Kristol, Cohen and Krugman

That poisonous toad Kristol, who has been wrong about everything since the day he picked up a crayon, excreted a thing called “A Joe of His Own?”  He opines that a McCain-Lieberman ticket may have a better prospect of winning than the more conventional alternatives.  I doubt that the Republicans are so bereft of evil little weasels that they need “Smoochy” Lieberman, but they’re more than welcome to him.  Mr. Cohen’s column is titled “Out of Africa,” and he says race can be a means for Barack Obama to talk about reconciliation — of America with its past, its ideals and the world.  Mr. Krugman would like to “Accentuate the Negative,” and points out that the Obama campaign only has to tarnish John McCain’s image enough that voters see this as a contest between a Democrat and a Republican.  Here’s that bit of pond scum Kristol:

The anguished cries of Hillary supporters pierced the midday calm here on Saturday, as Barack Obama confirmed that his vice presidential choice was not Clinton, who got about 18 million votes this year running against him, but rather Joe Biden, who gained the support of a few thousand caucusgoers in Iowa before dropping out of the race.

(OK, I didn’t personally hear any anguished cries from my work space near the Pepsi Center. But I’m an empathetic guy — I felt as if I could hear them.)

McCain operatives were pleased by the Biden selection, which they considered, as one said to me, “a pick from weakness.” Still, it complicates McCain’s vice presidential calculations.

The two leading G.O.P. prospects have been Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor, and Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. But with Biden’s foreign policy experience as a contrast, could McCain assure voters that the young Pawlenty is ready to take over, if need be, as commander in chief? Also, Biden is a strong and experienced debater. Pawlenty is unproven. If he is the choice, there will be many anxious Republicans in the run-up to the vice presidential debate in St. Louis on Oct. 2.

Romney might match up better against Biden in debate. But it’s clear that the Obama-Biden campaign is moving aggressively to embrace a traditional Democratic populist economic message. Such a message will have appeal this year — especially, one supposes, against a doubly multimansioned G.O.P. ticket of McCain and Romney.

If not Pawlenty or Romney, how about a woman, whose selection would presumably appeal to the aforementioned anguished Hillary supporters? It’s awfully tempting for the McCain camp to revisit the possibility of tapping Meg Whitman, the former eBay C.E.O., Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, or Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. But the first two have never run for office, and Palin has been governor for less than two years.

So what’s to be done? McCain could well decide the obstacles to Pawlenty and Romney aren’t insuperable, and pick one of them. He could choose a different Republican governor or ex-governor, senator or congressman. Or he could decide that Obama’s conventional pick of Biden allows him to seize the moment by making a bold choice. He could select the person he would really like to have by his side in the White House — but whose selection would cause palpitations among many of his staffers and supporters: the independent Democratic senator from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman could hold his own against Biden in a debate. He would reinforce McCain’s overall message of foreign policy experience and hawkishness. He’s a strong and disciplined candidate.

But he is pro-abortion rights, and having been a Democrat all his life, he has a moderately liberal voting record on lots of issues.

Now as a matter of governance, there’s no reason to think this would much matter. McCain has made clear his will be a pro-life administration. And as a one-off, quasi-national-unity ticket, with Lieberman renouncing any further ambition to run for the presidency, a McCain-Lieberman administration wouldn’t threaten the continuance of the G.O.P. as a pro-life party. In other areas, no one seriously thinks the policies of a McCain-Lieberman administration would be appreciably different from those, say, of a McCain-Pawlenty administration.

Would McCain-Lieberman have a better prospect of winning than the more conventional alternatives? If they could get over the early hurdles of a messy convention and an awful lot of conservative angst and anger, I’ve come to think so.

Obama and Biden will try to frame the presidential race as a normal Democratic-Republican choice. If they can do that, they should win. That would be far more difficult against a McCain-Lieberman ticket. The charge that McCain would merely mean a third Bush term would also tend to fall flat. And an unorthodox “country first” Lieberman selection would reinforce what has been attractive about McCain, and what has allowed him to run ahead of — though not yet enough ahead of — the generic Republican ballot.

A Lieberman pick should help with ticket splitters. But can such a ticket hold the support of pro-lifers, conservatives and Republicans? If you’re conscientiously pro-life, you will have reservations about a pro-abortion-rights V.P. If you’re a proud conservative, Lieberman hasn’t been one. If you’re a loyal Republican, you’d much prefer someone from within the ranks.

But if you’re pro-life, conservative and/or Republican, you certainly don’t want Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid running the country. If a McCain-Lieberman ticket is the best way to thwart that prospect, you could probably learn to live with it — even perhaps to like it.

And Hillary supporters could protest Obama’s glass ceiling by voting for John McCain and the Democratic Party’s 2000 vice presidential nominee.

Well, Billy, if you’re pro-Constitution you certainly don’t want your lot any where near the levers of power.  Oh, and it’s nice to see that you’re joining MoDo in passing fiction off as commentary.  “Anguished cries” my foot…  Asshat.  Here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from Elmina, Ghana:

In the castle here, slaves force-marched from the African interior were held in dungeons until their passage through the “Door of No Return” onto the ships that would carry them to the New World.

For centuries, the trade continued, overseen by pious European men of commerce, who prayed to their consoling God as they trafficked in black serfs for whom the Americas held no promise, but servitude.

I walked through Elmina with a handful of tourists. A guide made neither too much nor too little of the construction by the Dutch of a church above the slave depots. He said he did not want to reopen old wounds, merely safeguard memory.

It was not easy to tie this remote fort and other slave-trading centers along the coast, departure points for millions of enslaved Africans, to the plantations of Louisiana or to America’s “original sin,” as Barack Obama has put it, of slavery.

Yet the link must be made. More American kids should be wrested from their computer screens and ushered at an impressionable age to this faraway shore, where they might gaze through that one-way exit at a heaving sea.

They might then better understand acts and their consequences, not least a bloody civil war; they might better see the world’s interconnectedness; and they might better grasp the distance between words and deeds, as in how far the founding fathers were in 1787 from securing “the blessings of liberty” for one and all.

Spreading those blessings took struggle: that civil war, court fights, civil disobedience. No wonder then that, around the world, the first question about the U.S. election is always: “Is America really ready to elect a black man?”

That blunt inquiry, which I’ve heard from Indonesia to Latin America, is a reminder on the eve of the Democratic Party’s convention in Denver of the historic nature of the Obama candidacy.

But the question also suggests the barriers, spoken and unspoken, that he and his running mate, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, must still overcome to reach the, so-named, White House.

It’s been a long campaign already. We’ve seen Obama at the glittering top of his game, we’ve seen how introspective remoteness can dull that electricity. We know the main Republican lines of attack against him: untested, aloof, radical and, yes, different.

That’s politics. It’s about winning and damn the means. Power, as an Italian observed, wears out those who do not have it. But none of the above can obscure how this campaign’s moments of upliftment have come from Obama.

Often those moments have emerged from his experience of race even as he has sought to downplay it. It was he who said, in a Father’s Day speech noting that more than half of black children live in single-parent households, that “what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child, it’s the courage to raise one.”

It was he who said he had chosen to run “because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together — unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes.”

And it has been Obama who, since his speech at the last Democratic convention, has painted the starkest picture of an America polarized by the underperforming schools and health care of a rich-takes-all culture at odds with the country’s founding promise to “promote the general welfare.”

Contrary to all the talk of radicalism, he has repeatedly identified the center as the place to tackle these ills.

Race, in other words, as lived by Obama, is a means to talk about reconciliation: of America with its past, of America with its ideals, and of America with the world. All three are necessary after the Bush years. Obama should keep saying so. Race hushed is race as quiet poison for him.

There’s a plaque at Elmina which reads in part: “In everlasting memory of the anguish of our ancestors/ May those who died rest in peace/ May those who return find their roots/ May humanity never again perpetrate/ Such injustice against humanity.”

Amen.

Obama returned to a different corner of this continent to find his roots, pursue a lost father and build his identity. That took courage, as it has taken courage to rise above politics as usual to summon the “better angels” of a divided, debt-ridden America at war.

When I’m asked that question — “Is America really ready to elect a black man?” — I say yes. That readiness exists in this close election of uncertain outcome. Elmina was built in 1482. Over a half-millennium attitudes do change, not least in a land hard-wired since 1787 to perfectibility and hope.

Here’s Mr. Krugman:

So the Obama campaign has turned to the politics of personal destruction, attempting to make a campaign issue out of John McCain’s inability to remember how many houses he has. And the turn comes not a moment too soon.

Over the past month or so many Democrats have had the sick feeling that once again their candidate brought a knife to a gunfight. Barack Obama’s campaign, inexplicably, was unprepared for the inevitable Republican attack on the candidate’s character. By the middle of last week, Mr. Obama’s once formidable lead, both in national polls and in electoral college projections based on state-level polls, had virtually evaporated.

Mr. Obama’s waning advantage brought back bad memories of the 2004 campaign, whose key lesson was that there are no limits to the form G.O.P. character attacks can take.

You might think, for example, that a party claiming to support the troops would shy away from attacking a war hero’s military record — but back in 2004 the Swift-boat lies were enthusiastically embraced by Republican activists, and helped neutralize the advantage John Kerry was supposed to get from his biography.

And you might think that a party committed to tax cuts for the rich, a party that routinely castigates those who engage in “class warfare,” would shy away from attacking a Democrat for his wealth. But raw class envy played an important role in the attacks on Mr. Kerry, whom Rush Limbaugh described repeatedly as a “gigolo” with a “sugar daddy wife,” and G.O.P. supporters don’t seem to have experienced any cognitive dissonance.

It was predictable, then, that Mr. Obama would find himself on the receiving end of an all-out character attack, much of it nonsensical: he’s un-American because he vacations in Hawaii, where his grandmother lives? It was also predictable that responding by repeating what a great guy the candidate is, or denouncing the attacks as unfair, would be ineffective.

So now the Obama campaign has responded with its own character attack.

Is it fair to attack Mr. McCain for having too many houses?

In an ideal world, politicians would be judged by their actions, not by their wealth or lack thereof. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born to wealth, but that didn’t stop him from doing more for working Americans than any president before or since. Conversely, Joseph Biden’s hardscrabble life story, though inspiring, didn’t stop him from supporting the odious 2005 bankruptcy bill.

But in the world we actually live in, pro-corporate, inequality-increasing Republicans argue that you should vote for them because they’re regular guys you’d like to have a beer with, while Democrats who want to raise taxes on top earners, expand health care and raise the minimum wage are snooty elitists.

And in that world, stripping away the regular-guy facade — pointing out that everything Rush Limbaugh said about Mr. Kerry applies equally to Mr. McCain, that Mr. McCain lives in a material world few Americans can imagine — is only fair. Yes, Mr. Obama vacations in Hawaii — and Cindy McCain says that “In Arizona, the only way to get around the state is by small private plane.”

The squealing from the usual suspects demonstrates how much the Obama counterattack has the G.O.P. worried. Back in 2004 Fox News described John Kerry as “one of the haves” with a “billionaire wife”; now it asks whether raising the issue of Mr. McCain’s houses is “bashing the American dream.”

And the McCain campaign, after initially mumbling something about how Mr. Obama eats arugula, quickly resorted to its all-purpose answer: you can’t criticize the candidate because he’s a former P.O.W. Maybe the campaign hopes that the Obama people will fall into a reflexive cringe, the same way they did when Wesley Clark made the entirely reasonable point that having been a P.O.W., while it makes you a hero, doesn’t necessarily qualify you to become president.

Assuming that the Obama campaign isn’t scared off by the P.O.W. thing, can it really win in an exchange of character attacks? Probably not — but it doesn’t have to.

The central fact of this year’s election is that voters are fed up with Republican rule. The only way Mr. McCain can win the presidential race is if it becomes a contest of personalities rather than parties — and if his campaign can instill in voters the perception that Mr. Obama is a suspicious character while Mr. McCain is a fine, upstanding gentleman.

The Obama campaign, on the other hand, doesn’t need to convince voters either that he’s the awesomest candidate ever or that Mr. McCain is a villain. All it has to do is tarnish Mr. McCain’s image enough so that voters see this as a race between a Democrat and a Republican. And that’s a race the Democrat will easily win.

From your lips to God’s ear, Mr. Krugman.