Edgewise

Tonight's Democratic party primary debate...

...was as eloquent an argument as you're going to see for keeping the 2%ers out of at least the final primary debates. Dennis and Al are smart guys with a lot of interesting points to make, but really, right now, for just a minute or two, I was wishing they'd both shut up so I could get a chance to hear one of the two guys on that stage who still have a chance to compete in the upcoming presidential election: John Kerry and Larry King.

No, that's a cheap joke. But you see? You see? That's what Dennis and Al have done to my head -- they've made me go vaudeville. And for that I can never forgive.

Speaking of vaudeville, Jackie Mason was on the TV tonight, speaking for the Jews. And let me just say, as a Jew, that you haven't known suffering, the way my people have known suffering, until Jackie Mason represents your people on national TV.

Why biologists don't tend to vote Republican

In Pharyngula: This is never going to end...but once more into the breach. PZ Myers explains some of the "bias" against the political views of the current ascendant Republicans found in most university biology departments.

Meanwhile, Bush has endorsed a constitutional amendment to prevent gay marriage (and possibly civil unions - the language is unclear), choosing one of his subconstitutiencies (culture-war conservatives) over another (most gay Republicans). Intended as a wedge issue for the liberal-but-timid Democratic party, it seems to be pounding at least as wedge-y a wedge into a fissure on the right.

Proposed Santa amendment

So Bush has come out for an amendment banning gay marriage. Here's Kerry's line from today's news, unusually sharp and on point: "All Americans should be concerned when a president who is in political trouble tries to tamper with the Constitution of the United States at the start of his re-election campaign." Very nice thump.

Now I happen to be pro gay marriage. But even for those folks agin' it, can recent events in Massachusetts and San Francisco really be so alarming that it's time for the President to starting looking into revising our Constitution?

I'm pro gun control. I'm pro choice. I'm against prayer in school. And I'd be opposed to Constitutional amendments reinforcing any of these positions.

All that said, I have a daughter in kindergarten, see. It's a public school, see. And the things she tells me about -- the things that go on there every day are unbelievable. For example, there are these loudmouth 8-year olds in this school, and they're going around telling some of the 5- and 6-year olds that Santa isn't real. Like, at recess. We're Jewish, so this isn't a particularly huge crisis for my daughter. But still, I'm deeply troubled by all this. In fact: It's an outrage!

These are rogue 8-year olds. Smudgy kids with sinister intent. Something must be done. I'm therefore calling for a constitutional amendment making it a misdemeanor to tell a child under the age of 8 that Santa isn't real, unless you already know that the child in question already knows that Santa isn't real, or you have it on good authority that the kid's parents don't particularly want the kid to believe in Santa, in which case, just try to make sure you aren't overheard, alright? Alright.

(One quick aside here: if you're reading this, and you're a 7-year old who still believes in Santa, don't worry. Cecil's just kidding. Ha ha ha ha!)

All right then. So I've got the torches and pitchforks and a xerox of the Constitution and a big red pencil. Who's with me?!!

Five seconds inside Mel Gibson's brain

According this mini-bit from MSNBC, Mel Gibson was near-suicidal right up to the point he started making the Passion. Also, he's pretty sure his wife, a very religious Episcopalian who he says is a saint and a much better human being than him, will unfortunately be spending eternity in hell.

No disrespect meant to Mel, or to other folks who think his wife is going to hell. But the more I learn about him, the more he sounds like he really is that zany cop-with-nothing-to-lose from Lethal Weapon. And here I thought he was just a great actor.

Safire still blinded by Hillary

In a blog entry praising Safire's column in today's Times, Kaus nonetheless notes that Safire's main thesis is "insane."

I also couldn't help noting that his Hillary-paranoia has taken a new turn. He now says that the Clitonistas were hoping for a Dean debacle to clear the way for Hillary in 2008, but didn't he used to think that they had drafted Clark as some kind of a placeholder?

How can he hold so many inconsistent beliefs in his head at the same time? I guess as long as he can ascribe perverse Machiavellian motives to his favorite bêtes noires, he's happy.

How Kerry turned it around

The Philadelphia Inquirer has an insider's not-for-attribution look at the moment when the Kerry campaign hit bottom and then bet it all on Iowa - and won:

The low point of the campaign came on Nov. 10, a cold, rainy Monday in Iowa. The night before, Kerry had fired his campaign manager, Jim Jordan, in a staff shakeup that only reinforced the notion that the wheels were coming off his campaign.

...

At the end of the day, prompted by the vets to recite a poem, Kerry offered a near-perfect rendition of Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din, the story of an Indian water boy who died defending British soldiers.

"Din! Din! Din!" Kerry intoned the last stanza as his bus pulled into Cedar Rapids. "You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din! / Tho' I've belted you an' flayed you, / By the livin' Gawd that made you, / You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."

To some of those listening, Din was Dean, and the last line was an acknowledgment of a bitter political truth.

...

Kerry dusted off an old speech line that had been overruled when Jordan had pushed it during the earlier campaign quarrels. If Bush wanted to make the election about national security, Kerry boomed: "Bring it on!"

...

[Pollster Mark] Mellman had studied past campaigns, and he knew that 80 percent of the voters in New Hampshire primaries made their decisions after Jan. 1, many of them in the final days of the campaign. Iowa's caucuses were Jan. 19; the New Hampshire primary was Jan. 27. Mellman's polls in Iowa showed Kerry rising, tying Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt for second place and closing in on Dean.

"The fire lit by [Iowa's] caucuses will have huge repercussions for our campaign," he wrote in a memo for the meeting.

...

Kerry shortened his stump speech to a tight 10 to 15 minutes and, at every stop, he opened the floor to questions and urged voters to "grill" him. The sessions ran long as he tried to accommodate every query. It wrecked his schedule. Time and again he was forced to apologize for a late arrival. Then he'd stay and answer every question again.

...

"Sure it was a risk," Kerry said last week, reflecting on the Iowa strategy. But in a bit of post-election bravado, he added: "I never worried."

I know it's all very recent history and we just watched it unfold, but it's interesting to get this glimpse from inside the campaign.

Brutal brutal brutal

Right here -- a brutal brutal brutal editing job in Bush's state of the union (one year back, sounds like to me). Well worth your time.

We have the receipt

The father was seen as doing nothing to turn around a sluggish economy, and for that, he lost his job. The son learned a hard lesson and now no one can say he's been idle. Tax cut after tax cut. Spending program after spending program. And we all have the $500 billion dollar receipt to prove it. So fine, he's made an effort. But to what end?

Come November, if the economy is still sluggish and job growth still slim to none, the question has to be: what exactly did he buy with our money? Does this feel like a $500 billion dollar recovery to you? And if not, isn't getting the receipt and nothing to show for it one helluva lot worse than the sins of the father?

Our campaign, our message

On Sunday I'm running to be a delegate to the Democratic convention for Howard Dean. If we win 15% or more of the votes in the ninth congressional district, at least some of the delegates from our slate will go the convention and be able to press for the Dean message that has united and reignited the Democratic party's fighting strength.

I posted my official statement, request for your vote at Oakland for Dean.

If your candidate was a rock band

Reading Andrew Bayer is Dreaming of China: Edwards Or Clark?, I posted a comment that I like enough to reprint here, with one small addition in an alternate version:

We'll know soon enough. I agree with Philip. Kerry's joementum will be unstoppable unless something changes the dominant media narrative. This means someone has to attack Kerry (opponent or media) or he has to blunder in a major way. His posture vis-a-vis the AWOL meme I think is helping him in the toughness category that Dean used to own.

I'm still working for Dean in California, because I think it's his message and platform that are winning and I want to hold the eventual nominee's feet to the fire even if things don't magically break our way in the next week or so.

Edwards was my first choice before I fell for Dean, and I still like him. It was weird to read Safire this morning quoting dead Nixon as saying the exact phrase I've been using for Edwards for the last week: "He's a comer."

Clark is more and more striking me as a drain on the Dean movement - it siphoned off a lot of the same base on a candidate who is "better" than Dean in the way that betamax was better than VHS. It turns out that, "If you like Dean, you'll love Clark" isn't such a good premise when people don't like Dean.

Here's my rockband analogy, worked up from thinking about the way the Clarkies improved on the Dean example in terms of discipline and smarts:

Howard Dean = Grateful Dead
Wesley Clark = Phish
John Kerry = Rolling Stones (esp. Keef)
John Edwards = Beatles (esp. Paul)
Al Sharpton = James Brown
Dennis Kucinich = Joan Baez
Carol Moseley Braun = Aretha Franklin
Joe Lieberman = Sha Na Na
George Bush = Hank Williams, Jr.

Clinton, of course, was Elvis. Gore was Pat Boone, Bradley was They Might Be Giants. Tsongas was Buddy Holly, Jerry Brown was the Brian Wilson-era Beach Boys, Dukakis was the Kingston Trio, Bush I was Montavani, and Reagan was the Mamas and the Papas. Ford was the Monkees. Carter was the Allman Brothers, Nixon was Captain Beefheart, LBJ was Jerry Lee Lewis, JFK was Frank Sinatra, and Eisenhower was Guy Lombardo. I can do this all day. Truman was Bill Haley and the Comets. FDR was Duke Ellington. Hoover was Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale. Woodrow Wilson was Scott Joplin. Teddy Roosevelt was Pavarotti. The anarchist who shot McKinley was Mark David Chapman.

Bush's neoliberal foreign policy

One of Bob Dole's many yeeeagh moments in his long and cranky career was his surly reference to "Democrat wars" back around 1976, I think it was. (Yes, if anybody earned the right to resent the politicians who sent him to war, it is Bob Dole.)

Well, we finally have had a purely Republican war.

You say it was bipartisan? I like watching Republicans schiz out as they simultaneous revile Clinton and hide behind his skirts - "Clinton thought so too," as they simultaneously impugn Kerry's patriotism and point to the support of Democrats in the Senate for the resolution that authorized the use of force at the president's sole discretion.

If I was advising Dean, I wouldn't change his message one whit except I would ask him to stop verbalizing every posture (I said it first, he's copying my message, at least we changed the party already), and I would also emphasize that is long past (two, three weeks past) the point where he should have started tacking sharply right.

If only Dean had begun focusing on his plan to beat Bush and ignored the slings and arrows (oh,and stop saying pincushion - it sounds too, uh, metrosexual - Brooks kindly suggested "punching bag" instead on McLehrer a few weeks back) instead of showing his by then well known fighter side in his rearguard action, if instead of taking out Gephardt he had simply settld for second to hm in Iowa and even second to Kerry in NH, then second the Edwards in SC, etc., so that the story would be Dean is everyone's second choice.... If only. If wishes were horses, beggars would right, but Gephardt really did Kerry a solid, there, like a good blocker.

Kerry could still run left, more pro-union than Dean, etc., but they should really already both be trying to show their stake to the middle turf.

Since he's been upfront the whole time, Dean should have problem diving sharply to Kerry's right. Don't attack Kerry. Don't say 7 foot Dukakis or botox or whatever. Emphasize through contrast that Dean has staked out not kooky positions but commonsense positions based on truths that most politicians never dare admit. Dean has stomped on third rail after third rail. Salon described him today as a "dead candidate walking" but still he lives, he thrives. Mention the guns, the budgets, the honesty, the pragmatic effectiveness. "I really am a uniter, not a divider." Point to bipartisan successes in Vermont.

Point to criticism from professional critics from the left and right. Appeal to the vast middle. It's OK to write off the far right. In fact, it's delusional not too. You don't have to pick fights with those people.

Stop saying "I'm tired of being told what to do by fundamentalist preachers" although that horse is already out of the barn.

Criticize the war, but from the right, on the grounds of dishonesty, incompetence, and weakening of America's command of its network of allied countries.

Personally, I think that character comparisons and manichean language only gets you so far. (Saying Kerry is like a Republican or as bad as a Republican is, by contrast with my avice, tacking left.)

I'd go for something more like this:

With all due respect to Senator Kerry, when he tells you he will cut taxes for you and reduce the deficit and fund health care and fight terror, we all know that that's simply not true. Senators in safe states develop this unfortunate habit of pandering to their more extreme supporters. As I did in Vermont, I will first put the country's fiscal house in order, and then work to ensure fairness and equity (as I did when - as in almost no other state in the U.S., I made sure that all the public schools in Vermont got the same level of support). I understand hunters, I have delivered healthcare reforms. George Bush is spending too much for what he's taking in and I would fix that.

And, hey, maybe we should be calling Bush's foreign policy establish neoliberals, not neoconservatives.

Update: How about this? "As the only doctor in this race, I am the most pro-life candidate." I would pay to watch Dean debate Bush about matters of life and death.