A second post-election piece I didn't post at the time I wrote it (Nov. 5):
I've explained why I voted for Obama and I don't regret it today. But I am feeling a bit defensive because I've seen some emails from McCain voters that make important points and I hope I can provide some reassurance to my conservative friends.
First, I've been thinking about the political shortcomings of the Baby Boom generation for some time (well before Obama was on the scene). And perhaps more than anything I felt we needed a President who wasn't defined by the Vietnam War. I saw a documentary the other night about the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and I can see how each side thought the other was out to destroy the fabric of America. But it's not like that anymore and I'm tired of the silliness of it. Negative ads are fine if they help define the issues, and yes, I believe character still matters. But Elizabeth Dole's ads claiming her Sunday school teacher opponent was a closet atheist probably helped tip my vote. It was manipulative, irresponsible and personally and spiritually hateful. You know, for years Republicans have tried to convince minority voters that if they only vote for one party all the time they'll be (and have been) taken for granted. Well, the same holds true for Christian conservatives.
Second, I'm honestly not sure if I would have voted for Obama if I hadn't actually met the guy and, as President Bush famously said of Vladmir Putin, "gained a sense of his soul." Obama was a professor at my law school and I took a seminar from him. I got no sense that he's a radical, that's he's not pro-America, or that he's a socialist. If I'm right about Obama, the far left blogosphere is going to be deeply disappointed in his presidency. If I'm wrong about him (and look how well this looking-into-his-soul thing worked out for GW Bush w/r/t Putin) then I'll be very disappointed. In fact, a couple of my old law school professors recently had a debate on "whether conservatives should vote for Obama." Prof. Cass Sunstein, who is very liberal, made the case that conservatives should vote for Obama because, well, because he doesn't think Obama is really as liberal as his voting record and his anti-NAFTA campaigning in the primary would suggest. My best sense is that Sunstein is right. Imagine Clinton without the the sex and the lies and things don't seem too bad.
Third, look, I have to say that the top of the Republican ticket, John McCain is not a conservative except on a few social issues. McCain wasn't a conservative in 2000 and that's why he lost the primary. He pretended to be one this year but I didn't buy it. McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts. He came around on those because he knew he had to. But his economic instincts are not conservative and on any other issue I didn't trust him to govern as a conservative (his response to the foreclosure crisis and financial meltdown - a housing rescue plan of some $300 billion and blaming "greed on Wall Street"- sounded a lot like Chuck Schumer to me). If we're going to have socialism in this country I'd rather come by it honestly.
My last line of defense is this: Ronald Reagan started out as a Democrat. And he always said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party, but that the party left him. The Republicans are in the wilderness because of Tom Delay, Ted Stevens, No Child Left Behind, "You're doing a heck of job Brownie" cronyism, etc.
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
More Obama
I wrote two posts after the election but didn't put them up because they seemed not to say what I wanted them to say. Having re-read them, I think they hold up better than I was giving them credit for. Here's the first:
I've seen a couple of emails from people who voted for John McCain and it makes me wonder where the Republican Party goes from here. The party needs to start by understanding why John McCain got the votes he did and what they can (and cannot) build on.
What the GOP cannot count on in 2012:
1. Obama the inexperienced. A lot of folks had deep misgivings about Barack Obama as a candidate. They were concerned about a lack of experience and concerned about a lack of depth that was hidden by his soaring rhetoric. He's going to president and in four years, for good or ill, he'll have experience.
2. Obama the radical. Even more potently, many Americans were concerned about what Obama's real views were. Some of this was based on falsehoods like his being a Muslim (or having been raised as one) but these attacks gained plausible support for many conservatives when they learned about William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi and Jeremiah Wright. If Obama is radical, time will tell. I do not believe he is, nor do I believe that he harbors any anti-American views. I don't believe he's a socialist looking to have government take over massive sectors of the economy. But again, time will tell.
If Obama is not up to the job, or if he turns out to be too radical, the Republicans can be assured of victory in 2 years and again in 4. This is the genius of the American system: no one in our government has the kind of power to do much lasting damage without the support of the people. (Almost all of the most consequential decisions of the Bush administration were made with solid popular and Congressional support; and if the surge hadn't worked the troops would probably be on their way home now anyway).
What the GOP can count on
1. Joe the Plumber. No, not the actual Joe the Plumber, but the underlying idea that Joe was meant to symbolize. (Having the actual Joe out campaigning was, in my view, a real mistake for McCain.) The refrain from conservatives I hear over and over is "what happened to personal responsibility?" Bailouts for Wall Street are unpopular, so the political establishment (including McCain) propose bailouts for homeowners to "even the score." Yet what conservatives want are no bailouts for anybody. Here, John McCain failed to take a chance. His very early position was to be skeptical of handing taxpayer money over to people who made bad decisions and gambled with their homes. But, afraid of losing hard-hit areas like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Nevada, he turned around and proposed his own $300 billion bailout plan. If he'd stuck with a personal responsibility theme instead the worst that would have happened is that he would have lost all these states. But in the end, he lost them all anyway and wouldn't conservatives feel better about it if he'd lost them heroically fighting against a bailout? President Nixon spoke of a "silent majority" and the housing crisis is one where I believe a silent majority exists. It consists of people who, despite having seen their home values drop, are not willing to hand over their money to irresponsible neighbors in order to try to prop up home values. For these conservatives, even if you could prove that they'd be better off paying for a bailout, I think they'd rather take the hit than establish a regime where the irresponsible are cushioned.
This is a respectable position. The government has been trying hard to avert another Great Depression which was really, truly, bad for just about everyone. And that may require some interventions that conservatives hate. But many conservatives seem willing to accept some undeserved losses in order to prevent others from getting undeserved gains. This is not cruelty; it's a realization that if people are rewarded when a gamble pays off but protected when it doesn't, they'll keep on betting more and more so that each bailout will be bigger than the last. Better to take the pain now of letting them all fail than the death-by-a-thousands-cuts of ever increasing bailouts.
I've seen a couple of emails from people who voted for John McCain and it makes me wonder where the Republican Party goes from here. The party needs to start by understanding why John McCain got the votes he did and what they can (and cannot) build on.
What the GOP cannot count on in 2012:
1. Obama the inexperienced. A lot of folks had deep misgivings about Barack Obama as a candidate. They were concerned about a lack of experience and concerned about a lack of depth that was hidden by his soaring rhetoric. He's going to president and in four years, for good or ill, he'll have experience.
2. Obama the radical. Even more potently, many Americans were concerned about what Obama's real views were. Some of this was based on falsehoods like his being a Muslim (or having been raised as one) but these attacks gained plausible support for many conservatives when they learned about William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi and Jeremiah Wright. If Obama is radical, time will tell. I do not believe he is, nor do I believe that he harbors any anti-American views. I don't believe he's a socialist looking to have government take over massive sectors of the economy. But again, time will tell.
If Obama is not up to the job, or if he turns out to be too radical, the Republicans can be assured of victory in 2 years and again in 4. This is the genius of the American system: no one in our government has the kind of power to do much lasting damage without the support of the people. (Almost all of the most consequential decisions of the Bush administration were made with solid popular and Congressional support; and if the surge hadn't worked the troops would probably be on their way home now anyway).
What the GOP can count on
1. Joe the Plumber. No, not the actual Joe the Plumber, but the underlying idea that Joe was meant to symbolize. (Having the actual Joe out campaigning was, in my view, a real mistake for McCain.) The refrain from conservatives I hear over and over is "what happened to personal responsibility?" Bailouts for Wall Street are unpopular, so the political establishment (including McCain) propose bailouts for homeowners to "even the score." Yet what conservatives want are no bailouts for anybody. Here, John McCain failed to take a chance. His very early position was to be skeptical of handing taxpayer money over to people who made bad decisions and gambled with their homes. But, afraid of losing hard-hit areas like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Nevada, he turned around and proposed his own $300 billion bailout plan. If he'd stuck with a personal responsibility theme instead the worst that would have happened is that he would have lost all these states. But in the end, he lost them all anyway and wouldn't conservatives feel better about it if he'd lost them heroically fighting against a bailout? President Nixon spoke of a "silent majority" and the housing crisis is one where I believe a silent majority exists. It consists of people who, despite having seen their home values drop, are not willing to hand over their money to irresponsible neighbors in order to try to prop up home values. For these conservatives, even if you could prove that they'd be better off paying for a bailout, I think they'd rather take the hit than establish a regime where the irresponsible are cushioned.
This is a respectable position. The government has been trying hard to avert another Great Depression which was really, truly, bad for just about everyone. And that may require some interventions that conservatives hate. But many conservatives seem willing to accept some undeserved losses in order to prevent others from getting undeserved gains. This is not cruelty; it's a realization that if people are rewarded when a gamble pays off but protected when it doesn't, they'll keep on betting more and more so that each bailout will be bigger than the last. Better to take the pain now of letting them all fail than the death-by-a-thousands-cuts of ever increasing bailouts.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Obamacons Transform!
Tomorrow I intend to vote for Barack Obama. I consider myself a libertarian-conservative Republican and yet I plan to vote for someone with the most liberal recent voting record in the United States Senate. Why?
1. Post-partisan Doesn’t Mean Bi-partisan
McCain has made a lot of the fact that he has been behind bipartisan legislation on a number of issues and that, by contrast, Sen. Obama has consistently voted with the left wing of his part. This is true, but it misses the point. Sen. Obama is a liberal and I wish he wasn’t (or was less so). But Sen. Obama is not the one claiming that those who vote for him represent the “pro-America parts of America” or are somehow the only “real America.” At his best, starting with his 2004 speech at the Democratic national convention and including his speech on race relations, Sen. Obama has shown an ability to understand the other side and to acknowledge their points without demonizing them. McCain is stuck in a Baby Boomer, Vietnam-era mindset where politics itself became an extension of war by other means. (Bill) Clinton, Gingrich, Bush, (Hillary) Clinton, all fall prey to this same sort of mindset. And for those who lived through the turmoil of the 60s and 70s when it quite plausibly seemed that America was coming apart, it’s easy enough to understand (though still sad and deplorable). But for Generation X and especially Generation Y (or whatever you call them) this kind of politics just doesn’t fire them up the way it did the Baby Boomers. Instead it turns them off in droves. Sen. Obama is trying harder than any politician in a generation to transcend the “politics of personal destruction” which has been simultaneously practiced and decried by both sides.
So no, I don’t expect Obama to be a centrist president. He’s got a liberal voting record and I expect he’ll be a liberal president. Nor do I expect him to be all sweetness and light. But I’m tired of being told who’s a “real American” and who isn’t. I’m tired of a politics where the ostensibly conservative candidate can’t just run on the issue in what I believe is still largely a center-right country, but has to exaggerate his opponent’s views into socialism as though he’s campaigning in 1928 instead of 2008. (Incidentally, many people including me thought that George W. Bush was going to be this kind of President. Remember “I’m a uniter not a divider?” So why do we think Obama might be different? Well, Bush ran a very divisive campaign in 2000 which I was too willing to write off as something one must do to get elected. And I must admit that my personal experience as a student of Obama’s at the University of Chicago also gives me comfort that he really is who he says he is.)
2. Sarah Palin
First, I think she was treated unfairly by the mainstream media. But, at the end of the day, one has to demonstrate that one is ready to be President. You don’t get the benefit of the doubt on this one. Obama has largely done that through two years of very tough campaigning. Palin’s seven weeks on the public stage were unlikely ever to have been enough to prove she was ready (which is a strike against McCain having picked her, not a strike against her personally) but she didn’t do enough with the time she had to put people at ease. But far more important to me is that Palin seems to embody the sort of politics of demonization that I hope Sen. Obama can help the country start to overcome. She lost me with “pallin’ around with terrorists” and “real America” and with the media criticizing her as a violation of her First Amendment rights. (Gov. Palin, you should try reading the First Amendment sometime. It’s quite interesting. It starts with “Congress shall make no law…”)
3. The Decider
I’ve come to believe that the Presidency is not about being the smartest person in the room but about making decisions and setting a tone and philosophy for governance. Obama has done that, even if it is to the left of where I’d like it to be. McCain has not. The Palin pick was ill-considered as were the shifts in campaign strategies. And McCain’s response to the economy has been muddled beyond belief; especially if one thinks all the way back a few short years ago when he opposed the Bush tax cuts. I know Obama is going to be a liberal president. I don’t know what I really expect McCain to do. My support for McCain was strongest during the Russian invasion of Georgia because I thought McCains swift and forceful condemnation was right on and Obama’s waffling sounded indecisive and weak. But we’re in a domestic crisis now and we need a leader who knows where he wants to take the country. One prerequisite for a market recovery is for the market to feel that there are clear rules. The ever-shifting bailout policies have sown confusion and made a bad situation worse. A McCain presidency really does seem like more the same on economic policy confusion.
4. A Fresh Start
Finally, Obama promises a fresh start for the United States’ reputation. I don’t expect this to last long or be very deep, but it will help for a bit. Ultimately the United States isn’t going to change on a lot of issues that cause other countries to dislike us (the death penalty, unilateralism, and just the fact that we’re big and have our hands in everything under the sun). But one lesson of the Bush administration is that we still need allies and our traditional allies are likely to find it easier to justify to their voters cooperation with President Obama. In fact, given Obama’s popularity overseas, it may be difficult, at least at first, for our allies not to increase their cooperation with the United States and we could certain use help in Afghanistan.
5. Competence
Three words can explain why President Bush is mired at a 25% approval rating: Iraq, Katrina, Foreclosure (or Bailout, take your pick). These have been challenging times, no doubt, but the president seems utterly unprepared and out of his depth on them. Obama lacks executive experience and he may turn out not to be competent. All we have to go on is his campaign. But the same is true for McCain who has been a legislator all these years. His executive experience must likewise be judged by his campaign. Who’s run the more competent campaign? I believe it’s been Obama. As the Economist said in its endorsement, Obama is a risk, but based on all the evidence we have, he’s a risk worth taking.
1. Post-partisan Doesn’t Mean Bi-partisan
McCain has made a lot of the fact that he has been behind bipartisan legislation on a number of issues and that, by contrast, Sen. Obama has consistently voted with the left wing of his part. This is true, but it misses the point. Sen. Obama is a liberal and I wish he wasn’t (or was less so). But Sen. Obama is not the one claiming that those who vote for him represent the “pro-America parts of America” or are somehow the only “real America.” At his best, starting with his 2004 speech at the Democratic national convention and including his speech on race relations, Sen. Obama has shown an ability to understand the other side and to acknowledge their points without demonizing them. McCain is stuck in a Baby Boomer, Vietnam-era mindset where politics itself became an extension of war by other means. (Bill) Clinton, Gingrich, Bush, (Hillary) Clinton, all fall prey to this same sort of mindset. And for those who lived through the turmoil of the 60s and 70s when it quite plausibly seemed that America was coming apart, it’s easy enough to understand (though still sad and deplorable). But for Generation X and especially Generation Y (or whatever you call them) this kind of politics just doesn’t fire them up the way it did the Baby Boomers. Instead it turns them off in droves. Sen. Obama is trying harder than any politician in a generation to transcend the “politics of personal destruction” which has been simultaneously practiced and decried by both sides.
So no, I don’t expect Obama to be a centrist president. He’s got a liberal voting record and I expect he’ll be a liberal president. Nor do I expect him to be all sweetness and light. But I’m tired of being told who’s a “real American” and who isn’t. I’m tired of a politics where the ostensibly conservative candidate can’t just run on the issue in what I believe is still largely a center-right country, but has to exaggerate his opponent’s views into socialism as though he’s campaigning in 1928 instead of 2008. (Incidentally, many people including me thought that George W. Bush was going to be this kind of President. Remember “I’m a uniter not a divider?” So why do we think Obama might be different? Well, Bush ran a very divisive campaign in 2000 which I was too willing to write off as something one must do to get elected. And I must admit that my personal experience as a student of Obama’s at the University of Chicago also gives me comfort that he really is who he says he is.)
2. Sarah Palin
First, I think she was treated unfairly by the mainstream media. But, at the end of the day, one has to demonstrate that one is ready to be President. You don’t get the benefit of the doubt on this one. Obama has largely done that through two years of very tough campaigning. Palin’s seven weeks on the public stage were unlikely ever to have been enough to prove she was ready (which is a strike against McCain having picked her, not a strike against her personally) but she didn’t do enough with the time she had to put people at ease. But far more important to me is that Palin seems to embody the sort of politics of demonization that I hope Sen. Obama can help the country start to overcome. She lost me with “pallin’ around with terrorists” and “real America” and with the media criticizing her as a violation of her First Amendment rights. (Gov. Palin, you should try reading the First Amendment sometime. It’s quite interesting. It starts with “Congress shall make no law…”)
3. The Decider
I’ve come to believe that the Presidency is not about being the smartest person in the room but about making decisions and setting a tone and philosophy for governance. Obama has done that, even if it is to the left of where I’d like it to be. McCain has not. The Palin pick was ill-considered as were the shifts in campaign strategies. And McCain’s response to the economy has been muddled beyond belief; especially if one thinks all the way back a few short years ago when he opposed the Bush tax cuts. I know Obama is going to be a liberal president. I don’t know what I really expect McCain to do. My support for McCain was strongest during the Russian invasion of Georgia because I thought McCains swift and forceful condemnation was right on and Obama’s waffling sounded indecisive and weak. But we’re in a domestic crisis now and we need a leader who knows where he wants to take the country. One prerequisite for a market recovery is for the market to feel that there are clear rules. The ever-shifting bailout policies have sown confusion and made a bad situation worse. A McCain presidency really does seem like more the same on economic policy confusion.
4. A Fresh Start
Finally, Obama promises a fresh start for the United States’ reputation. I don’t expect this to last long or be very deep, but it will help for a bit. Ultimately the United States isn’t going to change on a lot of issues that cause other countries to dislike us (the death penalty, unilateralism, and just the fact that we’re big and have our hands in everything under the sun). But one lesson of the Bush administration is that we still need allies and our traditional allies are likely to find it easier to justify to their voters cooperation with President Obama. In fact, given Obama’s popularity overseas, it may be difficult, at least at first, for our allies not to increase their cooperation with the United States and we could certain use help in Afghanistan.
5. Competence
Three words can explain why President Bush is mired at a 25% approval rating: Iraq, Katrina, Foreclosure (or Bailout, take your pick). These have been challenging times, no doubt, but the president seems utterly unprepared and out of his depth on them. Obama lacks executive experience and he may turn out not to be competent. All we have to go on is his campaign. But the same is true for McCain who has been a legislator all these years. His executive experience must likewise be judged by his campaign. Who’s run the more competent campaign? I believe it’s been Obama. As the Economist said in its endorsement, Obama is a risk, but based on all the evidence we have, he’s a risk worth taking.
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