Good Governor News, For Once

Tim Kaine, the former Governor of Virginia, is tapped by Obama to run the DNC (one governor out, one governor in, I suppose). I like Tim Kaine, although I wouldn't call him 'charismatic' by any means (his eyebrow is certainly worth a few laughs).

What does this mean? Not too much, as Matthew Yglesias points out--the President is the head of the party.

The importance of the appointment, however, seems to me to be the fact that Virginia is a success story for the Democrats. First Tim Kaine wins governor; then Mark Warner goes on to be a popular governor, then Jim Webb becomes senator. Each of these three are Democrats, but they're Democrats in a different mold than coastal dems like Pelosi or Reid. The utter disdain that Republicans can address Red State voters when saying "Pelosi" or "Reid" doesn't seem to have the same traction if you toss it against Kaine, Warner, or Webb. Each of these men have grasped a balance of toughness and compassion that will do well for the Democrats; how to cast the Democratic message and make it popular in a state which, a decade ago, was firmly red.

We'll see if this mindset works out. Saxby Chambliss, for instance, had a much tougher race in Georgia than most other Southern congressmen. Do I think this means Democrats will eventually dominate the nation? No. But I think we may be entering a less regionalized era of politics. For a short period, we're gonna have more swing states to go round, more swing districts. And Tim Kaine might be the man to put some states back into play that weren't in play before

Burris And Franken COLLIDE

Democrats are threatening not to seat Burris. Constitutional questions persist.

Republicans are threatening to filibuster the vote to seat Franken (when Coleman's ridiculous opposition to his seating finally fails).

These two events are not disparate. Republicans are going to let Franken sit once Democrats allow Burris to sit--on the same rationale (they were picked by the legal process, so let it happen). If Democrats cave, so as to allow Franken to sit, it will feel like a Democratic victory (they get two Democratic senators rather than risking losing both Franken and Burris), but will really be a Republican victory (seating Burris might look like it damages Democratic legitimacy).

This Republican strategy doesn't seem to me like it'll work. It'll basically ask Republicans to go against two instances of Democracy (in one, opposing a special election in favor of an appointment; in the other, trying to invalidate an election as certified by the process). Furthermore, the odds are that at least two Republicans are going to think this strategy is cheap and political (Specter? Snow?), and Democrats will be able to override the filibuster--so they have no reason to cave on Burris. Let's just hope that they know that.

Colin Powell And The GOP's Future

A response to KevDog at Beautiful Futility:

I wasn’t one of those who cracked on the man for the U.N. speech. I think he was more deceived than duplicitous. The Frontline special Bush’s War makes a good case for exactly how pissed Powell was by what happened.

More recently, I think that he has been one of the leading voices of reason (sorry, Andrew) on the ills of the GOP. As a Democrat, I hope they don’t take his advice. There does need to be an opposition party, but the Republican party as it is currently formed needs to go the way of the Whigs.

A) As to Powell: I am simply disappointed that at no point he voiced his anger. I can’t remember where exactly it was sourced (The Daily Show poked fun at it), but when he received the first draft of the UN Speech, he apparently threw it up in the air and shouted, “This is bullsh**.”

Furthermore, if you look at the Powell Doctrine of the use of force, it actually seems to me that even if you believe what the Bush Administration was putting forward during the lead-up to war, the war doesn’t qualify under his own guidelines. I have a huge respect for the Powell Doctrine, and it hurts that he didn’t stand up for it when it was tested.

He should have known that. He should have investigated the plans for a post-war Iraq, and as the Secretary of State he should have realized that there was no plan. As the head of the diplomatic corps, he should have understood that there would be a more complex situation in a post-war Iraq than “being greeted as liberators;” he should have mentioned the words “shi’ite and sunni.”

Maybe he didn’t know everything. But I remember Albert Speer, in his memoirs about his time as a Nazi, saying that although he didn’t know anything about the concentration camps, he was always ten minutes away from knowing, if he really wanted to know.

Contrast Colin Powell to General Eric Shinseki. Shinseki still didn’t go as far as I’d have liked in terms of vocalizing his belief in the misguided lead-up for war. But Shinseki did not back off on his statement that we would need more troops. Powell went out there and defended the planning for the war, for the post-war; he defended Bush as going to war “only as last resort.”

I think he was neither deceived nor duplicitous. I think he abdicated responsibility. And the responsibility was his. He should know the responsibility to soldiers that the Presidential Administration has.

B) You’re right that the Republican Party as it is currently composed should go the way of the Whigs. But Democrats will be worse off if the Republican Party doesn’t take Powell’s advice. As Obama understands, if you have a smart, organized opposition that its actually in conversation with you, your ideas will get /better/. The ideas that lose out are the ideas that should lose out. If we’re actually debating on the issues in a smart and informed way from two different perspectives, Democrats may not get what they want, but their progressive positions will be better served.

The same goes for the Republican Party. Conservativism will be better served when they understand how to communicate with liberal groups and find common ground. There was an article recently somewhere about the pro-life argument for Planned Parenthood–if only they would understand that PP seeks to reduce abortions, the way that the conservatives say they want, then they should support it. There will always be fringe liberals and fringe conservatives whose ideas won’t have a place, but the mainstream of conservative and liberal thinking should come together to constructively criticize each other and create better policies.

I like Democrats, but recently I saw an ad with Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich sitting on a couch, and Nancy Pelosi was telling the viewer to “Contact their Congressmen and tell them to support legislation against climate change.” And my first instinct was: “What the hell are YOU doing? Aren’t you the head of the House? Isn’t that your job? who exactly is running this boat?” Democrats have a lot of sins that I think a strong, sane Republican party can help wash out of them.

On Rahmbo

Now, before I talk about Rahm Emanuel's appointment to the position of Chief of Staff, I'd like to point out that I'm 20 years old. I started really following politics after 9/11, at the age of 13, so much of the Clinton Administration really is "before-my-time." He's the President I came of age under. My family has very strong support from him. I had a more idealized image of who he was back then; since then, I've had my impressions of him moderated. I still respect his Presidency: I think he struck a tone of bipartisanship and, on a number of issues, left a lasting positive change. On issues like NAFTA and Yugoslavia, I think President Clinton will be remembered well. It is highly unfortunate that his own personal failures overshadowed the Administration's vision and successes.

That being said, Rahm Emanuel is part of that team, but at the time he was there, I was never in any way aware of what he did. I didn't, at the time, know what the Chief of Staff did; I assumed it was just a sort of secretarial position. I was, remember, less than 13.

Well, since then, I've learned a lot about government (and watched a lot of West Wing). But I still don't have the same insights on members of Clinton's administration, except from what I've read in hindsight; looking back.

That's how I'm learning about Rahm Emanuel, aka "Rahmbo." I had heard his name bandied about with consternation by the right wing; now that he is the Chief of Staff I've read the stories of him stabbing things, giving people rotten fish. It sounds like he has an incredible wrath. Will he listen? Will he be the bipartisan man to bring about Obama's agenda? Will he really prove the counterpoint to Nancy Pelosi?

I'm concerned.

I do have to say one thing though. It's encouraging that man who shares a background that is to a certain extent similar to mine has a career in politics. I hope I'm not a divisive figure.

The Independent Voter

Megan McArdle:

Every time we have an election, the partisans confuse the fact that the independents disliked the opposition candidate, with the idea that the independents joined their party. The independents did not want to stomp the Democrats in 2004, and they do not want to stomp the Republicans now. They are not interested in advancing the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party, any more than they were preparing to hand the Republicans a "permanent majority" in 2004. And when the various parties act as if it is so--as if the independents had actually voted to join their power-hungry two-minutes-hate, rather than voting for the guy they thought would best shelter them from the vicissitudes of fate . . . well, for the last few elections, they've had their asses handed to them on a silver platter two years later.

Yes. McArdle's original point was that partisans take such an election to be a broad mandate for the destruction of the other party. I agree with her on that point: just because Republicans have been handed electoral defeat does not mean the independent voters want their destruction, are stomping them out.

In order for independent voters to be satisfied one way or the other, one basic thing must happen: they must be satisfied that one guy is better than the other guy.

Now, if one guy sounds like the guy who's in power, and people are unhappy at the people in power, that guy will probably lose. But, the other guy has to show that he is going to be better. So: loser must be shown to be bad, and winner must be shown to be better.

I mean, that's basically the heart of the election. John McCain did not manage to distinguish himself enough with Bush, and Barack Obama managed to convince people that he (despite inexperience and, for some people, despite race) would be better.

That's what happened. And ironically enough, the catch-word in this election was change. Not just from the Republican Party (which is what I loathed about Dean's "Anyone But Bush" approach) but to something. And Change encapsulated changing the Democrats too--after all, the Democratic Congress was the one that set the record of unpopularity, beyond the Republican ones under Bush. Independent voters are very open to change. In four years from now, they may change back, if they feel like it.

What makes a party partisan is an ideology; ideology implies a long-term sense of history. Party partisans think they see into the future and see the past clearly; they think that an election is a referendum on ideology. How much of the actual debates, the actual campaign ads, etc. are actually devoted to the esoteric field of political philosophy? Not much. That is left to the politicians and the highly informed journalists; to the partisans and to the people who speak their language.

The independent voter, on the other hand, is looking at today's problems and looking at the candidate's in terms of today's solutions. That's why they're accused of having a short memory span; for instance, when John McCain made his talking points "earmarks" I think people looked at that and said, "Yeah, that's nice, but that's not today's problem." Terrorism as a concern came in at 8% because, well, only 8% of Americans are actually concerned about it at the moment. Duh. Today's problem is not terrorism: it's the economy. It's the Iraq War. It's health care.

In the year 2000, what were the problems on people's minds? I can't really point to anything specific over all. After all, we were still riding the gravy train. The result? A near 50-50 election. Why? Because it didn't really matter one way or the other. Now, if someone had sorted through the difference in Bush's ideology and Gore's ideology they would have probably come to a clear decision one way or the other. But most independent voters don't. That's what makes them independent.

Identity Politics

Today, in my Culture of Dissent class (taught by the inimitable Jan Urban, a Czech dissident from the Velvet Revolution and an excellent journalist in Bosnia, and Kosovo), we discussed the rather difficult question of why Communism proved to be popular.

The answer, from my point of view, is one having to do with the nature of identity in the 20th Century. There are many people who don't believe themselves to be very philosophical in their everyday life (philosophy being a very 'elite' passtime), but in point of fact, everyone has philosophical ideas and worldviews. And one of the big philosophical questions is, "Who am I? What is my identity?"

People base a surprising amount of their political convictions and idealisms based on who they think they are. For instance, one of the reasons that Americans have consistently voted for tax cuts for the wealthy is an array of polls which show that Americans consistently think that they are wealthier than they actually are (which corresponds to the way that they think they're thinner than they actually are).

We talked about the appeal of communism in the Industrial Revolution era. In order to understand it, you need to take a village-eye view of the change. The poor serfs, living in small rural communities, lived in an era with very little mobility. They were engaged in occupations passed down to them from generations, among a small community of people they knew. As the industrial revolution came to pass, serfdom was abolished: they were not necessary anymore. A vacuum formed, which sucked these serfs into the city. Suddenly they were in a huge community, much larger than themselves. Whatever they had previously been known for, through their family, was no longer a mark of identity. They passed by nameless and faceless masses everyday; they worked alongside nameless and faceless masses that did exactly what they did. There was no honor in their new work: they were (proverbially) just another cog in the machine; just another brick in the wall. They had been robbed of their identity, their purpose, and their security.

It was rather like going to a large college after being in a small high school.

At any rate, they needed a new identity. Communism provided that. It gave them a name for themselves: proletariat. It gave them a cause for their misery: bourgoisie. It told them that not only were the proletariat powerful, they were the single most powerful force of history: and that it was historically determined that they must succeed.

So, to turn to contemporary politics: during the Cold War, these identity politics broke apart into large dualisms: Communists and Capitalists on the world stage, and Democrats and Republicans on the American stage (note that third parties were still a noticeable force until World War Two). Ideology became, for one of the few times in American history, a primary source of identification: Democrats, Reds, Anti-Communists, Republicans, Socialists, Peaceniks, Hippies. All of these tags were ideological in nature. They gave people a sense of identity.

Today, these two grand coalitions seem more fractured. At least, the Republican camp seems to have split decisively into moderates, libertarians, neoconservatives, and social conservatives. A messy primary season filled with candidates who did not fully appeal to any of these groups (with the exception of Mike Huckabee for social conservatives and the Ron Paul movement for Libertarians) left people on the right with a lack of a sense of direction. Many of these people identified themselves as Republican strongly, without being on board with many of the actions or beliefs of other Republicans.

A big tip-off to me that this identity politics is coming apart? Obama has a large following of so-called Obamicans (Republicans for Obama). Notice, of course, that they are still calling themselves Republicans despite voting for Obama. I'm not necessarily saying that they aren't actually Republicans, but I'm noticing that their insistence is on defining themselves by a party affiliation which, in this election, may not be entirely accurate.

One of my favorite sayings to hear is "I've been a life-long Republican, but I'm considering voting Democrat." Notice the phrase "life-long." This is put forward as a positive, even though being a life-long Republican might imply that you've supported characters like George W. Bush, Nixon, or Reagan (in the same way that a life-long Democrat must have supported Carter, Dukakis, McGovern).

But this is the way people have previously identified themselves.

But with a hyper-specification of polls, there is a new level of identification going on. We hear it today on the news all the time. Demographics. Very small clusters of identity. How are middle-aged women going to vote? What about older men? Young black men in rural towns? These statistics can all be coallated. And apparently, they matter. And although women's groups have been condemning Palin since she was first put on the ticket, the latest poll shows that McCain has indeed spiked among women.

The question, I suppose, is whether we can move past identity politics. Barack Obama (in my opinion) has a way of addressing that. He appeals to people to vote not as Democrats, or Republicans, or as black and whites, but as Americans. This isn't just a trite slogan of identification: he's asking us to identify ourselves as America, and vote in such a way that doesn't just benefit my group or your group or any group, but benefits all of America.

And the question is: will it work.