McCAIN'S "I'M A CENTRIST! REALLY!" STRATEGY BECOMES CLEARER

Two stories today strongly suggest that John McCain plans to worry less about shoring up right-wing support and concentrate more on selling himself as only kinda-sorta Republican and really really really not like George W. Bush at all.

First, there's this front-page New York Times story, which starts out with what seem to be McCain talking points, then turns a bit skeptical. Thus, earlier on, we're told that this month's overseas trip

offered him the chance to test his hope that he could repair America's tattered reputation by shifting course on some of the policies that have alienated its allies, in areas like global warming and torture....

At several stops along the trip, Mr. McCain struck a markedly different tone from that of President Bush....

Mr. McCain spoke in Britain and France about the need to take action to reduce global warming....

He also denounced torture and repeated his call to close the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba....

But much of the rest of the article discusses the difficulty McCain faces in making the case that he's not like Bush while he's an unstinting supporter of Bush's war. McCain's insistence that Iran is aiding Al Qaeda in Iraq is also played prominently.

So this story is only a partially successful spin effort for the McCain campaign. A Politico story today about McCain's relationship with Joe Lieberman is far more of a win for the campaign -- it's almost 100% spin, disguised as journalism:

...As McCain hopes to wage a campaign that appeals to an independent-minded electorate exasperated by the Bush administration and the political status quo, Lieberman, a former Democratic vice presidential nominee, has become something of a symbolic character witness meant to testify to the Arizonan's bipartisan approach.

(See what I mean?)

...Though he had initially wanted to stay out of the 2008 presidential fray, Lieberman was swayed by a personal appeal from McCain, an aide to the Connecticut senator said....

(I don't believe for a second that Lieberman intended to stay out of this race. He might not have become the constant companion of the other candidates, but I'm certain he would have endorsed whichever of the Republican candidates won the nomination, Ron Paul excepted.)

...McCain strategists see great value in the dissident Democrat and promise that Lieberman will play a key role in the general election.

"He contradicts the DNC caricature [of McCain]," says Mark Salter, McCain’s closest aide and former chief of staff.

As Democrats seek to portray the Arizona senator as representing a third Bush term, argues Salter, Lieberman's willingness to back a Republican "exposes that for the emptiness that it is."

"It's a great story about character and courage," adds Charlie Black, another top McCain adviser, alluding to Lieberman's unlikely path from would-be Democratic vice-president to senior surrogate for the GOP standard-bearer.

"And it reinforces McCain's character and courage," he adds, hinting at the Republican's own willingness to buck his own party for principle. "[The endorsement] would not have happened for any other Republican."...

No? It wouldn't have happened for, say, Giuliani, whose line about terrorists' "war against us" Lieberman once borrowed for a Wall Street Journal op-ed? AndI'm really sick and tired of the way "courage" has been defined down by people like Black, to the point that absolutely no risk, physical or otherwise, is required for some acts to be regarded as acts of courage (usually expressions of opposition to Democrats and/or liberals).

But I'm getting away from the main point, which is that McCain clearly thinks GOP voters will be with him no mattter what, and his best strategy is to persuade centrists that he's not really a Republican. I wish I thought it wouldn't work.

EVERYTHING IS OUR FAULT

Wingnut-lite columnist John Leo at the Huffington Post:

Barack Obama isn't the only presidential contender with a prominent bigot among his supporters. John McCain accepted the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, who regularly attacks the Catholic Church as "the great whore of Revelation," a "false cult system," and "the anti-Christ."

... the mainstream media has barely reacted. The likely reason: reporters, editors and intellectuals aren't much interested in attacks on Catholics. Minorities, women and gays are eligible for sensitive concern. Catholics aren't....

Er, John? The press would have been all over words deemed offensive to Catholics if the person uttering those words were backing a Democrat. Just ask Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan.

Leo fills out his column with a series of examples of speech he deems offensive to Catholics, none of which is from a declared supporter of any presidential and some of which has nothing whatsoever to do with Catholicism (or did Mike Huckabee convert when I wasn't looking?). Most of it exists entirely outside the sphere of electoral politics, and is the same kind of stuff Leo and other graybeard right-wing pundits who are desperate for fresh material have been grumbling about for a generation:

In Jerry Springer: the Opera, which played for two nights at Carnegie Hall in January, Jesus is an effeminate gay-like character who walks around in a diaper and is hailed as a "hypocrite son of the fascist tyrant on high." The Virgin Mary is introduced as a woman "raped by an angel," and Eve fondles Jesus' genitals.

...Jesus on the cross can be wrought in chocolate ("My Sweet Lord"), as a homosexual sex scene, or on the cover of the New Yorker as the Easter Bunny. Advertisers and movie-makers feel free to mock Catholics too. An ad for Equinox fitness clubs featured young women dressed as nuns sketching a naked man while staring at his crotch. Elizabeth: the Golden Age took many swipes at Catholicism....

(Anti-Catholicism in a movie about Elizabeth I! I'm shocked!)

What's odd is that whenever someone bashes Islam in a cartoon or film (e.g., the forthcoming movie by Dutch provocateur Geert Wilders), the right points out that if something similar were produced about Christianity, there'd be no violent outrage. But the right apparently also believes that there should be violent outrage -- or state suppression, or something. So which is it?

CLASS WARFARE

Yes, class warfare -- nice to see the editorial page of The New York Times engaging in some:

The ongoing bailout of the financial system by the Federal Reserve underscores the extent to which financial barons socialize the costs of private bets gone bad. Not a week goes by that the Fed doesn't inaugurate a new way to provide liquidity -- meaning money -- to the financial system. Bear Stearns isn't enormous. It doesn't take deposits from the public. Yet the Fed believed that letting it implode could unleash a domino effect among other banks, and the Fed provided a $30 billion guarantee for JPMorgan to snap it up.

Compared to the cold shoulder given to struggling homeowners, the cash and attention lavished by the government on the nation's financial titans provides telling insight into the priorities of the Bush administration.... if the objective is to encourage prudent banking and keep Wall Street's wizards from periodically driving financial markets over the cliff, it is imperative to devise a remuneration system for bankers that puts more of their skin in the game.

You know those angry white working-class folks we've been talking about so much this week? I just want to point out that if their forebears -- and I mean that literally in many cases, their grandparents and great-grandparents -- were around today, this is one of the main things they'd be angry about.

More from the editorial:

Financiers, of course, dispute that they are being insufficiently penalized. "I received no bonus for 2007, no severance pay, no golden parachute,” E. Stanley O'Neal, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told a House committee recently. That doesn't seem like much of a blow to Mr. O'Neal, who was removed earlier this year following gargantuan subprime-related losses.

True, though, alas, we're not told that while O'Neal technically didn't receive a bonus, severance, or golden parachute, he was allowed to "retire" rather than resign, which meant he could leave Merrill with $161.5 million in securities and retirement funds that he might otherwise have had to give up.

DUMP 'EM BOTH?

I'm just throwing this out there because so many people are (understandably) in despair at news like this:

In the new Franklin & Marshall College Poll ... some troubling news for Democrats.

...In a sign of just how divisive and ugly the Democratic fight has gotten, only 53% of Clinton voters say they'll vote for Obama should he become the nominee. Nineteen percent say they'll go for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and 13% say they won't vote.

Sixty percent of Obama voters say they'll go for Clinton should she win the nomination, with 20% opting for McCain, and three percent saying they won't vote....

We don't know that this will hold -- we have seven and a half months to go before Election Day. But if it's still true by the end of the primary season and neither candidate is a guaranteed first-ballot winner, is it time to bail -- and draft Gore? Or Edwards?

Just asking.

DIONNE'S HYPOTHETICAL: NOT SO HYPOTHETICAL

In a well-intentioned article titled "Another Angry Black Preacher," E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post wonders what the reaction would have been in a YouTube age to the denunciation of the Vietnam War by Dr. Martin Luther King:

Listen to what King said about the Vietnam War at his own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Feb. 4, 1968: "God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war.... And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place." King then predicted this response from the Almighty: "And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."

If today's technology had existed then, I would imagine the media playing quotations of that sort over and over. Right-wing commentators would use the material to argue that King was anti-American....

I would ... ask my conservative friends who praise King so lavishly to search their consciences and wonder if they would have stood up for him in 1968.

Actually, King was widely castigated when he expressed opposition to the war in 1967 -- particularly by those in the center:

...national media heard [King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech] loud and clear back in 1967 -- and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

In fact, it was Time's sister magazine Life that used the "Radio Hanoi" line, adding:

... he goes beyond his personal right to dissent when he connects progress in civil rights here with a proposal that amounts to abject surrender in Vietnam....

Taylor Branch reminds us that the Johnson White House pressed blacks to criticize King:

White House aide Clifford Alexander ... and others mobilized civil rights leaders to isolate King's threat to their White House alliance. Former ambassador Carl Rowan angrily told King that millions of their fellow black people would suffer for his insults against the greatest civil rights President in American history. He ascribed sinister motives to King in a syndicated column later expanded for Reader's Digest, and King's folly became a front-page theme within a week.... "N.A.A.C.P. Decries Stand of Dr. King on Vietnam / Calls It a 'Serious Tactical Mistake' to Merge Rights and Peace Drives," announced the April 11 New York Times, which followed two days later with a headline about United Nations undersecretary Ralph Bunche, the only other black American Nobel Peace laureate: "Bunche Disputes Dr. King on Peace."

Michael Friedland adds:

Many were particularly incensed at the comparisons King had made between the military tactics used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Nazis. Malcolm Tarlov of the Jewish War Veterans said it was "utterly incredible that Dr. King's denunciation of our Government should manifest itself in such an ugly parallel," and said his organization considered King's "extremist tirade to reveal an ignorance of the facts, pandering to Ho Chi Minh, and an insult to the intelligence of all Americans.... His speech could have been written in North Vietnam."

Dionne implies that a lack of YouTube prevented King from facing the degree of critixcism Wright and Obama are experiencing today. But King did face that degree of criticism. We just don't remember it now.

THE SO-CALLED AMERICA-HATER OBVIOUSLY DOESN'T HATE AMERICA THAT MUCH

If I utterly despised America and thought white people were irredeemably racist, I'd make a principled decision to reject a white president's invitation to the White House. (And don't tell me that no one refuses to go to the White House when invited -- remember the poets who refused Laura Bush's invitation to a White House poetry symposium, not out of hatred of America but out of a patriotic outrage at the rush toward war in Iraq.)

Or I'd show up and make a statement, like Eartha Kitt in the Vietnam years:

Eartha Kitt, the singer, stunned other guests at a White House luncheon today when she angrily told Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson that American youth was rebelling because of the Vietnam war....

"You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed," she said. "They rebel in the street. They will take pot and they will get high. They don't want to go to school because they're going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam."

A pale Mrs. Johnson later rose and looked directly at Miss Kitt, who leaned against a podium in the yellow walled Family Dining Room....

But it appears that the Big Scary Black Guy America Hater Reverend Jeremiah Wright did neither of these things when he was invited to the White House. In fact, he seems delighted to be there:



During one of the most difficult periods in the presidency of Bill Clinton, he addressed a group of clerics at an annual prayer breakfast in September 1998 just as the Starr report outlining his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky was about to be published.

Among those in attendance, was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., who is seen shaking hands with Mr. Clinton....

So I guess the Big Scary Black Guy America Hater Reverend Jeremiah Wright doesn't really have an unquenchable hatred for America or white people after all. Maybe white America really doesn't really have to lock its doors when he's around.

YES, BUT WHAT ABOUT HANNITY'S OTHER BIGOT PAL, THE ONE HE STILL WORKS WITH AND SUPPORTS?

He's hardly the messenger I would have chosen, but Malik Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party, brought onto the Hannity and Colmes show last night to serve as a proxy for Barack Obama in one of Hannity's Two Minutes' Hates, apparently changed the subject in a way Sean didn't like:

... Last night, Shabazz was there because his organization had endorsed Barack Obama. It was an endorsement that Obama specifically rejected but FOX News deliberately trumped up the endorsement by inviting Shabazz on the program (See, look what kind of extremists Obama associates with), playing a clip from one of Shabazz' more incendiary confrontations with Hannity (Jews knew about 9/11 and got out of the way), and repeatedly running the "news" on the crawl that the Obama campaign had rejected the endorsement because the New Black Panther Party is considered to be an organization that advocates violence.

But last night, Shabazz wisely toned down his rhetoric....

Shabazz [said], "Let me ask you this. Are you to be judged by your promotion and association with Hal Turner?"

Hannity waved his arm around. "I don't know anybody named – this is nonsense. I don't…" Then Hannity changed his tune. "Sir, sir… That was a man that was banned from my radio show ten years ago, that ran a Senate campaign in New Jersey."

Then, as Shabazz refused to stop talking or back down, Hannity, in a tacit admission, said, "I'm not running for president."

"A neo Nazi, you backed his career," Shabazz said....

I can't help wondering if Shabazz is conflating the two racist radio hosts Hannity has been associated with. Turner is a minor leaguer -- his primary outlet is Webcasting these days, and, yes, Hannity has now disassociated himself from the guy. But as I noted back in '06 -- when Turner was talking about assassinations of members of Congress ("Members of The United States House of Representatives or United States Senate who try to grant any form of Amnesty to millions of illegal aliens are hereby notified they may as well paint a bulls-eye target on themselves"), Turner used to be a regular Hannity radio guest and a friend:

Turner was once a prominent activist in New Jersey's Republican Party. To area conservatives, he was best known by his moniker for call-ins to the Sean Hannity Show, "Hal from North Bergen." For years, Hannity offered his top-rated radio show as a regular forum for Turner's occasionally racist, always over-the-top rants. Hannity also chatted with him off-air, allegedly offering encouragement to Turner as he struggled to overcome a cocaine habit and homosexual leanings. Turner has boasted that Hannity once invited Turner and his son on to the set of Fox News's Hannity and Colmes.

... During an August 1998 episode of the show, Turner reminded Hannity that were it not for the graciousness of the white man, "black people would still be swinging on trees in Africa," according to Daryle Jenkins, co-founder of the New Jersey-based antiracism group One People's Project. Instead of rebuking Turner or cutting him off, Hannity continued to welcome his calls....

That's one of Hannity's racist radio pals, who now seems to be an ex-pal. But Hannity's still willing to lend a helping hand to another radio racist, the much more high-profile Bob Grant, a longtime star of the New York airwaves.

Go here to see Hannity at one of his "Freedom Concerts," on September 11, 2007, inviting Grant to the stage and giving him what seems to be a manly neck kiss. This was a few weeks after Grant returned to New York radio following an absence that resulted from remarks Grant made on the air after Ron Brown's plane crash ("I have a hunch [Brown might be] the lone survivor. But then I'm a pessimist at heart"). Hannity had pressed for the return of Grant to the airwaves (Hannity inherited Grant's radio slot when Grant was fired):

IF Sean Hannity has his way, talk-radio titan Bob Grant will return from his WABC "exile" soon.

Grant, 76, was abruptly fired 10 years ago - right after Disney bought ABC - for making a wisecrack about the death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown in a plane crash.

Now, WABC is awaiting the closing of a Disney deal to sell ABC's radio division to Citadel Broadcasting - which could open the door for Grant's return....

The Fox News Channel star pledged to have Grant "fill in on this program one day, [but] right now there's a bondage issue, if you know what I mean."...

How racist is Grant? This racist:

...When black college students gathered at a New Jersey beach, Grant talked of "the savage mind, the primitive, primordial mentality.... As far as that stretch of beach there at Belmar, it's being written off by, shall we say, civilized people."

Referring to thousands of blacks who attended a celebrity basketball game involving rap stars, he spoke of "subhumanoids, savages, who would feel more at home careening along the sands of the Kalahari...people who, for whatever reason, have not become civilized."

The few blacks who call the show can expect to be insulted -- and perhaps derided as "shoeshine boys." In hanging up on a black caller, Grant said: "Get off my phone, you creep, we don't need the toilets cleaned right now." When he hangs up on black women, he yells: "I don't need the windows washed today."

When an African-American caller pointed out that the KKK was more violent than the Nation of Islam, Grant hung up on the "swine": "On the evolutionary scale, you're about 25 generations behind me." ...

More:

...He has ... expressed hope that Haitian immigrants would drown on their way to America, called blacks "screaming savages" and described former New York City Mayor David Dinkins as "a washroom attendant." He bemoaned the fact that the AIDS virus might take "a long time" to claim Magic Johnson's life....

This is Hannity's pal -- not years ago, but right now.



How dare Sean Hannity damn anyone else for the opinions of that person's associates?

SILENCE = ASSENT

A letter to The Boston Globe, in response to a Jeff Jacoby column critical of Barack Obama's race speech:

Double standard

JACOBY NAILED the race issue in his column. A double standard does exist, but not as Obama sees it.

As Jacoby suggests, it's OK for African-Americans to criticize this country, presumably because of all the suffering they endured. But it's not OK for them to be criticized for doing so.

SHERMAN H. GROSSMAN
Needham

You know what, Mr. Grossman? It's OK for you to criticize this country, too. It's your damn country, and if you don't like the way its leaders and plutocrats are running it, you can say so, too.

Every poll I read says the vast majority of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Every poll I read says the vast majority of Americans think the economy is a disaster and the war was a mistake. But complain? That would be terrible, wouldn't it? What do I think, this is supposed to be a government of the people?

Well, fine, Mr. Grossman. Just sit there and take it. And guess what? If you think there are problems in this country but you act as if you don't have the right to complain, everything will stay exactly the way it is. You're the sucker -- you and everyone else who thinks we have a moral obligation just to shut up and take it all the time.

(Via Aimai at If I Ran the Zoo, who also quotes a vile John Derbyshire mini-essay suggesting that white resentment of blacks is justified by poor treatment by the counter staff at the Department of Motor Vehicles, as if bureaucratic rudeness doesn't exist across a wide spectrum of races, colors, and creeds.)

HILLARY'S CHANCE OF WINNING THE NOMINATION IS PROBABLY BETTER THAN HER CHANCE OF WINNING THE ELECTION

The press reaction to Barack Obama's race speech is starting to seem like the a window into the thinking of the media on just about every subject: Yes, journalists and pundits are from an educated, somewhat elite, more or less socially liberal substratum of our society, and at first they responded to the thoughtful, intelligent, sophisticated, grown-up speech with praise. But now they're saying to themselves, "Eeeuuw -- I'm from an educated, somewhat elite, more or less socially liberal substratum of our society. I suck! The people whose take on the speech really matters are blue-collar guys sitting around in a bar in the Rust Belt on a Tuesday. And curiously, their opinions sound remarkably similar to RNC press releases and Rush Limbaugh transcripts! Woe is me, I'm such an out-of-touch elitist! These blue-collar folks really know what's important!"

The reporters are out of touch, but not in the way they think -- they don't understand that the words they hear when they make their anthropological field trips to the blue-collar bar almost certainly bear the influence of right-wing talk radio and faux-Joe Lunchpail print pundits. They're not necessarily the earthy, visceral, spontaneous reactions of The Common Man.

But now we're seeing the beginnings of a feedback loop: right-wing bloviators cherry-picking the parts of the speech that feed white anger and downplaying the rest (including Obama's criticisms of his own community), blue-collar whites firming up their rejection of Obama, and the press going to more and more blue-collar bars.

Which is why I think Hillary Clinton really has a much better shot at the nomination than Adam Nagourney of The New York Times does:

...Without new votes in Florida and Michigan, it will be that much more difficult for Mrs. Clinton to achieve a majority in the total popular vote in the primary season, narrow Mr. Obama's lead among pledged delegates or build a new wave of momentum.

Mrs. Clinton's advisers had hoped that the uproar over inflammatory remarks made by Mr. Obama's longtime pastor that has rocked his campaign for a week might lead voters and superdelegates to question whether they really know enough about Mr. Obama to back him. Although it is still early to judge his success, the speech Mr. Obama delivered on race in Philadelphia to address the controversy was well received and praised even by some Clinton supporters....

I think you're going to stop hearing that the speech "was well received" soon, after a few more reporters head down O'Malley's to see what the common folk think.

****

Polling evidence is starting to show problems for Obama:

A new set of polls by SurveyUSA shows that Barack Obama's electability has taken a serious drubbing as a result of his recent setbacks, and he now does much poorer than Hillary Clinton does against John McCain in the three tested states:

Ohio
Clinton (D) 50%, McCain (R) 44%
McCain (R) 50%, Obama (D) 43%

Missouri
McCain (R) 48%, Clinton (D) 46%
McCain (R) 53%, Obama (D) 39%

Kentucky
McCain (R) 53%, Clinton (D) 43%
McCain (R) 64%, Obama (D) 28%

But does any of this really speak to the question of Clinton's electability? Right now she's looking better because she's kicking a fellow Democrat, who happens to be black and a perceived hero of yuppies and a perceived favorite of yuppie-scum reporters -- but if she gets the nomination, she'll lose Obama as a foil and the only person she'll have to attack is a white male war-hero Republican saint. So won't she simply become the unpleasant bitch again? Won't these head-to-head numbers change very quickly?

AS LONG AS WE'RE WALLOWING IN MUCK...

May I just make a trivial, pointless observation in response to this trivial, pointless story by ABC's "Investigative Unit" ("Heh-heh -- you said 'unit'!"), a story that has understandably aroused widespread outrage?

Hillary At White House on 'Stained Blue Dress' Day

Schedules Reviewed by ABC Show Hillary May Have Been in the White House When the Fateful Act Was Committed

Hillary Clinton spent the night in the White House on the day her husband had oral sex with Monica Lewinsky, and may have actually been in the White House when it happened, according to records of her schedule released today by the National Archives....

Er, I've been to the White House. It's a big house. Nearly all of us grew up in houses or apartments that are much, much smaller. Ever have sex or make out with someone or masturbate or smoke pot or smoke a cigarette in your room while your family went about their business elsewhere in the house? Happens all the time. So what could the possible ostensible reason for this prurient story be? That there's something wrong with Hillary because she didn't know? Then there's probably something wrong with your mom and dad, too, if you ever did anything right under their noses and they didn't notice.

PHIL NUGENT

I'm a little late informing you of this, but he's back.

HUCKABEE'S PAL BILL GOTHARD IS FAR MORE BIZARRE AND DANGEROUS THAN JEREMIAH WRIGHT

Well, it doesn't surprise me that VP wannabe Mike Huckabee said this about the Wright controversy:

"[Y]ou can't hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do," Huckabee says. "It's interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what ... Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable, years ago...."

Huckabee, after all, has to worry that he might someday be asked to explain his significant ties to a right-wing preacher named Bill Gothard, whose organization, among other things, has been accused of abusing children sent for residential counseling:

Hundreds of young people from around the country come to the ITC – some sent by their parents, others by juvenile court – for a special brand of bible-based learning and counseling.

It's run by Chicago-area minister Bill Gothard, who oversees a $63 million evangelistic empire....

But Eyewitness News has learned of disturbing allegations about the center, including routine corporal punishment - sometimes without parental consent - and solitary confinement that can last for months.

...[One] girl allegedly was confined in a so-called "quiet room" for five days at a time; restrained by teenage "leaders" who would sit on her; and hit with a wooden paddle 14 times. At least once, the family contends, she was prevented from going to the bathroom and then forced to sit in her own urine....

Gothard has nutty ideas. He's warned of the evils of Cabbage Patch dolls, claimed that schizophrenia is the result of avoidance of personal responsibility (citing an unnamed "Jewish psychiatrist"), and believes that rock music is evil in all forms, blaming rock music for last December's shooting rampage in Colorado Springs (the gunman had angrily denounced Gothard after going through a Gothard homeschooling program).

Huckabee's ties to Gothard are not trivial:

...From Gothard's website:

Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas stated, “As a person who has actually been through the Basic Seminar, I am confident that these are some of the best programs available for instilling character into the lives of people.”

From the March 10, 1997 Ocala (FL) Star-Banner:

...Little Rock, Ark., had already been established as friendly terrain for Gothard. Two of his long-time admirers - Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee and Little Rock Mayor Jim Dailey, a Democrat - are loyal advocates of Gothard’s agenda and have encouraged him to expand juvenile rehabilitation programs there.

According to Gothard's website, Huckabee helped bring IBLP's program into the Arkansas prison system, in partnership with the Corrections Corporation of America....

Huckabee also helps market [Gothard's] "Character Cities" program....

But maybe we shouldn't tip McCain off on this potential liability if he decides to run with Huck. Or, of course, it might not matter, because they're Republicans, and pretty much everything's OK if you're a Republican.

IT'S NOT A REAL PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN UNTIL THE GOP FINDS A DISTRACTION

Well, of course -- are we surprised?

GOP sees Rev. Wright as pathway to victory

... GOP strategists believe they've finally found an antidote to Obamamania.

In their view, the inflammatory sermons by Obama's pastor offer the party a pathway to victory if Obama emerges as the Democratic nominee. Not only will the video clips enable some elements of the party to define him as unpatriotic, they will also serve as a powerful motivating force for the conservative base....

That's from the Politico.

Now, most people who saw this story read it as follows: The Democrats were going to win with Obama, but then a surprise gift dropped in the GOP's lap. The Wright tapes are alienating working-class whites, and by a strange turn of events the GOP happens to have chosen a nominee who could win over these voters after Obama's stumble.

Here's how I read it: The GOP was going to find something on whoever the Democrats nominated that's utterly unrelated to the issues the next president will face. This was inevitably going to become the central issue of the race. By the fall, the GOP nominee, whoever it was, was going to be "normal" and the Democrat was going to be beyond the pale.

I won't quote it to you again, but I said all this last May. Hell, I even predicted that Reverend Wright might be the distraction if Obama won the nomination.

That's why I'd almost like to see Hillary get this thing, because if she doesn't, we "Obamaniacs" will be deemed the people who screwed it up for the Democrats. We'll be told that she would have won -- whereas I'm thinking, You think they won't do this to you? You think you're vetted? No Democrat is ever vetted. You thought your husband was vetted when he was elected in '92, and they just kept un-vetting him, picking away at old and new scandals until he was boxed in by their attacks on him. Don't kid yourself -- they can still do it to you. And he had youth, freshness, and opponents who became media laughingstocks. You won't have any of those advantages.

Look, I don't really know at this point who would match up better against McCain. What I do know is that, sooner or later, the press will turn the race into a referendum on some irrelevant issue regarding the Democrat, just as the GOP wants it to. And I'm not sure either Democrat this year can withstand that.

THE WHITE WORKING CLASS, STOMPED BY A COMPACT FLUORESCENT JACKBOOT

A commenter to my post about the Obama speech writes,

The reality is, what he patronizingly calls 'white resentment' is going to kill him in the Rust Belt, and all the blogging about how dumb, racist, and illiterate working class whites are isn't going to make things any better.

Well, as I've said before, I'm a truck driver's kid originally from an Italian-American neighborhood in Boston (and I mean in Boston, not in the 'burbs), so I think I know a little bit about this particular voting bloc.

And I'm afraid there's some truth to this. In the speech, Obama made the point that the non-elites of all races have common enemies:

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.

And that's the message the white working class hasn't seemed to want to hear, certainly not since the 1960s. The white working class has been much more receptive to arguments like this, from a Rush Limbaugh bloviation on the Obama speech:

...But this business we all want to move in the same direction. Yeah, we all want freedom, we all want liberty....

We all want opportunity for our kids. We all want a growing, expanding economy. The argument we have is how do you get there? The argument is very simply put, or the distinguishing aspects of the argument are: Liberals want to use government based on a contempt and lack of understanding and confidence that average Americans can overcome things in life. Conservatives like us believe that if you just trust people, the inherent goodness and decency of people will come to the forefront if you don't tamper with their freedom, if you don't tamper with their liberty.... We know that liberty is under assault. Don't make me give you all the examples. This is something that's not even arguable. We're talking about banning certain kind of lightbulbs; talking about how you can use your property, all these examples -- liberty is under assault at the leadership level of the Democrat Party....

A couple of key points. First, "confidence that average Americans can overcome things in life." Many in the white working class hear that and don't think about Milton Friedman or Ayn Rand -- they think about something a bit nastier. As my commenter said:

The problem is not with the color of your skin, but with a subculture that doesn't understand their core values. Like hard work, or taking responsibility for yourself.

Turning down the government cheese and assimilating into the culture.

In other words: We work hard. They commit crimes and deal drugs and sponge off welfare. (As if there are no white criminals or drug dealers or fifteen-year-old mothers on public assistance.) And if they were more like us, they'd reap the benefits. (As if the subprime mortgage crisis and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in America and the death and crippling injury in Iraq are somehow bypassing the white working class.)

Another key Rush point is his identification of the real enemy: It's Democratic yuppie scum! Of course! It's not the plutocrats who actually run things. (They're heroes.) It's upper-middle-class frou-frous who force you to buy those stupid expensive squiggly lightbulbs! Everything's their fault!

There's one more Rush riff, from elsewhere in the rant, that's significant:

Those of us my age, my generation have been hoping and praying to get rid of race as a dividing issue and as an identity issue in politics and in our culture for as long as I've been an adult, thinking and caring about these things. But there's an entire race industry on the left that will not allow that to happen. You know the kind of people I'm talking about. It's become very profitable for them.

Yes, "profitable."

I actually don't think Limbaugh means by this what his some of the demagogues who are his spiritual forebears might have meant -- i.e., that Jews are the real enemy, that they pit blacks against whites for profit. I think he's alluding to the notion of the "poverty pimp" -- a phrase New Yorkers remember hearing from our ur-Lieberman, ur-Zell Miller phony-Democratic mayor a generation ago, Ed Koch. Here's a more recent use of the phrase, from an online discussion in fall '06:

Poverty Pimps-Pimping the poor for politics!!

the so called black leadership have been pimping the poor black community since the 1960s in order to push an agenda of if I cry the loudest, people will give me what i want, and they have won again with Imus firing.

sharpton and jackson are leaders because they get society feeling bad about being non black and its pathetic

And the money these "pimps" are demanding is coming out of your pocket, white working-class man. In fact, that's the real problem -- not a system that sweet-talks you into a mortgage you can't afford and ships your manufacturing job overseas and has so little opportunity for your kid that his best shot economically is getting part of his brain blown away by an IED in Iraq. No, the rich aren't the people responsible for your economic struggle -- it's Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (and Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright) who are taking your money.

Them and those damn Prius-driving chardonnay-swillers with their squiggly lightbulbs.

AND IN OTHER NEWS...

Word from Shakesville of an upcoming benefit concert:

And oh bully! Hillary and Elton:One Night Only. I have never been a fan of Elton John and there will probably be another damn version of "Candle in the Wind" for Hillary this time or endless playing of "I'm Still Standing." UGH!(AFP)

"I'm Still Standing"? Yeah, an obvious choice. "Candle in the Wind"? That's for dead people, right? Probably won't make the cut.

But my question is: Will Hillary ask Elton not to play or, post-Tina Fey, will she specifically request "The Bitch Is Back"?

ANSWER: IT'S OK IN A ROOMFUL OF REPUBLICANS

In response to Barack Obama's speech, Charlotte Hays of National Review wrote this:

Obama says that we shouldn't "condemn without understanding the roots" of remarks like those Wright made.... Within what context is it correct for the Rev. Wright to say "God damn America?"

Well, at the Huffington Post, Frank Schaeffer says it was perfectly fine to say more or less the same thing within the context of religious-right politics not too many years ago:

When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

...Dad became a hero to the evangelical community and a leading political instigator. When Dad died in 1984 everyone from Reagan to Kemp to Billy Graham lamented his passing publicly as the loss of a great American. Not one Republican leader was ever asked to denounce my dad or distanced himself from Dad's statements....

(Schaeffer wrote, for example, "If there is a legitimate reason for the use of force [against the US government]... then at a certain point force is justifiable," and cited legalized abortion as a situation to which Christians might need to find an "appropriate response.")

And today Steve Benen reminds us that at last fall's Values Voter Summit, attended by many prominent religious right leaders as well as by presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Duncan Hunter, a choir sang a version of "God Bless America" that began:

Why should God bless America?
She’s forgotten he exists
And has turned her back
On everything that made her what she is.

Go here for a video and the full lyrics.

So, apparently, engaging in this kind of talk, like so many other things, is OK if you're a Republican.

A SPEECH FOR ADULTS, SO IT PROBABLY WON'T WORK

I didn't watch Barack Obama's speech this morning, but I read it (the Huffington Post and Drudge Report have the text) and I think it's superb. However, the premises it lays out require you to be an adult, and I'm not convinced that most Americans are adults, at least when looking for a candidate to support. These premises include the following:

* There is racial progress, which is easier for someone Obama's age to see than for someone who grew up in the era of Reverend Wright's youth, but racism still exists and the legacy of our racial history hasn't vanished.

* There is a great deal of good in Reverend Wright and he has said things that must be rejected.

* There is analogous racial resentment in the white community -- but it's time for a multiracial effort to work through our real problems.

This isn't what Americans like to hear in political speeches. They like to hear: Good people = us (America, our party). Bad people = them (communists, terrorists, criminals, drug dealers, our ideological opposites, the other party, or some group we identify in code rather than explicitly).

That wasn't the tone of this speech. I hope I'm wrong, but Obama may pay a price for not giving people what they like to hear.

STEELE: ALL BLACK POLITICIANS SUCK. THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHICH WAY THEY SUCK.

The Wright issue has given Shelby Steele an excuse to write yet another op-ed, this one for The Wall Street Journal, flogging the premise of his non-bestselling book A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win. Steele says Reverend Wright is a problem for Obama, but it doesn't matter, because Obama's presidential quest was hopeless no matter what, because it's manipulative, like all efforts by black politicians, even those who are stylistically the polar opposite of Obama:

...whatever [Geraldine Ferraro's] motives, she was right: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position."

...How to turn one's blackness to advantage?

The answer is that one "bargains." ... Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain....

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers....

So you can't win. Either way, this black intellectual tells us, you're an evil shifty black man, toying with white people. (The relative success of the two strategies in the realm of presidential politics is, apparently, irrelevant.)

I despise Steele's argument because it gives everything "bargainers" do a patina of deliberate fraud -- according to Steele, it's just not possible that Obama simply is who he is and is saying what he believes, and that that's just connecting with voters.

And if Obama's skin color is part of what makes that connection happen, well, so what? All kinds of politicians connect as a result of attributes that don't show up in their position papers. Clinton had a lip-biting aura of empathy. John F. Kennedy had Rat Pack cool. Both had youthful sex appeal -- and Kennedy had P.T. 109 to boot. In fact, the 1960 election had two candidates under fifty (people forget how young Nixon was), both of whom had had meteoric rises in politics fueled in large part by their status as veterans. If you think Obama is a manipulator because guilty white liberals respond to his race, were Kennedy and Nixon manipulators because voters who'd stayed stateside during World War II responded to their military service? And that applies now as much as it did then -- the major parties will have nominated nine people to run for president between 1988 and 2008, and nearly half (four out of nine -- Bush the Elder, Dole, Kerry, and McCain) will have reminded voters that they survived violent encounters with the enemy in wartime. Is that unacceptably manipulative?

One other point: If Obama is a "bargainer" and Sharpton and Jackson are "challengers," what is Shelby Steele? Well, how convenient for him -- he seems to be neither. Oh, I suppose one could argue that he's a "reassurer" -- someone who reassures white people that prominent blacks (or at least prominent nonconservative blacks) are all phony and overrated, and therefore it's perfectly OK for white people to dismiss them out of hand -- but that would be unfair, wouldn't it? No, I'm sure Shelby Steele exists entirely outside this system in which all blacks are defined by how whites receive what they say. I'm sure Shelby Steele is a truly free man.

TOLD YA

From the Stamford Advocate:

... Friday, [Senator Joe] Lieberman said he will attend the Republican National Convention this summer, "if Senator McCain thinks it will be helpful to be there in some capacity."

... "I am not going to attend the Democratic Convention for obvious reasons," Lieberman said....

As I never tire of telling you, I've been predicting that Lieberman will not only attend the Republican convention but give a prime-time speech there for more than a year. And I think that would have been true even if the nominee weren't his pal McCain.

Another Hero Passes

Bruce Hilton, father of Tom and Steve Hilton of If I Ran the Zoo, passed away on Thursday. Their mother Virginia died in October 2007. Both of the Reverends Hilton worked on the front lines of the civil rights movement and continued to advocate for social and economic justice throughout their lives. They were strong supporters of LGBT equality and founded the Parents Reconciling Network. Bruce was the author of Can Homophobia Be Cured?, which graced my bookshelf for many years before I "met" Tom and Steve online and became part of the IIRTZ family.

There is a nice article from the University of Indianapolis alumni magazine detailing Bruce's life and career here. The San Francisco Chronicle did a feature on Virginia after her death. Go read them and be inspired by what two ordinary people can do when their lives reflect their passion for justice.

Tom and Steve, I'm so sorry for your loss. Your father and mother left a wonderful legacy -- for you and for us.

Cross-posted at Birmingham Blues, IIRTZ, and Shakesville.

CAN YOU CHUCKLE SELF-EFFACINGLY IN AN UPPITY WAY?

dnA, John Cole, and Robert Stein have all said what needs to be said about "Obama Walks Arrogance Line" by AP's Ron Fournier -- namely, that Fournier is saying Obama is "uppity" without having the honesty to use the word itself.

I'll just add that Fournier is full of crap when giving specific examples of Obama's alleged "arrogance":

...Obama may not be offensive or overbearing, but he can be a bit too cocky for his own good.

The freshman senator told reporters in July that he would overcome Hillary Rodham Clinton's lead in the polls because "to know me is to love me."

A few months later, he said, "Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama's been there."

True, there's a certain amount of tongue-in-cheekiness to such remarks....

A certain amount? The source of that second quote is a Nightline interview from November, and you can watch Obama say it at around 3:30 in this clip. He says it in a joshing way -- understandably, because it's in response to a question from ABC's Terry Moran that's posed as a faux-critical half-joke:

MORAN: What are you doing out here in western Iowa? It's rural -- I wouldn't think it's Barack Obama country.

OBAMA: You know, every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama's been there.

Here's a freeze-frame that's literally from the middle of that sentence:



Arrogant?

And as for Fournier's first example:

...He said he's trailing Clinton now because she is so well known and he is not, but he expressed confidence that will change.

"To know me is to love me," the candidate said with a wide smile during a news conference Tuesday....

Emphasis mine.

Jokes, Ron. Jokes. Or are only white people allowed to be ironic?

****

Fournier also takes a swipe at the Clintons, and I don't want to give him a free pass on that, either:

That may seem unfair to a candidate who's running against Clinton, the former first lady who is the model of overbearing pride....

But voters expect arrogance from Clinton and her husband, Bill. It's part of the package. It's a 90s-thing.

I think they've dealt some low blows and have lost sight of what's good for the party (and the country), but "arrogant" isn't the word I'd use. They're aggressive, but they're not haughty. But it's always appropriate to apply any negative word to the Clintons.

ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RIGHT-WING HATE SPEECH AND POLITICAL RADIOACTIVITY

At The American Prospect, Ezra Klein argues that it would be perfectly OK for a Republican presidential candidate to have had a long association with, say Jerry Falwell. Ross Douthat of The Atlantic, replies that that's nonsense -- you don't get much grief, he argues, if you merely have ties to extremists like Falwell, but if Falwell were your spiritual advisor, mentor, and pastor, you'd be answerable.

We don't really have a test case on that, so I think the jury is still out -- but I want to respond to a point Douthat makes at the end of his post:

It's also worth noting that two of the specific examples of white Christian extremism Ezra nods to - Falwell's 9/11 comments, and General William Boykin's "my God is bigger than your God" remarks - both provoked controversies that ended in public apologies, albeit of the mealy-mouthed, "I'm sorry if you were offended" variety.

Yes, and it's also worth noting that the White House did not feel the need to cut off ties to Falwell after that remark -- for instance, the White House sought Falwell's advice in 2005 on the subject of possible Supreme Court nominees:

...The Bush administration has also been consulting with its political allies outside the Congress.

"Someone from the White House called me yesterday, asking for any input I might have," said the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority and chancellor of Liberty University in Virginia.

Mr. Falwell said he declined to offer advice, telling the White House staff member that, because of Mr. Bush's track record appointing conservative judges, "I am willing to sit back and trust him and pray for him." ...

And while the highest officials kept Falwell at arm's length, a White House liaison stayed in touch with Falwell until a month or so before his death, and then attended his funeral.

And as for Boykin, he wasn't demoted or punished in any real way, and he quietly remained in his job for more than three years after the controversy broke.

WHITES RULE: YOU CAN'T SAY IT IN A BLACK CHURCH, BUT YOU CAN SAY IT ON FOX

dnA:

... Oddly enough, conservatives would seem to agree with Wright about the role of whiteness in America, so I have no idea why they are all reaching for the fainting couch right now. Presumably, these are the same conservatives who saw O'Reilly sound the alarm over the possible collapse of the "white male power structure," John Gibson's demand that white people "make more babies" and give financial support to the conservative groups working towards that very goal.

...Confederate Yankee (that's right, a man named after the Confederacy has the gall to lecture others on racism) describes Wright as displaying "naked anger, resentment, defeatism, and conspiratorial paranoia". Well that's funny, because last time I checked it was conservatives who were claiming gay people were a greater threat to America than Al Qaeda, that Mexicans were "invading" the country, that greedy Jews were coarsening our culture, that several billion Muslims want nothing more than to destroy us, that unqualified blacks are stealing spots from white students, and that granting women equal rights has made us weak.

It would be more correct for CY to say that kind of " naked anger, resentment, defeatism, and conspiratorial paranoia" is only appropriate for white people. When white conservatives make blanket statements about race, sexuality, or gender, they are treated as deeply serious. When black people make them, we call it bigotry....

Go read the whole thing.

(The Confederate Yankee post in question is here. Also see TBogg on that post and the whole controversy.)

****

By the way, I've been rather puzzled by the way truly inflammatory Wright statements and Wright statements that would seem to be beyond dispute have been thrown at us by the media in a big jumble, as if they're all beyond the pale. For instance, I would have thought there was no controversy whatsoever about Wright's assertion that white people don't know what it's like to be rejected by a cabbie on the basis of skin color. Apparently, though, it's now an angry racist statement.

So, I guess that means the ranks of the vilest hate speech mongers in America now include that fearsome provocateur Lenny Kravitz:



Let hate rule!

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK

How the uber-ultra-hyper-mega-liberal National Public Radio commemorates the week of the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq:



Oh, but I shouldn't complain, because I'm sure it's just an attempt to help out Rupert Murdoch's tiny, struggling Fox network, which needs all the help it can get from our lavishly funded state-sponsored media.

GENDER ISN'T THE ONLY ISSUE HERE

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this paragraph from Kate Zernike's article in the Week in Review section of today's New York Times, which is ostensibly about Eliot Spitzer but primarily about Hillary Clinton:

A year ago, it all seemed so different. If the nation wasn't quite gender-blind, still, a woman stood poised to become president, didn't she? So unskeptical were women about that possibility that lots of them felt they did not have to vote for "the woman candidate"; it was the ultimate feminist decision to find Mr. Obama the better candidate -- or John Edwards or any of the other men running, although it was Mr. Obama who seemed to transcend the identity politics that many young women in particular found tiresome and anachronistic.

There's a lot to unpack there.

Let me start with "A year ago, it all seemed so different." Do you recall where we actually stood politically a year ago? We were in a country where George W. Bush had been president for more than six years and had nearly two years to go -- and the vast majority of us were sick to death of him. The most important issue was the war, yet Bush was doing the exact opposite of what the public wanted and it was becoming clear that he and his Borg Republicans might be able to thwart the will of the people until his last day in office.

Everyone knew that this was the most important fact of our political lives -- women as well as men.

In beginning to form opinions on the upcoming presidential race, those who were the most fed up -- women as well as men -- were asking themselves, What's the best way to ensure that we put an end to Bushism? That seemed so vitally important -- in fact, it seemed vitally important to swing the pendulum as far away from Bushism as possible -- that it colored many people's assessment of the question Should I vote for Hillary Clinton? That was true of women as well as men.

For one thing, she had voted for the war, and for a long time was unwilling to express regret for that vote. Beyond that, she was, justifiably or not, a lightning rod for criticism -- could she really be elected?

So when Zernike says, "So unskeptical were women about [the] possibility" that Hillary Clinton could become president "that lots of them felt they did not have to vote for 'the woman candidate,'" she's ignoring the larger context -- she seems to assume that every woman who wasn't engaging in identity politics was merely letting her guard down, when, in fact, many thought we were (and are) in an emergency in this country, and were desperate the most effective remedy.

Many women backed Clinton. Quite a few others felt that John Edwards offered the most passionate opposition to the Bush agenda. And ultimately Barack Obama persuaded quite a few female as well as male voters that one could reject Bushism and divisiveness at the same time -- and persuaded many others that, whether or not that notion made sense, the young voters and moderates he'd won over with it could be added to the Democratic base and thus make him the most effective vote-getter against the Republicans. And so his level of support increased.

For women, was backing Obama or Edwards a feminist decision, as Zernike says? Well, if women are deeply engaged in the most important issues of our time, that strikes me as feminist. But when Zernike says, "it was the ultimate feminist decision to find Mr. Obama the better candidate -- or John Edwards or any of the other men running," she seems to be implying that the women who didn't join the Clinton camp did so out of naive overconfidence about the strength of feminism. She doesn't seem to entertain the possibility that they thought there were other pressing issues at stake.

And when Zernike says, "it was Mr. Obama who seemed to transcend the identity politics that many young women in particular found tiresome and anachronistic," again I disagree. I don't think it's that young people find identity politics tiresome -- they just want the battles being fought in this country to lead to something other than an impasse. They don't seem angry at the leaders of feminism and other progressive political movements -- they seem angry at a political culture that doesn't seem to want consensus to be reached once issues are aired and grievances raised. Sure, you can call their hope for resolution of conflicts naive, but I don't believe it's a rejection of advocacy.

Women are full citizens. They're voting as full citizens. And if that means some of them are rejecting Hillary Clinton, it doesn't mean they're naive about the health of feminism or disrespecting feminism's godmothers -- it's simply that, as full citizens, they have other concerns.

THE POLITICO, DOUBLING AS THE McCAIN CAMPAIGN WEB SITE

Teaser for a Politico article on McCain, found at the bottom of this page:


Go to the actual article and the headline tells you that McCain wants to paint blue states red. There's at least a thin veneer of objectivity. (Though not much. Sample sentence: "By virtue of his maverick brand, nontraditional stances on key issues and his Western roots, McCain may be able to compete in states that were far out of reach for Bush and that have otherwise been trending away from Republicans.") But the teaser above doesn't even have that veneer.

EEEEEK! CHICKPEAS!

I'm waiting for the right-wing freakout over this:

Wal-Mart Tweaks Store for Arab-Americans

DEARBORN, Mich. -- Faten Saad knew she wasn't in a typical Wal-Mart when she saw an end-of-the-aisle display featuring Mamool.

Boxes of the date-filled, whole wheat cookie from the Middle East welcomed the 21-year-old Lebanon native into the international aisle of the new Wal-Mart store in this Detroit suburb known as the capital of Arab America. Aisle 3, which also features Eastern European and Hispanic food, represents many of the 550 items geared toward Arab-American shoppers in the store that opened last week.

…The Dearborn store also sells Arabic music and plans to offer Muslim greeting cards. But the modifications go beyond merchandise: It has 35 employees who speak Arabic -- noted in Arabic script on their badges. The store also has hired a local Arab-American educator to teach the staff cultural sensitivity.

… a few women in hijabs -- traditional Muslim head scarves -- inspected produce. One spoke in Arabic to Mohamad Atwi, the developmental store manager….

OMIGOD! THEY'RE TAKING OVER! YOUR GRANDCHILDREN WILL PRAY TO MECCA!!!!!!!

Actually, I don't know what's going to bother the righties more -- the cultural outreach or this:

Bags of pita bread come from Dearborn-based New Yasmeen Bakery. Despite its "always low price" mantra, Wal-Mart vows it will not undercut the bakery or other local merchants who sell it. "You can go get it for $1.25, … we sell it for $1.32," said Raed Kildani, the store's co-food director. "We're not here to fight the guy; we're here to grow together."

What?! Wal-Mart isn't trying to grind small business into dust? And Arab-American small businesses at that?

Michelle Malkin is quietly sobbing even as we speak.

(Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo.)

OBAMA CHOOSES OPTION (A)

Over at Too Sense this morning, One Drop looked at the recent history of 9/11 pronouncements by preachers and wrote:

Senator Obama, you really only have two options: either completely denounce Rev. Wright, and state that you want nothing more to do with him...or get him to deliver a sermon blaiming 9/11 on the gays. Everyone will be fine with that.

Obama has now issued a statement (published by the Huffington Post and Pat Robertson's chief political reporter) that essentially follows option (A):

...I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy. I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies. I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it's on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue.

...Let me repeat what I've said earlier. All of the statements that have been the subject of controversy are ones that I vehemently condemn. They in no way reflect my attitudes and directly contradict my profound love for this country.

I don't know why he didn't distance himself from Wright a long time ago. But whatever you think about this, in order to believe that Obama embraces divisiveness, you have to believe that he's a Manchurian candidate who's espoused the exact opposite at every possible opportunity. We've heard and read so many of his words and we know so much about his deeds that in order to believe he's like Wright at Wright's worst we have to believe Obama is engaged in a sinister B-movie plot, presenting himself in a manner that's almost 180 degrees different and wickedly concealing his true nature. We have to believe that every word about bringing America together across racial and regional and cultural lines is a lie.

But a hell of a lot of Americans probably are willing to believe that, right? Just as a lot of Americans are willing to believe that, after fifteen years of highly public centrism, Bill and Hillary Clinton are really radical commies hell-bent on imposing the tyrannical, totalitarian governing philosophy of Marx, Lenin, and Mao on a sleeping, deluded public.

Republicans, of course, always get the benefit of the doubt. Embrace Pat Robertson, John Hagee, and Rod Parsley -- or, for that matter, Norman Podhoretz, Laurie Mylroie, and Rush Limbaugh -- and you'll still be seen as a safe centrist, someone whose beliefs are right down the middle.

That's because Democrats are always scary and weird and beyond the pale.

I hope Obama's current media offensive turns the tide. But he's a Democrat, so that just might not be possible.

TODAY'S BROOKS COLUMN: NOT JUST ABOUT WHAT HE THINKS IT'S ABOUT

In today's New York Times, David Brooks endeavors to explain the difficulties many high-achieving men have with intimate relationships. He argues that if you "grow up in homes with an intense success ethos and get fed into the Achievatron, the complex social machine that takes young children and molds them into Ivy League valedictorians," you're likely to emerge with the ability to claw your way to the top but not to have real friends or experience real love.

He's writing about Eliot Spitzer, of course, though he never mentions Spitzer's name. I think he's also trying to get you to think about Bill Clinton, though that name also doesn't come up (in fact, no names are mentioned).

But if you read through the column a second time and skip the parts about intense academic achievement, another Alpha Dog comes to mind -- an Alpha I imagine Brooks didn't think he was talking about.

Especially here:

And, of course, these people succeed and enjoy their success. When Bigness descends upon them, they dominate every room they enter and graciously share their company with those who are thrilled to meet them. They master the patois of globaloney -- the ability to declaim for portentous minutes about the revolution in world affairs brought about by technological change/environmental degradation/the fundamental decline in moral values.

They treat their conversational partners the way the Nazis treated Poland. They crush initial resistance, and the onslaught of accumulated narcissism is finally too much to bear.

Remind you of anyone? Perhaps a guy who makes sure his speeches and campaign appearances are always before crowds of the worshipful, who identifies himself as a leader in the mold of Churchill fighting the most important global fight of the twenty-first century, who goes on and on and on about how freedom is God's gift to everyone in the world and he himself is God's designated bringer of that freedom?

Or how about this?

I don't know if you've seen a successful politician or business tycoon get drunk and make a pass at a woman. It's like watching a St. Bernard try to French kiss. It's all overbearing, slobbering, desperate wanting. There's no self-control, no dignity.

These Type A men are just not equipped to have normal relationships.

... they are completely unprepared. And in the middle of some perfectly enjoyable dinner party, a woman will suddenly find a tongue in her ear.



Angela Merkel, your thoughts?

SYLLOGISM: IF (A) OBAMA CAN'T BEAT McCAIN AND (B) CLINTON AND OBAMA ARE EVENLY MATCHED AGAINST McCAIN, THEREFORE (C) ...

Gallup has a new poll that shows Barack Obama now running no better against John McCain than Hillary Clinton does:



(Click to enlarge.)

And now we have this from the Clinton campaign:

Though the campaign later argued that he hadn't said it, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief campaign strategist told reporters this morning that Sen. Barack Obama "can't win the general election."

...[Mark Penn] says Obama "really can't win the general election." ... he also says that "if Barack Obama can't win" in Pennsylvania, "how could he win the general election?" ...

I've thought of Obama as more electable than Clinton, and he was, or so it seemed, but I'm struck by the way the polling numbers have changed recently, as tracked by Real Clear Politics (and pointed out yesterday by A.J. Strata over on the right side of the blogosphere).

Go here to the Obama numbers and you see that Obama's significant lead over McCain all through February is down to pretty much a dead heat. (Scroll up and down for full results.)

But Clinton's rise (here) is from a period extending back to early December in which she mostly trailed McCain to, well, pretty much a dead heat.

So if Obama is unelectable and Clinton runs no better against McCain than Obama does, doesn't that make them both unelectable?

The New Republic's Jonathan Chait says Clinton is in the process of making Obama unelectable. The Clintonites would argue that they're hitting Obama with what he'd get from a Republican. The counterargument to that is that Clinton's attacks carry more weight with Democratic voters.

I'm worried that, yeah, Obama's being made much harder to elect -- by a candidate who's never going to be easy to elect. If she were up by 7, 8, 10 points against McCain right now, she'd have a much stronger argument. But she isn't.

Of course, is that if you go back to 2007 polls, Clinton and Obama were both beating McCain by healthy margins. Can we get back to those days, when the only question on most people's minds was which Democrat would beat which Republican? I just don't know, though I find it hard to imagine.

(Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo)

MY CHOICE IN '08, AS AN ITALIAN-AMERICAN

Let's see: John McCain has called the Reverend Rod Parsley a "spiritual guide," and Parsley

is not shy about his desire to obliterate Islam. In Silent No More, he notes -- approvingly -- that Christopher Columbus shared the same goal: "It was to defeat Islam, among other dreams, that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492...Columbus dreamed of defeating the armies of Islam with the armies of Europe made mighty by the wealth of the New World. It was this dream that, in part, began America."

Meanwhile, Barack Obama's pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, says:

Jesus was a poor black man who lived in a country and who lived in a culture that was controlled by rich white people. The Romans were rich, the Romans were Italian, which means they were European, which means they were white, and the Romans ran everything in Jesus' country. It just came to me, within the past few weeks, y'all, why so many folks are hatin' on Barack Obama: He doesn't fit the mold. He ain't white, he ain't rich, and he ain't privileged. Hillary fits the mold. Europeans fit the mold. Giuliani fits the mold....

(More here.)

So what about Hillary? Well, there was this about her husband:

The Clinton-Cuomo confrontation began ... when [Gennifer] Flowers made public a tape of what she said was a secretly recorded telephone conversation in which she and Mr. Clinton were discussing Mr. Cuomo.

"I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't have some Mafioso major connections," Ms. Flowers said.

"Well, he acts like one," Mr. Clinton responded.

So I guess I can pick the candidate whose "spiritual guide" enthusiastically praises one of my most famous countrymen for seeking to wipe out Islam, the candidate whose minister thinks my people hate blacks (and hated Jesus because he was black), or the candidate whose spouse thinks our most eloquent public official in recent years sounds like a mobster. Gosh, I'm so motivated to vote right now.

NEW POLL, SAME OLD RESULT: TOO DAMN MANY DEMOCRATS (AND LIMBAUGHNISTAS) LIKE McCAIN

There's a new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll out today. The Journal's poll story carries the headline "McCain, GOP May Have Cause for Hope."

Well, I've been saying that for a while -- without the "may."

The problem has long been the discrepancy between the Democrats' "generic ballot" advantage and their much smaller advantage when real flesh-and-blood candidates are substituted for party labels. And that's true in this poll:

...By a 13-point margin, 50% to 37%, registered voters say they would prefer a Democrat to be elected president. When asked to choose specifically between Arizona Sen. McCain and either Democrat, the results in each case are a statistical tie....

Illinois Sen. Obama edges Sen. McCain by 47% to 44%, while Sen. Clinton, of New York, beats the Republican by a near-identical 47% to 45%....

What's the problem? Well, this is a big problem:

Sen. McCain evokes positive responses among voters generally -- by 47% to 27% they say they have a favorable view of him, with the rest mostly neutral. Those with positive feelings include seven out of 10 conservative voters who otherwise say they are unhappy with Sen. McCain as the nominee. Fewer than half of Democrats have unfavorable views.

Let me repeat that last sentence: Fewer than half of Democrats have unfavorable views. Is there any possibility that someone might be batting around some ideas to, y'know, turn that around?

And no, we shouldn't count on widespread Limbaughnista anger -- elsewhere, we're told that "even dissatisfied Republicans would vote overwhelmingly for Sen. McCain against either Democrat."

It's not as if McCain represents what voters say they want in the next president:

Three-quarters of voters say they want the next president to govern differently from Mr. Bush, the poll shows, yet just as many say Sen. McCain would "closely" follow the Bush program.

A lot of this is because McCain is McCain -- voters find him familiar, non-threatening, an old shoe. But I think we might well have gotten to this same point with Romney or Thompson or Giuliani or maybe even Huckabee -- Republican presidential candidates are always safe, and Democrat presidential candidates are always weird and scary (even when, as now, voters identify themselves much more as Democrats than as Republicans).

The full results are here (PDF). One finding of note: 13% of voters think Obama is a Muslim.

*****

Oh, and I think this gives the lie to theory that all this focus on the Democratic battle is good for the party because it draws attention away from McCain.

(Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo.)

IF BILL CLINTON WERE NORTHERN, NEITHER BILL NOR HILLARY WOULD BE NATIONAL FIGURES TODAY

I suppose I should drop the subject now that Geraldine Ferraro has left the Clinton campaign and Hillary Clinton has offered apologies, but I just want to point out that our last Democratic president undeniably was the beneficiary of an accident of birth -- he was a Southerner.

No one can actually point to evidence that African-Americans routinely have a leg up in American presidential elections, or even in Democratic presidential primaries. But it was certainly an article of faith in 1992 that Bill Clinton had a shot at the presidency not because he was a smart, charismatic young Democratic governor of a small state, but because he was a smart, charismatic young Democratic governor of a Southern state. Super Tuesday, at the time, was essentially a Southern regional primary -- and Clinton won a lot of contests that day. And it was generally understood even by us Northerners that Clinton had a better shot at winning the general election than he would have if he'd been, say, Bill Clintonetti from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, or Bill O'Clinton from South Boston. After all, only one Northerner had been elected president since 1944 -- and that's still true today.

I'm looking for evidence that something similar is going on right now regarding Obama, and I'm struggling to find it. I'm looking for evidence that African-Americans win elections, or even Democratic primaries, for state and local races all out of proportion to their share of the electorate. I'm looking for all the black Democratic officeholders and candidates in majority-white districts in, say, Iowa or Wyoming or Wisconsin. I can't find them.

But Southerners really have had an advantage in presidential races -- we'll break the streak this year, but between 1964 and 2004 every president we elected was from either the South or California. If Bill Clinton hadn't said "y'all," it seems clear that he wouldn't have been one of them.

MEA CULPA? MAYBE, MAYBE NOT.

I've been assuming that there was forethought behind the rollout of Geraldine Ferraro's recent comments about Barack Obama, but Kevin Drum thinks that's unlikely:

... the Torrance Daily Breeze is a faceless little local newspaper with a circulation of about 60,000. Nobody outside the South Bay reads it, Ferraro's comment was buried near the end of the original article, California has already voted, and no one in the Obama campaign cared about it. In fact, nobody would ever have noticed her remarks in the first place if Kos hadn't highlighted them three days after they appeared. Ferraro's moment in the national press didn't start until after the blogosphere erupted.

If Ferraro was trying to do some dog whistling, she sure picked an unusually ineffective forum for it. It's way more likely that she just blurted out something dumb to a local reporter, and then got her dander up when people started piling on about it....

Well, OK. On the other hand, everything -- certainly everything said by a prominent supporter of either of the candidates -- eventually gets read all over the country, because of this wacky thing they call the Internet. So this was said more or less out of the limelight, but not in complete obscurity, because there's no such thing anymore.

So was this a spontaneous outburst that was never meant to be noticed, or was it a dry run/trial balloon? If it had never been noticed, is Drum sure it wouldn't have been repeated in a more prominent setting until it was noticed? Remember, we've got nearly six weeks to go till Pennsylvania votes.

In any event, if this was a supporter going off message, there was a simple solution: The Clinton campaign could have done everything in its power to get Ferraro to stop, and could have put the maximum amount of distance between itself and her as quickly as possible. Instead, the initial response was tepid (Washington Post headline: "Clinton Disagrees With but Declines to Press Ferraro"). It clearly didn't horrify to the campaign. Make of that what you will.

GERALDINE FERRARO, PROFESSOR OF U.S. HISTORY

Geraldine Ferraro on Bill O'Reilly's radio show, in a rare non-racist moment before her defiant resignation from the Clinton campaign:

...Take a look at the experience of the people that we've elected president or have made nominees in their party -- senators of long standing, members of -- you know, a vice president. Dwight Eisenhower is the only one that wasn't governor of a large state or in the Senate....

Arkansas? Arkansas is a large state?

The city of Chicago alone has more people than Arkansas.

Arkansas ranks 32nd among the 50 states in population.

POLITICAL ANALYSIS BY M.C. ESCHER

What's wrong with this analogy from Time's Mark Halperin (which is quoted approvingly here by The New Republic's Michael Crowley)?

The media loves a close game -- It would be much better for Obama if the press stopped describing the race as "deadlocked" and "tied," as he tries to certify himself as the clear frontrunner given his manifest lead in delegates and his unflagging national popularity. (Think Bush-Gore 2000 when the media may have functionally tipped the scales by portraying Bush's miniscule margin snapshot in Florida as a decisive lead, somewhat de-legitimizing Gore's recount efforts.)

Er, if "the media loves a close game," how is that proved by the fact that the media said Bush-Gore in Florida wasn't a close game?

If the press works to ensure that contests go on as long as possible, why did the press suggest that the Florida recount shouldn't go on?

Want a theory that fits both examples? Here, try this: The media loves saying that Democrats are screwing up -- whether or not they are. That was the message with regard to Florida in 2000 and that's the message now with regard to the Obama campaign and the party as a whole.

(And yes, I know: I frequently accuse the Democrats of screwing up. But I don't have the mainstream press's ability to create conventional wisdom, and I don't do because it reinforces the aura of power of the kool kidz in my neighborhood.)

EXPECTING TO HEAR FROM THAT BRUTALLY EFFICIENT DEMOCRATIC NOISE MACHINE ANY MINUTE NOW

So Eliot Spitzer has resigned. I'm not near a TV -- I assume a whole phalanx of highly disciplined Democratic spinners has fanned out, all making the point that Larry Craig and David Vitter are still in office and all asking why Democrats are held to a higher standard (particularly by a politicized Justice Department) while Republicans can apparently get away with anything, however illegal or immoral.

That is what's happening, right? Right?

This is a point I tried to make yesterday. Yes, I realize that trying to steer the discussion in that direction would be a tall order. But it's what Republicans would be doing right now, isn't it?