Thursday, May 22, 2008

The interminable campaign

Just seems to go on forever, doesn’t it?

McCain boots Hagee’s endorsement

John Hagee has long been known for his incendiary remarks about people of other faiths, and I was genuinely baffled how McCain could possibly accept Hagee’s endorsement and keep a straight face. Eventually, I had to conclude that he had completely given in to the necessity of pandering to the religious theocrats that make up a significant portion of GOP voters.

McCain, however, apparently finally looked into it.

Y’see, among other things, Hagee thinks God had a hand in creating the Nazis to persecute the Jews.

Well, that appears to be too much for McCain. “Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Reverend Hagee’s endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well.”

It would have taken very little research to find this stuff out, after all. Of course, all this after the flak that Obama took over much more benign remarks by Jeremiah Wright . . . wanna bet the pseudoconservatives will give McCain a pass on this one?

Clinton gets increasingly bizarre

So here’s the deal: the Democratic National Committee disqualified the primary results in Florida and Michigan because both states held their primaries earlier than the party rules allowed.

Now, truthfully, I don’t care so much about that. States can hold primaries whenever they want, in my not-so-humble opinion. But the DNC had rules, Florida and Michigan broke those rules, and the DNC has the right to do whatever it wants.

The candidates went along with this. Most of the Democratic candidates—including Clinton and Obama—agreed not to campaign in either state. Obama also withdrew his name from the Michigan ballot, in accordance with the rules.

But Clinton didn’t.

Now Clinton feels that the votes should be counted “exactly as they were cast.” Furthermore, she believes that the primary nomination should not be decided by delegate counts but by popular vote—which is awfully convenient, given what happened in Michigan.

So let’s get this right: Clinton skirted the rules and kept her name on a ballot, and Obama followed the rules and removed his name from the ballot . . . so Clinton should be rewarded for this?

That, indeed, appears to be what she’s arguing.

Worse, she’s trying to cloak this bizarre argument in the backdrop of the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage, and other voting-rights struggles.

It’s breathtakingly disingenuous.

In Michigan’s case, the only fair way to resolve this is to have the primary not count at all, or to have a revote. In Florida’s case—well, besides the fact that Florida seems to be able to screw up any election these days—a revote seems to be called for as well here, too.

However, the DNC will have to decide that. Not Clinton.

Clinton’s attempts to subvert the Democratic primary process are getting more and more disturbing as time goes on. At this point, I really don’t believe that an Obama-Clinton ticket would do well—I worry that she would constantly be undermining the ticket. Perhaps a better place for her would be a cabinet position—like the Department of Health and Human Services, since health insurance is the drum she’s been beating throughout her campaign.

On the other hand, this rhetoric of hers is going to alienate a lot of her voters from voting Democratic if/when Obama gets the nomination. (“If” seems to be headed inextricably to “when” at this point, given the number of delegates pledged to Obama, but I’m not going to give in to that assumption until the nomination actually takes place.) And presuming that Obama does get the nomination, that means that Clinton will have done a lot to undermine his potential victory in November.

Maybe she doesn’t realize it. Maybe she doesn’t care. Maybe power is more important to her than evicting the GOP candidate. Maybe she’s dumber than we think.

Either way, once again, Clinton comes off as considerably less presidential, and for me, she has become a deep disappointment. In the early days of the Democratic primary campaign, I genuinely would have supported either candidate, but Clinton’s increasingly weird rhetoric, her attacks on Obama, and all the rest have gotten to the point where I think I really need to look forward to a different female presidential candidate in a future campaign.

Clinton is bobbling this rather badly. She has the right to continue her campaign right up to November if she wishes it. But I am gradually becoming persuaded that she may well be hurting her party’s chances for victory in November at this point, and what the Democratic party needs (and what the GOP needs, frankly) is a Democratic landslide.

Conservatism and solving problems

Today, Andrew Sullivan, a conservative columnist I respect quite a bit, was commenting on something Ezra Klein wrote regarding how the conservative movement approaches problem-solving. Klein’s assertion is that conservatives are not faced with any “appropriate problems.” Sullivan, on the other hand, believes that the approach towards solving problems is entirely wrong—that conservatism should respond by ameliorating problems with as minimal intervention as possible.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with either of them, though I’m more sympathetic to Sullivan’s position. (I’m not so sympathetic with his statement that Republicanism is “an amorphous political entity that does what it wants in the pursuit of power”—I think he’s talking about the GOP, and not Republicanism proper, but I take his point.)

First off, I think the biggest challenge for most conservatives is simply admitting that there are problems. The GOP, for example, appears to be in utter denial about numerous problems that not only exist, but are bearing down on us at a breakneck pace. Climate issues, privacy issues, poverty issues, diplomatic issues, military issues—all these seem to lead the GOP and its lackeys into a spate of jamming their fingers in their ears, shutting their eyes, and bellowing random syllables to drown out any facts that might threaten their tiny worldviews.

The second biggest challenge for conservatives is to devote some time and energy into studying the problems. It is not enough to perform some effort with minimum impact—it must be a thoughtful minimum, an effective minimum, a sensible minimum, and that takes some careful consideration. The GOP has a tendency to dismiss issues long before any attempt to study them, but I believe that no improvement can be made without some sort of thoughtful, rational debate.

Given all that, I don’t believe that “solutions” are ever perfect. There are always tradeoffs that sometimes require careful navigation and forethought. I tend to think of problems like global warming or health costs or the mortgage crisis like a big heavy object floating in space that happens to be in the wrong place. You can either give it a huge shove and send it elsewhere—and probably make it crash into something else—or you can push it with a single finger in just the right place and gently nudge it in the right direction, and stop it from going too far with about the same amount of effort. But there’s little point in pushing with too little force to move it effectively, or pushing in the wrong place and sending it spinning in the wrong direction. It takes some analysis, and a willingness to address the issue properly.

Of course, when it comes to issues like this, it’s not as easy to determine the center of mass of an issue; it will require thoughtful debate, careful analysis and perhaps some trial and error. That’s okay, though.

Whatever the case, I don’t think conservatives should be adverse to solving problems; I just think they should be more careful and considered about how they do it. Minimalism shouldn’t be the goal—the goal should be effectiveness—but it can guide the debate, and decide between actions of roughly equal effectiveness.