Arm Yourself

If you read no other political post this month, let it be this revelatory GOP insider piece, Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult. It's everything you may have ever suspected about today's nightmarish Republican Party, not just anti-Democratic but anti-democracy, instead pro-oligarchy, pro-authoritarian and theocratic:

It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill...

I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them...

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté...

During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined.

If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.

So is Obama up for the task of calling out these crazies or can he get anything done without compromise? Will the people stop voting for the destruction of America, or are we lost as so many empires past?

Is this first salvo of a wised-up post-deficit crisis Obama, or yet another brick in the road to a GOP-driven American sunset?

The Second Coming of George W. Bush

I'll be shocked if Texas Governor Rick Perry is not the next Republican nominee for President. He's W. without having been born with a silver spoon. In fact, he used to be a Democrat. But now he's a hard-right Christianist anti-tax, crony capitalist ideologue with Reagan's hair but youth and Texas. The question is whether the U.S.A. electorate is ready to make the same disastrous mistake they made just 12 and 8 years ago with another hard-right Christianist anti-tax, crony capitalist ideologue, also a low-grade achiever at college, also with a killer political instinct, also chronically underestimated but great at winning elections.

It chills me to say this, because so many of my friends on the Left are cynical about President Barack Obama. At least it's not about corruption, but they're pissed that he's not acting more pissed, that he's not winning the tax battle and budget battle, which means the jobs battle -- since GOPconomics are proven to be disastrous in actual practice...hence the collapse of the system just in time for Obama to get elected on a high tide of idealism.

So I wish they'd consider this trenchant analysis of Obama operating in the context of the ongoing Civil Rights struggle by an Andrew Sullivan reader:

How does Obama break the iron unity of the GOP opposition to assemble a governing majority in the US Congress? ...

Obama acts entirely within the tradition of mainstream African American political strategy and tactics. The epitome of that tradition was the non-violence of the Civil Rights Movement, but goes back much further in time. It recognizes the inequality of power between whites and blacks. Number one: maintain your dignity. Number two: call your adversaries to the highest principles they hold. Number three: Seize the moral high ground and Number four: Win by winning over your adversaries, by revealing the contradiction between their own ideals and their actions. It is one way that a oppressed people struggle.

...

Honestly, I have been reminded more than once in the last few months of those brave college students sitting in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, back in the day. Obama sits at that table, like they did at the counter. Boehner and McConnell and Cantor clown around, mugging for the camera, competing to ritually humiliate Obama, to dump ketchup on his head.

I don’t think those students got their sandwiches the first day, but they won in the end.

...

If white progressives understood much about the politics of the African American struggle in the United States, we would see Obama in the context of that struggle and understand him better. And you don’t have to be African American to know something about the history of the African American struggle. The books and the testimony is there. It’s not all freedom songs. But you have to be convinced that it is something that can teach you something you don’t already know.

The Help is seeming timely, middlebrow as it might be, popularizing the Civil Rights reading of our recent and ongoing history.

If Perry wins the nomination and Romney accepts having been swooped on, joins as VP, it unites the GOP. It could be Pawlenty as Veep, quitting the race the day after he comes in third in the Ames Iowa Straw Poll, the day after Perry enters, never has to face him in a debate and embarrass himself further. I don't know if Mitt could accept the demotion -- maybe run Treasury? -- so my money is on Perry/Pawlenty vs. Obama/Biden.

It'll be much more racially charged than against Romney and even McCain, because it'll be a Perry, Texan, Tea Party/Bircher Party. Secessionist Party -- that's the whole Confederacy right there. Then the straight shot up from TX to ND, the Western Conservative reliables Utah, ID, AZ, etc. So if they can pick off FL, NC, even PA...

Every voter from Dwight Eisenhower all the way to the Left of Cornell West should be thinking hard about slagging on our current President, when they consider the relentless sales job that's coming like a storm:

Compelling stuff. Wonder if the truth with be able to get out, if it'll get beaten down, or if everyone will know:

And that's not the worst of it. A rising tide of evangelical voters as tool of the oligarchy. Being sold by a folksy swaggernaut from Texas who likes executions.

Sound familiar?

McConfused

Is John McCain flip-flopping or confused?

On regulation of the financial markets and institutions, he was anti-regulatory until, I believe, yesterday. ABC News calls him out on it. At the same time, today, he seemed to confuse Spain with some Latin American country with which we maybe don't have perfect relations. In the Spanish language papers, he's coming across short of an international incident, just rather...loco.

Good news for John, however -- he did, indeed, gain a Hillary Clinton supporter, and one who says she's for him because, ""I don't like him. I feel like he is an elitist."

Damn, she must have credibility then, right?

If only she weren't, and I kid you not, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, wife of Sir Evelyn Robert Adrian de Rothschild of the prominent Rothschild banking family of England, with whom she splits their time between New York City and a British country estate:



Ah, just the kind of crossover support Sir John McCain doesn't need. Might even make him nostalgic for Carly Fiorina.

This week has been the turning point in the Presidential campaign, and McCain has been completely blindsided. Why bother asking what's McCain's plan for the economy -- he doesn't even have a plan to win the election, which the Obama campaign is laying theirs out in public, via email today to supporters, David Plouffe being transparent and, I think, convincing:



I mean, $39 million to seriously contest Florida. If that isn't a gauntlet thrown down before the McCain campaign, what is?

Back to the turning point -- it's in the polls, including a new poll showing Obama ahead in traditionally red Indiana. But the big trend polls are the lead flipping on Gallup Daily, Obama 47% vs. McCain 45%, and in the CBS News poll. In that one, last week it was McCain 46% Obama 44%, tonight it's Obama 48% McCain 43%.

Here's my prediction: barring Obama having an Edwards-level scandal, I don't think it's going to matter what slime they try to throw at him, these numbers will never be this tight again. If anything, the Obama campaign, steeped in Internet enterprise culture, knows that it's a winner-take-all world now, and mindshare is everything.

Without Palin I'd have given McCain a 38% floor, absolute rock bottom. With Palin I think it could be 42%, still giving Obama room enough for a landslide.

The semiotics of the campaigns are interesting now. Obama comes across cool, even-handed but firm and willing to duke. His produced ads are efficient and clear, his email blasts focused and just frequent enough. I expect them to accelerate as we close in on election day, but he's showing excellent taste throughout both new and traditional media. The only other big video element of his campaign is the raw, man-with-a-camera clips from his stump speeches daily, sometimes a zinger like this:



McCain's semiotics are, however, all over the place. He's for this one day, he's against it the next in a different, jarring setting. His banking crisis ad is a mishmash of fear evoking imagery, unfortunately for McCain having him in a black-box netherspace, as if giving us his word on the economy from an undisclosed sci-fi bunker:



And he falls back onto biography at the end, the biggest mistake any Presidential candidate can make. It's vision we vote for, even ersatz if the other side has zero. Kerry lost on biography. McCain also acts like he's somehow "Best Manager," a big traditional loser for Dems (Mondale/Dukakis/Gore) which is rather ridiculous when today's claim is that he was Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee. On one hand, he once again misstates, this time its jurisdiction. But the other reason this is a loser for him is so much more obvious.

It's like raising your hand when the teacher asks who set off the fire alarm, and there's the identifying ink from the security system all over it.

Are you trying to get nailed?