Liberal Thought

10:23 Biden is rolling again. Just hope people are still watching.

10:22 “[John McCain] is the man that we need to leave, lead…” –Sarah Palin

10:21 Joe Biden says maybe it’s his “excessive passion?” How self-flagellatory. (sp.?)

10:19 “Shining city on a hill”… attributed to Ronald Reagan by Gov. Palin. I believe that was John Winthrop… easy confusion, they were only… 300 years apart…

10:14 “A long talk with her principal” or “principle?” Did Biden just throw out the first type of ambiguity?

10:12 Can’t let that go: “Say it ain’t so, Joe; there you’ll go again; doggone it” and then a “shout out” to a 3rd grade class. Nothing against that but Palin is treating this like… the Emmys? **And the Reagan homage is a little weak when you misquote him.

9:45 I’ll write more after the debate. Biden is on a roll with Iraq, so I’ll leave it to him. I have a paper to write. More later.

9:43 One has to admire the restraint of any US Senator who can listen to that “white flag of surrender” line and not want to throw up all over his solid-color tie.

9:41 Prediction: things get progressively dicier for Palin from here on out. She has two major weaknesses: foreign policy and far afield.

9:39 Wow, was that the most intellectually dishonest discussion of gay marriage you’ve ever heard or what? Of course not–that’s sadly about as good as it gets these days.

9:38 Biden just de-answered the gay marriage thing, and replaced it with a superdupersubtle re-answer!–he said it should be left to different faiths! Without changing the civil definition, sure…but the second part of his answer removed the civil dimension from it entirely!

9:37 Sarah Palin is tolerant. Sarah Palin has a very diverse family. (Did she steal that from The Indicator?)

9:36 Here comes the gay marriage fudge. Still pretty forceful, though, from Biden.

9:32 I don’t get how, if humans are not the cause of global warming, we can so easily be the solution? Wow, Biden JUST said that…weird. Must be like, a really obvious point…

9:31 “I’m not one to attribute every activity of man to changes in the climate.” Me neither.

9:30 Climate change. Aw yeah.

9:27 prepositional phrase crutches (with the… with the… in the…) and more rearing of the head…. now we’re getting somewhere.

9:25 Five weeks….five weeks…five weeks… And then she commits John McCain to keeping every campaign promise… is there a light at the end of the tunnel?

9:24 Palin could not possibly describe a supposedly bitter fight with oil companies in cuter languange.

9:23 Palin responds with a reference to something Obama did…but I don’t get it.

9:21 “That’s what I call the ultimate Bridge to Nowhere.” Okay, I smiled at that one. And then he gave her such a look…

9:14 I’d like to say, 14 minutes into the debate, of course. Gov. Palin is actually pretty good at this. Biden ain’t no slouch either, but I’m imagining hoardes of Democrats sitting in the Red Room right now waiting to see Palin, I don’t know, drool on the podium or something. Doubt that will happen. And as soon as this is over the conservative media is going to go wild for this debate. Oh, well, crap.

I want to make a plug, both shameless and, considering the (lamentable) title of my blog, counterintuitive. This weekend is the fall meeting of the Colloquium on the American Founding, and there are a few talks on the docket that would be of interest to folks of all political stripes. These talks are usually pretty well underattended, and for a campus curious and political as ours that’s a shame. Among the several speakers are Ted Cruz, the Texas solicitor general who argued Medellin v. Texas before the US Supreme Court (and won), and Judge Carlos Bea of the 9th Circuit, whose dissent in the 9th Circuit case that went to the Court as Parents Involved v. Seattle School District formed the argument for the winning side in that case–notable because it was, in essence, and affirmative action case. Anyhow, these should all be interesting talks and you all got fliers in campus mail, etc. Just in case the CAF site is here with all the times and locations.

In other news, let’s just hope that when we leave there and march over to watch the debate, there are two people other than Jim Lehrer on the screen. Yikes and a half if McCain blows it off–I just don’t know for whom. Thoughts?

UPDATE 9/27: It was pointed out to me, quite correctly, that I should disclose for all those who don’t know that I’m a member of the “steering comittee” on the American Founding. I’ve decided to make this a topic of a post in the near future, so stay tuned.

Maureen Dowd has an unusually readable column on the Op-Ed page of today’s New York Times. That’s possibly because, as she claims in the introductory paragraph, she didn’t write it. The conversation she imagines between Barack Obama and (fictional, sadly) President Josiah Bartlet of Aaron Sorkin’s lamentably term-limited NBC drama The West Wing contains some moments that make me believe Sorkin actually contributed his voice to the piece. It also contains this little exhortation which, in case you haven’t or don’t plan to read the column, I’ll quote for you here.

And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic…And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

First of all, any West Wing fan who can’t hear Martin Sheen bellowing that at 9:19 p.m. on the east coast isn’t trying hard enough. And second of all, that same West Wing fan will likely be alert to a whole host of illusions that the Dowd-Sorkin piece alludes to humorously, and fails to resolve.

To wit: can Barack Obama’s “elitism” be turned to his advantage? Will the electorate be disabused of the notion that John McCain would “rather win a war than an election?” Can this all be done by telling the candidate to buck up and buckle down and grow a pair? Wouldn’t it help if Obama, like Bartlet, were a Nobel Prize-winning economist?

I’ll be thinking about this column this week. I just wanted to get it out there, since it made me laugh…and then twist a lot of frowny eyebrow muscles for a while.

Sarah Palin has finally surfaced, in an ABC interview with Charlie Gibson.

William Saletan in Slate.

What do we think?

Memo to Harry Reid/Harry Reid’s spokesman: please don’t do that again.

This is me. This is me trying to resist mentioning Sarah Palin.

See how long that lasted?

But I want to talk about Palin in the context in which she appears to have been picked: as a fresh, young face in the Republican party; a candidate of change, if you’re into that sort of thing. More generally, I want to wonder aloud about the vernacular that has emerged in this presidential race.

During the Democratic primary we heard complaints piled on complaints about the lack of substantive difference between the two major candidates; as a result we spent a lot of time talking about health-care mandates and troop withdrawal deadlines, but nothing compared to how much time we spent talking about change, hope and experience. Was there any comfort to be found? Yes! And we were told time and again, by both candidates, that their differences were nothing compared to the differences between each and their likely Republican opponent. Just wait until the general, we decided, when we’ll really start to hear contrasts drawn between our candidate and the Republican.

And we have. But–and make sure you’re sitting down, now–the contrasts as drawn up by the Democrat himself at his convention have been of the same talismanic breed we got in the primary. Now instead of Hope and Change vs. Experience, it’s Change vs. More of the Same. To be fair, Obama’s speech was pretty plentifully seasoned with policy visions and relatively detailed ambitions for his administration. But the more subtle, implicit messages we absorbed from the surrounding white noise of minor speeches, common turns of phrase and rythmic chants were all of that same paradigm: “That’s not Change, that’s More of the Same!”

I find this interesting as a method of transmitting political thought because it’s not devoid of substance; it’s just backwards. Change might be a talisman, but it’s a sign, and it represents a lot of important things we know (or seem to know) are meant by that. Universal health care, sanity in foreign policy and a halt to the conservative judicial revolution are all things we talk explicitly about less than we should; still, we seem to know that those are among the very things meant by our Democratic leaders when they tell us that John McCain doesn’t get Change and they do. And this is not to say we haven’t heard our issues preached out loud: what I mean by “backwards” is that these days, our themes draw out our specifics, rather than the other way around. As someone with an abiding affection for pragmatism in governance, I find this…interesting. Troubling? Maybe. What do you think.

Well, I have to admit that it’s a little funny how much coverage an essentially meaningless primary is getting tonight. Sure, Obama is losing really, really badly in West Virginia (like, totally, really badly), but it seemed all week as though all the media outlets had agreed that WV and on were just show contests. Now nytimes.com has gone so far as to create a bar graph graphic on its front page showing Clinton’s margin of victory, county by county. She appears to have won them all. By a lot. Seriously, it looks like some West Virginians founded new counties of their own just so they could then vote for Clinton in them.

I suppose this is news, that the presumptive Democratic nominee is being roundly trounced by a candidate who most of us think won’t be in the race a month from now, even if we knew it was going to happen. But the utter…thoroughness…of this coverage is intimidating. I suppose it would be less fascinating if it weren’t inexplicably sharing the headlines with the earthquake and cyclone that have killed tens of thousands of people in the past week and a half.

Meredith, apparently Sergio Vieira de Mello’s death caused the President to give up golf. Nice to know he cares.

A couple of things I learned from that last post:

1) Tagging “HuckaBurgers” four times will only yield you a count of one in the tag cloud.

2) The full excecution of this revolution in Tag Cloud Theory (I call it this in the hope that one day, I will be able to earn a PhD in it) will require more posts than I think are tasteful. But let me make one plea: tag your posts! And do it in the “code” window of your writing thingy, or else it seems that it won’t work! Together we can change the tag cloud. I hope.

3) [bonus] The day Ryan figures out how to get italics into the tag cloud will mark the beginning of the deconstructive period of Tag Cloud Theory. May that day come soon.