McCain downgrading eloquence?

My colleague Steve Greenhut and I did live-blog tonight's debate over at the Orange County Register's Orange Punch blog, so if you want to see real-time reactions, including to the cable news media coverage, you might want to click over there. I have just a couple more observations here.

On several occasions, when Obama came back with a fairly smooth response to one of McCain's charges or criticisms, McCain would come back with a relatively dismissive reference to Obama's "eloquence." I think I know what he was trying to do: dismiss what Obama had just said as merely a smooth but fact-free statement, and perhaps trying to garner some underdog sympathy for the plain-spoken straight talker. But in using the word "eloquence," I think he gave Obama more credit than he should have; I suspect people value eloquence in a president. Maybe a word like "smooth talker" would have been more effective.

Botoom line: I think this was McCain's best performance, and he certainly did some attacking on specifics. He may even have won on points if you were scoring as a debate judge would. But I think he didn't come close to doing enough to turn the race around, and I'm not sure what he could do that would. As I've mentioned before, I think he lost his best chance by not opposing the $700 billion bank bailout. I haven't talked to anybody who isn't in the political or chattering classes who favored that ill-conceived move, and the stock markets seem to agree.

Empire in decline

The great Albert Jay Nock once wrote an essay that tried to puzzle out the question of how one might know one is living in a period of decline or the onset of a dark age. It's not that easy a question, since there's a strong tendency among most humans to view the situation and the era into which one is born and lives as simply normal, just the way things are. However, certain evidence from the recent presidential debates suggests to me that we are living in or entering into a period of imperial decline in the United States. The evidence, as I put it in my most recent column for Antiwar.com, is the sheer mediocrity of the candidates for president and vice president. It's not surprising that Sarah Palin doesn't know much about issues beyond Wasilla, but she seems (like W) to see her ignorance not as a reason to learn more but almost as a badge of honor, a condition that makes her all the more sure of things about which she has little or no inkling.

But look at the others. Barack Obama is hailed as a great orator for speeches with virtually no intellectual content. Joe Biden is viewd as a seasoned "expert" on foreign policy yet he makes almost inexplicable gaffes and buys into the standard mythology on NATO and Russia. As for John McCain, he's an unstable angry man who has been that way since childhood who equates honor with bellicosity. If this crowd of third-raters vying for the "highest" offices in the criminal enterprise our imperial government has become isn't a sign of decline, I don't know what would be.

Palin at least coherent, but not game-changing

As far as I know, this Register editorial reviewing the vice presidential debate was the first place it was suggested in print that McCain's best shot at changing the presidential game would have been to oppose the $700 billion bailout bill -- but he put government first (and the malefactors in the financial industry) rather than the people. It's not the only reason he deserves to lose, but it will do.

The editorial found Sarah at least coherent, if ill-informed, and rather dangerously so on foreign policy, while Joe Biden did what he had to do -- avoid condescension. A pretty low bar for both. Incidentally my colleague Steve Greenhut found Sarah even less enchanting than I did, arousing foul-mouthed wrath and threats to cancel subscriptions from several dozen of Orange County's true believers. I'll be so happy when this election is over and the partisan hormones settle down a bit.

Financial crisis a government failure

Here's a link to the piece I did for the Register Sunday Commentary section on the current financial crisis. I think I make a pretty good case that this crisis was made in Washington (though Wall Street has some culpability, of course). But the government created subprime mortgages and pressured banks and other institutions to offer more and more of them. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were near-perfect examples of moral hazard. Add the mark-to-market accounting rules that the government required, and you have something of a perfect storm. And of course, the government creates a huge crisis and uses it as justification to grabe even more money and power.

Incidentally, I didn't have room for it in this piece, but while I think John McCain was playing irresponsible faux-populist politics in calling for SEC Chairman Chris Cox's head (full disclosure; Chris was Newport Beach's Congressman for years, I've met him many times and like him) as what could only be seen as a symbolic gesture, I thought the SEC's outright ban on short selling was a big mistake

Live-blogging the debate

My colleagues Steve Greenhut, Mark Landsbaum and I live-blogged the presidential debate tonight at the Register's Orange Punch blog. We didn't score it, as some did, just made comments as it went along. I thought it was fairly even, which probably meant Obama won since foreign policy was supposed to be McCain's turf. As I said at the end, however, it was two imperialists jousting about which parts of the empire they wanted to put resources into, which is hardly satisfying to somebody like me who wants to see a new foreign policy. Ah. well.

A few other comments, based on some channel-switching. Chris Matthews was ballistic wanting Obama to be more populist and talk about the misery of people being laid off and all. But Obama isn't a populist type and never will be. For some liberals, it's always the Great Depression. He also went on and on about how McCain didn't look Obama in the eyes. Big deal, phony issue. David Gergen on CNN scored it for Obama. And Frank Luntz's focus group, composed of undecided independents, he assured us, split 17-10 for Obama

Worth reading

Steve Coll's piece in the New Yorker on Gen. David Petraeus as he prepares to leave Iraq to head the Central Command, is more reporting than opinion and quite valuable. Petraeus is definitely smart, probably smarter than most of the civilians who nominally supervise him. The piece doesn't offer too many insights as to what he'll do once Afghanistan and Pakistan are in his portfolio; maybe he's smart enough not to know yet.

Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic piece on "The Wars of John McCain" is pretty even-handed but offers what to me is a near-frightening insight into his devotion to war. I'm not sure if he sees it as the highest of human endeavors, as some deluded sols do, but he does see it as a likely solution to problems rather than a last resort to be entered into only reluctantly.

And Leon Aron's piece in the New Republic explains how the Putin regime has introduced new history textbooks into Russian schools that essentially whitewash the brutality of the communist era. Scary stuff.

The week that was

Well, it's certainly been an interesting political week. I and others, including Mark Landsbaum on site in Denver have been blogging much of it on the Register's Orange Punch blog. I thought Obama gave a very good acceptance speech that capped off a remarkably successful convention that in retrospect (staged as these things are anymore) seemed to have a positive dramatic arc for the Democrats, from letting the Clintons, who behaved rather well, have their say, then moved to make it clear that this is Obama's party.

Then that rascal McCain showed he had a pretty good trick up his sleeve and stole Obama's thunder by choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate. She has some downside risks, but what I saw on conservative blogs was a real energizing of the base. It's become a much more interesting race.

Solzhenitsyn on evil

I'm a little surprised that with the death of Solzhenitsyn having occurred so recently, a death most politically aware people had to have noted, that neither Barack Obama nor John McCain thought to incorporate some of Solzhenitsyn's classic statement in the Gulag Archipelago when they answered Rick Warren on whether there is such a thing as evil:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Instead of acknowledging this likelihood, which as nearly as I can understand it is close to the heart of Christianity properly understood, they defined evil as something somebody else does -- and in McCain's case especially, as something to make one angry. But isn't anger itself at least a shortcoming?

Live-blogging the "Civil Forum"

If you're interested in contemporaneous comments, Mark Landsbaum and I blogged pretty steadily on the Register's Orange Punch blog during this afternoon's "civil forum" with Obama and McCain at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in Orange County. Mandie Russell, our editorial intern last summer, attended the event in person and had some comments afterward as well. If I may say so, I was pretty close to as radical as I get in some of my comments.

It lived up to its billing as a civil event -- a bit unusual but somewhat interesting in that Warren asked each candidate the same questions separately, with Obama going first while McCain was in a "cone of silence" so he couldn't hear Obama's answers. Somewhat revealing, and it will certainly boost Rick Warren's prestige. As I noted in an earlier Orange Punch blog, however, it was just on the edge of proper. I don't remember Jesus and Paul being all that eager to cozy up to the principalities and powers.

Obama's Grand Tour

Here's the Register's editorial on Barack Obama's world tour last week. It notes that he ran it well and didn't make any serious gaffes -- the stuff about the Landstuhl hospital is desperate reaching by the McCain campaign -- but there's still a disturbing lack of substance in what he says. If his followers think he is really saying important things, that may be disturbing. But at least he isn't McCain.

Some interesting comments too.

McCain's true colors

Some readers have asked what it is that conservatives and libertarians find so objectionable about John McCain on domestic policy. Considering that during the election season he has sounded almost like Phil Gramm, who was advising until he stuck his foot in his mouth, it's a not unreasonable request. He almost sounds like free-market conservative.

Of course Matt Welch's book "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick" is a pretty good source, especially on McCain's veneration of Teddy Roosevelt, the original big-government Republican (though until Bryan that wasn't that big a deal: post-civil war the Republicans were the party of big government and the Democrats advocates of limited government). But there's a more concise piece run in the New Republic in February by Jonathan Chait, who describes McCain's turnaround after the 2000 election. It's been fairly common knowledge that McCain was considering switching parties then, and perhaps it's no wonder. Chait argues that "It is no exaggeration to say that, during this crucial period McCain was the most effective advocate of the Democratic agenda in Washington."

Sound overheated? "In health care McCain co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Ted Kennedy, a patients' bill of rights. He joined Chuck Schumer to sponsor one bill allowing the re-importation of prescription drugs and another permitting wider sale of generic alternatives. . . . On the environment, he sponsored with Kerry a bill raising automobile fuel-efficiency standards and another bill with Joe Lieberman imposing a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was also one of six Republicans to vote against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."

Need more? He teamed with Carl Levin on bills regarding tax shelters, accounting and use of stock options that were fiercely opposed by business lobbies, almost all Republicans and even many moderate Democrats. The fact that he voted against the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts is well known. He sponsored bills to close the gun show "loophole," expand Americorps, and federalize airport security.

The key is a Teddy Roosevelt-style progressivism that is deeply suspicious of business (especially "big business") and wedded to ever-increasing federal regulation. He's toned it down, but you see this occasionally emerge when he talks about the importance of being dedicated to something larger than self or to mere profit, or when he rails about the evils of selfishness. The cause greater is always a government project, preferably a war.

Iraqi government wants a timetable now

Well, I doubt this was what they had in mind when all those administration officials said things like we want to Iraqi government to be independent and sovereign, to reflect the wishes of the Iraqi people, and especially, when the Iraqis stand up we will stand down.

Now Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has said it would be a good idea to have a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. He didn't offer a specific timetable, just said it would be a good idea. The foreign minister followed up, more forcefully. Of course the Bush administration has gone apoplectic whenever any U.S. war critic has uttered the forbidden word, "timetable," claiming it would play right into al-Qaida's hands. Of course, al-Qaida never was much of a factor in the insurgency, but never mind; it's the preferred enemy. Now that al-Maliki has said it would be a good idea, it puts the Bushies in a bit of a box. Do they acknowledge, as they have been claiming has been happening, that Iraq is really independent of us, which is what we claimed to want?

McCain's virtual dismissal of the remarks as "political" is more revealing of McCain than he might have wanted. If they were "merely" political it suggests that al-Maliki knows that most Iraqis want the U.S. out sooner rather than later and he has to say so or risk domestic political repercussions. But if most Iraqis want us out, isn't it time to congratulate them on achieving a measure of independence, wish them luck, and start to leave? Does McCain think his opinion is more important than that of the majority of Iraqis, or that he is so wise that he has a right to override the majority in a foreign country? A bit paternalistic and colonial are we?

Not so different

Here's a link to the column I wrote last week for Antiwar.com, comparing and contrasting the three remaining possible candidates for president on the Iraq war and foreign policy. I concluded that even though their rhetoric is rather different, when you get to likely policies they aren't all that different. Obama will face the fact that even a prompt withdrawal will take more than a year just to get all the people and equipment out, and might face a situation that makes him want to delay withdrawal a while. McCain, obviously more militaristic, will face the prospect of the military being thoroughly "hollowed-out" if he stays in Iraq much longer. Likewise Hillary.

The striking thing is that when it comes to what the political scientists call Grand Strategy there's not more than a dime's worth of difference among them. They all believe the U.S. should play a grandiose role in the world at large. Even Barack does, though he calculated that Iraq was a mistake at the outset, which was not all that tough to do.

McCain not that different from Bush

Here's an excellent piece by Chuck Pena analyzing John McCain's recent foreign policy speech. Most of the news media portrayed him as fundamently different from Bush, mainly because he vowed not to "go it alone" unilaterally in battling the central threat he perceives, that of radical Islamism. Such analysts, Chuck argues rather persuasively, overestimate Bush's unilateralism -- he's said he's willing to act unilaterally but he does try to gather allies -- and underestimate the policy similarities between McCain and Bush. If anything, McCain might be even more aggressive militarily than Bush.

McCain snubs Ron Paul supporters

Here's another reason to wonder whether John McCain is all there. In a Washington Times interview, Ron Paul acknowledged that not only had the McCain campaign made no effort to make contact with the candidate who inspired the most enthusiastic grassroots support, especially among young people, essential if the Republican Party is to have a future, but McCain and the party establishment have actively snubbed him and his supporters. Apparently the drop-dead requirement to be a "good Republican" in today's party is to love war and foreign interventionism. The GOP should be put on suicide watch, but it may be too late.

McCain the warlike

Here's a link to my latest piece for Antiwar.com, a review of Matt Welch's excellent recent book, "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick." The book cuts through the heroic history and the media's love affair with with the 2000 Straight Talk Express to check out what McCain really thinks and what kinds of policies move him. The bottom line is that what his philosophy has evolved into is "national greatness" nationalism as expressed mostly through military action. He could be, if elected, the most militaristic president we've had in decades. He missed a chance to distance himself from Bush and identify with Petraeus on his recent trip when Petraeus talked about the lack of Iraqi government progress toward reconciliation. He could have talked nicely but tough to Maliki, but he seems so in love with the idea of the Iraq war that he doesn't seem to have thought of it.

And on the domestic side, he's about as far from a conservative, let alone a free-market advocate, as one can get. Add the legendary temper and possible instability, something he's displayed ever since he was a kid. He strikes me as actively hostile to liberty and a fairly complete disaster.

Iraq: Five years a nd counting

Here's a link to the Register's editorial Sunday on the fifth anniversary of the misbegotten war in Iraq, and realikstically there is no decent end in sight. People laugh at McCain saying he wouldn't mind if we were there for 50 years or even 100, but I suspect he reflects what many in the foreign-policy "community expected and wanted out of the deal. Early on Stratfor.com said the real purpose of the invasion was to establish permanent bases in Iraq so we could have a forward presence in the Middle East but not in Saudi Arabia. Even the dimmest knew, though neocons and other ignorant war-whoopers deny it, that the presence of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, home of the two holiest sites in Islam, was a special burr under Osama bin Laden's saddle and one of the reasons for the 9/11 attacks, and would remain a spur to terrorist attacks as long as they remained there.

Of course they didn't count on the insurgency, having been beguiled by the Cheney-neocon meme of being greeted as liberators and neglected to look into the homework the State Dept. and others had already done. The sheer carelessness of the commitment still rankles me. All those connected with starting the Iraq war deserve to be im peached and/or tried for treason, but of course it will never happen. Now the occupation of Iraq serves the purpose policymakers feared the bases in Saudi Arabia would serve, of attracting jihadists, "blooding" them in actual combat and insurrection, and training them to wreak havoc when they return to other countries.

To give McCain his due (not that he really deserves it), he wasn't talking about 50 years of active combat, but envisions things settling down and the U.S. keeping a garrison of U.S. soldiers there, much as we have in Korea, Germany and Okinawa. It's a stupid idea, but at least it's not endless combat, which even he must know would be disastrous (I think).

McCain embraces torture

John McCain has now abandoned one of the few aspects of his stand on issues that was reasonably attractive and laudable. I have been reading Matt Welch's excellent book, "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick," which documents numerous shifts in position accompanied by declarations that he has never shifted positions, and prevarications accompanied by promises never to lie, so I shouldn't have been surprised. Nonetheless, this shift is particularly dispiriting. I had allowed myself to believe that this was one position on which he was likely to stand, given that he had already taken whatever grief was coming to him for this particular deviation from what seems to be (sadly) the new Republican orthodoxy, and his life story was compelling enough that it trumped any serious criticism.

The occasion was Bush's veto of a bill designed to prohibit U.S. agents from using "waterboarding" and other forms of "enhanced interrogation" techniques. McCain announced he would support the veto. Thus another betrayal of whatever traces remain of his better self.

The saddest aspect is that in the wake of Bush-Cheney tortured justifications for torture seem to have become an article of faith for the misguided band who remain unaccountably loyal to this terrible president. The justification here is that the CIA has better-trained interrogators and is likely to be dealing with rougher characters than the military so it shouldn't be bound by the Army Field Manual on interrogation. It also seems to be an expression of Bush-Cheney's drive to enhance the power of the presidency as an unaccountable repository of power vis-a-vis the other branches of government. In fact that may be the issue that persuaded McCain, who is also an unabashed advocate of a Rooseveltian (TR and FDR both) view of untrammeled executive power.

It might also be another way of pandering to what is laughingly called the Republican "base." which is said to be enamored of constant war and torture.

I refuse to believe that all is lost, but this is a sad day for America

Why Iraq could blow

Here's a piece by Patrick Cockburn, the conservative Cockburn who was an opponent of the Iraq invasion from the beginning and has spent considerable time reporting from Iraq for various British newspapers. He notes that while things are better in Baghdad compared to the really violent period in 2006. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, for example, visited an ice cream parlor recently to show how safe the neighborhood is. But before he made the little visit, a horde of soldiers, including colonels and generals, swept the neighnorhood and checked all the shops within proximity.

Thanks to the U.S. and its subsidies, the Sunnit now have armed, trained and "blooded" militias, to match those of the Shia and the Kurds. One may certainly hope the place stabilizes, but it's a long way from being a certainty. John McCain had better hope his prayers work.

McCain's real vulnerabilities

The New York Times may have done John McCain a favor with its Feb. 21 piece that led with the story about his campaign workers being worried that he might have been having an affair with an attractive young lobbyist (well, 30 years younger than he) back in 2000. That part of the story was thinly sourced, and the fact that it was the NYT caused numerous conservative knees to jerk and defend him. And hardly anybody has commented on the ambivalent relationship he has with lobbyists that was described in the rest of the long artricle.

The basic narrative is that after the Keating Five scandal back in 1989 he decided to reinvent himself as the soul of integrity, expressed in support for things like campaign finance deform, opposition to earmarks, and talk about the evil of special interests. But his self-confidence is such that he seems to think nothing he does could possibly be corrupt even though there may an appearance of conflct of interest. For example, in 2001 he founded the nonprofit Reform Institute and collected hundreds of thousands from companies with issues before the Commerce Committee, which he chaired at the time. His campaign manager is Rick Davis, who as a lobbyist represented companies before McCain's Senate panel and then went months without collecting a salary, which amounts to a gift from a lobbyist.

This Washington Post article, which ran the 22nd, got little publicity, but has more about McCain's close relationship with lobbyists. When he huddled with his top advisers at his cabin in Arizona, all four of them -- Charles Black, Rick Davis, Steve Schmidt, Mark McKinnon -- were lobbyists, some of them still active as lobbyists.