Fun Stuff: Read About Newt Gingrich’s Doctoral Dissertation

by Lev on 16 May 2012

Hey, did you know our favorite shithead Newt Gingrich is actually Dr. Newt Gingrich? It’s true, incredibly. He even wrote a Ph.D. dissertation back in the ’70s, one described as having “pedantic, adequate prose”:

The political or ideological orientation of the dissertation, if I may put it this way, is roughly that of a Cold War member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Colonization is seen almost entirely from the perspective of the colonial power, not from that of the indigenous population. The rule of King Leopold II, who literally owned the colony as his private property until, at his death, he willed it to Belgium, is widely understood to have been the most horrifyingly brutal colonial regime in Africa. Gingrich acknowledges this fact once in the dissertation. Speaking of the financial pressures placed by the Congo on King Leopold’s coffers, Gingrich reports that a “state official told a missionary in 1899 that each time a corporal ‘goes out to get rubber he is given cartridges. He must return all those that are not used; and for every one used he must bring back a right hand.’” [p. 15]

The undertone is that he went easy on the Belgians to suck up to his Belgian dissertation adviser. I know, the thought of Newt Gingrich compromising his ethics and sucking up to someone who can help him advance is really farfetched, but maybe you can imagine it if you try. Full review is here.

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Identity Silliness

by Lev on 16 May 2012

I must admit that the idea that Barack Obama is our first gay president (or, more accurately, the “first gay president,” as without the quotes it’s tabloid fodder) is somewhat bizarre to me. Yes, I know it’s a riff on the idea that Bill Clinton was called the “first black president,” but that made sense because it captured something about Clinton, namely that Clinton was comfortably multicultural in terms of his personality that was genuinely unusual in a president at that time. Clinton was technically just as white as, I don’t know, Dwight Eisenhower, but Ike didn’t socialize with black people, didn’t listen to their music, and didn’t make an effort to understand them. Clinton demonstrably did all these things, and his personality reflected it, so the term is somewhat illuminating. Setting aside the little fact that we’ve almost certainly already had a gay president (and probably more than one, if you do the math), I’m not quite sure what to make of applying the label to Obama. For one thing, I’m not wild about connoting Obama with a closeted, secret identity, which is essentially what the right always accuses him of (even if the intent here is hardly negative). But more importantly, while there are some groups of gay men that have group identities I’ve never really thought there was a single gay identity, just gay people, most of whom just live normal lives indistinguishable from straights like me, aside from in their choice of romantic partners. If you think the same way, then a gay president is a completely jejune concept.* And it’s true that Obama has a pretty great record on gay rights, but that doesn’t go to identity. Was Lyndon Johnson our first black president? By this logic he’d have to be, even though that’s a pretty laughable idea.

Also, I just find these sorts of distinctions passe. Who cares? Obama winning the election was historic, but his race hasn’t had any impact on how he would govern that I can tell, compared to Biden or Clinton or anyone else. I’ve heard people argue that his complex racial identity makes him more receptive to compromise and conciliation, but that’s highly speculative. Democrats just tend to want to meet Republicans halfway all the time anyway, no matter what the issue is. The notion that having a president of color would change politics was a complete flop, just as having an out gay president undoubtedly would be (and we will eventually have one, I’m quite sure). The past few years have made me jaded to such distinctions. I don’t really care about identity anymore, let’s just see how they govern.

*Admittedly, there is no single black identity, or Irish identity, or evangelical Christian identity either. These groups all have common histories and culture, but there are large breaks in all these communities, and certainly you’ll always find individuals that buck the trends.

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Don’t Count On Another #DebtCeilingClusterF*ck

by Lev on 15 May 2012

People are buzzing about this, but it’s not technically news, since Boehner and especially Mitch McConnell have not really been coy about their intention to wreck the government again. Obviously, if Romney wins, Republicans will roll over on this issue. But I’m hardly convinced we’ll see another showdown if Obama wins. Republicans will be far more interested in extending the Bush Tax Cuts than anything else, and if November shakes out the way I think it’s likely to (another Obama term, a 12-15 seat Democrat gain in the House–possibly a few more, but I don’t think it’ll be much less–and dead even in the Senate with Biden breaking the tie), Boehner will have very little leverage. So making statements like this has to be understood as a bid to improve his negotiating position, nothing more. Boehner would be happy to trade away a debt ceiling increase in exchange for an extension on the upper-bracket tax cuts, and considering that Obama’s campaign has thus far used tax fairness as a running theme, Boehner has naturally trying to find leverage. As we saw in 2010, Republicans can be extraordinarily generous in negotiations if they get tax cuts for the rick out of them. Does it really make sense that Boehner’s top priority would be to procure a bunch more cuts during a lame duck session, or to parley that threat into an objective his party values infinitely more? Now, if Obama said that he absolutely will not extend the upper-bracket tax cuts under any circumstances, I could see Boehner and his House contingent as petty enough to refuse to raise the limit. That would not exactly be politically brilliant, but he’s got a lot of true believers in his caucus.

Now, obviously, this would be a lot less powerful of a threat had there not been a precedent of holding the debt limit hostage being so successful. I wonder whether Obama has rethought his resistance to using something like the 14th Amendment option in a debt ceiling crisis. Because if Boehner is earnest here, I have to seriously wonder whether the cure was worse than the disease–routine debt ceiling holdups strike me as much more devastating to America over the long run than the government having to issue I.O.U.s for a period of time (or a minor constitutional crisis). I don’t think we’ve even begun to understand just how big a boner Obama pulled when dealing with Boehner.

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Americans Not Flocking To Vague, Shadowy Political Gimmicks

by Lev on 15 May 2012

I think we’ve hit the end of the (middle of the) road here:

Presumably AE could delay its timetable and hope someone (Buddy Roemer?) eventually crosses the bar to become a nominatable candidate. It could lower its already pathetically low threshold for candidate viability. Or it could just make a mockery of the entire bottom-up process that is supposedly the group’s signature and pick a candidate (or candidates) to put forward, assuming anybody even remotely credible out there would accept the damaged goods of a nomination.

I could have told you this was going to happen. Day-to-day politics going on in America is largely a bottom-down affair, with a relatively small group of people in government and the media setting the agenda that everyone else reacts to. But political movements do not work this way! They start with a group of people who want to make a change, always, and expand out from there. Americans Elect has been pretty smart about giving that first small group of people something to play with, something that is very fascinating to them, but just starting a quasi-political party because a couple of influential people want one that thinks like them is a perfect misapplication of how politics typically works to the realm of genuine political and social movements. You can’t just will into existence a new party that backs everything you support, it doesn’t work that way, and it smacks of an elite misunderstanding of the nature of politics. Sure, with money you can astroturf, you can use paid ads, really, there are any number of tools to manipulate public opinion. But there are limits, thankfully.

The truth is, the only way AE would have become a factor would have been if some freefloating movement, perhaps even a single-issue campaign (climate change? civil liberties?) had used it as a conduit to get a presidential candidate on the ballot. I’m actually halfway surprised they didn’t, since it wouldn’t have been too hard to do. Then again, the AE chalice is a tainted one, and considering how thoroughly it’s been mocked from the beginning nobody must have wanted to take the image hit. If the financial backers behind AE had, I don’t know, given money to moderate Republican Senate candidates to win primary bids instead of launching some contentless, grandiose bid to change the face of American democracy, they would have done much more good. But good luck trying to make hedge fund managers understand that small, practical, commonsense measures are the way to go.

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Charlotte Wasn’t The Right Choice for the DNC. What Would’ve Been?

by Lev on 14 May 2012

The case for picking Charlotte, NC, as the site of the Democratic National Committee was supposed to be simple:

When Democrats announced the choice in February 2011, they said selecting the Southern city signaled Obama’s intent to fight hard for the conservative-leaning state like he did in 2008. They also highlighted the economic transformation in the state and in Charlotte — from tobacco, textiles and furniture-making to research, energy and banking. Party leaders noted the state’s strong political leadership and expressed hope that a Perdue re-election bid would get a boost from the attention that would be lavished on the convention.

But it’s turned into something of a nightmare:

Labor unions, a core Democratic constituency, are up in arms. Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue isn’t running for re-election; Democrats say she was likely to lose. The state Democratic Party is in disarray over an explosive sexual harassment scandal. Voters recently approved amending the state constitution to ban gay marriage, a position that runs counter to Obama’s. And unemployment in the state remains persistently high.

“Nobody can sugarcoat the fact that we got problems here,” said Gary Pearce, a former Democratic consultant who was an adviser to former Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt. Pearce was referring specifically to state party woes but could have been talking about any of the troubles here for Democrats.

But, he added: “I think the greatest strength that the party has is President Obama. And he’s the thing that people will rally around.” [...]

Now traditional Democratic Party groups are threatening huge protests in part because they’re deeply uncomfortable that the convention is being held in one of the least union-friendly states. And thousands of Democrats across the country are calling for the convention to be relocated because of the gay-marriage vote.

That obviously won’t happen, the amount of real people who care about this story is pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things, and the amount who would change their vote over it is either zero or very close to it. Still, it’s almost hilariously self-defeating. Party conventions are supposed to be a few days dedicated to pumping up the party and its ticket, a spectacle widely (but accurately) derided as a week-long infomercial for the parties. This much is true. Let’s just say, the news out of North Carolina hasn’t been all that great from a Democratic perspective recently.

I think that the DNC missed a step here. Picking Charlotte is a sop to the Mark Halperins of the world, a statement of electoral strategy more than anything else. It doesn’t really speak to any of the themes of the Obama re-election effort (no, I don’t see a transition from the “old economy” of textiles and furniture to the “new economy” of banking and research as reflective of a theme, at least none I’m aware of). I wonder why Detroit wasn’t the first and only candidate here. It’s aggressive because Romney has a connection to it, it ties into the automotive rescue (which has assumed a central role in Obama’s re-election spiel), and it’s a poster child for a city ravaged by Romneynomics, a place where industry withered because management sent the jobs overseas and just fired many of the ones they didn’t, all while executive pay surged. The city could use the help, but increasingly it’s becoming rebranded as a tough town where stuff is still being built in America. Not a bad message to be associated with, nor is the fact that Michigan is recovering unusually quickly from the recession. Were President Obama to brag about saving the auto industry, standing in the place where it is most identified with (and perhaps with some of those very workers whose jobs were kept due to his own initiative) would make the point louder than a normal speech could. It would be something of a risk (Republicans would inevitably claim that Detroit has been failed by Democrats and unions), but if pulled off well, it would have been a rare case of the setting being the star at a political convention (only the Republicans’ convention in New York in 2004 sort of came close to this recently, though not quite as the city itself was relegated to a supporting role as the victim restored to safety by G.W. Bush. Charlotte, by contrast, is safe. It has no real connotations to it, aside from memories of Larry Johnson’s glory years on the Hornets back in the ’90s. But notwithstanding the disasters mentioned in the article–many of which couldn’t have been forseen–it still seems somewhat bland to me. Admittedly, this is one of those “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” conversations because it doesn’t matter in the real world, but I can’t help but feel regret about how much more effective a setting the Motor City would have made (plus, Ted Nugent would probably do something to get his sorry ass arrested as a protester, which would have been icing on the cake).

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Fun Friday: Indiana Jones and the Policy of No Refunds

by Lev on 11 May 2012

From the maker of the incredibly long (but great) reviews of the Star Wars prequels:

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Consequences of Gay Marriage

by Metavirus on 10 May 2012

FailBlog

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Further Thoughts on Obama and Marriage

by Lev on 10 May 2012

Glenn Greenwald is wise here:

When it comes to assessing a politician, what matters, at least to me, are actions, not motives. If they do the wrong thing, they should be criticized regardless of motive; conversely, if they do the right thing, they should be credited. I’ve had zero tolerance over the last three years for people who pop up to justify all the horrible things Obama has done by claiming that he is forced to do them out of political necessity or in cowardly deference to public opinion; that’s because horrible acts don’t become less horrible because they’re prompted by some rational, self-interested political motive rather than conviction. That’s equally true of positive acts: they don’t become less commendable because they were the by-product of political pressure or self-preservation; when a politician takes the right course of action, as Obama did today, credit is merited, regardless of motive.

The trap that politicians set for us (and I admit I’m not immune to it) is that they want us to identify personally with the image they project. But that image is rarely (I wouldn’t say never because it’s theoretically possibly) a full portrait of the person. You often hear about people having “relationships” with an artist through their work, but the goal of an artist is to reveal him- or herself to the world, which is not really the goal of a politician. We’ll never know the latter group much better than they want us to know them. So, as Greenwald says, the only fair way to evaluate them is by what they actually do as public figures, not by our perception of their motives, which is essentially based on assumptions we make about them based on an image deliberately crafted for our consumption. Thus, Obama deserves enormous credit for his stance on marriage.

And I, for one, think the timing is actually pretty close to ideal. Obama just kicked off his re-election campaign formally last week, and this will help in re-energizing and renewing his support among the base at just about the perfect time. Coming as it does after the North Carolina Amendment passing, it doesn’t seem as opportunistic as it would have had the initiative failed, and it’s early enough not to seem sincere rather than desperate. The media response, for once, has been pretty helpful to the president, casting the announcement as something bold, controversial and possibly damaging, rather than a foregone conclusion that nearly every engaged observer had already guessed at. It seems apparent that the whole thing was pretty spontaneous, but this is one of those times when that can make an event much more powerful. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Obama get a bit of a polling bump from this, as it’s essentially a way of unambiguously taking the lefties’ side without having to make policy concessions of any sort. Younger voters too. It also shows how fragile Romney’s path to power is–so far, the president has been better able to define what issues the campaign has been about than the challenger has, and expecting the election to be the economy all the time (as Romney hopes) is not all that realistic.

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The Evolution Is Over

by Lev on 9 May 2012

And it turned out a lot better than that one!

President Obama made history Wednesday, becoming the first sitting president to come out in support of legal same-sex marriage.

In an interview with ABC News, Obama said, “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”

The ABC appearance followed several days of amped-up pressure on Obama to change his stance on same-sex marriage after Vice President Biden and members of Obama’s Cabinet expressed their support for legalized marriage between same-sex couples.

I continue to think that the energy spent getting him here could have been more profitably deployed elsewhere–the practical impact of this is zero–but it’s still a big deal, and it feels good.

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