Politics, Oct 2008
I don't usually write about politics here. There are probably few things as tedious and banal as someone else's political opinion. But I want to write down how I feel, if for no other reason so that I can come back later and think about how my opinions have changed.
So, with that caveat in place, here's a few random thoughts:
I recently re-watched The Smartest Guys In The Room (more info including a preview), a documentary from a couple years ago about the Enron collapse and how the energy market got distorted by deregulation and manipulation. Within Enron there was complete corruption and utter contempt for public values; they rapidly liquidated the Californian treasury under the guise of deregulation, and fleeced their own employees out of $2 billion. (Note that this started under the Clinton administration, which plays to the old argument that both parties are bad for consumers and the middle class, but I think the last 8 years have clearly put the lie to that one.) One thing that's remarkable about all this, and the recent crisis on Wall Street plays to this as well, is that it was only when wealthy investors and corporations started getting harmed that suddenly these became crises. Here in the state of Georgia we fought for legislation to stop predatory lending 5 years ago, and people were getting absolutely screwed 5 years ago, and those protections were quickly rolled back a year later at the behest of the financial industry. Now we're awash in sub-prime loan defaults and suddenly it's a big problem because the wealthy investor class is affected?
History will judge this Bush administration harshly, despite the partisans' protests to the contrary. Even conservatives have been dismayed. I mentioned Jeffrey Toobin's book The Nine in an earlier post about the Supreme Court and links to coverage. Here's a passage where he describes Sandra Day O'Connors disgust with Bush, in the context of the political gaming that occured around the Terry Schiavo case in early 2005:
... To her, the Schiavo case marked only the latest outrage from the extremists who she believed had hijacked her beloved Republican Party. The hiring of John Ashcroft, the politicized response to the affirmative action case, the lawless approach to the war on terror, and the accelerating disaster of the war in Iraq all appalled O'Connor.
With the apparent collapse that the neocons have brought upon their party, it's interesting to note a double standard. In 2002 and 2004, we had endless handwringing about whether the Democratic party was dead. Now we have the pendulum swinging the other way and yet nobody is claiming that the GOP is dead. So much for liberal media bias.
In the past few weeks, as the impact of the Palin pick has set in, it's been quite entertaining to read columns by conservatives arguing that the GOP is a complete disaster and has abandoned whole chunks of the country. David Brooks calls them the party of the past and for the stupid. David Frum refers to the "rump", the only part left after everyone else has left. Kathleen Parker skewers Palin. In that I see some hope that maybe we are starting to come out of the Dark Ages of the last 14 years, of playing to the base, use of wedge issues and splitting the country.
Speaking of wedge issues, Hillary on the ticket would have been a dream come true for Republicans. Nothing would have made them happier than to have her, because she's a red meat motivator for their base, no question about it. And she would have continued the toxic tone of the last 14-16 years -- a country rendered in two and campaigns that focus on what separates us instead of what unites us. Sure, negative campaigning works, but what's the result?
Unfortunately we can look forward to another few months of speculation and positioning on whether Hillary will be in the Obama cabinet. I hope she won't be. Obama needs to make a clean break with the politics of the past 16 years. There's so many good people that he can get to serve with him, why play into the haters hands with a Hillary pick? Let her be a force in the Senate.
I still believe that the November 2004 election was this generation's principal watershed event for our country. At the time I sincerely expected that there would be a 70/30 landslide rejection of Bush and his administration's horrible policies, and I was completely wrong. The 2004 election legitimized the Bush presidency; the Bush cronies had spent the previous 4 years showing that "compassionate conservatism" of the 2000 campaign was a Big Lie and had been doing everything precisely against the interests of 95% of the electorate, and yet they still got voted back in. Two years later we at least got Congress out of their hands and the six years of bleeding stopped. But the precedent has been established: the electorate can be goaded into voting against their own interests. Objective truths no longer matter in a world of 24-7 news networks and endless talk radio opinionating. And this is why I really would not be surprised if McCain actually won after all of this.
John McCain is weak. By allowing the Bush/Cheney/Rove political hacks to take over his campaign and sully his reputation, he has shown that he would be dominated by his advisors just like Bush was. I'm tired of having a weak president who can't think for himself and stand up for his own principles. John McCain was a decent, honest politician who has now allowed himself to be steered into the mud.
John McCain is reckless and would be a shaky hand, not a steady hand, on the tiller. He has chosen a chaotic management style for his campaign, and what we need right now is an administration that is focused and organized for the purpose of rebuilding this country as efficiently as the Cheney machine dismantled it.
I believe Obama will bring bipartisan compromise back to Washington (and end the neocon's stranglehold on the dialogue), and that starts with running a campaign that doesn't demonize the opposition, because they're going to have to actually work with the opposition next year. The Obama campaign has not wallowed in Palin's effort to ban books or belief that dinosaurs and human coexisted or the hypocrisy of her daughter pregnancy. They've stayed on the topic that she's fundamentally unqualified for the job. And they've stayed on the topic that McCain is now just another tool of the Republican machine.
On a completely different subject, I believe that we've enjoyed an increasing sense of cultural unity over the last few years, especially in the art/music underground, because there's been a common enemy in Bush. Those days will be behind us when Obama takes office, because the Left will be split, just like it was during the Clinton years. The sense of unity (unified against Bush and blatant corruption) will give way to infighting and handwringing and internecine politics as people disagree on Democratic policies; the old arguments of "the Dems and Repubs are two sides of the same coin" will rear their heads again, with little attention paid to shades of grey that do in fact differentiate the parties. I fell for it in the late 90's and I won't do it again. Republican politicians are not working in your or my interest; Democratic politicians are at least trying.
I spend a lot of time working with and using open source software. Open source is a powerful concept -- it says that you can basically tinker with a software and make it work better for you. To me it means that, over the long term, the market will evolve better and better software, and that we all will benefit from that refined software. Open source is starting to take hold in the arena of voting machine technology, and it can't happen fast enough. But I really hope that it will take root in the legislative process itself, specifically the concept of revision control. Did you know that the actual language of legislation, how particular clauses, is not tracked? Congressmen can simply slip in language via backroom maneuvering and then claim ignorance when their buddies get a windfall from the government or a loophole in the tax code. There's a movement afoot to track the process of writing legislation the same way we track software code -- with a source code management (SCM) process. SCM simply tells you what language was changed when. We don't have that, and that's a form of sunshine that we desperately need on our laws.
The GOP has been leveraging electronic voting machine technology to steal elections since 2002; Dems need to win by margins large enough to beat the cheat percentage, or expose the cheating in the process of losing. I'm not sure which will happen on Nov 4th, and I worry about the Bradley effect.
I believe that Obama is the best choice in this election, but that doesn't mean I agree with everything he says. Telecom immunity? Lock em up. Detroit bailout? Let em fail. Offshore drilling? Don't yield one more inch to the oil industry, they've got their decades of windfall profits and their time is now over. So don't snark at ME every time you find something laughable in an Obama statement, or worse, want to pick on some position of the Democrats in general. The GOP's failings completely dwarf any problems I have with Obama or the Democrats.
Money has completed corrupted our government, and frankly I had given up on that a long time ago. However I see a glimmer of hope in the fact that Obama has repudiated PAC and lobbyist money.
Assuming Obama wins, it'll probably take about 3 weeks for the right to settle back into their comfortable position of sniping about how the Democrats controlling Washington have ruined everything. One can only hope that we can at least dig ourselves out of this mess (again) before they sweep back into office and start digging back down. This is why I hate the rhetoric of "change", because it's just going to boomerang back on them once they take office. I don't want change, I want an end to corruption and a transparent government. I realize that an Obama administration may not deliver all those things to me, and I'm bound to disagree strongly with some of the things they decide to do, but at this point anything will be better than the Republicans.
Finally, I leave you with a graphic that I saw on the web somewhere over the summer. I made a few bumper stickers out of it; let me know if you want one. The point isn't that Obama is not worth supporting, and it's not just naked cynicism; the point is to recognize that no one candidate is perfect for any one person, and when your candidate makes a disappointing move, like supporting telecom immunity, you should step back and look at the bigger picture.
