I’m in 100% agreement with David Broder :

“I thought the most damaging to the American people — both those living now and those yet unborn — was placing the entire cost of Bush’s ambitious, if not misguided, national security policy on the tiny fraction of American families with loved ones in the armed services.

Iraq and Afghanistan are the main fronts in the fourth major war of my lifetime, following World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and the first in which nothing was asked of the civilian population — no higher taxes, nothing to disrupt the comfort of daily life.

…

But in that moment [after 9/11], when the country was truly unified and the people were more than ready to sacrifice, Bush asked for . . . nothing. He spoke of the need for “patience” and “resolve,” but at a news conference at Camp David on Sept. 15, 2001, he was asked, “Sir, how much of a sacrifice are ordinary Americans going to have to be expected to make in their daily lives, in their daily routines?”

Bush’s first words were: “Our hope, of course, is that they make no sacrifice whatsoever. We would like to see life return to normal in America.”

…

Over the next few years, families of active-duty, National Guard and reserve volunteers sacrificed mightily in the form of repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and involuntary extensions of tours of duty, not to mention deaths and wounds by the thousands.

As for other Americans, as John McCain repeatedly noted last year, the only thing they were asked to do was “go shopping.”

I’m convinced that had he done more than this, had he called for a shared American sacrifice across the board 8 years ago - rekindling a common sense of national spirit not seen since World War II - he would be remembered as a far greater president today & in the future, even with the disasters of Katrina & Iraq.

He blew it.

FURTHER READING: Bob Woodward on the 10 lessons of the Bush Presidency any future president from any party would do well to heed.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Just like (yet, by definition, not at all like) in Iraq, the key is counterinsurgency.

An absolutely essential read over at Foreign Policy shows how General David Petraeus’ counterinsurgency strategy can lead to victory, including these so-called “paradoxes:”

Paradox 1: Some of the best weapons do not shoot.

Paradox 2: Sometimes the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be.

Paradox 3: The hosts doing something tolerably is often better than foreigners doing it well.

Paradox 4: Sometimes the more force is used, the less effective it is.

Paradox 5: Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.

If you care about victory over terrorism, you need to read this.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

There’s no denying the man above had a failed presidency.

& while a case could be made that the blame rests upon his party’s principles, such an argument will likely cause Bush’s supporters to close their ears to a fatal flaw I’m highlighting below.

Part of the purpose of this blog is to demonstrate which qualities President Bush didn’t live up to, so we never make the same mistake again.

& I’ve come to the conclusion that there are many areas where party didn’t figure into it one bit.

Newsweeks’ Jacob Weisberg presents Exhibit A, Bush’s ‘loyalty’ problem:

“Those who fixate on personal allegiance, like Johnson, Nixon and George W. Bush, tend to perform far worse in office than those, like FDR, Truman, JFK, Reagan and Clinton, who can tolerate strong, independent actors on their teams.

The demand for absolute loyalty is a relic from the age of patronage, when political appointments were tied to the delivery of votes for a sponsor. A modern-media politician does not depend on this kind of machine for his existence and has political control over only a thin sliver of top-level government jobs. As the complexity of the government has increased, so too has the importance of expertise and experience.

This is part of what has made George W. Bush’s loyalty obsession such a throwback. Bush’s first job in politics was as an “enforcer” for a father he thought was too nice to discipline traitors and freelancers. His own fixation with loyalty was born from the experience of watching James Baker and Richard Darman put their own careers ahead of his dad’s. When his turn came, the younger Bush made personal loyalty a threshold test, and even came to regard private challenge as an indication of untrustworthiness.”

I believe President Bush, to his detriment, put far too great a premium on loyalty, & that because of that, truth became a casualty.

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

“I think the Republican ticket represented too much of the status quo, too much of what had gone on in these last eight years, that Americans were kind of shaking their heads like going, wait a minute, how did we run up a 10 trillion dollar debt in a Republican administration? How have there been blunders with war strategy under a Republican administration? If we’re talking change, we want to get far away from what it was that the present administration represented and that is to a great degree what the Republican Party at the time had been representing. So people desiring change I think went as far from the administration that is presently seated as they could. It’s amazing that we did as well as we did.”

-Sarah Palin, to the Anchorage Daily News

That’s her take. I’m more in the school of these essential reads:

From the (conservative) Wall Street Journal:

“Their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.”

&

“There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.”

(Conservative) Kathleen Parker chimes in:

“Palin covered her inadequacies with folksy charm and by drumming up a class war, turning her audiences not just against elites but against the party’s own educated members. The movement created by that superelite, but never elitist, William F. Buckley Jr. was handed over to Joe Six-Pack. Know-nothingness was no longer a stigma, but a badge of honor.

The Republican Party’s Baghdad Bobism with regard to Palin, a denial so pernicious that party operatives were willing to let her sit a heartbeat away from the presidency in a time of war and financial collapse, revealed what really ails the party. The “P Factor” isn’t a single person but a sickness that will have to be acknowledged and cured—Republicans will be reciting their newly tailored principles only to themselves.”

(Conservative) James Joyner:

“…it’s inconceivable that she got elected and re-elected to so many offices over the years, culminating with a state governorship, by being an airhead. She’s obviously quite charismatic and a strong campaigner. And I’m sure she knows Alaska issues backwards and forwards. I saw little evidence, though, that she’s very interested in foreign policy or most issues of American domestic policy. That doesn’t make her a bad person — she’s in the same boat as most Americans on that score — but it made her a bad choice for the vice presidency.”

& finally, (conservative) Rod Dreher:

“The right has developed a vicious habit of tagging any dissenting conservative as a closet liberal. This folly has constructed an airtight bubble around the GOP and conservative leaders, not only depriving conservatism of constructive criticism from within its ranks, but also reinforcing the rank-and-file’s worst instincts. If the election results didn’t convince Republicans that they couldn’t afford to throw people out – especially their intellectuals and people who respect intellect – then their ignorance is invincible.”

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

The most fascinating discourse of this election cycle, for me, has been those in the conservative movement who recognize that their movement is adrift without a rudder, in this nearly-post-Bush era.

I’ve already touched on this here, here, here, & here (& many other places - click on “The GOP” over on the right, in the categories, to get the full list)

Over the course of the next 10 days - & beyond - I hope to highlight some of this fascinating discussion.

The questions that remains to be answered: how long will it be before conservatives regain power in American government again? & who will be the standard-bearer to take the conservative movement in a new direction?

I agree with blogger L’Hote who says he is tired of what he sees, which is an unhealthy preponderance of the implementation of the phrase President Bush used in the days after 9/11: “you’re either with us or against us:”

“There’s been a lot of talk in reformist conservative circles about what the litmus test for conservatism is these days. It’s simple: the willingness to participate in dividing the country between worthy people and rotten people. There’s no ideology or policy preference or philosophy or method of intellectual comportment that holds a candle to hatred of the other, in today’s American conservatism. To that extent, a reformist conservative is no conservative at all. Some will deny this. But they only have to look around to see the absurdity of this claim. Spend a few moments on Red State. Cruise around the Corner. Follow Instapundit’s links. Check out Drudge. Watch Fox News. Attend a McCain/Palin rally. Tell me what you see. You can certainly question the right of these culturally conservative institutions to expel anyone from the ranks of conservatism, but if we recognize that they represent a kind of conservative center, we should acknowledge that this center seeks to define conservatism by its willingness to exclude others from real America.

This isn’t fair to many conservatives. But there simply exists a conservative movement, a conservative center of gravity, that has moral content. And that mainstream of conservative thought insists on cleaving these bright lines. So while I have sympathy for those who come under criticism here unfairly, to an extent this is an inevitable consequence of exactly the “big sort” that the Republican mainstream has been engaging in.

…

There comes a time when a reformer has to realize that what he is reforming is beyond saving. At what point does the conservative zeal for punishing the wicked Blue become such a dominant narrative on your side that principle demands you abandon the designation? Conservatism is not going to give up on dividing the nation into camps of the worthy and the unworthy. It is not going to stop questioning the patriotism of those who disagree with it. It’s the engine that powers the ideology. It’s possible that conservatism can be saved from pure other-hatred. But I am beyond skeptical. Those who question this allegiance to pure identity politics are quickly smacked down by the conservative message-discipline machine. (A machine which has no liberal analog.) What’s more, those conservatives who do pose these kinds of questions then become twice as likely to traffic in apologetics for the same kind of behavior, as their professional lives depend on not going too far off the reservation. (Pick your favorite CW-questioning conservative blogger. Wait for them to post something critical of conservative hatred of unreal America. Now see how long it takes them to turn around and excuse a similar but less intense argument. I think you’ll find it happens with almost mathematical precision.)

So look, conservatives– if you’re going to engage in tribalism, here is your party. Here’s your tribe. It’s at an extreme place. I can’t continue to take stock of conservatism as it currently stands and deny that the only meaningful criteria for designation as a conservative is willingness to cast your opponents out of the American experience. (Which is an act of extreme intellectual violence.)”

Well said.

Yes, I know this is an election year, but this whole “whose side are you on” mentality is really what’s contributed to driving this country into a ditch.

I believe more pluralism is what’s called for. That’s the system of government the founding fathers believed in. Pluralism is when various groups who share a common interest band together to bring about change.

Pluralism has never failed to exist in this country; it’s just that these days it is often groups with corporate or lobbying interests (Wall Street, anyone?) that have really been able to exploit pluralism’s power.

There is no problem that we can’t come together to solve - even if it’s only for that one problem.

I believe that deep down in my soul.

So let’s stop the bickering, & caring about sides or teams, stop the discussions about what constitutes the “real America” et al, & roll up our sleeves & get to work - no matter who wins the presidency.

Please? For the country?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

[note: this post 1st appeared on September 19th, & has since been one of the most popular on the Vote08 blog. This weekend, I will add what I think is another 'quality of great presidents' to consider.]

Thanks & credit go to NewsChannel 9’s Marcia Kling , who told me about this story.

Presidential historian Doris Kearnes Goodwin writes in Parade Magazine about the secrets to a great president. This is worth your time & careful consideration when applying these guidelines to Barack Obama, John McCain, & perhaps most importantly, President George W. Bush.

After the jump, I’ve expanded on the piece with images & relevant links for further reading.

If you plan to vote for president this year, please read this article.

1. The courage to stay strong

A President needs the ability to withstand adversity and motivate himself in the face of frustration. From childhood, Lincoln showed a determination to rise above the poverty into which he was born . Despite failures that would have felled most others, he never lost faith that if he refused to despair, he would eventually succeed. Roosevelt, by contrast, grew up with wealth, privilege, and love. His crucible came in a polio attack that left him a paraplegic at 39. While crippling his body, the paralysis expanded his sensibilities . He emerged from his ordeal with greater powers of concentration and greater self-knowledge. Far more intensely than before, he was able to put himself in the shoes of others to whom fate had dealt an unfair hand.

2. Self-confidence

Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation. Lincoln placed his three chief rivals for the Republican nomination in crucial positions in his Cabinet and filled the rest of his top jobs with former Democrats. His Cabinet sessions were fiery affairs, but they provided him with a wide range of advice and opinion . Similarly, FDR created a coalition Cabinet on the eve of war, bringing unsparing critics of the New Deal into key positions as Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy. And for his Army chief of staff, he reached 34 names down the list of senior officers to appoint George Marshall, because the straight-talking general was the only one to disagree with him in a meeting.

3. An ability to learn from errors

To lead successfully, you must be willing to acknowledge and learn from your mistakes. After the rout of Union forces at Bull Run , Lincoln stayed up all night writing a memo on military policy that incorporated the painful lessons he had learned. And when FDR concluded that a New Deal program was not working, he created a new one in its place, built upon an understanding of what had gone wrong.

4. A willingness to change

Conditions change, and Presidents must respond. When war came, FDR made his peace with the industrialists whose hatred he had welcomed during the New Deal. He relaxed anti-trust regulations, guaranteed profits, and brought in top business executives to run his production agencies, aware that only with their commitment could we build the planes, tanks, and ships we needed to win.

5. Emotional intelligence

A President must encourage his closest advisers to give their best and remain loyal. Lincoln shared credit for his successes and shouldered public blame for the failures of his subordinates. FDR had a remarkable capacity to transmit strength to others, to make them feel more determined to do their jobs well.

6. Self-control

Great leaders manage their emotions and remain calm in the midst of trouble. When angry with a colleague, Lincoln liked to write him a “hot letter,” giving his emotions free rein. Then he would put the letter aside, knowing he would calm down and never send it. If he lost his temper, he would invariably follow up with a kind gesture. “If I was cross, I ask your pardon,” he wrote to one of his generals. “If I do get up a temper I do not have sufficient time to keep it up.” And on the Sunday that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Eleanor Roosevelt was struck by her husband’s “deadly calm.” While aides and Cabinet officers ran in and out in excitement, panic, and irritation, FDR remained at his desk, absorbing the news, deciding what to do next.

7. A popular touch

The best Presidents have an intuitive awareness of public sentiment, a sense of when to wait and when to lead. Lincoln once said that if he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation six months earlier, “public sentiment would not have sustained it.” By following the gradual shift in the newspapers, by opening his office to conversations with ordinary people, by visiting troops in the field, he rightly concluded that by early 1863, the opposition was no longer “strong enough to defeat the purpose.” FDR was said to possess an uncanny awareness of the hopes and fears of his countrymen and to know precisely when to move forward, when to hold back, and when to deliver one of his fireside chats.

8. A moral compass

Only strong leaders have the courage and integrity to follow their convictions when the risk of losing popular support is great. In mid-1864, top Republicans warned Lincoln that unless he renounced emancipation as a condition, the Confederates never would agree to peace talks, without which he had no chance of re-election. Yet Lincoln turned his party’s leaders away without a second thought. “I should be damned in time and in eternity,” he wrote, if he chose to conciliate the South over the slaves to whom he had pledged freedom. FDR chose in 1940 to supply England with what little America had in the way of weapons. In so doing, he drew the wrath of isolationists, liberals, and educators. His own generals warned that he so risked American security that he might be impeached or “found hanging from a lamppost” if England fell and Hitler used our captured weapons against us. Believing England’s survival critical to the preservation of Western civilization, FDR was willing to take that risk.

9. A capacity to relax

FDR held a White House cocktail hour every evening. Its cardinal rule: Nothing was to be said of politics or war. Guests were to gossip, tell funny stories, and reminisce so that everyone could enjoy a few precious hours away from the pressures of the day. Lincoln possessed a life-affirming sense of humor and a legendary ability to tell long, winding tales that allowed him “to whistle off sadness.” He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep.

10. A gift for inspiring others

One of the key qualities of a great President is his ability to communicate national goals to the people and to educate and shape public opinion. Both Lincoln and FDR conveyed their convictions with stories and metaphors, as well as a profound sense of history and a love of poetry and drama. When Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address , the North was on the verge of winning the Civil War. Yet he avoided a triumphal message. Knowing that his next challenge was to return the defeated South to the Union, he suggested that the sin of slavery was shared by both sides and called on his countrymen “with malice toward none; with charity for all…to bind up the nation’s wounds.” FDR’s first inaugural address , delivered at the height of the Depression, conveyed a clear understanding of the difficulties the nation faced and projected such serene confidence in the fundamental strength of his country that he renewed the hope of millions.

What do you think?

Which qualities do the current candidates for president have?

Which do they lack?

& what about President Bush?

Post a comment! All views are welcome.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

(above: McCain as a baby)

Today’s Episode: Essential reading about McCain’s campaign behind-the-scenes…new footage surfaces of McCain as a POW…McCain tells country he’s not Bush…Al Qaeda website claims its rooting for a McCain win..a new ad touting Joe the Plumber

Click here to see McCain appear with Palin in an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Above: At St. Anselm’s college in New Hampshire yesterday.

Behind the Scenes: Finding a Narrative

Check out this absolutely essential reading from the New York Times magazine that looks at the behind the scenes strategy sessions that brought the campaign to where it is today, including the decision-making process behind choosing Palin, the suspension of his campaign the week of the first debate, & much, much more. Don’t miss it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

New POW Footage Released

Above:the French National Archive releases this footage from McCain’s time as a POW. Like the article above: essential viewing.

“I Am Not Bush”

In an interview with the Washington Times, McCain lambasts the current administration:

“Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,”

The Endorsement No One Wants

The Washington Post:

“”Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the “failing march of his predecessor,” President Bush.”

Read more about the McCain campaign’s (understandably) somewhat panicked response to this story here.

I’m Spartacus! No, I’m Spartacus!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Above: a new ad that says we’re all Joe the Plumber.

& just for fun, as a segue…

Click here to view the embedded video.

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Post-Debate Ad Rips the Incumbent

On NewsChannel9.com’s main page: a new web poll that asks “who would make a better president?”

Go vote!

His Best Debate Moment

Joan Venocchi:

“McCain had at least one good line last night: “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush you should’ve run four years ago.” But one good line isn’t a lifeline.

BUT

The Arizona senator finally mentioned Bill Ayers and ACORN to his opponent’s face. But he can’t link Obama to Ayers and domestic terrorism, or to the controversial community group called Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, as tightly as Obama can link McCain to Bush. And that remains one of Obama’s biggest advantages in this race.”

What the Right Thought

John Podhoretz:

“The general feeling on the right side of the blogosphere is that this was McCain’s best debate and he did himself a lot of good. I think people on the Right were so relieved that the debate finally turned to matters of ideological and partisan moment — abortion, ACORN, Ayers, trade, spending — that, perhaps for the first time in his political career, they graded him on a curve. The problem, in my view, is that the shorthand in which McCain spoke about these matters made them comprehensible only to those of us who are already schooled in them. In almost every case, Obama answered McCain’s shorthand with longhand — with detailed, even long-winded answers that gave the distinct impression he was more in command of the details of these charges than the man who was trying to go after him on them.

We’re not the audience for these debates. Undecided voters are, and undecided voters are, or so studies tell us, often astonishingly ill-informed. You can only bring up new issues if you’re able pithily to explain the context and meaning of them. It is not a rap on McCain to say he’s not good at it; he doesn’t want to bother with the introduction. But in a setting like that, the introduction is what matters, far more than the attack.”

As a person whose “day job” consists of constantly attempting to make complex stories “clear & easy to understand,” I completely agree with this assessment.

Daniel Larison at the American Conservative (essential read):

“There is a basic rule in any competition, and elections are no different. If you assume that all you really need do is show up and wait for the other side to fail, you will lose and probably quite embarrassingly at that. McCain never made the case for himself, because he assumed that he would be the default winner once the public decided Obama was unprepared. Whether or not Obama is unprepared by some standards is not the point. Relative to McCain, he has shown himself to be fairly masterful while his opponent blunders and lurches. Despite having every advantage in the political conditions this year, Obama has not taken those advantages for granted nearly as much as he could have done. The post-nomination pandering and position-switching, all of which now seems to have been quite unnecessary, were part of a steady, cautious effort to appear cautious and steady, which gave calls for undefined change a reassuring rather than an unsettling quality and negated McCain’s efforts to portray him as reckless and unready.”

&

“Perhaps most remarkable about the attempt to potray Obama as a lightweight celebrity is how true of McCain that description now seems to be.”

Above: McCain speaks on Fox News today.

RNC Ad Says Obama’s Not Ready

But: isn’t this also an argument against Sarah Palin?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

An absolutely essential read from “pointy-headed conservative” David Brooks on how the Republican party’s decades-long campaign against “the elite” has turned into a serious anti-intellectual drag on its own success, Palin being the most recent manifestation:

“What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

…

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

…

…no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite. She is another step in the Republican change of personality.

…

Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.”

I couldn’t agree more.

It wasn’t always like this. I’ve been reading a collection of letters from author & ultra-left leaning Norman Mailer (who died this year) in last week’s New Yorker; I want to reprint one of them, to conservative icon & ultra-right leaning William Buckley (who also died this year). The two had engaged in a series of debates in the 1950s; but their differences of opinion didn’t keep them from being civil to each other, as this letter demonstrates:

To William F. Buckley, Jr.

April 20, 1965

Dear Bill,

What a marvelous girl Joan Didion must be. I think that’s one conservative I would like to meet. And who would ever have thought that the nicest piece [review of “An American Dream”] I am to read about myself four weeks after publication should come in the National Review. Well, this is the year of literary wonders. What do you think the odds would have been for a parlay of good reviews in National Review, Life, the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Paul Pickrel at Harper’s, and the Chicago Tribune. One hundred fifty million to one, or would we have picked it by light-years?

Anyway, I write you this letter in great envy. I think you are going finally to displace me as the most hated man in American life. And of course that position is bearable only if one is number one. To be the second most hated man in the picture will probably prove to be a little like working behind a mule for years, which brings me to your address before the police department’s Holy Name Society. I missed all of it at the time; I was in Alaska, and got my first inkling in the New York Post that some sort of bomb had gone off. At any rate I was not surprised when I read your speech today to find that it was literate, moderate in relation to your own position, and felicitously phrased. And of course I don’t agree with your fundamental premise. On that I think you’re all wrong. I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to in your speech if we were debating is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would maintain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal, and so as you can see I can hardly concur with the valuations you put on these matters. At the same time there’s no doubt in my mind that the newspapers misquoted you shamefully and the net result of that is to deepen one’s sense of an oncoming disaster; for I think humanly it could only drive you further into some of your own most charming surrealisms, such as bombing China’s atomic plants. Truly you amaze me, Bill. Did it ever occur to you as a good Christian that it is immoral to destroy somebody else’s property?

But listen, I think our public debating days are probably over—for a time at least. As wrestlers we are not both villains, and that excites no proper passions. Still, it may open something interesting—which is that the two of us have a long careful private discussion one night, because I think in all modesty there’s much in your thought which is innocent of its own implications, and there’s much surplus in mine which could profitably be sliced away by the powers of your logic. . . .

Incorrigibly yours,

Norman

One can disagree with someone without being disagreeable. If you are of the school of “thought” (a word I use loosely) that liberals/conservatives aren’t worth even speaking to, it’s my belief that you’re contributing to the decline of the United States of America. Please stop. Please open your heart & your mind to those who don’t share your views. Here at NewsChannel 9, there are plenty of differing opinions. But each & every one of us has respect for the others’ way of thinking.

Please understand that the myriad differences of opinions & outlooks makes America stronger, not weaker.

E pluribus unum.

Update: Bill Buckley’s son has endorsed Obama.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Above: Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics.com shines the light of the presidential polls against the backdrop of the momentous economic events of this month:

“It is fair to say that, on a purely political basis, McCain needs a resolution more than Obama. His numbers have taken a hit - and, despite his best efforts, he has not successfully gotten in front of this issue. That’s not to say that he needs this particular bill to pass - the fact that members of Congress in the most competitive districts voted against the bill tells us something. Rather, McCain needs this issue to become less immediate, less salient. Nothing else is getting through right now. McCain needs this to drop off the front page as a first step to recover the ground he has lost in the last 20 days.”

Another interesting nugget in this same piece:

“..the number of undecided voters has increased in the last three weeks, from a low of 6.3% of the electorate on 9/8 to 8.8% last night.”

Another acute assessment of the steep climb McCain faces comes from Bush administration official [& McCain supporter] Peter Wehner:

“John McCain has faced far more difficult challenges in his life than he does now. But politically speaking, the race, never an easy one, looks considerably more difficult. Senator McCain can still prevail, but at this point, he may need an assist from outside events or from Barack Obama. And one thing Senator Obama has shown is that, for whatever flaws he has, he doesn’t make many glaring, stupid, and unforced errors. He’s hard to knock off stride. Obama and his team, while certainly not flawless, have run a very impressive campaign for 20 months. To hope they’ll badly slip up in the last five weeks is asking for a lot. As we’ve seen this year, a lot can happen, including in a short period of time. But for McCain it needs to happen, and soon.”

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Thanks & credit go to NewsChannel 9’s Marcia Kling, who told me about this story.

Presidential historian Doris Kearnes Goodwin writes in Parade Magazine about the secrets to a great president. This is worth your time & careful consideration when applying these guidelines to Barack Obama, John McCain, & perhaps most importantly, President George W. Bush.

After the jump, I’ve expanded on the piece with images & relevant links for further reading.

If you plan to vote for president this year, please read this article.

1. The courage to stay strong

A President needs the ability to withstand adversity and motivate himself in the face of frustration. From childhood, Lincoln showed a determination to rise above the poverty into which he was born. Despite failures that would have felled most others, he never lost faith that if he refused to despair, he would eventually succeed. Roosevelt, by contrast, grew up with wealth, privilege, and love. His crucible came in a polio attack that left him a paraplegic at 39. While crippling his body, the paralysis expanded his sensibilities. He emerged from his ordeal with greater powers of concentration and greater self-knowledge. Far more intensely than before, he was able to put himself in the shoes of others to whom fate had dealt an unfair hand.

2. Self-confidence

Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation. Lincoln placed his three chief rivals for the Republican nomination in crucial positions in his Cabinet and filled the rest of his top jobs with former Democrats. His Cabinet sessions were fiery affairs, but they provided him with a wide range of advice and opinion. Similarly, FDR created a coalition Cabinet on the eve of war, bringing unsparing critics of the New Deal into key positions as Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy. And for his Army chief of staff, he reached 34 names down the list of senior officers to appoint George Marshall, because the straight-talking general was the only one to disagree with him in a meeting.

3. An ability to learn from errors

To lead successfully, you must be willing to acknowledge and learn from your mistakes. After the rout of Union forces at Bull Run, Lincoln stayed up all night writing a memo on military policy that incorporated the painful lessons he had learned. And when FDR concluded that a New Deal program was not working, he created a new one in its place, built upon an understanding of what had gone wrong.

4. A willingness to change

Conditions change, and Presidents must respond. When war came, FDR made his peace with the industrialists whose hatred he had welcomed during the New Deal. He relaxed anti-trust regulations, guaranteed profits, and brought in top business executives to run his production agencies, aware that only with their commitment could we build the planes, tanks, and ships we needed to win.

5. Emotional intelligence

A President must encourage his closest advisers to give their best and remain loyal. Lincoln shared credit for his successes and shouldered public blame for the failures of his subordinates. FDR had a remarkable capacity to transmit strength to others, to make them feel more determined to do their jobs well.

6. Self-control

Great leaders manage their emotions and remain calm in the midst of trouble. When angry with a colleague, Lincoln liked to write him a “hot letter,” giving his emotions free rein. Then he would put the letter aside, knowing he would calm down and never send it. If he lost his temper, he would invariably follow up with a kind gesture. “If I was cross, I ask your pardon,” he wrote to one of his generals. “If I do get up a temper I do not have sufficient time to keep it up.” And on the Sunday that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Eleanor Roosevelt was struck by her husband’s “deadly calm.” While aides and Cabinet officers ran in and out in excitement, panic, and irritation, FDR remained at his desk, absorbing the news, deciding what to do next.

7. A popular touch

The best Presidents have an intuitive awareness of public sentiment, a sense of when to wait and when to lead. Lincoln once said that if he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation six months earlier, “public sentiment would not have sustained it.” By following the gradual shift in the newspapers, by opening his office to conversations with ordinary people, by visiting troops in the field, he rightly concluded that by early 1863, the opposition was no longer “strong enough to defeat the purpose.” FDR was said to possess an uncanny awareness of the hopes and fears of his countrymen and to know precisely when to move forward, when to hold back, and when to deliver one of his fireside chats.

8. A moral compass

Only strong leaders have the courage and integrity to follow their convictions when the risk of losing popular support is great. In mid-1864, top Republicans warned Lincoln that unless he renounced emancipation as a condition, the Confederates never would agree to peace talks, without which he had no chance of re-election. Yet Lincoln turned his party’s leaders away without a second thought. “I should be damned in time and in eternity,” he wrote, if he chose to conciliate the South over the slaves to whom he had pledged freedom. FDR chose in 1940 to supply England with what little America had in the way of weapons. In so doing, he drew the wrath of isolationists, liberals, and educators. His own generals warned that he so risked American security that he might be impeached or “found hanging from a lamppost” if England fell and Hitler used our captured weapons against us. Believing England’s survival critical to the preservation of Western civilization, FDR was willing to take that risk.

9. A capacity to relax

FDR held a White House cocktail hour every evening. Its cardinal rule: Nothing was to be said of politics or war. Guests were to gossip, tell funny stories, and reminisce so that everyone could enjoy a few precious hours away from the pressures of the day. Lincoln possessed a life-affirming sense of humor and a legendary ability to tell long, winding tales that allowed him “to whistle off sadness.” He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep.

10. A gift for inspiring others

One of the key qualities of a great President is his ability to communicate national goals to the people and to educate and shape public opinion. Both Lincoln and FDR conveyed their convictions with stories and metaphors, as well as a profound sense of history and a love of poetry and drama. When Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address, the North was on the verge of winning the Civil War. Yet he avoided a triumphal message. Knowing that his next challenge was to return the defeated South to the Union, he suggested that the sin of slavery was shared by both sides and called on his countrymen “with malice toward none; with charity for all…to bind up the nation’s wounds.” FDR’s first inaugural address, delivered at the height of the Depression, conveyed a clear understanding of the difficulties the nation faced and projected such serene confidence in the fundamental strength of his country that he renewed the hope of millions.

What do you think?

Which qualities do the current candidates for president have?

Which do they lack?

& what about President Bush?

Post a comment! All views are welcome.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

[Disclaimer: the views expressed in this post are completely my own & do not necessarily reflect the views of anyone else at WTVC NewsChannel9 or Freedom Communications]

Vice President Dick Cheney is visiting the Chattanooga area Friday; he will be present at the commemoration of the 145th anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga.

So please join me in welcoming America’s worst-ever Vice President.

I believe he is a man who, while in office, has done far more damage to the United States than any terrorist ever has or will in the future.

At the risk of displaying a less-than-flattering view of me, I want to show you that I am an Eagle Scout. That’s me at age 14. I was a Cub Scout & a Boy Scout, & in my teen years I worked summers at a Boy Scout camp as a swimming instructor.

This is my stepson in 1997, at the very beginning of his Scouting career. Just this past month, he achieved his Eagle rank - an honor only 4 out of 100 boys who join Scouting can claim. His achievement this past month is something that fills me with immense pride. Throughout his 11-year Scouting career, I have been deeply involved in his troop, & that includes spending an occasional week in the summer at Skymont, attending campouts, & helping the boys in the rest of the troop.

I’m getting biographical here because Scouting taught me values that have been near & dear to my heart. Those values are expressed in the Scout Oath:

“On my honor, I will do my best, to do my duty, to God & my country, to obey the Scout Law, to help other people at all times, & to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, & morally straight.”

The “Scout Law” mentioned in that oath contains 12 values that I consider part of my core.

The Scout Law:

“A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, & reverent.”

You don’t have to be a Boy Scout to subscribe to these values. In fact, it’s my view that following them makes for good character, no matter who you are.

As Vice President, it is my view that Dick Cheney has failed to live up to these values, & I’d like to demonstrate that now.

It is my hope that we elect a president & vice president that lives up to them, & I urge you to consider them when making your choice on November 4th.

.

Dick Cheney has not been trustworthy.

Dick Cheney helped mislead the American people into thinking that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But don’t take my word for it.

Here’s what the former House Majority Leader, Dick Armey, a Republican, had to say about it recently:

“Did Dick Cheney … purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue?” Armey said. “I seriously feel that may be the case…Had I known or believed then what I believe now, I would have publicly opposed [the war] resolution right to the bitter end, and I believe I might have stopped it from happening.”

.

Dick Cheney has not been loyal.

In August 2007, at a rally in Alburquerque, New Mexico, Cheney demanded that those attending the rally sign a loyalty oath before he set foot in the building.

The disloyalty here, is to democracy.

.

Dick Cheney has not been helpful.

Early in the Bush administration, Dick Cheney held an “energy task force” meeting that was largely comprised of oil executives & other industry bigwigs to essentially write the government’s energy policy, one that would consider the interests of those executives first & environmental & public interests last, if at all. Cheney fought tooth & nail to keep the results of that meeting under wraps, something which a federal judge & the General Accounting office ordered him to turn over. For vice president Cheney, being helpful is a relative term.

.

Dick Cheney has not been friendly.

Look at how he treated the covert identity of Valerie Plame, who worked for the CIA, shortly after her husband penned a piece in the New York Times that questioned President Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger. Outing a CIA agent is treasonable; doing it for political reasons is reprehensible. As the first President Bush once said, ““I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”

.

Dick Cheney has not been courteous.

As Vice President, Cheney is president of the U.S. Senate. Posing for a “class photo” in 2004, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy questioned him about his ties to Halliburton, the company which he presided over as president before he was called to public service, & the company which has profited enormously since the invasion of Iraq. Cheney’s reply to Leahy was something I can’t reprint here.

.

Dick Cheney has not been kind.

There’s no question that we have lost a lot of precious treasure thanks to the sacrifice of the men & women of the U.S. Armed forces. But have they (& their families) been the ones who have borne “the biggest burden,” according to Dick Cheney? No:

“The president carries the biggest burden, obviously,” Cheney said. “He’s the one who has to make the decision to commit young Americans.”

&, from the same interview:

“When you talk about an all-volunteer force, some of these soldiers, airmen, Marines have been on two, three, four, some of them more than that, deployments,” Raddatz said. “Do you think when they volunteered they had any idea that there would be so many deployments or stop-loss? Some of those who want to get out can’t because of stop-loss?”

“A lot of men and women sign up because sometimes they will see developments,” Cheney said.

.

Dick Cheney has not been obedient.

Not even to his own president:

Just after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney refused President Bush’s request to head up a “cabinet-level task force” aimed at speeding the recovery effort, writes the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman in a still-embargoed section of his new book, “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.”

When asked by Bush if he would “at least go do a fact-finding trip for us,” Cheney responded saying, “That’ll probably be the extent of it”:

Days after the storm had passed, when he finally returned to Washington from Crawford, Bush assembled his senior staff in the Oval Office. He was going to set up a cabinet-level task force, he said.

“I asked Dick if he’d be interested in spearheading this,” Bush announced. “Let’s just say I didn’t get the most positive response.” Bush nodded ironically toward the vice president, putting on a show for the others: Card, Rove, Bartlett, Condi Rice. His expression, the tone of voice, had a hint of edge. Can you believe this guy? […]

“Will you at least go do a fact-finding trip for us?” Bush asked.

“That’ll probably be the extent of it, Mr. President, unless you order otherwise,” Cheney replied.

Gellman writes that White House counselor Dan Bartlett “came to see Cheney’s demurral ‘quite frankly as pretty good judgment.’ Cheney ‘doesn’t do touchy-feely,’ Bartlett said.”

.

Dick Cheney has not been cheerful.

Click here to view the embedded video.

…

OK, you got me here.

Dick Cheney is one of the most cheerful people in Washington.

.

Dick Cheney has not been thrifty.

“If there’s anything about the economy that keeps Dick Cheney up at night, it’s the prospect of sabotage aimed at disrupting the oil market, he told FORTUNE.

“Clearly the world depends on a global supply of oil, and that will continue to be true for some considerable period of time. Efforts to shut down the flow of oil could conceivably have a significant impact.”

So when President Bush’s 2008 budget was coming together, with the goal of balancing the budget in five years, Cheney nevertheless insisted on a $947 million line item: a speedup of the flow of crude into the Texas and Louisiana salt caverns housing the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The budget guys pushed back: Can’t we wait until crude prices level off? No, the word came back from Cheney, this was urgent. That was all it took. “He doesn’t weigh in on a ton of issues,” said a person close to those negotiations. “But when he does . . .”

When he does, the Vice President tends to get his way.

.

Dick Cheney has not been brave.

From Cheney’s Wikipedia page:

“When Cheney became eligible for the draft, he was a supporter of the Vietnam War but did not serve in the military. Instead, he applied for and received five draft deferments. In 1989, the Washington Post writer George C. Wilson interviewed Cheney as the next Secretary of Defense; when asked about his deferments, Cheney reportedly said, “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service.”

.

Dick Cheney has not been clean.

In 2000, Dick Cheney was the head of the Vice-Presidential vetting team for George W. Bush. He ultimately told Bush that he was the best candidate. But he did not subject himself to the same strenuous vetting process he forced others to undergo; in fact, he never filled out his own questionairre.

.

Dick Cheney has not been reverent.

“Reverence” often means matters of faith, but in my view, it also applies to the U.S. Constitution. It has been evident throughout his Vice Presidency that Cheney holds that most hallowed of American documents in contempt; he has tried at every turn to expand the powers of the executive branch & reduce the powers of the legislative & judicial branch. This is a topic of major concern; this link makes the case far better than I can.

You may want to tell me that this involves the outgoing administration, & that I should stay focused on the one arriving on January 20th of next year.

I happen to think that I am.

If nothing else, I want a president & vice president who uphold the values that shape my moral center.

I believe there’s little else that matters more when you cast your vote.

For me, it’s a matter of honor.

I’d love to hear what you have to say about any of this.

FURTHER READING: Barton Gellman of the Washington Post has chronicled Cheney’s role in the Bush administration quite expertly here, in a series called “Angler.”

p.s. [Presidential trivia: the only U.S. president to fight at Chickamauga was James A. Garfield, for the Union. He was 34 at the time of the battle, & later became the 2nd United States president to be assassinated.]

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Here’s a pretty essential read from the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza for those of you curious about the years not mentioned much in Barack Obama’s 2 memiors - his first years as an Illinois state lawmaker. The article reveals a man driven by ambition - something that’s of course required for anyone running for president at age 47.

Curious to see whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Here’s part two of our point today about “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes,” & how it leads you down the path to greater wisdom.

Maybe you’re a rabid Sarah Palin supporter who is not willing to listen to anyone on the left argue why Palin isn’t the best choice for McCain.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Well, the entire GOP is not smitten with her. Here’s what some voices (sure to be branded “ELITISTS” by some) are saying:

I don’t always agree with him, but David Brooks’ column in the New York Times today pretty much hits the nail on the head for me:

Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.

Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular people need to take control.

And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.

How is prudence acquired? Through experience. The prudent leader possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and who can’t, what has worked and what hasn’t.

Experienced leaders can certainly blunder if their minds have rigidified (see: Rumsfeld, Donald), but the records of leaders without long experience and prudence is not good. As George Will pointed out, the founders used the word “experience” 91 times in the Federalist Papers. Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared.

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place.

Next up, David Frum, former speechwriter for President Bush, who argues that it would have served the nation - not to mention Palin - well to let her wait for another election year:

Here’s my reading of the Times’ big story on Sarah Palin’s record in Alaska:

Anyone who has ever covered a school board or worked in municipal politics will recognize the pattern.

A network of long-term incumbents settles into comfortable patterns of self-dealing and nest-feathering.

Periodically there is an eruption of reform. The leaders of these eruptions have to be brave and charismatic. They excite intense loyalty among their followers - and provoke keen resentment among those who have enjoyed the old ways of doing business.

But it also often happens that this same bold leader has a strong messianic streak. They see no difference between themselves and their movement. They draw fierce lines between friends and enemies. They intensely resent criticism. They see no contradiction between their demand for total openness from others - and secrecy for themselves. They can be paranoid and vindictive - because after all, their enemies are enemies of the great cause.

Ralph Nader fits this profile. So did Robert Moses. So did a friend of mine who did heroic work cleaning up the Toronto school board. These people can accomplish important things. And if they have sufficient largeness of spirit and understanding of politics, they put their reforms into enduring institutional form - and truly enhance the public welfare before they burn out.

If not … their careers can end very destructively for all concerned.

John McCain caught Sarah Palin at the rising part of her career arc. She had been governor for not two years. She dusted away a lot of incumbents who needed to be dusted. Her original proposals for revising Alaska’s severance tax look reasonable and prudent. (What emerged from the legislative process on the other hand looks dangerously confiscatory - and also exposes Alaska to greater downside risk in the event of an oil price drop.)

What comes next for her? How would she deal with adversity - and the criticism that accompanies adversity? How strong are those dark aspects of the reformer personality that the Times‘ article depicted?
It might have been better to wait to learn the answers to those questions before putting her at the top of a party ticket. But the decision is made - and the answers will come.

Next up, Ross Douthat of the Atlantic., who weighs in on the now infamous Charlie Gibson interview. Again, this is a conservative speaking:

The most that can be said in her defense is that she kept her cool and avoided any brutal gaffes; other than that, she seemed about an inch deep on every issue outside her comfort zone. Yes, the questions were tougher than the ones that a Tim Kaine or Tim Pawlenty probably would have been handed, but they were all questions that a vice-presidential nominee needs to be able to answer. And there’s no way to look at her performance as anything save supporting evidence for the non-hysterical critique of her candidacy - that it’s just too much, too soon - and a splash of cold water for those of us with high hopes for her future on the national stage.

& finally, Rich Lowry of the National Review, also on the Palin-Gibson interview:

My take (and I didn’t see the bits that aired on 20/20 or Nightline last night, although I read the transcript) was that she survived. That’s all she had to do. Politically, everyone was grading her on a pass/fail, and she passed. No gaffes, not that much to fuel damaging follow-on conversation. She’s likable even when she’s at her least authoritative. Most people, I believe, are rooting for her, and she was helped in the post-game by the incredible scorn directed at her by Charlie Gibson. But this was a merely adequate performance. The foreign-policy session was a white-knuckle affair. She barely got through it and showed no knowledge more than an inch deep. What she did demonstrate was amazing self-possession. She somehow bluffed her way through the Bush doctrine question. Gibson apparently didn’t want to go into full “gotcha” territory by asking flat-out if she knew what it is. And then he muddled things further with his dubious definition of it, so she was never truly nailed and there was enough ambiguity there for conservatives to defend her. The fact still remains that she very likely didn’t know any of the possible definitions of the Bush doctrine. I can’t imagine if Obama had picked Gov. Tim Kaine and he had had a similar moment, conservatives would have rushed to say that the Bush doctrine is just too amorphous and complicated for him to know anything about it. Palin seemed weak on economic and budgetary policy too, talking in the vaguest generalities. She was much better, and positively good, on the social issues—which are dear to her and she’s thought about—and anything having to do with her personally or with her record in Alaska. She was magnificent on the Iraq-prayer question. This tends to suggest she’ll be as strong on the national issues, once she’s truly conversant with them. I hope she got up from the foreign policy session and said to her aides, “Dammit. That wasn’t good enough and I’m not letting it happen again. I’m not going to allow myself to be so under-prepared for another high-profile interview again.” Of course, she has a tremendous amount of material to master in a short period of time. What she has to do is the equivalent of Charlie Gibson or any of the rest of us having to answer questions about pipeline policy in Alaska on a moment’s notice. I understand how we all want to be protective of her—I feel the same impulse—but let’s not be patronizing. I believe the truly pro-Palin position is to think she can, should, and will do better than this.

So ponder all this, conservatives! Where do you think these men have good points to make, & where are they off base? I’d love to hear from you! (all other viewpoints are welcome too). Post a comment!

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Click here to view the embedded video.

What the heck is going on with the U.S. economy?

I will admit here that economics is not my strong suit.

But Paul Solman of PBS really does a good job in the clip above making things clear & easy to understand.

He uses Monopoly pieces & other “dollar store” items to help make sense of what’s happening.

This piece aired on PBS in March, but it still is relevant to what happened with the markets yesterday.

Again, highly recommended viewing. I hope you take the time to educate yourself about it - it should be one of the reasons in making your choice for president.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

WASHINGTON (AP) - A new poll says two out of three Americans are strongly opposed to expanding the president’s powers at the expense of Congress or the courts, even if it would improve national security or the economy.
The Associated Press-National Constitution Center poll finds people wary of increased government authority, and especially skeptical of increasing the president’s powers after the controversies surrounding the Bush administration.

The government’s power to take private property for redevelopment had little support in the poll, not even when owners are paid a fair price and the project creates local jobs.

The poll also finds a generational gap over the issue of gay marriage. More than two-thirds of those under 35 favor the recognition of gay marriage. Less than 40 percent of those over 35 feel the same way.

Those who believe the United States flag is the symbol of our country, aka “the one worth giving your life for,” I beg to differ. For me, it’s the document you see above that makes the United States the greatest country in the world.

If you haven’t read the U.S. Constitution, that most rare expression of genius in human history, allow me to strongly suggest doing so, especially before you vote.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

From “the GOP Plays the Victim Card,” by Gregory Rodriguez of the Los Angeles Times:

“…Republicans didn’t invent victim politics, nor do they have the franchise on it. But the form they engage in is particularly troublesome, not least because so many conservatives seem not to even realize they’re up to their eyebrows in a game they claim to despise.

…

Conservatives still behave like a battered minority.

Romesh Ponnuru was a voice in the conservative wilderness Wednesday when he argued in a National Review blog that the GOP’s response to Barack Obama’s lipstick-on-a-pig comment is making Republicans look like “whiny grievance-mongers.”

That’s too bad, because it undermines the conservative critique of the politics of victimization, which is not a bad one. When they aren’t practicing victimhood, conservatives argue that it weakens moral accountability and therefore personal responsibility. To identify yourself as a perpetual victim, they would say, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy that can undermine an individual’s or a group’s ability to improve their lot over time.

Of course, in this critique, those playing the victim card are always liberals or their fellow travelers. Just this June, Dennis Prager wrote that the “entire liberal-left [worldview] is predicated on portraying every group in America except white, male, heterosexual Christians as oppressed. Women are oppressed by men. Blacks and Hispanics are oppressed by whites. Gays are oppressed by straights. Non-Christians are oppressed by Christians.”

He must have been surprised when, at the GOP convention, his own champions, Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani, flagrantly predicated their positions on the same kind of oppression, this time of Sam’s Club, Main Street Republicans by those nasty “elites.”

But who really cares about fairness and consistent thinking when politics are in play? Like the minority activist groups that conservatives abhor, the Republicans know very well that crying out against a foe is one sure way to rally the troops. And it works particularly well when your side is in political or ideological disarray. If you can’t inspire your base with a coherent vision of the future, then you might as well unify it with the promise to stand up against the boogeyman.

In the end, conservatives are right, we have become a nation of victims, but surely it’s getting more difficult for them to blame it all on the liberals.”

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

(above: “Gossip” by Norman Rockwell)

If nothing else, 2008 is the year of the forwarded e-mail, touting the latest political ‘facts’ about a candidate. After the jump, some valuable advice on how to handle them.

This is from the website FactCheck.org, written back in March, but especially relevant today.

Read it, print it, & tape it to your computer monitor.

That Chain E-mail Your Friend Sent to You Is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously.

March 18, 2008

by Lori Robertson

I’ve noticed that chain e-mails, particularly those about politics, have a lot of things in common: urgent and frightening messages; spelling errors; a tendency to blame mainstream media for not telling the real story; and false, misleading, utterly bogus, and completely off-base claims.

If there was ever a case where readers should apply a guilty-until-proven-innocent standard, this is it. We at FactCheck.org ask the public to be skeptical about politicians’ claims. With these e-mails, outright cynicism is justified. Assume all such messages are wrong, and you’ll be right most of the time.

Yes, there are a few chain e-mails floating around the Web that are actually true – but not many. And when it comes to messages about the top presidential contenders, truth in e-mail is an elusive quality. In our Ask FactCheck feature, launched late last year, we’ve looked into several e-mails our readers have sent to us. We’re just getting started, but overwhelmingly they have turned out to be false. Snopes.com has been investigating e-mail and other urban legends since 1995, and the site’s founders, Barbara and David Mikkelson, have written articles about 31 e-mails about Barack Obama and Hillary (and Bill) Clinton. Only two e-mails were completely accurate. While a handful had elements of truth in them or couldn’t be verified, the vast majority were flat-out false.

Another writer who debunks rumor and lore is David Emery, author of About.com’s Urban Legends page. He lists seven e-mails about Hillary Clinton and five about Barack Obama. His verdict: 12 false and misleading, 0 true.

We have yet to see e-mails about John McCain, and Emery notes a decidedly anti-Democrat tilt to the bulk of the e-mail chatter. But there’s still plenty of time before the election. In 2004, a left-leaning e-mail claimed the Bush administration was quietly pushing legislation to reinstate the military draft. The claim was bogus, but the e-mail prompted such paranoia that a GOP-controlled House overwhelmingly voted down a bill to reinstate the draft just to show that it rejected the measure. Snopes has chronicled two claims about McCain – both were true, and one was a positive story.

In an e-mail to FactCheck.org, Emery says in 10 years of this line of work, he has looked into a thousand or so e-mails. Pressed to give a ballpark figure for how many are true, he responds: “I’d venture to say that less than a tenth of what’s circulating out there at any given time turns out to be 100% true. A substantially larger portion – maybe around half of all the emails or a little more – contain a mixture of facts and falsehoods.” Then, there’s a little thing called “spin.” “You can take a string of incontrovertible facts and present them in such a way that they point to a false conclusion.”

As for e-mails with political themes, Emery, who has been at this longer than we have, says the phenomenon has increased greatly in recent years, with a marked surge in 2004 with attacks on John Kerry. “I’m tempted to say that Internet rumor-mongering has become, for lack of a better word, ‘integral’ to the political process over the past few election cycles.” Internet-fueled innuendo has prompted stronger and quicker responses from the candidates, says Emery, who adds that it’s unclear whether or not any of these e-mails were written by political staffers themselves. “It’s possible, and I think even likely, that at least a few of these rumors were started by political operatives, but I’m not aware of any hard evidence of that.”

More Popular = More Likely to Be Bogus

We’ve noticed that the more times something is forwarded, the more likely it is to be false. We suggested this perverse theory when we threw cold water on the claim that the United Kingdom, or the University of Kentucky, had stopped teaching about the Holocaust. E-mails about Obama, for instance, have been particularly popular – they now rank as No. 3 on Snopes.com’s list of the 25 Hottest Urban Legends and one rumor holds the No. 1 spot in Emery’s top 25. But only one of the e-mails these sites have examined is true – and actually only a certain version of it passes the truth test.

This is the one claiming that Obama didn’t put his hand over his heart while the Star Spangled Banner played. That specific allegation is correct, as documented in a photo of presidential candidates at an Iowa steak fry. But it’s false, as some versions of the e-mail said, that he “will NOT recite the Pledge of Allegiance nor will he show any reverence for our flag.” We debunked this and other legends about Obama early this year after receiving a rush of questions about them. Again, for the record, he is not a Muslim, his middle name is not Mohammed, and he placed his hand on a Bible when he was sworn into the Senate. And he puts his hand over his heart when he says the Pledge of Allegiance. We even have pictures to prove it.

Still, two months after we wrote that story, we continue to get messages from readers asking about his patriotism, his religion, his church and whether he’ll take the presidential oath with the Quran.

Often, the message itself includes major red flags that should alert readers that the author is not to be trusted. Here are just a few of what we’ll call Key Characteristics of Bogusness:

• The author is anonymous. Practically all e-mails we see fall into this category, and anytime an author is unnamed, the public should be skeptical. If the story were true, why would the author not put his or her name on it?
• The author is supposedly a famous person. Of course, e-mails that are attributed to legitimate people turn out to be false as well. Those popular messages about a Jay Leno essay and Andy Rooney’s political views are both baloney. And we found that some oft-quoted words attributed to Abraham Lincoln were not his words at all.
• There’s a reference to a legitimate source that completely contradicts the information in the e-mail. Some e-mails will implore readers to check out the claims, even providing a link to a respected source. We’re not sure why some people don’t click on the link, but we implore you to do so. Go ahead, take the challenge. See if the information you find actually backs up the e-mail. We’ve examined three such e-mails in which the back-up material clearly debunks the e-mail itself. One message provided a link to the Tax Foundation, but anyone who followed it would have found an article saying the e-mail’s figures were all wrong. Another boasted that Snopes.com had verified the e-mail, but Snopes actually said it was false.
• The message is riddled with spelling errors. Ask yourself, why should you trust an author who is not only anonymous but partially illiterate?
• The author just loves using exclamation points. If the author had a truthful point to make, he or she wouldn’t need to put two, three, even five exclamation points after every other sentence. In fact, we’re developing another theory here: The more exclamation points used in an e-mail, the less true it actually is. (Ditto for excessive use of capital letters.)
• The message argues that it is NOT false. This tip comes from Emery, who advises skepticism for any message that says, “This is NOT a hoax!”
• There’s math involved. Check it. One message that falsely claimed more soldiers died during Bill Clinton’s term than during George W. Bush’s urged, “You do the Math!” We did. It’s wrong.
  

We hope that by writing about some of these messages we can enlighten a few readers and arm some of them with ammunition against their e-mail-forwarding friends. But clearly our battle against the viral e-mail monster has just begun. Months after debunking a popular piece of rubbish about Nancy Pelosi’s plan to tax your retirement savings and give the revenue to illegal immigrants, we’re still getting questions about whether it could possibly be true. Let me repeat: It’s not.

In another item on a common falsehood (but not yet, as far as we know, an e-mail legend), we suggested that a reader try ridiculing his friends to dispel their apocryphal beliefs. And we were serious. If the cold hard truth – or even an ounce of common sense – isn’t an effective weapon in combating a bogus notion, what is?

It seems that no matter the facts, the desire to believe some of this stuff is just too strong. Emery, too, has come to believe that there’s not enough proof in the world to stop certain political propaganda. “I have come to the conclusion that especially where political rumors are concerned, most people are so locked into a particular world view that they tend to reject any information, no matter how well supported, that contradicts their cherished assumptions,” he says. “It’s scary, actually how polarized we have become.”

In a 2004 report on this topic, our director, Brooks Jackson, called for an end to the e-mail madness, saying, “This cyber-sickness should stop. All it takes is a little bit of common sense and skepticism, some curiosity and a few keystrokes. Nailing these lies can even be fun.”

Apparently, lots of Americans didn’t heed the call. If you don’t find checking out these e-mails to be fun, or just don’t have time, I suggest an easier alternative: a healthy use of the delete key.

ALSO, CHECK OUT THESE VOTE08 POSTS:

“Answering Your Questions about Barack Obama”

“Fact Checking Rumors about Sarah Palin”

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

(picture by Matt Brunson)

…she’s a hockey player.

(WARNING: This post is rated PG-13 for violent content.)

I’m going to post a great piece in full here written by FiveThirtyEight.com’s Sean Quinn for 2 reasons:

1. It will calm the anxieties of Sarah Palin fans (the poor dears) who believe she has been insulted by that horrible Barack Obama because of that ‘lipstick’ line, &

2. It will make Obama supporters realize why McCain picked Palin, what she represents to the ticket, & what they’re really up against.

Sarah Palin Is Not a Hockey Mom

“She’s a hockey player. She’s a fourth-line hockey agitator, beloved by the home crowd, loathed by the opponents, injecting passion into both fan bases, the kind of home-team hero that no Stanley Cup winner goes without.

Once upon a time, I applied an NFL-replay mentality to hockey playoffs, holding on to outrages over missed calls, blatantly unfair officiating, double standards, and outright getting-away-with-stuff (which always led to an early spring exit for my beloved Blues). I wanted – and unreasonably expected – bad behavior to be proportionally punished.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And then several years ago I had an epiphany about the hockey playoffs – nobody is coming to save you. Initiators win, reactors lose. Expect adversity, because it’s built in. The fourth-line, no-scoring-talent, pest agitators (or as we now call them, “energy guys”) have a specific job. Skate in, take a cheap shot, make it after the whistle. Make it against the rules. Stir something up. Put a wet glove in the other guy’s face and rub it. Get the outrage flowing. Get the opponent not thinking about the game, get them thinking about your shenanigans. And what happens? The “victimized” team loses its composure, hitting back. The guy who hits second is always the guy who goes to the penalty box.

Watching Sarah Palin this week, and the reaction to her by both sides, and all the talk of hockey mommery, I realized that this is who she is. She skates into the corner, throws up an elbow, and the Democrats cry: “Foul!” Hey! She said Obama has never passed a major bill – this is an objective lie! Hey! She ridiculed community organizing the day after Service was the theme! Technically people should punish her by not voting for her over this infraction!

It’s whining, and whiners hit back second and go to the penalty box on top of it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sarah Palin is a person who by her own admission found out about the Iraq surge – the centerpiece of the McCain judgment argument – from television. Apologies to conservatives, but technically, objectively, inarguably, this alone makes her unqualified to be President. But we don’t live in that technical or objective world. Political campaigns – as distinct from policy and governance – are the NHL playoffs. It’s only about who survives the war of attrition to the finish line first. Is Brett Hull’s skate still in Dominik Hasek’s crease and was that same situation disallowed in every previous instance throughout that season? Yes, but so what? Dallas had a parade.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the hockey analogy, Palin wouldn’t get within a thousand miles of an NHL All-Star Game because she’s not a scoring talent. She’s a role player, an emotion-rouser. Emotion messes with the chalkboard-drawn game plan and thus achieves a specific strategic objective. She can make game-changing agitation plays that rouse her home team and provoke the other side into counterattacks that – 100% of the time – end up punishing the team who hits back. Democrats would be smart to understand her as such, and I see a lot of reaction that doesn’t seem to grasp what Palin is doing and the value she’s providing. I see a lot of Democrats taking a lot of bait.

This applies more to Democratic surrogates than it does to the top-ticket duo. Joe Biden had the smart response yesterday – naming the behavior – expecting it, and then riding through without taking the bait:

“It was about how well placed — and boy she is good — how a left jab can be stuck pretty nice. It’s about how Barack Obama is such a bad guy.”

And that’s all he says of Palin’s antics. Name the behavior, even praising the skill with which the agitation was attempted, and then back to focus. It’s “the economy, stupid.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Finally – is the analogy complete? In the end a great hockey agitator who rouses both sides emotionally (and successfully gets the other team to lose focus) still needs the home team scoring talent to come through. Successful agitator Kris Draper of the Detroit Red Wings had the clutch Steve Yzerman for a lot of years. That worked. Detroit won Cups. They had parades.

Successful agitator Tyson Nash, when he was on my Blues, was stuck with the antithesis of playoff clutch, the easily thrown-off-his-game Keith Tkachuk. That didn’t work. No Cup. Even if Palin is successful in her task of agitation and distraction, which one is John McCain?”

What do you think? Post a comment now! All opinions are welcome.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Forgive the defensive crouch, but as a bona fide member of the media [who, admittedly, never uses a long "I" when I say the words 'Iraq,' or 'Iran'], I’m a bit perplexed at the vitriol I’ve felt from the GOP over the coverage of the Sarah Palin story.

I’d like to ask you, the person who’s reading this webpage at this very moment: If you were a member of the media, how would you have handled the situation?

As far as I can tell, most members of the ‘mainstream media’ were trying to satisfy the public’s insatiable appetite to find information about her.

That is what I have done my entire adult career, & shouldn’t be taken as a slight.

It’s an acknowledgement of current conditions.

Millions of people are typing “Sarah Palin” into the Google search bar to see what they can find out about her.

A decent percentage of them will reach conclusions that are the virtual opposite of yours.

But that’s okay - ”E Pluribus Unum,” right?

The questions, in my view perfectly legitimate, included:

Who is Sarah Palin?

What is her record as a public servant?

What are her stances on the issues?

What choices did she make as a public servant that voters would be interested in knowing?

Which parts of her biography make her particularly prepared or unprepared to be vice president or President of the United States?

I could go on. But somehow these questions have morphed into “vicious attacks.” As far as I’m concerned, the only thing the media is after is the truth.

Here at the NewsChannel, one of the biggest deciders on doing a story (any stry) is whether the story is generating what’s known as “water cooler conversations.” My ears always perk up when I hear someone (usually out of the newsroom) talk about a national story. It tells me that there is interest.

That is the case for any reputable media outlet.

If you, the person reading this webpage right now, are not discussing it with anyone you interact with in person, chances are far lower that the story will get done.

The Sarah Palin story was one of the biggest “water cooler” stories to come down the pike this year. In fact, I had more response & comments on Sarah Palin this week, both on this blog & in person than I’ve had for any other week during the campaign.

So help me out here, folks. Satisfy my curiosity. What specific examples of “vicious media attacks” are you talking about? Tell me how you would handle the news (released by the McCain campaign) that Sarah Palin’s daughter is pregnant. Should we have ignored that, given the fact that it was the hot topic of conversation among you, the voter/viewer, for a nearly 48 hour period?

p.s. Please don’t give me the excuse that it was the “left wing blog” rumors that played out all through last weekend. I don’t pay attention to rumors & wouldn’t report them without any basis in fact. & the vast, vast majority of the American public who’s paying attention to this election don’t follow left (or, for that matter, right) wing blogs on a regular basis. This uproar over supposed “media attacks” didn’t start until after the pregnancy announcement.

p.p.s. Please also note that any information about the boy who is the father of Bristol Palin’s baby, such as his picture, his name, or quotes from his MySpace page, are completely absent from this blog. I just don’t care. If you care, you can find that somewhere else.

FURTHER READING: Why the Media Should Apologize, by the Politico’s Roger Simon. This piece pretty much sums up my view on the matter.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

First up last night, First Lady Laura Bush introduced her husband & outlined the President’s legacy:

Click here to view the embedded video.

& then, the man himself spoke - though it was from 1000 miles away at the White House:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It felt odd. You can certainly tell that Bush is disappointed he was not able to address the crowd that helped send him to the White House twice. Hurricane Gustav certainly did the McCain camp a favor - it kept away one of the biggest criticisms on the other side, that President Bush & John McCain are joined at the hip.

Bush was correct to bring up this, his greatest moment as president, on September 14th, 2001, in New York City. Watch:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Many are calling him the worst president in history, & in many ways one could describe this president as a failure. I hope to get more into this later, but I consider his biggest mistake to be one that former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan outlined in his book - that the administration never got outside of what McClellan called “the permanent campaign.” Bush governed as if he had a mandate from the country (by a large margin, he didn’t). Nearly every single act as president was designed to please half of the country without being anywhere close to empathetic for the concerns of the other side.

But there are bright spots to the Bush presidency, & Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek magazine spells them out in a recent edition of Newsweek. Before you banish President Bush to the dustbin of history as a failure, read this excellent piece to recognize that things aren’t so much black & white as they are shades of gray.

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

I saved a couple of lines from the speech last night for this post:

“America, our work will not be easy. The challenges we face require tough choices. And Democrats, as well as Republicans, will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past, for part of what has been lost these past eight years can’t just be measured by lost wages or bigger trade deficits. What has also been lost is our sense of common purpose, and that’s what we have to restore.

We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country.

The — the reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than they are for those plagued by gang violence in Cleveland, but don’t tell me we can’t uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals.

I know there are differences on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in a hospital and to live lives free of discrimination.

You know, passions may fly on immigration, but I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers.

But this, too, is part of America’s promise, the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.”

As one who’s read both of his memoirs, I have to say that this philosophy really gets to the core of what Obama’s approach to government is. The GOP & the right wing is eager to brand him as an ultra-liberal, which has been so effective for them in the past, but in many ways there will be disappointment from the left side of the Democratic party.

A piece called “The Empiricist Strikes Back,” by Cass R. Sunstein of the New Republic, shows how pragmatism seems to be what Obama values over all:

“The real problem lies in the assumption, still widespread on both the left and the right, that Obama is a doctrinaire liberal whose positions can be deduced simply by asking what the left thinks.

Of course Obama is a progressive. From health care to assistance for low-income families to education to environmental protection, he emphasizes that Americans have duties to one another, and that government should be taking active steps to provide equal opportunity and to help those who need help. But, by nature, he is also an independent thinker, and he listens to all sides. One of his most distinctive features is that he is a minimalist, not in the sense that he always favors small steps (he doesn’t), but because he prefers solutions that can be accepted by people with a wide variety of theoretical inclinations.

When he offers visionary approaches, he does so as a visionary minimalist–that is, as someone who attempts to accommodate, rather than to repudiate, the defining beliefs of most Americans. His reluctance to challenge people’s deepest commitments might turn out to be what makes ambitious plans possible–notwithstanding the hopes of the far left and the cartoons of the far right.

Obama’s views have never been simple to characterize. For a number of years, Obama has expressed his support for capital punishment. As a teacher of constitutional law, he does believe that the Second Amendment creates an individual right to have guns and said so well before the Supreme Court ruled to that effect. While he emphasizes the need for environmental and labor safeguards, Obama is no protectionist. He understands the power of markets, and, in principle, he is committed to free trade. Reiterating these long-held positions does not exactly count as flip-flopping or “tacking to the center.”

…

There is a much larger issue here, and it has to do with the distinctive nature of this particular candidate. Obama really means it when he deplores red-state-blue-state divisions and claims to draw ideas from Republicans as well as Democrats. Just as he resists ideological templates, Obama does not believe in “triangulation”; his skepticism about conventional ideological categories is principled, not strategic. It is revealing, and entirely characteristic, that Obama admires Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, in which Goodwin describes Lincoln’s self-conscious decision to assemble a contentious, bipartisan cabinet. By nature, Obama does not follow old-line political orthodoxies. Above all, Obama’s form of pragmatism is heavily empirical; he wants to know what will work.

Obama’s not the only one that’s worthy of shattering past stereotypes. In many ways, John McCain is not a typical Republican. (We’ll of course get much more into that next week.) In this regard, this historic election is extremely good for the country. We need to move past cartoon caricatures & actually do our homework this time around. Don’t rely on someone else to paint the picture for you - educate yourself about the candidates, their positions, & their approach to government. It is how you, as an American, are being called to duty.

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08