4 posts tagged “obama”
by Hendrik Hertzberg, via the New Yorker
The precise origins of Memorial Day are a little fuzzy. According to one version, it was first celebrated in 1865, a few weeks after Lee surrendered to Grant; freed slaves and black and white Union soldiers marched to the site of a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Charleston, South Carolina, for some hearty hymn-singing and picnicking. Others place its beginnings in Waterloo, New York, a year later, while still others date it to 1868 and a proclamation by the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Northern veterans’ organization. What no one disputes is that the holiday’s founding purpose was to honor the Civil War’s fallen.
This year, thanks to HBO, the remembrances of the Memorial Day weekend encompassed another American civil war, happily less lethal to its combatants but far from trivial in its consequences: the election of 2000. HBO’s movie “Recount” has fewer shrinks than “The Sopranos” and fewer laughs than “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” but its over-all factual accuracy has been attested to by close observers of the events it portrays. It reminds us of some essential truths about the election and its aborted recount: that more Floridians went to their polling places to vote for Al Gore than for George W. Bush; that a full and fair count would have confirmed the voters’ preference; that the White House was awarded to Bush, the half-million-vote loser across the nation, by a 5-4 Supreme Court diktat. The injustice of Bush v. Gore was obvious at the time; its sequel has proved it to be a tragedy.
The stock defense of Justice Antonin Scalia is a three-word sneer: “Get over it.” Many people find themselves unable to take this bracing advice. The wound to the country’s civic health remains fresh, though of course it is active, committed Democrats who feel it most keenly.
In the current Presidential primary campaign, as in the Electoral College, the “popular vote” has no official significance. According to the Party’s rules, the nomination will go to whoever can garner a majority of the delegates at the Convention in Denver, regardless of how many voters or caucus-goers sent them there, or didn’t. (The so-called superdelegates, who make up a fifth of the Convention, represent voters only in the highly attenuated sense of having earlier won public or party office.) Yet the popular vote, however juridically meaningless, carries immense moral and political weight with Democrats, for whom the 2000 travesty is a station of the cross and vote-counting a kind of sacrament. The superdelegates understand this. That’s why it has been clear all along that if one of the candidates is able to claim an indisputable majority of actual flesh-and-blood Democrats it will be difficult to deny him—or her—the nomination. But what if the majority is highly disputable, and everybody has one?
“We’re winning the popular vote,” Hillary Clinton said last week, after prevailing in the Kentucky primary by a margin bigger than that by which she lost in Oregon. “More people have voted for me than for anyone who has ever run for the Democratic nomination.” These statements must be read with the sort of close grammatical and definitional care that used to inform her husband’s descriptions of his personal entanglements. They are not quite true in the normal sense, but if made under oath they would not be prosecutable for perjury, either.
In a nominating process, especially this one, the “popular vote” is an elusive phenomenon. RealClearPolitics.com, an independent Web site whose numbers political reporters and operatives tend to trust, maintains six separate tallies. At the moment, Obama leads in four of them. With or without participants in the caucus states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington (i.e., states where voters’ preferences were expressed by gathering in corners and the like, and whose numbers can be estimated but are not pinpointed), and with the totals for both Florida (whose primary was unsanctioned by the Democratic Party, with the consent of all the candidates, and where no one campaigned) and Michigan (also unsanctioned, and where Obama’s name was not even on the ballot), Clinton’s claim that more people have “voted” for her is factual. But her claim to be “ahead” depends entirely on a tally for the Michigan primary that is distinctly North Korean: Clinton, 328,309; Obama, 0. However, if the bulk of the 238,168 Michiganders who voted “uncommitted” are assumed to have been Obama supporters—a reasonable assumption—then Obama leads by every possible reckoning. And if only Florida is included, then Obama leads whether or not those four caucuses are counted.
Next week, after the three remaining primaries—Clinton is expected to sweep the largest of them, Puerto Rico’s—the likelihood is that each candidate will be able to point to “metrics” showing that he or she is the people’s choice. Obama will almost certainly have the better case, especially in view of opinion polls showing that his national lead among Democrats has been growing, but the reality is that the two have been almost equally strong. Obama will remain the leader in the delegate count, owing largely to a more astute strategy, and he will be the nominee. If there is a loftier lesson, it is that the nominating “system”—and not just in the Democratic Party—is an irrational mess. But that’s not how Hillary Clinton sees it.
Last Wednesday, Clinton described the Democrats’ long-standing
reluctance to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations in their
entirety, a reluctance that she shared back when she saw her nomination
as inevitable, in these words: “We’re seeing that right now in
Zimbabwe.” In a speech in Florida, she invoked the Declaration of
Independence, “the consent of the governed,” the abolition of slavery,
“our most fundamental values,” the 1848 Seneca Falls women’s-suffrage
convention, the sacrifice of soldiers, the tear gas at Selma, “equal
justice under the law,” and the Voting Rights Act. Worse, she invaded
the Democratic sacristy, picked up the chalice, and flourished it like
a club, saying that right
here in Florida, you learned the hard way what happens when your votes
aren’t counted and the candidate with fewer votes is declared the
winner. The lesson of 2000 here in Florida is crystal clear. If any
votes aren’t counted, the will of the people is not realized and our
democracy is diminished.
Well, that depends on what the meaning of “count” is, doesn’t it? Florida’s (and Michigan’s) votes in January’s rogue primaries were indeed counted, and everyone understood well in advance that the question of how they would be translated into delegates was, at best, problematic.
In an eerie echo of the “Brooks Brothers riot” depicted in the HBO
movie, when shouting Bush operatives and Republican congressional
staffers who had been dispatched to Florida managed to shut down the
Miami-Dade County recount, CNN reported on Thursday that Clinton
supporters “are planning to swarm the capital in a little over a week
to pressure Democratic Party leaders as they gather to decide the fate
of the Florida and Michigan delegations.” In 2000, the candidate most
willing to deploy principles and trash them, according to the tactical
needs of the moment, was awarded the prize. In 2008, maybe not. ♦
It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.
When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.
No, no, no, we’ll just get the money by taxing Big Oil, says Mrs. Clinton. Even if you could do that, what a terrible way to spend precious tax dollars — burning it up on the way to the beach rather than on innovation?
The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”
Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.
But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.
Are you sitting down?
Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies.
These credits are critical because they ensure that if oil prices slip back down again — which often happens — investments in wind and solar would still be profitable. That’s how you launch a new energy technology and help it achieve scale, so it can compete without subsidies.
The Democrats wanted the wind and solar credits to be paid for by taking away tax credits from the oil industry. President Bush said he would veto that. Neither side would back down, and Mr. Bush — showing not one iota of leadership — refused to get all the adults together in a room and work out a compromise. Stalemate. Meanwhile, Germany has a 20-year solar incentive program; Japan 12 years. Ours, at best, run two years.
“It’s a disaster,” says Michael Polsky, founder of Invenergy, one of the biggest wind-power developers in America. “Wind is a very capital-intensive industry, and financial institutions are not ready to take ‘Congressional risk.’ They say if you don’t get the [production tax credit] we will not lend you the money to buy more turbines and build projects.”
It is also alarming, says Rhone Resch, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, that the U.S. has reached a point “where the priorities of Congress could become so distorted by politics” that it would turn its back on the next great global industry — clean power — “but that’s exactly what is happening.” If the wind and solar credits expire, said Resch, the impact in just 2009 would be more than 100,000 jobs either lost or not created in these industries, and $20 billion worth of investments that won’t be made.
While all the presidential candidates were railing about lost manufacturing jobs in Ohio, no one noticed that America’s premier solar company, First Solar, from Toledo, Ohio, was opening its newest factory in the former East Germany — 540 high-paying engineering jobs — because Germany has created a booming solar market and America has not.
In 1997, said Resch, America was the leader in solar energy technology, with 40 percent of global solar production. “Last year, we were less than 8 percent, and even most of that was manufacturing for overseas markets.”
The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.
Obama: The Know-too-much candidate? by Roger Simon, borrowed from Politico.com
Having had the national media at his feet for more than a year, Barack Obama now finds them at his throat.
The fault is his. He has disappointed us. He is not winning every voting bloc in every state. He cannot close the deal.
Running against an older, white candidate, Obama has been losing the older, white vote.
Zounds. What did we ever see in this guy?
The Bubba voters, the NASCAR voters and the Joe Six-Pack voters don’t seem to like him. (This is according to exit polls, whose accuracy is an open question but whose results are the crack of media analysis.)
Pennsylvania proved to be the turning point. Even though it had been clear since the earliest polls that Obama would lose Pennsylvania, the press was shocked by Obama’s loss of Pennsylvania.
The significance of this loss becomes clear when you see it as part of a larger picture: The superdelegates, the party insiders who will decide the nomination, are watching events very, very closely. And what do they see?
Obama has now lost the popular vote in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania. He has been hurt by the irresponsible statements of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and Obama insulted small-town Americans when he accused them of “clinging” to guns and religion.
Hillary Clinton has accused Obama of being “elitist and out of touch.” (And Clinton should know: She lived in a governor’s mansion for 12 years and in the White House for eight, and you can’t get more in touch with real America than that.)
So far, however, there has been no great stampede of superdelegates to Clinton. (Since Super Tuesday, Obama has picked up 87 and she has picked up seven, according to his campaign.) Which just goes to show how out of touch and elitist the superdelegates must be. Or else, how politically savvy they are: They don’t find it shocking that Obama can’t win every demographic group in every state.
Not that he has to. No Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson has won the white vote. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton found that if you win enough of the white vote and an overwhelming percentage of the black vote, you can get to the White House.
But what about Obama’s bigger problem? Comparisons are already being made between Obama and Adlai Stevenson, who was an intellectual (read: loser). Obama used to teach law at the University of Chicago, one of the brainiest universities in the country.
And Americans don’t want presidents who are too brainy. (Obviously.) We would rather plunge into foreign wars or fall off economic cliffs than have presidents who know too much. That is because braininess is elitist, and being an elitist is the worst thing you can be if you want to be president.
Obama now gets this. Since his loss in Pennsylvania, he has been emphasizing his non-elitist roots. At a recent news conference at a gas station in Indianapolis, he said, “I basically buy five of the same suits and then I patch them up and wear them repeatedly.”
(I guess Obama thinks this is supposed to appeal to the working classes, but my father was a truck driver, and he would have thought that owning five suits was a lot.)
At the same news conference, Obama said that what he ate while growing up also reflects his non-elitist upbringing: “I was raised in a setting with my grandparents who grew up in small-town Kansas, where the dinner table would have been very familiar to anybody here in Indiana: a lot of pot roasts and potatoes and Jell-O molds.”
That settles that, I guess. Diet is destiny. But does anybody besides me find it a little dismaying that a person feels he has to campaign for president in this country based on whether he ate Jell-O molds as a kid? (Though, now that I think of it, how did my mother actually suspend those little marshmallows in the Jell-O? Wires?)
Wouldn’t it be more refreshing if Obama was saying what he used to say: that it is wrong to “slice and dice” voters into isolated groups and that it would be good for America to emphasize what unites people and not what divides us?
But Obama’s new approach is valuable for one thing: It teaches us that everything our parents told us was wrong.
“Study hard so you can go to a good school and get a good job,” parents say. “And stop dressing like a bum!”
But not if you want to be president.
