The Broad View

Broken record

In less than three days, Obama will be giving another of his make-or-break speeches. Once again, he'll be trying (and, I expect, failing) to redefine the health reform debate that has careened so far out of reason or control. On the Sunday gasbag shows, White House officials prepared the way -- for another round of insipid boilerplate and equivocation. From the NYTimes:

Three days before President Obama is to address a joint session of Congress about overhauling the health care system, administration officials on Sunday continued to characterize a new government program for the nation’s 50 million uninsured as worthwhile but not essential to legislation.

David Axelrod, a White House senior adviser, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Mr. Obama “believes the public option is a good tool.” But Mr. Axelrod added: “It shouldn’t define the whole health-care debate.”

Oh no, the public option certainly doesn't define the whole debate. The right-wing whackjobs have taken care of that and now it's insane conspiracy theories about commie-fascist death panels and withholding health care from Republicans that drive the "debate".

The White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, who appeared on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” sidestepped questions on whether Mr. Obama still regarded the so-called public option as a necessity for any bill he would back.

“We’re trying to provide choice and competition for individuals and small business owners,” Mr. Gibbs said when asked if the public option was “essential.”

“The president strongly believes we need to provide choice and competition,” he said. Pressed on whether Mr. Obama would demand that a government insurance program be included in legislation, Mr. Gibbs said that it could be a “valuable component” of any health plan. And asked whether the president would reject a plan that did not include government insurance, Mr. Gibbs responded: “We are not going to prejudge where the process will be.”

[...]

And The Associated Press reported that on a call with prominent liberal House members Friday, Mr. Obama refused to be pinned down.

In his talk-show appearance, Mr. Gibbs said, however, that Mr. Obama will clarify his position in his address to Congress and is considering broadly outlining his own legislation instead of letting Congress set the terms.

It's nauseating. Just fucking make up your mind, already. Stand for something, dammit. I have this nightmare vision of getting to 2012 with a president that has spent the last four years refusing to be "pinned down" about anything of importance.

The endless parroting -- "choice and competition," "competition and choice," blah, blah, blah. What does that mean, exactly? That's right: Nothing. There hasn't been one component of actual reform (versus insignificant tinkering at the edges) that Obama hasn't supported, then "indicated" he'd trade away, and back and forth, yes, no or maybe, ad infinitum.

Are we supposed to cheer that Obama might propose an actual plan? It beggars the imagination that this "clarification" will be any less nebulous than his statements thus far when the latest trial balloon is floated using words like "considering" and "broadly outlining." If he truly wants to "clarify" this clusterfuck, he'll ditch everything and start over by first reading the riot act to the Senate Democrats and then taking a tire iron to their future electoral ambitions.

That won't happen, though. We'll probably get another mealy-mouthed paean to bipartisanship, competition and choice along with heart-felt thanks for the cooperation of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries in fashioning this historic legislation. Feh.

An aside: Not only have I called and emailed the White House, I mailed an ink-and-paper letter to the president in which I promised that he will lose my vote if a fully competitive public option is not passed. Late last month, I received a reply. It's a canned response, brimming with bland boilerplate. The letter includes this line:

There are tough choices to be made, and I will bring businesses and workers, health care providers and patients, and Democrats and Republicans together to create a system that delivers better care and puts the Nation on a much sounder long-term fiscal path.

I am then urged to "learn more about [Obama's] agenda" online. The letter ends with this:

I share the sense of urgency that millions of Americans have voiced. I watched as my ailing mother struggled with stacks of insurance forms in the last moments of her life. This is not who we are as a Nation; together, we will fix it.

Sorry, but Obama's language and tone are so dispassionate, so dry, so brittle, that the merest gust of Teabagger bullshit can easily shatter his narrative -- and that's exactly what's been happening.

Americans are dying because they can't get or afford health insurance. Americans in the hundreds of thousands are facing medical bankruptcy even with insurance. Insurance and pharmaceutical companies are posting the biggest profits on record and they're lavishing millions in salaries and bonuses on their executives while children are denied life-saving treatments. How can these fuckers be winning?

I know Obama is a cool customer. However, if he wants to change the scorched landscape of American health care, he had better get angry --  very angry and very soon. This is a life-and-death debate and Obama's got to man up and fight. Get in touch with your lizard-brain, man.

[Cross-posted at The Followspot.]

Let's teach Americans their names

The AP has issued new guidelines for identifying heads of state. This can only be a good thing, since perhaps people will get better at knowing the names of international figures. Well, those people who read newspapers, anyway. (But will there be any papers left to read?)

There goes the neighborhood

http://www.politico.com/blogs/michaelcalderone/1108/Baker_named_WSJs_deputy_editorinchief.html?showall

A village voice speaks — from the crypt

I nearly blew my coffee out of my nose when I read this, from David Broder, to be published in tomorrow's WaPo.

The country faces a choice between two men who both promise the nation a more principled, less partisan leadership.

Broder says this is the best campaign he's ever covered. The best? Well, maybe the craziest and even the most exciting, from his Village perspective. "Best" is a word that just doesn't fit. And Broder's forcing an equality between the presumed governance styles of both candidates is, at the very most charitable, absurd.

As for "more principled" — see RJ Eskow's piece, noted immediately below.

And for "less partisan" — well, Tristero at Hullabaloo has the last word.

Update: Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian says something a lot different from Broder, and a lot closer to the mark:

THIS has been the worst US presidential campaign I've ever seen. Vacuous, fatuous, misleading, dishonest, trivial, at times unhinged in its disconnect from reality.

I don't agree with Sheridan's general slant (he leans to the right, and doesn't like Obama) but I think his lede quite captures the "American Idol" idiocies of our post-modern campaigns.

Uh-oh!

Well, the only poll that matters has been taken, the only vote that counts has been cast.

The Alien has endorsed McCain. Obama should just concede the election right now and save us all time and money.

WASHINGTON, DC - In a shocking reversal, the Alien has switched his endorsement from Barack Obama to John McCain.

With major implications for the U.S. presidential election, political kingmaker the Alien has changed his endorsement amid furor. Both political camps are buzzing about the implications, as the Alien has correctly predicted the winning president in every election for the past 28 years.

Ongoing investigation points to Cindy McCain as being the cause for this historic shift in allegiances.

Yes, it's true. The Alien has been mesmerized by Cindy McCain's eerily transparent eyeballs and was last seen cavorting with Mrs. McCain in a hot-tub.

Also abuzz are the Village Elders who have been rendered incoherent by the revelations. While they are properly scandalized by Cindy's dalliance with the Alien -- Sally Quinn has vowed to strike the hussy from her guest list -- they are simultaneously overjoyed that Favorite Son and former Maverick John McCain will be their next club president. The Washington Post reports that David Broder, Dean of the Undead, will postpone his embalming to attend the Inaugural Balls.

Weekly World News editors remain cautious in their predictions:

What impact this news will have on the election has yet to be determined. Swing state voters, who will decide this election, have the highest rate of alien abductions and UFO sightings and are known to vote in accordance with supernatural forces.

Hey, WSJ. Chill!

The goal of Sen. Obama and the modern, "progressive" Democratic Party is to move the U.S. in the direction of Western Europe, the so-called German model and its "social market economy." Under this notion, business is highly regulated, as it would be in the next Congress under Democratic House committee chairmen Markey, Frank and Waxman. Business is allowed to create "wealth" so long as its utility is not primarily to create new jobs or economic growth but to support a deep welfare system.

So sayeth a certain Daniel Henniger in the Wall Street Journal. The emphasis is mine.

Jeez. Aside from being a big fat lie, this is stupid. Just plain dumb.

Didn't this guy ever hear the old saw, "A rising tide lifts all boats"? Nah. Has he actually been listening to Obama on jobs and economic growth? Nah. Does he believe that making real things again (instead of merely deals) is some kind of subversive notion that should be stopped before Barack and EdBarneyHenry can wrest the free-enterprise system from his cold, dead hand?

Or is he simply like so many of his ilk, someone who thinks that real people have no value and that only rich people count for something in this world? I know he knows his Rand. But does he know his Bible? Like, I mean, that business about a camel and the eye of a needle.

That Buckley lad's a damn fine writer

Update 10/14: Ooops.

Christopher Buckley apologizes to his father's ghost, says why he's voting for Obama: here.

What if the whole world could vote?

London's Economist asks, "What if the whole world could vote?" and to provide a response to the question has set up a "Global Electoral College." There's an interactive results map and an opportunity for you to cast your vote for Obama or for McCain.

The Economist has redrawn the electoral map to give all 195 of the world's countries (including the United States) a say in the election's outcome. As in America, each country has been allocated a minimum of three electoral-college votes with extra votes allocated in proportion to population size. With over 6.5 billion people enfranchised, the result is a much larger electoral college of 9,875 votes. But rally your countrymen—a nation must have at least ten individual votes in order to have its electoral-college votes counted.

There are few countries whose votes in the Global Electoral College are a foregone conclusion. So the winner is unlikely to be decided by a small number of "swing countries". Rather, they will have to cobble together a coalition of small, medium and large nations. (A campaign stop in Beijing is recommended, as well as a tour of Africa.) Voting in the Global Electoral College will close at midnight London time on November 1st, when the candidate with most electoral-college votes will be declared the winner.

Maybe the authors of the idea really believed that the winner "will have to cobble together a coalition." One also might have thought that the readers of The Economist would be tilted toward McCain. Neither assumption proves true, at least as far as the map stands now.

It's all blue...except for Georgia and Macedonia, and the latter is merely "leaning" in McCain's favor.

Lovers' spat or a sea change?

One thing about Richard Cohen -- He's not afraid to expose his profound foolishness on the WaPo OpEd page for all to see (h/t Josh Marshall).

It's sad, really, when the object of one's man-crush so thoroughly whores himself that no amount of blind love can disguise the truth. Even sadder is to have been so oblivious for so long to evidence that the McCain mythology is just that: A myth.

Cohen recounts the moment the scales fell from his eyes. "The precise moment of McCain's abasement" came last week when he was confronted by Joy Behar on "The View" about the lipstick-on-a-pig and sex-ed-for-kindergartners ads:

"We know that those two ads are untrue," Behar said. "They are lies."

Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like "Home Cooking" or "We Will Not Be Undersold." Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation "I approve this message" was just boilerplate. But he didn't.

"Actually, they are not lies," he said.

Congratulations, Richard, for catching up to those of us who suspected McCain was a fraud back in 2000 and were absolutely sure in 2004. It must have been difficult, given the strength of your infatuation with McCain:

... McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains -- his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that's all -- but just as honorably. No more, though.

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty.

What an extraordinary confession.

At a forum last week at Columbia University, McCain said, "But right now we have to restore trust and confidence in government." This was always the promise of John McCain, the single best reason to vote for him. America has been cheated on too many times -- the lies of Vietnam and Watergate and Iraq. So many lies. [...]

McCain was going to fix all that. He was going to look the American people in the eyes and say, not me. I will not lie to you. I am John McCain, son and grandson of admirals. I tell the truth.

But Joy Behar knew better. And so McCain lied about his lying and maybe thinks that if he wins the election, he can -- as he did in South Carolina -- renounce who he was and what he did and resume his old persona. It won't work.

It's nice to know that Cohen won't be fooled again, but I'd like to know why he was so thoroughly hoodwinked in the first place.

How can Cohen cite the "lies of Vietnam and Watergate and Iraq" and say that McCain would "fix all that." McCain was a main conduit of those lies.

Cohen thinks McCain redeemed himself when he renounced his Confederate flag pander in South Carolina, but isn't that just part of McCain's modus operandi for years? He'd insult someone, say or do something nasty and then apologize later. It was supposed to be so honest and endearing but all it did was give McCain license to indulge his ugliest impulses with a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card.

Cohen still doesn't drill down to the deeper truth: McCain's "old persona" is no different than his new persona. He always was a lying, opportunistic hypocrite. The "maverick" hogwash and "straight-talk" doubletalk were always ad slogans.

For me, the definitive proof that McCain is a phony came in 2004 when he campaigned for Bush.

After the truly horrible smears that Bush and Rove unleashed on McCain in South Carolina in 2000, anyone with an ounce of integrity and self-respect would have told Bush to go fuck himself in 2004. John McCain, however, decided that his political ambition was more important than what shreds of integrity might have remained. So he went on the stump for the bastards who dragged McCain's family through the mud.

The smears claimed that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains' dark-skinned daughter was adopted from Bangladesh), that his wife Cindy was a drug addict, that he was a homosexual, and that he was a "Manchurian Candidate" who was either a traitor or mentally unstable from his North Vietnam POW days.

You know, I could forgive someone for coming after me, but not for trashing my family. But this is the man who called his own trophy wife a c**t. The man who trots out blond trophy daughter Meghan and keeps adopted daughter Bridget out of camera range.

After that, the revelations about his divorce and his temper, his almost comical flip-flops, the cynical pandering of his veep pick -- all of it filled in the picture but none of it was all that surprising.

If we wind up with President McCain and President-in-Waiting Sarah Palin next January, elite Washington pundits like Cohen will bear a good share of the blame. He is just one of the gaggle of useful idiots who embraced McCain's shtick with all their hearts and propagated the legend far and wide. They've taken forever to finally start wiping the sleep from their eyes and it may well be too late. 

Calling Charles Atlas... There's a campaign that needs you

Today, the NYTimes headlines the Obama camp's "plans" to step it up, at last. Is it the campaign or the reporting that makes me feel that Obama and his advisors still, at this late date, do not understand that the Big Mo' has been stolen by McCain and Palin and that they need to fight hard to get it back.

Obama Plans Sharper Tone as Party Frets

Senator Barack Obama will intensify his assault against Senator John McCain, with new television advertisements and more forceful attacks by the candidate and surrogates beginning Friday morning, as he confronts an invigorated Republican presidential ticket and increasing nervousness in the Democratic ranks.

[...]

Mr. Obama's campaign released two new advertisements this morning that underscored the tougher road it is taking, criticizing Mr. McCain for, among other things, favoring tax cuts for corporations and acknowledging that he doesn't know how to use a computer or send e-mail. "Things have changed in the last 26 years, but John McCain hasn't," an announcer says in one advertisement. "After one president who was out of touch, we just can't afford more of the same."

That is just so lame. Out of touch? Oh yeah, that's gonna hurt St. John. People really prefer a president who can google over one who brandishes a battle ax and promises to slay the dragons and avenge the fallen.

I said it before, and I'll say it again:

The Obama campaign has two jobs now: repair the damage done to Obama and shred McCain's reputation. [...] Dems can't allow it to be close or the Republicans will have no compunction about trying to steal another four years in power.

Obama won the nomination because he made people feel good about being Americans and hopeful about the future. His campaign must somehow recapture that feeling.

At the same time, they must get brutal and savage McCain and Palin's reputations. It should be easy -- Obama has the facts on his side.

So stop the courtly dance, fer gawd's sake! What the frak happened to Biden? Did they shoot him with horse tranquilizers or something?

Once and for all: Get rid of the idea that you're all Senators who debate languidly and good-naturedly in the morning and then get together for bean soup in the Senate dining room. This is fighting your sworn enemies to drag the power from their dying clutch. Stop being too polite to slice into their entrails. This is a fight to the death and it's not just your petty political careers that will die if you lose -- this democracy is dying and I don't think it will survive under continued Republican misrule.

But what's the use? It's falling on deaf ears. From the Times:

In addition, advertising themes will be pay equity for women, an issue that has particular resonance as the campaigns battle for female voters, and a more pointed linking of Mr. McCain to President Bush and Republicans in Washington.

But Mr. Obama’s aides said they were confident with the course of the campaign. They said that, other than making some shifts around the edges, particularly in response to Mr. McCain’s effort to seize the change issue from Mr. Obama, they were not planning any major deviation from a strategy that called for a steady escalation of attacks on Mr. McCain as the race heads toward the debates.

[...]

“We’re sensitive to the fluid dynamics of the campaign, but we have a game plan and a strategy,” said Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe. “We’re familiar with this. And I’m sure between now and Nov. 4 there will be another period of hand-wringing and bed-wetting. It comes with the territory.”

No, Plouffe is pretty satisfied, although he admits they were surprised by McCain's change in tactics, Palin's strength and the new McCain message of "change". I guess being "surprised" by a thorough hijacking of his own campaign's mojo isn't enough to do more than make "some shifts around the edges":

Inside the campaign headquarters in Chicago, aides said, there have been no emergency conference calls or special strategy sessions to deal with the new dynamic in the race.

Obama's campaign will not be saved by pay equity for women. And I must ask: Why should there be any room now, less than two months before Election Day, to develop "advertising themes" that have "a more pointed linking" of McCain to Bush and the Republican failures of the last eight years? Why haven't ads hammered that link mercilessly? How could there be any doubt in voters' minds about this fundamental fact after months and months of campaigning?

[...] Mr. Obama’s aides said they had been taken aback by the newfound aggressiveness of the McCain campaign under Steve Schmidt, who has played an increasingly powerful role since last summer. Even as the aides have denounced the tactics as unsavory, they acknowledge that Mr. McCain is running a more effective campaign than he was a month ago.

I want to punch Plouffe's lights out. It's nice to know they have a game plan and a strategy but can he say with any assurance that it's still working? He's content to pass off the urgent pleas of Dems everywhere as "hand-wringing" and "bed-wetting"? This, from the campaign geniuses who failed to anticipate scorched-earth tactics from Schmidt, a disciple of Rove? Who failed to anticipate Rove himself?

Stop giving interviews about what you "plan" to do, and just do it. You look weak and reactive, meditative when you should be aggressive. It sounds like you're gonna join a gym and the next time that bully tries to kick sand in your face... Well, just you wait and see!

We're waiting, all right, but we're not seeing anything and time is running out.