Empire Notes

February 11, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Iraq, the Campaign, and the Antiwar Movement

Back in early 2004, I predicted – correctly – that Iraq would be the defining issue of the presidential campaign. It was a message not really heeded by anyone – Howard Dean had risen to prominence over it, but then lost consistency as he became a front-runner, and even Nader and Kucinich never really made use of it as they could have. Kerry, of course, refused to see the light – or even to understand that running against George Bush as a better militarist was a bad idea.

This time around, unfortunately, I think it’s already clear, in this extended campaign season that has given us all a taste of what Purgatory will be like, that this is not the case.

It is true, of course, that revulsion against some varying combination of Bush’s militarism, incompetence, arrogance, and stupidity frames the election and is the reason the Democrats are favored over all. And it’s true that a lot of people are fed up with the bullying stupidity of the right wing and much of the Republican Party. It’s even true that nobody except for a few crazies (who are marginalized to powerless enclaves like the New York Times opinion page, foreign policy advisor to presidential candidates, etc.) actually wants to get into another war.

But there is virtually no traction to be had from an increasingly confused and tuned-out public over Iraq policy.

One case in point was the miserable failure of Dennis Kucinich’s candidacy to attract attention from anyone at all. Kucinich raised less than $4 million, as compared with $11 million last time around, and presumably quit running not just because of the threat to his seat but because he wasn’t accomplishing anything.

Similarly, Bill Richardson, a conservative Democrat and previously an Iraq war hawk, like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, attempted to juice up his lackluster campaign by promoting himself as the only “mainstream” candidate who would pull American troops out on day one of his presidency – or start pulling them out or pull them out within a year or whatever parsing allowed him to stay ahead of his rival candidates without actually saying anything. Looking at the New Hampshire exit polls, I think about 1% of the voters in the Democratic primary shifted their allegiance to Richardson because of this.

The Obama-Clinton matchup is all about “change” vs. “experience” and, to the extent that any support hinges on “policy positions,” it depends on whether you support garnishing workers’ wages to force them to pay corporations for health insurance.

Although some on the left habitually excoriate the media for covering only the “horserace” aspect of a campaign rather than paying attention to actual issues and positions, it’s somewhat understandable. There is utterly no point in trying to parse Obama’s and Clinton’s stated positions on Iraq; not only are they about as clear as a Rorschach test, all they reveal at the end of the day is what position each candidate thinks will help them win.

Interestingly, even though Obama and Clinton are wildly different on foreign policy – she is a big fan of her husband’s interventionism and went around making speeches about the “grave Iraqi threat” before voting for war without even bothering to read the National Intelligence Estimate while he clearly wants to avoid wars in favor of domestic transformation and actually spoke at an antiwar rally – they sound virtually identical on Iraq, a sign that their advisers, at least, agree with my analysis. And they agreed even a few months ago, when polls were still showing Iraq as the number one issue on voters’ minds.

There is at least a smidgen of hope that there will be some change in the general election, where John McCain has staked himself on a messianic vision of staying in the Middle East at least until the Rapture. There are two potential strategies for a moribund antiwar movement right now, understanding that, as in 2004, there is little chance to do very much non-electorally during a campaign season.

The first is to get involved in the Obama campaign (I judge him as much better placed to attack McCain effectively on the war than Clinton), in part to engage with Obama’s enthusiastic converts and turn some of their attention to other things, and the second is to support a Nader campaign, if it emerges, that focuses relentlessly on the war and avoids the personalistic narcissism that helped split the left in 2004.

I’m not excited about either strategy, frankly, but the alternative seems to be another year waiting for Godot.

Posted at 8:20 pm.

February 4, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Lessons from Edwards' Failure

Despite John Edwards’ talk of going all the way to the convention to take the country back from our corporate overlords, in the end it turned out Eli Manning had more fight in him than Edwards.

Though I personally find this unsurprising, given my perception that Edwards was a poseur and an empty suit, he certainly excited many progressives; it’s worth the effort to try to see what lessons we can learn from his failure.

For a long time, it’s been a majority view on the left that if only someone who had the right opportunities – i.e., had lots of money and mainstream respectability and didn’t believe in UFOs -- would stand up in an election season and promote a strong, anti-corporate economic populist message, the entire game would be changed. Part of the underlying belief was that the masses who don’t vote – usually 45+% of the voting-age population – allow servants of the plutocracy like George Bush to get elected because they are closet socialists and don’t want to sully themselves by voting for a mildly redistributionist pro-capitalist politician. And even for those who end up voting, the reasoning would go, very often it’s like playing eeny-meeny-miny-moe because they don’t get anyone who really represents their interests.

Well, John Edwards raised $44 million in 2007, he’s a former vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, and he has excellent hair. Nobody mocked him as a leprechaun or a vegan. And his words – all twelve of them, repeated over and over – were anti-corporate enough that Ralph Nader himself, famous for his claims that there’s no difference between the two main parties, called Edwards a Democratic “glimmer of hope” and said that this was, “the only time I've heard a Democrat talk that way in a long time.”

Well, it’s true that, as his wife pointed out, he had the handicap of being from that ultimate historically disadvantaged group, white males. As politically asinine and overall whiny as her comment was, it wasn’t exactly wrong – Edwards couldn’t really make himself interesting to most, especially when compared with Obama. And it’s true that the mainstream media gave him less attention than the other two – and later panned him for his “divisive” rhetoric.

Even so, he had absolutely the best chance in a long time of catching on with a populist message and it just didn’t fly. In fact, the message did considerably worse than it appears from his vote totals. If you look at exit polls from the primaries, you’ll find that in Iowa and South Carolina those who identified themselves as conservative voted for Edwards at twice the rate as those who identified as liberal, while in general Obama and Clinton spread pretty evenly across the categories. In South Carolina, it was clearest, when white men (the most conservative demographic group overall) voted largely for Edwards.

It’s possible that most of them really weren’t paying any attention to what he said. It’s possible that some of them picked up on his obvious homophobia (which differentiates him from Clinton and Obama). Or, perhaps, just the comforting fact that he was a white man with a Southern accent blinded the conservative voters to all else.

This is not a nicely controlled experiment. Edwards raised money from his hedge-fund cronies to run a populist campaign, he repudiated every single legislative stance he had ever taken, and he generally had difficulty projecting credibility with his new tack. On the other hand, Nader, who had all the credibility in the world in 2000, tried to run outside the two-party system, forgoing the massive institutional support that the system gives by design to the two parties.

Still, put it all together and the results suggest very clearly to me that we should give up on the fetishization of “If we could just get the information/message out” and realize that, even on what ought to be the slam-dunk issue of representing 80% of the people’s economic interests against those of the other 20%, the ground must be prepared.

The right wing has done this so well that even an insane message like “Cutting tax rates always increases tax revenues” seems automatically true to a significant chunk of the population, of media opinion-makers, and of politicians – and even with the rest, it doesn’t qualify you as a wingnut. We have yet to do this with even a much more intuitive message like “When corporations control your health care and are paid with fixed premiums, their profits will be higher the less care they actually allow.”

Until we can do that, we can forget about changing the game of electoral politics in this country.

Posted at 9:33 am.