Entries in Politics (57)
Big Boi and Mary J. Blige
Lifted via facebook from Long Live The Message
2g2k: It Takes A Million
After Obama excommunicated Wesley Clark from his campaign, which he was never working with to begin with, I half-expected Clark and McKinney to join forces. It would have been like one of those wrestling events where a wrestler unexpected changes teams and stirs half the auditorium into a frenzy while leaving the other half in disbelief. Even without this imagined WWE scenario a McKinney/CLemente ticket makes the Green Party more interesting than it was a week ago. One of the knocks against the greens is that they were too white. McKinney and Clemente not only change this perception in terms of phenotype, but set the stage for altering party politics in this country for years to come. As the WSJ article contends African Americans have voted democrat at a 90% rate, a statistic that McKinney and Clemente are unlikely to alter during this election. What they can do however is make cities and districts around the country, especially in states like California, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania battle-ground states in upcoming elections in ways that the democrats and republicans are not normally accustomed. If Obama generates as high a voter turn out as some are predicting, it is virtually impossible for the democrats and republicans to retain all of these enthusiastic new voters. We have already seen how the Ron Paul phenomena has siphoned some youthful voters away from McCain and the republicans, a similar process can occur if the Green Party can present itself as a more multi-racial coalition. It's not so much the Obama's of the world who have to worry, but more so patronage peddlers like Kwame Kilpatrick.
My two cents....
PS, you were right about the Billy Beane analogy.
PPS Baron Davis to the clippers, ouch.
Ferentz
in Politics, Barack Obama, 2G2K Circus
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The Right is Where We Go Wrong
There has been a lot of discussion recently about Barack Obama's move to "the center." The concern as Ariana Huffington explains in a post on HuffPost is that by doing so Obama threatens to alienate his core supporters, legitimizes many of the right-wing policies that have bankrupted this nation, and most pressingly, this approach did not work for either Al Gore or John Kerry, Obama's predecessors as Democratic nominee. Writing for the New York Times yesterday, Bob Herbert is even more critical:
But Senator Obama is not just tacking gently toward the center. He’s lurching right when it suits him, and he’s zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash.
Obama's move to the center is Clintonian in approach and it remains to be seen whether it will also be Clintonian in affect, thereby garnering him a November victory. What is surprising about Obama's decision to borrow from the Clinton playbook is that unlike Clinton who succeeded two Republican administrations, and battled a Rebuplican candidate in 1992, George H.W. Bush, who voters were merely agnostic about whether he stayed in office, unlike the current Bush who Obama would succeed, and who voters vehemently want out of office. Moreover, Clinton went toward the center because back then the right wing had strong and competent figures like James Baker, Bob Dole and Jesse Helms who were masterful at enacting a right wing agenda at home and abroad. Clinton knew that Dole and Helms would have an inordinate amount of sway in determining his fate, and while their allegiance to Bush Sr. was slim, their conviction to the principles of their party was not.
By contrast, one would be hard pressed to find a Republican figure who currently holds as much sway as the aforementioned Republicans. The most powerful right wing members in office these days are not even politicians, but instead are supreme court justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. Roberts and Scalia in particular have become more aware of their power and this past year opened up to the public in ways that they had not done earlier in their careers. Additionally, while Republicans walk around announcing themselves as conservatives like frat-boys enamored by their fraternities acronym, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas have become the right-wing's political conscience, and in so doing have set the stage for the Supreme Court to become more reflective of this nation's political conscience than either the legislative or executive branches of government.
Case in point in the last five years we have seen a President initiate an unjust war without any sensible debate, and last month we witnessed a presidential candidate undo his opponent's signature piece of legislation by simply sending an email out to his supporters announcing that he will not accept public campaign financing. On the other hand, we also took part in a judicious debate on Affirmative Action that while it repealed some of the program's initial gains, the inclusion of so many stakeholders in the process to determine the program's fate prevented a far worse outcome.
Bringing this back to Obama's move to the center, it is a risky strategy because so much of what was once termed "the right" is now ensconced in the supreme court. Senate conservatives are a gaggle of contradictions without a party leader capable of mobilizing them. Dubya's war upended republican tenets of fiscal conservatism, and unleashed a conservative movement that as Mitt Romney learned during this year's primary hinders the prospects of successful republican politicians who are not in line with the grossly over-hyped Christian right. Ironically, the only republican senator capable of making Obama or any other Democratic candidate veer to the center is John McCain. However instead of undoing some of the damage done by Bush and Karl Rove, McCain has decided to prostitute himself to Bush and Rove's backers thereby further delegitimizing this nation's right wing and their agenda. Writing for The New Republic, Robert Gordon and James Kvaal, have renamed McCain, "McContradiction," continuing a theme that has plagued the Republican nominee throughout his presidential bid.
McCain's desperate flailing for a conservative port to parachute into suggest that arguments proclaiming a right wing movement are not to be taken lightly during this campaign season. It also suggests that after twenty years of seeking to define themselves as centrists, democratic politicians would do well to recognize that save for flirtations with the Green Party, the left has not been mobilized to the same degree as their counterparts on the right in a general election, and were there any year to do this, this would be the year.
Ferentz
in Current Affairs, Politics, Barack Obama
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2g2k: MoneyBall
As I read your post, something came to mind that I think a Yay-Area-ite such as yourself might appreciate. If as your ace Humanity Critic declares John McCain is the 50-Cent of politics, is Obama the Billy Bean of politics? Yes, I know Billy Bean is not a rapper so the analogy is an imperfect one, but I still wanted to give HC a shout.
When Michael Lewis dropped MoneyBall, many baseball traditionalists were offended because it challenged their approach to the game with its emphasis on statistics. Considering baseball is a sport obsessed with stats, this was an ironic critique, no less so than the offense supposedly taken by so many Americans with Obama's eloquence. What traditionalists did not like about Moneyball is that it prioritized a different set of stats, in the case of hitters On Base Percentage (OBP) over home runs and battting average.
However, Beane's success with the small-market Athletics enticed other teams to take chances with similar younger general managers who favored Beane's statistics oriented approach. The most successful of these GMs thus far has been Boston's Theo Epstein who's overseen the teams last two World Championships. If you look online you'll find any number of sites that abide to a stats-driven approach to analyzing athletic performance producing some fascinating assessments. Case in point one basketball statistician once ranked someone like Eduardo Najera ahead of Kobe Bryant, a revelation that the analyst conceded meant you can not take the numbers at face value. Nonetheless, the success of teams like the San Antonio Spurs, Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots prove that some variation of Beane's stats driven approach works.
Where this relates to Obama is that so much of his campaign is tied to numbers; his fundraising totals, size of crowds, red states he's putting in play; and of course his age. Numbers have a way of making people more effective than they seem, and quickly bringing accord where a moment ago there was discord. Considering his long battle with Hillary Clinton their union, while necessary, may seem too perfect too soon, which in turn leads to people again focusing on the numbers. In this case the numbers are reflected in the amounts that Obama is helping Clinton's campaign raise. Dubya professed to not pay attention to the numbers which led to him characterizing Al Gore as out of touch, and Kerry as a "flip flopper." Obama's association with numbers has McCain declaring that Obama is both out of touch and a flip-flopper.Moneyball's subtitle is "The Art of Winning an Unfair Game." Baseball is as artful as it is unfair precisely because it's as irrational a sport as it is a scientific one. The Cubs and Athletics practically sellout every game but haven't won a title in ages, the Marlins have won two titles in a decade yet they can't draw any fans. It does not make any sense.
But it does, because more than numbers, what baseball fans love more than anything else are stories. Obama had a better story to tell than Clinton in the democratic race and that's largely why he won. One of the reasons that Wesley Clark's comments have gotten so much attention is that Obama's response unmasked a concern of his campaign, and that is that John McCain may be as good a story-teller, or have as good of a story as the skinny black kid with the funny name.
More than not bringing a title to Oaktown, Beane's legacy may be that he took the story out of the Athletics. Once people started focusing on the numbers, they forgot about those teams from the 70s and 80s and the characters who made them national phenomenons, larger than life figures such as Rollie Fingers, Reggie Jackson and the "Bash Brothers" Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. Obama might want to consider putting aside the speeches until the fall and think of this summer as if it's one big BBQ and the eyes of the world are on him waiting to tell his story. We may have heard it before, but we'll gladly listen again.
2G2K: What on Earth Happened to the Republicans?
The question I have for you this week is: what on earth happened to the Republican party?
Surely when Newt Gingrich led the Republican Revolution in the early 90s never did he imagine in his wildest dreams that in 2008 the Republican party would feature a septuagenarian atop its presidential ticket, a Democratic controlled house, and that Republicans would be struggling to find viable candidates to fill Congressional. Well here we are in 2008 and that is precisely the case.
Case in point, here in New York, after Staten Island representative Vito Fossella stepped down the Republicans selected mogul Frank Powers to run for his seat. Sadly, Powers passed away and the Republicans were sent scrambling again to find a suitable candidate. Powers’s untimely death was yet another unfortunate setback for a party that has been reeling for much of this decade, and which suffered a string of disheartening defeats in the 2006 midterm elections.
Worst yet, as the Democrat’s brand is soaring in light of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama’s historic campaigns, the Republican brand name appears to be going out of style. Ironically, it’s not as if the Democrats are the ones downgrading the Republican brand, it’s the Republicans themselves. Listen closely to McCain or any of his surrogates from within the party talk these days and you’ll hear them use the term “Conservative” to describe themselves a lot more than they use Republican. On the contrary you do not hear Democrats going around announcing themselves as Liberals. This is not simply because in some circles the “L” word is a dirty one in American Politics, but all Democrats are not liberals—a lesson that Joe Lieberman has been determined to teach us since 2000. Former Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman’s transformation into John McCain’s #1 cheerleader is not the only peculiar development over the last eight years; as interesting as Lieberman’s transformation has been the disappearance of figures such as Bill Frist, Tom Ridge and Christine Todd Whitman, who at one time represented a more-centrist Republican party, one capable of going toe to toe with the kinds of candidates being groomed by the DNC and DLC. Eight years later, neither of these retain their prominence as party spokespersons, and as with many of their Republican peers who have retired from the spotlight, they were not adequately replaced within the party.
The Republican, rather Conservative party has also let Fox News and flamboyant talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh set its agenda. Throughout this campaign many of the memorable “right-wing” sound-bites were not uttered by anyone working directly within the Republican party, but rather by sundry commentators on Fox. Since 2000 Fox has transformed itself from a mouthpiece of the Republican party dispensing party memos as news reports, to being an unwieldy beast that the Republicans themselves barely know how to control and therefore work to their advantage. What this has created is a news cycle that often features back and forth debates between prominent Democrats and Fox-News hosts instead of their Republican counterparts, or as has often been the case throughout this campaign, absurd-racist-sexist comments such as calling Barack and Michelle Obama’s embrace a “terrorist fist jab” or referring to Michelle Obama as “Obama’s Baby Mama” overtakes John McCain’s attempts at getting his own headlines and making Americans familiar with his agenda.
Seriously, has there ever been a point in this nation’s history where the party who has just spent eight years in power has entered an election cycle in such disarray? The Republicans do not appear to have any prospects in their farm system, they’ve rebranded themselves as conservatives therefore either alienating or confusing many voters, and their allies in the media are outfoxing them?
What in the world happened to the Republicans?
Ferentz
in Politics, Presidential Campaign, 2G2K Circus
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