Time's come....

...to unflop the flag.

Congrats, America.

I Have Been Censored

Taking the woman at her word, I went to HillaryClinton.com and did as she asked tonight: I wrote a response to her blog post, in which she says:

"This has always been your campaign, and tonight, there's no one I want to hear from more than you. I hope you're as proud as I am of what we've done and that you'll take a moment to share your thoughts with me now at my website."

My comment was critical. I said she had blown an opportunity to be the unifier she promised to be, and to yield the stage to the nominee of the Democratic Party. I said the speech she gave was eloquent, but not the one Democrats or the country needed to hear. It's what I felt as she spoke tonight. It was not the worshipful pap that everyone else seems to be posting, but she asked for feedback, and I gave it.

I posted at about 11:35 pm. As I write this, it is 11:54 and my post has not been allowed to appear. I've been filtered out.

Apparently, if I really want to have my say, I can use this handy form at Hillary's home page:

Notice the comment box. That's the context in which Hillary will accept dissent.

I'm with Jeffrey Toobin, re: "the deranged narcissism of the Clintons."
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Ugliness Begets Ugliness

Feelings are hardening among Democrats. Those who go on numbly suggesting the party will heal when the nomination battle is over are whistling past the graveyard.

The bottom line: After 8 years of the neoconservative program of cynicism and neglect, Americans are just dumb enough to elect another Republican president. If this actually happens, I don't ever want to see Bill or Hillary Clinton's faces again.
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What Really Went Wrong at the ABC Debate

My 30-Second Spot for John McCain

A Solomonic Solution to the Democrats' Impasse

Before I say this, I want to make it clear that I'm in earnest. I tend to be a smartass, but today I mean exactly what I'm about to say.

I'm highly partisan in the presidential nominating process. I strongly favor Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton, for a lot of good reasons that I'll lay out if pressed to do so. Suffice it to say for now that there are very meaningful policy and temperamental differences between the two. But those differences pale by comparison to the differences between the two alternative futures we have to choose from in November.

We can choose at least the possibility of abandoning the catastrophic neoconservative agenda of the Bush years, by electing the Democrat. Or we can embrace the Bush program by electing his heir and single remaining cheerleader, John McCain. It boggles my mind that the latter choice is even on the table, but there it is.

I feel rather strongly that another dance with the neocons is the last thing this beleaguered society needs, and that it is essential that the Democrats somehow find a way not to screw this up. But the Democrats apparently have seen the cliff, heard its mesmerizing siren song, and seem bound and determined to drive the bus, Thelma and Louise style, off into the canyon once again.

As I understand it, there is no known scenario by which Hillary Clinton can smack together enough pledged delegates to win the nomination before the convention. Barack Obama would have to win the Pennsylvania primary to do it, and that seems not to be in the cards. So we're headed for a scenario where the Superdelegates make the decision. These are mostly the party elite, and the elite have tended to lean Hillary's way -- she of the Democrats' royal family. If this is the outcome, they will have frustrated the will of the majority of primary voters and pledged delegates, an extremely risky undertaking.

If they break Obama's way, they alienate a powerful fundraising machine and neutralize a charismatic former President who, a year ago, was anticipated to be one of the Democrats' principal weapons in the general election. (Actually, that gun's already effectively spiked; Bill Clinton's just not likely to be that credible an advocate for Obama, having said the things he's said about Barack during the primaries.)

I think I have a better idea. Rather than waste several months' effort and funds on unproductive infighting between the remaining Democratic contenders, only to see it end demoralizingly in an old-fashioned brokered convention anyway, I offer a more Solomonic solution. I do NOT mean settling on a Clinton/Obama or Obama/Clinton ticket -- which would be an absurd-looking pushme-pullyou in any case.

I propose that they just flip a coin.

There would be no crisis of recriminations among Democrats, if the matter were simply entrusted to luck instead of the whimsy of the Superdelegates. You can't second-guess heads or tails. It is what it is. That's why the advantage in something as monumental as the Super Bowl is decided this way each year.

I propose flying the captains of the two campaigns up to Detroit, for a globally televised meeting on the 50 yard line of the Pontiac SuperDome. (This would give Michigan an opportunity to regain a stake in the nominating process without undertaking an expensive and complex do-over primary. As for Florida...screw Florida. Democrats never win there anyway.)

Let the principals shake hands and commit themselves to abide by the result of the toss. Give the coin -- an ordinary half-dollar, chosen at random from a bag of half-dollars by a Deloitte auditor -- to someone of excellent reputation: Lee Hamilton or George Mitchell, say, ideally someone uncommitted to either candidate. Let Hillary, as the underdog delegatewise, call it in the air.

One toss, no double-or-nothing. Let the world see it as it happens. Let the candidates accept the outcome with grace and dignity, shake hands, and get on with the work of defeating the Republicans instead of eviscerating one another.

I'm open to suggestions as to why this solution is inferior to collective self-immolation on the way to a cacophonous clown show in Denver. Thoughts?
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Framing 2008

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff is making the rounds with another exposition of the ideas that make him such an important contributor to the day's discourse on government, policy and ideology. I'm a fan, but there's another reason for my thinking that this latest piece, "Why Voters Aren't Motivated by a Laundry List of Positions on Issues," is important now.

The article (written with colleague Joe Brewer at the Rockridge Institute) reiterates a core Lakoff contention: That behind each "material" policy prescription -- universal health care, charting a new foreign policy course, immigration reform, stimulating the economy -- are a set of underlying, subliminal assumptions that voters fail to understand and policymakers obscure, sometimes deliberately but frequently because they don't really understand them either. These "cognitive-level" assumptions make up the framing of the issue addressed by the policy. In policy debate, Lakoff asserts persuasively, the side that succeeds in imposing its framing of the question generally has the high ground and wins the argument.

Lakoff is unapologetically liberal, although he's pragmatic enough to prefer the term "progressive." He's argued, with increasing urgency over the last several years, that conservative ideologues have understood the cognitive level framing of issues for a generation and have been able to shape issues in American politics far more effectively than progressives have because they succeed in forcing each discussion into the conservative frame. This, in essence, is how the Gingrich mob pulled the rug out from under Bill Clinton in the '90s. It's how Karl Rove's boys got George W. Bush taken seriously in 2000 and re-elected in 2004. In general, the Republicans have mastered framing and the Democrats haven't.

I'm putting Lakoff's latest version of this conception in front of my little audience here to make a specific point. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are in a close and increasingly divisive race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Party leaders like James Carville and Howard Dean are trying to put the best face on this by suggesting that their constituents like both candidates and have trouble making a choice between two equally qualified people. I wish I could feel that way.

Read the Lakoff article and consider the distinctions between policy on the material level and the cognitive level. I believe this distinction matters, and that it provides an insight into the differences between Obama and Clinton. Clinton has a capacity to convey confidence in her competence. Obama motivates. He moves people because he disturbs his audience's cognitive-level perceptions of whatever he's talking about, and then gives them another way of feeling good about progressive positions. Many Democrats adopt progressive prescriptions because they are the endorsed planks of the party to which they belong; they're no different from rank and file Republicans in this respect. Obama gives these same Democrats a way to feel that these ideals are their own.

There is a faulty view of voting behavior – widely held by political strategists on the left – that people already know what they want. All you have to do is conduct a poll to find out where they stand on the issues, then build a platform of positions that accords with the polls, and they will vote for you. Missing from this view is the importance of cognitive policy – the ideas necessary to understand what the issues are and how they should be addressed. It is the ability to understand where a candidate is coming from that makes public support possible. Endorsement quickly follows when this understanding combines with a sense of shared values.

- George Lakoff, Joe Brewer

Barack Obama instinctively gets cognitive-level framing. Hillary Clinton may get it, but she really, really has to work at it. I'm being a little charitable here -- honestly, I don't think Hillary gets it at all, which is why her rhetorical style and her hammering on the "experience" talking point leave me cold.

I've seen it again and again in the debates. The journalists who formulate and pose the questions often have challenged the Democrats with issues incorporating conservative framing: Should English be the national language? Why pull out of Iraq just as the surge is starting to work? Should we build the fence along the Mexican border? Hillary plunges in and tries to just answer the question. Barack listens to the question, grasps the framing, and reframes the issue on the fly to force listeners (a) to understand the bias behind the question and (b) to provide an answer that expresses a position on the larger issue beyond the original frame.

In other words, Clinton is conducting a purely material-level campaign -- which works with a large slice of the Democratic rank and file. She does this well enough to win in some of the biggest primary states, against a fellow-Democrat who is conducting a very different campaign. Obama campaigns on both the material and the cognitive level, which is why he wins in landslides among the voters principally motivated by "change."

The general election is going to be a referendum on eight years of ideological conservative government, and thus highly winnable for Democrats, if Democrats control the framing. John McCain is already on the trail attempting to divert attention from the Bush Administration's record, even as he embraces that record more literally than did any of his rivals in the Republican primaries. Republican framing in 2004 was about fear, and fear won over all of John Kerry's rational but ineffectual material-level arguments about his policy differences with Bush.

I look for McCain to adopt the same playbook this year, because it works. The Democrats had better adopt a different plan. Bad enough as the economy is, I believe Americans largely view it through the conservative Republican frame -- government bad, free market/private sector good. Taxes, environmentalism, regulation and illegal immigrants bad, growth good. China bad, American entrepreneurship good. Head to head against Clinton, McCain wins these arguments.

The Democrats have to make the electorate really uncomfortable this year. It's going to take much more than a rational argument about competence and experience to win. My take is that Obama has the tools to shift the framing. Hillary, a smart and accomplished woman, has yet to prove to me that she has them. I think the difference could be decisive.
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