Billy “I’m such a moron I can’t get my facts straight” Kristol asks if it’s “A Campaign We Can Believe In?” He’s in a lather because he says Republicans he’s talked to are alarmed that the McCain campaign doesn’t seem up to the task of electing John McCain. From your lips to God’s ear, putz. Mr. Cohen writes about “The Good American and Monsieur Obama,” and says in French eyes, there’s a single good American: the Democratic Party nominee, Barack Obama. Mr. Krugman says “It’s a Different Country,” and that the de-racialization of U.S. politics has implications that go far beyond the possibility that we’re about to elect an African-American president. Here’s that waste of oxygen Kristol:
Hillary Clinton’s concession speech Saturday was the story of the weekend. But the dueling speeches by John McCain and Barack Obama on Tuesday night, after the last primaries, are what voters — and campaign operatives — should be revisiting.
McCain chose to speak early in the evening, before the polls closed in South Dakota and Montana, thereby getting the jump on Obama. He read a disjointed set of remarks at a badly staged rally at the Pontchartrain Center in Kenner, La. Here’s part of an e-mail message I received as McCain spoke, from a Republican who admires him: “They could have done so well tonight, shown a tone of confidence. Instead it looks like a bad Congressional race: dumb green puke background, small crowd … Makes me want to cry.”
Soon after Republicans finished shedding tears of frustration, Democrats were weeping tears of joy. Obama spoke about an hour later in a packed sports arena in St. Paul, Minn. His speech was well written and well delivered. He closed with quite a peroration, promising among other things that “generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs for the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
It was lofty oratory, exciting and even moving. Only later, in the light of day, might one pause to wonder: Would Obama’s election really mark the moment when Americans began to care for the sick? And while Obama would surely seek legislation regulating greenhouse gases, isn’t it a little much to promise that his election would not only slow the rise of the oceans but cause the planet to begin “to heal”?
In his evocation of healing powers and dominion over the waters, Obama summons up echoes of the Gospels and Genesis. His comment a week earlier at Wesleyan, that “our individual salvation depends on collective salvation,” I might add, would seem at odds with much of Christian teaching. But I’ll let Obama take that up with his minister.
In any case, with the battle against Hillary Clinton behind him, everything seems to be going swimmingly for Obama. Meanwhile, the McCain campaign dog-paddles along. And almost every Republican I’ve talked to is alarmed that the McCain campaign doesn’t seem up to the task of electing John McCain.
Several of these worried McCain supporters cited the decision by the campaign gurus that McCain’s Tuesday night speech should consist in large part of criticisms of Obama’s various proposals. The attacks often concluded, “That’s not change we can believe in.” Is it wise to begin a general election campaign by making fun of your opponent’s slogan and presenting yourself mostly as a debunker of his claims? Even hard-hearted Republicans think a general election message should be a bit more positive than that.
Actually, to be fair, there was a positive message Tuesday night. It was stenciled over and over on the now-notorious green backdrop behind McCain: “A leader we can believe in.” This was another play on Obama’s “change we can believe in” — and a foolish one. Because McCain doesn’t really ask for the electorate’s “belief.” Let Obama be about belief. McCain’s message is that he’s a leader we can trust, based on a record of many years, and that his character has been tested. McCain at least seems to grasp what his most effective message is. I’m told that it was McCain himself who insisted on the most effective passage in his Tuesday night speech.
Discussing the surge of troops and the new counterinsurgency strategy of early 2007, McCain pointed out, “Senator Obama opposed the new strategy. … Yet in the last year we have seen the success of that plan as violence has fallen to a four-year low. … None of this progress would have happened had we not changed course over a year ago. And all of this progress would be lost if Senator Obama had his way. ”
Early 2007 was as close as we’re going to get to a commander in chief moment for Senators McCain and Obama. They had to make a judgment in a difficult real-world situation — not on the healed planet of Obama’s dreams. With the Iraq war going badly, McCain took the lead in calling for a change in military strategy and a surge of troops. Obama, by contrast, went along with his party in urging withdrawal. Now, 18 months later, McCain seems pretty clearly to have been right.
Can McCain get voters to compare his judgment with Obama’s in a moment when the two of them were confronted with a weighty choice? Can McCain get voters to consider his leadership in this instance, and get them to ask when Obama took a similarly courageous stand on any issue? Yes he can — but it’s not clear if his campaign will be much help.
Here’s Mr. Cohen:
The French have always cherished a class of people called “les bons Américains.” These good Americans were those truest to a Gallic idea of what the United States should be, and in recent years those at the furthest remove from the aberrant folk who elected George W. Bush.
In recent decades, good Americans have included John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie (whose elegance betrayed a European sensibility), Woody Allen (of European urbanity and wit), Michael Moore (of European vehemence on the Iraq war) and Al Gore (of European environmentalism).
But right now, in French eyes, there’s a single good American: the Democratic Party nominee, Barack Obama. His book, “The Audacity of Hope,” is a best seller. His face is everywhere, sometimes in socialist realist images evoking Che Guevara.
An online support committee has drawn all-star support, including the fashion designer Sonia Rykiel, the Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë, the writer-philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pierre Bergé, the partner of the late Yves Saint Laurent.
Out in the troubled suburbs, with their large African and Arab populations and broad mistrust of a political system that has produced one black parliamentarian among the 555 representing mainland France, Obama is an urban legend. In France at least, he has high-low appeal.
France is not alone in its Obama fever — German infatuation is scarcely less intense — but I think the French case says something particular about the state of American politics and global expectations.
Four years ago, with post 9/11 nationalist sentiment still running high, John Kerry had to hide the fact he spoke French and had French relatives. Republicans liked to mock the then Democratic candidate by suggesting he began rallies with a “Bonjour.”
That anti-Gallic, freedom-fries fever has run its course. It’s exhausted, as are many of the jingoistic elements of the conservative, Republican wave that has been the dominant force in U.S. politics since Nixon.
The successful attack on Democrats that began in the 1960s with Nixon’s appeal to the “great silent majority of Americans” who abhorred anti-Vietnam agitators and glided into Bush’s vilification of egghead liberals short on Iraq testosterone, has exhausted itself.
As George Packer notes in a must-read New Yorker piece called “The Fall of Conservatism,” the politically fruitful Republican-engineered polarization of politics around military might, family values and small government has died with Bush.
“Polls,” Packer writes, “reveal that Americans favor the Democratic side on nearly every domestic issue, from Social Security and health care to education and the environment.”
Or, as the Republican strategist Ed Rollins puts it to Packer, “Today, if you’re not rich or Southern or born again, the chances of your being a Republican are not great.” No wonder John McCain’s campaign is very short on polarizing conservative orthodoxy.
What I think this means for Obama is that French or European adulation for him is no longer a political problem. It cannot be associated by the likes of Karl Rove with wimpy Euro appeasement and “socialism.” If anything, Americans are looking to European health care and environmental measures as possible models.
Still, the wave of international good will needs careful handling by the Obama campaign. For the providential “good American” can never be as good as the Gallic and global imagination would like. The silent Americans are still there; they are not as European as the French would wish.
One thing the French love about Obama is his talk of dialogue, even with Iran. But what Obama must do domestically in the coming months is prove his toughness on national security. He needs to temper change with resoluteness, even tradition.
That may mean the selection of a white, male running mate with military experience and appeal to blue-collar Reagan Democrats — somebody like Jim Webb, the Senator for Virginia.
It may also mean more hawkish speeches like the one Obama made last week on Israel-Palestine to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He declared that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” He also said “Israel’s identity as a Jewish state must be preserved” — a dismissal of the Palestinian “right of return.”
How the first of these conditions is compatible with any peace is unclear to me. But Obama needs to win Florida, and Jews there remain skeptical of his Israel commitment. Domestic needs trump the idealized French vision of Obama as peacemaker and friend of the oppressed, Palestinians among them.
Obama’s right to play hardball to win. A core lesson of Republican methods these past four decades is that winning is everything.
International hopes have been raised so high that disappointments are inevitable. France’s imagined America and the real country remain at some remove.
But they are closer than in decades, creating the possibility that a deft Obama can at once triumph and bring the world with him.
Here’s Mr. Krugman
Fervent supporters of Barack Obama like to say that putting him in the White House would transform America. With all due respect to the candidate, that gets it backward. Mr. Obama is an impressive speaker who has run a brilliant campaign — but if he wins in November, it will be because our country has already been transformed.
Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.
And the de-racialization of U.S. politics has implications that go far beyond the possibility that we’re about to elect an African-American president. Without racial division, the conservative message — which has long dominated the political scene — loses most of its effectiveness.
Take, for example, that old standby of conservatives: denouncing Big Government. Last week John McCain’s economic spokesman claimed that Barack Obama is President Bush’s true fiscal heir, because he’s “dedicated to the recent Bush tradition of spending money on everything.”
Now, the truth is that the Bush administration’s big-spending impulses have been largely limited to defense contractors. But more to the point, the McCain campaign is deluding itself if it thinks this issue will resonate with the public.
For Americans have never disliked Big Government in general. In fact, they love Social Security and Medicare, and strongly approve of Medicaid — which means that the three big programs that dominate domestic spending have overwhelming public support.
If Ronald Reagan and other politicians succeeded, for a time, in convincing voters that government spending was bad, it was by suggesting that bureaucrats were taking away workers’ hard-earned money and giving it to you-know-who: the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, the welfare queen driving her Cadillac. Take away the racial element, and Americans like government spending just fine.
But why has racial division become so much less important in American politics?
Part of the credit surely goes to Bill Clinton, who ended welfare as we knew it. I’m not saying that the end of Aid to Families With Dependent Children was an unalloyed good thing; it created a great deal of hardship. But the “bums on welfare” played a role in political discourse vastly disproportionate to the actual expense of A.F.D.C., and welfare reform took that issue off the table.
Another large factor has been the decline in urban violence.
As the historian Rick Perlstein documents in his terrific new book “Nixonland,” America’s hard right turn really began in 1966, when the Democrats suffered a severe setback in Congress — and Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California.
The cause of that right turn, as Mr. Perlstein shows, was white fear of urban disorder — and the associated fear that fair housing laws would let dangerous blacks move into white neighborhoods. “Law and order” became the rallying cry of right-wing politicians, above all Richard Nixon, who rode that fear right into the White House.
But during the Clinton years, for reasons nobody fully understands, the wave of urban violence receded, and with it the ability of politicians to exploit Americans’ fear.
It’s true that 9/11 gave the fear factor a second wind: Karl Rove accusing liberals of being soft on terrorism sounded just like Spiro Agnew accusing liberals of being soft on crime. But the G.O.P.’s credibility as America’s defender has leaked away into the sands of Iraq.
Let me add one more hypothesis: although everyone makes fun of political correctness, I’d argue that decades of pressure on public figures and the media have helped drive both overt and strongly implied racism out of our national discourse. For example, I don’t think a politician today could get away with running the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad.
Unfortunately, the campaign against misogyny hasn’t been equally successful.
By the way, it was during the heyday of the baby boom generation that crude racism became unacceptable. Mr. Obama, who has been dismissive of the boomers’ “psychodrama,” might want to give the generation that brought about this change, fought for civil rights and protested the Vietnam War a bit more credit.
Anyway, none of this guarantees an Obama victory in November. Racial division has lost much of its sting, but not all: you can be sure that we’ll be hearing a lot more about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and all that. Moreover, despite Hillary Clinton’s gracious, eloquent concession speech, some of her supporters may yet refuse to support the Democratic nominee.
But if Mr. Obama does win, it will symbolize the great change that has taken place in America. Racial polarization used to be a dominating force in our politics — but we’re now a different, and better, country.
