{Edited to spell Mr. Fineman’s name correctly.}

Here’s one reason why political discourse in this country is so messed up. I watched the Presidential press conference on MSNBC. (Normally, I would not, but the remote wasn’t working and I hit MSNBC before any of the other news channels.) I found it to be above average, with President Obama tackling important questions about the administration’s health care plan and the looming political struggles over it. The questions were not bad, surprisingly, and President Obama was his usual erudite self. I think that, while little in the way of breaking news happened, he did capture the essence of the debate and make it meaningful for the average citizens.

Because I couldn’t switch the TV off fast enough (remember, no remote), I accidentally watched a brief exchange between Chris Matthews and his trained expert (Howard Feinman? Fineman).  Mr. Matthews led off with something like “Didn’t the president just step on his own headline with that final remark about Prof. Gates’ arrest in Cambridge?  Isn’t his taking the side of the professor going to be the story tomorrow?”  And Mr. Fineman nodded sagely and offered up the idiotic sentiment (again paraphrased), “It will dominate the discussion because it was news while little of the health care part was.”

Get it?  A citizen who watched the press conference — someone, we might assume, who tuned in because he or she is concerned about, maybe even a bit worried about about the state of their health care and the future of their family’s health treament — watched the President expound for 50 minutes in a solid, understandable way … this same citizen will apparently forget all of that and be seduced by the flash of a (notably pedestrian) discussion of the role of race in America.  Apparently that wipes out everything that went before, even though the citizen just spent an hour hearing it.

Of course, that’s just stupid.  Anyone who watched the conference will walk away thinking about health care.  Of course, very many Americans did not watch the conference.  More than likely, Messrs. Matthews and Fineman are correct:  Those Americans will mostly discuss the race question.  Why?  Because the media — including Matthews and Fineman — will spend the next few days telling America that the race question was the important part!  Why will that message be pushed?  Because it’s “self-evident” that it will be.  And my main anger flows towards the media pinheads (such as Matthews and Fineman) who will bemoan the circus and will complain that President Obama blew his opportunity, without even once noticing that the circus results from the actions of the clowns … that is, the very same media pinheads.

Political discourse is dying in thie country — indeed, if health care reform stalls, actual Americans will be dying in this country — because we have a media establishment that incentives flash and sizzle over substance and which actively discourages paying attention to serious issues by offering up tempests in teapots.

So, Senator John McCain has chosen Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, as his running mate.

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.

Senator Hilary Clinton has finished her address to the Democratic National Convention. My personal response: She didn’t hit it out of the park but she definitely got some extra bases and maybe batted some runs in.

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…

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a little while but net issues have been keeping me away. In any event, the recent passage of the so-called “FISA reform” (now with telecom immunity!) has sent the Health of the Republic tumbling downward. I had begun to be cautiously optimistic that American liberty might begin to recover now that we are approaching the end of the Worst Administration Ever.

But Senator Obama and the Senate Democrats blew this call. Somehow they believe there is a huge constituency for enhanced domestic spying, for rewarding lawbreakers, and for undermining the Constitution. I understand the political calculus, I think, but I’m pretty sure it’s flat-out wrong and it’s disturbing to see the “change” candidate get stuck in worn-out thinking. Usually, Sen. Obama treats Americans as smart and engaged. He is never better than when an issues is nuanced and charged. This time, he just surrendered to the “We must sacrifice liberty to survive the Evil Terrorists” meme.

I’m still going to vote for him and I’ll probably even continue to donate money. After all, the only hope of addressing the ills of this bill lie with a Democratic President and Congress — you can be sure McCain won’t do anything to rein it in. But something has gone out of my enthusiasm. The public finance thing and the slow withdrawal thing didn’t really faze me. But this was important.

It was a chance to lead, and he blew it — and we don’t have all that many chances left.

I suspect I will write more on this, eventually, but for now, here’s what I’ve sent to the Obama campaign regarding the Senator’s disappointing collapse on FISA:

I have contributed over $500 to the Senator’s campaign, more than all my previous contributions in my life. I had intended to donate all the way to the $2300 limit. No more. I am finding it hard to even type the words that express my disappointment and my revulsion at the Senator’s craven position on the amended FISA bill that was just passed by the House. His words are disingenuous and misleading, and indicate either that he does not understand this issue or that — cynically — he assumes ordinary Americans won’t understand it.

As a senator he has taken an oath — the same oath he hopes to take on Inauguration Day — to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic. A law that circumvents the Fourth Amendment, hands the executive unfettered powers of surveillance, and grants immunity to those who have flagrantly broken the law to date — that sort of law is the death knell of a free republic.

The Senator claims to offer change. I had hoped that the change would be Democrats standing up for what is right, stepping up to defend the Constitution. I had hoped the Senator would know to put principle before politics. I am no rosy-eyed daydreamer. I understand that taking the right stand would entail risks and would expose the Senator to the vacuous accusations of unpatriotism that is the forte of the rabid Right. I even concede that, with so many of his colleagues abandoning their own duties, there is a good chance that he would expend political capital only to be defeated.

I don’t care.

There are times to play the cards you’re dealt, and there are times to kick over the table and refuse to play the game. True leaders understand the difference. When fundamental protections that have been hallowed by centuries face erosion and destruction, I think the line is pretty bright. Senator Obama should have known that this is an issue on which there should be no compromise. This is the issue to take to the American people, who are smart enough to understand the threat. This is the issue to take to the wall, to the very edge, because if we tolerate the destruction of our Constitution, there will be no America in which to raise our children.

I am surprised and shocked and saddened that apparently the Senator does not see this. And until I see evidence that he does in fact have both the savvy and the character I thought he did, I will not contribute another penny. I will route that money, instead, to groups like ActBlue and the ACLU, who have their eyes on the ball.

The final irony here is that — literally at the moment I heard the news — I was clicking over to this site to donate another $100 as my show of support for his decision to reject public financing. From what I know of his supporters, he might come to regret that decision… a lot of us will be holding back.

{Minor edits for grammar.}

For full disclosure, I am an Obama supporter, I feel he is the best candidate both in terms of electability and in terms of actual ability to do the job. I’ve watched his campaign with interest and rising enthusiasm. All of that said, I think people have to recognize that his statements in San Francisco, saying that working class people are “bitter” and so “cling” to their guns and their religion, has been a giant misstep. It was a gaffe pure and true, and he is paying the traditional price: Time spent off-message, defending and responding rather than proposing and advancing.

A lot of what he says is true, nonetheless, and if you read the context, you will see that his major sin is choosing words that can be taken many ways. And hey, it’s politics, and politics ain’t a tea party. His opponents can, and probably should, use this to their advantage in an attempt to define him for America. That doesn’t mean that I agree that his remarks were “elitist” and “talked down” to working class America. But it’s McCain’s right, or Clinton’s right, to make that case.

Obama’s main problem was his choice of the word “cling”:

And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

This would all have passed without notice if he had chosen his words better. For example, if instead of saying people “cling” to guns or religion, he could have said they “fall back on” guns and religion — the things in their life that they can control, that give comfort and surety. Why didn’t he? To be honest, because it is all too easy for a Democrat to fall into language that dismisses such beliefs as tools of cynical manipulation. Here’s the bigger question: Why is it so easy? Because for a generation and a half, one party (the Republican party) has used those beliefs as tools of cynical manipulation. Appeals to patriotism, to gun ownership, to faith, are easy and cheap and — if the record of the Republicans is any guide — meaningless.

The truth of that lies in the speed and tone of the response from both McCain and Clinton. They piously promise to protect the little guy, they publicly feel umbrage for him, they pat him on the head. They don’t speak to the concerns that Obama did, the reasons that he thinks that middle America might be “bitter”. They don’t offer any actual solutions for their distress. Instead they facilely promise to somehow recover every job that’s been lost.

Obama missteps because he tries to speak about the plight of the working class without having been a member. He doesn’t get the lingo. Fair enough. But the other two nominally-major candidates go much further. They celebrate their false membership in the working class. They too have never belonged but they appoint themselves to feel the outrage of the class.

In the end, in my opinion, that is condescending — that is “talking down” to the working class.

I’m sure that this is going get me marked as a rabid Obama supporter (which I am not). But I can’t help but gush over his impressive response on the issue of church and state. In an interview with BeliefNet, he was asked, “You wrote in The Audacity of Hope about the role that faith and faith-based programs could play in confronting social ills. Isn’t your view on that similar to George W. Bush’s?”

His answer — the clearest ever seen — follows below the fold.

No, I don’t think so, because I am much more concerned with maintaining the line between church and state. And I believe that, for the most part, we can facilitate the excellent work that’s done by faith-based institutions when it comes to substance abuse treatment or prison ministries…. I think much of this work can be done in a way that doesn’t conflict with church and state. I think George Bush is less concerned about that.

My general criteria is that if a congregation or a church or synagogue or a mosque or a temple wants to provide social services and use government funds, then they should be able to structure it in a way that all people are able to access those services and that we’re not seeing government dollars used to proselytize.

That, by the way, is a view based not just on my concern about the state or the apparatus of the state being captured by a particular religious faith, but it’s also because I want the church protected from the state. And I don’t think that we promote the incredible richness of our religious life and our religious institutions when the government starts getting too deeply entangled in their business. That’s part of the reason why you don’t have as rich a set of religious institutions and faith life in Europe. Part of that has to do with the fact that, traditionally, it was an extension of the state. And so there is less experimentation, less vitality, less responsiveness to the yearnings of people. It became a rigid institution that no longer served people’s needs. Religious freedom in this country, I think, is precisely what makes religion so vital.

I get goosebumps just reading it.

So Senator Obama has generated some heat by making the following remarks:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.

(I’m quoting them from here.)

And a tempest has blown up in the Democratic party by some progressives that Obama should be shunned for having “praised” Reagan. Of course if you read the remarks, he didn’t actually do that. He did point out that Reagan was transformational — that the Reagan presidency moved the political stance of the country in a way that, say, the Clinton presidency did not. This statement is from praise. It’s a recognition of fact. The proof is below the fold.

As a quick example, take the following comment posted on firedoglake, ironically intended to show we should pillory Sen. Obama:

Dems have been out of power so long, even they forget what ‘centrist’ means. Right now, the center of the Democratic party is closer to what the center of the Republican party was in the 1970s. Run and govern as a damn liberal already!

Someone earlier had said,

Yea, Jane!!! We are the agents that drag the Overton Window to the Left!!!

And all I can say, it’s about damn time!!!

without noticing, apparently, the fact that shifting the Overton Window was in fact what Sen. Obama was talking about — clearly, Reagan was more successful at this than Clinton, if only because two decades later we are still bemoaning that ” the center of the Democratic party is closer to what the center of the Republican party was in the 1970s” even after Clinton’s eight years.

I don’t know why so many people seem to be missing the point. Perhaps it’s because Reagan was transformative, and now he’s become the bogeyman of the progressive movement. People apparently can’t be rational about him anymore. I am not yet an Obama supporter but this “controversy” is pushing me that way, because it highlights that he seems to be the only one who will speak to us as if we’re not stupid — as if, being adults, we can understand nuance and thus accept uncomfortable truths, such as that a president can be very effective in effecting change even if the changes he effects are bad ones. (Of course, the rabid sputtering on Obama’s left flank provided evidence that, no, the American electorate is in fact as stupid as everyone complains.)

I understand the need for mythmaking and crafting a progressive narrative to combat the conservative one. But aren’t we supposed to be the party of the reality-based community?

Shirt answer: A whole lot less than the punditocracy would like you to believe.

Long answer: Oh, my goodness, people. Could we all just stop with the wild oscillations from day to day? No one in their right mind believed the polls showing Obama up by double digits in a single week. Clinton didn’t score a “comeback” because she didn’t go away: She has been strong in NH for the past year. Until a couple of weeks ago, Clinton had a 20 point edge on Obama and yet she won the state by only 2 points. How is that a comeback?

But what about all those polls showing the “Obama bounce”? They were ludicrous to believe. It takes time for actual views to shift, but polls are sensitive to short-period trends and, especially, news coverage. All of a sudden, after winning Iowoa, Obama was everywhere on the news. Of course his numbers ticked up.

Did Clinton “save” her candidacy by shedding a tear or by performing well at the debate or by saber-rattling? No, she “saved” it by having a strong organization in a friendly state. For five days, her supporters have been yelling at us that no one should count her out — correctly. But after castigating everyone for misinterpreting Iowa, they are exultantly misinterpreting New Hampshire. Excluding the post-Iowa media insanity, things turned out about as would be expected — indeed, I think Obama did better than anyone would have said just four weeks ago. (I mourn that my guy Edwards did not stage the upset that would truly have been an upset.)

Anyone with technical experience knows you don’t trust the gauge until it’s had time to settle down. Trying to spin Obama’s bounce into a steamroller mandate was silly. Trying to spin Clinton’s just-barely-held victory in a state she’d expected to win handily into a comeback of epic proportions… well, that’s just mendacious.