Tom Watson

Blair Witch House

Chuck Butcher displays his perfect pitch on the state of the healthcare reform debate: "I'm glad I'm not a Democrat trying to fluff the Senate Bill, but I'm much happier I'm not a Republican trying not to look like a plutocrat while doing their shilling."

But you have to wonder in re: yesterday's curling-like summit gabfest at Blair House - where Puerto Rican nationalists once tried to snuff President Truman (an observation by way of nothing whatsoever) - was John Boehner really pissed off about the Democrats' proposed tax on tanning salons and cosmetic surgery?

I followed along only in fits and hi-def spurts, but I did catch a few angry GOP references in the negative to "two thousand pages" and wondered if the Republicans were, at long last, repudiating their party's  ideological reliance on the Bible.

Lame Change: The Cartooning of Elizabeth Edwards

For a woman in American politics, there's simply no floor space between harridan and sainthood. There's nowhere to stand, no place to exist, no neutral platform from which to speak. No gray. Bitch or angel, and too few of the latter.

Take Elizabeth Edwards, dying of cancer and the target of the post-2008 whisperings of campaign aides eager for revenge and an off-the-record chat with political Dirt Devils Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. For a while on what passes for the public commons in this country, Edwards was the Mother Theresa of the Democratic Party, holding on her illness-ravaged shoulders the shame of her husband's infidelity and the progressive dreams of followers who judged her calls for public healthcare to be legitimate.

No more. Cheered on by a Washington media rooting section that could only be portrayed by a cackling Heath Ledger brought back from the dead and replicated to fill every seat at Politico, Edwards is now caricatured as a shrill, unhinged she-devil rending her garments in airports and slicing the Achilles tendons of underlings with the vicious alacrity of a demanding hellcat.

I haven't read the apparently juicy Game Change yet, but I read the breathless excerpt in New York Magazine - which felt it necessary not only to carry the take-down of Edwards, but to cartoon the imaginary scenes as well. Yet reading all those juicy details about this supposedly evil woman merely provided a somewhat sad insight into a complicated and painful life lived during the glare of a national political campaign. There is nothing shocking in the one-sided Elizabeth Edwards portrayal in the book - indeed, it's as believable as her sainthood story...or Barack Obama's salvation myth concoctions. Which is to say, a bit but what does it matter.

And why the sheer mean-spirited style of the whole sorry mess? What's the point? I caught a minute or two of Halperin and Heilemann on Imus this morning. Halperin looked dizzy with the rush of attention, giddy with his well-publicized takedown. Heilemann, a good reporter whose work I've admired, looked apologetic and downcast. And as the dearth of sourcing becomes apparent - the book has no notes, and there's already budding controversy over direct quotes from people like Bill Clinton that are now characterized as paraphrases, and second-hand ones at that - I suspect a guy like Heilemann (who appears to have a soul) will become more dispirited. Because Digby has it right:

Sweet Jesus, I hate this goddamned Halperin/Heilemann tabloid atrocity. It's got the villagers so excited I fear they are going to literally orgasm on camera -- and that's something I just don't want to see. A book based on backstabbing gossip from disgruntled campaign aides and pissed off rivals is about as reliable a six year olds playing a game of telephone. When you combine these nasty little tidbits with the Villager sensibility and biases of the writers, you end up with a docu-drama rather than a work of non-fiction.

Over at the Daily Beast, Lee Siegel takes the Elizabeth Edwards reporting apart, bit by bit. And it's not so much whether the stories are true, but whether they amount to anything at all:

According to the book, Elizabeth called John’s campaign manager an idiot. Maybe he was. She accused David Axelrod of lying to her. Maybe he did. At one point during the 2004 presidential race, she “snarled” at the people who were scheduling her appearances: “Why the fuck do you think I’d want to go sit outside a Wal-Mart and hand out leaflets?” Well, why the fuck would she? Halperin and Heilemann are veteran political reporters. Surely they know that such language and tantrums are as common in political campaigns as their opposite: sheer, calculated niceness.

You can't help but feel that the "crazy woman" character is so easily applied to females on the political stage - their anger is never contained, rarely effective, and almost never portrayed as just. It's usually just crazed, unhinged, pre-menstrual or menopausal. Glancing through the New York cartoons is a trip through that little garden of American political sexism so beloved by the mainstream media.

If Game Change (from what I've seen so far) is at all a reminder of the 2008 campaign, it's a reminder of that prism that existed then - and, God help us, exists now - that distorts the lives of public women and creates the kind of monsters that, I guess, sell books.

The Obama Disconnect: the 'Organizing' Myth

The truth is that Obama was never nearly as free of dependence on big money donors as the reporting suggested, nor was his movement as bottom-up or people-centric as his marketing implied. And this is the big story of 2009, if you ask me, the meta-story of what did, and didn't happen, in the first year of Obama's administration. The people who voted for him weren't organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests--banks, energy companies, health interests, car-makers, the military-industrial complex--sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting.

via techpresident.com

Micah Sifry's terrific piece in TechPresident (where I contribute occasionally) neatly sums up one the year's greatest political frustrations on the left - the utter failure of the super-connected Obama campaign to use that grassroots power in the cause of the very issues the President ran on.

When I talk to groups about social media trends, Obama '08 is a key data point - yet as the year went on, I started to add a crucial caveat to my presentations: that political campaigns don't generally translate to governance.

I remember asking Micah late last year when Obama should begin using his vast network of online and grassroots supporters to start pushing for public healthcare and other issues. This was during the campaign, actually; Micah was probably right in answering "not yet," since Obama still had to defeat McCain and the Republicans.

But it's a tragedy that he didn't switch instantly from campaign mode to policy mode after winning election - especially on public healthcare. I'm firmly convinced we wouldn't have this pale, anemic Senate insurance regulation mish-mash tarted up as "historic reform" if the President and his team hadn't made the decision to stop campaigning and organizing.

In the end, "Obama the Organizer" remains largely a myth, at best a one-off tactical feature of his successful political campaign. And that's too bad for all of us.

Healthcare 'Reform' - Sand Between the Fingers

We're not changing our health-care system very much at all, in fact.

Nothing happens in 2010. Or in 2011. Or in 2012. In 2014, when the bill really begins, the insurance situations of 18 million people change. A full 16 million of those people are uninsured. Aside from the small sliver of people who will pay a surtax on the final few dollars of uncommonly expensive insurance plans, the country simply will not notice this legislation.

We're reforming the margins of the health-care system.

via voices.washingtonpost.com

As Big Tent Democrat says: "Put THAT on the teleprompter."

My disappointment with so-called "healthcare reform" is profound and Ezra Klein's post at the WP does the best job of laying out why. There's not much there. No public option. No real reform for five years. A so-called mandate with no penalties and a seemingly optional agreement with the health insurance industry - whose stocks are soaring to half-century highs on the news of this mess.

Some will call it "historic." They will be wrong.

Obama's War

From tonight onward, the relevance of George W. Bush to the foreign policy of the United States begins to diminish like a lifting winter fog to the vanishing point. This war in Afghanistan is Barack Obama's war, and he traveled to West Point to boldly claim that ownership before some of the young men and women who may soon face death under the terms of his order.

President Obama's team, transported nearly whole from its triumphant political campaign, has a sure-handed mastery of the image, the words, the brand. So there was no mistaking any intention whatsoever in tonight's speech upon the Hudson - and any continued carping about inherited warfare and the failed policies of a predecessor in office conflicts with the image of strength and decisiveness the President projected at the U.S. Military Academy.

To put it bluntly: he was not forced into this decision. The failures of the opposition party are no longer all that relevant to what happens now. The Afghanistan policy - more fully understood, in my view, as the Pakistan-Afghanistan policy - is the Obama Administration's policy. It is not some moth-eaten hand-me-down hybrid forced on a unwilling President.

Liberals, who have long deluded themselves into believing Obama was a fellow traveler (in John Heileman's words), have got to find a way to accept this - to understand that President Obama is both the best and the brightest and a practical centrist to the core of his being. (This stands in stark contrast, of course, to the sheer lunacy of the hard right, which insists on branding the Administration as socialist). Progressives who somehow intuited an anti-war politician, a near-pacifist, based on Obama's opposition to Bush's Iraq misadventure must finally understand that this is a President who won't shy away from ordering military action.

Indeed, the President's national security and diplomatic team is resolutely interventionist - committed to military strength and its strategic use - even if they're not wild-eyed exceptionalist cowpokes like the previous Cheneyites. The key words in tonight's address were these:

“We are in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan. That is why we need a strategy that works on both sides of the border.”

This is about the danger from that region to American interests and lives. While I may believe Afghanistan to be an unwinnable quagmire that only cost lives and dollars with short results, that it's useless to try and prop up what Bob Herbert calls "ragtag and less-than-energetic Afghan military" and the corrupt regime, President Obama has decided differently. Clearly, the U.S. does have a national security interest in the immediate future of Pakistan and Afghanistan - and so, I might add, does the civilized world.

As David Sirota writes in a tough post tonight (he seems somehow personally hurt that Obama has decided to retain the mantle of "wartime President"), the punditry around this decision is tiresome:

Why do so many pundits and pro-Obama activists continue to focus on how "hard" and "difficult" and "trying" this decision is for President Obama, rather than on how "hard" and "difficult" and "trying" this will be for the soldiers who are killed? Doesn't Obama get to make this decision, and then go home to the comfortable confines of a butlered White House, while thousands of Americans will be sent 7,000 miles from home to face their potential deaths? Isn't the latter "harder" than the former?

I suspect the President himself would agree. Of course this wasn't an easy decision, but it was the President's decision - and the decision he ran so hard to make. Yes, he took his time and that's to his credit. And now it's his war.

And because he acts in your name and mine, it's still ours.

Fired Up - Ready to Go on Climate Change?

That President Obama will travel, after all, to Copenhagen next month to take part in the United Nations climate change conference is huge news in my house - or at least, in my daughter's high school environmental activism club.

There are those who argue that the U.S., even with a Democratic President and Congress, is not ready to come in from the cold on climate change in a formal manner, that the Obama Administration has moved too slowly in joining international action. But the actions of the President speak loudly, particularly to young activists who very often drive this issue with more passion than their political professional elders.

So Obama's trip to Copenhagen, where he will speak at the beginning of the conference and then zip over to Oslo to collect his Nobel, is important to the environmental movement in the U.S. I know that I was hearing a bit of "why should we bother?" after a long day of telephone-banking to Congressional offices - but that was when the young activists believed the Administration would skip Copenhagen.

Welcome too is the small bit of policy the President will bring with him: "a tentative promise to reduce production of climate-altering gases," the first time the U.S. has ever entered in the arena of concrete emission numbers. According to John Broder in the Times, Obama "will tell the delegates to the climate conference that the United States intends to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions “in the range of” 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, officials said. No American administration has ever delivered even a tentative pledge on emissions reductions because Congress has never enacted climate legislation or approved an international global warming agreement with binding emissions targets."

But the White House is doing something else as well: firing up the portion of the activist base that spends long afternoons calling Congress about climate change.

'I Deserve Health Care'

Organizing for America has announced the winner of its Health Reform Video Challenge, and it's terrific. Hope the Senate's watching.

Empowering Sarah

There's a great little Mad Men moment in Jonathan Van Meter's detailed profile of Hillary Clinton in this month's Vogue (and what socially ambitious magazine piece doesn't have a Mad Men moment these days). "That's how it was!" enthuses the Secretary of State. "That's why the women's-liberation movement was so shocking. It was like news from outer space."

It's tempting in a pop-culture, byte-wasting, quarter-hour-per-column Maureen Dowd kinda way to cast Secretary Clinton as the Peggy Olson of national politics: talented, under-appreciated and driven - and just as tempting to put Sarah Palin in the Joan Holloway role, ticketed by wise-cracking white-haired Republican men for her physical assets and discarded after the fact. Tempting, but we'll let it pass.

Except that Newsweek went with the full Joan on its cover this week, fronting essays by Evan Thomas and Christopher Hitchens, pieces that are also accompanied by a photo of a Palin doll dressed in full schoolgirl-slut porn costume. That picture alone - never mind the Runner's World cover shot Newsweek chose from among the thousands of stock Palin photos available - gives lie to editor Jon Meacham's disingenuous note: "We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do. We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard."

There's plenty of Palinology to oppose, of course - but I think it's telling that Newsweek buried the cover on its web page just this afternoon, after playing it huge for a day. I suspect it's because of complaints from Palin directly, and from her followers (few voices on the left said a word, more on that in a moment). After all, the conservatives are hideously split on the Palin phenomenon; your permanent establishment types are scared to death that Palin and Glenn Beck's tea party know-nothings will take over the Party of Reagan. The radical right loves her.

But it's the cultural split over Palin that's so damned interesting. Why has this failed Vice-Presidential candidate captured so much attention - left, right and center? There were no Lloyd Bentsen porno dolls. And if you dislike Sarah Palin intensely - as half the Republican Party does, joined by all of the Democratic Party and 99-percent of the media - why feed this blooming cult of personality so assiduously?

What makes a respectable national magazine run porn doll photos of a 45-year-old politician? What makes commenters on liberal blogs dive into the deep-end ooze of bitter and crude sexism?

In truth, Hillary Clinton has to secretly love the Palin phenomenon - because Palin has replaced the now wildly-popular Secretary of State as the female public figure most likely to drive grown men (and some women) to crazed and angry obsession. (You suspect Nancy Pelosi and Michelle Obama also admire that high pick that Palin's setting at the top of the political key).

To say that Palin is a lightning rod is to say the Empire State Building is a walk-up; her strange white heat wattage could power some of the more under-populated red states. It's turned writers like Andrew Sullivan into cackling Cody Jarretts, howling frenetic ghouls doing the full self-destructive Cagney at the top of the massive gas storage tank that comprises the political blogosphere.

"Made it, Ma! Top of the world! I'm the world's authority on Sarah Palin's uterus!" That's essentially the single-Tweet version of Sullivan's entire blog of late, as he picks up his detailed Baedeker of the Alaskan's reproductive history to coincide with the heavy breathing in political circles around Palin's get-even-with-McCain memoir, Going Rogue.

The attention meter is stuck on eleven and honest to God, it's like dropping a live toaster into Godzilla's bathwater.

Since the days of Richard Nixon, the American right has been fueled by the resentment of elitism - very successfully, I might add. By mocking Sarah Palin, by sticking her on the cover in shorts, and portraying her inside the magazine as a porn doll, Newsweek is attempting to reduce her to an object - easily packaged, handled, and defeated. But the effect is the opposite; that kind of stuff only makes Palin more popular. Look at the book sales and Oprah's numbers. And conservative fans of Palin's golly-gee social conservatism aren't the only ones noticing the sexist taint in much of the Palin criticism.

I agree with Hitchens when he savages the central theme of Matthew Continetti's book, The Persecution of Sarah Palin, "that liberal dislike of his heroine is no more than a distaste for those who hail from outside America's coastal metropolises; a revulsion toward people who do not aspire to adopt the norms, values, politics, and attitudes of the Eastern cultural elite." The revulsion is clearly there - Hitchens himself generously employs the term "hick" in his essay, thereby earning the coveted merit badge of the coastal clans and applying a little more electricity to the publicity monster. But that revulsion doesn't explain all - it doesn't account for the hard-core right-wing policy, religion-based political and social blinders, and the sheer lack of preparation and study that typifies the Palin public brand. All that is real, and not for second do I find Palin an appealing political figure.

But when the left goes all "iron my shirt" on Sarah Palin - or stands aside in silence in service of some greater goal (and we've seen this movie before) - not only does it dunk progressive values into a cesspool, it empowers her so-called movement. Need some proof? Read Rick Perlstein's Nixonland - the whole game plan's there.

It's not popular for liberal bloggers to defend Sarah Palin, but Media Matters and Julie Millican did just that yesterday with a Newsweek-ripping riposte. "Newsweek offers some interesting analysis of Palin and her appeal in its November 23 issue," wrote Millican. "Unfortunately, its sexist treatment of Palin's physical appearance distracts from any legitimate arguments the magazine and its contributors wish to make." And Melissa McEwen, the great feminist blogger of the world, neatly captures the "she asks for it" aspect of some of the left's attacks on Palin. "If a woman is 'bad,' that justifies using sexism against her and she had no right to complain. The fauxgressive mantra." Digby, meanwhile, catches CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin talking up Palin's "gams" like she's Moe from The Simpsons.

They were voices in the wilderness. Most liberal bloggers either said nothing, or defended Newsweek. The comments on some of the pro-feminist blogs were depressing. "Then it comes down to, 'Is she f*ckable?'" writes one commenter at Digby's place, seriously attempting to mock the GOP's fascination with Palin. The typical 19-year-old South Park fanboy frat kegger viewpoint came from (shockingly) Gawker: "She wants to be the hot mom, and she wants to be the emerging political power center. She wants those two identities to reinforce one another, but she doesn't want anyone to screw with the messaging."

No, bumpkin. She wants to be President of the United States.

And, to borrow an analogy that would surely appeal to any Gen X hockey mom, you're playing Messier to her Gretzky.

On the Cold Tarmac of History

Four years ago, I castigated the Bush Administration on this blog for what seemed a public lack of regret over the mounting war losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush visited families in private, but unlike Presidents Reagan, Clinton and his own father, he refused to attend solemn rites for actual soldiers - like standing at an Air Force base as the remains of sons and daughters fighting America's wars are brought home. Those posts stirred a bit of controversy; one compared our official disdain for national public mourning to the memorial for a slain Italian security officer. Perhaps because I'm headed for Italy tomorrow, those images came back at me. More likely: President Obama's overnight visit to Dover Air Force Base to stand at attention as the bodies of 18 Americans were carried from a transport plane, and to comfort the soldiers' families and comrades.

Without doubt, the President's timing carries real policy import; he is on the verge of a major decision on the continuing conflict in Afghanistan, a seemingly endless battle to stem what  seems unstemmable. Yet the image of President Obama standing on the tarmac at Dover is important, whatever his strategic decision. That is because he is not a figurative commander-in-chief, a mere head of state who leaves the conduct of American military action to the generals. No, he - and every president - is the literal commander, the immediate supervisor of the vast defense establishment. Ever since President Washington took the field to crush the Whiskey Rebellion, American President's have run the military directly. Nowadays, Presidents can direct the virtual battlefield from the highly-wired command center under the White House. Indeed, modern Presidents are often called upon to give the order to kill enemy combatants.

For the President to be seen publicly mourning his own comrades-in-arms - however tenuous and thinly constitutional that bond sometimes feels - is ethically vital. As their commander, he is responsible for their actions and must bear the burden for their deaths. But symbolically, he is also a direct link to the people who elected him - and who he is sworn to protect. When he stands before the bodies of fallen soldiers, he represents us. For whether or not we support or oppose this war, or other wars, the President and his soldiers act in our names.

Bush's refusal to be seen near the caskets of dead soldiers, and his Administration's ban on photographs of those returning remains, willfully broke that link. I think it attempted to remove Americans from responsibility for the war - to make it seem like a distant event. And to hush up the cost.

Whatever you think of President Obama's foreign policy, you cannot argue that he turns a blind eye to the terrible price of war. I understand that his visit was symbolic. But in the middle of the night in Dover, the President walked the walk.

Crazy Like A Fox

There are fans of President Obama who insist that every move made by the Administration has eight-thousand levels of three-dimensional chess choreographed by the grand master of karmic jujitsu. I'm far too cynical to buy into that particular fable. But I do want to take note of a pretty obvious strategic campaign on the part of the White House that hasn't generated much comment.

Here's the executive summary for you bullet point types:

1. Health care reform is quickly gaining strength after a horrendous summer of political malaise on the left.

2. The right is increasingly outraged by the Administration's box-out of Fox News, and its reframing of mainstream political argument in general.

3. These  two trends are not unrelated.

Strip away a lot of the noise and heat surrounding the public diss Obama is laying on Fox News, and what you're left with is a classic misdirection. It's Patton's phantom army massing to invade the Pas de Calais. It's Peyton Manning's audibles and play fakes before pounding it into the endzone. It's Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown.

Over the summer, the President and his party was in full, disastrous backpedal. This was decidedly not jujitsu - this was poor planning, a drift in framing the storyline. A tiny minority of Tea Party types, sporting all manner of racist and divisive signage and spewing the infectious sputum of know-nothingitis, grabbed the momentum away from a Democratic Party that seemed increasingly splintered. The President's popularity dropped. The public option, centerpiece to the most important initiative of Obama's domestic agenda, lacked even a faint pulse. What to do?

Feint and jab for the fleshy and painful midsection. Who could have known the punch would hurt so much - and be such effective strategy? You see, the people at Fox News actually believe that "fair and balanced" malarkey. Enervated and slowed to slurred and drunken speech by eight years of Bush-favored ascendancy, Roger Ailes and Company actually began to believe their own press clippings; they thought they were part of the mainstream establishment, a "real" news organization respected by their peers and feared by the very government they covered.

So the freeze-out on Pennsylvania Avenue actually hurt, inducing tears of pain and rage beyond even the salty ducts of Glenn Beck's hateful nativist tribe. It hurts not to be invited to the party.

Neutralizing the largest media outlet of the opposition - by inducing a great sob of self-pity - is simply good strategy. Meanwhile, there's a whole lotta policy shakin' going on. The Fox Hunt, the Great Rush Limbaugh NFL Blitz, and the White House's new willingness - nay, eagerness - to throw the penalty flag on crazy right-wing stuff in the media - it's all good strategy.

It also has others in the so-called mainstream press - your ABC News, your Joe Kleins - tut-tutting about the rights of their "sister" news organization, or providing false advice on how the President's taking his eyes off the ball.

But the opposite is true. The Administration, after a tough summer, has its eyes on the ball and it's moving down the field with some momentum. Meanwhile Fox News is tangled in a pile of slow-moving linemen about 20 yards behind the play.