It's still early on, but I'm going to take out my crystal ball once again and write a bit about how I see the Presidential campaign of 2008 proceeding -- or how it should proceed.
As I've written a number of times, I believe that a strong emphasis on progressive populism is the key to winning in 2008. My memory is that whenever Gore or Kerry punched populist themes in their campaigns, they surged, and when they heeded their DC-centric advisors and tamed their economic rhetoric, they fell back again.
Even though I'm currently leaning towards favoring Edwards as the Democratic candidate, I don't advocate this emphasis on populism because it's basically Edwards' program -- it's the other way around. I lean towards Edwards because he's currently the only candidate who's forcefully making those arguments. But I think it would be a mistake for the other candidates to believe that because Edwards has been out front with progressive populism, it's necessarily his issue and they shouldn't embrace it. It's a winner for anyone who uses it -- but if no one picks up on it, then I'll still be supporting Edwards.
The problem is this: the corner has clearly been turned with respect to Iraq, the public is very much opposed to it, so running against Iraq is not a winning position, it's now the default position that everyone will take to one degree or another. Even the Republicans will eventually do so — but not until after the convention. Before that, they'll pay obeisance to "staying the course" in order to get the GOP voters to go for them, but after the convention, the nominee will tack away from that position, possibly with some equivalent of Nixon's "Secret Plan" to end Vietnam, something they feel will appeal to the public's general anti-war sentiment. Given that, being anti-Iraq is more of a necessity than something to peg a winning campaign on.
The same thing is true with building a campaign on being anti-Bush/Cheney. Even though the public clearly disapproves of the administration, banging on the evils of Bush & Cheney, while a necessary part of the overall campaign strategy, isn't going to be enough to win, because the public knows that neither Bush nor Cheney will be around in 2009. The Republican nominee will run away from Bush/Cheney, much as Gore (mistakenly) ran away from Clinton in 2000, so it'll be hard to tar him with the misdeeds of the current administration -- they'll undoubtedly co-opt that argument by criticizing Bush and company themselves.
What's left is economic issues, and I continue to think that this is the hidden lever on which this election will turn -- and by "economic issues" I mean the economic state of the middle class, their lack of economic security and the vast amount of risk that's been shifted off corporate shoulders onto the backs of the average household. The great thing about progressive populism is that it can advocate for the middle class and the working poor at the same time, because in the current situation their needs are not antithetical, and the argument can be framed in such a way that it can't be smeared as "culture war". It can be the people vs. big business and not necessarily the rest of us vs. the rich. At the same time, progressive values can be upheld, so it's win/win as far as I can see.
My worry is that the emphasis by party activists on Iraq will force the candidates into what is basically a dead-end issue. Here is a truth that I think people have been slow to realize: The reality is that the Iraq war is essentially already over, the only question is when the plug will be pulled and who will do the pulling.* From what we can judge now, Bush and Cheney clearly won't give up on it, so it will be the next president who does the pulling**, but whoever that is will wind it down in the best possible way they can figure out. That's why making Iraq central to the election is a mistake.
It's natural that in the aftermath of the 2006 election, progressive activists would demand a certain amount of adherance to a liberal agenda from the Democratic Party's nominee, and they would certainly be energized by such a candidate, but (as I've written before) it would be a mistake to choose a candidate purely on this basis, without considering how they appeal to a broader audience. A campaign which appears energized only to liberals, progressives, and the Democratic rank-and-file, because it dwells on our particular sacred cows, is doomed to failure. Gore and Kerry didn't lose because they tried to reach a wider spread of the electorate, they lost because this did so very badly and without using the right approach.
In point of fact, in the peculiar political system we've got, unless there is a third party candidate in the race to pull votes from one of the two major party candidates, there is no other way to win a Presidential election except by reaching out to a broad swath of people, which is why we have the old saw about the necessity of campaigning from the center.
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* I say that knowing full well that people will continue to die even as the war winds down on its way to closing out.
** However, it's not outside the realm of the possible that as the election nears, Rove will convince Bush and Cheney that the only way for a Republican to win is for them to shut down the Iraq war. They'd probably be more likely to do that with a candidate they approve of and who shares their ideology (although I'm not sure who that would be right now), but they might end up doing it to help any Republican nominee.
absolutist
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anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
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con artists
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criminal
crooked
culpable
damaging
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deadly
debased
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disconnected
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dishonest
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dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
fantasists
felonious
hateful
heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
ideologues
ignorant
immoral
incompetent
indifferent
inflexible
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insincere
irrational
isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
lacking in public spirit
liars
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Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
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recent listening
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
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Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.
Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.
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the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
