The Maverick Tribe

Wincing their way through Pennsylvania, the press corps is forced to dutifully record Barack Obama's carefully orchestrated attempts to relate to Joe Sixpack.  See Barack pretend to like Rolling Rock.  See Barack in bowling shoes.  See Barack throw a gutterball.  Can we go home now?

This is so dumb.  I hate this aspect of presidential politics.  Guess what, Lunchpail Larry?  Barack Obama is not just like you.  He's a black guy who lives in Chicago and knows how to shoot hoops, but can't bowl for shit.  And you know what?  You can still vote for him anyway.

If Barack comes to San Francisco, should I expect him to suck another guy off for the cameras?  Just asking...

No, that wasn't Skeletor being interviewed by Larry King on CNN the other night.  (I made the same mistake...was He-Man's nemesis making the talk show rounds promoting a new iteration of the 1980's Masters of the Universecomic book/action figure/animated series franchise?)  Closer inspection indicates the gaunt, hairless, and cadaverous talking head on Larry King to be that of James Carville, former political strategist to Bill Clinton.

Carville (or Skeletor, if you insist) was elaborating on a previous interview with Wolf Blizter he had given elaborating on a previous interview with The New York Times he had given in which he compared Bill Richardson's endorsement of Mrs. Clinton's opponent to Judas' Good Friday betrayal of Jesus for thirty shekels.

"He made misrepresentations," spat the Evil Lord of Destruction.  "He told people that he was going to endorse Senator Clinton, that he couldn't endorse someone else, and then at the same time apparently he was -- he was doing something else, and people are justifiably and understandably furious about this."  Who was furious?  "Major donors in the Democratic party" and "very, very senior people".  Carville named names: Elizabeth Bagley, Haim Saban, and Alan Patricof, three rich people you've never heard of.

"I thought that this was an exceptional case that merited special consideration," he continued later, referring to his Judas retaliation.  Still later he flogged the point a bit more:  "I thought that this was an act that deserved to be singled out and I'm glad that I singled it out.  I was quoted accurately.  And what I said I mean," adding that he thought Richardson owed the Clintons an apology.

Earlier on the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, the osteological ogre emphasized - no fewer than three times during the course of the segment - that the New York Times had in fact quoted him accurately.  "I gave the quote, I knew what I was doing, I knew what its effect would be when I gave it, and it's effect has been predictable," he explained.

"I said it, I said it in context, and I'm glad I said it," he also told Anderson Cooper.

In case anyone on the outskirts of Eternia still doubted his sincerity or the ability of the Times and CNN to transmit his statements accurately, the Grim Reaper penned an op-ed appearing in The Washington Post this morning.  "Most of the stuff I've ever said is pretty insignificant and by in large has been said off the cuff and without much thought to the potential consequences. That was not the case in this instance," he wrote, underscoring his emphasis of his amplification of his original insult.

Meanwhile, another cabal of major donors in the Democratic party (no doubt very, very senior people and, more importantly, Clinton allies - let's call them Kobra Khan, Trap-Jaw, and Associates) fired off a rather ill-tempered letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.  Pelosi evidently had misbehaved by publicly concurring with a gathering Democratic Party consensus holding that the votes of the superdelegates ought not overturn the decision of the elected delegates.  Anyone following the delegate math understands that to follow such a doctrine is almost certainly to hand the nomination to Senator Obama.  Kobra Khan and Trap-Jaw, sitting on their suitcases full of money ready to fund Democratic congressional campaigns, kindly suggested Ms. Pelosi might reconsider her view.

Sadly, Obama's suits responded to these broadsides with their Pavlovian statements of outrage and denunciation.  But does the average voter have their skivvies in a wad over all this?  Well, I happen to have taken a poll of likely Democratic voters gauging their reactions to Carville's recent CNN appearances, and the results are as follows:  11 percent believed Carville's statement about Richardson was justified, 13 percent believed it was unjustified, 20 percent had no opinion, and the remaining 66 percent wondered aloud whether hawking their TV might enable them to make next month's mortgage payment.  Meanwhile, observers inside the Beltway have wondered, if Richardson is Judas, then what represents the 30 silver pieces in this analogy?  A promise of a veep slot?  And, more disturbingly, which of the Clintons represents Jesus, Bill or Hillary?

If you think the Clinton apparatus is beginning to show the desperation, solipsism, and bitter score-settling of a campaign sliding toward defeat, then you aren't fully grasping the gravity of the situation.  Mrs. Clinton's favorability rating is at a seven year low, and the more rancid the primary campaign gets, the less people like her.  Polls (ok, real polls this time) have shown that significantly more voters blame Mrs. Clinton for unfairly attacking Obama than vice versa.  Meanwhile, Carville himself has difficulty hiding his dismay at what he sees as the election's inadequate level of acrimony and is doing what he can to provoke more of it.  But whether the Clinton crowd realizes it or not, what is at stake here is not merely Hillary Clinton's shot at the presidency, but the very relevance of the entire Clinton infrastructure for years to come.

Just as Obama's one-million-and-counting small time internet donors are marginalizing the monied bigwigs that normally bankroll campaigns, Obama's bracing earnestness - when he can muster it - is beginning to marginalize old-style bomb-throwers like Carville, an encroaching reality about which he seems unaware.  (Then again, Carville shows a curious lack of self-awareness.  "I'm not of the Washington world," the veteran political operative told an incredulous Anderson Cooper.)

For Gov. Richardson's part, he must have known his endorsement of Obama would cause a stir.  As Carville rightly points out, Richardson "gained national stature -- and his career took off -- when President Bill Clinton appointed him U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and later made him energy secretary."  But Richardson claims to have settled on Obama because he believes the Senator from Illinois to be the best bet to lead the country.  Of course, this is a preposterous explanation to Carville, as political choices not animated by personal ambition are unintelligible to Washington hacks such as him.  "I believe that loyalty is a cardinal virtue," Carville wrote in the Post.  I'm sure Skeletor, not to mention any cartoon villian, mob boss, or petty dictator worth his weight in mustard gas, would agree.

The rest of us, whether we be Clinton, Obama, or McCain supporters, can come together and agree that James Carville is the last person we want lecturing us on virtues.  Instead, he might consider turning his thoughts from the biblical to the metaphysical and ponder the following question:  if a cannon is shot from a sinking ship, and no one is interested in hearing it, does it make a sound?

Smart, charismatic, and sexy!  My new favorite blog, by Marc Lamont Hill.

In a previous post I accused Senator Clinton of telling tall tales about her trip to Bosnia.  Much to the contrary, newly released footage (below) reveals Mrs. Clinton to be, if anything, heroically modest about the perilous conditions on the ground.  Maverick Tribe regrets the error.

Barack Obama introduced the term "silly season" in one of the debates, and the pundits seem to have taken a liking to the word.  I guess it refers to when a supposedly high-minded, issue-focused campaign off-roads into the sludge of ad hominem attacks, tits-for-tat, and innuendo.  And lately when I look through that window to the political world (my TV), it's a blizzard of silly on every channel.  Let's hope it stays that way for awhile.

The "issues" are overrated, and I, for one, am sick of them.  If I have to sit through one more debate on the minutiae of Clinton's and Obama's health care proposals, I'll end up with some mental health care bills of my own (which I'll send to each of them).

In the past week we've had Bill Clinton imply that Obama is unpatriotic, an Obama ally compare Bill to Joe McCarthy in return, ragin-cajun James Carville refer to Bill Richardson as a "Judas" for what he saw was as a sell-out to Obama, the punditocracy slurping up McCain's mix-up of al Qaeda and Shi'ite extremists, and Hillary Clinton reviving the Rev. Wright story soon after having to face up to her bald-faced lie about a trip to Bosnia in the 90's.  Some especially talented flacks even managed to pepper the discourse with Tony Rezko.

You might think all this stuff amounts to an unproductive distraction in a time of raging war and a cratering economy.  But is it really?  A debate over Iraq invariably swerves to character issues of judgment and preparedness anyway, since their policy positions are so similar.  And does anyone think that a debate over economic policy will be all that illuminating?  The differences between their approaches are likely to be minor as well, but magnified in a way that is both disingenuous and confusing to everyone.

By contrast, I think a lot of the pot-shots, attacks, and gotchas of the past week have been instructive.  We know that the Clintons will continue to play up fears of Obama's readyness to take on the Republicans and be commander-in-chief.  Her only hope is to have him bloodied up so bad that the superdelegates, driven by their survival instincts, will have to hand her the nomination out of fear of losing the general.  We know that Bill Richardson, despite the offical Clinton line, ain't never gonna get a job in Clinton town again.  And although a transparent political move to distract from her whopper about Bosnia, I actually think her taking up the Wright issue is within bounds.  The issue unveils for us a communitarian feature of Obama's character that is unwilling to make enemies.

We have schadenfreude that McCain's misstatement is catching a lot of flak, "flak" being the very word into which Obama's Senate office inserted an extraneous 'c'  in a written statement last May.  McCain pounced on the typo, eager to portray Obama as a preening ignoramus on military matters.  Silly season, indeed.

As far as Clinton's "misstatement" over the alleged sniper fire she evaded during her trip to Bosnia (a delegation that included her daughter and the comedian Sinbad), I hope we are all finally clear on what kind of politicians she and her husband are.  A lot of Democrats appear to have gotten through the 90's too busy cashing out their Yahoo! stock to notice what shameless phonies they both are.  Do you get it yet, Democrats?!

April Fools Day is coming up.  Get ready for more silly!

Another anti-American rant from the Reverend:

"God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place."

Oh, by the way, that would be not Reverend Jeremiah Wright, but the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Maverick Tribe, yesterday: 

Under what I am sure is enormous pressure to go conventional, [Obama] has occasionally indulged in some of the cheap shots and predictable tactics of his rivals during the course of this long campaign.  Especially in recent weeks, I could feel my own high expectations and confidence in him flagging.  Maybe he really is just a conventional politician? 

Today's speech showed that he isn't, and it reasserted the idealism and authenticity of his campaign. 

Barack Obama, today:

I think we were starting to get a little comfortable and conventional right before Texas and Ohio. And, you know, in some ways, this controversy has actually shaken me up a little bit and gotten me back into remembering that, you know, the odds of me getting elected have always been lower than some of the other conventional candidates.

And, if I bring something to this conversation, it's going to be because I do what I did yesterday, which is hopefully open up a new conversation about a new direction in the country.

A couple things I wanted to clarify about my own feelings about Wright's statements.  Look, the point is not that these outbursts were offensive to white people, or the U.S. government, or Bill O'Reilly.  We'll be fine.  The government will be fine.  Bill O'Reilly is going to pull through.  But when a spiritual authority tells a room full of African Americans that AIDS was invented by the U.S. government to decimate their race, he is hurting the very people he's preaching to.  A huge problem in the African American community, AIDS thrives in an environment of ignorance and rumor.  When a spiritual authority teaches that hatred and rage on Sunday morning are proper responses to racial injustice, he is contributing to the destruction and despair of those families and those communities.  That is not "empowerment".  That is not what I thought Christianity was about.

I will probably always be disappointed in the tardiness of Obama's gesture of integrity on this matter.  Hate is hate, a lie is a lie, and slander is slander, no matter the source.  But in response to these transgressions, let's not suggest equivalence between white demagogues like Jerry Falwell and black demagogues like Wright.  One arises from a bitter attachment to its own historical power and the other arises from a bitter resentment of its own historical powerlessness.  I think the best defense of the Obama/Wright situation was offered by, of all people, Mike Huckabee.  Huckabee, a preacher himself, said that given the painful and humiliating history of African Americans, still palpable, we need to just "cut them some slack".  That's called compassion.  That is what i thought Christianity was about.

Obama's speech today was honest and brave.  While Mitt Romney's "I'm a Mormon, but I play a Christian on TV" speech was politically shrewd and packed with horseshit ("Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom", "I saw my father march with Martin Luther King", and so on), Obama's speech on race relations was the reverse.  It was raw and personal and politically hazardous.

Obama is an idealist.  No, he's not an idealist about policy.  He's even more naive than that.  He is an idealist about politics.  He founded his campaign on the belief that he could rescue our politics from the petty, cynical course set in motion by the Roves and Clintons and Atwaters of the world.  And, like any idealist, he has not always lived up to his own ideals.  Under what I am sure is enormous pressure to go conventional, he has occasionally indulged in some of the cheap shots and predictable tactics of his rivals during the course of this long campaign.  Especially in recent weeks, I could feel my own high expectations and confidence in him flagging.  Maybe he really is just a conventional politician?

Today's speech showed that he isn't, and it reasserted the idealism and authenticity of his campaign.  Obama was forced into answering up to questions about his ties to Reverend Wright, a terrain that he would rather not have to defend.  But he was faced with a choice.  He could give a perfectly acceptable speech, a product of professional advisers, with an address to the concerns of those working class whites, so prized in Pennsylvania at the moment, as its centerpiece.  Or he could choose the riskier option, and give a speech that was uniquely his own, facing up to all the uncomfortable shortcomings and resentments and paranoia on both sides of the racial divide.  And he chose the latter, because that's who he is, and being who he is got him this far.

The ostensible objective of this speech was twofold:  to put the Rev. Wright controversy to rest and to allay the suspicions of those key demographics into which Obama wants to make headway.  I'm not sure he entirely succeeded on either front.  Some, myself included, will continue object to his level of tolerance and closeness to a pastor capable of such vile and irresponsible remarks.  Did Obama ever confront Wright over his demagoguery or did he just dismiss it as the ramblings of an ornery old uncle?  It's a question that matters, and Obama didn't give an answer.  I think this speaks to one of his flaws.

But Obama did achieve something more fundamental.  He reestablished the basis of his campaign as a next generation political movement, a campaign that was beginning to look tired.  And he did it on the basis for which Obama has the most authority:  race.  And so the conversation has begun.