Coat Tails

I am liking Obama more the more I get to know him. But I would be lying to you if I did not admit to ulterior motives.

My primary one is seeing as many Democrats get elected as is humanly possible. Obama seems a far more appealing and less divisive figure than Clinton. Lots of Republicans have come to me to confess that they voted for him and intend to in the general election if he is the nominee. Most seem to both like him and dislike Clinton. The range of reasons WHY they dislike Clinton is dizzying. I will not dwell on them, but suffice it to say, she arouses powerful negative emotions in a surprisingly large section of the electorate. Some may vote for McCain in protest, some may just sit out the election, but it will be less favorable to us than running a candidate that people seem inclined to go out and vote for, to cross party lines to vote for, and to send lots of money to. Last night the list of individual donors to the Obama campaign crossed the One Million mark. The average of those donations has been $109. If one could tally up all the volunteers in the various primary states, the precinct captains, sometimes five or more in a precinct, the numbers compared to the other campaigns would be staggering. That's why Obama is going to win Texas and why he may also win Ohio.

But all of that just tells me something else. When Obama has been drawing more voters out of the woodwork to vote for him than vote in that same primary for ALL the Republican candidates combined, that looks extremely promising. When turnout exceeds any prior primary election in all of the states so far, something is going on. Yes, it is Clinton as well, but Obama seems to be drawing in apathetic and new voters, including independents and cross-over voters. What that means, I believe, is that in a general election many of those same primary voters, if not all of them, will find themselves in a voting booth with Obama on the ballot and a list of Democratic Party candidates further down the list. And a good percentage of those voters are likely to go ahead and vote for the Congressman or Senator in the same party as their candidate, in this case Obama. That's called coat tails. My sense is that if the election keeps powering along the way it has, those coat tails may be extremely long, long enough to permit a host of Democratic candidates to ride along on them in 2008. In this election cycle ALL of the Representatives are up for re-election. Democrats and Republicans alike. We enjoy a slight edge in Congress, my hunch is that will increase a good bit. In the Senate a third of the Senators are up for election in 2008, but more Republicans than Democrats, which means that we have more opportunity for pick-ups this year. If our candidate energizes the voters into coming out to vote. Obama seems to do a good job of that. I am not the only one to have this idea.

Arthur

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

(More from Uncle Bob concerning John McCain and his experience as a POW.)


I gave John McCain short shrift in my previous note, so here is more. My POW experience was nowhere near as excrutiating an ordeal as his. His lasted five and one half years, mine less than four. He was singled out for inhumane treatment bordering on torture which finally extracted a bogus confession which he took pains to bowdlerize so that all except his naive Communist interrogators would recognize it as bogus.

In contrast, I was a lowly Marine private, just one of the herd with no secrets to reveal to our captors, and was therefore never singled out for questioning.

To hint that McCain has been "brainwashed" or at least significantly mentally diminished by his POW experiences a la The Manchurian Candidate is a Hollywood scenario that would make a hell of a movie but has no connection with reality. McCain is no more "brainwashed" than I am.

"Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! (Hysterical laughter!)

Uncle Bob

From Uncle Bob

(Uncle Bob responds to questions raised by Arthur in earlier posts. For those of you who are new here, Uncle Bob is a retired Marine Sgt. Major, a Wake Island Defender, former Japanese POW, Vietnam Veteran, and a pretty interesting guy to listen to after a couple of brandies. We digress....)

I was twelve when Franklin Roosevelt began his first term in office and twenty-four when the only president I had ever known as a teenager and young adult finally succumbed to the wear and tear of the presidency and was laid to rest in Arlington.

He was revered by families like mine who had lost all due to the depression. My father went to work for FDR’s WPA to put food on the table for his family and probably would have voted for his sainthood if asked to do so.

An interesting footnote to all this is the fact that in the early months of his presidency, FDR pushed through Congress the so-called "Economy Act" which reduced the pensions of government retirees and the salaries of all servicemen by twenty percent, thus ensuring that when I enlisted in the Corps in 1939 my monthly stipend as a private was $21 instead of the $30 it should have been. But that was before FDR surrounded himself with advisers who embraced the John Maynard Keynes notion that "deficit financing" may become necessary to salvage a national economy tottering on the brink of bankruptcy and out the window went "pay as you go" government, eliciting frenzied editorial shrieks and caterwauls from the fiscally conservative Republican establishment, which seven decades later, in a supremely ironic turnaround, embraces the deficit financing of the Iraq war, which even if it ends this year, will have cost US taxpayers trillions of dollars they have not yet earned.

The record of Roosevelt’s early days in office prove that noone becomes president knowing how to be a president, and some never learn, as the current incumbent has proven in spades. After seven dreadful years (why did we attack Iraq, and why are we torturing dissidents?), impeachment is the only answer, Nancy Pelosi!

My reading of the political tea leaves indicates that an intellectually agile Barack Obama may inherit the Rooseveltian mantle, and if he does, I hope that he follows the Rooseveltian tradition of surrounding himself with experts in all the fields that he knows nothing about, which notwithstanding his supreme title as the new President of the United States of America, I hope he understands will be essentially everything.

Yes, I know. There are experts and then there are experts. Let us hope, for the survival of the nation as we know it and want it to be, that he chooses the right ones.

.........

Has John McCain been so emotionally tainted by his imprisonment as a POW that he is unfit to serve as President of the United States?

McCain, according to press reports, when things do not go his way, occasionally erupts in what I can only describe as "hissy fits." I do not think that this has anything, or very little, to do with his imprisonment as a POW. It’s just McCain letting off steam.

My friend, whose POW experiences were almost identical to mine, blames the Japanese for his subsequent emotional problems and distress. In my view, he would have had these problems no matter where he had been, but the Japanese were a handy excuse.

Sure, John McCain's view of the world have been changed by his experiences. So have mine. So have yours.

Uncle Bob

Arthur's Tuesday Notes

• Newt Gingrich is given credit for waging a semantic war on progressive politics. His inventions include calling it the "Democrat Party" instead of Democratic. To call Estate Tax "Death Tax" and so on. In the process the term "Liberal" was so often used in a negative context that it became a slur, rather than a description. Obama, whatever else he is, seems to have a better sense of how to attack that issue head on. It is a fight that is long overdue.
• When the election is over and people are tallying up inappropriate comments, this will be my nomination in the "funny, but inappropriate" department. From the Clinton campaign, after their New Hampshire victory (apparently through use of cattle prods) one Clinton staffer mused (to a reporter, which is a no-no) the following thoughts:
  "If you have a social need, you're with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you're young and you have no social needs, then he's cool."
• And here's the ultimate election spoiler: Diebold accidently announces the results of the 2008 election.

Arthur

Random Musings On a Stormy Sunday

I've spoken previously about my impressions of the Obama campaign, particularly commenting on their focus on outreach to donors, rather than just sending out e-mails or letters asking you to send more money. Another point worth making. If you have e-mail, they never send anything through the mail system. It all goes electronic. The tempo of e-mails is never intrusive or excessive. Maybe one every three or four days, at most, each very different from any previous one. Almost all of them suggesting things that one can do to help the campaign beyond just donating money. Very, very smart. People (opponents) speak of Obama building a "movement", usually in a dismissive tone of voice, as though that is somehow cheesy or not playing by grownup rules, and they are probably right.

I have heard people speak of this phenomena as unlike anything they have seen since the McCarthy era, or Bobby Kennedy. I do not recall either as having this character. What I am wondering is whether Uncle Bob can help us by comparing and contrasting this with FDR. It seems to me that may have been one of the last eras when there was a sense that the nation had a responsibility to unite and correct the terrible conditions spawned by the Depression. My wife hangs out a bit at a local coffee joint run by a remarkable lady who lived through hard times in San Diego before the war. She says things were so bad that that many families were housed in an enormous tent community. She speaks of getting rickets as a child and having a doctor who worked there as part of the public health system tell her family she needed to eat a lot of oranges to get over it. We don't think of ourselves as being a country in which people go hungry, or live in tent cities like refugee, or in which people are dangerously undernourished through lack of good food. But it was true then, and while hidden, sadly it remains true now. As with the effects of a poor education, the effects of poor nutrition as a child creates consequences that impact and impair that individual throughout their life. The effects can be both physical and mental. By some measures the effects of malnutrition can be seen in as much as a third of the world's population, and the breadth of those problems are likely to increase as populations increase during this century. The Bush administration(s), deeply in the thrall of fundamentalists who suspect Jesus may be due back any minute, have never been big on the idea of population control, fearing that it might lead to recreational sex, or thwart the destiny of the "unborn", or lead to abortions or promote licentiousness among the young. Meanwhile, the world's population, particularly in poor countries with marginal land resources, continues to grow beyond the ability of that land to support their populations.

And sadly, holding large rock concerts and sending food from overseas is not a sustainable solution to a structural problem within a given country. It certainly makes every one feel good and feel noble, but it fails to address the long term structural issues. Many of those issues may be impossible to solve, due to political impediments. Just like the impediments in our country. But at the very least we can get our own house in order before we lecture other nations. We can, if we have the political and moral will to do it, create a better and more egalitarian society. Will Barack Obama, one man, be able to do it all by himself? Impossible. Even if he has the will to do so, and is able to engage large sections of our population, is it possible? It would still be a stretch, but that a task may be out of reach is no reason not to attempt it. Of the candidates running for President in 2008 he seems the most likely to accomplish something. Instead of nothing, or worse, which I think will be seen as the true legacy of the Bush administration. 19% approval rating. That was similar to the approval rating of General Musharaff just before his political party lost the parliamentary elections by 230 to 40. I personally can think of an entire list of Republican foot-soldiers and camp followers that I would like to see be driven into the political wilderness. And there are a host of them that I just haven't paid much attention to. If, as I suspect, Obama is the nominee, and if he is not killed during the campaign by a crazed racist seeking to create chaos and race war, I am inclined to think that Obama will have long, long coat tails. It has been a long time since we have seen a Democratic President in office with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a comfortable margin in the House.

By coincidence, here is the Obama campaign sending out a list of the things you might want to read, watch, discuss, make phone calls to support, oh... and maybe even donate to, so that they can reach their goal of a million donors. It is sad that the campaigns are often judged by the media by how much money they can raise. Or from how many donors. But that is the world we live in, those are the childish measures by which political campaigns are judged to either be relevant or irrelevant. We need to work to change that, but during this campaign we must work with what we have. A donation of even as little as a dollar serves to add another "donor" to the list edging toward a million (it is currently in the low 900,000s) and this is the only funds appeal that you are ever going to hear from me. For as little as a dollar, or whatever feels comfortable, you will also have the opportunity to see what I have been seeing, which is outreach a political organization that appears to be rewriting the rules. Without exaggeration, I think after a couple of weeks you will begin to see the same thing I am seeing, that something quite unusual is happening.

And since the media seems to be composed of well-dressed sheep, bleating in harmony as they prostrate themselves before power, the numbers of donors will drive them into paroxysms of delight and wonder. To see the news pundits turn themselves into fools in public and struggle to explain what part of the Republican "message" has gone so terribly wrong this years... well hey, that's a sight that's got to be worth a buck or two, right?

p.s. I have heard a number of Republicans recently say that they think McCain is not quite right in the head, which they think is a consequence of his long imprisonment. Again, I would defer to Uncle Bob in that regard, though I think Bob would tell us that McCain's experience was by far the harsher of the two. Am I right? Does terribly harsh imprisonment lead to emotional damage? Or is McCain just a Republican?

Arthur

(Bad Hat Alert: The Clinton campaign is winding down. Click here. For an update on the Obamma campaign, click here. )

Texas Is On Fire

This pattern of early voting, in wide margins Democratic, is strongly suggestive of a shift in political winds. My youngest son is in college in Austin. I have a cousin in Midland, actually a couple of them. A lot of folks in Texas have been voting Republican because there were a lot of Republican candidates from Texas. Seemed like a good idea, but not so good right now. Particularly to young folks. The polling place was moved to seven miles from the Texas A&M campus, to keep those damn liberal agriculture and mining students from voting. The students organized a march of two thousand students who walked seven miles down the highway with signs to the polling place so they could vote early. Probably not for the local political machine.

The odd Tom DeLay redistricting ploy in 2002 produced districts that in this election will award disproportionate numbers of delegates to Obama. Who could have seen that one coming? If Clinton loses in Texas, her race is over. If Obama really does raise $50 million in February he will have raised more than John McCain has during the entire primary season. That bodes well for Obama being able to raise more than enough money to stay competitive in any state he wants to contest in the general election. Personally, I'd like to see him advertise even in safe GOP seats, just to improve his overall popular vote count. That matters to people in regard to building a sense of consensus.

I don't want to knock Clinton when she is on the ropes. But there is one point that has been nagging at me. Yes, Clinton did try to get some sort of universal health coverage for all Americans. But what was the result? The situation now is far worse than then. I am not saying that she personally made it worse, but rather that her efforts misfired so badly that they did not serve to put the brakes on the path to where we are now.

Meanwhile oil has topped $100 a barrel, gold it at $945 an ounce, headed toward $1,000/oz. What that means is that our currency has been significantly devalued. What that also means is that other nations are going off the dollar standard and on to Euros or Yen. Not good news for our economy.

Arthur

McCain

McCain might be able to claim that he did not actually have sex with that Lobbyist woman, that since he often was in bed with lobbyists, that doing so doesn't really mean anything. There are some interesting statistics in this article. I definitely want to elect the Democratic Party candidate who can independently raise stacks of money (Obama) so he can stand up to the corporate money flowing in to the other (dark) side. This is shaping up as an interesting election campaign, for an entire host of reasons.

By the way, if you watch the last of the debate last night, watch during Clinton's moving rendition of a John Edwards speech, that he delivered during an earlier debate. Clinton's reading of it was even better than Edwards'. But did she give credit to Edwards, as she was all over Obama for not doing? Nope, not a word. Watch Obama while she is doing that. He is not a happy man. In fact, I would argue that his body language says he is furious. He had just been raked over the coals on national TV and accused of being nothing more than a "xerox". Mere minutes later, there is Clinton delivering a purloined speech, almost... yes, almost as though she hoped that he would explode on camera. It didn't work, if that was what she and her advisors hoped for. She had a nice speech, but my sense is that she hoped for much, much more. But just as that particular speech served as a swan song for John Edwards, it may well signal the start of her farewell tour. It was interesting to see how Obama acts when he is tired, is said to have a cold, and someone tries to blindside him. He seemed very rigid for about five minutes, then appeared able to shake it off. That works.

And all through the evening Clinton smiled that amazing stainless- steel smile, a facial mannerism intended to convey confidence, radiance, high spirits, warmth and good humor, but in the end, signifying... nothing.

She is a hell of a campaigner. They both are. I am feeling good about the general election, though it will get very, very strange before it is over. Racist stuff, anti-Moslem stuff, zenophobia, fear, fear-mongering, attack ads, false claims, phony bimbo eruptions, lies, fake national crises, avuncular statements about the "grave threats" to America if Democrats are elected. All sort of Big Brother, version 1.2b. If you want to see what Orwell envisioned, stay tuned.

Obama is running the smartest political campaign I have ever seen. The Edwards campaign was just... ineffective. Nice guy, valuable discussion of the gulf between rich and poor, an important voice in the early campaign. But do you want to see a campaign with legs? Donate as little as one dollar to the Obama campaign and you are in for an education in what can be done with even the most minimal contact from a voter. They reach out to ask your opinion, to engage you in writing to super-delegates, to donate, to make a pledge to match the donation of a first time donor, then they put you in touch with that new donor so you can bond. Then they ask you to come and work in the office and make calls to Ohio, to stuff envelopes, to call donors, to... and the list goes on. They don't just tell you all about what THEY are doing, they tell you about what they need you to help make happen. It takes both the donations and the interest on the part of a voter and grabs them and gives them a job. That multiplies their donation ten-fold. Seriously, send them one dollar, or five dollars, and you'll see. You can unsubscribe, but I think you will find, as I have, that it is fascinating to watch one of the cleverest people-based political machines I ever hope to see in operation, as it increasingly looks as though history is being made. Oh, stuff can always go wrong. Nothing is certain. But crossing a street has a risk, too. And I agree with Obama's base premise, we are badly in need of a major change right now. Being stupid is not charming, nor good governance.

Oh... and cozying up to a herd of lobbyists is not a sign of character.

Arthur