The end is not in fact "near." It's not even close. It's eons away. John McCain is gaining in the polls at warp speed. Election Day is coming in slow motion.
There are 1,872 hours until the election.
I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to make it.