History is Happening Now

Like Ian, I was overjoyed to learn that Sarah Palin was McCain’s pick to be his running mate. 

She so obviously undermines the storyline McCain has been telling about Obama–that he is not experienced enough, specifically on foreign policy, to be President–and so exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of his campaign, that I can’t imagine what he must have been thinking.  All evidence suggests that he wasn’t thinking very much, but going with his gut.  Some people call this being a maverick; I call it being reckless and impulsive when making a hugely serious decision.

Like the rest of this country, I know next to nothing about Palin.  The little I’ve read suggests that as recently as 2007 she had very little to say about foreign affairs and Iraq, far far less than Obama, who publicly expressed his opinions on the war before it even began with his 2002 speech.  I am a bit unhappy with some of the nastier attacks by liberals and those on the left–and also by self-professed conservatives like Andrew Sullivan–who seem to think it’s fair to mock Palin for once having been a beauty queen, who claim that Palin is putting politics “before” raising her own five children, who are investigating the question of whether she faked her fifth pregnancy, etc. 

You need not personally smear Palin or even bring up her personal life to expose the fundamental unreliability of McCain’s character and the utter ridiculousness of his choice.  The facts almost speak for themselves.

To get a sense of the problem with the Palin pack, I refer you to the Weekly Standard blog.  In an email to Bill Kristol, Newt Gingrich performs his propaganda duty by praising Palin like so:

Authenticity is the one word threat to the Obama-Biden ticket.

There is something going on this weekend which traditional pundits, traditional consultants and traditional politicians are simply missing. All of the normal biography-oriented and issue-oriented analysis misses an emotional gestalt event comparable to when Ronald Reagan in 1980 crystalized his leadership in New Hampshire when he seized control of the GOP debate.

In one sudden moment Friday, John McCain fundamentally changed American politics in a manner that transcends issues and details.

I don’t know about you, but I for one think that “issues and details” kind of, uh, matter a lot.  When there is an international crisis, I care less about the “authenticity” of the president who confronts this crisis than about whether or not this person knows a whole lot about the “issues and details” of the situation, or has a machine in place to learn about the “issues and details,” fast.  But Gingrich seems to agree with Robert Kagan, who believes that the “details of who did what” when Russia invaded Georgia “are not very important.” 

For neoconservatives like Gingrich and Kagan, the “issues and details” of how to save a city threatened by a giant hurricane maybe also don’t matter (they therefore approve of appointing unqualified hacks to run FEMA); nor do the “issues and details” related to the question of whether a country actually poses a threat to us (they’ll invade a country when it suits the narrative they want to tell); nor do the minor “issues and details” of what the Geneva Convention says (they’ll torture who they want, when they want); nor do the “issues and details” related to a host of other serious issues from climate change to our national healthcare crisis (don’t even think about questioning the market, Commie!). 

Again and again for so-called conservatives, authenticity–the brush-clearing ways of George W. Bush, for example–trumps the ability to govern.  Authenticity, often of a hypocritical and fabricated sort, is always the selling proposition behind their candidates, usually at the expense of competence.

More damningly, as I mentioned in the comments section to Ian’s post, this decision does much more to undermine McCain than it does Palin.  McCain is the person who made the bad decision here, not Palin.  Forget her being a heartbeat away from the presidency.  I’m much more concerned about McCain’s being the president.  Who is to say he won’t take us to war on a whim–say with Iran or Russia–convinced that the “issues and details” of “who did what” simply don’t matter?

Ever since John McCain picked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate, pundits and reporters have been using the word “wow” as in “McCain wows the nation,” and “Wow, we didn’t see this one coming.”

I’ll add another one: “Wow! This is so awesome for the Obama campaign!”

If John McCain, 72, is elected president, he will be the oldest newly-elected president in our history – not two years younger than Ronald Reagan was when he was elected to his second term. Although McCain’s 2001 operation to treat skin cancer was successful and he has “survived without a recurrence for more than seven years,” McCain’s age means it is especially important to know who would become the most powerful person in the world if President McCain had to leave office.

This is the astonishing fact, as obvious as the sun is bright: If McCain wins the election and then has to leave office for some reason, Sarah Palin, 44, would become the most powerful human being on the planet, our commander-in-chief, our diplomat-in-chief, our chief problem-solver. If McCain wins, Palin will be “one heartbeat away” from the presidency, and the heartbeat in question has been beating for 72 years, including more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp.

Under normal circumstances, a Palin presidency would seem absolutely ludicrous and unacceptable to the American people. Sarah Palin is obviously not qualified to be the most powerful person in the world.

The easiest way to make this clear is to tackle the silly push-back Democrats hear from Palin supporters — you have to feel sorry for these people — who say, “Palin is no less qualified to be president than Barack Obama.”

Of course she is less qualified than Barack Obama!

Let’s recall some relevant facts about these two potential presidents, drawn largely from Wikipedia articles about them. For an Alaskan bloggers’ view on Palin, click here. To read what some Alaskan newspapers are saying, click here.

1. Barack Obama has an undergraduate degree in political science (with a specialization in international relations) from Columbia University. Sarah Palin hold an undergraduate degree in communications-journalism (with a minor in political science) from the University of Idaho. I’m not certain, but I suspect it’s harder to gain admission into Columbia than it is to get admitted into the University of Idaho — and it’s easier to graduate from Idaho than Columbia. (But maybe I’m just an Ivy League elitist.)

2. After college, but before he went to law school, Obama went to work in Chicago helping former steel workers who lost their jobs due to plant closings. It appears that after college, “Palin briefly worked in broadcasting as a sports reporter for local Anchorage television stations and with her husband in commerical fishing.” Straight out of college, Obama demonstrated a commitment to public service and grass-roots politics. Palin didn’t.

3. Not only did Obama earn a law degree from Harvard (easily among the top ten law schools on the planet), he also became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. Below I’ve listed a relevant excerpt from a Wikipedia article about the Harvard Law Review.

Prominent alumni of the Harvard Law Review include Supreme Court Justices Edward Sanford, Felix Frankfurter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, Stephen Breyer and Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Charles Hamilton Houston, Alger Hiss, Archibald MacLeish, Secretary of Transportation and Brown v. Board of Education attorney William Coleman, Jr., Judge Richard Posner, Chief Judge Henry Friendly, Chief Judge Michael Boudin, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Chris Cox, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan, Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, former Canadian ambassador Allan Gotlieb, former Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh, former New York State Solicitor General Preeta D. Bansal, University of Texas President William C. Powers, and former Harvard University president Derek Bok.

Anyone who doubts the significance of being chosen to lead the Harvard Law Review should find a lawyer and ask him or her if they think it’s a big deal. (Hint: It’s a big deal.) Obama later taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, easily one of the top 10 law schools in the United States.

Palin doesn’t have a law degree, or any advanced degree for that matter. Given that she’s only 44 years old, I’d love to see what her grades were at the University of Idaho.

4. Sarah Palin’s political career began in 1992 when she ran for city council in her hometown of Wasilla. In 1996 she was elected Mayor of Wasilla, a town with a population of less than 10,000 people. Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996. Obama was elected to represent the 13th district. I’m having trouble finding the population of Obama’s Senate district, but I understand that there are 59 seats in the Illinois State Senate representing districts with roughly equal populations. The current population of Illinois is more than 12 million — so if we divide 12 million by 59 we get roughly 200,000. Let’s assume, for the sake of being conservative, that Obama’s Senate District was only 25% as large as that — that still means Obama’s constituency in 1996 was five times as large as Palin’s. Furthermore, Obama’s constituency came from a city that draws high-powered professionals from all over the country, whereas Palin’s constituency didn’t. (I don’t mean to dis Wasilla, but let’s be honest.)

5. Barack Obama was re-elected to the state Senate twice, in 1998 and 2002. Palin was only re-elected once, in 1999, to be mayor of her town. In a state with an annual budget of more than $50 billion, Obama participated in passing plenty of legislation. As a former reporter who spent a lot of time covering towns about the size of Wasilla, I’d conservatively estimate that her town’s budget for everything — schools, roads, police, etc. — never exceeded $50 million. So Obama was a much bigger fish (representing 50,000 to 200,000 while Palin represented 10,000) in a much bigger pond (at least 1,000 times bigger, money-wise).

6. In 2004, Obama was elected to represent the entire state of Illinois as a United States Senator. His constituency: 12 million. In 2006, Palin was elected to represent the entire state of Alaska as governor. Her constituency: just under 700,000. In other words, Obama has spent nearly four years representing a population more than 15 times the population Palin represented for less than two years.

7. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama has some real foreign policy experience at the national level. Palin has none.

8. About three months after Palin took over as governor of Alaska (state budget: $6.6 billion), Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president of the United States. Since then, Obama has been the chief executive officer of his campaign, managing thousands of employees and volunteers, in an environment where most campaigns fail. Under tremendous pressure, he has had to make daily decisions not just on public policy positions, but also about money management and communications.

So if we look at the last 18 months of Obama’s candidacy, we see Obama leading a multi-million dollar organization to a point where he is the Democratic nominee for president and ahead in the polls. Meanwhile, if we look at Palin’s 20 months as governor of Alaska, do we see a similar level of achievement? Palin is certainly popular in her home state, but has she, a first-time governor, accomplished anything comparable to what Obama has achieved as a first-time presidential candidate?

Obama won the Democratic primary by defeating Hillary Clinton, making him one of the great dragon-slayers in contemporary American politics. (No offense to Hillary Clinton intended.) Palin won the Alaska gubernatorial race by defeating incumbent Governor Frank Murkowski in the Republican Primary.  What does it mean to have defeated Frank Murkowski?

I would have more respect for the possible presidency of Sarah Palin if she had at least tried to compete in the Republican Presidential Primary, and if she’d managed to avoid making a fool of herself. That’s the question: If Palin had tried to become president on her own by campaigning for the job, could she have made it through two months of a campaign without saying something that would disqualify her for the job? Is her apparent competance as a candidate a carefully constructed fiction of a Republican campaign machine rallying around it’s VP selection? We know what would happen if Biden ran for President: He has done so twice, appearing in dozens of nationally televised debates and emerging with the respect of the American people, earning high praise from former President Bill Clinton.

It’s also important to note that McCain and Palin met only once or twice in person before he chose her to be his fill-in for leader of the free world.

Obama is obviously more qualified to be president than Palin. Everything we know about Obama tells us he is smarter, more experienced in government, more committed to public service. And if Obama becomes president, he will have earned that position by campaigning intensively in almost every state in this country. Palin hasn’t earned a spot on the ticket — it’s been given to her in a transparent ploy to attract women who don’t care about abortion, global warming, teaching science, etc.

I agree with Paul Begala. McCain is out of his mind.

I have little to add to the flurry of blogospheric chatter surrounding Obama’s nomination speech.  My favorite flourish in the speech is this bit:

For over two decades — for over two decades, he’s subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy: Give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.

In Washington, they call this the “Ownership Society,” but what it really means is that you’re on your own. Out of work? Tough luck, you’re on your own. No health care? The market will fix it. You’re on your own. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, even if you don’t have boots. You are on your own.

This is a clear rebuke to those who follow the Reaganite cant that “government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.”

My least favorite bit of the speech is this:

And, Democrats, Democrats, we must also admit that fulfilling America’s promise will require more than just money. It will require a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F. Kennedy called our intellectual and moral strength.

Yes, government must lead on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and businesses more efficient.

Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can’t replace parents, that government can’t turn off the television and make a child do her homework, that fathers must take more responsibility to provide love and guidance to their children.

Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility, that’s the essence of America’s promise. And just as we keep our promise to the next generation here at home, so must we keep America’s promise abroad.

I mean, are there Democrats, Democrats who refuse to “admit” that homes and businesses should become more efficient, that government programs alone will not solve all our problems, that fathers should take responsibility?  The implicit claim that Democrats deny any of these sane and sensible propositions gives undue credence to Republican talking points, I think.  Obama isn’t running for president of our civil society; he’s running to lead the executive branch of our government.

Overall, an excellent speech, which should help Obama sustain the bounce he has reportedly already received from the convention.  The main strategic question, from the Democratic perspective, is whether or not the Republican politics of personal character destruction–the inevitable flurry of smears, innuendos, attacks on patriotism, and mudslinging–to come can negate these positive developments.  And, if they can arrest Obama’s momentum, how to fight back effectively.

The fair and balanced AP of course, unlike pretty much everyone else who has commented on the speech, contra even most supporters of McCain, has this to say in its analysis of Obama’s speech:

Barack Obama, whose campaign theme is “change we can believe in,” promised Thursday to “spell out exactly what that change would mean.”

But instead of dwelling on specifics, he laced the crowning speech of his long campaign with the type of rhetorical flourishes that Republicans mock and the attacks on John McCain that Democrats cheer. The country saw a candidate confident in his existing campaign formula: tie McCain tightly to President Bush, and remind voters why they are unhappy with the incumbent.

I have noted with some interest the recent dramatic transformation of Thomas Friedman from an arch advocate of free-market capitalism–an almost textbook proponent of neoliberalism–to an arch economic protectionist, a man almost Hamiltonian in his adoration of state planned economies.  His latest column, written from Beijing, illustrates his miraculous shift as dramatically as any.  Friedman writes:

China did not build the magnificent $43 billion infrastructure for these games, or put on the unparalleled opening and closing ceremonies, simply by the dumb luck of discovering oil. No, it was the culmination of seven years of national investment, planning, concentrated state power, national mobilization and hard work.

…

The difference is starting to show. Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.

Then ask yourself: Who is living in the third world country?

Friedman is of course also famously the advocate of what he called in The Lexus and the Olive Tree “the golden straightjacket,” the idea that privatization is the magical answer to the economic woes of every country–the one and only answer, in fact.  Wise nations will deregulate their capital markets (enabling financial crises like the one that rocked Asia in the late 90s), balance their budgets (by cutting off services, like welfare, if needed), privatize industry (selling off State Owned Enterprises, usually to foreign multinationals, usually at fire sale prices), and eliminate all tariffs (ensuring that their privately owned “infant industries” will die, and eliminating the only mechanism most poor countries have to raise revenue to pay for services and welfare).  Capital will vote with its feet, Friedman 1.0 cheerfully assures us, for the benefit of all.  Those who advocate state protection of industries are economic troglodytes, caught up in outmoded orthodoxies or ignorant xenophobic nationalists.

It would of course be total nonsense to say that China is growing at the rate it is because it has applied a golden straightjacket to itself.  Yes, post-Deng China has privatized many State Owned Enterprises, and has introduced a salubrious degree of freedom and competition into its economy, eliminating many of the bad features of total state planning, and the various insanities of Maoism, but its breakneck industrialization is, as Friedman 2.0 comes right out and says, the product of “national investment, planning, concentrated state power, national mobilization and hard work.”  Unlike many of the Asian Tigers, China did not liberalize its capital markets, which allowed it to weather the Asian financial crisis with little trouble.  And it has spent enormous amounts of money investing in unprofitable infrastructure projects and propping up business with taxpayer yuan.  China is pretty much the opposite of a laissez faire economy, to spectacular effect, as Friedman 2.0 openly admits.

It is remarkable how commentators like Friedman stick to their economic orthodoxies when prescribing solutions for other nations — they must wear their golden straightjackets! — but instantly see the Glorious Light of State Planning when it comes to the economy of their own nations, not only in relation to infrastructure, which he discusses in this column, but also notably in the area of Green Technology, which Friedman 2.0 (rightly, in my view) thinks US taxpayers should subsidize in order to artificially build comparative advantage in this 21st Century industry and in the process create good high-value-added jobs at home.

So much for the miraculous power of the free market!

This is definitely the better of the first two days of the Democratic convention.

Brian Schweitzer, the governor of Montana, did an especially excellent job.  He hit McCain hard and got the crowd going.  Clinton’s speech was also very effective.

Consider this an open thread to discuss your impressions and analysis of the convention thus far.

On Friday nights I download a podcast of PBS’s “Washington Week,” a weekly television news program featuring a roundtable of journalists who discuss politics and public affairs, moderated by Gwen Ifil. Lately, I’ve also been downloading the program’s “Webcast Extra,” in which the panel takes questions submitted by email or from members of the audience (when there is an audience).

This week, the podcast – which was a recording of a show filmed in Denver in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention – included a fascinating exchange between a member of the audience and one of the panelists, James Barnes, who writes for the National Journal:

 QUESTIONER: John McCain made a statement after Russia invaded Georgia that “nations don’t invade other nations in the 21st century,” apparently not acknowledging our invasion of Iraq. Other than in the blogosphere, the press paid little attention to this statement that I saw. And is this because the press is timid and afraid of being called unpatriotic, or did it not, in your mind, deserve more critical comment from the general press?

IFIL: (to the panel) General thoughts?

BARNES: Well I think, um, I guess I would argue for the purposes of this election it’s pretty clear which candidates, how they stand on the war on Iraq, and I think that’s very clear. I mean, if you want to call out McCain for being hypocritical, I suppose you can, but I would, I’m not so sure, um, I mean, if we jump on everything, when we jump on everything, we are already, then we are part of a process that just magnifies these gaffes and sort of sends the election on this constant, ever-changing, 24-, 48-, 72-hour news cycle, which quite frankly, personally, I do not believe, uh, serves people well. There are other journalists who do, and they are all over the blogosphere. And so they are out there. But I think that we shouldn’t make big deals out of what I would argue just isn’t really a significant, I don’t really think it’s that significant an issue.

I thought this was a fascinating exchange. I find myself wanting to refer to Glenn Greenwald’s piece, which might surprise people given earlier comments I have posted. (Like Walt Whitman, I contradict myself.)

On ABC’s This Week, Mark Halperin of Time Magazine reportedly said the following about McCain’s inability to remember the number of houses he owns:

My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates but it’s Barack Obama. […] I believe that this opened the door to not just Tony Rezko in that ad, but to bring up Reverend Wright, to bring up his relationship with Bill Ayers.

This claim was rightly attacked by George Stephanopoulos for its utter absurdity and obvious illogic.  But I present the quote to you here as another example of the inherent asymmetry in how our media covers the American Left and the Right–or, as we should more accurately label them, the Center and the Right.

Democratic Centrists, the only sort of Democrats who are ever allowed to run for national office now, are never given any sort of traction for the–very rare–character-based attacks they level against their opponents on the Far Right, who are always uniformly the sort of candidates Republicans run for national office. 

No, when hypercentrist John Kerry wasn’t being characterized as a far Radical Leftist–an absurd claim, as any genuine Leftist will tell you–he was being castigated in the favorite terms of Republican “class warfare”:  as an elitist, out of touch, Frenchified, gigolo (because his wife is wealthy) with an “arrogance” problem. 

Four years later, McCain is a salt of the earth maverick POW superhero (like Batman, of course) who knows how to be a good bipartisan compromiser, despite the fact that he is a womanizing hyper-neoconservative who cheated on his wife and married his wealthy mistress and proudly fought in the morally odious and unnecessarily destructive Vietnam War, a war even his own party was forced to oppose when Nixon ran for office (forgetting Nixon’s escalation of the war when actually in office).

For news cycle after news cycle, we have been treated to sage analysts explaining the huge “inexperience” and “national security” and “arrogance” problems Obama will have to overcome if he wants to win over skeptical working class voters.  We are almost never informed that the American people overwhelmingly support Democratic policies.  When mainstream analysts don’t directly deploy these character smears against Obama, they are constantly discussing such smears in purely “analytic” terms and will justify such discussions by saying some hypothetical set of American people holds these views, regardless of what the national polling numbers actually are, and without even a second’s thought to the possibility that discussing these “problems” is precisely what brings them into public consciousness in the first place.

All of this would be bad enough, and enough of a sign that our democracy is horrifically broken, but when a clearly symmetrical “character issue” emerges on the Right, these same upstanding standard-bearers of journalistic integrity immediately and reflexively flip the story into a liability for the Democratic Centrist candidate.  When McCain reveals himself to be a “gigolo,” in exactly the same manner as John Kerry, Obama better watch out, because he dared to squeak in opposition to the Bipartisan Maverick War Superhero POW. 

Be prepared for more of this:  When Joe Biden makes a gaffe, he will be accused of “Destroying Obama’s Campaign” and “Showing How Poor Obama’s Judgment Is.”  When President Bush or Senator McCain make gaffes–and they have made a huge number of documented gaffes, every day–these slips will go unreported or will be glossed over in the mainstream press.

I have recently begun to listen to Air America’s Rachel Maddow Show, which is a fairly entertaining and informative program, and Maddow mentioned the other day that she has noticed a systematic anti-Obama bias in the stories coming out of the AP.

No sooner was I alerted to this claim than–lo and behold–I read the AP’s “analysis” of Obama’s decision to select Biden as his VP candidate.  The headline of this “analysis,” written by Ron Fournier, reads “Analysis: Biden pick shows lack of confidence.”  The “analysis” begins like this:  “The candidate of change went with the status quo.”

This “analysis”–which confirms Maddow’s observation (which was, I should note, targeted not just the AP’s analyses but also its journalism), and almost borrows talking points from the McCain campaign’s playbook–has rightly set off a firestorm on the blogosphere, led by Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly, who observes, among other things, the basic lack of logic in Fournier’s “argument”:

By his logic, any potential running mate shows a “lack of confidence” — picking Hillary would mean Obama lacked confidence in his ability to win over women voters; picking Bayh would mean Obama lacked confidence in his ability to win over independents and conservative Dems; picking Webb would mean Obama lacked confidence in his ability to win over voters concerned about national security; picking Kaine would mean Obama lacked confidence in his ability to win over voters in the South; etc.

Beyond the amply documented fact that Fournier is very cozy with Republicans, and the controversy over the direction Fournier is taking the formerly more neutral AP in, there is a more important point here:  this is what we’re going to be getting, not only from the AP but also from every major “Serious” source of journalism, from now until November.  We’ll have reframing of every decision Obama makes in negative terms, attacks on his character and fitness to command based on the slimmest of evidence, practically naked partisan attacks on every utterance he makes by supposedly objective journalists (like our friend, Matt Lauer). 

It is in this context–the usual context within which the right-leaning mainstream media establishment operates–that Sacha Zimmerman, over at The New Republic, can worry about how troubled she is that Maddow is getting her own show on MSNBC:

I really like Maddow and have found her thoroughly compelling throughout this latest campaign season, but I am not so thrilled about this trend toward partisan networks and news. By all means we should have progressive and conservative commentators and analysts, but is there no room for argument between the two? Where have all the iconoclasts gone? With this split in the networks and a near perfect red-blue divide nationwide, it seems that we are more and more retreating to our comfortable trenches and refusing to acknowledge anything but spite, paranoia, and conspiracy theory when it comes to the other side. And, since cable news is not exactly renowned for its nuance or intellectual rigor, knee-jerk reactions can pass for smart commentary. I think Maddow will be a wonderful host (and God knows MSNBC could use a smart woman), but how exciting is it really if she is just preaching to the choir?

It is in this context that Democrats, no matter how completely mainstreamly centrist they are, will always have to fight.  Even being at the center of the center of the political spectrum–which I think is a fair description of Obama-Biden, and no insult on my part, just an observation–is no guarantee that you won’t be painted as a terrorist-loving, Weatherman-supporting, radical antiwar, Code Pink-worshipping, soft-on-national-defense commie/anarchist or whatever.

Slight deviations from the center toward the left are regarded–by the stalwart liberals at TNR–as mortal crises to democracy and journalistic integrity.  Meanwhile, systematic bias toward the right by supposedly objective news wires, like the AP, to say nothing of Fox News, is just par for the course, occasionally noteworthy when their bias becomes too blatant to ignore, as it is in this case, but usually accepted as being as natural as air.

As a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University has shown, the media has indeed covered Obama more than McCain.  Thing is, that coverage has been overwhelmingly negative.

Welcome to our political discourse.

Here’s what Joe Biden wrote about America for The Atlantic Monthly just over a year ago. I think his short essay captures the revulsion that many of us feel toward the Bush Administration, and the threat we face from right-wingers going forward.

The NYT reports that Joe Biden is going to be Obama’s running mate.  From the perspective of iconography–old gray suit next to young biracial change candidate–and as a way of correcting what the mainstream media perceive as Obama’s “weakness” on national security, he is a good choice.

I don’t know enough about Biden to make much more of an informed comment, but I’d like to link to Glenn Greenwald, who is critical, I think rightly, of certain of Biden’s comments in an interview with Matt Lauer:

LAUER: [McCain's] argument — the Democratic Party itself, somewhere in the late 1960s, became weak on national security, at least perceived to be weak — we started to see a party wringing its hands and blaming American for what’s wrong in the world. Now, as we look at the upcoming election, particularly between a war hero and Barack Obama, do you think that’s going to be a major problem for Democrats?

BIDEN: I think that’s what they’re going to revive. There’s truth to that. I ran in 1972 as a young 29-year-old guy who won the Senate seat, being the guy who was viewed as a hawk, because I didn’t join in that mantra.

It was Bill Clinton — and, I might say, me pushing it — saying that you had to go to war in the Balkans to end genocide. It was John McCain initially saying, no no no you can’t do that — the Republicans voting, no no no we can’t do that.

I find this sort of response infuriating.  The problem here is Biden’s claim that “there’s truth” to the idea that the Democratic party is “a party wringing its hands and blaming American for what’s wrong in the world,” a party that apparently once blamed America first as a “mantra,” before Clinton showed them the royal road of military interventionism. 

And Biden’s claim is so historically accurate, too!  Apparently John “Missile Gap” Kennedy and Lyndon “Carpetbomb” Johnson were wussy peaceniks, whose mantra was a flower of love for every Vietnamese civilian. 

How can Biden concede such pivotal Republican propaganda points to Lauer?  Will Biden back away from these sorts of attacks on his own party as Obama’s VP?  Why do Democrats feel the need to show how manly and tough they are as a strategy for defeating Republicans?  It only reinforces, and does little to neutralize, their talking points.

I think you damage your chances of winning the White House if you go around accepting that your own party is “wringing its hands” and “blaming America” for the world’s problems, then proudly suggesting how willing you are to go to war, proving your manliness, showing how willing you are to stand up to the sissy “antiwar” wing–who of course by 72 were being blamed for having started the Vietnam War and lost the White House to the “antiwar” Republican candidate, Richard Nixon–of your own party. 

Still, all things considered, Biden may be a good choice, at least as a way of appeasing the moronic Matt Lauers of our idiotic mediasphere, until our pundit class finds another character-based smear to fire off at Obama.  Obama, of course, should respond to such smears by promising to bomb some other country–not Iraq, of course–into oblivion, maybe Afghanistan, or–who knows–maybe the Balkans again, just to show the hand-wringing, America-blaming, peacenik-mantra wing of the Democratic Party how tough an Obama-Biden ticket would be.