Baby Boom to Fizzle

Work with me for a moment as I make some connections. Tell me if I'm force-feeding...
I've got a crazy work schedule and have had to write this in parts. And I won't have time to proofread or edit... enjoy.

When I discussed this piece by Andrew Sullivan about the significance of Barack Obama's candidacy, I was especially fascinated by the way he framed Obama's ascendancy as a fundamental change from the 40 years worth of baby boom-driven political battles:

Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

When I think about the last 40 years, I can see it all unfold. The divisiveness of the Vietnam War. The backlash to the Civil Rights Movement. White flight. The rise of political evangelicalism. Phyllis Schlafly's undoing of the Equal Rights Amendment. Roe v. Wade. The Moral Majority. LGBT awareness.... And so on and so forth... The ebb and flow between cultural liberals and conservatives. The Clintons vs. the Bushes. The Kennedys vs. Reagan....

You can sense the way that several of these cultural issues: race, abortion, women's equality, and gay rights have, in one form or another, dominated the pitched political battles of the last 40 years. These cultural battles go on to inform our other debates. (i.e. the backlash to progressive social policies as a reaction to perceived racial entitlements; the push to force religion into the public sphere and changing cultural values in regards to the role of women in the family, the morality of sexual preferences)

You can also see the juxtaposition between Hillary Clinton, disciple of the women's movement and Barack Obama, who is too young to have taken a side on these issues on a national level.

Now, you can either agree or disagree with Mr. Sullivan's paradigm. I don't necessarily consider it to be an analysis of Mr. Obama's chance at winning this nomination.

It is, however, an extremely fascinating lens with which to examine the historical significance of this nomination fight.

And a lens that I think can be extended beyond representations of the differences between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton.
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First, let's stay within the Democratic umbrella. Behold this op-ed from today's Washington Post that tracks the reluctance of traditional African American political leaders to endorse Senator Obama.

The most amazing thing about the 2008 presidential race is not that a black man is a bona fide contender, but the lukewarm response he has received from the luminaries whose sacrifices made this run possible...

...That's because, positioned as he is between the black boomers and the hip-hop generation, Obama is indebted, but not beholden, to the civil rights gerontocracy. A successful Obama candidacy would simultaneously represent a huge leap forward for black America and the death knell for the reign of the civil rights-era leadership -- or at least the illusion of their influence.

The most recent example of the old guard's apparent aversion to Obama was Andrew Young's febrile YouTube ramblings about Bill Clinton being "every bit as black as Barack Obama" and his armchair speculation that Clinton had probably bedded more black women during his lifetime than the senator from Illinois -- as if racial identity could be transmitted like an STD. This could be dismissed as a random instance of a politician speaking out of turn were it not part of an ongoing pattern.

... Taken as a conglomerate, Jackson, Young, Sharpton and Georgia Rep. John Lewis represent a sort of civil rights old boy network -- a black boy network -- that has parlayed its dated activist credentials into cash and jobs. Jackson, a two-time presidential candidate, has become a CNN host; Young was mayor of Atlanta and sits on numerous corporate boards; and Lewis is essentially representative-for-life of the 5th Congressional District in Georgia. Sharpton is younger than the others but a peer in spirit.

Hmm. One line there really struck me.

the death knell for the reign of the civil rights-era leadership -- or at least the illusion of their influence

It reminded me of something I've covered here at We Could Be Famous.

It reminded me of the way the SCLC and the BPP behaved and were received by the crowds at Jena.

And it reminded me of what was said when the SCLC threatened to boycott the city because Council was investigating some sham contracts with some waste disposal companies. And it reminded me of Oyster's response.

(Now, it turns out that the national SCLC is one of the few old guard African American movement orgs. that HAS decided to support Senator Obama, but this doesn't preclude me from using the prior bizarre actions of the SCLC to highlight the diminishing significance of ALL Civil Rights movement organizations and personalities within the African American community at-large.)

Now think about all that.

It certainly is interesting to examine the position of the many African American old guard leadership, the battles they fought over the last 40 years, and their waning political relevance today in the face of an America in which those baby boom battles look more and more like a stalemate every election cycle.
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Now I'd like to take the lens provided by Sullivan over to the other side of the baby boom divide. There is change afoot in the Republican caucus as well. It's name is Mike Huckabee.

I've written about him a lot lately. I've tried to cast his meteoric ascendancy within the Republican Presidential nomination fight as somehow linked to the change movement put forth by Senator Obama. If you follow that link, you'll read my argument about the increasing political empowerment of grassroots evangelicals and their growing frustrations with their historic alliance with the Republicans of Wall Street.

Now, read this article from the New York Times. It's title sounds remarkably similar to those discussing what is occurring on the Democratic side:

"Huckabee Splits Young Evangelicals and Old Guard"

Then go back and read Andrew Sullivan's article again.

Pretty interesting stuff, huh?

The baby boom is so 40 years ago.

More on the Meaning of Huckabee

Adrastos linked to a recent article by Thomas Edsall, who I mentioned in the post on Huckabee and the empowerment of the Religious Right.

His analysis is excellent as always and adds a lot to the conversation below.

He explains why Huckabee should be considered a major threat to take the Republican nomination and makes it clear that this would be an excellent thing for Democrats.

What Huckabee Means

There's been a lot of back and forth chatter about the significance of Mike Huckabee's rise toward the top of the Republican field for their Presidential nomination.

Check me out. Check oyster out. Check Jeffrey out.

Oyster and I, especially, have been debating Mr. Huckabee's chances at getting the Republican nomination in the end.

I've argued that he has an excellent shot. In my more passionate moments, I've come close to outright predicting his nomination.

Oyster, in the meantime, has argued that Huckabee's economic populism is an anathema to the traditional Wall Street Republicans that need to be on board financially for a Republican candidacy to work. Here's what he said today:

I never said he didn't have "appeal". He's got a lot of it. But he hasn't fully received the media "treatment" yet, and he's got powerful enemies in his own party.

Here's what I wrote over at Library Chronicles:

For all Huckabee's political talent, and his admirable "intimacy" on camera and in person, his enemies in the GOP are legion. They are some of the most powerful and effective elements in conservatism. They will work hard so that he won't redefine "their" party, and they'll cede a Presidential election if need be, in order to regroup.

Huckabee won't raise a ton of money, won't energize national turnout, has no foreign policy advantage, his dumb sales tax idea undercuts his "populism", and he won't attract independents with his fundagelical social extremism.

I was teasing Oyster about Huck's convincing win over the economic establishment choice, Mitt Romney because I'd been arguing all along that Huckabee represented a grassroots movement more powerful than the divided and uninspired Wall Street Republican preferred candidates.

I would now like to expand upon those thoughts and maybe, in the end, synthesize the points that Oyster and I have been discussing into something that everyone can cherish forever.
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It all started in the 1960s.

As Democrats worked to thrust the New Deal coalition into a working political majority for that decade, Republicans reinvented their party. As conservative southern democrats became increasingly unwelcome because of their reactionary stances to the Civil Rights Movement, the Republican Party opened their arms. Barry Goldwater's "law and order" rhetoric spoke in code to Americans upset about African American empowerment. He lost big in 1964 but set up the Republican Party for the next 40 years.

Fiscal conservatives, having made MAJOR concessions during the FDR Presidency, were extremely alarmed at LBJ's Great Society's pledges to redistribute a certain level of wealth via social programs. They huddled down and figured out how to create a new coalition for victory by convincing poor whites to vote against their own financial self-interest in order in exchange for promises to correct the "social injustices" of racial preferences and the other relaxed social moors of that emerged in national discourse during that era.

The Dwight Eisenhower model, the rational patrician Republican, no longer captained the Republican ship. Gerald Ford was a special case for a variety of reasons. By 1966, Ronald Reagan was governor of California and Democrats began to lose grip of Congress. A powerful, largely exclusive alliance was born between social and fiscal conservatives.

One book that changed my life is called Chain Reaction. It was written by Mary and Thomas Edsall and it provides the best historical account of how conservatism came to power from a top-down perspective.

For a bottom-up perspective, let us consider What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank. In it, his thoughts on the Conservative stranglehold on middle America are quite revealing.

Essentially, economic conservatives were able to argue that the social programs of the Democratic Party ignored "average Americans" because they were geared mostly to the minorities and rights groups that were fueling the social unrest of the 60s and 70s. Voters concerned with these changes to the social fabric put aside their economic self-interest to vote for Neocons that promised to deliver on issues like gay rights and abortion.

Frank argues that the Republicans have largely done little to reverse the course of social change in America but have been able to reek economic havoc on these small town communities through economic deregulation, etc. He argues that there exists a cycle of sorts because the inability to get results on issues like abortion and homosexuality allows Republicans to further insist upon the pressing need to elect more neoconservatives to office.

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President Bush is a PERFECT example of this style. His 2004 reelection campaign relied heavily on the turnout of social conservatives highly motivated by the Bush team's cultivation of homosexuality as a national emergency and by raising the possibility of changes to the Supreme Court that might reverse Roe v. Wade. Meanwhile, his top post-election priority was an attempt to privatize social security. His most defining domestic "accomplishment" has been his tax cuts to the wealthy, not any particular reaction to any of the social issues that his grassroots base find so important.

Things, however, are changing. The coalition between Wall Street Republicans and Main Street Evangelicals has begun to fracture. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, though it ultimately failed, enraged the evangelical base of the party. Another example is the gang of ten compromise that saved the filibuster option and made the nomination of a explicit anti-abortion judge unlikely. Religious conservatives were mad at their Republican representatives, disillusioned by promises not kept again and again.

Meanwhile, the Republican apparatus had just spent the last 40 years building up the religious right, empowering them, giving them a voice. They reached out to poor whites that felt disenfranchised by Great Society Democrats perceived to answer primarily to minority voters and hippies.

So now, they're empowered. Individual churches and fundamentalist leaders know how to get out the vote, know how to raise money, know how to write letters to Congress. Grassroots religious conservatives in the South and Midwest have become more important as an electoral base than the traditional fiscal conservatives from New York and New England. Because they were largely credited with bringing victory to W. Bush in 2004, there must indeed be a reasonable perception amongst evangelicals that they can drive the Republican Party themselves.
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That brings us the the Republican field for the 2008 nomination. The Wall Street Republicans seem to have fallen in behind either Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani. They were the first to begin aggressive campaigning and fund-raising and have been considered the two front runners for the nomination for the majority of 2007.

How do you think grassroots evangelicals felt about those two guys?

Not great is my guess. I think they took it as a big F you. They see Romney's past as a social liberal. They see Giuliani's present as a social liberal. They largely have not benefited financially from the economic policies of the candidates they've supported in the past. Why support Giuliani or Romney when they're to continue to screw you economically without even making any promises on the social end?

Throughout much of the run up to yesterday's Iowa Caucus, every poll showed remarkable Republican disinterest in the race and dissatisfaction with the candidates available.

On the Democratic side, voters have been largely enthusiastic about their top choices, Clinton, Edwards, and Obama. Edwards, and especially Obama, have created a social movement buzz about their candidacies by stressing connections to the grassroots, enhanced by an incredible campaign organizations, personal charisma, etc.
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Along came Huckabee.

Without any kind of Iowa organization or campaign bank account, Mike Huckabee was a real long shot candidate. Because of his own extremely impressive charisma and charm, Huckabee was able to sneak into second place at the Ames straw poll over the summer. The fund-raising and media attention boom thrust Huckabee into the spotlight.

Grassroots religious conservatives, the electoral base of the Republican Party, have responded resoundingly to him. Why? Well, he's an evangelical minister that is right with the base on every important social issue.

Maybe more importantly, Huckabee represents something else.

The very fact that Huckabee's economic populism has made him a problem to the establishment Wall Street Republicans is a plus for the grassroots evangelicals.

As Obama and Edwards have won big big big with the rhetoric of change and promises to buck the old way of the Democratic Party, Huckabee has represents an anti-establishment Republican. His charisma is remarkably Obama-like. He's young, he's an outsider. For grassroots Republicans, he's clearly disconnected from a presidential administration and republican mainstream that has sandbagged party popularity for the upcoming race and stabbed evangelicals in the back by failing to produce results on any number of social issues. This makes, for grassroots Republicans, Huckabee just as "electable" in a general election as a Rudy Giuliani or a Mitt Romney or a John McCain.

I've previously referred to it as Obama-envy.

But it could be even more than that. This is from today's New York Times:

Mr. Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, rode a crest of evangelical Christian support to victory on Thursday over his rival Mitt Romney, capping a remarkable ascent over the last two months from near the bottom of the Republican field. A poll of people entering the Republican caucuses on Thursday showed more than 8 in 10 of his supporters identified themselves as evangelicals.

The same surveys showed extraordinary turnout among evangelicals, who represented some 60 percent of Republican caucusgoers. In years past, Republican Party leaders in Iowa put evangelical turnout at about 40 percent.

That's seems to be a pretty significant point. There could be very enthusiastic, very real Huckamania amongst grassroots Republicans energized by this candidate's ability to coalesce support by utilizing the on-the-ground networks of evangelical churches instead of the ad money of Wall Street.

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Oyster argues, with a great deal of validity, that Governor Huckabee still faces monumental obstacles in a wide-open primary race. Certainly. The Republican field is still much too fluid to call winners now. Oyster has said, in essence, that Huckabee has yet to receive the full treatment of media scrutiny. This is true. Oyster has said that there are powerful legions within the GOP that consider Huckabee's economic populism to be dangerous and will do everything they can from preventing his ascendancy to the top of the party, even if it costs them 2008.

I may also agree with this. If Wall Street Republicans are unable to take Huckabee down in favor of Giuliani or Romney, they may indeed ditch the Republican party for 2008 for an independent run by their own man, Michael Bloomberg.

I think so. I think they would do this. They'll need to flex their muscles to take back control of the GOP, put evangelicals back in their place, dictate the policy down to the grassroots instead of take policy up from the grassroots.

The question for now, however, is whether or not grassroots evangelicals can continue this show of power through the primary season. Huckabee will certainly finish outside of the top two in New Hampshire, but South Carolina could be a resounding victory. What happens after that? Will he be able to get the money necessary to compete on Feb. 5? I don't know.

I do know that the roots, the most likely Republican voters, those most empowered, outraged, fearful, and activist will be out for Huckabee and out for Huckabee with pride. He will indeed continue to be the evangelical choice. The challenge for Huckabee is to mobilize those evangelicals in enough numbers to trump whatever Giuliani and Romney and McCain can put up on television.

I think he can be the Republican nominee for the Presidency. Will he? I don't know. But I do know that the movement mobilization of grassroots Republicans was underestimated by Democrats and the punditocracy in both 2000 and 2004. It is happening again now, perhaps more naively than ever.

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One last side note, an interesting observation about Republican voters.

When I made my prediction for the Republican Caucus results, I, in the end, gave Huckabee only the smallest of victory margins over Romney. The reason I did this, instead of picking the convincing Huckabee victory that I had been anticipating for months, was because of some truly bad foreign policy blunders by the Governor from Arkansas over the last two weeks of the campaign. Here's a link to one of those stories. Given that Republicans have relied so heavily on advantages in voter perception of foreign policy credentials, I thought that Huckabee's factual mistakes would bring him down significantly.

This did not happen and I began to think about why.

And I realized that Republican voters don't look for foreign policy credentials, they look for tough-talk rhetoric. It didn't matter that Huckabee didn't know that Pakistan had lifted martial law, it didn't matter that Huckabee made up that Pakistani illegal immigrants were a major threat.

I remembered the 2000 election and I remembered one little story that came and went without much fanfare. A reporter gave Bush a simple foreign policy quiz in which he was asked to name some leaders from some world hot spots. He flunked it, badly. But who cared, really? Many probably thought the President was ambushed by those questions, I mean how could anyone be expected to know foreign people's names anyway?

And I remembered statistics that I've read about Americans' knowledge of the world. In 2002, as we prepared to go to war, only about 13% of Americans between 18-24 could find Iraq on a map. I don't imagine the percentage of all adult Americans to be too much higher than that.

I realized that rank and file Republican voters don't care even a little bit how much you know about other cultures, other countries, world events because grassroots Republicans themselves know so very little about these things.

So maybe Huckabee's assertion that Benazir Bhutto's assassination more than anything else proves we need a border fence was more shrewd than I originally thought. Because it so played upon the fearfulness, ignorance, and bunker mentality of grassroots evangelicals, it may have even been a genius "gaffe" that gained him more votes than it cost. If he had only said that it justified our second amendment and that more Americans should arm themselves...

Caucus Prediction Time

Big day for soap opera fans. This storyline has been tirelessly built since 2006. The first payoff is tonight.

Did you buy into the inevitability of Hillary Clinton's victory? Remember when she was considered unbeatable? It happened. Shame she just blasted through so many millions of dollars... because Iowa democrats are voting the anti-establishment ticket.

I never believed that invincibility bullsh*t. That never appeared to be the case to me. Nice narrative for the media to run with, though.

'90s Democrats are out.

Progressive populism is in.

Flannel is in.

Patterned zip-up hoodies are out.

When these turn out to be the results tonight, I will be happy happy:

1. Barack Obama: 40%
2. Jon Edwards: 33%
3. Hillary Clinton: 27%

I'm having a harder time handicapping the Republican race because Republican voters are... I just won't say anything.

For weeks, I've been going back and forth with Oyster and Jeffrey regarding this race. I've been saying again and again that Huckabee would be able to sustain his momentum enough to carry Iowa. I still believe that argument is compelling.

He is uniquely positioned as the grassroots populist Republican answer to the progressive movement that is threatening to unite Democrats on the other side.

Romney and Giuliani are actually quite similar candidates due to their position changes on a variety of social issues and they're support for and from the traditional bastions of economic and industrial neo-conservatism.

McCain holds down prudent, moderate lane. The thinking man's Republican, as it were. Still crazy, but seems less crazy.

I've been arguing that this would be enough, in spite of the traditional Republican thirst for a war-hawking type.... I thought that McCain would surge a little bit and I thought Romney would continue his collapse. Mostly, I thought Huckabee would take the caucus with surprising ease.

But Huckabee's recent MAJOR AND INEXCUSABLY EMBARRASSING gaffes on foreign policy, namely the idiotic statement he made last week about illegal immigration from Pakistan, have really poisoned his candidacy.

Thus, Romney has inexplicably regained ground in spite of the fact that he's Gordon Gekko with a creepy sweater. So the Republican race is going to be tighter than I initially thought.
Either way McCain is in great position. He'll be in third, I believe. He'll easily be able to spin third place as a big plus given how he's largely ignored campaigning in Iowa as he did in 2000. He's rocking in New Hampshire right now and blast ahead to a surprisingly easy victory there, riding the momentum and positive media attention from his better-than-anticipated Iowa showing.

Here we go:

1. Huckabee: 27%
2. Romney: 27%
3. McCain: 20%
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I don't think Obama is going to finish lower than first in a single primary until Nevada. I think he's going to get Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina before pundits even have the chance to find this blog to anoint me caucadomis.

The Dumbest Thing I've Read Today

Mike Huckabee has an interesting take indeed on what should be done in the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto's assassination. This is from the NYT:

“We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there’s any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country.”

On Friday, in Pella, Iowa, he expanded on those remarks.

“When I say single them out I am making the observation that we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities except those immediately south of the border,” he told reporters in Pella. “And in light of what is happening in Pakistan it ought to give us pause as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders.”

In fact, far more illegal immigrants come from the Philippines, Korea, China and Vietnam, according to recent estimates from the Department of Homeland Security.

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“The fact is that the immigration issue is not so much about people coming to pick lettuce or make beds, it’s about someone coming with a shoulder-fired missile,” he said.

Wow. Where do I start? Almost leaves you speechless it's so crazy.

He's using Bhutto's assassination as justification to build a wall on our border with Mexico - absolutely nuts. Ridiculously irrational.

This is THE typical reaction that some sort of grassroots conservative charismatic leader might have. It plays upon all of the fears, insecurities, and international ignorance of the vote base he seeks. I would very much like to see Barack Obama destroy Mr. Huckabee in a landslide next November.

We're all waiting with baited breath for Mitthew Romney's pathetic attempt to outflank these Huckabee comments from an even more irrational right-wing mindset.

Rudy is a Copy Cat

Adrastos informs us of an excellent reason to hate Rudolph Giuliani.




An excellent reason, indeed. What a prick.

But just in case you weren't aware, Rudy be jocking Michael Huckabee! He totally just copied Mike Huckabee's painfully sentimental video and forced out his own.

Watch this one, which came out just the other day, h/t: attytood:




You can decide for yourselves whether or not Mike Huckabee should be hated for his video. I think it's pretty brilliant as a campaign tactic considering the Huckster's base and image to this point. I still hate him though. The supposedly subliminal cross in the background of the video has stirred controversy.

UPDATE: Dick Polman has an excellent analysis of the Huckabee tactic.

Did We Buy It?

During last night's debate for the Republican nomination, one of the lines that seems to be generating a lot of attention was delivered by candidate Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas. Here is what happened: (the exchange is just past halfway down)

As the potential nominees were asked to weigh in on the War in Iraq, Congressman Ron Paul of Texas defended his position in favor of immediate withdrawal of all U.S.

"...The war has not gone well one bit. Yes, I would leave. I would leave completely. Why leave the troops in the region? It was the fact that we had troops in Saudi Arabia -- was one of the three reasons given for the attack on 9/11. So why leave them in the region? They don't want our troops on the Arabian Peninsula. We have no need for our national security to have troops on the Arabian Peninsula. And going into Iraq and Afghanistan and threatening Iran is the worst thing we can do for our national security. I am less safe, the American people are less safe for this..."

When it was Mike Huckabee's turn to answer a question on the topic, he responded directly to the comments of Congressman Paul, saying

"Congressman, whether or not we should have gone to Iraq is a discussion the historians can have, but we're there We bought it because we broke it. We've got a responsibility to the honor of this country..."

Congressman Paul answered back arguing that the war is the responsibility of the small neoconservative cadre that "hijacked our foreign policy" and that the American people should not be punished by remaining bogged down there.

Huckabee's moment came here, when he shot back:

"Congressman, we are one nation. We can't be divided. We have to be one nation, under god. That means if we make a mistake, we make it as a single country: the United States of
America, not the divided states of America."

Now there can be no doubt that Huckabee came through with a snappy line there, maybe it'll make him famous.

At Dick Polman's American Debate, the Huckabee's "we bought it" position is contextualized as being emblematic of the Republicans' struggle with the Iraq issue as potential nominees dance between remaining true to the majority of Republican voters that remain steadfast behind the war effort and the opposing views of the populace at-large.

Congressman Paul, fueled by his libertarian political ideology, has been against the war for quite some time. His views on the conflict are more similar to those of many democrats and progressives.

While many today are discussing the political efficacy of Huckabee's sound-bite (will it play? will it play in the public? will Huckabee play?), what about the argument?

How do you classify personal and national responsibility?

Is the post-Sadaam wave of sectarian strife the fault of the United States government?

What is the moral obligation of the United States government to the Iraqi people?

As a progressive myself, I have always thought this war was misguided, imperial, unjust, botched, etc., and of course I want it to be over. I want American soldiers to stop dying and I want Iraqi civilians to stop dying. Yet I am curious as to how those out there that are fervently calling for immediate withdrawal feel about the limits of our moral obligation to the lives of Iraqi civilians. Are there imaginable post-withdrawal scenarios for Iraqi citizens that make you uncomfortable with leaving? What are we already responsible for and what else could be added to the list?