Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly...

John Ibbitson wrote what I think is going to be one of my favourite op-eds ever (partly because he gets the smugness just right) in yesterday's Globe and Mail about Parliament passing C-38, the gay marriage recognition bill.

The best part is what he writes about "healthy conservatism":

Healthy conservatism promotes the continuity of civilization, the importance of community, the dangers of thoughtless change. It does not, or should not, assert the right of white, Christian heterosexual males of a certain age to limit the rights of everyone else. The past 100 years of social history has been dedicated, on good days, to constraining the dominance of this minority. Yesterday was a good day.


What a nice fantasy. If conservatism was like that, I'd call myself a conservative. Unfortunately, it's not anything like that. Not in the US, and not in Canada either, where our right wing is just as embarrassing (if not as dangerously powerful) as theirs:


Conservative Leader Stephen Harper says if his party forms the next government, the law will be revisited.

Harper made the promise one day after suggesting the adoption of the law lacked legitimacy because it relied on the support of the separatist Bloc Québécois. Harper said he believes Bloc MPs are the legitimate representatives of Quebec voters. But he argues most Canadians aren't buying it as a final decision since most federalist MPs are opposed to same-sex marriage.

Harper says a Conservative government would hold a free vote for all MPs on the matter, rather than forcing cabinet ministers to vote with the government.


This is (a) horseshit; the Tories conspired for months with the Bloc to try and bring down the government. The Bloc only recently switched sides because of C-38 and because they think their electoral prospects will be brighter in the fall; and (b) disgusting; implying that Quebecers (through their elected representatives) aren't real Canadians in the service of implying that homosexuals don't deserve full and equal rights before the law.

Harper has proved himself over the past three months to be an appalling politician. He's a dangerous, reckless demagogue, pandering to the very worst aspects of Canadian culture, not excluding homophobia. It's simply amazing that the Canadian newspapers keep treating him with such kid gloves, especially in comparison to the full-bore cynicism with which they cover Martin and the Liberals (hah! tell that to any American liberal I guess).

Oh, yeah, and the great smugness part of Ibbitson's piece:


With this vote, one of the most eventful and stressful House sessions in Canadian history reaches its end.

...So, enjoy the summer while it lasts. And congratulate yourself. You are part of the most diverse, tolerant and open-minded place on Earth.

And yesterday proved the thesis once again.


Sometimes, we Canadians gotta be smug.

Lee Siegal vs. Morgan Spurlock

The New Republic's TV critic, Lee Siegel (who, excepting Dissent Magazine's co-editor Mitchell Cohen, is possibly America's last surviving honest-to-God jaded goo-goo) took on indie director Morgan Spurlock, who has a new miniseries called 30 Days on the FX network, yesterday in his always-fantastic weekly "Down the Tube" column:

Seven years after Morgan Spurlock graduated from film school in 1993, he came up with an idea for an online proto-reality show called "I Bet You Will," which eventually was picked up by MTV. The premise for the series was that, as Spurlock told an interviewer at the time, "people will do anything ... and I mean anything ... for money." The "anything" consisted of, for example, a woman dancing in public for $150 wearing just a thong with the words "I Bet You Will" printed on it, and a man eating dog shit for $400.

Spurlock waxed eloquent about his brainchild: "People love to watch this. It's the public forum, it's the idea of seeing something new and original out there. And to see a regular person who's coming up and getting the chance to win $300 if he eats an entire jar of pigs' feet and wash it down with a pint-glass of corn oil, you know ... it's ... not something you might do, but it's something that somebody else might do, and something, you know what? I'd wanna watch that, too! I'd wanna watch that happen!" Other episodes had a woman drinking a can of condensed milk followed by a can of chicken broth, and then four shots of cod liver oil. Spurlock spurred her on: "Yeah! Four shots of cod liver oil. Want another one?" One of the anythings people will do for money is also to invite other people to humiliate themselves. Spurlock was a pioneer in this new public style of humiliation. Our new American imperial style, as the career-minded Niall Ferguson might put it.

...Once he justified "I Bet You Will" as being part of the "public forum." Now Spurlock has perfected the depressing art of humiliating people under the pretext of performing a public service. The first episode [of 30 Days], in which Spurlock and his fiancée try to live on a minimum wage--just as Spurlock took the idea for Supersize Me from Eric Schlosser's incomparably superior Fast Food Nation, he took the idea for his debut segment from Barbara Ehrenreich's incomparably superior Nickel and Dimed--says it all.

Throughout the entire hour, Spurlock and his turgid fiancée look at the camera and ask, "How can people live like this?" It's rough all right. Rising to a mountain peak of indignation, Spurlock--he can't stop smiling the entire time--offers this searing reproach to society: "We're educated, articulate, white"--and they have to work at lousy minimum wage jobs. But educated, articulate, white people don't apply for those kinds of jobs. Not unless they're slumming for 30 days, followed around by a cameraman and technician, at the end of which it's back to a really great lifestyle, with a juicy paycheck and an even fatter moral payoff. As Spurlock puts it in the show's final scene, staring meaningfully into the camera (and barely suppressing that peculiar smile): "I've been affected. And I'm better for it." Supersize you.


Siegel really is the last of a dying breed, one of those liberals who noisily weds a perfectly justified world-weariness born of watching too much bad (and bad-faith) art to a pervasive faith in social responsibility, pluralistic concensus, and all those old-school liberal (as opposed to left-libertarian) values. In the past eight months, he has nailed the presidential election, and the media circus surrounding the double-whammy deaths of Terri Schiavo and John Paul II, pitch-perfectly. Like Sarah Vowell (who has a new book out), Siegel is chicken soup for the goo-goo's soul, a moderate liberal's late-night guilty pleasure, not to mention the neo-snarky New Republic's old-Dem conscience. Reading him on politics and pop culture is a lot like listening to The Cure when you were fourteen: you're glad not all music is like that, but you're sure as hell glad some of it is.

Anyway, Siegel's take on Spurlock reminded me of my reaction, and then of the review I wrote, of Spurlock's first feature-length film, Super Size Me when it first came out about a year ago. Rather than write something original on the state of the world today, I'm going to repost it (with an edit) in honour of Siegel and of deliciously humourless liberals everywhere:

***

In this year of lefty "social conscience" movies (there was The Corporation which I haven't yet seen because I missed the bus the night I was supposed to go; and Michael Moore's F911, which we're assured will change the whole dynamics of this election season from a slim Kerry lead into a Democratic landslide, is due in just a couple of months), Morgan Spurlock's new anti-McDonalds film, Super Size Me, is winning praise as another must-see entry in the Thinking Liberal's canon. The high-brow premise is that the documentarian will subsist soley on McDonalds for 30 days while scrutinizing both his own physical condition and the condition of corporate food-obsessed America, trying to figure out what makes it tick, and what makes us crave those Big Macs. Spurlock started on this intellectual journey after reading about a lawsuit filed (and dismissed) against McDonalds by two overfat teenagers. That sparked the film's central question, which Spurlock poses at the beginning of his story: "Where does personal responsibility end and corporate responsibility begin?"

This premise sounded pretty dicey to me, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer glibness of the follow-through. In answer to the film's central question, it very quickly becomes evident that, in Spurlock's documentarian worldview, responsibility shifts very quickly from the individual onto the corporation. This might not be so bad if Spurlock didn't put himself and his completely self-imposed ordeal -- eating french fries until long after it stops being enjoyable -- at the center of the tale. As it is, Spurlock and his "vegan chef" girlfriend really are two of the biggest yuppie self-parodies imaginable. Spurlock is one of those directors who thinks its envelope-pushing to make the audience watch him barf out a car window. After 20 days of the junk food lifestyle, he treats us to a long scene of himself moaning to his mother over the phone about various McDonalds-induced aches and pains. Earlier on, the girlfriend complains into the camera that her boyf's unhealthy diet is cramping her style, preventing him from "getting it up" anymore. Which goes to show that those McNuggets really are more sinister than you think.

But at least these elements of the film are mildly entertaining, and, of course, a matter of taste in protagonists. It's the movie's psuedo-social commentary that is really appalling. How embarrassing does it get? Spurlock employs a nutritionist, a personal trainer and three doctors to help with his experiment. The film contains scene after scene of these professionals running tests and clucking at him and the numbers he turns up on their charts. Spurlock's doctor informs him solomnly about 15 days into the overfeed that he's "pickling his liver" and suggests that if the whites of his eyes turn yellow, he should consider getting himself to an emergency room. All of this is in service of exposing the effects of a corporate consumption culture that preys on groups of low income Americans who, more often than not, don't have regular access to any doctor. Spurlock interviews a few of these people inside and outside, on their way to and from, the McDonalds. They are invariably more interesting than he is, but they fail to cast much light on why society likes McDonalds so much because, with the exception of the skinny Wisconsonite who makes a habit of eating two Big Macs a day with the hope of getting into the Guinness Book of World Records, they don't really think about it much.

Still, the film's potential, and its best moments, lie in its man-on-the-street sociology. Rather than focus there, though, Spurlock aims to be a Rennaissance Man, albeit adapted to the Upper East Side lifestyle. The movie is full of junk nutritional-science, in full-throated praise of organics and bemoaning the evils of processed food...though little is actually divulged about why processed food is so bad. Spurlock and the slim vegan chef girlfriend certainly think so (he in theory, she in practice) and the audience is simply assumed to share their values. Spurlock supposedly gains 25 pounds of extra body fat in a month -- a humanly impossible feat for a fit man in his twenties eating three squares a day (no non-Mickey D snacking is allowed), even if they are "super size". Almost certainly, Spurlock is retaining water because of the high-salt diet. But such details are not the stuff of socially conscious poetic license.

Later, Spurlock heads out into the public schools to look at how the food culture perpetuates itself there and how public school policy fails to deal with the problems. This allows for lots of gratuitious Michael Moore-esque shots at conservative politics -- No Child Left Behind is blamed for "elminating recess" so that children can prepare for all that testing, a totally bizarre, and unsubstantiated, claim even for a NCLB-hater like me. What about the more subtle, but serious, claim that public school kids often head for cheap comfort food in the cafeteria because they are...poor? What about the still unequal regional funding, or chronic underfunding, that has prevented urban public schools from taking a stand against the soft-drink companies that provide desperately needed sponsorship in return for keeping a vending machine in the hall? There's not a word of serious discussion about these issues. At one point, Spurlock rather strongly insinuates that the government ought to mandate organic food be served in public school cafeterias...never mind that that's simply too authoritarian-socialist an idea for even most European societies to stomach, let alone free-market, anti-government America. And if there's a market for fast food in schools, is it government's job to close that market? I lean toward answering yes, but a morally serious film on food culture and social responsibility would take the question and its underlying libertarian-vs-statist debate seriously. And really, doesn't Spurlock's tut-tutting over lifestyle choices border on the sort of Joe-Lieberman-type moralizing that lefties supposedly hate?

The film's various condemnations are easy, but they don't make a lot of sense. George W. Bush is blamed twice for general evils (in one pointless scene designed to show that kids identify Grimace before famous cultural figures, a five year old confuses Bush with Jesus so that the audience can have an ironic laugh), even while the movie profiles clearly healthy government-run cafeteria lunch programs for low-income kids, part of a popular federal program that's been in existence since the Truman administration. In 2003, the Bush Admin tried to tighten eligibility requirements for the NSLP, but without actually cutting funds to the program. To substitute for any real information, we're divulged the shocking fact of how many calories there are in a McDonald's yogourt parfait (information McDonalds isn't exactly trying to hide from the public). And at one point, Spurlock expresses dismay about how the food administered by the NSLP, or an affiliate, isn't cooked from scratch like his mom used to do. Instead, it's just reheated from frozen (and it doesn't even look appatizing frozen!) For shame. Maybe Spurlock really should run Lieberman's next campaign.

But the worst thing about this movie -- the really offensive thing -- is its casual cruelty toward its corporate scapegoats...where Spurlock really is the new Michael Moore, but with less descretion. Toward the end of the film, Spurlock, having failed to win an audience with a McDonalds exec, manages to wrangle an interview with a Washington grocery store lobbyist. That's right: not a Coke-in-schools, not a fast-food industry lobbyist, but a grocery-store lobbyist. In Bowling for Columbine, Moore at least took aim at a few people who deserved it at Michigan K-Mart corporate headquarters and at the NRA (Charlton Heston can look after himself.) By contrast, Spurlock's target is clearly well-intentioned, working for a comparatively benign industry, and he tells Spurlock in obviously good faith, while giving his lobbyist spin, that the industry too must work to "promote responsibility", that it's "part of the problem", but also (he stumbles a bit here) that it's "part of the solution."

A ha! At this point, Spurlock pauses the tape on the man's face looking shifty as food brand labels start to pop up on the screen. "Did you hear that?" the documentartian crows in overdub as if a shadowy figure has just told him about a break-in at the Brookings Institution. Those corporate behemoths are "part of the problem!" Even their own spinner says so! In the epilogue, Spurlock gleefully informs us that the interviewee "no longer works for" the behemoth in question. Brilliant. Spurlock has managed to use a man's good faith to get one of those evil corporate bastards fired... or at least thinks he has. Score one for the progressive left, comrade! (In another moment of end-credit self-congratulation, Spurlock says that McDonald's "claims that its recent decision to end its Super Size-gimick had nothing to do with this movie." He obviously doesn't believe them.)

Why am I ranting like this? Because this sloppy, nihilistic, self-indulgent piece of shit is getting rave -- rave! -- reviews, scoring a 73 on MetaCritic. The dominant critical view seems to be that Spurlock is more socially responsible: a "more benevolent" (Owen Glieberman), "more personable" (Adam Caro), less "grating" (Michael O'Sullivan) Michael Moore, a good thing in theory.

In theory. But the argument is false. Super Size Me is not any less irritating and intellectually dishonest than "Bowling for Columbine" was in its worst moments. At the same time, though, it has none of the latter film's redeeming merits. In fact, Moore's willingness, and ability, to make intellectual arguments, to at least probe at real social issues that divide people and take intellectual risks, is commendable in comparison to this piece of flyweight dillitantism. Mainstream liberals are wary of Moore at the moment, as they are of the entire muckraking left that might upset the Democrats' delicate balance this election season. So Moore is offered up here as Spurlock's strawman. Spurlock, new meat without Moore's anti-Clinton, all-encompassing-critical baggage, is raised as the pillar of good humour and moderation. It's hard to imagine a glibber, more facile and less deserving recipient of those kudos.

Liberalism and social insurance.

Jacob Hacker has another article up at TNR's site about social insurance and liberal politics. Nothing we haven't seen before, but these arguments are just so true and right that they bare repeating over and over:

Although the Depression was a watershed in liberal thinking about the economy, there was nothing automatic about the reforms eventually embraced. Nor did the New Dealers simply dream up a coherent program once the scope of the disaster became clear. Instead, they drew on a wide range of often well-established ideas and precedents, guided by an abiding conviction: Capitalism needed to be "made good."

Making capitalism good implied many things: public employment, the taming of monopolies, relief for the destitute. Yet the most important ideal--and certainly the most enduring--was insurance. The word is familiar today, but, in the 1930s, it had a radical air. Insurance was an affirmation of free will over fate. If not an effort to stay the hand of God, it was an attempt to soften His blow. And it rested on modern actuarial science. The genius of insurance, especially when coupled with the power of the state to require participation, was that it could transform individual misfortunes into social costs distributed broadly across the citizenry. "Social insurance," as it came to be called, transformed the dislocations of modern capitalism into risks that could be managed and redistributed, rather than blows of fate that could only be feared and suffered.


In this passage and those that follow, Hacker gets at several points that are vital to the current political debate, both over specific programs like Social Security and over the broader role of government as society's insurer. First, he correctly points out that the beauty and endurance of the New Deal programs is that social insurance is simultaneously a progressive and a conservative idea. Its progressivism is obvious. Its conservatism rests on several facts. For one thing, it involves minimal governmental oversight and interference, its core programs providing simple income transfers rather than the type of in-kind provision of services (like housing or health care) that traditional liberals have long championed. Neither does social insurance propose or entail radical redistribution across socio-eonomic or ethnic classes. The philosophy of insurance rests on our shared uncertain expectations as citizens beginning life, not on the actual lifecycle realizations that fate hands us. Ex-ante, we're all together in the same boat; ex-post, anybody can fall onto hard times, illness or destitution through no fault or small fault of their own. And insurance provides those who fall a level of protection befitting their previous contribution to society as measured through wages. Because of this philisophical reliance on the Rawlsian "veil of ignorance" where uncertainty is universal and payouts are proportional, the New Deal social insurance programs entailed few of the normative choices about who "deserves" extra protection, or an extra economic boost, that hurt much of the Great Society liberal programs like AFDC.

Second, support for broad-based social insurance -- unemployment insurance, Medicare, social security, and supplemental security income -- actually rests on an appeal to the best in citizenry, our sense of and respect for an commitment to society, shared experience and public good. This too is tradtionally conservative, in the same sense that veneration of national service, and shared sacrifice in hard times, is traditionally a conservative (now a neoliberal) phenomenon. Making a personal sacrifice for the State in wartime, or even showing solidarity with for other States faced with national disasters or unavoidable military engagements, has a powerful draw for Americans: witness the extent to which military families supported the Iraq war early on, or the outpouring of private resources into the recent East Asian tsunami relief funds. Demanding a few dollars off your paycheck, roughly the same few dollars everyone pays, to support the "society" that supports you, is a politically supportable, even appealing, request, particularly when, as is the case with Social Security proper, the main deprivation being insured against-- old age -- is one that everybody in society eventually faces with an almost 100% probability.

Hacker's major theme is that the need for social insurance is actually greater today, in the post-welfare-capitalist society, than it has been at any point since the Great Depression, and that this fact retains enormous political power:

Against this backdrop, it's little wonder Americans remain so pessimistic about the economy. President Bush keeps saying the "economy is strong, and it's getting stronger." But Americans don't believe it. Unfortunately, Americans also don't believe that government can effectively address the problem of rising insecurity. In a recent series of focus groups, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that middle-class Americans "believe traditional relationships that formerly provided some security are disappearing." Yet they also believe that "government is corrupt and neither trustworthy nor a source of solutions." The middle-class response to rising insecurity, according to the EPI's focus groups, is blunt and resigned: "It's up to me."

All of which suggests that there may well be a method to the madness of Bush's calls for an "ownership society." The Republican agenda is to replace existing protections with highly individualized private accounts and then let the chips fall where they may. This strategy may help the affluent and fortunate, but it won't provide strong guarantees of economic security to most Americans...Yet, while the ownership society can't guarantee economic security, it fits perfectly with the idea that "it's up to me"--that Americans are on their own in the new world of work and family. And, the more Americans believe that, the more likely it is that they will support conservative politicians who want to shift even more risk onto their shoulders. Call it the vicious cycle of insecurity--if Americans feel no one can help them, they will back leaders who won't. In the '30s, Democrats saw economic security as the keystone of a broad coalition in support of their party. Today, Republicans appear to see economic insecurity in much the same way. [Emphasis mine.]


There's a lot more to Hacker's piece (and his earlier, pre-election one on the same topic) but the highlighted bit gets to two of the major political realities facing liberal politics and politicians in the US. The first is a problem: that Bush and the Republicans understand Americans' sense of insecurity, and its sources, as well as the Democrats do, but, for various reasons, are willing to talk about it more plainly at crucial moments. Hacker quotes Bush's 2004 nomination speech at the start of the piece:

"The times in which we work and live are changing dramatically. The workers of our parents' generation typically had one job, one skill, one career, often with one company that provided health care and a pension. And most of those workers were men.

Today, workers change jobs, even careers, many times during their lives. And in one of the most dramatic shifts our society has seen, two-thirds of all moms also work outside the home.

This changed world can be a time of great opportunity for all Americans to earn a better living, support your family, and have a rewarding career. And government must take your side.

Many of our most fundamental systems -- the tax code, health coverage, pension plans, worker training -- were created for the world of yesterday, not tomorrow. We will transform these systems so that all citizens are equipped, prepared, and thus truly free to make your own choices and pursue your own dreams.


Essentially, Bush could acknowledge the fact of a changing, postindustrial society because his party is the party of conservatism, despite the fact (maybe even because of the fact) that his policy prescriptions are terrible, exacerbating the very problems he was addressing. Kerry, fronting the (comparative) party of modernity and of progressive change, had no big rhetorical breakthrough to make on the topic of change, even though his policy solutions were closer to the ones needed to mitigate working and middle class insecurity. In tangling with the concept of American angst in the face of modernity, Kerry would have endured all of the risk of upsetting potential supporters but reaped none of the gain of breaking a political taboo. This was the same crack logic behind Bush's famed embrace of the poor -- of the nun washing the feet of the homeless -- in his 2000 nomination address. Bush wasn't actually proposing to do anything for the desperately poor except rhetorically encourage the provision of private charity on their behalf. The Democrats weren't really proposing anything either -- their welfare policies were accessible through participation in the tax system -- but as the (comparative) "party of the poor", neither did they have any mileage to make in acknowledging the existence of those who existed outside that system. By merely talking about the politically untouchable destitute, Bush awed op-ed columnists in a way Gore would not have been able to do, by busting one of his party's stereotypes.

This is an essential irony of current American politics: when Democratic politicians bust their party's stereotypes, like Clinton did in 1992 by refusing to accept Jesse Jackson's entreaty for the vice-presidency in front of the Rainbow Coalition or by having a mentally retarded death row inmate executed in Arkansas, it's often ugly stuff, carried out at the expense of the "others" -- the demographic and interest groups that Democrats support and rely on but that "average Americans" (the desperately needed working and middle class whites) don't relate to. (To be fair, neither of the last two Democratic campaigns, for all their faults, engaged in this sort of symbolic severing behaviour, even in comparison to Bush.) Bush's politicial genius has been in engaging in the reverse of this: busting his party's uglier, more divisive stereotypes in word while never deverting from the standard pro-business supply-side program in deed. Where the Democrats break down the stereotypes of their coalition, invoking separation and independence, Bush's stereotype-busting chases its opposite, creating a phony notion of social concensus out of the divisiveness beneath, soothing the nerves of those who might traditionally lean GOP but be put off by the party's Reagan-Buchanan antisocial, antimodern edge. This is enormously effective. The power of rhetoric, the power to advance your plan in a uniting, spectrum-spanning way, is in fact the alternative to triangulation: a meeting in the rhetorical rather than the governing middle.

This is all very depressing. But the second important point of Hacker's analysis is the potential remedy to the first: it's the simple fact that the Democrats need to re-embrace the role, and potential positivity, of government (not "big government", but active, responsible government.) This is, of course, not a stereotype-buster. It's riskier, but much less divisive, than that: an attack on a stereotype, on the EPI's finding that "the government is corrupt and neither trustworthy nor a source of solutions." As Hacker points out, "Students of public opinion have long marveled at Americans' seemingly inconsistent celebration of government insurance programs, on the one hand and the ethic of rugged individualism on the other. Americans are "operational liberals" and "philosophical conservatives," public opinion analysts Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril once argued." (Just as a digression, Free and Cantril's dichotomy is also one of Bill Clinton's favourite sayings).

The Democratic rhetorical breakthrough needs to come in reconciling these two facets of Americans' view of government. Even while embracing the desperately poor, the changing economic times, and certain types of multiculturalism, the neoconservatives have never dropped their ranting against government and against the Democrats' supposed hatred of individual freedom of economic choice -- it's the one thing that stays true in the conservative message. And its the one thing that has to be countered in the liberal message, especially given Republican hypocricy on the matter. Bush has railed against government intrusiveness through two campaigns and four and a half years of governing, even as he has swelled the ranks of the federal bureaucracy and run up enormous debts that will someday have to be paid off with taxdollars. Bush (and the Delay Congress) is the reason Americans see government as corrupt and wasteful -- and the irony is that, as Hacker points out, this helps them so long as they paint themselves as the party of less government.

This is the sort of catch-22 that has to be confronted, not evaded. The message (in Hacker's context; there are additional arguments in favour of government as a counterweight against private profit-seeking industry) is simple. The private sector cannot provide universal insurance; it can't guarantee our ability to live with some basic dignity behind the veil. There is no private entity that could attempt such a thing profitably or fairly. Government, because of its universality, can fill that gap. Elected government is the representative body of the people; it's the only entity that can really provide social insurance by spreading risk across the population in ways that have remained popular from 1935 to this day.

Risky? Of course. But the Democrats need both to do something brave and offer up a message that is universal and intellectually engaging. Defending the philosophical, as well as the practical, role of government-provided social insurance is the best and truest thing we've got to offer.

Garence Franke-Ruta has good advice for MoveOn.org.

Yesterday at TAPPED, she gave the organization a talking-to about its crappy media strategy, in particular its painfully slow clarification (at this point, about six months too late) that, contrary to Karl Rove and the usual batch of carnie-barking sophists on the right, it didn't officially oppose the War in Afghanistan back in 2001 (Franke-Ruta also links to an RNC attack-memo offering more "proof" of MoveOn's alleged hippy pacifism. Once you swallow the unpleasant fact that one of the US's major political parties regularly churns out bullshit like this, you're left with the realization that these are in fact the worst quotes the RNC could come up with, and they're hardly incriminating). Moreover, even Pariser's post-911 peitition, run through an organization called 911Peace (later renamed MoveOn Peace, pace the RNC memo, though the initial petition urging restraint in Afghanistan had nothing at all to do with MoveOn), was hardly the sort of "hard-left" thing that Hugh Hewitt likes to insinuate when he uses that phrase. Mainly, 911Peace advocated a deliberately ambiguous "moderate and restrained" response to the terrorist attack, exactly the sort of thing you'd hope to hear from a mainstream left-liberal org during a violent, uncertain time and in the face of an untested, hawkish, ultra-conservative administration. And anyway, Pariser, who circulated the online petition with a fellow activist, didn't join MoveOn for another 12 months after that.

Franke-Ruta gets to the heart of the matter near the end of her posting:

"...MoveOn is, as it has long aspired to be, now a player in Washington. It should start acting like it knows it, and realizing that every opportunity it gives the Republicans to attack it -- by, for example, failing to get its own house in order -- is going to be used against Democratic elected officials over time.

...The Republican Party has three central political targets -- Howard Dean, MoveOn, and Michael Moore -- that it's actively seeking to completely discredit and make ridiculous, in order to then tie every elected Democratic official and left/liberal thinker to them (rendering them discredited, in turn). That's part of the long-term strategy, and something MoveOn is going to have to learn how to deal with effectively on an ongoing basis. It won't be easy."


Exactly. Exactly. Remember that MoveOn got its start defending a centrist Democratic president; it came into being during the Clinton impeachment in 1998, urging the nation to "censure and move on". It opposed Ralph Nader's 2000 campaign. Pariser himself is a pathetic excuse for a radical (in this interview he talks about unsuccessful efforts to convince Republican Senator Susan Collins to vote against the Iraq War Resolution. If the right wants a MoveOn radical to demagogue against, they're better sticking to Zack Exley of GWBush.org fame). And even if MoveOn has, from time to time, alligned itself for publicity campaigns with some dodgier characters on the left -- Michael Moore, Arianna Huffington -- it has hardly mapped out any ultra-left territory in its policy prescriptions. In fact, when push comes to shove, MoveOn has basically remained noncommital on all but the most blatantly obvious policy issues: Bush's various relaxations of environmental standards; the invasion of Iraq; getting John Kerry elected. The org is, and always has been, working for concensus and is clearly aware of where the mainstream of American political thought lies.

But none of that -- reality, that is -- matters if it doesn't get its media game going. Franke-Ruta replays all the greatest hits, most eggregiously the MoveOn founders' pathetic rebuttal to TNR's Peter Beinart and his stupid call last winter for the Democrats to renounce the group for being pacifist (along with Michael Moore. Beinart is now on leave from TNR turning his brilliant thoughts on these matters into a book. This is a double whammy since Beinart is simultaenously a great editor and a horrible commentator. TNR has suffered from his editorial absence while the book is likely to be as silly-ass as the original column). Nevertheless, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades spent not nearly enough of their allotted rebuttal space being outraged about Beinart's erroneous claim that they officially opposed military engagement in Afghanistan, and too much of it acting like the stereotypes Beinart made them out to be. Not surprisingly, Karl Rove and the RNC brought it all back this week.

MoveOn doesn't need to be purged. It's a valuable org that spans a wide ideological space on the left; imposes discipline on its members while at the same time providing a forum for citizen activism; and, in the McCain-Feingold era, helps close the hole left by the departure of soft money without the sort of strings that hamstrung the policy choices of the soft-money Democrats. It's allowed to make mistakes and to growl over territory, like, say, in its post-election "we bought it; we own it" lashing-out at Terry McAuliffe. But power engenders responsibility. Like Howard Dean, MoveOn now has an obligation to make things as difficult as possible for the Republicans and their radicalization strategy. That means wising up to the game.

In Iran, the hardliner has it.

The AP's Kathy Gannon reports that:

The Interior Ministry gave Ahmadinejad 62.2 percent of the vote over his more moderate rival, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, who had nearly 35.3 percent. The ministry posted a notice in its headquarters declaring Ahmadinejad the winner of Friday's runoff. The rest of the ballots were deemed invalid.


On the face of it, this seems like a very funny outcome. Ahmadinejad won only 19% of the (official) first-round vote, in an election in which, according to reports, conservatives turned out strongly while reformers had been encouraged to boycott the proceedings. One would expect that some of those liberal or reformist abstainers would have turned out in the second round out of fear of an Ahmadinejad victory, while Moeen's and Karroubi's first-round votes would have been redirected to the "moderate" Rafsanjani, just as Leonid Jospin's votes went to Chirac in the French presidential election run-off in 2002. In fact, turnout fell (to 47% according to the Washington Post; to 56% according to al-Jazeera), and the hardline share more than tripled.

On the other hand, complaints about potential vote fraud have hardly cracked the Western media this time (so far, silence at The Corner). And even if the lopsided hardline win seems logically implausible on the surface, the possibility of the authorities fudging the vote by the 12% or more that marks Ahmadinejad's majority looks similarly unlikely, at least given initial reports. The US State Department agrees, judging by its resigned response:

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Joanne Moore indicated the result would not change the U.S. view of Iran, and what it considered to be a fundamentally flawed election that refused to accept scores of candidates, particularly women.

"With the conclusion of the elections in Iran, we have seen nothing that sways us from our view that Iran is out of step with the rest of the region in the currents of freedom and liberty that have been so apparent in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon," Moore said.


The first concern in the West must be what the election outcome means for future nuke talks. But, even on that score, the damage may well have already been done by the upset inherent in the first round of voting and the Parliamentary (Majlis) elections in 2004, in which reformists only one 28% of the seats for which they were permitted to run. The AP reports that "The pragmatic Rafsanjani has appeared more willing to negotiate on the nuclear program. But a Foreign Ministry spokesman Friday underlined that the suspension is temporary and that enrichment will eventually be restarted no matter who wins the election." Since conservatives already dominate the Majlis, the presidential outcome may have been little more than window dressing to the outcome of ongoing talks between Iran and the US/EU-3.

Maybe this election outcome is immeasurably terrible; given Ahmadinejad's conservative and military hardline history and the excited response of Islamic hardliners in other parts of the world, that's certainly a valid interpretation. But I'm not wholly convinced of it. (Iranian bloggers, whose opinions are more relevant than mine, seem to have mixed opinions on the both the legitimacy of the vote and on what the Ahmadinejad victory means.) One of the edifying, or at least interesting, things about the Iranian campaign, from my perspective as a Western liberal, was just how reformist it was in its emphasis. The candidates went around making pie-in-the-sky promises, running glossy, secular media campaigns (Rafsanjani, the best-funded candidate, actually had rollergirls handing out flyers in Tehran traffic according to one report I read), and talking about moving ahead with more reform in an attempt to appeal to voters and to surmount apathy among youth. If anything, the candidate field criticized outgoing president Khatami for not being reformist enough.

Of course, Ahmadinejad was the exception to all this, with his low-budget campaign, his focus on frugalism and the need to ensure a basic level of economic dignity to all Iranians, and his embrace of Revolutionary ideals. Either the first-round vote was heavily rigged, or the other candidates seriously misjudged the desires of the majority of Iranians, failing to adequately compete for the conservative populist niche. But in the run-off, even Ahmadinejad, whether honestly or out of necessity, tried to allay the fears of his reformist critics. Thursday's New York Times reported him lightly mocking frightened reformers:

"They say if I become president, I will shut down the Internet...Why would they say that? My wife and children are constantly on the Internet. They don't give me a chance to use the phone line. My wife loves doing her research on the Internet."


The imagery there is telling: of the indulgent, henpecked husband, slightly bemused by, but open to, modern technology. Part of Ahmadinejad's redistributive platform also involved the extention of state-sponsered economic benefits to women. (Though basically irrelevent, it's at least interesting that Ahmadinejad is also the first non-cleric to assume the Iranian presidency since 1981.) Also worth noting are the widely varying voter responses quoted in this Knight-Ridder article:

Even in northern Tehran, where women flout Islamic laws on modest dress by wearing brightly colored scarves and snug, short overcoats, Ahmadinejad voters said they preferred their candidate because he'd honed a reputation as an honest and effective mayor.

"I don't want there to be nepotism, for someone who finished high school being assigned to a very high post," said Elnaz Ashtari, 23, a fashionably dressed dentist. "Ahmadinejad says he'll clean house."


The apparently solid rejection of Rafsanjani seems itself to be a sort of protest, a refusal to settle for a cynical, over-financed career politician whose earlier, nonreformist presidency inspired neither conservatives nor reformers and who had lost a bid for a Parliamentary seat just 16 months earlier. (Nor does the result look like an example of the tyranny of a tiny minority of the reform movement who won't settle for a consensus candidate, charges hurled by moderate liberals in the wake of the 2002 French runoff election and the 2000 US election. If the results are to be believed, Rafsanjani was very solidly rejected, failing to even double his vote share between balloting rounds.)

At the very least, the vote is a major slap to Washington: both to the ramped-up American presence in the Middle East since 911 and to Bush and Rice's stupid pre-election bigfooting about reform and freedom and the rest of it. If exit interviews are to be believed, it's also prime evidence of the universal danger of allowing liberalism to become identified with elitism (and "nepotism") while conservatives claim the mantle of populism and communion with the downtrodden and the traditional. Ahmadinejad may not actually manage to do much to help Iran's poor. On the other hand, he may decide that helping lift economic conditions requires some rapprochement with the West. He may be utterly powerless against Khomeini. Or he may be able to use his proximity to the hardliners to increase the nominal power of the presidency. He may be a liberal's nightmare. But if there's any legitimacy at all to Iran's electoral process -- the process that wrung concessions out of him not to reverse earlier reformist gains in the final stretch of the campaign -- then he might not be. It should at least be an interesting test.

Martin is right about 0.7, dammit!

Poor Paul Martin. For handshaking, babykissing, speechmaking change-the-world political types like him it must be a cruel fate to be Prime Minister of a country that makes a national habit of disdainfully tolerating its political leadership. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush may be hated, but they're also loved. Canadians never love their leaders (OK, Trudeau is the one exception to the rule), though we can be drawn into a sort of wistful fondness for one departed leader in comparison with the new one.

The flip side is that we don't generally hate our political leaders either, though this may have something to do with the fact that we keep electing boring, tolerably corrupt moderates while our southern cousins routinely go for the love-him-or-hate-him, envelope-pushing, extremely corrupt choice over the boring, tolerably corrupt moderate opposing him.* I can see Canadian liberals literally hating, rather than just disdaining, Stephen Harper, but I can't see a multi-million-dollar Harper-hating industry sprouting up, riots at the Conservative convention, an attempted impeachment over sex. I think Harper-hatred among liberals would largely take the form of sighing over lattes at the Second Cup and typing on blogs: where is this country headed?

In a sense, it's a chicken-vs.-egg thing. Does the fact that the party of boring moderates is always in power lead Canadians into complacent apathy about politics; or it actually our complancent, moderate political apathy that leads us to elect and reelect the boring moderate party? (In recent history, the only time power shifts hands in Commons is when one party supplants another as the most convincingly boring and moderate. Right now, that means the Liberals basically have a lock.) Does the fact that no Canadian politician ever really fades away -- afterall, outside the Cabinet, half the Commons seems to be terminally ill -- mould our all-forgiving-because-we-don't-actually-care nature? Or does our nature prevent us from encouraging the sort of scandal and demand for new, untainted blood that keeps up the party leader churn down South?

It's because I'm half American that I can occasionally be drawn into actually feeling defensive about Paul Martin, faced as he is with the perpetually sighing Eyeores that make up the mainstream Canadian press. It's profoundly un-Canadian of me. Getting het up about how fucking, disproportionately mean the Washington Press was to Al Gore during and after the 2000 campaign is fine; that's what American liberal political junkies were supposed to do. There actually exists a fairly popular, and quite good, 7-year-running blog more-or-less devoted to the subject. I'm virtually positive that Martin, a comparably unloved politician scaled to Canadian standards, will never have a blog devoted to his problems with the media. But at least he has me.

So after reading in yesterday's Globe and Mail about my poor Prime Minister getting trashed by Bob Geldof -- Bob Geldof! -- over his refusal to commit to Lester Pearson's old and Tony Blair's current goal of contributing 0.7% of GDP as aid to Africa by 2015, I'm defensively weighing in on Martin's side. The PM explained himself and his decision as follows:

"I believe it is important that governments say not just what they are going to do, but that they should say how they are going to do it," the Prime Minister said.

"I am telling members that the problem with international policy is that, too often, commitments are made on the grounds of photo ops and I will not do that."


Exactly, Mr. Prime Minister. The pile-on was, of course, immediate:

"There's no use your Prime Minister coming to Scotland unless he's prepared to do this deal," Sir Bob said in a pre-taped video message at the announcement of the special Live 8 concert in Canada.

"If he's not prepared, [then] stay at home. Just stay at home. Don't come. You're not welcome unless you're prepared to do something finally and irrevocably on behalf of the poor of this world."

...

NDP Leader Jack Layton said Canadians will be bothered by Sir Bob's criticisms. "Does it bother this Prime Minister enough that he is finally going to keep this promise?" he asked during Question Period.


After approvingly quoting "Sir Bob" and Layton, the reporter, Brian Laghi, lays down the goods (emphasis mine):

"To reach the 0.7 per cent figure by 2015, Canada would have to devote $15-billion a year to foreign aid, almost five times the $3-billion it currently gives.

The Finance Department has developed several scenarios on how the country might get there, including one that would see Ottawa begin increasing outlays by 25 per cent a year starting in 2010. Such an idea would cost $28-billion extra in the five years before 2015.

Another would see Canada raising expenditures by 15 per cent a year starting this year. That scenario would cost $41-billion in total over 10 years.

Canada currently gives a little more than $3-billion a year, and has announced it will increase funding by about 8 per cent each year through to 2010.


Ignoring the transition costs, ($28, $41 billion, whatever), placating "Sir Bob" would require committing to pay an extra $12 billion per year after 2015, about $300 per capita (not to be confused with the much higher per taxpayer figure), and that's excluding the costs to Canadian industry from the much more morally pressing step of untying our aid from our national products. Adjusted for population size and growth trends, that would be like the United States government committing to an extra $115 billion dollars (CDN -- or $100 billion USD) in spending every year. In the US, that's a politically unthinkable amount to propose spending on pretty much any single domestic policy program, let alone sending off to Africa. With Canada's babyboomers starting to retire under the Medicare program, and with the likely anti-federal-tax revolts coming in Alberta and other rich provinces, committing to this sort of outlay ten years down the road is just ludicrous. It would be an obvious case of convinient political lying on Martin's part, just as he says. And, geez, Mr. Layton, when Prime Minister Pearson made that promise back in the 60s, he didn't have to contend with the post-Mulroney-years national debt. He didn't spend the last ten years of his career making hard cuts to social programs in order to get the country's fiscal house in order. Is that sort of deficit spending what the NDP is threatening to take us back to?

The article points out that Italy, Germany, Britain and France have committed to reach the target by 2015. Well, big deal. The 0.7 figure has been bandied around for decades by opportunistic liberal politicians all across the globe. Africa is still a mess and few rich countries give anything close to that much aid. So far, only Luxembourg, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands give 0.7 or more of their GDP in total foreign aid. And, even if we assume that these other G8 members are sincere this time (Blair, at least, is), surely being a progressive politician in one of those countries can't be as utterly thankless a task as it is in Canada. As Geldoff himself says, "In this instance, at least, we do need more Canada. We need you to urge your neighbours to come along with this." See, Canadians are just supposed to be the leaders on this; it's our international job to pony up and guilt-trip the Americans. No kudos for that; it's just our duty. Nor can the leadership of the Liberal Party -- already committed to doubling the African aid budget over the next five years, mind you -- expect to reap a political reward for this among left-leaning voters or the Canadian press. But at least Geldof and Bono would stop complaining.

So, yes, dammit. Prime Minister Martin is right, both in principle and politics, not to commit to the 0.7 target right now. And in Canada, being right doesn't necessarily win much applause. Mr. Martin, I salute you.


Update: Having written this, I now see (courtesy of Google News) that, for once, the Globe and Mail editorial staff is giving the Prime Minister some love for his position on Live8.


* A couple of notes on this: In 1996, it's true that Clinton was more of a moderate than Dole, and that he fashioned himself as such, though conservatives didn't see it that way. But Clinton was much less boring than Dole and though he wasn't really any more corrupt, his brand of corruption was more flamboyant. Also, it's unfair to suggest John Kerry was "tolerably corrupt" since he really wasn't corrupt at all by American standards. The only overtly corrupt thing he ever did was help overrule Clinton's veto of the odious 1995 Private Securities and Litigation Act. Alas, perhaps cleanness was actually Kerry's biggest problem.

The smearing of Dick Durban.

After a week of high pitched screeching, the Propriety Brigade on the right -- and a few asshole Democrats like Chicago's mayor Richard Daley (why exactly did he need to do that?) -- finally managed to exact a grovelling apology -- complete with Muskiesque tears -- from Illinois Senator Dick Durbin for his remarks about Gitmo on the Senate floor last week.

Durbin shouldn't have apologized; and he really shouldn't have cried. It's wrong, wrong, wrong to let the right think it can get away with this, that if it just feigns enough outrage it will win the moral arguments. There was nothing wrong with Durbin's floor statement on the 14th. There is nothing wrong with using historical references in political debate. American politicians are, by and large, the least hyperbolic politicians in the world. The absolute worst Durbin could be accused of was a little bit of bad taste. And there was much to commend in Durbin's outrage over the FBI memo (or, try these companion pieces archived at the ACLU site) on Guantanamo, especially since the Administration and its cheering hawks in the press have spent months arguing that there had been no credible reports of prisoner abuse in Guantanamo, in contrast to Abu Ghraib and Bagram.

Anyway, Durbin should probably have taken the Republicans' extra-zesty fury as a complement. Before the dustup, Durbin was a valuable figure for the Democrats (as he likely will be again if he doesn't let this keep happening to him.) Durbin is the Senator who makes progressive politics bland, folksy and safe. Among the other Senate progressives, Feingold is -- and often behaves -- like a celebrity of the left. Wellstone wore his liberalism as a badge of honour, and was widely identified as the "most liberal Senator" (Kerry was actually 11th, contra Dick Cheney). Kennedy is a Kennedy, a well-understood Massachusetts speciality with no political-survival reason to remain within "the mainstream" (a similar sort of thing holds for Iowan Institution Tom Harkin). But Durbin is a reliably liberal voice and vote who doesn't come off as distinctly progressive, as self-conciously "on the left" -- even when he does great but (sadly) edgy things like defend MoveOn.org's right to air anti-Bush ads during the Superbowl. That's why the right really wanted to get him, to "radicalize" him. He shouldn't have let them get away with it.

How does this "radicalization" work? Hugh Hewitt offered a particularly loathesome (and lengthly) nugget in the shitstorm at Monday's online Weekly Standard (to his intellectual credit, he at least repeats Durbin's floor comments in full so we can see how reasonable, not to mention Realist, they are in their entirety). First, Hewitt demands that Bill Frist and Arlen Spectre, the "moderate" Republican chairman of the judiciary committee, "initiate a censure resolution" against Durbin, that will "oblige every senator to go on the record about how they view the American military as we enter the long phase of the war."

Try to follow the logic of that: Hewitt doesn't think what Durbin said was appropriate; that he should have kept his more pungent comparative thoughts to himself in the interest of propriety. So the obvious solution is to have all Senators go on record with what they think about "the character and purpose of the United States armed services"...or at least with the sort of brain-dead pablum on the subject that they think will protect them from guys like Hewitt. At best, this is pointless and intellectually stultifying. At worst, its a threat to the mere possibility of dissent.

Then there's the obligatory tying of Durbin to "the left" and "the bloggers". This is a big theme for Hewitt's crowd: how the Dems are being taken over by long-suppressed unsavoury radical elements from "their base". In this case, the example Hewitt offers is perennial boogieman (and Democratic moderate) Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos defending Durbin's remarks. Later, Hewitt fleshes the linkage out: "Durbin is speaking in code, communicating with the hard-left base of his party and their European friends and well-wishers. "

Huh. As a Democrat, I've actually wished for a long time that Democratic senators (and presidential candidates) were a little better at speaking in code to their "hard-left" (read: pretty much everyone who might attend a Democratic rally) base, and that various parts of that base were a little better at reading the code when its offered. Hewitt's allegations are simply ludicrous. What he offers are examples of Durbin beginning to regret what he's brought on himself and squirming a bit at the pressure. There's absolutely no "code" there. If there was a working code, maybe Durbin wouldn't say the things that get in shit-storms with the right.

Later in the piece, Hewitt references a report aired on al-Jazeera that slightly tabloidized Durbin's remarks and initial refusal to apologize. Hewitt rails in response that "This Al Jazeera story reinforced the obvious and undeniable consequence of Durbin's recklessness: An enormous propaganda gift had been given by Durbin to jihadists everywhere, not to mention anti-Americans of every stripe."

Wait a minute. Wouldn't Hewitt be the first to argue that we shouldn't give a shit what "anti-Americans of every stripe" think? Wasn't the whole point of the White House's reaction to the September 11 attack to prove that the United States would not be cowed by terrorist actions, that it would not alter its behaviour in appeasement to either its attackers or its critics? Wasn't there a lot of thanking our lucky stars for the fortunate fact of Bush's presidency to save us from all that quinessentially Democratic dithering around in search of root causes? But of course that luxury of insouciance doesn't extend to Bush's opposition and their concerns. Bush is right to be bellicose, to demand that our enemies "bring it on" (I wonder how that played on al-Jazeera?) But Durbin is "irresponsibly" responsible for everything al-Jazeera broadcasts, regardless of how factually or stylistically accurate it is. And just imagine what Jacques Chirac must think of the whole affair!

After typing up an initial clarification Durbin gave on the Senate floor that he meant no disrespect in his remarks to that vast, untouchable and deeply sensitive entity known as "the troops", Hewitt complains that "Durbin refused to confront the central issue: What tactics equal "torture," and whether the Gitmo interrogations have anything of the Nazis, the Stalinists, and the Khmer Rouge about them." Hewitt doesn't explain why exactly this is "the central issue" -- nor does he ever explain in the whole huge piece why he believes the behaviour described in the FBI memo quoted by Durbin is not "torture", why it had "nothing of the Nazis" about it (perhaps modern Uzbekistan would be a slightly better analogy). If this is the "central issue", maybe Hewitt himself should address it. Maybe he should try a rebuttal. But since Hewitt is a total sophist, none is forthcoming.

Of course, the Outrage isn't complete without at least a bit of mau-mauing from "the troops". So Hewitt reproduces a letter from an outraged soldier stationed in Kosovo he cribbed from a rightwing blog. The soldier in question grouses that "The senator's remarks, while apparently intended to apply to only a small number of us, actually hit ALL of us squarely in the heart. To compare any member of the U.S. armed forces with the murderous thugs who ran Hitler's camp system, the Soviet Gulag, or who gleefully slaughtered entire populations in Cambodia, is an affront to all men and women of our military."

Ah. Who says identity politics has lost its bite? For the record, the soldier suggests some reading material Durbin should peruse before he slanders the troops again, a trick repeated by that ever-upstanding Senator John McCain on his weekly Sunday talkshow appearance two days ago.

Finally, Hewitt is of course burned by what Durbin didn't say (emphasis mine):

"Of course Durbin will not segregate the criminal conduct by a handful of out-of-control G.I.'s not acting under orders--and already prosecuted and punished--from the authorized conduct at Gitmo and elsewhere. To do so would be to protect the military's reputation, but it would damage Durbin's agenda of demonizing the war effort. To advance that agenda, Durbin takes a single report from an FBI investigator, inflates its allegations to Abu Ghraib-level criminal conduct, and attributes it to every detention facility used in the war on terror. This is not the simple slander of one interrogator, or one facility.

Durbin's argument also systematically makes the case that the threat from Islamists is overstated...Durbin never articulates a defense of any interrogation tactics, never pauses over the threat, never recalls the brutality of the jihadists from September 11, to Bali, to Madrid. He never names a single victim of their violence, but instead worries over their conditions, telling his Chicago interviewer that "we have held 500 to 700 people for sometimes up to two and a half years with no charges."

And why didn't Durbin do these things? Duh:

"Durbin stands with the Michael Moore left, the Howard Dean attack-America-first caucus, and the international chorus that assigns the responsibility for the jihadists to American overreach in the world."


Remember that The Weekly Standard is the respectable conservative weekly magazine. Democrats cannot, cannot, cannot give into this sort of shit. When decrying the failure of standards to which the Allied West has always held itself -- say, the standard not to behave in a way commonly associated with deplorable regimes -- becomes a "censurable" offence, there's a problem. When doing so in the process of pointing out the embarrassing fact of the US military's continuing inability to fully reign in the use of torture among those "handful of out-of-control G.I.s" that keep popping up is declared beyond the pale, then humanistic liberal thought itself has come to be defined as "radical". That's exactly how Hugh Hewitt wants it. And it's scary. And worth fighting. This is no time for tears.

Did Bush affect the outcome in Iran?

On Thursday, the Washington Post reported Bush taking a hard line on Iran's presidential election:

"Today, Iran is ruled by men who suppress liberty at home and spread terror across the world," Bush said. "Power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy. The June 17th presidential elections are sadly consistent with this oppressive record."

Addressing the Iranian people, Bush added: "As you stand for your own liberty, the people of America stand with you."


At least tacitly, the Whitehouse endorsed the idea that Iranian liberals should sit on their hands during the presidential election to express their dissatisfaction with the regime. As it turned out, the first round of the Iraqi presendential election ended on Friday with reported 63% turnout. The results (from Wikipedia) are as follows:


Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani 21.01%
Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad 19.48%
Mehdi Karroubi 17.28%
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf 13.90%
Mostafa Moeen 13.83%
Ali Larijani 5.94%
Mohsen Mehralizadeh 4.40%
Blank or invalid votes 4.17%


Ahmadinezhad, the anti-liberalization (appointed) mayor of Tehran, is universally considered the conservative hardliner in the field (though also a populist who called for greater aid to the poor as an expression of piety). Juan Cole describes him as a "very bad guy" and links to this interesting interview with him. At the very least, he was the most overtly Khomeinist, anti-American candidate in an election in which, according to articles in TNR, the Economist and the Christian Science Monitor, the candidates outbid each other to appear young, forward-thinking, independent and reformist, and to thereby surmount the generally reported apathy for the vote among Iranian youth. By contrast, according to the WaPo's Karl Vick, Ahmadinezhad had a niche: "His campaign posters were printed in black and white. A half-hour television special dwelled on the modesty of his home, a traditional Iranian house furnished with only a chair at the desk he shared with his father. "Where's the swimming pool?" the narrator asked. Several voters had described him as refreshingly authentic.

Today, he told a meeting of Parliamentians that he saw no reason to negociate Iran's nuclear ambitions with the West.

Western commentators seem to think Rafsanjani -- who was a profoundly unreformist Iranian president from 1987 to 1995 but has restlyed himself as a "pragmatic conservative" with insider heft and who was always in the running for one of the two top spots -- will win next week's runoff vote easily (although Windsteed at Tehran-based Iran Votes 2005 is pessimistic). But a look at the polls right before the election reveals that Ahmadinezhad essentially came out of nowhere.

A June 12th poll by IRNA found Ahmadinezhad with only 7.7% of support, compared to 27.1% for Rafsanjani, the reformer Moeen with 18.9%, the conservative Qalibaf with 16.5% and moderate reformist cleric Karroubi at 11.3%.

An IASP poll (translated at Kos) released a day later found Ahmadinezhad at only 9.9%, trailing Rafsanjani at 21.7%, Ghalibaf at 14.7% and Moeen at 11.5%.

As late as Thursday, the BBC reported that "Expert projections suggest most votes will be shared between Mr Rafsanjani, former hardline police chief Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, and reformist Mostafa Moin." The same day, the Christian Science Monitor profiled Ghalibaf (Qalibaf), Moeen (Moin) and Rafsanjani as the frontrunners (almost the whole mainstream Western media, both centrist and conservative, seem to have had an almost ludicrously strong, and possibly blindering, pro-Moeen bias).

What happened? Several quarters (including the Moeen and Karroubi campaigns and National Review) have alleged fraud by the mullahs (spectacular fraud according to NR) but so far most of the Western media, and the White House, has been slow to endorse the idea that the mullahs completely rigged the election -- and it appears the reformists will have to be mollified by the partial recount that the Guardians Council ok'ed. The Boston Globe also reports that the boycott called by Iranian reformist youth to protest the Supreme Council's vetting and disqualification of various candidates depressed turnout in the capital, Tehran, below the national average, thereby allowing Ahmadinejad to win his home turf on the strength of the conservative vote there.

The other leading candidate factor is ginned-up anti-Americanism. That's how the regime is playing it of course: Interior Minister Kamal Karazi called the election results a "big no" to the United States. But the A.P has also endorsed this angle:

"I say to Bush: 'Thank you,'" quipped Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi. "He motivated people to vote in retaliation."

Bush's comments - blasting the ruling clerics for blocking "basic requirements of democracy" - became a lively sideshow in Iran's closest election since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and highlighted again the United States' often crossed-wire efforts to isolate Iran.

..."Unknowingly, [Bush] pushed Iranians to vote so that they can prove their loyalty to the regime, even if they are in disagreement with it," said Hamed al-Abdullah, a political science professor at Kuwait University.


(For a view closer to home, the proprietor of Iranian political blog The Adventures of Mr. Behi recently debated the issue with four of his commentators though none of the other Iranian reform blogs seem to have weighed in on the topic.)

The two possibilities -- vote fraud and a whipping up of anti-American fervour combined with a depressed reformist vote -- aren't mutually exclusive. If Bush's remarks produced even slightly higher conservative turnout or provoked even slightly more screw-the-West sentiment among Iranian voters, it would become that much easier for the regime to fudge the results in favour of the hardliners and to quash complaints of fraud (which they've done, with relish). On the flip side, if Bush and the hawks helped increase enthusiasm for the the ill-conceived reformist boycott of the presidential poll (these boycotts basically never work, and they certainly didn't work for Iraq's Sunni population six months ago), then they just delivered a blow to the very candidates they, and the rest of the West, needed to serve as a counter-balance to the mullahs, particularly in future nuke talks.

At the very least, by waving the big stick, the Bushies set themselves up for a big snub, and possibly did much worse damage than that (we'll know on Friday). Today's wishy-washy post election comments aside, the White House might want to consider being a little more cautious -- or maybe shutting the hell up about what Iranians ought to do and whether they ought to vote -- until after Friday's runoff.

Batman vs. "economics".

First, Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins really is the best Batman picture so far, even better than the 1989 Tim Burton one (although there's bias on my part since I can't stand Tim Burton, the Robin Williams of directors). Nolan's Batman is nice and dark. It's gritty and violent. It's haunted and human and defiantly imperfect. Nolan's Batmobile is more Abrams Tank than Ferrari. The Bat Suit is imported in pieces from Asian subsidiaries of Bruce Wayne's multinational tech firm and assembled in the Bat Cave underneath the Wayne Mansion. The bat signal is created slapdash by stringing up villains across floodlights. The Bruce Wayne "hero" is as comfortable playing his alter-ego drunken millionaire playboy by day as he is being the avenging superhero by night. There's little visible blood or bruising, but in the film's climax -- though you have to think a bit to realise it -- a doomed little blond kid, gratuitously showing up to remind us of Bale-Wayne-Batman's own fucked-up childhood, gets gassed, his only solace being the right to die, by going insane, in Katie Holmes' surregate mother arms. This is pretty dark stuff.

On top of all that, the cast is great. Christian Bale is a better, more respectful-of-his-responsibility-to-Bob-Kane's-vision Batman than Val Kilmer, George Clooney or Michael Keatan were. He's so good that he almost overcomes the essential ridiculousness that dooms all goth-comic movies: the spandex suit. Bale's Batman is twisted (and narcisstic) enough to enjoy dressing up like a bat and rasping at villains, yet self-conciously macho enough to be vaguely uncomfortable in his chosen uniform. (Bale and Nolan know you don't need nipples on the batsuit to be a bit kinky, to exploit the thin line between fear and fetish.) Katie Holmes is, of course, too-perfect-by-half as the Brainy Girl in Silk Shirts with the Heart of Gold -- but Bale is creepy enough to make her goody-two-shoes chastity credible. Besides, she's a requisite, and the rest of the cast is a real hoot, in the best way. There's Gary Oldman as the Last Honest Cop. There's Morgan Freeman as the Brilliant-but-Cool Physicist Who Makes the Bat-Gadgets. There's Michael Caine as Alfred the butler, Bale's surregate father-figure and the film's best source of comic relief.

There's also a whole smorgasbord of terrific villains: Liam Neeson plays the Evil Psychobabbling Vaguely European Ninja-Fighting Arch-Villain. Chris Lehane--er, Cillian Murphy--plays the effete but demented shrink who eventually gets a taste of his own shock-therapy medicine. There's a mob boss named Falcone. There's also a whole gang of ninja-fighting baddies, under Neeson's employ, called the League of Shadows, whose historical and vaguely mythologically-rendered role has been to wreck Shiva-like havoc on societies that have become too decadent (making them an interesting and tantalizingly opaque combination of al Qaeda and God). But the real villain in the film, the great evil with which the Shadow-Ninjas originally tried to destroy Gotham, is (Neeson sneers knowingly) "economics" -- or, maybe more precisely, rampant capitalist economics. By contrast, the real force for good in the film isn't really the creepy, humourless, self-obsessed Wayne-Batman. Rather, it's that scourge of rampant capitalism: noblesse-oblige. Noblesse-oblige is personified in the film by Bale's dead father, who once built a giant, audacious, subsudized public-transport system to help the poor and the politically unconnected get where they needed to go in Gotham. Such altruism, we're told, led him to "nearly bankrupt Wayne Enterprises during the Depression trying to fight poverty". And that's why "economics" alone couldn't get the job done for the bad guys. Instead, the League of Shadows has had to come back and try to finish the job in a more appropiately science-fiction manner: by gas-poisoning Gotham's citizens and turning them into flesh-eating zombies.

Batman Begins is uber-political (contrary to what Liam Lacey at The Globe and Mail says) but it's uber-political in a very old-school kind of way. In a terrifically observant review, the L.A. Weekly's Scott Foundas describes Bale and Nolan's creation as the first "neorealist" Batman. Maybe, but this sure isn't a "neoliberal" Batman. The film is set in a distinctly American time-warp. Afterall, the Depression, during which Jonathan Wayne spread his largesse being a model unto other capitalists and thwarting the League, took place during the 30s. The childhood flashback parts of the movie look distinctly Greatest Generation. The film's "present" (which should be about 20 years later) could conceivably represent any time between the actual 80s and George Orwell's 1984. But society's problems are apparently timeless. Neeson, being evil, advocates cracking down on the underclass: "criminals thrive on the indulgence of society's understanding" he tells Bale omniously. The hero thinks there might be more to it than that.

Batman also proves himself on the right side of the film's ideological debate by disfavouring capital punishment. In effect, he's the Mario Cuomo of superheros, throwing his veto around with relish. Early in the film, he breaks with the League of Shadows by refusing to execute a sacrificial murderer they've brought him, an act the League requires to prove their proteges' war-on-drugs-style hardassedness. Neeson tells Bale that sort of softness will be his undoing, sort of like coddling those welfare moms. (The sacrificial criminal comes to a bad end anyway when Batman escapes from the League by torching their ninja training center located at the top of the Himalayas; more on this kind of thing below.)

There is a little bit of New Left anti-corporate, anti-military-industrial-complex posturing to temper the film's bleeding-heartedness, but it's pretty half-hearted by Hollywood standards. Afterall, the rapaciousness of the corporate behemoth, Wayne Enterprises, is eradicated as easily as changing the CEO and getting the company out of the arms industry. As Bale returns to Gotham to begin his dual-identity life, we learn that, since Jonathan Wayne's death, the nasty CEO of Wayne Enterprises proved his nefariousness by taking the firm public, (something "Jonathan Wayne probably wouldn't have done.") Of course, the Waynes, salt of the earth, kept full partner legal-responsibility for their own business back in the day. Bale's great act of market-savvy and public responsibility is to restore that legacy by buying up most of the IPO shares so that the firm once again becomes his and his alone. He can then fire that rabidly downsizing CEO and appoint Morgan Freeman in his place. And probably raise wages up to some respectable level down on the floor.

Of course, noblesse-oblige has its moral ambiguities. Batman doesn't kill the big villains if he can avoid it. But he knocks off their underling thugs with relish. And if the whole of Gotham has been corrupted and people are desperate, is it really the fault of these thugs that they're working for the bad guys? Aren't they just cogs in the corporate-capitalist wheel? In the film's big climax, Batman refuses to kill Neeson, but informs him that "I don't have to save you," then lets him plunge to his death in a train crash that Batman's friend, the Last Honest Cop, had set up. Similar ambiguity surrounds the Gotham underclass, a member of whom killed Bale's parents and set him on the road to Batman-hood. The murderer was desperate, we're told, because the mob boss Falcone kept everyone desperate, unemployed and poor. So was the mugger more a victim of The Man or more of a heartless, socially irresponsible criminal who destroyed good lives? The villain Neeson and the League of Shadows have their answer of course -- it's the same answer as Bat Buchanan and Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich and Jon Kyl have given. The film's good guys know, or come to know, that it's the wrong answer, but their own alternative response is more ambiguous. They hem an haw a bit. Bale overpays a homeless guy for his coat. Holmes comforts a doomed little boy. The evil CEO gets fired. But at the end of the film, the lunatics from the asylum are still running in the streets (how should the criminally insane be dealt with?), Wayne-Batman is still a hell of a lot richer than anybody else, and the essential questions about how to run society remain unanswered.

I like this. I think noblesse oblige is generally underated in today's politics and it's sure as hell neglected in today's popular culture. North American society doesn't demand nearly enough from its people in power. The failure to make demands on our economic and cultural elite is a major failure of the post-Great Society era, and it's probably the definitive failing of the American neoliberals. And here is that rare film that rises above the typical Hollywood libertarianism. Batman Begins is wonderfully austere; it's all about the responsibilities, rather than the rights, of liberalism. It's about the interplay of the public good and the selfish good in the dark human heart. But while my poor maligned discipline -- "economics!" -- takes another hit to the solar plexus, Nolan also ignores the solutions it offers. Where's Keynes in all this? Economics, the good kind at least, can offer us the proper channels for greed. It can help align private incentives with the public interest where markets fail. It can help keep make noblesse-oblige more than just noblesse-oblige. In fact, the dream of well-regulated capitalism is that it turns economic victims into players, that it spreads autonomy. Granted, autonomy is not a social value that's very conducive to the goth-comic world, composed as it is of heros, villains and their miles and miles of victims. But it's important to any vision of liberalism in our real world. As Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman or Jackson Lears or the editorial staff of the Washington Monthly might tell you, 20th Century history, be it the 1920s or the 1990s, suggests that the capitalist class' noblesse oblige might not be enough to ward off the League of Shadows. On the other hand, when demanded by the political class and combined with smart market regulation, meaty enforcement agencies (the Last Honest Cops), strong labour interests who feel they have a stake in the economic and political system, and maybe a Democratic Congress, it probably can play a major role in keeping us from turning into flesh-eating zombies.

The casaulty rate and political feasibility of occupation.

CBS reports today that another 6 U.S. servicemen died on Thursday in Ramadi, a western Iraqi town, five by a roadside bomb and one by gunfire. That raises the official US casualty count to 1718 deaths, 1905 including UK and other coalition member deaths.

It's a morbid topic, but it's worth wondering at what kind of casualty rate does the occupation cease to be politically feasible in the US. The current of US politics -- on the op-ed pages, in the polls, online -- is, unsurprisingly, very sensitive to the nature of developments in Iraq. The immediate lead-up and aftermath of the January 30th national election -- remember all those wonderful images of the women with the purple fingers? -- led to a big groundswell of support among doubters and much crowing among the hawks. But as things have gone back toward chaos amid grim reports from the ground in and around the Sunni triangle, there has been a reversion to cynicism and recriminations among foes of the war and critics of occupation, and a resumption of madcap lying by Dick Cheney and Scott McLellan. Although Bush's poll numbers didn't closely track the situation in Iraq through the election season, American support for the war has tanked along with Bush's overall and WoT approval rating since the US election. Most polls are finding a majority of Americans saying the conflict was "not worth fighting". About 75% of Americans say the current casualty rate is "unacceptable". According to a recent Gallop poll, six in ten Americans want [corrected, earlier typo] to see the start of partial or total troop withdrawal from the region. The war isn't very exciting anymore. It's just a grind, and without the adrenalin, Americans are likely to become become less increasingly unwilling to tolerate casualties, or extended duties.

The Iraq Coalition Casualty Count is a good resource. Looking at average coaltion deaths by month, the January elections ended one of the hardest periods for the coalition, which experienced a daily death rate of about 3.8 soldiers per day, almost half the death rate that had prevailed during the actual war between March 20, 2003 and the fall of Baghdad in mid-April. In the three months following the January 31st election, coalition deaths fell to an average of about 1.7 per day, or about 0.9 deaths per thousand according to an article in McLeans Magazine. In May, renewed violence brought the average death rate back to 2.84. So far this month, factoring in the most recent deaths, it stands at 2.94, with all but two of the deaths in the numerator being American.

These numbers might change again, but what if they don't? Can the U.S. continue to sustain casualty rates of 3 soldiers per day without provoking a politically viable demand for immediate exit at home? (afterall, the drumbeats have already started in Congress, even among nervous Republicans, like North Carolina's Walter Jones who represents a strong military district and who actually voted for the IWR). There are currently around 140,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, a figure that has been roughly stable over the past two years. At the three-per-day rate, annual deaths in Iraq would account for 0.8% of the (rotating) US stock of soldiers in Iraq, and about 0.25% of the entire U.S. active-duty army. Add to that the fact that there are roughly 3.5 serious injuries for every death (casualties who don't return to combat within 72 hours) and you have an additional 3% of the the total force-size having their lives ruined or ended each year, or about 0.8% of the US active-duty army.

This is hardly WWI-level carnage, but unless Americans are enthusiastic about promoting Middle Eastern democracy and see Iraq as a way to do that (and its worth remembering, again, that Bush and his national security council are recent converts to the cause; that this wasn't why Bush was originally elected; and it's not how the war was originally sold), it does make the ongoing occupation look politically very difficult. In Vietnam, American deaths eventually totalled about 11% of the force as it stood at its peak of just under 550,000 troops in 1968, and the war wreaked political havoc at home. Granted, the sin of sending young men off to slaughter to service the Big Red Scare was worse -- and more deserving of outrage -- because of the draft and its inequtities than it should be under a (technically) all-volunteer force. (On the other hand, that was also an age in which noblesse-oblige argubably still existed to a measurable extent among the hawks in power as well as the doves.) More recently, US participation in ongoing Balkan peacekeeping was politically possible largely because of the small numbers of troops involved, under 5000 in Bosnia-Herzegovenia and Kosovo by the early '00s.

What about the prospects for Iraq itself? Without getting into any political analysis -- like what effect the beginning of troop withdrawal would have on the insurgency -- the data from Iraq Body Count (though it looks to be about two weeks out of date right now), suggests that Iraq has experienced a civilian violent death-rate of about 23 per day since the "end of major combat operations" and the start of the occupation phase on May 1st, 2003; those numbers are roughly comparable to, or maybe a bit lower than, the numbers reported by Juan Cole and others for recent carnage. The ICCC also reports that, since the beginning of 2005, about 1,000 Iraq security and police personnel have been killed, bringing the average closer to around 28 Iraqis killed due to the occupation and/or guerilla conflict daily. In a country of just under 26 million people, those figures, if they prove to be representative of what's ahead, suggest that about four percent of one percent (0.04%)of Iraqis will be dying in violent conflict annually, with the casualty rate probably well over one in a thousand once serious injuries are added into the numerator.

Again, those numbers are tiny compared to the carnage going on in civil and inter-tribal wars in various parts of Africa. But they're probably pretty close to the borderline of what might be sustainable and still allow the possibility of maintaining the trappings, and functioning government, of civil society (which involves things like keeping people like Ahmed Chalabi from assuming too much power.) A poll of Iraqis taken last year suggests that a majority of Shiites and a large majority of Kurds don't perceive life in Iraq to be "unpredictable and dangerous", though it's unclear if the poll concluded before or after the upswing in violence that dominated the three months leading up to the January 30th election.

Nevertheless, at the risk of sounding hopelessly pedantic, both the coalition and Iraqi death rate look plausibly permanent, various US military figures having remarked that insurgencies of this type can last up to ten years. And the Iraqi violent death rate looks to be about an order of magnitude above the occupation violent death rate, while the Iraqi population is two orders of magnitude larger than the size of the occupying army. So at least at first pass, Iraqi civil society looks a lot more sustainable than does the ongoing American military presence in Iraq, especially given Americans voters' potential to vote the War Party out of Congress in a mere 17 months. Expect to hear more from Walter Jones in the weeks to come.

Update: Because I wrote this late at night and then had to be somewhere in the morning, I posted this entry way too soon. Consequently, it contained a bunch of real groaning errors, including math errors, which I hope I've now corrected. I assume nobody is reading this blog but if they are, I apologize for the sloppiness.

Props also to this excellent post on roughly the same topic from Lies.com.

Why do Democrats have such crappy campaign slogans?

A few deep thoughts that have nothing to do with my upcoming Econ Seminar presentation: why do Democratic presidential campaigns always end up with such hopeless, lousy campaign slogans? And is this a development that has occured within my politically aware lifetime?

For some reason, I had just been thinking about Kerry's "Stronger at home, Respected in the world" campaign theme. To be fair, back in July of 2004, I recall being actually pretty pleased when Kerry settled on this theme. "Stronger" was sturdy. It didn't inspire sniggers. It was something both the candidate and his surregates could say out on the trail without seeming foolish. And it sure as hell beat Kerry's previous slogan, the one he'd been experimenting with in the spring, "Let America be America again" (At the time, Timothy Noah of Slate politely explained some of the various problems with this Langston Hughes tribute slogan.) And that hadn't even been the worst of it: back in the dark days of Kerry's primary campaign, his people had adopted the slogan "The Real Deal". To put it succintly, no male liberal politician should ever refer to himself as "the real deal". It immediately made me think of that SNL sketch about Al Gore's 2000 running mate search in which the guy playing Kerry bangs himself on the chest and refers to himself confidently as "the total package".

At another level, though, "Stronger", along with its biographical counterpart, "A Lifetime of Strength and Service" sort of encapsulated the eventual problems with the Kerry campaign: it was servicable, respectable, coolly compentent, but utterly soulless -- especially compared to Bush's soothing, strutting-with-subtlety, almost-perfect-iambic-pentameter, "Steady Leadership in Times of Change" (say it three times to yourself.) "Stronger at home", by contrast, seemed to prove concretely that the Democrats still hadn't learned the lessons of 1988 (or 2000 for that matter). It's not about competence, though competence helps. It's about ideology. Kerry's slogan showed he was Dukakis without the month-long post-convention vacation, without the high-minded firing of John Sasso, with realistic competence in spades, but scattershot vision: a man, in fact, fully deserving of 48% of the popular vote and his party's respect in defeat.

But the problem was hardly limited to the Kerry campaign. Kerry's primary rivals also had slogan problems. The most famous slogan of the season was Dean's "You have the power". Late in the game, when Dean's people were haphazardly trying to transition him from insurgent to frontrunner, the campaign theme became "Results not rhetoric", possibly the most blatantly oxymoronic campaign slogan in history. But Dean never really got over "You have the power"; it was, in the end, what defined him. It's the title he gave his campaign memoir. And along with its counterpart, "Help me take this country back", it did have a real oomph during the Sleepless Summer Tour, when Dean barked it at conflict-and-solidarity-starved Democrats at outdoor rallies. But in the end, it was also Dean's undoing. The vast majority of primary voters didn't want to "have the power", or the responsibility, to win the election and save the country. That's the job of the nominee. So rightly or wrongly (probably rightly), they decided that Kerry was, in fact, "the real deal" (or "the total package". Whatever.)

The nicest, most genuinely memorable bit of rhetoric to come out of the 2004 primaries had to be John Edwards' sweet, sad "There are two Americas" talk, particularly when combined with Edwards' earnest decrying of an economic system that rewards "wealth, not work". But much got lost in the translation into a campaign slogan: "Let's make one America.", which was too sweet, too trite by half, reinforcing all of Edwards' bad play-doh stereotypes. This was equally true also of Edwards' abysmal, over-emotional "Hope is on the way!" admonition at the 2004 Convention and later on the trail. (It's also, it's worth pointing out, a long-standing problem for the candidate. Way back in 2002, Edwards named his midterm PAC the New American Optimists PAC, earning Josh Marshall's derision. While Edwards' populism can be appealling, the tone-deafness of all this is remarkable: was ever there was an election cycle -- beginning with the theft of the presidency, leading through a terrorist attack, a recession, the corporate scandals and an unnecessary, dishonestly advoctated, nightmarish war and occupation of a soveriegn country -- that screamed out not to be based on the other side's delightful hope and optimism?

But 2004 wasn't even necessarily a bumper year for bad sloganeering. Back in 2000, the Gore campaign, like its candidate, found itself caught between two opposing slogans, representing two opposing worldviews -- the earthy-lyrical, Stanley-Greenberg-approved "The people not the powerful" and the safe, New-Economy-buzzword, Mark Penn-approved "Keep the prosperity going". Nothing captures the conundrums of the Gore campaign better than these two phrases. Gore officially rolled out the first in his loving tribute to his southern progressive father at the 2000 convention, in almost-perfect-iambic quadrameter (And never in the years to come...did he forget the reason he entered public service -- to fight for the people, not the powerful). The problem with "the people" was that it was too personal, too combattive to repeat over and over on the campaign trail without eventually sounding silly, always a risk for Gore. It was also his one really good moment in the campaign and such things rarely last in politics. Typically, the conflict-loving press exascerbated the problem by unhelpfully changing the slogan to "The people versus the powerful", that extra syllable doing a lot to ruin things.

So Gore ended up falling back on the alternative tie into the Clinton years, the utterly forgettable "Keep the prosperity going". It reminded me a lot of a mattress warehouse somewhere that had gotten an overlarge shipment. "Great deals! Low, low prices! Keep the prosperity going with the Gore Democrats!" For a candidate with sincerity and/ or political-identity problems, this was just terrible. But in fact the slogan was so bad that even Clinton sounded oily rather than soothing while saying it out on the trail in the dying days of the campaign.

But the very worst slogan of my political life had to belong to Gore's primary opponent that year. Bill Bradley's campaign catch-phrase was, incredibly, "It can happen" (later amended to the more reasonable "Make it happen", but not until after New Hampshire.) Ask yourself this: If you were a neoliberal insurgent running against an incumbant vice president from a popular administration, what would you most want people to think? Would it really be something along the lines of "Bill Bradley? That guy from New Jersey? Huh, well It Can Happen I guess. I mean, last summer my brother finally got a job. We didn't see that one coming...

So where are the great Democratic slogan writers? Going back into the mists of time, there was Clinton's basically vapid but pitch-perfect, beating-them-at-their-own-game "Bridge to the Future" 1996 reelection campaign theme. Clinton's crowning touch was the "Bridge to the 21st Century" twist of his nominating speech, the perfect, if slightly cruel, rubuttal to Dole's proffered "bridge to the past". Clinton's 1992 slogan, "Our new covenant" was actually wonderful rather than just effective: an evoking of scripture, erudition, tantalizing promise and the ever-powerful theme of conquering and remaking the party in your image. On the other hand, that was arguably what Dean wanted to do in 2003 when he told us "You have the power!", and look where that got him (well, the Chairmanship, at least.)

With campaign slogans, as with everything, greatness is fleeting. But some basic competence, and ideology, would be good.