The Republican paternity suit

Sackcloth and ashes

David Seaton's News Links
(Before going any farther, at the bottom of this post, I've put down a short manifesto of what my objectives are, because the paths I take in following them may seem a bit tortuous to my readers.)

One of my favorite bloggers, James Wolcott, over at Vanity Fair, has written a good piece about a lament-filled article by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, yesterday I riffed on it, today I'd like to riff a little bit more.

I think that, through an understandable lack of empathy for Republicans, Mr. Wolcott perhaps missed the significance of the most important phrase in Ms. Noonan's ashes and sackcloth aria. This was the phrase:

Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years.

What Ms. Noonan -- with a broken heart -- is saying is that the Republican Party of Goldwater and Reagan (Ms Noonan's life's work) has been destroyed by feckless Bushism. That John McCain might very well win the presidency is no consolation to Peggy Noonan, because to win it, he will have to drive a stake through Barry Goldwater's and Ronald Reagan's hearts.

This is an election that McCain can win but which Noonan's Republican Party cannot. Dick Morris, former adviser to Bill Clinton and political analyst for Fox News sums the situation up brilliantly in the Washington Post:

A candidate who cannot get elected is being nominated by a party that cannot be defeated, while a candidate who is eminently electable is running as the nominee of a party doomed to defeat.

Morris then goes on to plausibly map out McCain's possible path to victory in November. It isn't pretty, but it sure isn't Reagan redux. here are some points:

McCain needs to go after the swing voters:

Lash out at the corporate greed that landed us in the subprime mortgage crisis. Attack the golden-parachute pensions, the ill-gotten commissions and the maddening lending fees.

Go after credit card companies' interest rates, late fees and consumer gouging.

Demand action on global warming (as McCain began doing last week, including hawking "eco-friendly" campaign T-shirts).

Call for a ban on all congressional earmarks, with their inevitable waste and pork, and insist that Congress appoint a permanent ethics special prosecutor to police itself.

Attack big tobacco, and blast the movie industry for helping sell its poison.

Pledge to make hedge-fund managers pay full earned-income taxes on their incomes, rather than the undeserved capital-gains treatment they currently get.(...)

McCain need not depart from long-held principles to wage any of these battles. He has always embraced these causes as a senator, and he needs to do so ever more forcefully as a candidate for president. The danger for McCain is that he will forget that he has already won the Republican nomination and retreat to safe GOP positions, which will alienate precisely the Democrats and independents whom he is uniquely positioned to attract.

I would add that only other Republican that could sell this convincingly with McCain is the populist, Mike Huckabee.

It is easy to see why Ms. Noonan, like Job, is sitting in the ashes scraping her sores with a pottery shard, but where I differ from James Wolcott is to think that Peggy Noonan's discomfort holds any comfort for Barack Obama or the Democrats this year. DS

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Full disclosure (a declaration of principals)
I want to make it clear, where I am coming from so that what I say from now on can be correctly interpreted.

What I would like for the USA is first: a federal, universal, obligatory, public health system that would be so good that the private system would be reduced to preforming silicon breast implants on precocious 12 year old Valley girls. This would mean that a little black girl in Tupelo Mississippi would have the same medical care as a rich little white boy in Lake Forest Illinois.

Next I would like a free, federal, universal, public education system, from cradle through post graduate, that would be so good that only people belonging to strange sects, would think it worth the money to send their kids to a private school. Like the French Lycée system: the same all over the country, same courses, same exams, same standards for all students, so that the little black girl in Tupelo Mississippi would get exactly the same, quality education, as the rich little white boy in Lake Forest Illinois. All of this with a free public university system, so good that Harvard, Yale and Princeton would be reduced to diploma mills for rich kids that didn't want to study hard.

And a good pension system, of course. This what I consider the minimum a "progressive" should demand from the state.

You might have a few questions.

Does this mean big government?

You bet. It would mean a huge, unionized, bureaucracy.

Wouldn't that be very expensive?

Horribly expensive.

How would you pay for it?

To start with I would reduce US military spending to make it only more powerful than the combination of China and Russia and not more powerful than the next 19 countries on the list all together. I would be grateful to see the numbers, but I imagine that setting up my version of America would cost a lot less than the war in Iraq.

Now it is easy to understand that from my viewpoint the Democratic Party of the USA is the greatest bunch of wankers since Tommy Chong's definitive, "Harry Palms". I am not sure that the Democrats are a path to the kind of America I would like, in fact they might be the greatest obstacle standing in the way. So while generally feeling more comfortable traveling in the company of Democrats, I am not rooting for them.

Having read and understood this, you may understand why I am often crueler to Democrats than to Republicans. With them, what you see is what you get, while with the Democrats we may be looking at nothing more than a Judas goat to neutralize the appearance of any social movement in America that might bring about social justice.

I think that all of this is something that the politicians really cannot be expected to do. The civil rights movement came from the African-American community's political agitation, the politicians bowed to that pressure. I think it will require mass movements, even a classic general strike to get my agenda taken care of. Barack Obama is not going to do any of this... people are fooling themselves if they think he ever will.

Time to stick it to the Gipper

"The surge from nowhere of Mike Huckabee(...) threatens to split and even destroy the Republican coalition, by dividing social conservatives from economic conservatives."
Clive Crook -FT

"The strategic failure of a whole generation of economists, bankers, and policy-makers has been so enormous that it may now take a strong draught of socialism to save the Western democracies."
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - Telegraph

David Seaton's News Links
I have been writing a lot about Mike Huckabee lately, not because I'm endorsing him but because I find his sudden appearance, his explosion, so significant.

It seems to me that he has discovered and is exploiting for all it's worth, what is in effect a "contradiction" within the Republican, conservative coalition that Reagan built. He is speaking to the working poor of America but without the nauseating, implicit racism of Reagan's state's rights, anti-welfare, rhetoric.

I don't believe that Huckabee is really a serious populist. He isn't because he wishes to abolish income tax and substitute it with a sales tax. Progressive income tax: taking wealth from the wealthy and redistributing it to the poor, is the heart and soul of social justice and sales taxes favor the wealthy and penalize the poor. Everything begins there. So to advocate eliminating income tax while bombastically attacking the "The Wall Street to Washington axis" is either cynical or weird.

I think it's cynical, and I prefer it that way. If he is cynical it is because he is shrewdly exploiting a lifetime of knowledge of his audience (flock?) and their fears and resentments and this is knowledge that progressives could profit from acquiring for themselves.

What Huckabee is for sure doing is taking control of the social conservative wing of the Republican Party. And even if he isn't the candidate, without his enthusiastic support, no Republican anywhere will win much of anything in November of 2008.

It is really difficult to talk about class conflict in American English because all the words like, "class struggle", "contradiction" etc are taboo or sound foreign to American ears. This is as if a doctor would have to use awkward euphemisms when making a diagnosis. Imagine a gynecologist writing, "the patient reports experiencing severe discomfort whenever a dime is inserted in her pay phone." Communication would suffer. The march of science would be arrested. Probably the most significant thing that will happen in the coming months in America will be the rebirth of progressive politics and the language of progressive politics among the working poor.

Any real change has to come from people who feel oppressed and victimized. Mike Huckabee is probably nothing but a red herring, but we should encourage the "red*" and discard the "herring". If the Democrats cannot exploit the goldmine that Huckabee has opened then others will come along who will. DS
*Notice how the language of American politics has been deliberately deformed. In every other language in the world including British English, "red" means "left" and "blue" means "conservative". In the US they mean exactly the opposite. DS

Clive Crook: America in 2008: Populism calls the shots - Financial Times
Abstract: If the elections give Democrats the presidency and increased majorities in both houses, as seems likely, the US is going to see one of the most radical alterations in its political outlook for decades. As things stand right now, the politics is all good for the Democrats and all bad for the Republicans. The time-series of national opinion-poll ratings for the Republican presidential candidates looks like the read-out of a patient having a stroke. The lines jerk up and down, as party supporters search desperately, and so far in vain, for a candidate they like. The surge from nowhere of Mike Huckabee – to join a three-way tie with Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney – is partly a sign of this desperation. It threatens to split and even destroy the Republican coalition, by dividing social conservatives from economic conservatives. Mainly, though, it underlines something even more significant than that: the growing appeal of economic populism among supporters of both parties. Mr Huckabee is an evangelical – his faith leads him to reject the theory of evolution and to favour constitutional amendments to ban abortion and gay marriage – but he is an economic populist as well. On trade, on the tyrannical power of Wall Street and sometimes even on public spending, he sounds more like John Edwards than Mr Romney. Trade must be “fair” not free. There must be an end to “shipping jobs overseas”. He rails against outlandish CEO pay. He is not averse to more regulation, or to spending (financed with higher taxes) on many social programmes. Immigration complicates the picture: as governor of Arkansas, his treatment of illegal immigrants was too soft for many Republicans. But he is making up for it now, promising to fence the border and deport (and bar from re-entry), immigrants who fail to register within 120 days. “The Wall Street to Washington axis, this corridor of power, is absolutely, frantically against me,” he boasted this week. To be sure, for many Republicans, his main attraction is his religious conviction; he is also a likeable, funny, easy-going man and good on television. Nonetheless, the economic populism is all upfront and has plainly struck a chord.(...) A recent poll by the Wall Street Journal and NBC found that 58 per cent of Americans think that globalisation has been bad for the US and that only 28 per cent believe that it has been good. Ten years ago the split was more even: 48 per cent thought that globalisation was good and 42 per cent that it was bad. The biggest surprise is that supporters of the two parties are no longer far apart on the question. Globalisation has been bad for the US according to 55 per cent of Republicans and 63 per cent of Democrats.(...) the real question is what happens in 2009, when (let us suppose) the main obstacles to a populist turn in policy have been removed. How far left, in economic policy, might America then veer? The answer is a long way. As a rule, the stridency expressed in the primaries fades once the nominees are chosen and the general election approaches. Debate gets tugged back to the centre as candidates try harder to appeal to independents. That cyclical correction will happen again next year, but it will be milder than usual because populist economics is selling so well across the board. It is striking, too, that the growth of anti-trade and anti-corporate sentiment has happened up to now in a relatively benign economic environment. Stagnation in middle-class living standards, erosion of manufacturing employment, financial stress, alarm over the cost of health insurance and a college education – all these concerns came to the fore with interest rates, inflation and unemployment low, with the stock market strong, and with aggregate output (until very recently) growing at a reasonable pace. Add an election-year slowdown, already begun or even an outright recession to this mix. Add rising unemployment. Add an accelerating fall in house prices and a gathering wave (counter-measures notwithstanding) of mortgage foreclosures. If populism had material to work with in 2007, just wait for 2008. READ IT ALL

Carter's call: Bush is the all time worst

The Killer Rabbit Strikes

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It is quite extraordinary for a former president to criticize the officiating President of the United States in as harsh a fashion as Jimmy Carter has done. It is obvious that Carter is genuinely alarmed at Bush's behavior and fears for the future of the Republic. I think he has every reason to be.

To use Bush's pet phrase, "There are some who," ... There are some who think Bush is stupid. I don't. I think the problem with Bush is that he is a very bad man, what the Spanish call "una mala persona" or what a cockney would call "a nasty piece of work". But he is not dumb.

A proof of his superior intelligence is that he has been able over the years to convince many people (most Americans at one time or another) that he is a "regular guy", a "straight shooter", "just folks" etc, when the fact is that he is a cheater a liar, a nasty sonovabitch and a jerk to boot. To do that takes brains, not just cunning. It also takes an enormous focus, a focus that must be very draining on all the rest of his personality. His own self-deception and fear of self-examination must be so monumental as to preclude almost any other kind of meaningful mentation.

Jimmy Carter has every right to be alarmed. The next few months may be the most dangerous in the history of the United States. Here is a bad man with a damaged personality, facing total failure and humiliation... and with an atomic arsenal at his disposal. Take a look around you and savor it, next year the world may look a whole lot different. DS

Carter Blasts Bush on His Global Impact - Associated Press
Abstract: Former President Carter says President Bush's administration is "the worst in history" in international relations, taking aim at the White House's policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy. The criticism from Carter, which a biographer says is unprecedented for the 39th president, also took aim at Bush's environmental policies and the administration's "quite disturbing" faith-based initiative funding. "I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper's Saturday editions. "The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me."(...) "We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered," he said. "But that's been a radical departure from all previous administration policies." Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, criticized Bush for having "zero peace talks" in Israel. Carter also said the administration "abandoned or directly refuted" every negotiated nuclear arms agreement, as well as environmental efforts by other presidents. Carter also offered a harsh assessment for the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which helped religious charities receive $2.15 billion in federal grants in fiscal year 2005 alone. "The policy from the White House has been to allocate funds to religious institutions, even those that channel those funds exclusively to their own particular group of believers in a particular religion," Carter said. "As a traditional Baptist, I've always believed in separation of church and state and honored that premise when I was president, and so have all other presidents, I might say, except this one."(...) Carter also lashed out Saturday at British prime minister Tony Blair. Asked how he would judge Blair's support of Bush, the former president said: "Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient." "And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world," Carter told British Broadcasting Corp. radio. READ IT ALL

Bush DOA - Bloomberg

"Dead Duck" - Lucas Cranach

"Bloomberg is the leading global provider of data, news and analytics. The BLOOMBERG TERMINAL and Bloomberg's media services provide real-time and archived financial and market data, pricing, trading, news and communications tools in a single, integrated package to corporations, news organizations, financial and legal professionals and individuals around the world." About Bloomberg

David Seaton's News Links

The article below is from Bloomberg, not from the American left-wing's institution, Mother Jones and the author, Albert Hunt, is Bloomberg's Washington bureau chief and not Noam Chomsky. Money talks!

Bush's legacy will finally have been to have killed the "Conservative Revolution" that Barry Goldwater inaugurated in the 1960s. Bush seems to have opened the doors for something new and not just another Clinton-Blair "Third Way", reacting to conservative charisma by trying to dress in the clothes of Reagan and Thatcher. America is at the door of a period that may see conservative policies having to dress up as "liberal - progressive". In France Sarkozy has just offered cabinet posts to important socialists. If you think that Reagan began as a dyed in the wool New Deal Democrat, you can see that the old saying, "what goes around, comes around" is a profound political insight. DS

Republicans Shaken by Bush Presidency - Bloomberg
Abstract: There's a number that chills Republicans: 616. That's how many days remain in the Bush administration. Private conversations with Republicans throughout America reveal doom and gloom about a politically paralyzed presidency and party.(...) ``The country doesn't believe George W. Bush, it doesn't trust him, and with 19 months to go it's only going to get worse,'' predicts Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist who ran Ronald Reagan's 1984 presidential campaign. ``There is nothing the president can do to get his (poll) numbers back up.'' According to those polls, almost two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Bush's job performance; that is Richard Nixon territory. A majority of the public approved of the performance of the last two lame-duck presidents, Reagan and Bill Clinton, at this same stage in their administrations.(...) America is mired in a rudderless status quo. A new embarrassment or scandal -- Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove -- seems to surface daily; the only good news for the White House is that occasionally these stories overshadow the bad news coming out of Iraq. Bush is reviled around much of the world, has precious little political capital at home, and seems surrounded by hacks or the forgettable and faceless. Strikingly, perhaps the two most important members of the Cabinet -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson -- have little history with the president, and their greatest leverage is the havoc that would be wrought if they left. Each has served in the administration for less than a year.(...) This has enormous implications for foreign policy, domestic politics and the legislative agenda for the next year and a half. Bill Cohen, a Republican who served as defense secretary under Clinton, thinks Bush blew what may have been his last opportunity by failing to embrace the bipartisan recommendations by the Jim Baker-Lee Hamilton-led Iraq Study Group to gradually disengage from Iraq. Cohen, who travels the globe advising clients, says the president ``doesn't have much influence on anything,'' commanding little respect or fear around the world. That's why the notion that he may take military action against Iran -- for good or bad reasons -- is far-fetched. The American military, bogged down in Iraq, lacks the resources and the president lacks the credibility for such a huge step. Politically, there is a telling indicator: Count the number of times any Republican presidential candidate cites Bush in speeches, debates or interviews. You will need only one hand, if that. READ IT ALL

A hot, dry, but golden age?

David Seaton's News Links
There is something about global warming that reminds me of that moment when Reagan told Gorbachev that the cold war would be forgotten in an instant if the earth were invaded by creatures from outer space. It sounded like the onset of Alzheimer's at the time, but at this moment of raised climate consciousness and of Reagan-revisionism it could easily be seen in another, more benevolent light.

With global warming it seems we have actually invaded ourselves from outer space. So, in fact, we are moving into Reagan's dream scenario, with its opportunity for humanity to put aside its quarrels and work together to save our common space.

Seen from that point of view, instead of being at the gates of hell, we might be on the threshold of a golden age ... A very hot, very dry, very flooded, very austere, but very golden age of brotherhood, solidarity and cooperation. Hot and dry it going to be anyway... so we might as well make the best of it. DS

Zakaria: Unfortunately, We Can’t Stop Global Warming - Newsweek
Abstract: In an intelligent, practical speech last September, the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Frances Cairncross, urged that we begin such a discussion. "We need to think about policies that prepare for a hotter, drier world, especially in poor countries," she said. "That may involve, for instance, developing new crops, constructing flood defenses, setting different building regulations or banning building close to sea level." She points out that adaptation programs could move forward fast. Unlike plans to slow down global warming, which require massive and simultaneous international efforts, adaptation strategies can be pursued by individual countries, states, cities and localities. Three years ago the Pew Foundation sponsored an excellent study, "Coping With Global Climate Change," which focused on the role of adaptation. The report found that moving in this direction would be costly and fraught with uncertainty and error. Yet, the authors point out, humankind's long history has shown it's possible; we have adapted as the environment around us has changed. The costs of relocating seaside communities are extremely high, but they will be even higher if we wait 20 years. The most important conclusion of the Pew study was that early planning is far more effective than managing the consequences of a breakdown. In other words, strengthening the levees in New Orleans costs much, much less than rebuilding the city. READ IT ALL

In Nicaragua: Chavez 1, Bush 0 - Greg Grandin - Washington Post

David Seaton's News Links

When you live in a Spanish speaking country for any length of time and become fluent in the Spanish language and begin to mix freely and even go to school with Latin-Americans, you will receive, whether you like it or not, what might be euphoniously known as an "alternative narrative" to "American exceptionalism". This experience was the beginning of my political consciousness, such as it is. Reagan's war in Nicaragua was every bit as criminal as Bush's war in Iraq and the World Court condemned it as criminal and was ignored. A lot of the same players are involved in both stories. DS
Abstract: Both Hugo Chavez and George Bush made it clear who they wanted to win last week's presidential election in Nicaragua: the first backed Daniel Ortega, the ex-guerrilla and Sandinista leader; the second, conservative banker Eduardo Montealegre. But the difference in the way each supported their candidate says much as to why the United States is so distrusted in Latin America. Venezuela helped Ortega by selling cheap oil with long-term, low-interest credit to Nicaraguan municipalities, a popular move since the country is gripped by a severe energy crisis. Caracas also donated tons of fertilizer and provided free eye surgery to hundreds of cataract patients. Chavez's critics pointed out this aid was nothing compared with what Washington gives Nicaragua, more than a billion dollars since Ortega was voted out of office in 1990. But roughly half of this aid goes just to keeping Nicaragua's bankrupted economy afloat, either in the form of debt relief or covering currency shortfalls, which in effect works as a subsidy to U.S. creditors and exporters, thus limiting its PR value. And of course this money pales in comparison to many billions of dollars of damage that Washington caused in Nicaragua with its devastating Contra War. In fact, the U.S. conditioned its financial assistance on Nicaragua abandoning its attempt to collect the estimated $17 billion that the World Court, in 1986, ordered Washington to pay to Managua as reparations for waging its illegal war against the country. But the real difference is that Chavez never threatened to punish Nicaraguans if they didn't vote as he hoped they would. Caracas offers all carrot and no stick. The Bush administration, in contrast, warned that an Ortega victory could bring aid cuts and trade sanctions, while Congressional Republicans said that they would pass legislation prohibiting Nicaraguans living in the U.S. from sending money home. Nicaragua is the hemisphere's second poorest country, and very heavily dependent on foreign aid and remittances; and such retaliation, if enacted, would be ruinous. That Washington reserves this kind of intimidation only for small and powerless nations like Nicaragua as opposed to a country like Mexico, where it was careful not to intervene in last summer's election, only serves to reinforce the opinion of many Latin Americans that the U.S. is a bully.(...) Jeane Kirkpatrick is one of those foreign-policy hawks who blame Chavez for Ortega's comeback. In the 1980s, as Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the UN Kirkpatrick defended the Contra War as part of a broader foreign policy that would both "protect U.S. interest and make the actual lives of actual people in Latin America somewhat better." Nicaraguans are still waiting for the second half of that pledge to be fulfilled. READ IT ALL