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A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:
KJ, the Democrats may not have a poster child for health care reform, but they are getting a public enemy. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Sen. Arlen Specter got shouted down by anti-health care reform protesters at an embarrassing town hall meeting Sunday ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Like Jessica, I devoured Todd Purdum's blistering report in the current issue of Vanity Fair
about Sarah Palin that draws on sniping from former John McCain aides,
shrugging statements of disownment from acquaintances in Wasilla, and
sorrowful head-shaking from the Republican intelligentsia. The
wide-ranging “profile” of the woman who almost stood second in line to
the presidency pre-empts the forthcoming book that netted the Alaskan
governor seven figures. And, having undergone the saga of the 2008
presidential campaign—particularly the post-Labor Day sprint that made
up Palin’s first months in the public spotlight—it’s astonishing to
think that there could POSSIBLY be more to the story.
And yet, writes Purdum ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Politico just ran a pretty intriguing story speculating on why there are so few women in the Republican party, and it definitely rang true for me. A few weeks ago, I went to a GOP lunch at the National Press Club sponsored by the RNC.
The main speaker? A fiftysomething white guy in a suit. Who proceeded to talk nonstop for the next 30 minutes about his impressive political connections (yawn—does he think we know who these people are?), the dire need for volunteers that weekend for a tight race in Pennsylvania (dude, we live in D.C.), and the strange predicament of...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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My beloved Liz Lemon—er, I mean Tina Fey—isn't the only one suggesting that Sarah Palin's focus has shifted from 2008 to 2012. Today, trying get a jump on the post-election story before the polls even open, much less close, a host of politicos are placing their bets over who will emerge from the broken GOP as the next to be (unofficially) crowned party leader.
When John McCain chose his running mate, he was rightfully lambasted as cynical for passing over experienced insider men for an accessible outsider woman. In the end, he was right on one count: that a swath of the American public—though one which perhaps may not be wide enough to elect him tomorrow—felt so disenfranchised by the people who hold power in this country that they would line up behind someone who reflected and could articulate their own proud feelings of ordinariness. (This profound cultural conflict—rooted deep in issues of education and economics—will require far more systemic thinking than the fuzzy feeling of "unity" Obama hopes to usher in tomorrow and beyond.) Where McCain may have been wrong—and this is big—was in his perception of this election as a game of identity politics.
People have talked plenty about whether Obama is a post-race candidate for a post-race America. I've generally taken issue with that notion—and should he be elected, my heart positively swells with the notion of the descendant of slaves raising her children inside the White House. But by the same flawed token, did Sarah Palin become a post-gender candidate for a post-gender America? Of course, Palin has certainly worked her gender in this race: from that flirty wink and sky-high Manolos to her uber-mom positioning. But like Obama's race hasn't been the totalizing meta-narrative of his candidacy, neither has Palin's gender, and just as this hasn't been an election year for single issue voters, it hasn't been one for single-identity ones either, despite what pundits may have predicted from the outset. We entered this race all aflutter about our first female presidential candidate. We're ending it considering the next one with hardly a shrug about her gender.
While I am hardly a Palin fan, and for myriad reasons shudder to imagine how she might develop with the next four years to study up, the fact that neither her supporters nor her detractors seemed to make a big deal about a female commander in chief (remember those days?) suggests that in unexpected ways, we've come a long way during this long march to Election Day.
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I'm intrigued by this interpretation, from psychology professor Jonathan Haidt on Edge, which Ann already wrote thoughtfully about, about why people vote Republican. Haidt points out that mostly liberal academic psychologists have concluded that "conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death." And then right when he is about to lose me, for seeming pat and condescending, he writes:
"our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. ... Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats."
and
"the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats 'just don't get it,' this is the 'it' to which they refer."
I don't entirely understand why Democrats haven't generally persuaded more voters in the middle that they're also about binding people together. That's what Barack Obama's community organizer past was about, and yet somehow that job description was treated as a bad word at the Republican convention. But I think Haidt's framing of the challenge is useful. And humble, which is a nice change of pace from all the campaign clattering this week. (More natterings from me about that here and here.)
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Dahlia's got it: what's depressing about Palin is that she represents the Ann Coulterization of the Republican party. That's what was tugging at my unconscious mind as I watched her spout the most vicious and irresponsible claptrap, with such a gleeful expression on her face.
Watching Palin was like watching a cross between Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin-- only Palin accessorizes with babies. And she's got a governorship, instead of a column or a TV show.
I'm beginning to suspect that it's not just me, either. Palin offered red meat to the hungry GOP faithful, but not sure how her speech played with independents. Way too soon to really know-- but for what it's worth, a Detroit Free Press focus group wasn't too impressed with her.
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What I'm stuck on is that image of Bristol Palin and her betrothed holding hands up on stage last night, along with the rest of her family, as the party of Bill Bennett and the Family Research Council applauded. It isn't that I think she should have been locked in a closet somewhere, or shipped off for a "year abroad'' in nearby Russia. But when my best friend got pregnant in high school in the conservative town of 8,000 where we grew up, I do not remember anybody throwing her a parade; nope, pretty sure that did not happen. (I also don't remember anybody thinking that our mayor was qualified to be president, but that might be my small-town humility talkin'.) So, is the takeaway that the Republican Party is getting more tolerant, or that, as Hanna says, the only thing that matters is that she's carrying the child to term? Maybe, but when I try to imagine an Obama (or any Democrat's) daughter up there in a similar situation, my guess is no; if that happened, wouldn't we be hearing about how that's what liberal permissiveness and Hollywood and rap music and Bill Clinton hath wrought?
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Maureen, I suppose whether or not you find the Republican stance on abortion hypocritical depends on point of view. From a pro-choice perspective, yes, a commitment to banning abortion is government intrusion on a woman's body. If you look at it from the perspective of the unborn child, the platform stance is an attempt to recognize the sanctity of life for everyone, born or unborn.
Republicans, as a party, are not trying to ban birth control. (Yeah, I know there are some extremists out there. I don't like ‘em, either.) And I will defend to the death a woman's right not to have sex. But biology sucks. Blame God if you're religious; otherwise blame Mother Nature or evolution. Women have babies. Men don't. We trash our girlish figures and lose hours of sleep on those 2 a.m. feedings. It's not fair. Aside from birth control and abortion, there's no getting around it. Birth control prevents the creation of a life, but if you're pro-life, you believe that abortion ends one.
When Republicans say they don't want government intruding in their lives, it's because we trust people to make decisions that are sound for them, we trust people to take care of themselves. But when you're pregnant, you're not making decisions just for yourself. You're making them for another person. And believe me, I don't buy the load of crap that South Dakota is selling, that a woman who gets an abortion is terminating a "whole, separate, unique, living human being." No other "unique" person has ever made my back ache or caused my ankles to swell to elephantine proportions. At the same time, that "clump of cells" isn't going to turn into a watermelon, or a puppy, or a ficus tree. It's a human being.
Almost everyone, regardless of ideology, accepts some form of government regulation in their lives, largely in the name of protecting us. We accept speed limits and drunk-driving laws to keep us safe on the roads; we trust building codes to keep us safe in our homes and public places; etc. If, at the end of the day, a platform that respects the life of the unborn still represents a hypocrisy, well, then call me a hypocrite. It's a charge I can live with.
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A couple of years ago, my son remarked that President Bush seemed to think every day was Opposites Day, which would explain how he always wound up listening to the wrong people and giving the best ideas the boot. That's how I feel now, listening to Hillary's down-is-up take on why Obama can't win in November. And I am so invigorated by—which on Opposites Day means weary of—hearing her describe his greatest strength as his biggest liability.
No question he's made mistakes. But his fatal flaw, according to her, is that he is not as skilled as she in answering Republican attacks (with more of the same). Watch her gleefully practice on her fellow Democrat, with Republican-style ads evoking such GOP golden oldies as the red phone, Pearl Harbor, and, OMG, Khrushchev? I never expected her to be leading the proverbial Million Mom March, but doesn't it bother any of these old-school feminists to see her painting her rival as the girl in this race—yes, as if that were a bad thing—just as every Republican since Richard Nixon has done to every Democrat since Adlai Stevenson? No doubt the former Goldwater Girl will never be outdone on the mushroom-cloud front. But at what point does one turn into what one fears? If I wanted Karl Rove for president, I would have voted for him the first time.
To me, Obama's appeal is rooted in his view that we have more in common than we might realize—and can't afford to go on tearing each other to shreds in this polarized, cartoon world where if your views are two degrees north or south of mine, then U R evil and must die. It was his refusal to play the same old zero-sum game that got him where he is today—ahead by every measure and, barring the kind of collapse that won't happen unless he betrays his own best instincts, on his way to becoming the nominee.
So, why can't Obama close the deal? In a way, it's his strength in November that is his highest hurdle now. I always thought he would have a harder time winning the nomination than the general, because the Clintons have defined and dominated the Democratic Party for a long, long time. And it's the very same "Let's stand on common ground, together'' appeal—which will win him the support of independents and Republicans in the fall—that makes him so suspect to Democrats who don't want to stand anywhere with those people; they want payback for the Bush years. And while that's understandable, it's not a way to win. Even Bill Clinton, with all his superior political skills and peekaboo triangulating and solemn vows not to act like a real Democrat, would not have won without Ross Perot in the mix. We can't get there on our own —which, again, is Obama's message.
Another reason he can't close the deal: We are never satisfied! Republicans settle for the good-enough candidate, go on about their lives, and show up on Election Day, but not us. I took my children to an Obama rally where people were screaming and swooning and speaking in tongues they were so excited—and on the way home, my daughter sniffs and says she wonders if he's focused enough on global warming. And what can I do but swell with pride? My baby really is a Democrat.
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My only thought this morning is that I really want it to be over. I'll vow to raise $5 million for Hillary if she'll drop out.
Second thought: I'm glad Cindy traded canary yellow for red—it looks better on her. Hillary boringly wore red, as I predicted.
Final thought: This is a result of Democratic neuroticism—don't want to be a member of any club that would have me. When one rises high, they just see his/her flaws, and vice versa. It's like the girl who can't close the deal and get married. Republicans, though originally faced with worse, more flawed choices, just know how to make a decision. They are the Deciders. We are the Ditherers.
Read the rest of the conversation.
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1) As usual, a woman's skinny blondness is admitted as evidence against her, once again deflecting suspicion from zaftig brunettes.
2) As noted by Emily Y., insinuations about said skinny blonde are better than a spa week for making an old soldier young again.
3) Thank you, New York Times, for reminding us that unless the mistress (or mister) steps to the microphone, the teller of the tale is the one who comes off looking like the villain.
4) There's something touching about a man whose young friend so closely resembles the missus; is this the ultimate backhanded compliment? (And is that why Cindy McCain looked so oddly but genuinely pleased standing beside her man yesterday as he denied doing anything wrong ever?)
5) Is that an earmark in your pocket...? The possible sex scandal also diverts attention from the fact that Iseman's firm specializes in getting earmarks for clients—and didn't I hear that McCain was against those?
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Ellen, that is how I felt after I read an interview with The Sopranos' creator David Chase way back when, explaining that every word out of every character's mouth was a lie. (Up until then, I'd spent the whole hour going, "Well, that's not true ... and that's not either.'' So with that off my shoulders, well, I was freed up for whole other levels of viewing enjoyment. Sad, really.) And yes, Rachael, you are our rightful Elisabeth—even if I'm guessing it would take more than a congratulatory note on the birth of your baby to get you to reconsider Hillary Clinton. So now that your guy John McCain has the nomination, he knows he needs to make nice with Republicans well to your right, as he did yesterday at CPAC. But I think I finally get their McCain hatred after hearing an interview with the American Conservative Union's David Keene on Diane Rehm the other day. (And no, it is not the same as Hillary hatred on the left, over policy disappointments, political hedging, and Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.)
Keene was explaining that sure, some of the conservative anger toward McCain is over the issues—campaign finance, for instance, and initially opposing the Bush tax cuts as a ridiculously good deal for rich people. But a lot of it, Keene said, is only personal, because McCain is the kind of guy who can't seem to resist poking his finger in your eye, especially if you're someone he really ought to be sucking up to. (Sort of how Galileo's real sin was not as much his maverick views on Copernicus as his glee in making an ass of his pal Pope Urban in print. There he was, so enjoying his own bon mots, right up until the Inquisition arrived.) Unlike Hillary Clinton, in other words, McCain is the opposite of ingratiating. Suddenly, listening to Keene, I realized why I like this guy with whom I agree on so little. And why folks who do agree with him but have often felt his elbow in their ribs—hey, what was that for?—can go to pieces at the sound of his name. Keene said he personally is working on getting past some of the old slights, and I'm sure the GOP knows it can't wait 300 years to forgive him.
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That is a dandy plan if you don't want any of those bad, evil Republicans to vote for you in the fall. (And sure they still hate her; I think the clinical term is playing possum.)
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Every year for Lent, I give up speaking ill of anyone. It is a long 40 days, and it begins today. (I mention this so that if it seems like I've had my brain removed, no, I haven't, and I will be back to my old critical self before you can say mortification of the flesh.) But in the humble spirit of the season, what did we learn from Super Fat Tuesday?
1) Change is good: The single most unambiguous piece of information to come out of last night is that Democrats see the promise of change as way more important than the value of experience—52 percent to 23 percent said it was the No. 1 thing they were looking for in a candidate. And since in '08 shorthand Obama equals change and Clinton equals experience, this can only be good news for him; the candidate who wins the argument about what the election is over generally wins the election. (Only "generally'' may no longer apply, which leads us to our second lesson.)
2) Polls are caca, and all the rules have been suspended. Even more than has been generally acknowledged, this race is so fluid and voters so volatile that pollsters can't seem to keep up, and known patterns seem not to apply. The good in this is that it challenges some of our laziest assumptions and silliest stereotypes like ...
3) Conservatives are sheep who go bah, bah, bah all the way home. Not true, and I don't think it's so much that conservative talk radio has lost its influence as that it never had the authority to issue edicts in the first place; when Rush and Laura and Sean reflect conservative opinion, they do magnify it, but when they don't, voters seem to have no trouble dissenting.
4) Women across the ideological spectrum look great in red. Nah, scratch that one; Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama look good in anything. And on that positive note, one day down, 39 to go.
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Now this is interesting; I see where a focus group of Republican women has declared Mike Huckabee the winner of last night's debate. These undecided, right-leaning women thought Mitt Romney came off as phony, arrogant and "a snake''—and one woman who described herself as a strong Republican wondered if a guy that rich would really look out for the little guy. (Do you want to break it to her, or should I?) Others expressed discomfort with his Mormon faith and bridled at his lack of support for Sandra Day O'Connor, whom he suggested he would never have appointed to the Supreme Court.
John McCain also got a big thumbs-down from the group, which included 11 California women of various ages, races, and wings of the GOP: He's so snide, they said, as if that were a bad thing. But Huckabee they found caring, real, and in touch with their concerns. So much so that seven of the 11 declared him the winner, and four who'd been leaning toward other candidates decided to support him as a result. Maybe they liked how he patted Nancy Reagan's hand?
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Emily, thanks for bringing up Dick Cheney's bragging; I thought I was doing OK without Jon Stewart, but now I see I was only fooling myself. Speaking of which, poor Mitt: He had to address the Mormon question, but then did so in a way that told us absolutely nothing about the faith, which made it seem like the less the rest of us know, the better. Since the No. 1 knock against Romney is that his beliefs are so flexible even he can barely keep track of them, I don't see how it helps to give a big speech that boils down to: "Don't stress; I'd jettison my closely held religious beliefs with no more of a backward glance than I gave my previous closely held beliefs on abortion and gay marriage." And if he was supposed to be charming me with his nod to "the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass,'' he failed. (Glad you like our quaint and colorful folk ways. But can a ceremony even be profound? Pander better, please.) Maybe the most interesting thing about the speech was the intro, provided as it was by Poppy Bush. Is this as close to an endorsement as the Bushes can come without damaging their preferred candidate? Oh, but I forgot: The current commander in chief is pulling for Hillary.
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Writing in Slate, former Reagan administration lawyer Bruce Fein has gone on an impeachment tear this year—calling for Bush's impeachment, Cheney's, and maybe Nancy Pelosi''s next. He has also co-written a play, with Richard Lasser, "I—The Impeachment Trial of George W. Bush.” It's being performed in January as part of a series on impeachment and general teeth gnashing, put on by The Culture Project in New York. I can't vouch for Bruce's playwriting skills, but as the administration wanes without ending, it sounds like a night of fantasy.
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It seems like much longer than three years ago that Howard Dean was hailed as the great hope for Web political organizing. Now, Ron Paul has replaced him as the no-chance-in-hell candidate to best harness the misdirected money and idealism of the Internet masses.
But apparently Dean’s feeling nostalgic for the Internet, because he recently talked about one thing sure to stir up bloggers: who gets to go to heaven. During a speech Sunday to Jewish leaders, according to the Politico, Dean said that “there are no bars to heaven for anybody.” (The article headline—“Dean says Jews can go to heaven”—is a little odd: It seems to suggest that Dean granted Jews access to heaven.)
That assertion surely won’t sit well with conservative evangelical Christians who think that there actually is a bar to heaven, and a rather high one at that. But though the Democrats have apparently been trying to woo evangelical voters suspicious of potential GOP nominees Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, it’s not likely to happen. Could Dean instead be trying to stop the trend of Jewish Republicans? There have been periodic trend reports this year about Jews in ‘08, including some wondering if Jews might be more inclined to vote for Giuliani than they were to vote for Bush and how they might respond to Obama. Exit polling from the 2006 midterm elections found that young Jews (and Orthodox Jews) were more likely to vote for the GOP than their older counterparts. Is this actually something Dean and the Democrats need to worry about? Or was he just trying to please the audience in the crowd that day?
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Melinda and Rachael, your recent posts about knee-jerk political assumptions and the trend toward only listening to people we agree with really resonated for me. In years past, I had no trouble finding my political tribe. As a lefty lesbian, I might occasionally roll my eyes at the bourgeois liberalism of the mainstream American left, but I knew the difference between us and them.
And then, to oversimplify matters, came 9/11. Suddenly, I was out of step with a lot of my friends on national-security and foreign-policy issues, and conversation became more difficult. Should I tell my pals they sounded naive and disturbingly isolationist? Could they disagree with me without denouncing me as a deluded cog in the Bush-Cheney war machine? (The answer to both questions is sometimes.)
It's tempting to stay silent, but while I occasionally rely on a rueful smile to convey, "I think you're totally wrong, but now's not the time for that conversation," I've mostly learned to express my dissent. For one thing, it's more honest: To paraphrase a line from this week's Exes and Ohs, "You start be saying nothing ... and soon you have nothing to say." (I get all my political philosophy from bad TV shows.) But it's also damaging to pretend we all agree when we don't. One of the reasons I've found the anti-gay-marriage referendums of the last few years so hurtful is that, judging from the wide margins most of them have passed with, lots of Democratic voters supported them. My assumptions about what Democrats believe betrayed me.
We need to talk. The Democratic Party needs pro-life progressives. And the GOP needs social liberals (pro-life or not) like you, Rachael.