Something a bit different today. Last night the Baron received a long and detailed message from an old friend of his---who just happens to be a Bible-believing, born-again, Fox-News Republican from a blood-red Southern state---who has decided to back Obama. Like more than a few evangelicals, he has soured completely on Bushism, isn't enamored of his party's own candidates, can't bear the thought of another Clinton administration, and is more or less supporting Obama by default. He's still a bit uncertain about the man's presidential bonafides, so he asked His Favorite Liberal for his opinions on the man, perhaps to assuage his fears that Obama might be weak on security or terror issues. Along the way he referred to some relevant commentary on the subject of Obama's perceived weakness from Bill O'Reilly (like I said, the guy watches Fox), as well as voicing concerns about prospective judicial appointments: apparently, the Roberts Court is too liberal for his liking. Well, I spent about five hours working on a response, which turned out more like a manifesto. And rather than go through the motions with another discrete blog post today, here's the text of my letter---it's pretty much a summation of what this blog has stood for, and has cared about, since it was founded way back in . . . oh, last September. The first couple of paragraphs refer to personal and creative matters before diving into the Good Stuff.
Good evening, professor---
Good to hear from you after lo these many years. I am truly sorry to hear of your difficulties at present. I know of quite a few folks---friends and work colleagues---who are also battling with health issues or poor finances, or some awful combination of them. I seem to say prayers for more people every day these days, but I’ll not hesitate to put you and yours at the top of my list.
Sorry about your lack of band work, but I’m glad to hear about your other music projects. I didn’t know you both had orchestral gigs these days. (You’re still on French horn, no? I don’t seem to recall any electric guitar cadenzas in Rachmaninoff, though of course I could be wrong.) My last musical event hereabouts was attending a performance of Tristan by LA Opera last month. A fair-to-middling effort for a big-market company, but the orchestration alone is worth the money to watch it. It is one of those rare works like The Rite of Spring or Bitches’ Brew that makes you wonder how it could have ever been conceived, let alone written down in score, and the older I get, the more I am amazed by it. And that Wagner fella really knew how to write for brass, eh?
Now, since you asked, to get to the belly of the electoral beast---and this is going to be awfully long-winded, so settle in for a spell:
Yes, I voted for Obama in our primary two weeks ago, and I even sent him some money. I will probably send him even more money before the convention if it looks like he needs it. To me, it comes down to two things, namely (1) because of his “crossover appeal” to independent voters and his ability to turn out lots of new voters, Obama has the potential to realign the political landscape in this country in a way that no president has since Reagan, and possibly since Franklin Roosevelt; and (2) a Clinton candidacy will almost surely be a re-run of 2000 and 2004, i.e., sink all of your assets into the 17 or 18 biggest states, blow off the rest of the country, hope you can flip Ohio or Florida, and eke out a narrow majority. She may be able to pull it off, but the more likely result, I suspect, will be the same as before.
It is telling, I think, that up to now, the only states that Clinton has won decisively in competitive primaries have been states like California and Massachusetts and New York----states that the Democrats are going to win in November by big margins anyway, which sorta makes her candidacy up to now an exercise in Preaching to The Congregation. She’s simply not winning any new converts. But Obama is winning in states where Democrats never do well (80% in Utah?!?), and he’s bringing out enormous numbers of new voters everywhere he runs. Does that mean that he could win a red state like Alabama? Not likely, no, but with a huge turnout of black voters, young people, and even a respectable percentage of the white vote (15 to 20%?), it’s easy to imagine him polling upwards of 45% there, and that alone will force the GOP to spend a lot of time and money trying to hold onto states like Alabama that they haven’t had to worry about for 25 years. In other words, Obama is a walking example of Howard Dean’s “50-state strategy” that was a huge success for the Democrats two years ago. Hillary Clinton is a walking example of the “20-state strategy” that failed Al Gore and John Kerry, and will likely fail again, not only nationally but in the down-ticket races as well.
Finally, I can think of no better way to galvanize the Republican party than a Clinton candidacy. They might not be able to unite behind a candidate of their own, but they can certainly unite against one. I know it flies in the face of conventional wisdom to say that a black politician stands a better chance of winning the presidency than any white politician---but Hillary Clinton is not just any white politician. And Obama is, obviously, unlike any African-American political leader we have ever seen on the national stage, at least that I can remember.
And for what it’s worth, we have just suffered through seven wretched years of a guy who was essentially “born into” the presidency. Are the majority of Americans ready to cast their votes for someone who essentially “married into” the presidency? I suspect not.
What would an Obama presidency be like? My hunch is, he has a pretty ambitious agenda----like I said, I think he is looking to change the direction of the country in a deep and fundamental way a’la Reagan or Roosevelt---and that he’s been keeping his cards close to his vest for a couple of reasons: First, to avoid scaring and/or alienating people with a torrent of policy specifics that will be labeled by the usual bobbleheads and bloggers as either “dangerously liberal” or “corporate sell-out”. Second, I also think he knows that much of what a president does in this day and age is a form of big-picture salesmanship---the ability to articulate a sort-of Grand Unifying Theory of what our shared national identity should be at a given point in time. In this regard, his campaign is a lot like Reagan’s campaigns were. Plenty of the Gipper’s policies weren’t terribly popular in their own time (the nuclear buildup, missile shields, proxy wars in central America), and some were openly ridiculed (Just Say No, ketchup-as-vegetable), but because he was such an impressive salesman who had already won people over with his bigger vision of a Shining City on a Hill (or “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall”), most voters were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the particulars. And I think this is what we are seeing in Obama’s campaign style. I am convinced he is fully cognizant of this, and is intentionally modeling his campaign on Reagan’s. It also explains why he spent so much time talking about Reagan’s “transformative” political influence to a bunch of Las Vegas newspapermen a few weeks ago---which the Clinton people blasted him over, you may remember, even though he didn’t say a damn thing that wasn’t demonstrably true, even to the casual observer.
This is not to say that he is insincere---far from it. I just think he knows the way to win over the public is to give them a big-picture message that strikes an emotional chord, which makes them feel uplifted and energized, rather than try to impress the voters with his intelligence by rattling off program after program and statistic after statistic.
On the other hand, he did start rolling out a few domestic policy proposals yesterday in Wisconsin, and they probably provide an indication to what his priorities as president might be: Some federal jobs programs for infrastructure, tax incentives and subsidies for “green” industries, some tax hikes for the wealthy, and tax cuts for the blue-collars. And, of course, ending this stupid criminal war in Iraq. Personally, I suspect he’d like to launch the equivalent of a 21st-century New Deal, but I think he’s also smart enough to know that’s never going to happen without plenty of compromising, backpedaling and horse-trading with Congressional Republicans, Fortune 500 business leaders and the like.
Regarding Supreme Court judgeships, I don’t think conservatives have much cause for concern anytime soon---the judges most likely to retire in the immediate future (Stevens and Ginzburg) are both liberals, so replacing them with liberal-minded judges doesn’t alter the judicial calculus that I can see. And unless the Democrats have 60 Senate seats next year (virtually impossible until 2010 at the soonest), any Obama appointments can be filibustered at will by the Republicans. And some of them probably will be.
Foreign policy: Obviously, getting the hell out of Iraq, mending fences with the Russians and the Europeans, getting serious about mediating the Israel-Palestine mess, and solving the Pakistan Problem and nuclear proliferation are going to be front-burner issues. I cannot say with any certainty how President Obama would handle these, but I think it is safe to say his approach will be less confrontational and more thoughtful than the current clown’s.
As far as Mr. O’Reilly’s comments are concerned, I don’t give a rat’s ass about anything Bill O’Reilly says, and I can’t imagine why anyone else does at this point, either. The man is a serial fabricator and a proven liar whose word is as reliable as Erich Von Danniken’s. It is typical of the man’s dishonesty, not to mention his overall contempt for liberal democracy, for him to be interjecting Al’Qaida attack scenarios into the middle of a presidential campaign discussion because, by implication, it is telling us that we cannot---indeed, must not, for the sake of the republic---vote our consciences without running the risk of inviting disaster should we make the "wrong" decision. Which is to say more accurately, we should not freely exercise our Constitutional voting rights, period, since in the real world, terrorists can (and will) attack at any place and time, no matter who is president. Better to submit to the wisdom of our all-knowing rulers and their chattering TV spokesmodels like Bill O’Reilly.
Of course, it is all of a piece with this guy, as with Hannity, and Hume, and Rove and Bush and Cheney and the entire GOP political apparatus. In six years, through a 24/7 media campaign of hyperbole and outright lies, they have managed to magically transform 19 guys with box cutters, and a small Sunni splinter group run by an erratic millionaire who spends most of his time living in a cave with a dialysis machine, into a global threat greater than the Soviet Empire or Nazi Germany. In so doing they have helped to make Al’Qaida a global brand as recognizable as Nike or McDonald’s, and provided a road map and a rallying cry for every mental misfit and malcontent who has a bone to pick with America. Osama Bin Laden couldn’t have asked for a better marketing team than the Bush administration and its propaganda ministry at Fox. We will have to deal with some lethal gang of thugs that calls itself Al’Qaida for decades now, in chapters all over the world, thanks to every one of these idiots who thought it wiser to use the AQ brand as a political cudgel to wield against Democrats every election cycle than as a policy problem in need of an immediate solution. Heckuva job, guys.
On the other hand, we probably have a lot of this cynical crap to thank for the very existence of the Obama campaign. After six years of Manichean fear-mongering, and of surrendering our civil liberties---and our good name abroad---in the service of Dick Cheney’s “dark side,” I think it’s safe to say that a majority of Americans have had enough. They want someone at the helm who can make them feel optimistic for their future again. They want leadership that dares to insinuate that there are greater callings for this country than exploiting Perpetual Fear in the pursuit of Perpetual War. They’re tired of state secrets, and of chronic and unapologetic lawlessness. They’re tired of legalese arguments to justify torture, and they’re tired---as I am—of having their patriotism questioned, night after night, by dimestore fascists like Bill O’Reilly for daring to think for themselves. And now, along comes a most unlikely candidate---a young black dude with an African name---whose entire campaign message can realistically be boiled down to a single word: Hope. And the message, and the man, have caught fire across the country. I, for one, hope the fire keeps burning for years to come, and I’ll do my part to help fan the flames.
As for the Republicans . . . well, six months ago I have would bet you that the Mighty Midget---er, Mitt---would have sewn this thing up already since he had the money, the looks, the polish, the organization, a respected name, the whole package. Too bad he approached the voters like a crooked hedge-fund manager trying to pawn off his shares in a failing company instead of a real-life human possessed of some guiding political principles. I’m also a bit surprised that Mike Huckabee hasn’t gained more traction outside the southern states---I would have thought that his populist “social-gospel” domestic program would have resonated among a lot more voters than it has. He’s still going to go to the convention with a fair chunk of delegates, and he’d be a decent fit as a running mate for McCain---that is, if more moderate types were running the show. But as I see that Mitt has endorsed McCain today, I am guessing we will see some fences mended behind closed doors, and a McCain-Romney ticket this summer.
Personally, I have to admit that I rather like Huckabee---dude, he’s a bass player, how can I not like him?---though I realize he’s been a walking disaster whenever he opens up his mouth on foreign policy, and he carries a certain amount of ethical baggage from his days as governor of Arkansas. To be honest, I also rather like Ron Paul, even though his views on economics are pretty much straight out of the Lyndon LaRouche playbook. At least he has articulated his positions honestly and coherently, and he is the only candidate from either party who has had the temerity to ask whether we want to continue spending a trillion dollars a year to maintain an American Empire overseas that we simply can’t afford anymore. For that alone, he deserves our gratitude.
The problem I have with McCain is simple, and it is All About The War. Obama wants us out of Iraq, and McCain doesn’t. Even worse, he may want to start another war with Iran. That makes the choice an easy one for me. I also wonder, frankly, if McCain would even survive four years in the White House. He does not strike me as being in the most robust health. By contrast, if you have seen Ron Paul in the debates, would you ever guess that he is actually a year older than McCain?
Okay, enough for now. Sorry that this letter has turned into a manifesto. Hope no hackles were raised in the reading of this screed, and if so, my sincerest apologies. Drop me a line when time permits and let me know how things are going. Political ruminations, as always, are welcome and encouraged. God speed to all.
Yr Ob'd't Sr'vt,,