Politics

by hilzoy

Two races in my very own state of Maryland are worth watching, and, if you happen to live in the neighborhood, working for. Descriptions below the fold. Short version: Go Donna Edwards and Wayne Gilchrest!

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by publius

To join the chorus tonight, I too am favoring Obama. I feel like I’ve given my reasons over the past few months, so I’ll limit myself to one example that best captures the stakes for me.

Katherine recently posted on Clinton’s distasteful support for deporting immigrants who have committed crimes without legal process. Of course, as Hilzoy has pointed out until she’s blue in the face, “legal process” isn’t about supporting criminals – it’s about generating information to make sure the person is a criminal in the first place. Removing all legal process here would be cruel because it would completely ignore the underlying factual context. Multiple public urinators could face the same summary deportation that real criminals would. (Good thing I was a citizen while in college … and now).

But the larger problem is the demagoguery. Even more broadly, the problem is that the demagoguery provides further evidence of Clinton’s unwillingness to break from the larger conservative (and even nationalist) narratives that currently define our political debates.

To use an analogy, consider the Internets. More precisely, think about the process of downloading a pdf file. To be grotesquely general, you contact the server that contains the file and it then transmits that information in the form of packets. Those packets eventually reach your computer and are “translated” into a readable form as they ascend the application layers to the Adobe program.

The point I want to emphasize is the translation process and how it’s similar to the way political narratives translate facts on the ground into “readable” form. Issues like the war or immigration bubble up from the ground and eventually get translated into some broader narrative or schema that helps people digest it. While Lakoff is wrong about a lot (especially remedies), he’s right that narratives matter – and can be stubbornly resistant.

The problem though is not so much the existence of narratives, but that narratives are skewed in nationalist ways – “evil Adobes,” if you will. For instance, it bothers me that we as a nation translate willingness to go to war into signs of personal courage and strength. It bothers me that diplomacy is translated into lovey-dove appeasing of teh enemy. It bothers me that legal protections that people spent centuries fighting for are translated into, and casually dismissed as, terrorist sympathy measures. It bothers me that any tax increase – no matter how limited or progressive – is translated into robbing working people.

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by hilzoy

I, too, endorse Obama for President, to no one’s surprise. Since Katherine has already written a lot of what I would have wanted to say about his rhetoric, and since I’ve already talked about one of my most important reasons for supporting him, namely the fact that he got Iraq right from the outset, I’ll say something about the peculiar idea that Barack Obama is all style and no substance.

I came to Obama by an unusual route: as I explained here, I follow some issues pretty closely, and over and over again, Barack Obama kept popping up, doing really good substantive things. There he was, working for nuclear non-proliferation and securing loose stockpiles of conventional weapons, like shoulder-fired missiles. There he was again, passing what the Washington Post called “the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet” — though not as strong as Obama would have liked. Look — he’s over there, passing a bill that created a searchable database of recipients of federal contracts and grants, proposing legislation on avian flu back when most people hadn’t even heard of it, working to make sure that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were screened for traumatic brain injury and to prevent homelessness among veterans, successfully fighting a proposal by the VA to reexamine all PTSD cases in which full benefits had been awarded, working to ban no-bid contracts in Katrina reconstruction, and introducing legislation to criminalize deceptive political tactics and voter intimidation. And there he was again, introducing a tech plan of which Lawrence Lessig wrote:

“Obama has committed himself to a technology policy for government that could radically change how government works. The small part of that is simple efficiency — the appointment with broad power of a CTO for the government, making the insanely backwards technology systems of government actually work.

But the big part of this is a commitment to making data about the government (as well as government data) publicly available in standard machine readable formats. The promise isn’t just the naive promise that government websites will work better and reveal more. It is the really powerful promise to feed the data necessary for the Sunlights and the Maplights of the world to make government work better. Atomize (or RSS-ify) government data (votes, contributions, Members of Congress’s calendars) and you enable the rest of us to make clear the economy of influence that is Washington.

After the debacle that is the last 7 years, the duty is upon the Democrats to be something different. I’ve been wildly critical of their sameness (remember “Dems to the Net: Go to hell” which earned me lots of friends in the Democratic party). I would give my left arm to be able to celebrate their difference. This man, Mr. Obama, would be that difference. He has as much support as I can give.”

Imagine my surprise, then, when I heard people saying that Obama wasn’t “substantive”. It was exactly like my experience in 2004 when, after hearing Wes Clark for the first time, I went and looked up his positions on a whole host of issues of concern to me, and only then started reading media accounts of him in which I “learned” that no one knew what his positions were.

As some of my students would say: I was like, wtf?

I was also surprised …

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by publius

Though I watched the Democratic debate, I’ve read very little post-debate commentary today. So I don’t know who “won.” But as I was watching them last night, I stopped thinking about who was winning or losing. Instead, I found myself marveling at their combined performance. The entire debate – certainly the most substantive one in my lifetime – was a collective advertisement for the Democratic Party. Whatever else it achieved, the clash of these Titans made the Republican field look small, petty, and tired. Democrats should feel proud about both the caliber of the candidates and the level of the policy discussion on display last night.

It confirmed how much I enjoy primaries – especially this one. Frankly, I’ve never agreed with those who belittle primary races, or feel above picking sides. For obvious reasons, these races are extremely important – and historically consequential. But what’s less obvious is how interesting they are from a purely aesthetic perspective. The horse race we’re witnessing is drama of the highest order – pure political theater. And while emotions will surely run high in the weeks to come, political junkies in particular should take a step back and enjoy the beauty of it. Not beauty in the sense of flowers and butterflies, but in a higher, more human, aesthetic sense.

First, consider the novelty of this race. The Democratic Party is about to hold a runoff between a woman and an African-American for President of the United States. Obviously, this is a testament to these two individuals and their immense talents. But from a broader perspective, this runoff is the vindication of generations of activists and political organizations (armies of Katherines, if you will).

Consider the condition of both women and blacks a mere hundred years ago. Francis Fukuyama notwithstanding, there was nothing inevitable about the changes we’ve seen. Those changes were the product of blood, sweat, and tears over a long period of time. They were willed by political engagement and social movements that were often ridiculed in their day (and remain ridiculed – note the smug way people refer to “identity politics” today). Again, I’m not taking anything away from these two individuals, but we should remember the broader social and political struggles that made their ascension possible in the first place.

Second, step back and appreciate the epic-ness of this particular contest. This is a clash in a primary between two massive, well-oiled, well-funded machines. (Obama supporters should not ignore how many establishment bigwigs bundle for, and otherwise support, Obama). It’s rare to see these levels of competence, funding, and organization in rival presidential primary camps. Regardless of who wins, the nominee is going to be well-prepared for the general given that each is doing daily battle with nationally-organized campaigns performing at the top of their respective games.

These are big-time organizations. That’s why, at least here, I enjoy even the “silly” horse race focus. On some level, sure, I wish that media coverage and political strategy were 100% policy-based. But in the all too human world in which we live, it’s impossible to fully separate these contests from the schoolyard fights that remain the highlight of my primary education experience. In short, perceptions of the horse race matter. And for this reason, how the campaigns drive – and respond to – these stories is part of the broader “fight” that makes for such compelling theater.

It’s also quite fitting that, in the week before Super Tuesday, both camps are humming on all cylinders. They truly are at the top of their games right now. The debate, for instance, quite appropriately shifted from schoolyard antics to high-level policy discussions. And though this sounds cheesy, it was an honor to watch it. I haven’t enjoyed the debates this year, but the “runoff” debate last night was a different story. To see candidates of this caliber engaging one-one-one in a high-level substantive debate about the great issues of our day (e.g., Iraq and health care) was political junkie manna.

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by hilzoy

I think it’s more or less beyond question that Hillary Clinton, and her husband, have told a series of lies about Barack Obama. (I’ve put some familiar examples at the end of this post: anyone who wants to consider the evidence can do so, but it won’t be as distracting to those who have already seen it.) I basically agree with what publius said about it:

“What’s so infuriating is that, in doing so, they assume their audience is too ignorant to learn the truth. It’s not so much that they’re attacking Obama – after all, that’s politics. It’s that Clinton’s attacks illustrate a deep contempt for voters. Call it “the rube strategy” – we’ll say what we want and most people will be too ignorant to ever figure out the difference.”

However, I don’t think the problem is exactly that they are assuming that most people won’t follow the news closely enough to know who is telling the truth and who is lying. As far as I can tell, that assumption is accurate. The problem is that they are playing on that ignorance in a way that displays a different sort of contempt for voters: not the assumption that most people do not follow the news closely enough to be able to say what’s wrong with criticizing Obama’s ‘present’ votes on anti-abortion bills, which is probably true, but the idea that it is OK to manipulate them into casting votes they might not cast if people were not telling them lies.

Consider, for instance …

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