Campaign 2012: Mitt speaks!

8 10 2011

Anything goes in politics.

I have declaimed this often and loudly on this and other (well, TNC’s and sometimes Emily’s) blogs: the only thing that matters in political campaigning is what works. That’s it.

What about the law? If breaking the law doesn’t work, don’t do it. Most of the time it doesn’t, but some of the time—particularly as regards campaign finance—it doesn’t matter: any final rulings on the matter take place after the election and involve only a fine, if that.

More to the point, I see no point in getting OUTRAGED or offended! by campaign rhetoric  because so much of this rhetoric is designed to rouse one’s base, which pretty much has the effect of OUTRAGING and offending! the other side.

C’est la vie politique, in other words.

Anyway, there are limits the O and o! tactic, in that presidential candidates need to convince the undecideds to toss their votes to them. You don’t want to O & o! these folks, you want to bring them along; given that by definition they’re already more skeptical of your candidacy, you don’t want to do anything which causes them to squint their eyes, twist their lips, and say that’s dumb.

I nominate former governor Mitt Romney’s foreign policy speech to the Citadel for the squint treatment.

He says a lot of contestable items in the speech, repeating, for example, the canard that Obama has “apologized” for America. Whatever: that’s a Republican theme manufactured to sow doubts about Obama’s fealty to the US, and while there is no evidence of any sort of “apology tour”, this attempted theming is a standard part of any political campaign (see: Al Gore and his alleged invention of the Internet).

This, however, is dumb:

I will not surrender America’s role in the world. This is very simple: If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your President.
You have that President today.

Uh-huh.

All of the other nonsense about a military build-up and world leadership and big sticks are interpretive-partisan matters, that is, whether or not you see it as nonsense likely varies on where you stand. Romney may or may not believe that the Navy has been “hollowed out”, but it is within the realm of possibility that he thinks that the shipbuilding rate of 9 [nine what? nine ships? which ships?] is alarmingly low, and that increasing this to 15 will secure the nation.

But this, that President Obama wants a weak America, does he really believe that?

Please.

Romney is often hit with the charge of a Gumby candidacy: he’ll bend and fold and spindle himself into any shape his audience wants. From pro-choice to pro-life, pro-gay rights to anti-, from moderate to rightist, from the craven sane to the craven un-sane—again, whatever works.

But declamations on the president’s devotion to this country are dumb. Yes, there is a rump portion of the Republican electorate who question Obama’s bona fides, but there are likely many more who simply think he’s wrong; they question his strategy, not his motives.

Now, this latter group may not care if Romney dissects Obama’s heart, but as any Republican nominee will have to contest in a national election, he’ll want to avoid saying anything to his base that could cause undecideds to squint at his words.

Saying that Obama doesn’t want a strong America is squint-worthy for two reasons:

1) He authorized the killing of Osama bin Laden and drone strikes which have killed dozens of al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, gave the go-ahead in the capture of Somali pirates, and in his positioning of special-ops military teams around the world, has made clear that the US will do what it will do, regardless of national borders and international law.

(I have my own disputes with some of his actions, but I am in the minority in questioning what I see as presidential overreach.)

In any case, Romney is working against easily-available and hard-to-dispute evidence, such that he leaves himself open to the question of “what would you do differently in these cases?”, a question which allows him no good answers.

2. Along the same lines, he leaves himself open to the questions along the lines of  “do you really believe that President Obama wants a weak America/doesn’t put America first/doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism/etc.?”

This is dumb because, again, there’s no quick-and-easy way to answer this question, not only because of the evidence, but also because of the presumption of bad-faith.

Pundits and operatives can engage in bad-faith, but the president is supposed to be bigger than all that, he’s supposed to be generous and broad-minded and able to embrace all of America. (Yeah, yeah, I know, but what can I say: it’s a campaign trope.) He’s supposed to say stuff along the lines of “My opponent and I both love this country, but only one of us has what it takes to lead the nation forward.”  He’s not a bad man, he just has bad ideas.

You want questions which allow you in your response to demonstrate both your generosity and superiority. You want questions which allow you to focus unreservedly on your policies and vision, on your depth and far-sightedness. You want questions which allow you smoothly to rise above, even as you whack away at your opponent.

“Governor Romney, in your speech before the Citadel you stated that President Obama does not want the United States to be the strongest country in the world. Do you really believe that? Do you really think your opponent wants to destroy America? ” is not that kind of question, because any attempted smooth rising-above will be stuck on your own bad-faith words.

Which is why opening himself up to this line is. . . dumb.

(Edited for typos, grammar, and some nasty syntax errors.)


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I will follow

10 07 2011

How can a political freak not have fun with a fellow political freak—oh she of the Goth eyeliner (which only serves to accentuate her cheerful bats-in-the-belfry look) and psycholbin-inflected understanding of American history, someone given to hiding behind bushes to spy on an open protest and screaming about lesbian bathroom-kidnap plots—like Michele Bachmann?

I’ve had a lot of fun with the Republican representative from the sixth district  of Minnesota, and, frankly, I expect to continue doing so. She may be an ideological menace who would make a terrible, terrible president, but she’s so manifestly unsuited to the job that I have no real worries about her delivering an inaugural address in January 2013.

So I feel free to mock her at will.

There is, however, one (semi-? sur-?) real issue that her candidacy brings to the political debate, that of the influence of her husband, Marcus. Ms. Bachmann, you see, proclaims adherence to the “wifely submission” model of marriage.

How she and her hub run their home is, in the main, not my business, and the practice of a spouse influencing a politician’s decisions is hardly new (if only John had listened to Abigail’s admonition to “remember the ladies”. . .).  But outside of Edith Wilson’s alleged takeover of the presidency during husband Woodrow’s stroke-induced decline, it’s generally conceded that whatever the influence, the president is still is charge.

If, however, that politician states outright that she is not in charge, then what are constituents and voters to decide?

Marcus Bachmann, after all, isn’t the one taking the oath of office. He makes no promises to “uphold and defend the Constitution”, nor does he hold any responsibility to his wife’s constituents. He is in charge without being accountable.

Now, given that Rep. Bachmann stated in 2006 that “The Lord says be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands” a month before she was elected for the first time to the House, and has been re-elected twice, it’s entirely possible that her constituents decided they were just fine with voting for someone who answered to her husband before she answered to them. Maybe that they both claimed to answer to God was sufficient assurance that even if this greater accountability to the Lord translated into a lesser accountability to the people, the greater was for the better.

The issue of authority in marriage is a big issue in conservative Christian circles. The “complementarian” versus “egalitarian” models of marriage each (apparently) finds support in scripture, and even those marriages which claim the husband as head can look awfully equal. And with or without any scripto-ideological positioning, marriage can be a bugger.

Given these complexities, it’s possible that those who hear “submissiveness” translate the term  into “agreement”, and are thus unbothered by any notion that Mr. Bachmann might tell Mrs. Bachmann what to do; they’re simply a married couple, like any other, trying to keep it together.

That’s one end of the interpretive spectrum, anyway. At the other end, however, is the possibility that the Mister is in charge, and that what he says, goes, period. No oaths of office, no promises to constituents, matters as much as the God-infused authority of the Man of the House.

I’ll take the cynical middle course: Rep. Bachmann may see no conflict in choosing amongst her various accountabilities—her God, her husband, the Constitution, the citizens in her district—because these constituencies all line up. That is, because she doesn’t recognize that there might be other legitimate interests, because she doesn’t acknowledge the existence of those who legitimately (i.e., are motivated by something other than hatred or ignorance or some sort of anti-American bias) oppose her, she doesn’t have to reckon with the mess of pluralism—which is to say, the mess of American and global politics today.

Nope, she’s just able serenely to float above it all, hand-in-hand with her hubby, utterly unable and unwilling to engage in the realities of life as Other people live it.

We’re not real to her, and thus not to be taken seriously.

Which I guess frees us not to take her seriously, either.

_____

h/t Jill Lawrence, The Daily Beast; Jason Horowitz, The Washington Post; Molly Worthen, New York Times Magazine


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Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!

8 07 2011

Y’all have heard about the FAMiLY LEADER Pledge, right? The one for which a signature is required before the FAMiLY (honestly, that’s how they write it) LEADER will endorse a candidate for president?

Imma gonna roll right past the truly offensive preamble (Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President, et cetera) to get to the, well, rather wan defense of man-on-woman marriage:

  • Recognition of the overwhelming statistical evidence that married people enjoy better health, better sex, longer lives, greater financial stability, and that the children raised by a mother and a father together experience better learning, less addiction, less legal trouble, and less extramarital pregnancy.

Really? That’s it?

Aren’t married people also taller, better looking, in better shape, and better able to savor the distinctions between Speyside and Island single malt whiskys? Aren’t married men more likely to have a full head of hair throughout their lives and the boobs of married women more likely to remain perky? Aren’t their homes cleaner, their cars shinier (and with bigger engines!), and aren’t they more likely to have a pool?

And what about those kids? Don’t they also experience more popularity and have a better chance at being the captain of the football team, head cheerleader? Don’t they get ponies?

I think these FAMiLY LEADER types are far too tepid in their DEFeNSE of MARRiAGE.

I, for one, would not sign.


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Millions of people living life as foes

14 06 2011

Be very glad I forgot how to grab a screen shot.

Yes, I know, I’ve done it before: something about print screen or using one of those Firefox add-ons and then crunching it through Gimp [thanks Ms Blithe!] to get a usable jpeg image to be posted to this unhumble blog. But last night when I went to grab a shot from Michele Bachmann’s I’m-running-for-president! website, I couldn’t figure it out and it was late and maybe this was just a way for my computer to say No suh! to that Bachmann image and, anyway, no Michelle Bachmann.

Thus: you should be glad.

That is, if you aren’t sobbing over the thought that this woman, while generally thought to have no shot at the nomination, is nonetheless considered to have the chance to pull the party (and thus the country) even further along the rails of the angry crazy train.

Which, honest to god, if forced to choose between Ozzy and Michele, well, I might just move back to Montreal since Ozzy is ineligible to be president.

Or just hunker down in Brooklyn with a lot of booze. A lot.

And maybe a few guns.

‘Cause that’s how it would be. Yeah.


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Waiting for the great leap forward

29 10 2008

So I heard there’s going to be an election next week. Something about the presidency. . . ?

Yeah, I’ve been markedly blase this election season, and not just because ‘election season’ started shortly after the dinosaurs were killed off. I don’t like Bush, have little respect for the Democratic Party (tho’ much respect for individual Dems—go Russ Feingold!), and tend to think that the machinations in the nation’s Capitol are more likely to grind up citizens than ennoble them.

(Ennoble. I know, too much to ask for, but not too much to demand.)

Anyway, long before the major parties settled on their candidates, I knew I’d vote Dem. I’m not a Democrat—it’s a capitalist party, and I’m not a capitalist—but I often move to the right to vote for them. I don’t expect much (anymore), but thought Hey, if the Dem would close Guantanamo and stop torture, the vote would be worth it. That ought not be too much to ask for, and if I get more (sane HHS policies regarding women’s health and contraception, say, or an understanding that diplomacy is required in dealing with one’s adversaries, not friends), all the better.

So I registered with the nice woman in a Bed-Stuy park and asked for time off from Job1 to make sure I’d have time to get to the polls and listened to the conventions and speeches and urged my students to register and vote and listen to the conventions and speeches and listened to political coverage on WNYC  and read and read and read and. . . thought, Whatever.

It’s not that I’m blase about a McCain presidency. Given his apparent lack of interest in domestic policy, I feared that he would appoint ideologues to key positions in HHS, Education, and Justice as a bone to the rightists in his party (this was before the selection of Palin as his running mate). And while I agree with some conservatives that political questions ought to be dealt with politically and not juridically, I’m not looking forward to the judges a President McCain would appoint. Oh, and that whole Iraq thing. . . .

Still, as a pinko in the US, I’m used to the political despair of life under running capitalist dogs! in opposition. It’s not that hard, really. Try not to be OUTRAGED! every time someone says or does something with which you disagree—too exhausting. Don’t think that every person on the other side of you is fatally compromised as a human being—you will end up drinking alone. Oh, and have a drink every now and then, with friends to bitch, and with friends to spar. Yell, if you need to, then eat pie.

This is the one saving grace of the remoteness of federal politics from the ordinary lives of citizens: losing isn’t that much different from winning. Things may be slightly better or slightly worse, but you’ll get to bitch about it, regardless.

More to the point, you’ll get to bitch about it and forget it. That matters, more than any unhappy words (traitor! hater!) that some fool hurls at you. It used to. . . well, it still does irritate me when people foam that a Bush (or Obama) presidency means the end of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Whatever the flaws of the US, this ain’t Russia or Saudi Arabia or Myanmar: when you levee vos skinny fists comme antennae to heaven!, you will most likely be ignored, not imprisoned, disappeared, or murdered.

This is not to say that as long as we’re not being terrorized by our government all is well. Even as beaten-down a politics as exists in the US gives us some space in which to think and to act. Although I’ve moved from wide-eyed activist to squint-eyed theorist, I’m not willing to write off the possibility of something. . . good coming out of elections.

And thus my reconsideration of the coming election. I retain my squint, but I have to admit there is a humming within me at the prospect of an Obama presidency: Maybe we will get something more! Finally, an African-American president! Oh, the possibilities. . . !

It is a faint hum, but it’s there. Oh, the possibilities.


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Why I sing the blues

22 10 2008

No, not another disquisition on depression—although the real topic, presidential politics, is depressing enough.

Multiple posts on toleration, respect, religion, agnosticism, but only a few quick hits on politics.

What the hell? Aren’t I a political theorist, after all? Aren’t I the one who, in 2004, moved from a city I loved in another country back to the US in order to participate in politics? Who dragged her ass out of bed on Saturday mornings to ride a bus to another state for the privilege of knocking on doors and asking those granite folk who they were likely to vote for? Who had her dad drive her to NOW meetings (until she got her license)? Who remembers raising her first-grade fingers in a ‘peace’ sign every time the school bus driver/town mayor halted at the railroad tracks?

Jesus Christ, politics has been in my conscious life as long almost as long as I’ve been conscious of life. And yet my response to this campaign has been: Eh.

Yeah, yeah, I’ll vote, and I really am looking forward to an African-American family in the White House, but, honestly, I simply think Obama will do less damage (to this country, the rest of the world) than would McCain.

I’m not a moderate (I’m a ‘hard-core leftist: run for your lives!’), and my vote for Obama is not reluctant. I just doubt it’s going to matter all that much.

Sigh. It will matter, on some crucial issues: judges, executive power, Guantanamo, torture, access to contraception, the Lily Ledbetter pay act, diplomacy. These are not small things, so in saying I doubt how much the presidential race matters, I’m not saying it doesn’t matter at all. It does. That’s why I’m voting.

And Iraq? I truly don’t know how much leeway the next president will have to do anything momentous. From what I’ve been reading, the Iraqis want the US out sooner rather than later (tho’, preferably, not right this instant), and while the surge has brought a kind of peace to many areas of the country, it’s pretty clear that the force levels required for the surge are unsustainable. I’m guessin’ that whoever the next president is, the next stage of Operation Iraqi Freedom is ‘Iraqi-zation’.

Afghanistan? Unclear that either has a workable plan. That said, Obama seems far more practical (i.e., willing to adapt to exigencies) than does McCain.

So the vote matters: who do you want as captain of the ship?

And this is where I sigh and say, Eh, and sigh again, a bit more angrily, and say I don’t want a fucking captain and I’m not a goddamned ship’s passenger. I’m a citizen in a democratic republic who’d like there to be at least some connection between the peoples’ representatives and the people, who’d like to be addressed as something other than ‘constituent’ or ‘taxpayer’ or ‘prospective voter’. I don’t want to be wooed or massaged or have my pain felt up by some suck-up in a suit who’s going to tottle off to Washington or Albany (or City Hall) and do all that he or she can to cut the citizenry out of politics.

No, I’m not talking about enacting or blocking favored social programs (tho’ I would dearly love universal health care), but about legislators doing what they can to deepen democracy, to involve us further in our own governance. I’m thinkin’: New Deal. Or, more recently, efforts by people in the gulf region post-Katrina to rebuild their cities, physically and politically (and getting at best little help and at worst obstruction from govt officials). This isn’t just about self-help, but about acting in concert with one’s fellows and fully conscious of the political implications of such solidarity.

There’s so much more to say, and I think this really does matter, deeply and broadly, to us as citizens. To presidents, senators, representatives, governors, mayors, and city council members: we’re not you’re goddamned pets. Quit throwing us bones.

And to the rest of us: quit begging for those bones. Stand up already.

*Update*

Here’s the link to the lyrics to BB King’s ‘Why I sing the blues’

Or better yet, get Aretha Franklin’s ‘Spirit in the Dark’ cd and listen to her version. Fantastic.


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They’re not stopping!

15 10 2008

Forty more minutes of this.

Each minute a nail in my melting head. You’d think that [melting] would make the pounding [of nails] hurt less.

And yet it doesn’t.


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Make them stop. Please. Make them stop.

15 10 2008

Oh my god. The debate.

The horror! The horror!

Be glad I’m stifling the urge to blog line by line. This is less out of self-discipline than self-preservation: I fear my head would deliquesce.

I will forbear, and listen. But must. stop. writing. . . now.


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Enough already!

13 09 2008

Just who the hell is running for president, anyway?

Sarah P. has done what is necessary for the GOPper ticket—sent an electric current into all those social conservatives who had taken McCain’s maverick reputation seriously and thus considered staying home E-Day—so why is anyone not in McCain’s camp continuing to take her seriously?

Yeah yeah yeah, he’s old, she’s new, she could be the NEXT LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD (world world world. . .), but criminy, she’s a VP candidate. The only way she could be the NEXT LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD (world world world. . .) is if the man slotted into her party’s presidential candidacy is elected.

So why aren’t we talking about him?

And for the Obama/Biden camp, here’s the 11 millionth piece of unsolicited advice for you: ignore her. Stop talking about her RIGHTNOW. And in the VP debate, treat her as the adjunct to the McCain that she is: slice through her to stick your knives in him. That’s it.

McCain’s the one standing in the way of an Obama presidency, remember?

Criminy.


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