funny to serious

Julie and I went to see the Courthouse Steps with her parents in Florissant this weekend. They're kind of like the Capitol Steps, but a group with a lot of St. Louis-specific stuff. They're lawyers who happen to like to sing about various parody-worthy headlines.

We did dinner beforehand at Hendel's Market. Mmm, pork chops.

(P) So now that it's 2008 and a few of the delegates have actually been chosen by voters (as opposed to the 'superdelegates'), I thought this would be a good time to explore where I'm at. Or maybe I'm just procrastinating on starting the work week.

Basically, I started leaning toward former Senator John Edwards about a year ago, and by now, the leaning's far enough gravity's pretty much taken over. There are a couple of things I really like about what he is doing. First, while he's definitely running to be the Democratic party nominee, he seems to be running purposefully outside the parts of the party tied more to the DLC and corporate interests and DC consultants and so forth. I think this is particularly noteworthy given that the Kerry/Edwards campaign in 2004 very much earned the DLC seal of approval. Edwards used to be a New Democrat; I'm not sure if that makes him an "old" Democrat now. Perhaps, it just makes him a Democrat. He also used to be a Senator. He used to work for Fortress Investment Group, one of those Wall Street hedge funds incorporated in Delaware that incorporated its particular funds in the Cayman Islands for 'tax purposes', ie, tax evasion for the wealthy. He used to support the Iraq war; or, probably more accurately, thought it wasn't important enough to say anything that would upset the party leadership. That stands in stark contrast to positions staked out by a few notable Democrats, such as Al Gore and Barack Obama from outside Washington, or Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, and the 150-odd politicians inside Washington (from all parties) who voted against the war in 2002. The fact that Senator Edwards chose a strategy of breaking with all this history to try for the nomination in 2008 I appreciate and am very excited about. He's not been in government for years, which in and of itself is a plus for me right now. He's off talking about poverty and economic class and healthcare. Even if everything he would do is wrong, he's talking like a populist. In so doing, he's forcing the whole conversation of the Democratic candidates to change, to deal with what he's talking about.

Which leads to me to the second thing I like. Edwards' stump speeches tend to be a little repetitive; the mill and cleft pallette (palette, pallatt?) stories are older than the lumpy milk in my fridge. But the specific policy positions he has taken are incredibly detailed, especially considering how early he started talking in detail about things like healthcare and the environment. I like the fact that Edwards is substantive enough in the campaign to give you enough that you can disagree with him. The impression Senator Obama leaves sometimes is that of a vagueness where you can see what you want to see; there's nothing to disagree with. Partly that's unfair because he's outlined things in a lot more detail more recently in the campaign process, and earlier in his books. But in a lot of ways, that sounds like how Al Gore's campaign got handled. Dumb everything down, don't talk about the specifics, even (especially?) if you've written books about them. I really think right now what we need is not a progressive to sound like a centrist long enough to get into office and then take the gloves off, as Dick Cheney might say, but rather somebody who's going to talk the talk right now, to lead the national dialogue at a moment when Democrats are getting lots of attention in the corporate media (all efforts to ban Kucinich from the debates aside).

But before I talk too much about Senator Obama, let me address the rest of the field first. I really like Representative Kucinich. He's one of the few national Democrats that seem ready and willing to act independently of the Democratic leadership when he feels it's necessary. He seems to get it on a lot of the issues that are important to me. In some ways he's more liberal/leftist than I, but his independent streak I value highly. He just seems to lack an ability to get people energized on a national level. Perhaps that says more about the Democratic party's nomination process than it does about Kucinich, but nonetheless, I think it's there and it's real. He has the largely thankless task of trying to shape the debate, to raise different issues and paint issues that are raised in different ways, all the while being lambasted by a variety of people who want him to just sit down and shut up. Groupthink is just as dangerous in a political party as any other group.

Governor Richardson and Senator Biden never did much for me. Senator Gravel had his moments, but his positions are just too out of the mainstream on a few issues for me. Senator Dodd is another person that doesn't seem to have much national appeal, but the more I learned about him, the more I liked him. He's practically single-handedly responsible for delaying the incredibly absurd idea of granting immunity to mass criminals. Senator Clinton has too many issues I disagree with her on. She just seems too cozy these days with the kinds of companies that wrote the Medicare bill and the Peru trade pact and control the media. It's also worth noting that as a white male whose relatives have been in the country for centuries, I obviously don't have a personal connection to the possibility that a woman or a hispanic or a black man or the son of an immigrant might win the White House. I understand that that is an important symbol, and that is a very interesting factor in the Democratic race this year.

None of this is to say that I'm deeply opposed to any of the Democratic candidates. In fact, this year is exciting in large part because there's a good chance they should win in November and, whoever the nominee is, it'll be a pretty good one. That gets me back to the former North Carolina Senator. I think we have a chance (again) to not just have a decent president, another Bill Clinton of the 1990s, but to have a president who's going to rewrite the rules in Washington. The chance that I care about isn't to put a Democrat in the White House. I'm pretty disgusted with the Democratic Party, especially senior figures in Washington. 2008 will be even harder than 2004 and 2000 for the Democratic Party to not gain the White House. Short of an actual fascist takeover, a burning of the Capitol, so to speak, Bush will be out of office in 2009 no matter what the Democrats do. What is exciting is the ability to put a really intriguing candidate in the White House, a candidate who spent the campaign telling everybody that when it comes to making policy, the needs of average citizens will count as much as the demands of a few of the country's wealthiest citizens. Edwards is the one driving the populist rhetoric, even to the point of getting Clinton and Obama to adopt some of the same language.

Senator Obama might be the most energizing candidate. He might be something truly special, something different, something that's a notch above most other national Democrats. But I'm just not sold on it. In Obama-speak, I don't believe. And if he's not a new breed of politics, then the stuff I like about Edwards is more than enough to sway my vote. There are three fundamental questions I have. These are serious questions, I'm not just looking to bash the Illinois Senator (quite the contrary, I would be happy to vote for him in November). I would be happier about him, though, if I could get some answers on these.

The first thing that nags at me is his choice on endorsing certain candidates. In races that mattered, at times that mattered, he seems to have thrown in his lot with the DCCC and DSCC and established Washington thinking to the direct detriment of local grass roots efforts for change, perhaps even in conflict with Dean's efforts at the DNC. In fact, if there's one issue Senator Obama stands out the most on nationally, it's his opposition to the Iraq war in 2002 as an Illinois legislator. Yet by 2006, as a US Senator, Obama was doing things like endorsing Bush apologist Joe Lieberman a couple weeks after Ned Lamont announced his candidacy in Connecticut and endorsing the nationally picked Tammy Duckworth over the local, grass-roots supported Illinois candidate, Christine Cegelis, who practically did the unthinkable in running a competitive race with Henry Hyde two years earlier.

Now, it's not like Lieberman and Duckworth are terrible candidates. But the point is, if Iraq really is so important, at the least Senator Obama should have let local Democrats decide their own primaries, and gotten involved in the general election. And if he was going to get involved in the primaries, he should have endorsed the "anti-war" candidates, the candidates which made Iraq a signature issue, which was clear in these two particular races. In response to a Harper's magazine story, the Obama office answered part of this by saying, "Harper's takes exception to Obama's decision to donate money to Senator Lieberman, but fails to note that Obama endorsed Ned Lamont and gave him $5,000 the day after Lamont won the nomination". That's exactly my concern, though. His defense is that he endorsed Lamont after he won the primary. I'm interested in what he did when the outcome was unknown. Imagine what could have happened if Obama had come out for Lamont in March instead. Maybe Lamont, not Lieberman, would be the junior Senator from Connecticut. Imagine what that would do for the anti-war vote in DC. Unlike Lieberman, Duckworth wasn't pro-war. But the really disturbing thing is that she won the primary basically due to the influence of national Democrats and fundraisers. Cegelis and her local volunteers did the work in 2004, and then the national figures decided to pick a candidate they preferred over her (interestingly, it appears Duckworth was not the first choice of a more centrist opponent to Cegelis; Emanual wanted a wealthy, self-financing candidate but was turned down twice). Obama didn't tell people like Rahm Emanuel, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton to back off. Instead of asking fellow Illinois Senator Dick Durbin why he was looking to recruit a primary opponent to Cegelis in December of 2005, Obama joined the DCCC and DSCC in supporting Duckworth in the primary. Even if Duckworth had been a "better" candidate, I would like to know if Obama thinks it's good policy for the DSCC and DCCC to be regularly involved in selecting and financing primary challengers to run against established local candidates. If Duckworth was so great, why not have her run in another Illinois district with a weaker Democratic candidate? It's not like she's from the 6th District. And knowing now that, furthermore, Duckworth lost the general election, does Obama have doubts about this process, or does he think it was the best shot and Roskam would have won regardless?

The second question I have is in regard to what Senator Obama has done since speaking at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Kucinich has been active within government. Gore has been active outside of government. But Obama, he didn't even support Feingold's efforts to censure President Bush in 2006, let alone giving voice to more serious efforts of oversight, a special counsel, or impeachment proceedings. Even Senator Kerry joined Feingold and Boxer as a cosponsor a couple months later. How has Senator Obama changed the national discussion on issues like Iraq? What legislation has he pushed through on critical issues? What legislation has he filibustered? If his claim to fame is a new kind of politics, an ability to bring people together, to work together, where have his successes come in getting Republicans to join him? What has he done simply to stop the bleeding? A Senator is certainly not as powerful as a president. But look what Senator Dodd was able to do on telecom immunity, for example. What would be different about our government if Obama hadn't been in Washington for over three years now?

The third area of concern I have is about finances and strategy. The Obama campaign, I think, is clearly superior to the Clinton campaign. But, the majority of his money still comes from large donations. He has restrictions in place on lobbyists and corporate money and so forth. And yet, he's still a huge beneficiary of large Wall Street firms. He has several former corporate lobbyists involved in the campaign. None of this disqualifies him, of course. Rather, it suggests that he's not special; he's not a magical candidate that's somehow doing all of this from $25 contributions from college students and middle school teachers and firefighters. He hasn't kept corporate lobbyists and Clinton-era advisers out of his campaign. And I'm confused, and concerned, about what exactly Obama is saying about 527s, independent groups. Is Obama saying all groups are bad? Here's an article defending Obama's position. It makes some good points. But the question I have, then, is why hasn't Obama come out and flat out said I don't want any 527 support in the primaries, if I'm the nominee, I do not want any 527 groups running ads on my behalf in the general election, and I will challenge the Republican candidate to do so as well? The reason 527s run ads is because they work. If Obama is going to forego 527 support in the general election, he needs to be heavily educating voters about how to identify 527 groups and why they should punish the GOP candidate for using them. And if he's not, well, that will give the GOP candidate some nice lines. Why doesn't Obama just come out and say the whole process is absurd? We need clean, publicly financed campaigns. We need a media that serves the public interest. We need a primary process that makes sense. That would be powerful stuff.

Another strategy area I'm concerned about is how exactly the Obama Administration is going to govern. Democrats have been compromising with GOP leaders for years and years and years. From my perspective, the fruits of that have been increasingly bad policies. I don't see what it means to give insurance companies a seat at the table. Bill and Hillary gave them one, and they destroyed the whole shebang. I don't see how you build bipartisan support for troop withdrawal when you won't even guarantee troops will leave Iraq 10 years after the invasion, more than 20 years after the Gulf War. What does it mean to build consensus on telecom immunity or domestic spying or torture? Some people want to do it, most people think it's patently absurd. What I don't hear, as a pretty intelligent, well-informed voter, is Senator Obama answering the how. Will Senator McConnell all of a sudden be cooperative with President Obama? I'm not saying there aren't answers to these questions. In fact, I would love it if someone figured out an answer to people like Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde and Dennis Hastert and Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell that involved working with them rather than opposing pretty much everything they try to do. I just don't see the vision; I don't see how this is going to happen. I'm not looking for Obama to save me, to make me believe change is possible. I know change is possible. I'm asking him to tell me how you get change done his way. How do you even win an election, let alone govern, if you do not confront undemocratic practices, policies based on monied access instead of the will of the people? Al Gore tried this strategy after the 2000 election, and we ended up with George W Bush being annointed a war czar with the effective power to spy on and torture Americans.

Senator Edwards offers an answer, namely, that we have to stand up for America against corporate greed and special interests in Washington. I find that pretty powerful, in both narrative and substance. Senator Obama gets people excited, but I'm not clear on how he's going to deliver. As I finish this up, I can't help but think about Brian's support of McCain in 2000. He didn't support Bush at first; he had to come around for the general election. I wonder if I'm the same on Obama.

Or maybe Edwards will end up getting the nomination, and then we'll get to see what a candidate who ran as a fighting populist can do in DC. That still gets me the most excited.