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.”

There’s been a lot of discussion since Inaugural Day about the vast and growing gap between George W. Bush’s rhetoric about America’s relentless commitment to the spread of freedom and democracy, and his own administration’s rather different policies. My colleague The Moose succinctly described the Inaugural Address as “disconnected to reality.”
But Ryan Lizza of The New Republic has offered the best, so far, full documentation of this “disconnectedness” in Bush’s foreign and domestic policies. He names all the names of the freedom-hating, undemocratic regimes the administration has continued to snuggle up to, and cites all the sites of the administration’s domestic disrespect for the Gersonian values trumpeted on Thursday.

I got a few emails about my last post on Southern Democrats, which also received an extensive discussion by Armando on the Daily Kos site. Since Armando raises some of the same points–along with several others–as the emails, and because this is the first non-abusive mention I think I’ve ever gotten from someone posting on Daily Kos, I’ll go through his questions (paraphrasing them to save space) one by one and try to address them.
Q– Even if there is a cyclical nature to modern southern politics, isn’t the long-term trend pretty clearly towards the GOP?

A–Yep, not much doubt about it. The questions I was trying to address were whether (a) the trend is linear and absolutely irreversable, which I don’t think it is, (b) there are lessons in the previous Democratic comebacks that might be relevant today, which I think there are (mainly the possibility and necessity of building new biracial coalitions), and (c) Democrats can hope to at least become competitive, if not dominant, once again, which I think they can, maybe not in every southern state but certainly in some. I tried to set a pretty low threshold in this piece, basically urging national Democrats not to write off the region and local Democrats not to despair. And that answers another implicit Armando question which I didn’t raise: no, I’m not arguing for the Party to obsess about the South or put all their chips on the South or even “target” the South, as a region at least. I’m just saying don’t write it off without thinking about it and really looking at the record.
Q–Does your passage on Carter imply that evangelical Christians are swing voters, and hey, aren’t you ignoring Watergate as a factor in 1976?

A–Without getting into an obscure discussion of varying definitions of evangelical Christians, I certainly am not suggesting that the kind of proto-Christian Right voters who were, as a matter of historical fact, often attracted to Jimmy Carter can be won back by Democrats. And more generally, I hope neither Armando nor anybody else thinks I’m saying Democrats can reduplicate the particular alliances they forged in the past. The point is that they did keep coming up with new alliances in response to the Republican surge, and perhaps, as the three contemporary governors I talke about have shown, they can do it again.
As for Watergate: yes, this was crucial to Carter’s national victory in 1976, but he would have carried much of the South anyway. Look at the margins.
Q–What the hell is a “centrist African-American” candidate?
A–Okay, Armando, you caught me in the bad habit of ideological shorthand, which I generally try to avoid. Maybe the better way to describe the kind of candidates I’m talking about is to say they have an agenda and message that’s squarely within the Democratic mainstream in their state, with some demonstrated ability to appeal beyond racial and partisan boundaries. The African-American politicians I mentioned fit that definition (Georgia’s Thurmond and Baker have repeatedly won statewide); so, too, perhaps do others, like Harold Ford of Tennesee or Artur Davis of Alabama. The big point here is simply that Democrats cannot expect African-American voters, who represent as much as a third of the electorate and a majority of Democratic voters in many southern states, to perpetually vote for white Democratic candidates unless white voters show some willingness to cross the racial line themselves.
Q–Why, specifically, did Republicans overcome the “Wave II” Democratic response and start winning overwhelmingly in suburbs again?

There are two answers I’d offer here, recognizing that the picture is very complicated and varies state to state. The first is that southern Democrats often failed to offer a suburban-friendly agenda that went beyond better public education (an echo of the national Democratic problem in the suburbs). The second is that the composition of southern suburbs (at least in the high-growth states) really changed a lot in the late 90s and early 00s. Putting aside all the David-Brooks-Style exaggerations about sunbelt exurbs, it’s generally true that new suburbs, especially in the South, tend to be very conservative places loaded with young, middle-income families fresh from rural communities or alienated by urban centers or older suburbs. The good news is that as suburbs age, they tend to move politically away from rabid conservatism, often because the Republicans they vote for tend to let them down. And that brings me to perhaps the most important Armando question:
Q–What are the Republican divisions that Southern Democrats should try to exploit?
A–In Virginia and Tennessee, Republicans split over tax and budget issues, with educational finance being an important background issue. In Alabama, there’s an impending split over cultural issues between the hard right and the crazy right, with the infamous Ten Commandments Judge Roy Moore likely to challenge incumbent Republican Governor Bob Riley in the ’06 primary. At the local level, all over the South, there are deep tensions between suburbanites committed to public education and home-schoolers and private-schoolers committed to their destruction. And if history is any guide, there will soon be deep divisions in rapidly developing sunbelt suburbs between Republicans worried about uncontrolled growth and those addicted to developers’ campaign contributions.
The general point is this: the upside of Republican gains is that they have to actually govern, and (a) they aren’t very good at it, (b) they have to make choices that will alienate voters, and (c) you cannot run a city, county or state on the kind of cultural wedge-issues that Republicans use to win in the first place.
Q–What should Democrats do in the South about abortion? Or about creationism?
A–While there may be exceptions in states like Louisiana and the border-state Missouri where there are extraordinarily high concentrations of both fundamentalists and Catholics, I don’t believe there is a popular majority in any southern state for overturning basic abortion rights. But there are almost certainly big majorities supporting the contrived agenda of anti-abortion incrementalism: bans on “partial-birth” abortion, parental notification, restrictions on sex education in public schools, etc., etc. But in most cases, this stuff has majority support all over the country. So the smart pro-choice, not to mention Democratic, position in the South isn’t that different from what we should be doing nationally: relentlessly, endlessly, redundantly focusing on the basic right to choose, and refusing wherever possible to be drawn into fights that label 70% of voters “pro-life” when they aren’t in any meaningful sense.
As for “scientific creationism,” or “intelligent design,” I could personally care less if a biology teacher has to spend five minutes a year acknowledging that there is a tiny minority of “scientists” who reject evolution, so long as they are required to equally acknowledge that hundreds of millions of religious people don’t have a single problem with Darwin. Fight fire with fire. That’s also how I feel about the Ten Commandments brouhaha: I’ve long advised Southern Democrats to say, “We don’t just want to post the Ten Commandments; we want to practice them, so let’s talk about honorning our fathers and mothers with a decent retirement.”
Okay, I’ve clearly gone beyond answering Armando, and have ascended the pulpit for a tangentially related sermon, but I hope this post continues a debate about the fate of Southern Democrats in a constructive way. Lord knows there’s enough fact-free stereotyping going on with respect to this subject to make me crave a real discussion like I crave grits for breakfast.