http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=wJThPjvscFs

It’s on YouTube and I’d embed it if I had time to figure out how.

I am a “Values Voter”.

I value

* compassion over condemnation

* debate over demagoguery

* reason over rage

* freedom over fear

* truth over lies

These are American values.

I believe

* that real patriots ask questions

* that government should not decide who I am, or who you are

* that a sound safety net serves the interest of us all

* that people should be judged on the content of their character, not the content of their wallets or the color of their skin

* that justice everywhere is threatened by injustice anywhere

* that labor has dignity and diversity has worth

* that each person deserves a fair deal and a true opportunity

These are core American beliefs.

I am a “values voter”…
… and this is my country, too.

Wow.

It’s taken me a while to get my head around this. Sarah Palin is a political neophyte — if your main charge is that Barack Obama is inexperienced, then you have to see Sarah Palin as INEXPERIENCED. All of her avowed positions are far far to the right of mainstream American opinion. It’s impossible not to believe that the campaign picked her in a blatant attempt to pull off a cynical two-fer: (a) The ultra-right goes ga-ga over her ideological credentials; (b) low-information “Hilary die-hards” decide to vote against everything Senator Clinton believes in so as to get a woman — any woman, dammit — into the executive wing. The latter part is so blindingly obvious that, I think, the only people who will fall for it are people who would have found some reason to vote for McCain anyway.

What to do? How to react? The Obama campaign has a lot of people way more plugged in than me, but below the fold, I give my two cents:

Second, lay off attacks on Palin’s “experience”. It’s OK to point out the idiocy of thinking that, because Alaska is just across the Bering Strait from Siberia, somehow its governor is automagically an expert in Russian affairs. But don’t harp on the 20-month thing, if only because it keeps alive questions about Obama’s tenure in the Senate. Palin is underexperienced on the face of it; no need to keep drilling it home.

Third, focus your response on the process by which she was picked. Apparently there was remarkably little vetting; they didn’t even check the hometown newspaper archives. Senator McCain met her once and talked on the phone once, for something like half an hour tops. Many other, more obviously qualified, more serious candidates were passed over. All signs point to this being a last-minute, from-the-hip choice. Is that really something we want in the leader of the Free World?

Fourth, it’s OK to ask: Heaven forbid something happens to John McCain early in his term. Is Sarah Palin really the person we want ascending to the Presidency, even temporarily? This helps to underscore McCain’s age, a known millstone in his polling.

But above all, take the high ground and be anti-misogynistic. That is the best way to keep the Hillary supporters and to defuse the gender implications of this choice. It has the rare benefit of also being the right thing to do.

I think she delivered a full-throated, crystal clear indictment of the past eight years and of John McCain’s alignment with it. It was a bit corny but I liked the line about McCain and Bush meeting in the Twin Cities because you can hardly tell them apart. Senator Clinton did a good job enunciating what the Democratic Party is for — things like universal healthcare and improved public education — as well as what the Party is against — such as military adventurism, crony capitalism, and the abandonment of civilized society to a race of all against all. I still believe that had she delivered this message consistently throughout the primaries, rather than focusing on her opponents, she would have made the hurdle and would be speaking tomorrow instead of last night.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the speech was nonetheless still mostly about her — her experiences on the trail, her motivations for running, etc. That’s to be understood and it was a historic campaign, so it can be forgiven. She spent a little too much time on that, and she did detour into the end into a polishing of the legacy of President Clinton. If you tuned in to the middle and you cut out before the last few moments, you would be forgiven for thinking this was a Clinton acceptance speech.

Unfortunately, that’s where the speech fell short, too — because there are two meanings of “flatly”. Yes, she was clear and unequivocal. But she was also surprisingly indirect. She did not mention Senator Obama’s qualifications for president; for her, the clincher is apparently merely the fact that he has the (D) after his name. While that’s not a bad reason, what the party needed was for her to embrace Obama qua Obama, not just as “the guy who barely beat me”. Most emphatically, she needed to use this vast public platform to renounce the criticisms she made in the debates … the criticisms that right now form the backbone of McCain’s attack ads. She needed to take the wind out of those sails, and she did not.

In fact, what she needed to do is something that, it would seem, a Clinton cannot do: She had to say that she was wrong. Actually, even more weakly, she had to say merely that she was mistaken — we can leave the morality of “wrong” out of it. She could have said that, since the two campaigns have begun working together, she has seen a side of him she hadn’t appreciated before. It wasn’t necessary for her to swallow her pride and say he is more qualified than she; but she had to say that he is qualified. Having explicitly made the opposite claim on videotape, she needed to dispel it. At this, she failed; and so this speech was not what it should have been.

Ironically, this makes Senator Clinton’s future even more inexorably intertwined with Senator Obama’s. If Obama goes on to become the 44th President, people will remember this speech as a pivotal test for the campaign which lifted him up and started the Democrats, at long last, into their national strategy. Clinton will be set up to become the heir apparent to Ted Kennedy as Liberal Lion of the Senate, or if she chooses, to move into a Cabinet position or, perhaps, even a Supreme Court seat — in all cases, praised for her integrity and self-denial that cemented the support of her people for the candidate. But if Obama goes down to defeat, he takes Clinton with him… because, in memory, her speech will seem tepid and hedged, at least to his fervent supporters — and there are 18 million of them, too, remember. Come 2012, the Democratic Party will be long tired of the squabbling and a third candidate will likely take the nomination, neither Obama nor Clinton.

Of course, if you only watch the mainstream media, you won’t have gotten that speech. Instead, you’ve probably be treated to more important questions, like: Why did Michelle Obama look “angry”? Who choose the pantsuit worn by Senator Clinton? Because after all, those are the questions on which the election to be leader of the free world should turn…

Let’s be clear: It’s OK for a politician to change his/her mind. People change and situations evolve. But McCain, in particular, has run as the straight-talker, the dead-eye with keen judgment who isn’t moved by political winds. Yet every one of his many many flips have moved him from the “maverick” position towards one that just happens to line up with the special interests of whatever group he happens to be addressing. That’s not straight-shooting. That’s not even political evolution.

It’s pandering, pure and simple, and if a panderer wants to run on the strength of his so-called convictions, well I think he ought to be hoist on his own petard.