Category Archives: John McCain

High hopes for the Gang of 8′s immigration bill

It’s coincidences like this that make people think there’s some sort of conspiracy among news media. The story on thestate.com this morning, from the NYT news service, was headlined, “Rubio offers full-throated support for immigration bill.”

Meanwhile a story in The Washington Post said,

On Tuesday, the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” is set to unveil a proposal that would represent the most far-reaching overhaul of immigration laws since 1986. The process of developing the legislation, which features a path to citizenship for up to 11 million immigrants who are in the country illegally, was hammered out in two dozen meetings led by veterans of earlier immigration battles, including Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).

But in many ways, the senators’ negotiations, behind the scenes and in public, have hinged on a party of one. Rubio, the tea party favorite whose parents emigrated from Cuba, has been considered the most crucial player all along. Although he has seemed to waver at times, his full-throated endorsement of the bill Sunday, in a marathon round of seven television interviews, put at ease a group of colleagues who have been working hard to ensure he stays the course. I don’t know how full his throat was, but his calendar was certainly crowded on Sunday.

Sort of makes you think there was an emergency meeting of the Press Establishment yesterday, and “full-throated” would be the modifier of the week.

The chances are good that I, too, will be offering “full-throated” endorsement of the bill when it’s unveiled tomorrow. Partly because, as you know, if both Lindsey Graham and John McCain are for it, I have a tendency to agree. (When Joe Lieberman was in the Senate, and all three of them agreed on something, I was almost always with them — the big exception being health care policy.)

Beyond that, after months of work by this bipartisan group, the pragmatic truth is that politically speaking, whatever they have come up with is the best chance this country has to achieve comprehensive immigration reform. Whatever this one’s flaws may be, I can’t imagine where a better bill would come from. And the country is overdue to address this issue.

I have another rule of thumb — if both David Brooks and E.J. Dionne are for it, I usually am. And I heard them praising the effort on Friday, in a way that implied they’d had a look at the bill. In fact, I thought for a moment that I’d missed something in the news, since they were talking about it as though it were already out there.

But to return to where we started, the fact that Marco Rubio is so “full-throatedly” on board is a good sign that this will be something worth supporting. While McCain and Graham are taking a big political risk with this — Graham faces re-election next year, and as we know, there are elements in his party who despise him specifically for such things as this — for Rubio, the stakes are bigger. Everyone’s speaking of him as a presidential candidate for 2016 (on NPR this morning, they were talking about him being “the GOP’s Obama”).

Presidential ambitions would help explain why he would support something like this, as it helps move him and his party toward the center. It also presents a big risk, since he’s already alienated much of his base just by being one of the Gang of 8.

Which is why all the political talk shows wanted him yesterday.

Whatever happens with Rubio, though, here’s hoping that, after all this buildup, the Gang’s bill doesn’t disappoint.

One thing Graham definitely is NOT is dumb…

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Say what you want about the increasingly ubiquitous Lindsey Graham, Salon was way off the mark today when its header featured an unflattering photo of our senior senator next to the teaser hed, “Hagel’s dumbest enemies.”

Of course, as is often the case with such hyperbolic come-ons, the actual headline that the teaser linked to took it down a notch: “The increasingly ridiculous Hagel opposition.” The subhed, situated atop huge mugs of Graham and John McCain, begins, “Republicans block a vote for no reason…”

The very first paragraph of the body copy then refutes that (boldface added):

Sen. Graham and his best friend John McCain have been blocking the confirmation of Chuck Hagel as Defense secretary, because they want to know whether President Obama called the president of Libya the night of the Benghazi attack. While that’s not a very good reason to filibuster a Cabinet nominee, it is at least “a reason.” The White House has complied, giving Graham and McCain what they want. Graham’s response: Now he is just going to pointlessly delay the Hagel vote, because it will make him feel good. As always, with Lindsey Graham, being a senator is all about feelings.

Disagree with Graham — and McCain — all you want, but making him the poster boy of the “dumbest” is, well, pretty stupid.

I find a lot of the indignation on the left about delaying the Hagel nomination a few days a little on the disingenuous, even absurd, side. My least favorite manifestation of this is when I hear a Democrat express absolute mystification that these Republicans could possibly be objecting to Hagel, since he’s a Republican. There is no mystery as to why this is a Republican Democrats love. and Republicans have problems with him for the same reasons.

There are actual substantive reasons to question this nomination. We could start with his having been completely wrong on the Iraq surge. Which is kinda relevant in a candidate for SecDef. But then, of course, we’d have a whole other argument that we’ve had too many times before…

So never mind all that. I don’t call the president “dumb” for wanting a guy who looked at Iraq the way he did. I have more respect for the president than that.

But there’s a bigger reason I wouldn’t call Barack Obama dumb: I’ve heard him speak. And the same goes for Lindsey Graham.

I was speaking to a class at Lexington High School yesterday, and I let slip a comment that always makes me sound arrogant when I say it, but it’s true: It’s pretty unusual for me to interview a political officeholder in South Carolina who makes me think to myself, “This guy’s smarter than I am.” But I’ve had that thought more than once when talking with Lindsey Graham.

And I may have a host of faults — correction, I do have a host of faults — but being dumb isn’t one of them.

The Gang of Eight offers a solution on immigration

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“As far back as I can remember,” said Henry Hill in the opening to “Goodfellas,” ”I always wanted to be a gangster.”

The same might be said of John McCain and our own Lindsey Graham. And I honor them for it.

The gangs they tend to join are all about uniting to get around the partisan dysfunction of Congress. This time, despite having been so badly burned by the issue six years ago, they are once again ganging up to try to pass a version of comprehensive immigration reform.

This time, there are some new gangsters, such as that kid out of Florida, Marco Rubio. And Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Robert Menendez, Michael Bennet and Jeff Flake. The Washington Post is calling this “a bipartisan push that would have been unimaginable just months ago on one of the country’s most emotionally divisive issues.”

Here’s the memo they’ve put together. This is the introduction:

We recognize that our immigration system is broken. And while border security has improved significantly over the last two Administrations, we still don’t have a functioning immigration system.This has created a situation where up to 11 million undocumented immigrants are living in the shadows. Our legislation acknowledges these realities by finally committing the resources needed to secure the border, modernize and streamline our current legal immigration system, while creating a tough but fair legalization program for individuals who are currently here. We will ensure that this is a successful permanent reform to our immigration system that will not need to be revisited.

The document has a tendency to redundancy — “tough but fair” is mentioned three times on the first page (OK, technically, the third time it was “a tough, fair and practical roadmap”) — but readable. I just think it could have used a tough, but fair, editor.

Amid all sorts of stuff about tightening border security, giving our border patrol the latest technology and making sure people who are supposed to leave by a certain date actually do leave, there is the path to citizenship part:

While these security measures are being put into place, we will simultaneously require those who came or remained in the United States without our permission to register with the
government. This will include passing a background check and settling their debt to society
by paying a fine and back taxes, in order to earn probationary legal status, which will allow
them to live and work legally in the United States. Individuals with a serious criminal
background or others who pose a threat to our national security will be ineligible for legal
status and subject to deportation. Illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes
face immediate deportation…

Once the enforcement measures have been completed, individuals with probationary legal
status will be required to go to the back of the line of prospective immigrants, pass an
additional background check, pay taxes, learn English and civics, demonstrate a history of
work in the United States, and current employment, among other requirements, in order to
earn the opportunity to apply for lawful permanent residency. Those individuals who
successfully complete these requirements can eventually earn a green card.

Individuals who are present without lawful status – not including people within the two
categories identified below – will only receive a green card after every individual who is
already waiting in line for a green card, at the time this legislation is enacted, has received
their green card. Our purpose is to ensure that no one who has violated America’s
immigration laws will receive preferential treatment as they relate to those individuals who
have complied with the law….

There’s a lot more. I invite y’all to go read it, and react.

Your ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ scoreboard

McCain to go to bat for McMaster (as well he should)

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The Hill reports that John McCain is going to be raising funds for Attorney General Henry McMaster's (yet undeclared) bid for governor in 2010:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is hitting the fundraising circuit to return the favor to a local Republican who proved a key supporter in the 2008 primaries.

McCain and many of his top advisers will throw a fundraising reception on behalf of Henry McMaster, the South Carolina attorney general who backed McCain during his run for president in 2008.

The event's host committee includes McCain loyalists like one-time senior advisors Charlie Black, former campaign manager Rick Davis and former Republican National Committee deputy chairman Frank Donatelli. McCain will make an appearance, a spokeswoman confirmed.

And well he should, because Henry was right with him through thick and thin in his most recent presidential bid. He and Bobby Harrell, all the way, even when people were counting McCain as out of the GOP race. Note the video from above (this is the slightly more extended version of my most-viewed video of all time, at 59,850 views), in which Henry warmed up the crowd for McCain one night in the Vista in 2007 (the night of the first S.C. presidential candidate debate, as I recall).

Not that ‘Morning in America’ hubris again…

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Just got this e-mail a little while ago from a reader (I guess it was a reader, anyway):

The headlines today said that McCain claims Obama "must" consult with the GOP on stimulus talks. That's not true, any more than saying that Ronald Reagan was required to allow Dems much input in his 1981 plans. On election eve 1980, even old democrats like me realized that the public had said no to government spending, said no to government meddling and no to more regulations. I believed the public was wrong, but also understood that Reagan's mandate was to proceed as he'd promised.

Thirty years later, Americans' have decided that we need government, government to stop us from dying from eating peanut butter, government to stop bankers from stealing from us, and government to provide jobs until the economy picks up. That's Obama's mandate, and to do anything else would be to back off from his promises. McCain is wrong. He and his party lost. Obama wants to be nice and extend an olive branch to the losers, but it is not necessary that he does so. What's necessary is he goes forward with his plans.

To which I felt compelled to answer as follows (slightly edited, as I read back over it):

Interesting you should mention 1981. I'm still ticked off that Democrats back then took just the attitude that you're calling for. Tip O'Neill and the rest said, well, Reagan won the election, so let's give him anything that he wants. This, after four years of that same Democratic Congress not giving Jimmy Carter ANYthing he wanted.

I'm still mad about it. I'm still mad about how the whole world just rolled over for Reagan. Much of the media was full of that "Morning in America" hoopla, and I felt like …. well, have you ever been the only person in the room who was not drunk or stoned, and everybody around you thought everything was just SO funny, and you just thought they were all very irritating? Not much fun, huh? Well, that was me in the Reagan era.

I don't feel that way this time. I sort of thought Reagan's win in 1980 was the end of the world — not because I was anti-Republican, but because I had liked Jimmy Carter so much (I don't like him as much as I did then, but I really liked him then). I don't feel that way at all about Obama. Out of all the people running for president last year, McCain and Obama were my first and second choices. So while I'm sorry McCain didn't win, I'm glad Obama didn't lose. I'm highly ambivalent on that score.

But one reason I DO like Obama so much — and liked him so much more than Hillary — is that he IS about post-partisanship. (That's one of the main things I liked about McCain, too.) He's nothing like Reagan; he's far less the ideological warrior. And if he doesn't work with McCain (something which, to his credit, he's already demonstrated a willingness to do), then he's not the guy that a LOT of people voted for. I would expect exactly the same from McCain — a willingness to work across the aisle — had he been elected.

And I have little patience for Democrats who act the way the Reaganites did in the early 80s — We won, so we'll do what we damn' well please. Unfortunately, I do hear that from some. Like "Morning in America" revisited. And I didn't like that triumphalist bull the first time, not one bit.

And if you don't care about bipartisanship, think about this: There's a good chance this stimulus will fail. There's a good chance ANY stimulus would fail. So how would you feel about it if, once the stimulus fails, the GOP recaptures Congress, and then goes around telling Obama and the world that "We won, so we don't have to listen to you?"

Far better that we have a stimulus plan that both parties buy into. It's a little late for that, but it WOULD have been far better. It's never good to have one of the two major parties politically invested in the nation failing…

(I'll add one more thought: I would not say that Obama "must" work with McCain et al. I'm just saying that to the extent that he can, he should. This is not to say that if you've tried to bring the GOP along and they've just refused and you truly believe your plan is the right one, you don't go ahead — just as I thought it was right for us to go ahead into Iraq without France, Germany and Russia on board. But I am saying that if you can possibly swing it, bipartisan is WAY better for the country.)

Worrying about the stimulus

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

“This is your bill; it needs to be America’s bill.”

— Sen. Lindsey Graham,
addressing Senate Democrats

What
worries me, after all the rhetoric, exhortation, accusations,
counter-accusations, fault-finding and blame-laying, is that the
stimulus bill that spent the week staggering its way through the U.S.
Senate might not work anyway.

There was always
that very good chance. Several weeks back, Paul Krugman — who as a
Princeton economist is a Nobel Prize-winner, but as a political
columnist is a partisan automaton — said as much. He said it wouldn’t
be enough to give the economy the jolt it needs to overcome the lack of
activity in the private sector. He made a persuasive case.

Then,
last week, Mr. Krugman wrote that this bill just had to pass, that
those blasted Republicans opposing it were “putting the nation’s future
at risk.” Obama’s mistake, he now said, was trying “to transcend
partisanship” and work with the Republicans at all.

I believe the
exact opposite to be true. I believe the chances of the bill doing any
good declined with each step into the thicket of partisanship.

I
never won so much as a Cracker Jack prize for economics, much less a
Nobel, but there’s one thing I think I understand: Whatever Washington
does in the way of stimulus — and it needs to do something (with the
private sector in paralysis, this is a job for the Keynesians) — it
won’t work unless America can believe in it.

Just as Mr. Krugman
is right about some things, so is Phil Gramm. Remember how indignant
the Democrats got when the McCain adviser said, in mid-campaign, that
we were experiencing a “mental recession”? Well, he had a point. While
it doesn’t make the real-life pain any less, the mechanisms that get us
into a predicament like this have an awful lot to do with what’s going
on in our heads.

When businesses think they have a chance to
grow, they invest and create jobs. When they’re scared, they freeze up.
When buyers and sellers believe home values will keep appreciating, the
real estate market is hot. When they start to doubt values, buying and
selling stop. When everyone believes a stock’s value will keep rising,
it does keep rising; when they don’t, it crashes. When you think the
lousy economy is threatening your job, you stop spending and stuff your
earnings, literally or figuratively, into a mattress, and the workers
who depended on you to buy what they produce lose their jobs, which of
course increases everyone’s pessimism.

No, it’s not all in our
heads. At some point, certain things have real value. But we’re not
going to start buying and selling and hiring and investing and taking
risks at the levels needed to pull ourselves out of this tail-spin
until we reach a consensus that things are getting better, or about to
get better.

You can argue about the specific provisions in the
stimulus all you want, and Democrats and Republicans have been doing so
enthusiastically. But I don’t think I’ve seen a specific idea yet that
couldn’t be argued both ways. Even the worst idea pumps some juice into
the economy; even the best one is no silver bullet.

With private
sector leadership — especially on Wall Street — having failed us so
spectacularly, we need something intangible from our political
leadership every bit as much as we need infrastructure spending and/or
tax cuts: We need to look at what Washington is producing and believe
that it actually is for the good of the country, and not for the good
of the Democrats or the Republicans or this or that politician.

As
he entered office, I thought Barack Obama had what it took to lead us
in that direction — to pull us together and help us believe that we can
solve our problems. To persuade us, as FDR did, that we had nothing to
fear, that we were going to get through this, together.

I still
think he can. But last week, I saw him stumble. I’m not talking about
the Tom Daschle business. As the stimulus package faltered, he reverted
to campaign mode, blaming Republicans who wanted to cling to those
failed policies of the past eight years we heard so much about in 2008.

Helping
him in this counterproductive effort were such Republicans as our own
Jim DeMint, who most certainly was clinging to the ideologies that have
failed his party and the nation — such as the stubborn idea that tax
cuts are the only kind of stimulus anyone needs.

A far more
sensible position was taken by our other senator late Thursday. Lindsey
Graham grabbed headlines by saying “this bill stinks,” but he had
smarter things to say than that:

You know, my problem is that I
think we need a stimulus bill. I think we need to do more than cut
taxes. But the process has been terrible. The House passed this bill
without one Republican vote, lost 11 Democrats. Nancy Pelosi said, We
won, we write the bill…. (W)e’re not being smart and we’re not
working together, and people want us to be smart and work together, and
this has been a miserable failure on both fronts.

As I wrote this
column, much remained unsettled. By the time you read it, something may
have passed. But as I wrote, I was sure of this: If the Congress gave
the president a bill that was pleasing only to the Harry Reids and
Nancy Pelosis, it wouldn’t help the president inspire the kind of
confidence that the whole nation needs to recover. (The same would be
true if Jim DeMint got all he wanted, but there was no danger of that.)

But
if the president has a bill that Lindsey Graham and John McCain and Ben
Nelson of Nebraska and Susan Collins of Maine all voted for, the nation
would have a chance of moving forward together. And together is the
only way we can recover.

For more, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

McCain, Graham support Obama on Gitmo

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FYI, I just got this release from Lindsey Graham's office:

JOINT STATEMENT FROM U.S. SENATORS LINDSEY GRAHAM AND JOHN MCCAIN ON GUANTANAMO EXECUTIVE ORDER

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and John McCain (R-Arizona) today issued the following statement regarding the executive order put forth by President Obama calling for the closure of the prison at Guantanamo:

“We support President Obama’s decision to close the prison at Guantanamo, reaffirm America’s adherence to the Geneva Conventions, and begin a process that will, we hope, lead to the resolution of all cases of Guantanamo detainees,” said Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator John McCain. “The executive orders issued today constitute an important step in the right direction but leave several major issues unaddressed.”
“Numerous difficult issues remain,” Senator Graham and Senator McCain continued. “Present at Guantanamo are a number of detainees who have been cleared for release but have found no foreign country willing to accept them. Other detainees have been deemed too dangerous for release, but the sensitive nature of the evidence makes prosecution difficult. The military’s proper role in processing detainees held on the battlefield at Bagram, Afghanistan, and other military prisons around the world must be defended, but that is left unresolved. Also unresolved is the type of judicial process that would replace the military commissions. We believe the military commissions should have been allowed to continue their work. We look forward to working with the President and his administration on these issues, keeping in mind that the first priority of the U.S. government is to guarantee the security of the American people.”

####

… which seems to me an appropriate stance for the loyal opposition. They support their commander in chief because they share his concerns that our nation live up to its highest ideals — which is completely consistent with their advocacy during the Bush administration. (And remember, McCain said that he, too, would have closed the Gitmo facility if elected.) At the same time, they make sure they get on the record the unresolved problems inherent in this move. Smart, principled and appropriate.

The Obama-McCain meeting

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Not a lot to emerge from the president-elect’s meeting with John McCain (and Lindsey Graham and Rahm Emanuel) today, which is to be expected. Here’s the closest thing to substance I’ve seen, from their joint communique:

We hope to work together in the days and months ahead on critical
challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy
economy, and protecting our nation’s security.

Of those items, seems to me the greatest potential for collaboration would be on energy. (But I would think that, wouldn’t I?)

Here’s a scene-setter from the NYT politics blog:

Senator John McCain and President-elect Barack Obama are sitting
down together now and metaphorically smoking a peace pipe in their
first face-to-face session since the bruising campaign.

The two are meeting at Mr. Obama’s transition headquarters at a federal building in Chicago, where they just posed for the cameras.

The meeting space has a stagey look, in front of the kind of thick
royal blue curtain you see in an auditorium, not the usual
campaign-rigged blue backdrop. Flags are strewn throughout, with one
planted between the two principals, who are sitting in yellow,
Oval-Office-like chairs.

To their sides are their wingmen, Rahm Emanuel on Mr. Obama’s left
and Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina on Mr. McCain’s right.

They’re all looking jolly (Mr. Obama and Mr. Emanual the jolliest), and we’ll soon get a read-out on the discussion.

The Obama team is hoping they can smooth any ruffled feathers and
build an alliance with the old John McCain — not the one whom the Obama
camp called “erratic” during the presidential campaign but the
self-styled “maverick” who worked across party lines for various causes
that Mr. Obama wants to advance — global warming, immigration, earmark
spending among them.

In the brief moment before the cameras, Mr. Obama said: “We’re going
to have a good conversation about how we can do some work together to
fix up the country, and also to offer thanks to Senator McCain for the
outstanding service he’s already rendered.”

Mr. McCain was asked whether he would help Mr. Obama with his administration.

“Obviously,” he said.

Those pesky reporters tried to shout out other queries, like about a
possible bail-out for the auto industry, but the pool report says they
were “shouted down by the pool sherpas,” and that “Mr. Obama finally
said with a smile, ‘You’re incorrigible.’”

The last in-person meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain took place more than a month ago, at the third and final presidential debate at Hofstra, remembered chiefly as the coming-out party for Joe the Plumber.

Updated | 2:12 p.m.: A joint statement was released from President-elect Barack Obama and Senator John McCain:

“At this defining moment in history, we believe that Americans of
all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the
bad habits of Washington so that we can solve the common and urgent
challenges of our time. It is in this spirit that we had a productive
conversation today about the need to launch a new era of reform where
we take on government waste and bitter partisanship in Washington in
order to restore trust in government, and bring back prosperity and
opportunity for every hardworking American family. We hope to work
together in the days and months ahead on critical challenges like
solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and
protecting our nation’s security.”

Beyond that, here are versions of the story from:

The Associated Press (on thestate.com)

The Chicago Tribune

The Wall Street Journal (really just an update of their story from this morning’s paper)

The New York Times

One war, two wars: But who’s counting?

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This morning we ran an editorial calling upon the nation to unite after the election, and quoting something S.C. Supt. of Ed. Jim Rex had said:

“What’s important for our students to know is that after elections, Americans come together,” Dr. Rex wrote. “We have enormous challenges ahead of us — a war on two fronts, an economy in crisis, a broken health care system, and so much more. We cannot stand to be divided one more day. Regardless of who wins, it’s time for us to work together to move this country forward and create a better, more stable America for our children and grandchildren."

Did you catch the little grace note there that made his message truly bipartisan — his reference to "a war on two fronts?" In case you missed it, that is decidedly not the official Democratic Party version.

We were reminded of that last night in Barack Obama’s otherwise gracious, affirming victory speech, in which he sincerely called on the nation to come together, but nevertheless repeated the official Democratic Party version of reality:

we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime – two wars, a planet in peril…

And so we continue with the refusal to acknowledge either a) the global war on terror, or b) that Iraq is part of it. It makes me wonder: When we act against al Qaida in Somalia, or Yemen or Pakistan or Indonesia, are those third and fourth and fifth and sixth wars, etc.?

Sorry to be such a nitpicker. I truly thought Obama’s speech was good, and appreciated its attempts to reach beyond party.

Likewise, I appreciated the graciousness of John McCain’s acceptance speech, even though one could detect partisan difference in that even when he was trying the hardest to reach out:

In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.

Did you catch it? Yes, it’s a very Republican thing to say those Americans "WRONGLY believed that they had little at stake or little influence." Democrats would likely leave out the "wrongly."

Bottom line, I appreciated both speeches, for what they did, and more, for what they meant to do. I can think of no recent election in which both victor and defeated were so gracious at the critical moment.

But I’m an editor; I pick at words. And even while I’m applauding, these little flaws jump out at me. File them under the heading of "how far we have yet to go," even on agreeing about the nature of reality.

Congratulations to President Obama!

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Obama’s done the expected, and done it on deadline, which certainly warms my heart toward him.

Here’s hoping his leadership as president is on a par with the highest notes he struck during the presidential campaign. And he has struck some fine ones, such as on the night of his triumph in S.C. I certainly had an undivided mind about his victory on that night.

He’s shown he can inspire; let’s all hope and pray he can unite the nation. We need it. No, I’m not as happy about this as I thought I would be several months ago. But I’m hopeful, so call me audacious.

I now turn the floor over to you, the reader — I’ll have more to say in the coming days, but I’m going to go get some sack time now.

Obamawin6

My predictions

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Here are my predictions as to what I think will happen on the contested races that we dealt with in our endorsements. As always, endorsements are about who should win, not who will win. To fill that vacuum — and to help you see the difference — here are my prognostications (in which I place far less faith, because they are not nearly as carefully considered):

Obama will win the presidential election — the real one (electoral college, with at least 300 electors) as well as the popular vote. He’ll win it decisively enough that we’ll know by midnight. BUT McCain will win in South Carolina, probably 55-45. We endorsed McCain.
Lindsey Graham will easily win re-election. No prediction on the numbers; I have no idea. In fact, I’m only doing numbers on the presidential, because I really have no idea on any others. We endorsed Graham.
Joe Wilson will win against Rob Miller, but it will be close. We endorsed Wilson.
Jim Clyburn will have a blowout victory over his GOP opponent. We endorsed Clyburn.
John Spratt will win with a margin somewhere between Wilson’s and Clyburn’s. We endorsed Spratt.
Nikki Setzler will survive the challenge from Margaret Gamble, and thanks to the Obama Effect, it will be the first time it helped him to be a Democrat in 20 years. We endorsed Setzler.
Anton Gunn will beat David Herndon, but it will be fairly close. We endorsed Gunn.
Joe McEachern will cruise to victory over Michael Koska. We endorsed Koska.
Chip Huggins will roll right over Jim Nelson, who will NOT benefit appreciably from the Obama Effect. We endorsed Nelson.
Nikki Haley will win big, again in spite of Obama. We endorsed Ms. Haley.
Harry Harmon will again be Lexington County coroner. We endorsed Harmon, although we again made the point that this should NOT be an elective office.
Elise Partin will — I hope I hope — win the Cayce mayor’s office (this is the one I have the LEAST feel for, since we’ve never endorsed for this office before). We endorsed Ms. Partin.
Gwen Kennedy, despite being best known for a Hawaiian junket the last time she was on Richland County council, will ride the Obama Effect to victory over Celestine White Parker. We endorsed Ms. Parker.
Mike Montgomery should prevail (note my hesitation) over challenger Jim Manning, who seems to be running as much as anything because he felt like there should be a Democrat in the race with Obama running. We endorsed Montgomery.

Oh, and Ted Pitts will roll to victory over his last-second UnParty challenger. We didn’t endorse in this one, but if we had, we would have endorsed Ted.

The creeping sense of letdown

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This feeling has been creeping up on me in recent weeks, and it’s just emerged into my consciousness in the last days. I hesitated to mention it, and it seems particularly inappropriate given the fact that people are turning out in droves to vote, but…

The election has been a real letdown for me. And I didn’t expect that.

Remember back in January, when I said that if our two endorsees for the major party nominations both made it to the November ballot, it would be a win-win proposition for the country? Well, I did say it, and I meant it. But somehow, between then and now, my enthusiasm has just dissipated, like air slowly but steadily leaking from a balloon.

Part of this is just due to the fact that I was never going to enjoy the general election campaign as much as I did the primaries, nor would I appreciate these two candidates as much as party standard-bearers. They were SO much more appealing as insurgents — McCain running and prevailing against all the diehard GOPpers, over their vehement protests, and doing it even after his candidacy was declared dead. Obama running as the alternative to continuing the vicious, pointless partisanship of the Clinton-Bush years. But the climax of this drama seems to have occurred when they triumphed over their parties’ orthodoxies. Nothing has seemed that fun or that inspiring since then.

McCain picking Sarah Palin to please the base was bad, but Obama leading the charge of the crowd pretending that John McCain was some sort of incarnation of George W. Bush was, if anything, worse. All of it was dispiriting. I first noted that during the Democratic Convention; and while there were moments in McCain’s acceptance speech where he was almost the guy he needed to be to keep me applauding, he fell short of the mark.

Beyond those factors, three things contributed to my present political ennui:

McCain utterly failing to put his best foot — or even his second-best foot — forward. Every time he opened his mouth, I kept hoping he would explain clearly, in a way undecided voters couldn’t miss, why he was the guy. I still thought he was the guy myself, but it would have been nice if he had helped others see it. It’s like he was going through the motions ever since he upstaged himself with the Palin selection. This is a weird and unfair thing to say, but… you know those appearances he did on SNL Saturday and Monday nights? He was game, and I give him that, but… he just fell flat. It wasn’t funny. No, he’s not a professional comedian, but he can be funny — one moment when he was his old self, but I think too few people saw it, was at the Alfred E. Smith dinner. He was hilarious. His timing, and his feel for his audience was impeccable. But the SNL appearances were a letdown. Blame the writing if you will, but it was sort of symbolic to me of the way he generally failed to connect throughout the fall. Sometimes you click; sometimes you don’t. Yeah, I know that seems stupid, but what I’m trying to say is that he no more clicked as a presidential candidate during these weeks than he did on SNL. If you don’t know what I mean, go back and watch the debates. He was saying the right things, but not clicking. As I mentioned in a previous post, our endorsement was about his record, not about what we saw in the campaign. I’d endorse him again given the chance, but next time I would hope he’d help himself out more.
That shouldn’t have mattered given the "win-win" situation I had predicted back in January. With one guy faltering, that left us with Obama. But I found myself less and less enchanted with him as the campaign wore on. He, unlike McCain, never missed a step. He was on his game at every moment of every day, with a steadiness and discipline that seemed superhuman. That wasn’t the problem. The one real up-side I saw to the future, contemplating the future with a President Obama, was that he has consistently shown such stellar abilities with the intangibles of leadership, from his general unflappability to his rhetorical talents. The problem was that I started paying more attention to what he actually had to say about some issues, and started doing so in a more critical fashion, as I pondered our upcoming endorsement. And, as I’ve said in recent days, I got really, really disturbed about some of the things he said, because they were SO off-the-shelf, liberal Democratic dogmatic. (Ironically, the debates had a big impact on me here — even as I was disappointed at McCain’s political skills on those occasions, I became more and more disturbed by precisely what Obama was saying so smoothly.) Before, I had just accepted that he and I wouldn’t agree on abortion, for instance — something I had to accept in backing Joe Lieberman or practically any other Democrat. But then I started peeling the layers, and each new layer worried me more. First, his lack of concern for the moral value of the unborn seemed to go beyond most Democrats, and I just started fully noticing that near the end. Then there was his unwillingness to consider judicial candidates who didn’t agree with him on the issue. Then there was his equating the nebulous "right to privacy" with the right to free speech. Then there was his utter dismissal of the rights or duties of the political branches to decide such issues with that "state referendums" nonsense. Then I saw similar patterns on free trade, and there was a disturbing willingness to be doctrinaire on Big Labor’s agenda, not a transformative figure at all. Combine that with the inevitability of bigger Democratic majorities, and instead of a post-partisan president, you’ve got textbook Democrat, and that set us up for more partisan warfare in the coming years, not less.
Finally, there was the staggering economic news of the last couple of months. On a pure electoral plane, this as much as anything is what has delivered the election to Obama. But I gotta tell you, I sure wish I could be as sanguine as the Obamaniacs are about his ability to lead us through this. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think McCain could, either. It’s just that I have seen little to make me think Obama has a better idea of how to approach this. I wasn’t kidding when I said, several weeks back, that what we need is another FDR. And neither of these guys fills the bill, the way I see it. This factor has done as much as anything else to grind down my enthusiasm, day after day. Did you see the lead story in The Wall Street Journal today? That’s our reality, folks. I really, really hope that the Obama supporters are right and I’m wrong, and he WILL have what it takes to lead us to turn back the tide. But I remain worried.

Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe this is just physical exhaustion. Maybe it’s the wild ride of the past two years, all the excitement — all the fun we’ve had here on the blog, for that matter, with page views now essentially double the year before. And so on pure adrenaline, I’m due for a letdown. But I think it’s more than that.

In the last few weeks, I’ve said a bunch of times that I looked forward to this being over. But I just realized today that I won’t feel that way at all. Instead, I fear, the letdown will be complete rather than merely imminent, and I’ve just come to realize that. No, not because "my guy" lost the presidential election. It’s more because I thought it was win-win, and then I realized that it wasn’t, and that whoever won, we were going to have a mess that we still have to get through. The economy will still be a mess. We’ll still have the same problems with Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China… and ourselves. We won’t even be poised to solve our health care crisis, because even with a bigger Democratic majority and a liberal Democrat in the White House, no one will say "single-payer." The irony of that is palpable to me. (We’ll get the BAD stuff of liberal Democratic ideology — the activist judges, the intimidation of unwilling workers into unions, trade isolationism, and the like — without a National Health Plan. Sheesh.)

Basically, I realized fully, on an emotional level, that neither McCain nor Obama was going to deliver us from all that. And once the election is over, we no longer have the luxury of pretending that they might do so. So I think that’s why I’m down.

Sorry to rain on the parade. Y’all go ahead and have a nice time, though …

Of presidents, courts and the rule of law

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
AT THE OUTSET, John McCain had a great head start with me — on experience, national security, foreign affairs, bipartisanship, and his oft-demonstrated willingness to do the right thing regardless of political consequences.
As Labor Day approached, I began to doubt. First, he picked Sarah Palin. I don’t have as low an opinion of her as many seem to, but she’s no Joe Lieberman. Then, Sen. McCain ran a particularly ham-handed fall campaign, one that simply did not communicate his virtues clearly to the voters. As I had with Bob Dole in 1996, I wondered: If he can’t run a campaign, how can he run the country?
But my doubts ended during the third debate. Sen. Barack Obama “won” on style, on cool, on demeanor, much as John Kennedy did in 1960. But I was paying attention to what they said. That’s when I decided I had to stick with McCain.
Let’s consider several things they said about one subject, judicial selection.
This column is not about abortion. I knew already that I disagreed with Obama about abortion. I’m a Catholic, and I’m not a Joe Biden kind of Catholic. But I’ve supported Democrats (such as Sen. Lieberman) who didn’t challenge their party on abortion; I’m not a single-issue voter.
Aside from abortion itself, I find Roe v. Wade appalling in two ways: I don’t find a “right to privacy” in the Constitution. Secondly, the ruling has had a devastatingly polarizing effect on our politics. My respect for the rule of law is such that I’d be willing to put up with the political division for a ruling rightly decided, but this one didn’t qualify.
So the sooner Roe is overturned, the better. Obama strongly disagrees. And in rationalizing what he sees as the imperative to protect Roe, he turns against several other important principles that I believe a president should respect, from the separation of powers to the proper role of politics.
I’ll review each of these points briefly, starting with the one that concerns me least:
Sen. Obama seems to judge court rulings based more on their policy effects than on legal reasoning. In his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he wrote, “The answers I find in law books don’t always satisfy me — for every Brown v. Board of Education I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed.” That hinted to me that he cares more about good outcomes than law. But I forgot about it until I heard him say in the debate that “I will look for those judges who have an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through.” That third qualification disturbed me because it seemed to demand a political sensibility on the part of judges, but I wasn’t sure.
Much harder to overlook is the hard fact that despite his opposition to Roe, John McCain voted to confirm two Clinton nominees, Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Why? “Not because I agreed with their ideology, but because I thought they were qualified and that elections have consequences.” Senators should respect the president’s prerogative to the point that they should refuse to confirm only those nominees who are obviously unqualified. “This is a very important issue we’re talking about,” he added. Sen. Obama has had two opportunities in his brief Senate career to confirm highly qualified nominees — Samuel Alito and John Roberts — and voted against both. Yes, confirmation is different from nomination, but I would rather have someone who has demonstrated McCain’s relative freedom from ideology doing the nominating.
Perhaps worst of all, Sen. Obama was dismissive and misleading regarding the proper roles of the states with regard to the federal government, and the political branches with regard to the judiciary. Regarding Roe, Sen. McCain said, “I thought it was a bad decision…. I think that… should rest in the hands of the states. I’m a federalist.” He was saying abortion law should be returned to state legislatures, where we make most of our laws, rather than having it in a special, hands-off category.
In answering, Mr. Obama shocked me in two ways, saying “I think that the Constitution has a right to privacy in it that shouldn’t be subject to state referendum, any more than our First Amendment rights are subject to state referendum, any more than many of the other rights that we have should be subject to popular vote.”
If a right to privacy exists, it is at best inferred from the Constitution. The author of the “right,” Justice William O. Douglas, found it in “penumbras” and “emanations.” And yet Sen. Obama equated it to the very first rights that the Framers chose to set out in black and white, and subject to ratification. That a Harvard-trained attorney would do that may not boggle your mind, but it surely does mine.
Then there’s that bit about not subjecting such a hallowed “right” to “state referendum,” or “popular vote.” Sen. McCain had suggested nothing of the kind. In a representative democracy, such questions are properly decided neither by plebiscite nor by judicial fiat, but by the representatives elected by the people to make the laws under which we will live.
There are many issues to consider in this election, from national security to the current economic crisis. I can’t go into all of them in this column. But in just those few moments in that one debate, John McCain clearly demonstrated to me a far greater respect for the proper roles of the president, the Congress, the courts, the states, and the people themselves in making us a nation of laws and not of men.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Kagan’s right: Security trumps all

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Frederick Kagan has it exactly right in today’s Wall Street Journal: "Security Should Be the Deciding Issue." An excerpt:

As the scale of the economic crisis becomes clear and comparisons to the Great Depression of the 1930s are tossed around, there is a very real danger that America could succumb to the feeling that we no longer have the luxury of worrying about distant lands, now that we are confronted with a "real" problem that actually affects the lives of all Americans. As we consider whether various bailout plans help Main Street as well as Wall Street, the subtext is that both are much more important to Americans than Haifa Street.

One problem with this emotion is that it ignores the sequel to the Great Depression — the rise of militaristic Japan marked by the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, and Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, both of which resulted in part from economic dislocations spreading outward from the U.S. The inward-focus of the U.S. and the leading Western powers (Great Britain and France) throughout the 1930s allowed these problems to metastasize, ultimately leading to World War II.

Is it possible that American inattention to the world in the coming years could lead to a similarly devastating result? You betcha.

A couple of things to note: Mr. Kagan doesn’t express a preference for either Obama or McCain. Of course, folks likely to vote for McCain are more likely to agree with him that security overrides such considerations as the economy. Democrats love it when the economy is the one thing on the table; just ask James Carville. And of course, I’ve had arguments with bud here about the relative importance of foreign affairs vs. the domestic economy. He thinks the economy is everything, and to me it’s less important (not to mention simply being something I hate to spend time talking or thinking about, because it has to do with money).

And, yeah — I trust McCain more on national security. At the same time, I don’t think Obama would be all that bad. Yes, he continues to insist upon being wrong about Iraq. But I think he has calculated that he has to be consistent there; his views on the rest of the world aren’t nearly as MoveOn.orgish.

But set all that aside, and the main thing I’m saying here is that I agree with Mr. Kagan: For us we turn inward fretting over our pocketbooks at the expense of ignoring our proper role in the world would be extraordinarily dangerous. Yeah, we can do both. But not the economy at the expense of international security.

Helen Alvaré on Obama and abortion

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Tomorrow, I plan to write a column for Sunday about how the remarks of the candidates on judicial selection in the third debate solidified my preference for John McCain, on several levels.

It won’t be about the abortion issue. Obviously, Obama and I disagree about abortion. But so do most Democrats, and I’ve supported plenty of Democrats in my day. What I plan to get into is the less emotional aspects of that debate, those that deal with bipartisanship, pragmatism, the Constitution and the proper roles of the respective branches of government. For instance, as I’ve mentioned here, I was rather shocked to hear a Harvard-trained attorney equate the inferred (and I believe, nonexistent) "right to privacy" to the all-important First Amendment, deliberately stating that the first is just as sacrosanct a principle to him as the latter.

Here’s my text from which I’ll be working. It’s this passage from the transcript of the third presidential debate:

SCHIEFFER: All right. Let’s stop there and go to another question. And this one goes to Senator McCain. Senator McCain, you believe Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Senator Obama, you believe it shouldn’t.

Could either of you ever nominate someone to the Supreme Court who disagrees with you on this issue? Senator McCain?

MCCAIN: I would never and have never in all the years I’ve been there imposed a litmus test on any nominee to the court. That’s not appropriate to do.

SCHIEFFER: But you don’t want Roe v. Wade to be overturned?

MCCAIN: I thought it was a bad decision. I think there were a lot of decisions that were bad. I think that decisions should rest in the hands of the states. I’m a federalist. And I believe strongly that we should have nominees to the United States Supreme Court based on their qualifications rather than any litmus test. Now, let me say that there was a time a few years ago when the United States Senate was about to blow up. Republicans wanted to have just a majority vote to confirm a judge and the Democrats were blocking in an unprecedented fashion.

We got together seven Republicans, seven Democrats. You were offered a chance to join. You chose not to because you were afraid of the appointment of, quote, "conservative judges."

I voted for Justice Breyer and Justice Ginsburg. Not because I agreed with their ideology, but because I thought they were qualified and that elections have consequences when presidents are nominated. This is a very important issue we’re talking about.

Senator Obama voted against Justice Breyer [sic -- he meant Alito] and Justice Roberts on the grounds that they didn’t meet his ideological standards. That’s not the way we should judge these nominees. Elections have consequences. They should be judged on their qualifications. And so that’s what I will do.

I will find the best people in the world — in the United States of America who have a history of strict adherence to the Constitution. And not legislating from the bench.

SCHIEFFER: But even if it was someone — even someone who had a history of being for abortion rights, you would consider them?

MCCAIN: I would consider anyone in their qualifications. I do not believe that someone who has supported Roe v. Wade that would be part of those qualifications. But I certainly would not impose any litmus test.

SCHIEFFER: All right.

OBAMA: Well, I think it’s true that we shouldn’t apply a strict litmus test and the most important thing in any judge is their capacity to provide fairness and justice to the American people.

And it is true that this is going to be, I think, one of the most consequential decisions of the next president. It is very likely that one of us will be making at least one and probably more than one appointments and Roe versus Wade probably hangs in the balance.

Now I would not provide a litmus test. But I am somebody who believes that Roe versus Wade was rightly decided. I think that abortion is a very difficult issue and it is a moral issue and one that I think good people on both sides can disagree on.

But what ultimately I believe is that women in consultation with their families, their doctors, their religious advisers, are in the best position to make this decision. And I think that the Constitution has a right to privacy in it that shouldn’t be subject to state referendum, any more than our First Amendment rights are subject to state referendum, any more than many of the other rights that we have should be subject to popular vote.

OBAMA: So this is going to be an important issue. I will look for those judges who have an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through.

I won’t get into the right or wrong about abortion per se in my column except to acknowledge that yes, I’m pro-life, so there’s a fundamental disagreement there, and I think Roe has been enormously destructive to the politics of our nation. Then I’ll move on to the more abstract stuff, where I believe I will make points that someone should be able to relate to regardless of their position on abortion itself.

Other Catholics have taken on the ethical issue head-on, however, and are actively appalled at the idea of a "President Obama." A few minutes ago, I got an op-ed submission from Helen Alvaré, as follows:

(Helen Alvaré was the planning and information director for the pro-life efforts of the nations’ Catholic bishops for 10 years. She is now an Associate Professor at the George Mason University School of Law. The opinions expressed herein are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of either of these institutions)

My name has been closely associated with Catholic Church pro-life efforts for almost two decades. For that reason, and because I believe ardently that religion cannot be reduced to politics, I have studiously avoided public commentary about particular candidates over the course of 18 years of pro-life work. It still offends me at three or four levels when a minivan sporting a political bumper sticker arrives at carpool at my kids’ Catholic school, or parks for Sunday Mass. I will not have one.

But Barack Obama has pushed me over the edge of anonymity. Whatever else is true about the dangers of appearing to claim (wrongly) that God has a horse in this race, it is more dangerous to pretend that I’m less than horrified at the prospect of an Obama presidency.

For here is a man who has publicly thrown his considerable influence behind the idea that it is acceptable to let newborn infants die if their mothers wanted an abortion and the child was mistakenly delivered alive. Here is a man who can countenance doctors partially-delivering living unborn children, and then stabbing, suctioning and crushing their heads – all in the name of preserving “abortion rights.” His public record is unambiguous in this regard, despite attempts by the some to torture the meanings of Senator Obama’s voting record. The facts are simple. While an Illinois state senator, Senator Obama led the opposition to a law that would have protected children who were accidentally born alive after an abortion-attempt. He also worked with the nation’s leading chain of abortion clinics, Planned Parenthood, to strategize the defeat of bills that would have given parents information about their minor girls’ abortions. As a U.S. Senator, he denounced an overwhelmingly popular law to ban the killing of partially-born infants. And as a presidential candidate, he told Planned Parenthood’s Action Fund on July 17, 2007 that the “first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” For emphasis, he repeated: “That’s the first thing I’d do.” This is overwhelming on its face. Among all the first statements about the meaning of his historic presidency a President Obama could choose, it would be this: an expanded abortion license.

What can be made of such a man? It is no good to say he is simply acting to champion women’s rights when most American women would outlaw or more stringently regulate abortion (New York Times, April 19, 2007 Megan Thee, Public Opinion on Abortion). Or when even Obama concedes the possibility that abortion is killing, which of course makes it a forbidden “means” to any end – woman’s rights or any other. He cynically leaves it to others at a higher “pay grade” to determine the exact moment when life begins, but we all know the instrumental purposes of this utterance: appear to maintain common ground with both sides of the ever-churning abortion debate.

Some readers will say of my position: “She is a single-issue voter, and those people don’t care what becomes of the rest of us.” To the exact contrary, I am suggesting that when Obama supports allowing a parent to kill a child, at perhaps the most defenseless moment of his or her life, and when he refuses to see this killing as an intrinsic wrong, but calls it rather a cherished right, we should understand that none of us is safe. For where does his “reasoning” leave other defenseless persons? What does it imply about all of the decisions a “President Obama” will make?

Some will say that the good Obama will do for some people simply outweighs the harm he will do to others. Even this calculus is absurd; Obama’s judicial appointments will ensure that legalized abortion continues to be forced upon every state, as it has been since 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court in one fell swoop overturned laws against most abortions in every state in the Union. We’re talking millions more abortions during our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children. Obama has even declared himself opposed to continued funding for “crisis centers” offering pregnant women a way to support the children they wish to keep.

But even were the above calculus somehow measurable and correct, it is never acceptable to endorse killing as a means to any end. By endorsing it, then, candidate Obama has demonstrated that he doesn’t have a conscience that functions in a way Americans should even recognize. Rather, his is a “conscience” which surely comprehends what it must be like to die violently, or by means of starvation and dehydrations; yet he votes to allow these to continue. Elevating such a man to the most important legal and social bully pulpit in the nation is unthinkable. Worse, it is a national tragedy.

For these reasons, and for the first time in my life, I have to speak out. An Obama presidency would be a moral nightmare.

.
Professor Helen Alvaré is an Associate Professor of Law at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia.

I certainly understand where Ms. Alvaré is coming from on this, even though I’m going to be tackling this from another angle.

Personally, I haven’t been as shocked by Obama’s positions on this as she is. I say, you want to be shocked? Look at Joe Biden. He’s a Catholic; he should know better. And yet, as I’ve said plenty of times before, I like Joe. And I’m not horrified by the idea of an Obama presidency, he is after all my strong second choice. But pieces such as this make me wonder about myself: Maybe I’ve allowed myself to accept too much about the "political realities" of being a Democrat in America. There is an alternative — pro-life Democrats such as Bob Casey in Pennsylvania DO get elected nowadays, even with NARAL fighting tooth and nail to stop them. Obama and Biden have a moral alternative. So what excuses their position, from my own Catholic point of view?

But that’s not what my column’s going to be about.

South of the Border

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Some of y’all really hated it that I mentioned the Colombian Free Trade Agreement in the McCain endorsement — which to me illustrates the no-win situation I saw myself in with all those loyal and devoted Obamaphiles out there. Nice people, many of them, but hard to please if you don’t agree with them.

If I had just cited the usual reasons — being right on Iraq, taking a stand on doing the right thing on immigration, being a war hero, etc. — I would have been castigated for lack of original thought. So I decided to include something you might not have thought of — and something that actually helped confirm my preference for McCain — as a way of broadening the discussion. Perhaps predictably, I got the obvious response from those determined to find fault: Obviously you don’t have any good reasons, since you drag this out of left field.

No win situation.

Doug mentions back on this post that The Economist has endorsed Obama. Well, a couple of days ago I was reading something in The Economist that reminded me of why the Colombian FTA is important to me, but also why y’all might have trouble understanding that.

Blame it on my upbringing — or part of it, anyway. I spent two years, four-and-a-half months — easily the longest I lived in one place growing up — living in Guayaquil, Ecuador. From late 1962 through spring 1965. Like Obama in Indonesia, I saw a lot during that time that most nine-to-11 year olds growing up in the States don’t see. For instance, I was not only there during a military coup, but I was in the house at the time during when the plot was being hatched, at least in part. Our landlord was a captain in the Ecuadorean Navy, and my parents had left me at the landlord’s house while they went out one day. While I was there, a man came to visit the captain; they went into a room and closed the door. The next day, the president had been put on a plane to Panama, the man who had come to visit was a member of the new military junta, and our landlord had a big post in the new government. Minister of Agriculture, I think.

My guitar teacher, who had a little shop down by the waterfront where he made his own guitars by hand, was an agent for U.S. Naval Intelligence, I would later learn. And the missionary who preached at the nondenominational English-language services we attended on Sunday was working for the CIA. But not everyone was running things or plotting to run things. I remember the men who squatted in a circle in the dust of the vacant lot near our duplex as they bet on the cockfight in the center of their circle. I remember the smell of REAL poverty, the Third World kind, that arose from the poorest barrios of the city. It was different, very different, from living in this country.

I also remember people who were there working for JFK’s Alliance for Progress program. And ever since I came back in 1965, I’ve been acutely conscious of the fact that most of my fellow Americans just don’t give a damn one way or the other about these countries in their own backyards. JFK was the last.

This cultural indifference is definitely reflected in the mass media. So it is that I have to turn to such publications as The Economist to find out what’s going on in the realm of the Monroe Doctrine. It’s weird. Anyway, I got to thinking about that when I read this piece in The Economist the other day. It was about the irony that folks in Latin America seem to prefer Obama, even though it’s McCain who cares about the region enough to learn about it:

OF THE two candidates in the American presidential election, it is John McCain who knows something about Latin America. Not only was he born in Panama, he also visited Colombia and Mexico in July. He thinks the United States should ratify a free-trade agreement with Colombia and, at least until it became politically toxic, wanted to reform immigration policy. Ask him who the United States’ most important friends around the word are and he pretty quickly mentions Brazil.

And yet if they had a vote, Latin Americans, like Europeans, would cast it for Barack Obama—though without much enthusiasm. Preliminary data from the latest Latinobarómetro poll, taken in 18 countries over the past month and published exclusively by The Economist, show that 29% of respondents think an Obama victory would be better for their country, against only 8% favouring Mr McCain. Perhaps surprisingly, 30% say that it makes no difference who wins, while 31% claim ignorance. Enthusiasm for Mr Obama is particularly high in the Dominican Republic (52%), Costa Rica, Uruguay and Brazil (41%). In Brazil, six candidates in this month’s municipal elections changed their names to include “Barack Obama” in them.

In the third presidential debate, I noticed two things (well, I noticed a lot of things, but two things related to this post): That McCain had cared enough to understand what it meant to support a trade agreement with a key ally in the region — an agreement that could only be good for this country in terms of trade and jobs, and which affirmed a country that had undertaken huge sacrifices to ally itself with U.S. interests. That was the first thing. The second was that Obama seemed not even to have scratched the surface of the issue. His answer was such Big Labor boilerplate, it seemed plain that he had not looked into the issue or thought about it beyond his party’s talking points.

To me, that spoke to things that were true about the two candidates in a broader sense — experience, and the ability to differentiate between our friends in the world and those who wish us, and their own people, ill. I had been deeply impressed by the recent piece Nicholas Kristof — a guy who almost certainly will vote for Obama — had done on this issue, and the degree that Obama’s answer utterly failed to look at the issue as knowledgeably and thoughtfully as Kristof had. And as McCain had.

I sat and talked to Ted Sorensen about Obama as the heir to Camelot, and was deeply impressed. But I’ve gathered since then that aura aside, Obama seems actually less likely to take the kind of interest in Latin America that Kennedy did. McCain is more likely to do so. Ironic, huh?

So to me it was more than, here’s a little esoteric fact I know and you don’t. To me, it mattered. But to me, South America has always mattered.

The Flame of Alaska?

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The things you learn about candidates from reading their books. Despite the length of those columns I wrote after reading Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s chronicles of their early years, obviously there was much I didn’t have room to get into, including a lot of stuff that each candidate’s respective detractors like to point to.

Obama had his dope-smoking years, a period of rebellion in which I think he was self-consciously trying to emulate Malcolm X in his wild, self-destructive period — although being careful not to go too far, of course. (We both read the Autobiography in high school in Hawaii. I found it interesting; Obama saw it briefly as a guide to being a "black man in America," something he had to practice to learn.)

John McCain, having been a Naval Aviator, was less inhibited. He had Marie, the Flame of Florida. And others; that name just stood out. She apparently was an exotic dancer who performed for the fliers at Trader John’s, their favorite Pensacola after-hours locale. Ensign McCain dated her for awhile. She was "a remarkably attractive girl with a great sense of humor." He made the mistake once of taking her on an impulse to a party given by a married officer. (The single junior officers seldom socialized with the married couples. There was a good reason for this.) She was "a good sport" about it, but was clearly out of place among the Eastern Establishment-educated wives:

The young wives she was about to meet would be decorously attired and unfailingly genteel. Marie was dressed somewhat flamboyantly that evening, as was her custom.
… Marie sensed that the young wives, while certainly not rude to her, were less than entirely at ease in her presence. So she sat silent, not wishing to impose on anyone or intrude in the conversations going on around her. After a while, she must have become a little bored. So, quietly, she reached into her purse, withdrew a switchblade, popped open the blade, and, with a look of complete indifference, began to clean her fingernails.
… A short time later, recognizing that our presence had perhaps subdued the party, I thanked our hosts for their hospitality, bid goodbye to the others, and took my worldly, lovely Flame of Florida to dinner.

I like that line, "as was her custom…"

Kathleen Parker believes the crusty old sailor who once romanced the Flame of Florida had a similar motivation for choosing Sarah Palin — another remarkably attractive girl with a great sense of humor — to go with him to the party those Republican stiffs held up in St. Paul. Only this time, the date was the hit of the party. They particularly liked the part where she took out her switchblade and sliced and diced the Community Organizer with it.

But perhaps we’re reading too much into this.

You, too, can use irony — no experience required

39 Replies

Wow. As cool as Barack Obama is — and he IS cool, all the time — some of his supporters are VERY emotional.

Two of them — Jennifer and Pam — got so worked up by my very mild use of irony on this previous post (referring to their guy as "The One") that they mistook me for a Republican. To wit:

I don’t understand why Republicans continue to call Senator Obama
"The One" – none of his supporters has ever used that term. Why do you
rely on mocking the man and spreading lies about him? Is it maybe
because you are obviously wrong on the issues? Crawl back into your
caves, please, and let us get to work cleaning up another one of your
messes.

Posted by: Jennifer Mullen | Oct 29, 2008 9:13:15 PM

_____________________________________

When a party has no good ideas or solutions you slander your
opponent. Just like Brad , you know " the one " comment. The consistent
theme from the RNC and the McCain campaign is fear and hate . And ,
this paper’s editorial board enforces that theme. Sad to think that
some in this state are unable to look to the future .

Posted by: pam,greenwood | Oct 30, 2008 9:58:27 AM

Talk about letting emotion override the higher faculties…

p.m., thanks for pointing out the painfully obvious:

Jennifer, Oprah Winfrey introduced Obama as "The One" years ago. I
have seen the videotape. If you would Google it, you could probably
find it….

Posted by: p.m. | Oct 29, 2008 10:43:00 PM

Yes, I got the thing about "The One" from that font of Republican bile, Oprah… We "Republicans" always go to her for our marching orders, talking points, swastika armbands, etc.

Folks, where are we when we can’t even use the smallest bits of irony in our public discourse without somebody getting all offended?

Come on, folks — Phillip gets it. He’s for Obama, and he can josh about the cheesiness:

Naturally, my biggest complaint was the syrupy Saving-Private-Ryan-ish background music.

Posted by: Phillip | Oct 30, 2008 4:40:54 AM

And I didn’t even notice the music — leave it to Phillip; he’s our music guy. I just noticed the cheesy set, which someone was careful to make ALMOST exactly like the Oval Office, but enough unlike it to allow for plausible deniability. I mean, LOOK at it, people. Now that’s artistry.

Folks, cheesy is cheesy. Joe the Plumber — cheesy. Pandering with a gas tax cut — cheesy. Picking Sarah Palin — cheesy (although, to quote from the movie Phillip cites, I find myself "strangely attracted…"). Maverick this, maverick that — cheesy.

Now, you Obama supporters — make some ironic comments about your guy. Come on, you can do it. Look, this guy’s going to be the president, and I just won’t be able to stand four years of y’all being so deadly earnest. Loosen up.

My biggest hit ever: McCain on ‘that little jerk’ Graham

8 Replies

The kind words some of y’all offered about my video on this last post — which featured Lindsey Graham talking about Sarah Palin — reminded me of something I noticed just the other day.

Remember how I used to bore y’all with my Top Five Lists of which of my video clips were getting the most play on YouTube? Well, I sort of got out of the habit there for awhile (partly because I was tired of being depressed by the fact that three of my Top Five were clips of neoNazis at the State House), but the other day I looked, and lo and behold, the above clip from more than a year ago had come out of nowhere to top my list.

The last time I’d taken any notice of my stats, my top videos were at around 20,000 views. All of a sudden, the clip I shot in the Vista on the night of the first GOP presidential debate in South Carolina — way back in May 2007 (is it possible it was that long ago) — had shot up from nowhere to the top spot, at 45,000 views! It’s the one in which John McCain, standing on a podium with Henry McMaster and Bobby Harrell, looks out into the crowd and says,

… and I know that little jerk Lindsey Graham is around here somewhere.

Of course, being all about giving y’all the full story, I also posted the full, unedited context of that joke, in which McCain went on to say nice things about his buddy. But that context — which is sort of worth watching for the way my shaky handheld style captures the confusion and crowd excitement, although inadvertently — isn’t nearly as popular. It’s been viewed less than 1,000 times.

Obviously, on YouTube, brevity sells. So does irony.

One last note: I’m happy to say that my critically acclaimed "Who Resurrected the Electric Car?," probably my finest job of video editing ever (considering the low-res images I work with), stays in the number three spot at 28,000 views — right behind the not-so-acclaimed "Sieg Heil at the State House" and "Hillary’s Heckler."

Anyway, enjoy.

Brad Warthen

All The News That Gives You Fits