History is Happening Now

Here’s a question we patriotic Americans should be asking ourselves: What does it mean to be an “American”?

Why, you might ask, should we ask ourselves this question? After all, the definition of the word “American,” when applied to people, isn’t really relevant to the political values of most Americans. To take myself as an example, I want more safety, more freedom and more prosperity, health and happiness for all American citizens – and I’m content to accept the simple idea that all American citizens are “Americans,” period.

But for a small minority of people who have a disproportionate influence in our media, the question of who is “American” and who isn’t — or the question of who is “more American” and who is “less American” — is key to the way they think about politics. They see the word “American” as a term that can include some American citizens and exclude others, and they are intent on subtly imposing their definition on the rest of us as a way to increase their power.

We can’t afford to sit back and let their insidious usages infect our everyday conversation until the word itself — “American” – becomes a symbol of their destructive ideas. We must think, very deliberately, about how we define the word “American,” so we can defend ourselves and our country.

An obvious example of how media elites are trying to use the word “American” to undermine their political enemies was revealed by the Atlantic Monthly’s Joshua Green, who recently wrote an article about Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and also published a collection of memos written by Clinton’s top campaign strategists. Clinton’s uber-strategist was a man named Mark Penn, the CEO of the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller. Penn wrote a memo in late March 2007 suggesting Obama was “less American” than Clinton. Here’s an excerpt:

All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.

Save it for 2050.

It also exposes a very strong weakness for him — his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values. He told the people of NH yesterday he has a Kansas accent because his mother was from there. His mother lived in many states as far as we can tell — but this is an example of the nonsense he uses to cover this up.

How could we give some life to this contrast without going negative:

Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply held American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back.

Let’s explicitly own “American” in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the background.

We are never going to say anything about his background — we have to show the value of ours when it comes to making decisions, understanding the needs of most Americans — the invisible Americans.

Let’s be clear: Obama’s mother was American. His father, a native of Kenya, abandoned the family when Obama was two years old. Obama lived in Indonesia from ages 6 to 10, but otherwise he spent his entire life living in the United States. He grew up in Hawaii, attended Americans schools including Columbia University and Harvard University, and taught the U.S. Constitution at the University of Chicago Law School.

So why does Penn claim to think Obama’s “roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited”? Why does Penn claim to think Obama is “not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values?” 

It’s important to note that Penn is not framing his argument in ethnic or genetic terms — which would be a more blatant invocation of Nazi ideology — but rather in terms of Obama’s “values” and “culture” — but Penn doesn’t specifically explain what leads him to believe that Obama’s “values” are “limited” in their American-ness.

Setting aside what spooky thoughts might be rattling around inside Penn’s brain, it’s easy to understand Obama’s vulnerability to being called “un-American” in a general election. First of all, right-wingers use the word “un-American” to describe Democrats and liberals in general. Right-wingers like to draw a link between liberals and Marxists, thereby identifying liberals with America’s enemies during the Cold War. And ever since the 1960s, right-wingers have called liberals “un-American” because of the left-wing’s opposition to the Vietnam War.

Furthermore, people on the religious right who consider America a “Christian nation” consider atheism “un-American,” and atheism is more popular among liberals. Add to that Obama’s mixed race, his foreign father, his middle name — “HUSSEIN!” — and it’s clear why people think they can get away with suggesting that Obama isn’t American enough to be president.

But Penn doesn’t embrace the right-wing’s characterization of all liberals as “un-American,” nor does he point directly to Obama’s religion or ethnicity to show why Obama isn’t “American” enough. Instead, Penn uses words such as “values” and “culture.”

So here’s the question we should be asking. If someone shares the “values” and “culture” of Barack Obama, does that mean this person’s connection to American values and culture is “at best limited”? If you care about the things that Obama cares about and enjoy the things that Obama enjoys, are you not as “American” as someone like Clinton, who was “born in the middle of America”?

This is what I beleive: To use the word “American” to diminish Barack Obama is disgusting and terrifying. It is a perversion of the ideas we patriotic Americans value most. As far as I’m concerned, Hillary Clinton owes this country an apology.

A friend of mine uses two funny phrases to describe how he feels when somebody looks him in the eye and tells him something that’s obviously false.

He says, “Don’t (excrement) in my mouth and call it a sundae,” and “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

Well, that’s what John McCain did last Wednesday during an interview with National Public Radio. I heard a portion of this interview today while listening to a week-old podcast of The Rachel Maddow Show on Air America Radio. In the 8/13/08 show, Maddow called this McCain exchange “one of those am I dreaming moments” in the campaign.

INTERVIEWER: Steve Schmidt, who is running your campaign, has said something kind of simple and understandable. He said that a campaign needs one positive message about its candidate and then one good strong negative message about the opponent. Your–

MCCAIN: I never heard, I never heard that statement and I’d have to know who attributed it to him before I would agree with that. We’re not sending any negative message in our campaign. We’re drawing differences on positions, myself and Senator Obama, which are significant. He wants to raise taxes and I want to keep them low. He doesn’t want to drill off shore or have nuclear power. I want both. I’ve never heard Steve Schmidt say we need a negative message in the campaign.

INTERVIEWER: I’m quoting the Wall Street Journal here.

MCCAIN: I’ve run many many campaigns and I’ve never believed that we needed a strong negative message.

Keep in mind: there’s nothing wrong with a negative message. I have plenty of negative things to say about John McCain and I feel duty-bound as a Patriotic American to express my negative views about this liar. I’ve been thrilled to see the attack ads launched by Barack Obama and his allies targeting McCain. People should know McCain’s record includes opposing veteran’s benefits and supporting huge tax breaks for oil companies. They should know he supported an unnecessary war that cost more than 4,000 American lives.

For McCain to deny sending negative messages in this campaign is outrageous. For example, McCain recently said he was “proud” of the ad compairing Barack Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

I believe that if Obama had told a similar lie, the media would have jumped all over it. This double standard is an incalculable (but clearly enormous) advantage for McCain, whose contradictions, mistakes, and gaffes in this campaign have been numerous and have been reported by the media with absolutely no sense of significance, as though McCain were a “crazy uncle,” as Obama’s campaign once referred to Jeremiah Wright.

So why does McCain get away with it? And does this episode tell us anything about what we can expect from a McCain Administration if (when?) he wins in November?

A recent Zogby poll shows that a majority of likely voters favor the inclusion of Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate for President, in the forthcoming series of debates between McCain and Obama.  By a smaller margin, they also want Ralph Nader to be included.

Currently, neither candidate can participate because

[t]he CPD requires that to be included in their debates, candidates must appear on enough state ballots to have a mathematical chance of winning a majority of Electoral College votes, and must be winning at least 15% support in national public opinion polls before the debates.

I can see the justification in not featuring in debates candidates who, mathematically, just can’t gain enough electoral votes to win.

But the requirement that candidates (who could hypothetically win the contest) achieve certain numbers in national public opinion polls seems more dubious.  Beyond pointing out that national opinion polls have no particular god-like perspective on the world, these candidates could plausibly argue that they would gain significantly in the polls if they received media coverage comparable to the major party candidates, but that they can’t receive that coverage without high polling numbers.  Through this negative feedback loop, the system is gamed against them.  In some cases, debates may be the only way that candidates can reach out to a wider audience.  Isn’t it in the public interest to present the widest array of available ideologies and policy options from which the American people can choose?  Isn’t genuine electoral choice essential to a functioning democracy?  It is, and it is.

This isn’t a partisan issue.  Barr would hurt McCain’s numbers and Nader would hurt Obama’s (although, I suspect, he might also draw self-described “independents” from McCain).  It’s at root a fairness issue.  We should aim for full equality for all presidential candidates.  In the absence of such equality, I think it would be a fair compromise to have two rounds of debate, one that initially included all the qualifying candidates for President, and another for the front-runners. 

If you watched any of the early primary debates, and especially the Republican debates where there were serious angry ideological differences between the candidates, you also know a diverse field can make for awesome television.  Not that such shallow silly considerations should shape our national politics.  Certainly not.  We know they never have.

It’s painful to watch the following Web ad, recently released by the McCain campaign, showing clips of big shot Democrats praising John McCain. It’s important to understand that this ad, more than anything else, explains why John “the maverick” McCain won the Republican primary and why he has a reasonably good shot at winning the general election, in spite of the damage George W. Bush and the Republicans in Congress have done to their party’s reputation. McCain has benefited tremendously from the praise he has received from well-respected Democrats.

I painfully admit that I too used to have positive things to say about John McCain, perhaps because I foolishly thought that by praising a Republican who supported a reasonable immigration policy, spoke out against torture, called Jerry Fallwell and other Christian leaders “agents of intolerance,” fought for campaign finance reform, etc., that I could lend credibility to my arguments that the Republicans who take scarier positions on these issues are extremists.

Little did I know that McCain would embrace radical Christian nutball Rod Parsley as a “spiritual guide,” support legislation that allows the CIA to continue torturing, abandon his immigration plan in favor of “border security,” embrace the Bush tax cuts, take a warmongering approach to Iran and Russia, and make the sort of ridiculous campaign promises (balancing the budget by the end of his first term, for example) that would make his supporters sick to their stomachs if they were paying attention (but alas, most McCain supporters and most of the traditional media are too caught up in the great debate over Obama to hear anything McCain has to say.)

The Democrats in these ads sounded so happy and pleased-with-themselves as they praised McCain. They did so, I think, because they thought it would lend them credibility to patronize a “moderate” Republican. “See!” they seem to be shouting, “Look how fair and non-ideological I am. Look at how reasonable and transcendent I’m being in praising a politician who is loyal to the other party!”

The question is: Are Republicans a threat to this country or not? If they are, then under what circumstances is it appropriate for Democratic politicians to be praising Republican politicians? Under what circumstances does it make sense for Democrats to praise their own party’s candidates for being “bipartisan” or “independent”? I don’t think it’s good strategy to alienate honest, well-meaning Republican Americans by demonizing their beliefs (ignorant and misguided as those beliefs may be), but I also don’t think it’s a good strategy to pretend the lesser of two criminals is actually a law-abiding citizen.

McCain scares me. I’m worried he’ll lead us into more unnecessary war, as he has in the past. I’m worried that he’ll cut taxes while federal spending continues to explode, creating the conditions for further economic disaster. I’m worried that he will undermine or destroy the insitutions that protect many Americans from unnecessary poverty and suffering. And I’m disappointed with my party’s leaders for creating a Frankenstein with their self-serving praise. Am I wrong?

Such is the sage judgment of Robert Kagan writing in the Washington Post about the war between Georgia and Russia.

This op-ed is an almost textbook example of neoconservative militaristic fantasy, in which a big Nazi-like enemy (like the Iraqi Hitler we recently faced and the Iranian Hitlers we are heroically facing now) attacks a peace-loving pro-Western lily-pure democratic country because it (our Enemy) hates freedom and democracy.  In the terms of this fantasy, anyone who points out the inaccuracy of this picture, who brings up uncomfortable details like the fact that Georgia was the country that chose to launch a military offensive against the separatist South Ossetia, is accused of being anti-Western, a proponent of “appeasement,” a wimpy accommodationist, etc.

This line of neoconservative reasoning is also usually self-serving and self-enriching.  Kagan writes:

Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Russia’s attack on sovereign Georgian territory marked the official return of history, indeed to an almost 19th-century style of great-power competition, complete with virulent nationalisms, battles for resources, struggles over spheres of influence and territory, and even — though it shocks our 21st-century sensibilities — the use of military power to obtain geopolitical objectives.

A very convenient diagnosis coming from the author of The Return of History and the End of Dreams.

One should note that Kagan is the preferred foreign policy pundit of the McCain campaign and neoconseratives more generally.  McCain even wrote a blurb for Kagan’s book.  “In this important, timely, and superbly-written book,” McCain professes, “Robert Kagan shows that the ‘end of history’ was an illusion. Today’s global challenges pose a stern test for the world’s democracies. This book is a wake-up call and should be read by policymakers, politicians, pundits and all who want a guide to the dangerous waters of 21st century geopolitics.”

Put roughly, Kagan’s thesis is that the next worldwide geopolitical conflict will be between the world’s “democracies,” like the US and the nations of the European Union, and the world’s “authoritarian” regimes, like China and Russia, a return to nineteenth century power politics, except of course we are virtuous and only motivated by the desire to do good in the world, while the authoritarians we face think purely in terms of cynical Realpolitick.  ((See “The End of the End of History” in TNR))  This is an appealingly simplistic narrative, with heroes in white hats and villains who twirl their black mustaches, which I think does far more to exacerbate tensions than anything else.  To belligerently announce your intention to take a hostile stance toward another country–and to be driven by a semi-moral fervor in doing so–is a great way of fulfilling your own prophecy.  Remember, Kagan’s book came out before August 8, 2008, and neoconservatives have been taking a hostile stance toward Russia for many years.  The Caucus region is probably the second most strategic region in the world after the Middle East and so the US has a vital national interest in securing the region’s energy reserves, through such policy instruments as NATO expansion, multilateral deals to build energy pipelines, among others.

This is, it should go without saying, not to justify Russia’s turn toward autocracy or to in any way support its horrific attacks against Georgia.  But Kagan works hard to minimize the importance of NATO expansion and US missile defense systems in Eastern Europe in his version of the story, which is the reason he has to categorically dismiss the importance of such “details” in the first line of his op-ed.  Charles King, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, paints what strikes me as a much less simplistic picture of the conflict over South Ossetia, one in which Georgia bears a good deal of responsibility for setting off a regional powder keg.

Experts can argue about “the details” of Geogia’s attack on South Ossetia and Russia’s illegal invasion of Georgia, details Kagan claims not to care about, but my point is more straightforward.  It is in the context of the “self-fulfilling prophecy” that we should understand what the foreign policy of a McCain administration would look like.  It would be a presidential administration for which “details” are “not very important,” because they would already know how historians will in the future write about the present.  Evidence that contradicts their preferred storyline, whatever they decide it is, can be dismissed out of hand because we all already know what the story line is supposed to be.  What is that preferred storyline?  War!

I have written previously about the Obama campaign’s use of advanced marketing techniques.  Obama has the most sophisticated voter database that has ever been used in an American presidential contest.  He promises to unite us by tailoring demographically-specific messages to a thousand thousand market segments.  All the tools of modern marketing are at his disposal.

Now, the value of his database will be put to a test.  Politico reports that Obama has released two local advertisements attacking McCain, tailored specifically to Ohio and Nevada.  I assume this is just the beginning of a local media barrage by the Obama campaign, a good sign.

The election may turn on which is a better media strategy:  broad national attacks (by McCain), which seem to have successfully captured headline space on CNN and other national outlets, or a million little customized attacks in swing states (by Obama), which may convince voters that Obama is speaking directly to their local concerns.

Despite his recently declining poll numbers with his base, my bet is still on Obama to win it.  My sense is that the country is sick of Republican rule and I think the local media focus is extremely smart.

Then again, if McCain can successfully paint Obama as the antichrist–no, really!–maybe he can draw the Evangelicals out to vote in sufficient numbers of give him a better chance at closing the deal.  If Obama loses the election because a significant percentage of the American people believe him to be the antichrist, I think I would move to some more rational and enlightened country–like North Korea.

     It appears that a war has begun between Russia and Georgia. I just found out about it today, and I’m having a hard time putting it into a meaningful context. Questions arise: Why are they fighting? Is the outcome of the war relevant to U.S. security interests? What should the United States do? 

     It would be a mistake for someone as ignorant as I am about this situation to jump to conclusions about how America should respond to what is going on. This is a time when I — and many other United States citizens — look to our political leaders and foreign policy experts for wisdom and guidance. 

     That said, I would encourage our readers to check out the Wall Street Journal editorial on the war. Then, I would also like readers to check out this Politico article about the different responses of Barack Obama and John McCain to news of the conflict. 

     Is it possible that McCain is taking an aggressive, black-and-white position on this complicated situation in order to make himself seem like a more decisive leader, a leader with “moral clarity”? I don’t know the answer to that question — but I tend to think McCain is putting his own political ambitions ahead of our national security. It’s important to note that McCain is taking an even more aggressive position that President Bush.

Entertainment Weekly has asked  our two leading presidential candidates a number of penetrating questions about their pop cultural tastes and preferences.

Asked to name of his favorite superhero, John McCain replied:

Batman. He does justice sometimes against insurmountable odds. And he doesn’t make his good works known to a lot of people, so a lot of people think he’s just a rich playboy.

McCain’s answer reveals a lot about his values and tells us what sort president he would be. 

Our Republican candidate for president admires a vigilante who dresses up in a bat suit and, Dirty Harry-style, takes justice straight to the criminal, entirely ignoring the rule of law.  Yes, Batman makes a point not to kill his enemies–I doubt a McCain administration would be so kind–and has the support of the local authorities, who (make no mistake) hate the rule of law just as much as he does, but the so-called Batman takes his actions (which McCain calls “good works”) outside the framework of law and “does justice against insurmountable odds.”

Is Batman’s disregard for the laws of Gotham City not the very same neoconservative disregard for national and international law which led us into the Iraq War, which caused our government to give itself permission to torture enemy combatants, which inspired Bush and co. to illegally wiretap Americans after 9/11, which justifies executive orders and presidential signing statements as our primary form of government?  It is.

Bush and his neoconservative friends think of themselves precisely in these terms, as political Batmen, defenders of America’s global might who must always operate in a “state of exception” from the prevailing legal institutions.  They do the “hard thing” that no one else wants to do, that no one else has the strength of will to do, that is technically illegal–because of the ninny sissy liberal nanny state–but absolutely necessary to our very survival, and in so doing said hard thing, they preserve civilization, they stop the ticking time bomb, they take care of business. 

But they’re also humble, you see.  They don’t want to take credit for their good–illegal–deeds.  They would rather just be regarded as rich playboys and hide their good/illegal deeds behind the shield of executive privilege.  If necessary, they will conceal their great benevolence by shredding all evidence that they did anything at all.  Swell guys, those neocons.

*

In fairness to McCain, Barack Obama replied this way to the same question:

I was always into the Spider-Man/Batman model. The guys who have too many powers, like Superman, that always made me think they weren’t really earning their superhero status. It’s a little too easy. Whereas Spider-Man and Batman, they have some inner turmoil. They get knocked around a little bit.

     The question on everybody’s mind is this: Polls show voters want to vote for a Democrat by a sizeable margin. So why isn’t Barack Obama way ahead in the polls right now?

     With that question in mind, let’s consider the nature of the attacks that have been levelled at Obama in recent weeks. They’ve called Obama arrogant. They’ve called him presumptuous. They’ve called him narcicistic. They’ve called him vain. They’ve called him a phony, will no substance beneath his soaring rhetoric. They’ve called him a celebrity. They’ve mocked his supporters for thinking he’s “the messiah.” They’ve mocked him for thinking he’s “the one.” They’ve compared him to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. They’ve said Obama cares more about winning an election than about winning a war. They’ve said he makes time to visit the gym, but doesn’t make time to visit wounded troops. They’ve accused Obama of being unwilling to admit his “mistakes” on foreign policy.

      And that’s just in the mainstream media. In the second-tier media, Obama’s enemies say flat-out, as they have been for months, that he is unpatriotic, a self-serving political hack.

     It reminds me of a rant I heard several months ago from ultra-conservative whacko pundit Jay Severin, who spent several minutes insisting over and over again on his New England-area radio show that Obama supporters are “losers.”  

     The message is clear: They’re saying that we Obama’s hard-core supporters are shallow, self-righteous, America-hating idealists who have nominated Obama because he makes us feel good by being black and by putting on a good show. To the swing voters, they’re saying that if you look closely, you can tell that his whole candidacy is one big sham.

     Let’s review the facts. Obama grew up in a middle-class, single-parent household. He didn’t just make it into Columbia, he didn’t just make it to Harvard Law School: He became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. Unlike President George W. Bush, who relied on his family legacy to score plum admissions to an elite New England boarding school and later Yale; and unlike John McCain, whose admiral father gave him easy admission into the Naval Academy, where he placed near the bottom of his class — Obama excelled, not just as a student but as an instructor at the University of Chicago Law School. (Here’s a New York Times article I wish everyone would read about Obama’s years as a law professor.) Obama won election and re-election to the Illinois state Senate, rather than leapfrogging into national politics as many political hacks have a tendency to do. And then Obama managed to win election to the United States Senate, and finally the Democratic presidential primary, defeating the most powerful brand and the most prestigious minds in Democratic politics. Obama also wrote a thoughtful memoir that was very well written and very well reviewed before anybody knew anything about him other than that he’d been a successful law student at Harvard.

      I’ve heard Obama speak in person twice, and I’ve had the privilege to speak with him for a few minutes. And I can tell you his “rhetoric” is as good as his enemies say it is. I honestly believe he’s a better, more skillful communicator than Bill Clinton was — probably as good if not better than Ronald Reagan.

     In other words, all the hard evidence I’ve seen suggests that Obama is one of the most brilliant minds in American politics today. It’s also clear that Obama had plenty of opportunities to cash in on his brilliance and make a lot of money. But instead, he decided to go to Chicago and fight in the trenches of local politics — which isn’t easy, and it isn’t glamourous or sexy, and it doesn’t pay that well.

     So why are Obama’s enemies attacking him for being a fraud, when it’s so utterly obvious that Obama is the real deal? It’s straight from the Rove playbook: Attack your enemy where he is strongest. They figure if they can take Obama’s greatest asset — his brilliance, his ability to communicate, his ability to succeed politically, his willingness to fight and sacrifice — and turn it into a weakness, then the rest of Obama’s appeal will come crashing down.

      And they know they have a chance to win — a slim chance, but a real one — because most voters simply do not have the time to do the sort of research that’s necessary to feel like they really know him. So their minds are more open to the idea that he might not be what he seems.

     It’s true that voters want a candidate who will push for a common-sense agenda along the lines of what Obama is proposing. Voters want American troops out of Iraq. Voters want health care that’s more affordable for individuals and businesses. Voters want global leadership on the issue of global warming. Voters want a fairer tax structure that doesn’t leave a ballooning debt for our children to repay. Voters want to see social security remain solvent. Voters want improvements in education.

     But what they want more than anything is a President who inspires confidence. I wish I could say Bush’s low approval ratings reflect the country’s rejection of the Republican approach to public policy, but I believe it’s more accurate to say the country has rejected what Bush represents on a more visceral level. The American people sense that Bush is full of baloney. They know Bush is incompetent and corrupt. They know Bush doesn’t really understand the world. They know Bush can’t distinguish ideology from reality. They know Bush is a cocky bastard whose cockiness caught up with him when everything he fought for turned out to be a miserable failure.

     What the American people want is the opposite of Bush: a leader they can trust to demonstrate world-class intelligence and a world-class temperment in tackling the awesome challenges that face this country. The key word is trust. Obama’s enemies sense that his greatest asset in this campaign is his ability to inspire trust in the American people — and that’s why his enemies are hell-bent on eroding that trust, on making us feel like Obama is far away, an elistist celebrity who thinks he’s the second coming of Christ and cares more about satisfying his own ego than about this country or its people.

     Let’s be clear about what will happen if the Republican Party can pull this off: they will use this same disgusting tactic over and over again. If Obama can’t withstand the charge that he’s nothing but a phony, how will any other candidate hope to withstand that same charge, no matter what they say or how they say it?

    The only way to fight back is by going on offense. It’s time to start evaluating John McCain. This is a man who thinks Czechoslovakia is still a country. This is a man who thinks Shiite Iran is training Sunni Al Qaida. This is a man who called Paston Rod Parsley a “spiritual guide.” This is a man who wants to send our volunteer soldiers to die in Iraq for no reason other than to salvage the Bush legacy and by extension the legacy of his failed Republican Party. This is a man who tried to block an effort to give our soldiers the benefits they deserve — an education, for example — when they return home from the battlefield. This is a man whose famous temper inspires strong words of warning from his Republican colleagues in the Senate. This is a man who scored points with the American people by condemning torture and then quietly signed off on a policy that allows the CIA to continue torturing. This is a man who thinks it’s a good idea to privatize the U.S. Postal Service — as if that were an idea worth discussing for even a split-second when the challenges we face are so dire.

     McCain doesn’t have the courage of his convictions. He doesn’t value the lives of our soldiers. He doesn’t care about torture or the U.S. Constitution. He’s willing to let the poor suffer while the deficit blooms.

      Bust most importantly, this is a man who said he was “proud” of his recent ad comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. John McCain and the Republican Party will lie to the American people about Barack Obama, and then they’ll lie about every other enemy they face, and in this way the Republicans will slowly but surely use their ugly lies to erase the United States of America and replace it with something that will make us sick to our stomachs — unless we’re willing to fight to save this country! If you think I’m being hyperbolic, you haven’t understood what’s been happening to this country since September 11, 2001.

      George Bush has sent this country into a tailspin and John McCain will only intensify that tailspin. The general election is upon us and if we fall asleep at the switch and let the Republicans drive a wedge between us and Obama, we’ll pay for it for generations.

     We can’t spend the next three months thanking McCain for his service. Obama can do that — but we can’t. For the good of this country and its people, we need to start laying into that rat bastard with every fiber of our being. As Obama says, now is the time. Now is the moment. It’s time to drive a wedge between the American people and John McCain.

Writing for McClatchy, Steven Thomma reports on a recent Zogby poll, which indicates that “Barack Obama has lost ground among some of his strongest bases of support, including young people, women, Democrats and independents.”  Let me quote at length from this article:

Zogby called the results a “notable turnaround” from a July survey he did that showed Obama leading by 46-36.

“McCain made signifciant [sic] gains at Obama’s expense among some of what had been Obama’s strongest demographic groups,” Zogby said.

His findings:

-Among voters aged 18-29, Obama lost 16 percent and McCain gained 20. Obama still leads, 49-38;

-Among women, McCain gained 10 percentage points. Obama now leads 43-38;

-Among independents, Obama lost an 11 point lead. They’re now tied;

-Among Democrats, Obama’s support dropped from 83 percent to 74 percent;

-Among Catholics, Obama lost the 11 point lead he had in July and now trails McCain by 15.

Zogby said Obama also lost ground among minorities.

Zogby attributes Obama’s declining numbers to “McCain’s criticisms of Obama as inexperienced in the wake of Obama’s trip to Europe, the Middle East, Afghanistan and Iraq and to Obama’s flips on some issues.”

But it seems implausible that McCain’s attacks on Obama’s inexperience have been very effective, at least among Obama’s base.  Did former supporters of Obama not know about Obama’s relative experience level?  They knew.  Was his relative newness to the political scene not in fact an asset to his campaign?  It was. 

It seems more plausible to me that Obama’s base is dissatisfied with his apparent reversals on issues they care about.

This new data convinces me more than ever that defensive and post-partisan campaigning is a serious mistake.  Republican campaigning tactics–of the sort used even against McCain by Bush in ‘00–may be vile.  Using character assassination or deploying patriotism as a bludgeon to destroy political enemies is disgusting, but I think the general idea of being aggressive-as aggressive as possible–is a good thing.  We can learn that much from our political opponents. 

I like Obama’s ad that claims McCain is “in the pocket” of big oil.  It shows that the campaign is toughening up and developing a so-called “populist” line of attack.  The campaign should never give ground to McCain.  It should pound on him again and again, on the war, on health care, on the environment, on immigration, on internationalism.  Be unapologetically liberal. 

These are issues that put McCain on the defense.  These are issues on which Obama can win, if the polling numbers are right.