Cartoons of the Week

A Conservative for Obama

My party has slipped its moorings. It’s time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.

Wick Allison, Editor In Chief | D Magazine

THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.

In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.

Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.

Respected Republican Senator Claims Palin Not Ready To Be President

Sen. Hagel doubts Palin's ready

BY JOSEPH MORTON | September 18, 2008 | OMAHA WORLD-HERALD

WASHINGTON — Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska is the nation's most prominent Republican officeholder to publicly question whether Sarah Palin has the experience to serve as president.

"She doesn't have any foreign policy credentials," Hagel said Wednesday in an interview. "You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don't know what you can say. You can't say anything."

Palin was elected governor of Alaska in 2006 and before that was the mayor of a small town.

Democrats have raised questions about Palin since Sen. John McCain picked her as his vice presidential running mate. Most national Republican officeholders have rallied to Palin's candidacy.

Palin has cited the proximity of Alaska to Russia as evidence of her international experience.

Hagel scoffed at that notion.

"I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, 'I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia,'" he said. "That kind of thing is insulting to the American people."

Hagel said today in a conference call he had received no reaction from fellow Republicans on his Palin comments.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he hoped Hagel would trust McCain's judgment, considering he supported the Arizona senator for president in 2000.

Grassley said Palin has more executive experience than the men in the race. He said he wasn't surprised, however, that Hagel would depart from the party line.

A senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Hagel has been an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war and had considered making his own run for president. He skipped the Republican National Convention in favor of a trip to Central and South America.

Hagel, who says he has no plans to endorse either presidential candidate, traveled with Democratic nominee Barack Obama to the Middle East in July.

In criticizing Palin, Hagel broke with other Nebraska Republicans, including Gov. Dave Heineman, who have praised the selection.

Tom Kise, a McCain campaign spokesman, responded to Hagel's comments by questioning Obama's experience.

Kise pointed to statements that Obama's running mate, Sen. Joseph Biden, made during the Democrats' primary fight. At that time, Biden was seeking the nomination and questioned whether Obama was prepared to be president.

"It's much more alarming that Barack Obama's own vice presidential nominee doesn't think he has the experience or the judgment for the job," Kise said.

Palin herself addressed the question of her foreign policy experience in a recent interview with ABC News.

"We've got to remember what the desire is in this nation at this time," she said. "It is for no more politics as usual, and somebody's big, fat résumé, maybe, that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment where, yes, they've had opportunities to meet heads of state."

"I'm ready," Palin said. "I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink."

Hagel offered a couple of caveats on his assessment of Palin: Experience is not the only qualification for elected officials — judgment and character are indispensable.

Washington experience isn't the only kind of experience, Hagel said, and he noted that many White House occupants have been governors with no time inside the Beltway.

"But I do think in a world that is so complicated, so interconnected and so combustible, you really got to have some people in charge that have some sense of the bigger scope of the world," Hagel said. "I think that's just a requirement."

So is Palin qualified to be president?

"I think it's a stretch to, in any way, to say that she's got the experience to be president of the United States," Hagel said.

Hagel said voters ultimately will decide between McCain and Obama, and he hopes that the debates will refocus both campaigns on the important issues of the day, including the economy, energy policy and international relations.

One recent squabble between the campaigns revolved around whether Obama was being sexist toward Palin when he used a turn of phrase about putting lipstick on a pig.

That kind of back-and-forth is not what the American people want or need, Hagel said.

"It's terrible," he said. "It debases the system."

How Racism Works

A letter to the editor of the Forth Worth Star Telegram...

What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review? What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class? What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said “I do” to? What if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after she no longer measured up to his standards?

What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicted to pain killers, but acquired them illegally through her charitable organization? What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard? What if Obama were a member of the “Keating 5”? What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

— Kelvin LaFond, Fort Worth

Palin Comparison

This column isn't about the Republican v-p pick ... but 5 kids?!

by Lisa Van Dusen

It's an occupational hazard these days that if you mention the name of the Republican candidate for vice-president of the United States in the course of an average column, you're going to be bombarded by dozens of e-reasons to regret it.

In the 24 hours after the last piece I wrote about -- let's call her Sandra Balin -- I was accused of being a socialist, a communist, a fascist, a feminist, an anti-feminist, a liberal, an elitist and, best of all, jealous.

(Republican John McCain wanted me first but I was deemed overqualified to be leader of the free world because of my elitist refusal to drop my "ing"s).

When I first heard weeks ago that one of the dark horse candidates for McCain's running mate was the governor of Alaska and that she had five kids, I, like a lot of political junkies who follow these things with an obsessive eye to even distant specks on the political horizon, had never heard of her.

I just assumed Sandra Balin was in her 60s and that her children were mostly grown because, as a slacker mom who stayed at home for seven years with one daughter, it never crossed my mind that any woman with that many young children and in full possession of her senses would even contemplate being a governor.

I believe women should have the freedom to make their own choices, whether that means being a governor, an at-home mom, a working mom, or a mom period. So, I would never criticize Sandra Balin for choosing to work and raise children at the same time.

But like a lot of women and a lot of working mothers, I just genuinely wonder how Sandra Balin swings it with that many kids and with that job.

Being the mother of five children means you're surrounded by people all day long asking you questions. So does being a governor, only the people are taller, they have fewer questions about the location of the juice boxes and more of their questions arrive by BlackBerry.

When women ask how Sandra Balin does it, they know that even with one or two or three kids, there are awful moments when all the prioritizing goes out the window and one role or the other suddenly demands an exclusive commitment (limb broken in playground accident vs. boardroom presentation in 10 minutes). A lot of women who had the choice have changed jobs or traded ambition for peace of mind to avoid those moments.

Her answer to Charlie Gibson about how she does it was, "The same way the other governors have done it when they've either had a baby in office or raised a family. Granted, they're men, but do it the same way that they do it." According to the National Governor's Association Web site, the only current governors, other than the Mormon governor of Utah, who have more than four children are Togiola Tulafono, the governor of American Samoa and Benigno Fitial, governor of the Northern Mariana Islands, each of whom has six.

(We don't really know how they do it because they haven't done Meet The Press lately, either).

If Sandra Balin becomes vice-president, she'll have even fewer models to cite. But having seen a video of her recently holding her baby, Trig, in one arm while BlackBerrying with the other hand, I'd say never underestimate her ability to juggle. Just don't ask her how she does it.

Obama gets the 'quote of the day'

Responding to McCain's proposal for a commission to examine the economic crisis -

"This isn't 9/11. We know how we got into this mess," Obama said. "What we need now is leadership that gets us out. I'll provide it, John McCain won't, and that's the choice for the American people in this election."

When the 'wanna be reformer' needs reforming...

God and Lipstick on a Pig

"John just doesn't get it!"

Political Perspective From Sarah and Hillary

A Splendid Bit of Relief from the North

You think Canadian elections are bad?

By LISA VAN DUSEN | September 14, 2008

About the only thing crazier than selling an idea to American voters as, "It's what they do in France" would be pitching an election issue as, "It's what they do in Canada."

Between our crackpot gun laws, our suspiciously free health care system and our girliness about the death penalty, there are zip codes in the United States where "Canadian" is interchangeable with "communist" and to talk any other game would be like putting lipstick on a big slab of Canadian bacon.

But as Barack Obama and John McCain pant incredulously toward the finish line of a race so long it feels like it started before the last election which, in many ways, it did, they should take time to glance northward and get a load of what a civilized campaign looks like.

If a Canadian campaign is like a decathlon, then a U.S. campaign is like a war or, in the case of the last two, a civil war. Because the president of the United States gets to play pin the tail on the Axis of Evil map and invade other countries whenever he wants, making the title a prize awarded only to the victor of a gruelling, harrowing and often surreal trial of superhuman endurance is necessary to deter the squeamish and weed out the weak.

Being prime minister of Canada has more to do with listening to Pierre Trudeau stories at G8 welcoming receptions and not saying the wrong thing about Quebec, so the stakes aren't quite as high, which is why, if it weren't for the economic impact of all the advertising dollars, media overtime and padded catering bills lost, it might all be better settled with an arm-wrestling round-robin. The Canadian Arm Wrestling Federation, whose constitution, btw, could use a notwithstanding clause, (http://www.angelfire.com/sports/ARMWRESTLING/) could officiate.

(From what I've seen in the first week, my money would be on Stephane Dion getting whupped by everyone, including Elizabeth May, then whining interminably to the ref about it.)

Because we have one-tenth the population, that's one-tenth the number of babies to kiss and hands to shake, so one-tenth the amount of time needed to campaign; our two months to their 20.

Except that ours only have to be 36 days and -- other than the eight-week 2006 campaign that included a festive holiday season intermission -- Canada has stuck to that for the past few campaigns.

But compared to an American campaign, even eight weeks is like a day at a spa.

(Having said that, I logged one of those 60-day ones as a 21-year-old junior press aide and it nearly killed me. I broke down halfway through and slid slowly to the floor in the lobby of my sixth Peter Pan Motel, whining like Stephane Dion at an arm wrestling round-robin about just wanting a detachable hanger and a regulation-sized bar of soap. Campaigning, like grief and LSD, is one of those experiences that bring out different things in different people and sometimes you don't know what that'll look like until it's too late.)

By the time the U.S. campaign staggers into its bloodiest stretch in mid-October, Canadians will have already made up their minds. Meanwhile, what the overlap will underscore is that campaigns, even seemingly endless U.S. campaigns, really only happen in the last five weeks anyway.

After all the money spent in the primaries, after all the polls and concessions and debates and, now, after the conventions and the wheeling out of the running mates, all of it will conceivably -- if it doesn't come down to 5,000 lawyers invading one county in southern Ohio -- be settled in a Canadian campaign.

In the case of this U.S. campaign, the long lead time has served to both familiarize voters with an unknown Barack Obama and reassure them about the stamina of a septuagenarian John McCain.

At the same time, the relative hiccup of the final two months between the conventions and Election Day on Nov. 4 works to the advantage of the new unknown, Sarah Palin, since there's only so much familiarizing that can go on during a relative hiccup.

Given what the battlefield will look like by Oct. 15, maybe the only October surprise that could trump Bush's perp-walking Osama bin Laden out of his spider hole would be the promise of new, shorter Canadian-style campaigns.

Just don't say it was our idea.

Blizzard of Lies

By PAUL KRUGMAN September 12, 2008 | Op-Ed Columnist |New York Times

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?

These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”

Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.

So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.

Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.

And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.

Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”

Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.

One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.

But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

McCain Trashes Palin's Qualifications to be President