Most of our focus, of late, has been on the differences and campaigning styles among the Democrats, but it pays to step back once in a while and take a look at the Republican race. It really is something to behold. I have noticed a recent upsurge, among Republicans (on cable, in columns and blogs, and in the administration and Congress), of what I can only call a disconnect from reality. Most of it is willful and self-conscious, but not all of it. Here’s one example:
McCain campaigned along the [South Carolina] coast, the more moderate area of this conservative state and the place he counts as his geographical base. In the final hours before the polls open, he focused on national security to generate last-minute support for his candidacy.
“The greatest challenge this nation faces is this implacable enemy,” he told an audience of a couple hundred supporters in Florence. “When it comes to Osama bin Laden,” he vowed, “I will follow him to the gates of hell if necessary, but I will get Osama bin Laden, and I will bring him to justice.”
I’m all for capturing Osama bin Laden, but this ‘implacable enemy’ is hardly the greatest challenge that the nation faces.
I watched Fred Thompson campaigning in South Carolina yesterday and some lady asked him for his position on global warming. His response was to make a joke out it and say that you can’t believe the consensus of scientists because that isn’t solid science. I saw Rep. Marsha Blackburn basically say the same thing at a hearing of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
Then I saw the president say that it isn’t his job to back up the assessment of the Intelligence Community on Iran’s nuclear intentions and capabilities and that he doesn’t believe them.
It’s all a reminder that the Republican Party, as currently constituted, has a dangerously estranged relationship with the truth. It’s what allows them to assert that ‘the surge’ in Iraq has been a success rather than a money pit.
There’s no question that the whole party needs a decade in the wilderness to reestablish some kind of raison d’etre. But that doesn’t mean that the battle among the Democrats isn’t vitally important.
If you are going to caucus in Nevada today, please take a good look at Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist Mark Penn and his wife.
Mark J. Penn is worldwide CEO of the PR firm Burson-Marsteller (B-M), a position he has held since December 2005. [1] He is also the president of the polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates (PSB), which he co-founded in 1975.
Penn is also U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton’s top presidential campaign strategist. A biographical note states that he “has worked with Mrs. Clinton for over six years, since he ran the polling and messaging for her successful election to the US Senate in 2000.” [2]
Penn also served as NPI Fellow at the New Politics Institute. He advised United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair “for his successful run for a third term.” Penn is “best known for serving as President Bill Clinton’s pollster and political adviser for the 1996 re-election campaign and throughout the second term of the administration. He also ran the polling and messaging and was part of the media team for the successful Senate campaign of Hillary Clinton, serving as her chief campaign adviser. He advises organizations and companies on a wide range of image, branding and competitive marketing assignments. Mark has been a key adviser to Bill Gates and Microsoft for the last 6 years.” [3] [4]
Penn is married to Nancy Jacobson, a longtime Democratic Party fundraiser who in addition to helping found Third Way serves as Senior Advisor to Senator Evan Bayh, National Finance Chair for the Democratic Leadership Council, and Founder and Executive Director of Next Generation, a political action committee devoted to supporting moderate, centrist Senate candidates…
In mid-2007, the dual role of Mark Penn as the CEO of the PR firm Busron-Marsteller and chief strategist for the Democratic Party’s Presidential aspirant Hilliary Clinton, irked some labor leaders. The New York Times reported that labor leaders Bruce Raynor of UniteHere, and James Hoffa of the Teamsters union, wrote to Clinton expressing their concern about B-M’s anti-labor work. “He cannot serve two masters, working for a pro-union candidate and working for anti-union companies,” Teamsters President Jim Hoffa said. [6]
Take a look at the Third Way:
The Third Way, according to New Democrats Online, the Democratic Leadership Council’s online community, is “a global movement dedicated to modernizing progressive politics for the information age. Third Way politics seeks a new balance of economic dynamism and social security, a new social compact based on individual rights and responsibilities, and a new model for governing that equips citizens and communities to solve their own problems.” [1]
“The core principles and ideas of this Third Way movement are set forth in The New Progressive Declaration: A Political Philosophy for the Information Age.” [2]
Here are their principles (with my explications in bold):
“The Third Way philosophy seeks to adapt enduring progressive values to the new challenges of he information age. It rests on three cornerstones: [6]
* the idea that government should promote equal opportunity for all while granting special privilege for none; [no more affirmative action]
* an ethic of mutual responsibility that equally rejects the politics of entitlement and the politics of social abandonment; and, [no more welfare]
* a new approach to governing that empowers citizens to act for themselves.[Bush’s ownership society and the privitization of Social Security]“The Third Way approach to economic opportunity and security stresses technological innovation, competitive enterprise, and education rather than top- down redistribution [high margin tax rates, capital gains taxes, dividends taxes, corporate taxes] or laissez faire. On questions of values, it embraces ‘tolerant traditionalism,’ honoring traditional moral and family values while resisting attempts to impose them on others. [no gays in the military, no gay marriage] It favors an enabling rather than a bureaucratic government [ending big government as we know it], expanding choices for citizens [privitizing entitlements and services], using market means to achieve public ends [subcontracting to Blackwater and Kellogg and Root] and encouraging civic and community institutions to play a larger role in public life [charity, not hand-outs]. The Third Way works to build inclusive, multiethnic societies based on common allegiance to democratic values.” [7]
This is the basic philosophy of Clintonism when the Clintons are not trying to court Democrats that largely believe in none of these things. These are the solutions favored by New Democrats, the Democratic Leadership Council, The New Republic, and the vast majority of the veterans of Bill Clinton’s administration. If you do not support these policies then, for the love of all that is Holy, do not caucus for Hillary Clinton.
And I haven’t even touched on foreign policy. Bill Clinton implemented the eastward expansion of NATO and the aggressive military basing strategy in the Middle East and Central Asia that has caused all this blowback from terrorism. There is no indication that Hillary Clinton will do anything but fight tenaciously to maintain this costly and risky strategy. Yes, she will not run the government like a neo-conservative. But she will not make the changes that need to be made for the simple reason that it would repudiate one of the cornerstones of her husband’s foreign policy.
Bushism needs to be tossed on the ash heap of history, but Clintonism needs to be rejected as well. Clintonism helped pave the way for Bushism in many ways, and in foreign policy, they both share huge amounts of blame for our current predicament. Both the Bushes and the Clintons desperately need to be rejected and repudiated. It’s absolutely vital that neither of them occupy the White House ever again.
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So he moulded Hillary as DLC poster girl … enough said.
(NYT) July 29, 2003 – Mark J. Penn, a Democratic pollster who worked for Mr. Clinton and is now advising Senator Lieberman, offered polling data to show that Mr. Bush was vulnerable but that the Democratic Party was also in a politically perilous position. ”We’re at a postwar historic low of Democratic Party membership.”
Mr. Penn said that the Democratic Party now trailed the Republicans among people who earn more than $20,000, and that just 22 percent of white men called themselves Democrats. ”Among middle-class voters, the Democratic Party is a shadow of its former self,” Mr. Penn said.
The perception, he said, is that Democrats ”stand for big government, want to raise taxes too high, are too liberal and are beholden to special interest groups.”
Most important, Mr. Penn said, the party has to prove itself credible on the issue of national security — something that many Democrats attending the conference here said would be impossible to do if the party were perceived as opposed to the war on Iraq.
On Middle East policy, fondness of Israel and Saudi Arabia, the assessment of Iran and Pakistan, there is no light in expected policy between Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman and John McCain.
When asked about Iran, Lieberman said: “Our enemies are between the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan and Tehran. We cannot accept a nuclear Iran.” He said “we don’t look for war” and so he supports applying “economic and political pressure to make them hurt.”
Lieberman – who has not asked for an endorsement by any of the Democratic presidential candidates — praised McCain as his friend and the best candidate.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."BooMan nailed it. Again.
Hillary is No Democrat. She’s never dropped her GOP roots. And her politics? Examine closely her record.
Her campaign is right from the Karl Rove playlist, with a little fear added.
GOP has nothing to offer but fear. AQaedy is coming.
Bloomberg is saying to himself, ‘Ya know with this field and the critically ill economy, my chances to capture (buy) the White House is great…and I won’t have to spend a $billion, could pick that up at $0.35 on the dollar given that real estate prices are tanking’
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Omar Osama bin Laden bears a striking resemblance to his notorious father-except for the dreadlocks that dangle halfway down his back. Then there’s the black leather biker jacket.
The 26-year-old does not renounce his father, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but he says there is a better way to defend Islam than militancy: Omar wants to be an “ambassador for peace” between Muslims and the West.
Omar, one of Bin Laden’s 19 children, raised a tabloid storm last year when he married a 52-year-old British woman, Jane Felix-Browne, who took the name Zaina Alsabah.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Never read a better summary of Clintonism anywhere. And hard to understand why the Republicans were antiClinton in the 1990s; perhaps they were not Republican enough. But Republican they were and still are.
YOUR FINAST POST! EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I applaud you! Brilliant.
Thankyou!
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At La Pietra, Florence on November 20, 1999, a dinner was held to open a summit meeting of the Third Way Movement — Progressive Governance in the Twenty-first Century….” Around the tables sat European Commission president Romano Prodi, European foreign minister Javier Solana, Director-General of the International Labor Organization Juan Somavia, Prime Minister Tony Blair, Prime Minister Allesso D’Alema, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, and President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, President of Brazil … Under the auspices of New York University and the European University Institute in Florence, prominent intellectuals from the United States and Europe joined the party …”
LONDON (The Guardian) Sept. 3, 2001 – “Modernisation” began in the Netherlands before the Blairites took power; but left modernisers in the Netherlands now give the appearance of intellectual exhaustion, which surely has lessons for the Blairites.
During recent months the belief in the social democratic recipe for marrying social justice and free enterprise has evaporated. Even last week’s démarche by French socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin on the so-called Tobin tax had an oddly dispirited, even cynical air to it. The growth cycle has turned down, regardless of the colour of the governments in power in Berlin, Paris, the Hague or London. Suddenly, an intense focus on work as the way out of poverty – a hallmark of social policies in the Netherlands before Labour came to power in the UK – looks risky: what if there are no jobs for poor people to be dragooned or cajoled into?
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."how do we say, New World Order gangsters
Almost makes you think the game is rigged doesn’t it?
All the more reason to vote for Edwards. He’s the most anti-corporate of the top 3.
If I get forced to vote for one of the other two, today I’m leaning against Obama because his policy statement says that he is for temporary work visas. H1-B is nothing but a scam to undercut American wages while we teach underpaid visitors how to do our job, and ship our knowledge base out of the country.
Would that all the candidates, and certainly Edwards, had a bit more Feingold in them
http://jonathan__singer.mydd.com/story/2008/1/18/02424/5737
Feingold has paid a price for following through on his superb instincts; and certainly he’s allowed to criticize candidates who not only haven’t shared his instincts and his voting record but are now running on Feingold’s record.
Interesting.
I have no idea if Third Way really wants the things you put in brackets or not or if it’s yet another example of marketing people taking over and trying to make a product all things to all people.
But I do know that I never trust organizations if their statement of core principles is subject to argument about what they mean.
Thanks Booman. I see nothing progressive about the Third Way philosophy. You seem to have broken the code. This organization will not survive in the coming hard times. People are going to need a lot of help and not a helping of BS. Its more blame the victims of our harsh policies and not the policies. Lets just cut out the middle man here and fix the trickle down policies of the past 27 years.
Great post but you need to make the connection between the two halves of your post a little bit more explicit. It’s a great idea. Both the Republicans and too many Clinton supporters are denying reality.
I really don’t understand how many fairly liberal Democrats fell for Hillary’s charm offensive. Yes, she would be the first woman president and she would be a fairly good manager–but she will be absolutely awful for the liberal agenda and for progressive politics. How many of her supporters don’t see this just astounds me.