Centrist Pundits

I always liked John McCain.  I regretted that he wasn’t the candidate in 2000.  I probably still would have voted for Gore, but I would have felt that no matter who won, the country would have been in good hands.  John McCain 2000 seemed to be someone who gave some thought to his issues, and didn’t hide behind a veneer of civility that makes politics seem so phony. George Bush seemed like a big phony, and someone who didn’t give a lot of thought to anything, let alone political issues.  8 years of his Presidency didn’t convince me otherwise, by the way.  But those 8 years did a lot to convince me that what I thought of John McCain was incorrect.

McCain wanted to be President.  He wanted it bad enough that he sold out his maverick nature to toe the Republican line far more frequently; frequently enough that his moments of breaking with orthodox thought appeared more bizarre than maverick.  By 2008, he had fallen far enough in my estimation that I essentially never even considered voting for him.  He no longer appealed to the independent streak in me, instead seeming fairly standard issue Republican.

And yet, maybe the maverick spirit lives within in the McCain family.  I’ve liked Meghan McCain since she appeared on the scene – she’s a conservative, sure, but she has sensible stands on gay marriage, sexual freedoms, and she can explain her concerns on most issues, and is willing to listen.  She also has a sense of humor, which counts for a lot.  And she tells other Republicans that blind faith to far right agenda will never appeal to the youth voters, which is true.

And today, I have new reason to respect Cindy McCain.  I always thought of her as the severe and somewhat mean-spirited woman on John’s arm.  Not only was she a political wife who only seemed to speak in order to support her husband or take a swipe the candidate couldn’t take, but the darker rumor mill indicated she allowed her husband to get away with things that are verbal abuse.  She seemed smart, but willingly used.   So of course she had to throw off all my expectations by posting for the NoH8 campaign, a movement that photographs celebrities with duct taped mouths and No H8 penned on their faces, for promoting marriage equality – or, in another term, for gay marriage rights.

Mrs. McCain, I’m not sure I like you, as I genuinely like your charming daughter… but bravo.  Bravo indeed.

JC Personalities, gay rights gay marriage, gay rights, McCain, NoH8

Tonight, Massachusetts voted a Republican in to the Senate. This would surprise anyone who was looking at the race a few months ago, but comes as no surprise to those who’ve been looking at it for the last couple of weeks.

What does this mean for centrism? Well, you have to look at how the race was run.

On the one hand, it definitely reminds us that almost no state is a red state or a blue state. Like all states, Mass has a mix of people with a vast, muddy middle area. They elected Romney to office, after all, though he was a bit more liberal at the time. So it might be tempting to note this as a victory for centrists – that even in a “solid blue” state, moderates can and do influence the politics. A lot of people have said that Republicans could be in trouble if they go to the right particularly hard, and this might bear that out – for both parties.

On the other, neither side ran a typical campaign. Brown, for one, hardly ever called himself a Republican, knowing that word is anathema in Massachusetts. Coakley, on the other hand, sold herself mostly as a person with a penchant for misspeaking. Democrats didn’t take this race seriously, and it might have had another outcome if they had. But Brown’s strategy worked – Brown sold himself as a moderate, and yet a look at his record, while hardly the most conservative record in the world, if fairly solidly in the Republican camp. Whether or not the votes of Massachusetts will hold him to his promise of “social consciousness” while he has his personal beliefs tend towards the conservative side of the aisle will remain to be seen.

Now, the question is, what does this mean for the legislative centerpiece of the Democratic Congress, health care reform? I’ve seen a surprising number of posts tonight indicating that its dead, most of them in the “ding dong the witch is dead” vein (mostly from my conservative friends). And it could mean that. But keep something in mind: neither side really wants it dead, and neither side has to accept its death.

Democrats may actually come out ahead (at least in terms of how liberal a health care bill is passed), if they are willing (which is always the question with them.) The only option left to them is reconciliation, a concept I admittedly don’t understand well. I thought it could only be used for the budget. But people talk about using it for health care reform. If Democrats move this direction – costly as it may be in terms of making them look like they are playing fair – then they only need 51 votes in the Senate. They can tell Lieberman and Nelson to take their amendments and shove them, and pass the House version generally in tact. This might be a monumentally unwise move by the Democrats, but cornered animals tend to do strange things.

On the other hand, while no Republican in the world would admit it, they need Health Care as an issue. If they kill it now, it – meaning the need to repeal the bill – doesn’t help with the mid-terms and doesn’t help in 2012. I wonder if we’ll see Snowe or another moderate Republican have a change of heart, though that may be the cynical part of my brain.

What does this mean for the future? Not a whole lot. It will keep Steele in his job a little longer, and it will re-energize the morale of a number of downtrodden Republicans, but like NY23, it won’t maintain its party switch. Come 2012, barring a truly popular Republican with incredible coat tails, one Kennedy or another will decide to run, and take it from Brown. In short, what this race does is one thing only – remind us that the political pendulum in America is ever-swinging.

JC Congress, Political Parties, State Politics Congress, Health care, Massachusetts, Scott Brown, senators

The powerful earthquake in Haiti was nothing but a tragedy.  Everyone knows this.  A fault runs directly beneath a large city that is built out of the most flimsy materials available, and it is an unmitigated disaster.  There is a very good list of links to how to help at the Washington Post here.

As I said, everyone seems to get the utterly catastrophic scale of the disaster.  And yet we act shocked that some people are taking advantage of the disaster to make their own twisted points.  People who’ve done so repeatedly in the past.  For example, Pat Robertson, who has in the past talked about drowning New Orleans for its sin, has said that Haiti is cursed to disasters because of a deal with the devil for its freedom.

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you get us free from the prince.” True story. And so the devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” They kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free.  But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other…

Leaving aside the asinine nature of making the claim, the weak theology backing it up, the fact that Haiti is overwhelmingly Christian – 96% are Roman Catholics or Protestants, and the fact that a man of God should be spreading comfort, not trouble, in such times, we all need to remember one thing: he wants this attention.  He needs it.  He craves it.

People are calling Robertson a crazy old man.  Sometimes, alternatively, its that he’s an uncaring old man.  Neither are remotely true – in my opinion, its that he’s a self-serving attention whore who’s spent his life trying to be the center of attention, and uses statements like his ones about Haiti, his ones about Katrina, to keep the focus on him.  He’s not crazy – crazy people can’t plan statement to draw maximum attention this way.  And he’s not uncaring.  He cares… about how he can use these events for himself.

Rush Limbaugh, same thing.  Rush is smart.  Really, he is.  He knows that most of what he says is extreme to a point of absurdity, and he says it anyway because its gets people paying attention to him and his show, his ratings, and increases his bottom line.

Take a lesson from your childhood, folks.  While it may never really work because of their built in audiences, try ignoring them and see if it goes away – at least in how it impacts your life.  Or take your advice from the internet, if you’d rather, and don’t feed the trolls.

JC Foreign Relations, Personalities, Religion

So the world is atwitter about Harry Reid recently revealing that he said something extremely stupid and, frankly, racist during the campaign. I’m actually more shocked that we’re finding out about it now (one would think it would have come out sooner) or, if it didn’t come out immediately, that it came out at all.

There must be something about white men of a certain age thinking that being complimentary while saying something racist isn’t racist. You’ll remember that Biden did something a little less obviously stupid but still fairly dumb, calling Obama “clean”.

Part of me agrees with the Republicans who are trying to equate Reid with Trent Lott. Whether or not the comments were equally offensive, I understand the impulse to say that if your stupid enough to make a racist comment like that, well, you deserve what happens. And what’s good for geese is good for ganders… or Democrats and Republicans.

On the other hand, part of me wants to take President Obama’s lead. He’s basically told Reid that it was all okay now. Given that the comments were about Obama, that seems that.

On the third hand, what do I know? I’m white. On the other hand, a lot of people who shouldn’t be piping up are. Normally, I wouldn’t take Michael Steele to task for commenting on it, even as much as I like pointing out how bad a Republican leader he is – but he’s in trouble of his own right now for using the phrase “honest injun” and the sheer weight of hypocrisy for criticizing one foolish, probably innocent racial comment while defending his own foolish, probably innocent racial comment may cause him to implode. I’m concerned for his safety!

On the fourth hand, I’m perfectly willing to let this be Reid’s waterloo. I have no love for Reid, not because he’s a racist – and I don’t know that he is or isn’t – but because he’s not an effective leader. If in a month he emulates Dodd and says he’s retiring, I’d be fine with that. Sure, it means Nevada will almost inevitably go back to the Republicans, but I think that’s likely anyway.

I guess what I’m saying is Reid just bugs me. Whether or not he’s doing something stupid right now.

JC Personalities, Society racism, Reid, senators, Steele

Centrism is, at times, a powerful force for good.  If for no other reason than most Americans are not radicalized to the left or the right, finding the center and acting on that moderate agenda is often an effective means to the end of moving forward, but not leaving people behind.  That said, centrism and moderation have their own flaws as well, and we’d be foolish not to acknowledge them.

The bill currently moving through the Senate is an example of one problem with centrism: it can leave no one happy.  Progressives are saying it doesn’t do enough, conservatives are afraid it does to much, and the middle… well, we don’t seem to think its going to accomplish anything at all, except make things more expensive.

And who can blame us?  Weve seen Washington bail out Wall Street without passing any reform, and they are just back to their old tricks.  We’ve seen a job stimulus that may or may not be working – but the website that went to show us it was working had an extra 440 Congressional Districts on it.  And we’ve seen credit card reform pass in such a way that the cards had time to raise their rates more than double before it was enacted, to insulate themselves from the real effects of that reform.  Is there any chance Health Care reform can do any better?

If we take away the option from Health Care companies to drop our coverage if we get a bad condition or to deny us coverage in the first place, that sounds good, but its subverted by the fact they can still raise our rates to price us out of coverage.

If we mandate coverage for all Americans but don’t make coverage affordable, what have we really accomplished?

I want health care reform, and I didn’t necessarily need to see a public option, although I generally support one.  But passing only part of a set of laws, in the name of political expediency, because Senate rules allow one or two people a large amount of power, isn’t a good way to do things.  It looks like centrism – “moderates and Republicans forced the Democratic bill to the center” – but it isn’t in the middle in any logical, thought out way.  It is more like if the bill had been given to a mad barber.

Perhaps this is one reason why no one thinks well of the middle – nothing gets there unscathed.

JC Congress, Health care

I am going to try to write here regularly again.  Probably weekly, probably posted on Sundays.  Just an FYI for our readers.

Now, as to the issue of the day: A year or so ago, Vice President Biden predicted Obama would be tested on foreign policy in his first year in office.  A few months ago, there was the Somali Pirate incident which Obama ordered our special forces to handle, and they did so, beautifully.  That wasn’t the test Biden referred to.

I think today’s news is it.  Iraq is reporting Iran has seized an Iraqi oil rig.  Either Iran has done so, or Iraq is making false accusations, or this is all a set up.  In any case, the whole area is a powder keg and this is a dangerous, dangerous thing that is happening.

I don’t know what the outcome will be, but we can only hope Obama handles it well.  To make matters more difficult, I don’t even have a prediction of what “well” would be at this time.

Good luck, Mr. President.

JC Foreign Relations iran, Iraq, obama

Well, the media is all abuzz about Sarah Palin’s book.

I haven’t read it yet, so I’ll reserve judgement on it. But with all due respect to our friends over at Palintology, I think that she’s got a really big job ahead of her in terms of political rehabilitation.

Certainly her resignation as governor is the biggest thing for her to get around. I mean, I understand why she did; having to deal with one bogus ethics complaint after another week after week after week would make me want to quit too.

But it’ll take a lot more than a book to reverse her political fortunes. Yes, she’s the darling of the far right, and she can have a very lucrative career as a public speaker and fundraiser if that’s what she wants. But if she wants to be elected to national office, she’s going to have to appeal beyond that base — and that means to us, the centrists.

I remember watching her debate coverage when she ran for governor of Alaska and being impressed — and being shocked when she ran for Vice President and appeared to have lost at least 40 IQ points. That observation alone makes me tend to believe that at least some of what she says about being mishandled by McCain’s staff is true. But she’s gotta convince us that she’s more than a caricature, and she’ll do that by speaking things other than right-wing catchphrases.

It’ll take some time, and I don’t think it’ll happen in time for 2012. It took about 20 years for Joe Biden’s national political repuation to get repaired. Maybe it won’t take so long for Palin, but if she wants to get elected to something, she needs to have a realistic timeframe. The problem is that the GOP might actually nominate her in 2012, when she won’t be winnable. That’s a serious mistake on their part.

During the campaign, though, the time I was the most impressed with her was towards the end, when she says she stopped listening to the advisors (at a point where it was very clear that they couldn’t win anyway) and she gave a series of speeches on energy policy. It’s an area she knows, it’s an area she’s comfortable talking about and she makes a hell of a lot of sense. If she’s really lucky, she’ll get taken on as Energy Secretary in the next Republican administration.

Greg 2012 Election, Media, National Politics, Personalities Palin

One of the issues on the NY state ballot this last election was a question of whether or not to allow prisoners to do volunteer work while in prison.  I presume this would be work of the kind that could be done reasonably in a prison - envelope stuffing and the like.  I have to admit, that question gave me pause.

One of the places I lose my “liberal” cred is law and order, crime and punishment.  I’m for the death penalty, I’m for harsh sentences, I’m for prisons being a crappy place to have to live.  I’m not all “conservative” on my law and order stances - I’m for rehabilitation over punishment of drug users, for example - but by and large, I’m pretty harsh on those who break the law.

But you’d think the spirit of volunteerism would be something we’d want to foster in even the harshest, roughest souls, even in such soil as criminals.  You’d think that, as a former volunteer coordinator for  a non-profit, that I’d be sympathetic to allowing giving such groups access to any volunteers that they may have available.

But none of that really crossed my mind as I considered the question.  I’ll tell you what did, and I’m still not sure of the answer.  My question, as I considered the question, is what is the point of a prison?  I figure there are two options: it is a place of rehabilitation, or it is a place of punishment.

If it is a place of rehabilitation, then learning to give to your fellow man, learning that volunteering is a good thing, would be part of that rehabilitation.  If it’s a place of punishment, then letting them get the “volunteers high” would be a mistake, because it wouldn’t fit their punishment to let them feel good about their accomplishments.

So I ask you, readers, what are prisons?

JC Uncategorized

One of the great things about politics is that people tend to draw whatever conclusions they want to draw out of any poltical contest. I remember a Democrat in November of 1994 telling me that the election wasn’t anti-Democrat, it was anti-incumbent. I found that hard to swallow, since all of the incumbents who lost that day were Democrats. But it does remind me that it can be dangerous to find what you’re looking for in the tea leaves.

But, no matter, because now I am doing the same!

I think that the victory of Democrat Bill Owens in the special election for the NY23 congressional seat should indicate something very important to the major parties: shut out the moderates at your own peril.

Dierdre Scozzafava is a moderate Republican. She represents the future of the GOP — if, indeed, it has one. And the national party’s insistence on dragging the party to the right of what the locals knew would work lost them the seat. They might not have liked a moderate Republican, but they’d sure like her better than a Democrat.

Fact is, moderates and independents don’t like crap like this, and they’ve shown that it won’t be tolerated. Well, in upstate New York, at least.

Greg National Politics, Political Parties

(No, I’m not really back yet – new job and all – but I may post a bit this month.  I expect December to be when I start getting back in to this regularly.)

You know, the New York Senate was completely messed up this summer, and it barely made the national news.  But one not even particularly interesting Congressional race gets a bit weird, and suddenly, it’s everywhere.  I speak, of course, of New York 23, a bit north of where I live… but on my TV a lot these days.

Now, of course, normally, there would be no Congressional election this year.  But the previous Congressman is now the Secretary of the Army, and so a special election needed to be held to fill the seat.  Normally, this would be a remarkably open and shut case.  New York 23 is one of the more conservative districts in the state, and the area hasn’t had a Democratic representative since just after the Civil War, if  I understand it correctly.  Its Republican country until tomorrow.

Tomorrow, it may be Democrat country, or, more likely in this blogger’s opinion, Conservative country.    Now, I have no problem with a Conservative campaigning and winning an election (although he doesn’t live in the area, which I do have a problem with) but that’s not really the story.  The story is that a moderate – something that this website is interested in – was completely forsaken by the party – in favor of a conservative.

We all know the country, generally, leans to the middle, by most guesses, a little right of center, but towards the middle.  We also know that politics is completely defined by the two extremes of the political spectrum, both in their own self-definition and in their opposition’s definition of who they are.  Right now, the Republicans are looking towards their future, to figure out how they’ll define themselves.  And most of the bigwigs look like they’ve decided that they will define themselves as the far-right.

The vast majority of the party leaders said that the candidate for the Republican party (who is, admittedly, a moderate – but let’s face it, NY Republicans are never the standard bearers of conservatism – and who, admittedly, was not elected but appointed as the candidate by 11 NY Republican Party county chairs) wasn’t conservative enough to be a Republican, and endorsed the Conservative Party’s candidate.  I’m not one for blind party loyalty but I think the least one can expect when one is the candidate for a party is the endorsement of the party’s movers and shakers, whether its enthusiastic or not.  It seems pretty basic.

The Republican, Dede Scozzafava, on the other hand, isnt showing much loyalty to the ideals of the Republican party either.  Not because of her moderate stances on things like gay marriage – which isn’t nearly the issue here in NY that it is, say, in Oklahoma – but because when she withdrew from the race, she endorsed the Democrat.  Again, not one for blind party loyalty, and she’d been rogered pretty badly by her party, but you probably shouldn’t endorse your party’s traditional opposition, as a general rule.

The parties exist, whether they should or not, because like minded people pooling their resources make for more power than a bunch of individuals.  In exchange, sometimes, you take one for the team.  If either part of that equation falters, the party suffers.  Right now, it seems like no one is remembering why parties exist.  I’d normally be okay with that, except I think at the moment it plays in the political extremist hands, rather than the rise of the center.

I suppose some might say that this is the beginning of the rise of a Conservative party.  And maybe they are right.  But if they are, is that good for conservatism in America?  If most Americans are center or center-right, does a stronger national party that always plays far-right get elected?  Or do they split the vote with moderates and start to consistently lose to Democrats?  When people say that parties are, by definition, big tents, they aren’t just saying that because they like to see a few people of color, a few women, and a few homosexuals around.  They are pointing out that you need to get to at least the plurality of votes.  A Conservative party that ignores moderates only works if moderates themselves go by the wayside.  Right now, it looks like the only two Republicans who realize that are Newt Gingrich and Meghan McCain.

The sad part about it is, this election isn’t some sort of bellweather.  If the Democrat wins, it is because the vote was split.  If the Conservative wins, it is because of outside influences.  If the Republican wins – which is basically impossible – it is because the district votes Republican by default.  There’s no… data… to be garnered from the results.  Just noise.  And noise is what those who endorsed the Conservative want – they want their names in the papers for their own ambitions – Palin, Pawlenty, Pataki and more.  Because if they can say “Hey, I don’t toe the line, I do what’s right, heck, I don’t even endorse my own party’s candidates if they are the wrong person” they can claim to be mavericks, free-thinkers, and movers and shakers, even if all they are is an ideologue.

JC National Politics, Political Parties, State Politics Congress, Conservative Party, elections, Palin, Pawlenty