Conservative Crush on Obama

If upscale Republicans and Independents decide the '08 election, Barack Obama might well be our next President, judging from new love letters to the candidate from Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic and Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal.

Sullivan argues that Obama is beyond the toxic quarrels of the Baby Boomers over Vietnam, Nixon and cultural issues, an alternative to a Giuliani-Clinton contest that would be "a classic intra-generational struggle--with two deeply divisive and ruthless personalities ready to go to the brink."

Obama, according to Sullivan, opposed the Iraq war "for the right reasons" and is therefore "the potential president with the most flexibility in dealing with it." His face would be "a re-branding of the United States" to the rest of the world, particularly Muslims. He might even, Sullivan argues, bridge the religious divide in America:

"(H)e is not born-again. His faith...lives at the center of the American religious experience. It is a modern, intellectual Christianity. 'I didn’t have an epiphany,' he explained to me. 'What I really did was to take a set of values and ideals that were first instilled in me from my mother, who was, as I have called her in my book, the last of the secular humanists—you know, belief in kindness and empathy and discipline, responsibility—those kinds of values. And I found in the Church a vessel or a repository for those values and a way to connect those values to a larger community and a belief in God and a belief in redemption and mercy and justice … I guess the point is, it continues to be both a spiritual, but also intellectual, journey for me, this issue of faith.'"

Peggy Noonan's crush on Obama is less global but just as clear. In a column on Hillary-bashing in last week's debate, she writes:

"Barack Obama, with his elegance and verbal fluency really did seem like that great and famous political figure from his home state of Illinois--Adlai Stevenson, who was not at all hungry, not at all mean, and operated at a step removed from the grubby game."

Last month Noonan observed: “Barack Obama has a great thinking look. I mean the look he gets on his face when he's thinking, not the look he presents in debate, where they all control their faces knowing they may be in the reaction shot and fearing they'll look shrewd and clever, as opposed to open and strong...

“You get the impression Mr. Obama trusts himself to think, as if something good might happen if he does. What a concept. Anyway, I've started to lean forward a little when he talks.”

Compare this to her take on John Edwards' attack on Clinton "like a furry animal on a wheel, trying so hard, to the point he's getting a facial tic, and getting nowhere, failing to get his little furry paws on his prey, not knowing you have to get off the wheel to get to the prey. You have to stop the rounded, rote, bromidic phrases, and use a normal language that cannot be ignored."

Andrew Sullivan and Peggy Noonan may not represent much of a constituency but, if the Democratic nomination becomes a battle over electability, their attitudes may foreshadow Obama's advantage on that issue.

Media Mistrust: The Tipping Point

According to the latest Gallup Poll, Americans passed a milestone four years ago and have never looked back: More than half of us now have little or no confidence that mass media--newspapers, TV and radio--report the news fully, fairly and accurately.

Thirty years ago, only 26 percent felt that way. The gap then between Republicans and Democrats was only 10 percent. Today it is a chasm, with twice as many Republicans mistrustful of the news they are getting.

In the wake of Watergate, the public didn’t blame the messengers for delivering political bad news. In the post-9/11 world, they do and accuse them of distorting it.

Behind this change is the difference in the amount of news we get and how we get it. Before 24/7 cable and the Web, newspaper front pages and the evening news on ABC, CBS and NBC packaged our perception of the world and, for better or worse, there were few other sources of information to challenge what they gave us.

Walter Cronkite signed off every night, saying “That’s the way it is,” and most Americans had no way to doubt it.

Today, there are millions of Walter Cronkites on cable and the Web to decide for themselves the way it is and, although they still depend on MSM for most of the hard news, they decide for themselves what it means.

Mistrust and rancor are part of the price we pay for this privilege, but after the Bush-Cheney era gives way to a likely Democratic Administration, will partisan dissatisfaction with the news shift as well? Or do Republicans have the patent on media-bashing?

Schwarzenegger on Boffo Ballot Box Office

Gov. Arnold, who knows about these things, is advising his party on how to get the grosses up next year. He told a Republican convention this weekend that they are "dying at the box office" and “not filling the seats” because they have "lost the middle.”

“I have been a Republican since Nixon,” Schwarzenegger said. “I have been a Republican in spite of years of debates with Maria, the entire Shriver clan and all the Kennedys up at Hyannis Port. Believe me, it would have been far easier to abandon my Republican identity years ago.”

The majority of Republicans want health care reform and action to reduce global warming, he pointed out, suggesting their leaders follow them.

“I am of the Reagan view that we should not go off the cliff with flags flying,” Schwarzenegger said, quoting his fellow actor-governor who became President: "We cannot become a narrow sectarian party in which all must swear allegiance to prescribed commandments...This kind of party soon disappears in a blaze of glorious defeat."

The Governor went even further back for a new role model for the party, “President Eisenhower, the moderate military man who understood the need for logistics and infrastructure and created the Interstate Highway System--the largest public works project in American history. The majority of Republicans understand the need for investment.”

Schwarzenegger named no names, but another fellow actor, Fred Thompson, does not sound like good casting for the role he described. He has spoken warmly of Rudy Giuliani and, if all else fails, there is another New York Mayor he likes, Mike Bloomberg, who may run as an Independent.

Hide-and-Seek Republicans

The games go on in the United States Senate.

At a press conference yesterday, John Kerry pleaded with Republican colleagues to come out of hiding and go public with the opposition to the war they have been expressing in private. If they did, he predicted, more than 60 Senators would vote for a change in policy

“This is the time, this is the moment,” Sen. Kerry said at a press conference. Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe agreed. “We are at a crossroads between hope and reality,” she said.

White House marching orders were reflected, as they often are, on the Politico web site: “Republican leaders on Tuesday pounced on a newly released National Intelligence Estimate to argue that the increasingly powerful and ominous Al Qaeda presence justifies current troop levels in Iraq at least until September.”

Never mind that the Estimate was an exercise in vagueness, that it is the presence of American troops that brought Saudi suicide bombers to Iraq and that we are losing the hide-and-seek game of trying to uproot their increasing numbers. This White House uses the “kill your parents and ask for mercy because you’re an orphan” strategy without blinking.

It’s painful to see people sworn to serve the national interest keep playing political games with the lives of Americans in uniform.

Bush 41, Edwards, Dowd and Me

In her New York Times column today about John Edwards, Maureen Dowd takes a detour when the candidate tells her that, after praising a book about Socrates, he was “jumped on” because the author, I. F. Stone, was allegedly a Soviet agent.

In response, Dowd writes: “I tell the Democrat that Poppy Bush drolly told the story about his ’64 Texas Senate race, when a John Birch Society pamphlet suggested that Barbara Bush’s father, the president of McCall Publishing, put out a Communist manifesto called Redbook.”

That comes as news to me, and I was editor of Redbook at the time, working for Mrs. Bush’s father, who was as Republican as you can get but had Democrats like me editing his magazines because, as Henry Luce succinctly put it, “Those Republican bastards can’t write.”

Now, almost half a century later, here I am blogging away at the Bushes’ son for subverting American democracy. Maybe those John Birch Society nuts were onto something.

All the Votes Money Can Buy

Despite the clamor over his defecating dog, Mitt Romney is in clover for the early primary races. Polls show him ahead in Iowa and New Hampshire after starting the year in single digits.

But that was $32 million and 4,500 commercials ago. While McCain, struggling to raise money, lays off staffers and Giuliani keeps repeating his mantra, 9/11, Romney has been selling his blandness like soap or toothpaste, boosting his brand share seven to nine percentage points above them in those early states.

Nationally, the man who has spent $0 million, still undeclared Fred Thompson seems to be proving that absence makes voters hearts grow fonder by taking a 27-24 percent lead over Giuliani.

But Romney can’t keep spending at that pace and Thompson can’t hide forever. Will charisma trump cash? But then again, New York billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg, now a former Republican, may come in to run as an Independent.

If he does, the question becomes moot.

Tall Corn in Iowa

Half a century ago, in “The Music Man,” there was a song about Iowa being contrary: “And we're so by God stubborn/We can stand touchin' noses/For a week at a time/And never see eye-to-eye.”

This week the state’s Republicans updated the lyrics for a political visit by the Clintons: "After Bill Clinton tarnished the name of the president of the United States, the Republican Party restored hope, respect and morality within the Oval Office by bringing positive ideas and conservative values back to the White House," the Party said in an e-mail to reporters.

To round out the picture, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is reporting that “Iowa’s corn growers are poised to harvest the biggest acreage ever.”

Fancy Footwork for the G.O.P.

The elephant seems like an apt symbol for the Republican Party--a huge, noisy beast that tramples everyone and everything in its way.

But now there is evidence that the pachyderm is more sensitive than we knew, with delicate feelings and sensors in, of all places, its toes.

Scientist have discovered that they communicate “by vibrations transmitted through the ground to exquisitely sensitive elephant toes...The ground sounds travel a greater distance than airborne calls and may help keep herd members in touch with one another across a dozen or more miles.”

They can even distinguish whether such messages come from fellow herd members or strangers--a kind of "caller ID of the wild."

All this suggests new possibilities for their human counterparts. If Dick Lugar, John Warner and Mitch McConnell want to get through to Bush and Cheney about Iraq, they may want to have their next White House conference unshod and present them with a count of Congressional defectors that will knock their socks off.

That might keep the party on its toes for ’08.

McCain: Dead Man Walking

The party’s penchant for capital punishment of any candidate guilty of right-wing heresy has put John McCain on Republican Death Row, short of cash for appeals and dropping in the polls like the victim of a hangman’s noose.

McCain’s candor about campaign reform, global warming and immigration seem to have sealed his fate with the GOP faithful, who not only continue to flirt with Giuliani but are sniffing the after-shave appeal of Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson.

What amounts to McCain’s political obituary is in the Washington Post today under the byline of Bush’s former speech writer, Michael Gerson, who credits him with
“a kind of nobility that seems unique in the current presidential race.”

And, Gerson might have added, unseen in American politics since his former bosses stole the White House in 2000.

Safer Since 9/11? Wrong Question

It came up in the debate on Sunday and hasn’t gone away. The fact that the question is unanswerable is no impediment to Democratic candidates making it a campaign issue that will eventually hurt them all and help Republicans who have fewer scruples about using fear as a political weapon.

Hillary Clinton made the mistake of saying, “I believe we are safer than we were” to John Edwards’ bumper-sticker assertion that “the war on terror is a bumper-sticker slogan.”

Now the Clinton, Edwards and Obama campaigns are issuing position papers to one-up one another on a question the answer to which we have no way of knowing.

Safer how? There have been no domestic attacks since 9/11, but the various plots that have been publicized as thwarted have a whiff of self-serving inflation to them. (If this dire subject has any laughs in it, Nora Ephron found them the other day on the Huffington Post.)

After the alleged scheme to blow up fuel lines at JFK airport last week, Mayor Mike Bloomberg urged New Yorkers to relax. “You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist," he said. But then Bloomberg isn’t running for President--yet.

What we do know is that most of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations have not been implemented, and books like Stephen Flynn’s “The Edge of Disaster” have been sounding the alarm about what can reasonably be done to make us safer. But how much safer is unknowable. The hard truth is that we have to live with an anxiety that did not exist before 9/11.

Taking political cheap shots on our very survival is the height of venality. If the candidates have specific workable proposals to enhance our safety, let’s hear them. Otherwise stop saying “Boo” to American voters. George Bush has been doing that for too long.