Politics

by hilzoy

Lots of people are talking about Barack Obama. Is he running for President, or positioning himself to be someone else’s running mate? Does he live up to the hype? Is this all just one of those puzzling ephemeral media firestorms? Etc., etc., etc.

I have about as much interest in these questions as I have in polling about the 2008 Presidential race: that is, none whatsoever. I see the problem: he’s young and doesn’t have that much experience. I see the upsides: he’s not Hillary Clinton, he’s smart and decent and thoughtful; like a lot of the most successful candidates of recent years, he comes across as an actual human being rather than a stale droning political android, but unlike, say, Ross Perot and Jesse Ventura, he seems also to have the traits that make for good political leaders. (For instance, unlike Perot, he seems to be quite sane. Little things like that matter.)

All that said, though, I can’t imagine why we’re talking about this stuff when we haven’t even had the 2006 elections yet. There are a number of people I could imagine getting behind, and I’ll decide which of them to go for when the election is closer, and the question a bit less hypothetical. But I do want to add one little data point while people are talking about him, because it’s something I haven’t seen people say. And it’s this: a lot of people are going on about how Obama has not sponsored legislation on any of the Vital Issues Of The Day. Personally, I think that he’d have to be delusional to introduce, say, his own solution to the health insurance crisis: no bill on such a topic introduced by a freshman senator from the minority party would have a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding, and the only reason to introduce one would be to grandstand. For that reason, I think that his failure to do so tends to speak well of him.

(Besides, consider how many Senators must have been watching for any hint of self-importance when Obama arrived in the Senate, given the press he had coming in; how many of them would have had to have been waiting for any sign that he was thinking: here am I, the wondrous Barack Obama, ready to set the Senate straight! The fact that he seems to have disarmed most of them is, I think, an achievement in its own right; it would have been impossible had he introduced his own comprehensive anti-poverty program, or something.)

But I do follow legislation, at least on some issues, and I have been surprised by how often Senator Obama turns up, sponsoring or co-sponsoring really good legislation on some topic that isn’t wildly sexy, but does matter. His bills tend to have the following features: they are good and thoughtful bills that try to solve real problems; they are in general not terribly flashy; and they tend to focus on achieving solutions acceptable to all concerned, not by compromising on principle, but by genuinely trying to craft a solution that everyone can get behind.

His legislation is often proposed with Republican co-sponsorship, which brings me to another point: he is bipartisan in a good way. According to me, bad bipartisanship is the kind practiced by Joe Lieberman. Bad bipartisans are so eager to establish credentials for moderation and reasonableness that they go out of their way to criticize their (supposed) ideological allies and praise their (supposed) opponents. They also compromise on principle, and when their opponents don’t reciprocate, they compromise some more, until over time their positions become indistinguishable from those on the other side.

This isn’t what Obama does. Obama tries to find people, both Democrats and Republicans, who actually care about a particular issue enough to try to get the policy right, and then he works with them. This does not involve compromising on principle. It does, however, involve preferring getting legislation passed to having a spectacular battle. (This is especially true when one is in the minority party, especially in this Senate: the chances that Obama’s bills will actually become law increase dramatically when he has Republican co-sponsors.)

So my little data point is: while Obama has not proposed his Cosmic Plan for World Peace, he has proposed a lot of interesting legislation on important but undercovered topics. I can’t remember another freshman Senator who so routinely pops up when I’m doing research on some non-sexy but important topic, and pops up because he has proposed something genuinely good. Since I think that American politics doesn’t do nearly enough to reward people who take a patient, craftsmanlike attitude towards legislation, caring as much about fixing the parts that no one will notice until they go wrong as about the flashy parts, I wanted to say this. Specifics below the fold.

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by hilzoy

As I said in my last post, the ugliness is coming thick and fast — so fast that I have had to combine it all into one post, which is below the fold. Regrettably, my chosen schema did not accommodate some flat-out lies, like this one. (See also here — for factual details — and here.)

The main post is longish, so I put it below the fold. It concerns the many horrible things that will happen if Democrats win in November. Be very, very afraid.

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by hilzoy

From theAP:

“A senior congressional aide said Wednesday he told House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office about worrisome conduct by Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record) toward teenage pages more than three years ago, long before officials have acknowledged becoming aware of the issue. (…)

Fordham said he was serving as Foley’s chief of staff when he was told about the lawmaker’s inappropriate behavior toward pages more than three years ago. He said he had “more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene” at the time.”

Well, well, well. As Josh Marshall notes, if this is true, then the House leadership has been flat-out lying about this. We shall see.

Josh also writes:

“There have been a number of signals through the course of the day that the last gambit of the GOP House leadership will be to blame the Foley debacle on a cabal of gay staffers who hid and/or enabled Rep. Foley’s behavior for years. The idea being that they are to blame rather than the leadership.

That may sound like a plot turn out of a bad novel. But with the times we’re living in I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

Fordham, the staffer who just turned on Hastert, is openly gay, as is at least one other central player in the drama. Fordham’s word now threatens to take down the whole House leadership. So they’re going to throw everything at him.”

This could be about to get very, very ugly. It’s not as though there haven’t already been all sorts of people — not just bloggers but, for instance, the Wall Street Journal — who have a hard time wrapping their tiny minds around the thought that this episode has no more to do with being gay than the Monica Lewinsky affair had to do with being straight. If the House leadership decides to use this tactic for their own political gain, I do not think it will help them — after all, it will be hard to make the case that some gay cabal was able to deflect attention from all this if that cabal did not consist mainly of Republican staffers who were in a position to run interference between Foley and people who were in a position to do something about him, which House Democrats were not. If the alleged cabal does consist mainly of Republicans, then Republican candidates for office are going to face new questions about how well they chose and supervised their employees — after all, ‘the people we hired turned out to be intent on letting sexual predators run amok among the House pages’ is not normally a winning message, nor is ‘Poor innocent us! we have nourished a viper in our bosom, and we didn’t know a thing!’ a good way to rebut a charge of negligent management.

Besides that, the specific people who hired the members of the alleged cabal would have to explain themselves to their base, which in many cases includes some pretty homophobic people. If David Corn is right — and Josh links to him on this topic, which I take seriously — then the people who employ cabal-members “include Representative Katherine Harris and Henry Hyde and Senators Bill Frist, George Allen, Mitch McConnell and Rick Santorum.” Possibly the only even vaguely amusing thing to come out of all this would be listening to Rick Santorum trying to explain how he came to employ a member of a homosexual cabal, and whether he let him near the family dog.

But I wouldn’t want to go down that road if I were Dennis Hastert.

But let’s be completely clear what it would mean if he did. It would mean that rather than admit that he didn’t handle this right — which seems pretty clearly true, cabal or no cabal — and taking the consequences, he’s prepared to wreck people’s lives and play on the worst kind of homophobia. We already know that he’s willing to sacrifice teenagers for the sake of politics; we’ll just be able to add that he’s also willing to sacrifice adults whom he knows, some of whom are presumably his friends and comrades, and who have, rightly or wrongly, supported his party and his allies for years; along with civility, decency, tolerance, and any principles he might have left.

I really hope he doesn’t go there.

***

Other people have already tossed basic decency overboard. There is one right-wing blog, to which I will not link, that has outed one of the ex-pages — name, picture, employer, university, the whole nine yards. This is completely and totally out of bounds. We’re talking about someone who was the victim of a crime, and an unusually embarrassing one at that. The person who outed him claims that he will explain why he did so, but doesn’t deliver, and there’s no obvious reason I can see why he would have thought this worth doing. It would have been despicable and vile even if outing the ex-page had provided some new and relevant information; as things stand, it seems to be not just despicable and vile, but completely pointless.

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by hilzoy

Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

“One of the central prongs in the right-wing effort to blame Bill Clinton for the growth of al-Qaida (and one of the central aspects of the general neoconservative mythology of how to fight terrorism) revolves around Somalia. Specifically, the right-wingers claim that President Clinton’s withdrawal of troops from Somalia after a Muslim militia dragged the bodies of U.S. troops through the streets of Mogadishu conveyed weakness to the Muslim world and showed that we could be easily defeated. We suffer a few casualties, and we run away. They claim that that perceived weakness — “cutting and running” from Somalia — is what “emboldened” Osama bin Laden in the 1990s to wage war against us.

But that is pure historical revisionism; it is just completely false. (…) After the U.S. troops were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, numerous conservative senators and representatives — mostly Republican along with some conservative Southern Democrats — demanded that Clinton withdraw all American troops immediately, insisting that the U.S. had no interest in Somalia and that not one more American troop should die there. They gave speeches stoked with nationalistic anger and angrily demanded immediate withdrawal, and even threatened to introduce legislation to cut off all funding for any troop maintenance in Somalia.

Clinton — along with Democratic senators such as John Kerry — vigorously argued against immediate withdrawal, in part because of the concern that America would look weak by panicking and abandoning its mission at the first sign of trouble (just like President Reagan did in 1983 when he immediately withdrew U.S. forces from Lebanon after the attack on U.S. Marines). Clinton had to virtually beg to be allowed to keep troops for an additional six months (and he even increased American troop levels) to stabilize the situation, demonstrate U.S. resolve and a commitment to the mission and, most of all, avoid a panicky, fear-driven retreat.”

I remember this, and have always found it odd that our withdrawal was painted as a Clinton move, when as I remember it he worked against it. But unlike me, Glenn actually went to the trouble of looking up quotes from the debate over Somalia. He has put them here. It’s worth reading, in order to remind yourself who, exactly, was in favor of cutting and running as soon as we took casualties, and who, in the face of considerable pressure to cave, said this:

“So, now, we face a choice. Do we leave when the job gets tough or when the job is well done? Do we invite the return of mass suffering or do we leave in a way that gives the Somalis a decent chance to survive? Recently, Gen. Colin Powell said this about our choices in Somalia: “Because things get difficult, you don’t cut and run. You work the problem and try to find a correct solution.” (….)

So let us finish the work we set out to do. Let us demonstrate to the world, as generations of Americans have done before us, that when Americans take on a challenge, they do the job right.”

— On reflection, and because I too have TimesSelect ;), I’m going to paste longer sections of Clinton’s speech on Somalia below the fold, in the interests of historical accuracy.

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