At the risk of grinding an old ax, I’d like to call attention to an article by Michelle Cottle that’s up on the New Republic web site. Reviewing the reception on the Left to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s abortion speech from last week, and to the Rev. Jim Wallis’ emergence as a spokesman for how progressives can address people of faith, she says Clinton’s approach makes a lot more political sense. Her main argument is that Wallis is telling lefties too much of what they want to hear–i.e., that true Christians are more worried about poverty than sexual issues–while Clinton is trying to broaden the Democratic Party’s appeal to people who think otherwise. without abandoning progressive policy positions.
I tend to agree, with a few qualifiers. For one thing, I love Jim Wallis, who has been perhaps the most compelling figure on the Religious Left for many years. And to the extent that Wallis is out there reminding everyone, including his co-religionists, that fidelity to Holy Scripture does not necessarily, and in fact, does not obviously or logically, involve homophobia or anti-feminism, he is serving a function that transcends politics.
But I share Cottle’s concern that many of Wallis’ disciples among secular-minded Democrats are not terribly interested in the following the steps of Jesus, but in taking the path of least resistance in dealing with negative perceptions of the party among many people of faith, and among cultural traditionalists generally. That path is simply to take conventional Democratic policy positions and wrap them in God-Talk.
Jim Wallis can obviously pull this off, because for him God-Talk is how he talks all the time. But in the mouth of your basic Democratic politician, telling people that Jesus wants to preserve Social Security or withdraw from Iraq will sound both disingenuous and insulting.
Meanwhile, Sen. Clinton is doing something entirely genuine that defies all the stereotypes about Democrats: trying to find common ground on which people who violently disagree on abortion can stand. Sure, Right-to-Life activists won’t applaud, but the larger group of people who are troubled by the frequency of, and motivations behind, abortions may, if Democrats continue this approach. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, Clinton is doing something that goes well beyond the abortion issue: making it clear that in defending individual rights, Democrats are not ignoring the social implications of individual decisions that worry many Americans. In other words, she is taking seriously the belief of cultural traditionalists that the blessings of modern life carry a cost in the quality of our overall culture in a way that negatively affects our future as a people and as a country.
Cottle’s also right that Wallis’ interpretation of Christianity, much as I share it, will not quickly or certainly prevail among Christians who have been led to confuse cultural conservatism with the universal demands of their faith. My own simple formulation of the political challenge this poses is that politicians who want to prove something to people of faith need to articulate (to use the Christian formulation) both Old Testament and New Testament values: a clear sense of right and wrong along with an inspiring call for love for one neighbors, and even for one’s enemies.
If Democrats, religious or not, learn to speak with the moral certainty of the law and the prophets, then people of faith might not only be reassured, but could well start demanding that Republicans learn to speak with the charitable impulses–and commandments–of the Gospels.

Most of the time, pre-State-of-the-Union thumbsuckers are a waste of newsprint, full of administration spin and extended recycling of the most Conventional of CW. But Tom Edsall and John Harris of the Washington Post manage to convey something of importance in today’s brief but pointed front-pager: the constituency-group motivation behind most of George W. Bush’s domestic policy agenda. The extraordinary attention the GOPers are paying to so-called “tort reform,” for example, is a simple function of the amount of money trial lawyers contribute to Democrats, and the amount of money their enemies are beginning to contribute to Republicans. Similarly, the administration’s ongoing efforts to reduce public employee rights is no accident, and is driven less by ideology than by the amount of money public employee unions contribute to Democrats.
The article, naturally, quotes Grover Norquist, whose willingness to cheerfully admit the deeper motivations of GOP strategy makes him sort of the Norm Ornstein of the Conservative Id.
While noting that investment firms which would enormously benefit from transferring Social Security funds to private accounts have also been heavy givers to the GOP, Edsall and Harris generally appear to think the administration’s SocSec offensive is more a matter of ideology than hard-ball reward-your-friends-and-punish-your-enemies tactics. And that’s why the proposal may well represent a dangerous act of hubris, they suggest, aiming at destruction of the Crown Jewel of the New Deal at a time when Republicans don’t have a firm majority of consistent public support.
While this argument makes sense, Edsall and Harris may be missing two other well-established characteristics of the Karl Rove GOP: tactical flexibility and a belief that polarization works in their favor.
Going all the way back to Texas, Bush’s M.O. has been extremely consistent: push your proposals again and again and again without compromising at all, until the moment when defeat is imminent, and then either cut a deal or switch to something else, with never a hint that anything has changed. So what if the Republican chairmen of the House Committee and Subcommittee with jursidiction over Social Security have called Bush’s proposal DOA? Admitting that before the White House is ready for Plan B, whatever it is, would be like, well, admitting Mistakes Were Made In Iraq. (An instructive exception, of course, is Bush’s willingness to back off on pushing a Gay Marriage constitutional amendment because of the political landscape in the Senate–a surefire indication that he doesn’t really want to deal with the issue now that it has served its purpose in his re-election campaign).
But the second factor–keeping the debate in Washington as polarized as possible–is also important. There is zero doubt in my mind that Karl Rove thinks an ideologically polarized electorate will always tilt towards the GOP since self-identified conservatives outnumber self-indentified liberals by a three-to-two margin. At any given moment, you can expect Bush to be pushing at least one major initiative that literally makes Democrats crazy with rage. That rage, in turn, will make the actual policy dispute look like nothing more than a partisan food-fight to much of the non-polarized electorate, thus shifting the center of gravity of any given debate sharply to the right. Rove and Bush have pursued this strategy again and again. It’s hardly infallible, but it does create a trap for Democrats unless they are smart enough to modulate their anger according to the actual importance of a given issue, and offer positive alternatives instead of just negative opposition.
All three strands of this GOP strategy–extraordinary constituency-tending, tactical flexibility, and deliberate polarization–are right out there in public, hidden in plain sight; understanding them does not require any sort of taste for conspiracy.
But what’s really, really remarkable, as the Edsall-Harris piece implicitly demonstrates, is that actually making conditions in the country better doesn’t seem to show up anywhere in the Bush-Rove priority list.
For a long time, I’ve wondered if these guys want to entrench themselves in power perpetually, or just want to do as much damage as possible before they are driven from office. The answer, apparently, is they want to do both, by pursuing an agenda that creates power through the crudest possible methods: money and divisiveness. If I’m right, then it should be no surprise that the initiatives that really excite them are those which offer to enrich one group of Americans at the direct expense of others.

Here in central Virginia, the snow has stopped falling, and you can see the Blue Ridge through the low-lying clouds in a vista that even aesthetically-challenged people like me can understand as one of God’s regularly scheduled masterpieces.
Halfway across the world, in Iraq, the polls will soon be open for that nation’s blessed and cursed first democratic elections.
The Iraqi insurgents have done their worst to intimidate voters from participating.
The Bush administration, dating back to its negligent preparations for winning the war and the peace, has done little to make this day the triumph of democracy it has so often predicted.
The sacrifices made by all the people of Iraq, especially the brave souls willing to run for office, and by the U.S. and British troops who have provided what little security the country currently enjoys, will soon be redeemed or repeated. Whatever you think about the original decision to intervene militarily in Iraq, you have to hope that these elections help move the country away from the brink, away from civil war, and away from the Hobbesian choice between military tyranny and sectarian theocracy.
As Howard Dean, one of the most resolute opponents of the decision to invade Iraq, often said: now that we are there, we cannot afford to lose and abandon Iraq to chaos. Within hours, the people of Iraq will have a unique chance to begin the reconstruction of their country, and to show us the door. If I can make it over the snowy mountains to my tiny church tomorrow morning, I will join the Prayers of the People to ask the Almighty for just that result.

I don’t know if Dick Cheney’s casual, ski-trip attire at the extremely solemn event commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp received much notice around the country or overseas, but the Washington Post Style Section certainly riveted local attention on the subject with a couple of photos and some arch commentary.
But Tapped’s Garance Franke-Ruta provides the most thorough and serious discussion of this incident, along with the best sound-bite: “Cheney wore an outfit that made him look more like Kenny from South Park than an international statesman and world leader.”
She goes on to document the extraordinary attention to symbolic detail, particularly in matters of dress, of the Bush White House, and concludes thusly: “There’s no question in my mind that Cheney knew what he was doing when he chose to play the role of ugly American in his embroidered parka and knit cap. Perhaps he was trying to signal something about America casting aside the constraints of history.”
I dunno, Garance. Last time I checked, Karl Rove was pretty focused on chipping into the Jewish-American vote, and particularly on chipping into Jewish-American financial support for the Democratic Party. And this administration has made a true art form out of symbolic support for liberal values in foreign policy, while violating them as often as possible.
My take, which is obviously conjectural, is that Cheney’s sartorial gaffe shows these guys are not the infallible political geniuses that Democrats think they are–ironically echoing the Republican tendency to treat Bill Clinton as an adversary possessing demonically supernatural powers.
Maybe Franke-Ruta is right, and if so, that really scares me, since Auschwitz is a uniquely inappropriate place in which to show contempt for the lessons of history. But maybe there’s no deliberate symbolism here, and it’s a case where stupid clothes are just stupid clothes. Either way, it doesn’t reflect well on the allegedly Very Serious Mr. Cheney.

This week we’ve had extensive reminders of the potential of modern man to commit genocide during the Auschwitz anniversary, and millions of Americans have also passed up light comedies to go see “Hotel Rwanda” in the theaters. It’s a good time to think hard about the ongoing genocide in Darfur, where all our “never again” sentiments are being mocked by the Grim Reaper and his allies in Khartoum every single day.
What, specifically, can be done about Darfur? Read today’s New Dem Dispatch to find out.

I know I’m weighing in a little late on the Gonzales nomination, but I’m not a big fan of cabinet confirmation fights, as opposed to fights over lifetime judicial appointments, particularly to the Supreme Court.
In fact, I generally think presidents, even those I really dislike, should have significant leeway on cabinet appointments. And in this administration, it’s pretty clear the White House is calling all the important shots anyway. But I would make a big exception for the Attorney General.
It’s a familiar argument, but worth repeating: the AG is not just the president’s top lawyer, and not just head of a cabinet agency; he or she is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, supervising a vast array of prosecutors, investigators, and specialty cops. The AG has enormous power to help or hinder the pursuit of justice in this country, every single day. Sure, every AG reports to the president, but I cannot remember an AG nominee who is simultaneously so ill-equipped to show independence from, and influence in, the White House (Bobby Kennedy was obviously not independent from his brother, but he sure as hell wielded a lot of influence with him).
Gonzales is also, to put it charitably, a bit short in the Legal Heft department as well, owing virtually his entire career to the sponsorship of George W. Bush.
I don’t know whether these two factors alone would be enough to convince me the Senate should reject him, but it doesn’t really matter, because there is, of course, a third factor that’s the clincher: Gonzales’s status as the Poster Boy for Torture.
As it happens, I’m not an absolutist on this subject. I can’t honestly say I’d behave well if I had custody of an al Qaeda operative who was reported to know the time and place of a dirty bomb set to go off in Washington or New York, killing tens of thousands of people and spreading radioactivity to tens of thousands of others.
But Gonzales doesn’t represent the truly hard cases on torture; he stands for the proposition that anything not explicitly prohibited by the administration’s extremely narrow interpretation of U.S. law and international treaties is just aces with him. And as a Washington Post editorial yesterday noted, after stonewalling the Senate Judiciary Committee on the subject initially, in his final hearing he squarely confirmed that this was indeed his position.
If you believe, as I do and I hope you do, that the war on terror is an ideological war in which perceptions of American values and good intentions are in the long run as important as military assets, then confirming the Poster Boy for Torture as Attorney General provides a propaganda victory for Islamic Jihadism that’s potentially just as damaging as those images from Abu Ghraib. Moreover, Gonzales’s confirmation will also reinforce the already dangerous impression that the United States will only obey those rules we get to set ourselves, an impression the administration finds ways to strengthen nearly every day.
Add it all up, and for me at least, the calculus is pretty clear: this guy should not become Attorney General, on the merits, and completely separate from the politics of the thing. As for the politics, some Democrats think we can’t oppose Gonzales because of his ethnicity. But Jesus, folks, if we cannot find ways to appeal to Hispanic Americans without confirming a bad Attorney General, then we don’t deserve their votes in the first place.
But I don’t, for the record, share the view of other Democrats that “standing up” to Bush on Gonzales is some sort of political end in itself, as part of a “strategy” of total opposition to everything Bush proposes on every subject.
Look, I dislike Bush and his administration far more than any I can remember in a fairly long life. I certainly agree that an opposition party must oppose, particularly when they have no power at all, and I definitely want Democrats to oppose the many terrible things these guys are trying to do to our country. But just blindly, and at a uniform decibal level, opposing every single move Bush makes isn’t “standing up for our principles”–it amounts to letting Karl Rove lead us around by the nose and completely determine our course of action, in a way that obscures what we are for.
It is very important that we pick and choose our fights. As a matter of principle more than politics, I believe opposing Alberto Gonzales’s confirmation is a fight worth picking. But count me out of any future witch hunt against Democrats who disagree, and let’s think before we automatically move on to a massive campaign to fight like banshees against every dim hack Bush tries to appoint to relatively unimportant posts.

David Callahan of Demos has a provocative article up on the New Republic site that challenges Democrats to take on “Hollywood” as a matter of both liberal principle and practical politics.
As regular readers know, I am sympathetic to Callahan’s basic argument, insofar as Democrats who are willing to hold all sorts of powerful corporations accountable for the effects of their products and marketing on families and communities shouldn’t give the powerful corporations who purvey entertainment products an automatic pass. And he’s right to accuse Democrats who love to bash those who elevate “profits over people” of a double hypocrisy when they look the other way so long as a share of those profits are dumped into Democratic campaign contributions.
But in his seamless indictment of “Hollywood,” Callahan conflates two very different issues. I’m down with his suggestion that entertainment corporations who aggressively market, for example, video games glorifying extreme violence, sexual exploitation, and misogyny–in a word, pornography–to minors ought to be criticized and held accountable, not defended. And I also agree that the general drift of our popular culture–which we export to every corner of the world–towards infinite commercialization and compulsive consumerism should become a target as well.
Yet Callahan leads off his piece by talking about a very different aspect of “Hollywood:” political appearances by movie and television celebrities. He cites the famous Radio City Music Hall fundraiser in which John Kerry praised a group of actors including Whoopi Goldberg and Paul Newman as representing “the heart and soul of America” as exhibit A in the case for a Democratic assault on the entertainment industry.
Now let’s be clear about this: the Republican ability to distort and exploit this moment had nothing to do with the content of Whoopi Goldberg’s movies; it was attributable to obscene comments the actress made about George W. Bush earlier in the evening. The movie industry has absolutely no control, and frankly no responsibility, for what actors say and do off camera, other than maybe paying them a bit less in the future when they’ve alienated parts of their potential audience.
Moreover, Democrats have an easy solution to this particular problem: just stop inviting movie and television stars to share their platforms, particularly if they are unwilling to accept a script that keeps them from saying stupid or offensive things. Let them wave from the wings or sign autographs on the rope line if they are willing, but otherwise treat them just as they would the generous financial rainmakers from a law firm or an international union.
Musicians and other true performance artists are a different matter; after all, they are generally hauled onto political platforms to do what they always do, and serve the important function of breaking up the tedium of political speechifying.
But for those celebrities who do not perform their craft at political events, the only rationale for dragging them up to the microphone and letting them make still more political speeches is the worn-out “role model” theory whereby NBA stars bear the absurd responsibility of speaking ex cathedra on all matters of faith and morals. I mean, when you really get down to it, are Sean Penn’s pithy thoughts on Iraq any more meaningful than Howard Dean’s views on Method Acting?
So I conclude: flail away, Mr. Callahan, and my fellow Democrats, at the Joe Camels of “Hollywood” who are making a dishonest buck trying to turn our kids into pint-sized greedheads, airheads, and gangstas. But don’t blame Hollywood for the apparent belief of the political class that Alec Baldwin is indispensible to the goal of achieving universal health coverage.
Maybe the real problem is that politicians struggle and strive for high office in part because it gives them the opportunity to hang out with celebrities whose visages and alleged life experiences regale Americans in every grocery-store checkout line. This theory is reflected in the old jibe that “politics is show business for ugly people.”
Any way you cut it, the ugly people of politics should try to ween themselves from excessive dependence on the pretty people of People. As those suicidally unfashionable and anti-political performance artists, the Sex Pistols, once mocked their celebrity peers:
We’re so pretty,
Oh so pretty–
Pretty vacant.

In sharp contrast to the president’s evasive and deceptive phone-in comments on abortion yesterday, Hillary Rodham Clinton provided a direct, provocative pro-choice message that challenged people on both sides of the divide to help make abortion safe, legal and rare. The details are in today’s New Dem Dispatch.
The impressive thing about Clinton’s message is that it simultaneously refutes the extremist, all-abortion-is-sacred stereotype the Right has so successfully reinforced about pro-choice Democrats, while also helping expose the genuine extremism of pro-life activists and the Republican Party that’s given them an implicit promise to recriminalize abortion through Supreme Court appointments.
Most notably, Clinton pointed out that an estimated 15,000 abortions a year–or about twenty times the number of so-called “partial-birth” abortions that the GOP so loves to talk about–involve victims of sexual assault. She suggests that such abortions could be largely avoided if “day-after” pills were made available over-the-counter.
Many people who are troubled by abortion or want to see the numbers go down would agree. But the hard-core right-to-life position holds that day-after pills, like intra-uterine devices, are actually “abortifacients” morally indistiguishable from late-term abortions or for that matter, infanticide. They don’t like to talk about that publicly; proposals like Clinton’s force such extremist views right out into the open.
True, some abortion rights ultras will denounce Clinton’s position as a “move to the right” or a “compromise with the enemy,” but let’s be clear that she did not change her position on abortion rights one iota. She simply explored a higher ground from which pro-choice advocates can speak to the non-absolutist majority and actually expand support for the right to choose.

At today’s March for Life, the annual anti-abortion event in Washington marking the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the guest of honor, the President of the United States, was a no-show. He did phone in with a message that was broadcast to the half-frozen marchers, in which he trotted out the usual code-talk about his support for a “culture of life” and his contrived and largely symbolic legislative agenda aimed at gnawing at the far corners of the right to choose.
As my colleague The Moose pointed out today, anyone listening in who didn’t have an anti-abortion decoder ring might have thought all the talk about compassion and the need to protect the weak and the vulnerable referred to a broader agenda of helping women and children after, not just before, the moment of birth.
But today’s anti-abortion marchers know exactly what Bush was alluding to, and thus they probably didn’t mind that he characteristically refused to come out and say he shared their fervent desire to re-criminalize abortion, much less the fact that he chose to share the moment next to a fireplace in Camp David rather than braving the elements in his sometimes workplace of Washington, DC.
They’ll forgive Bush another phoned-in quasi-commitment to their cause so long as he shows up live and in person when a Supreme Court opening appears, which could happen very soon. At that point, the game will be over, the Code won’t suffice, and all the contrived and symbolic gestures will become meaningless, because one issue will be unavoidably front and center: does Roe v. Wade stand, or does it fall? Then Bush will no longer be able to stay all warm and toasty as the political winds whirl around the contending forces on this issue.

George W. Bush has now claimed the oracular mantle of a leader much too far-sighted to be troubled with the here-and-now–a man who looks beyond ephemeral problems like the mess in Iraq or the federal budget meltdown to gaze from high on history’s crest towards the End of Tyranny and the Social Security Crisis of 2060 or whatever it is.
So perhaps this report on the catastrophic dimensions of global climate change will get His Serene Majesty’s attention.
Oh, sorry, forgot. Been there, dismissed that as an enviro-hoax to destroy the U.S. economy and teach Druidism in public schools. But it’s sure going to be a truly royal pain in the butt for Bush if Tony Blair continues to use his chairmanship of the G-8 to draw attention to this issue, and to the Bush administration’s continued efforts to bury it until “the day after tomorrow.”