At this point, congressman Joe Wilson's boorish personal insult - an unprecedented fit of insolence that violated several centuries of House protocol - has sufficiently saturated the airwaves. The moment itself need not be further recounted here. But there is still much to be said about the moment as metaphor.

In a narrow sense, the moment was truly shocking. No previous congressman in 220 years had personally insulted the president of the United States to his face during a House proceeding. Mickey Edwards, a retired Republican congressional leader, was sufficiently shocked to write that Wilson's behavior marked "a new low in politics," because "any real congressman would have known that such behavior is not permitted in a place where members are not allowed to call even other members liars without being publicly and officially rebuked." Indeed, even the typically raucous British Parliament does not permit such personal attacks; when one member calls another a liar or a coward or a traitor, or other words that are officially deemed "unparliamentary," the offender is promptly asked to withdraw the insult.

Nevertheless, in the broader scheme of things, the spectacle of a right-wing back-bencher behaving like a horse's ass was not shocking in the least. Joe Wilson wasn't doing anything new; he was behaving as so many of his brethren have behaved since the rise of Barack Obama. Because deep down they refuse to accept Obama as their legitimate leader, they naturally don't feel that they owe him the requisite respect.

This was clear even during the '08 campaign, when conservative crowds yelled things like "Traitor" and "Kill him," and no Republican bigwigs said a word about it. This was clear when liars insisted he was a Muslim. This was clear during the summer of '09. when liars insisted yet again that he was an illegitimate president who had been born on foreign soil. This was clear last spring when a Republican activist in South Carolina (Joe Wilson's state) joked that a gorilla that had escaped from a local zoo was probably one of Michelle Obama's ancestors.

»  More Joe Wilson and the conservative id

In his high-stakes address to Congress last night, President Obama took on three interrelated tasks that he should have tackled long ago:

1. He framed universal health care as a compelling moral issue - just as providing seniors with a safety net via Social Security is a moral issue, just as providing seniors with health benefits via Medicare is a moral issue, just as providing poor people with health benefits via Medicaid is a moral issue.

2. He put strong emphasis on assuring the "haves" - the 180 million Americans who already have health insurance; and, most importantly, the haves who are also swing-voting centrist independents - that the sky would not fall on them if reform was enacted.

3. He finally called out the right-wing liars and demagogues, and stripped them down to their underwear.

»  More Pugilist-in-chief

Despite the laserlike focus on President Obama's impending Capitol Hill speech on health care, the war in Afghanistan may soon prove to be far more consequential, in terms of both policy and politics. Here's an expanded and updated version of my weekend print column:

My head hurts. At first I thought it was a sinus thing, or perhaps the start of a head cold. But it’s actually the pain of thinking about Afghanistan. After much deliberation, I have finally come up with a rock-solid stance that I can support 100 percent:

It’s nuts for us to stay, and it’s nuts for us to go. It’s nuts for us to send more troops, and it’s nuts for us to phase them out.

Granted, I have now violated the first rule of contemporary punditry, which requires that, in all circumstances, we shall declare ourselves inflexibly pro or con. Guilty as charged. But I invite you to ponder Afghanistan, to weigh the factual against the counterfactual, and see how it feels.

»  More The headache on the horizon

To the surprise of absolutely nobody - except perhaps those Americans whose paranoia impedes their ability to inhabit the real world - President Obama's Tuesday speech to the nation's schoolchildren, released in advance yesterday, turns out to be nothing more than a nonpartisan paean to hard work and personal responsibility.

But that won't stop our most noisome fellow citizens from mining the Obama text for its dastardly implications. One might argue that the text is blander than vanilla ice cream, and that it couldn't possibly serve as fodder for the irrationally indignant. Oh ye of little faith. I simply assume that all kinds of new talking points will soon provide fresh grist for Fox, the talk shows, the viral emails, the blogosphere, and the cable TV bookers. Consider these italicized possibilities...

Obama text: "Hello, everyone - how's everybody doing today?"

Real Americans should be outraged by those provocative opening words. The presumptuous attempt by Barack Obama to directly address our precious children by saying "hello" is further evidence that he and his socialist bureaucrats seek to build a socialistic personality cult in the tradition of Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong II. This is why we need to take back our homeland, and defend it from tyrants abroad and here at home.

»  More "Hello" and other socialisms

A vacation rumination...

On my final day in the mountains - the usual writing regimen resumes next Tuesday - I am reading the Jan. 13, 1970 edition of Look magazine, which I found at an antique show. For those of you too young to know, Look was a powerhouse in pre-wired America. It had seven million readers, and competed fiercely with its chief rival, Life magazine. The way it worked was, you flipped the pages with your forefinger, discovered lavish photo spreads and long, long articles on a range of general-interest subjects, and you didn't have to wait for a download.

Nevertheless, viewed through a contemporary prism, the issue in my hands seems as antique as the furniture in the musty shed. And I'm not referring to the retroactively hilarious ads for airlines ("the Economy seats are almost as roomy as ordinary First-Class seats...and more stewardesses than you've ever seen"), booze ("Grab for all the gusto you can"), cancer sticks ("Longer - Yet Milder"), and General Motors cars that look to be as spacious as yachts.

I'm actually referring to the magazine's sunny predictions of what life will be like in America during the 1970s and beyond. In retrospect, the wild optimism is almost touching. Particularly on the subject of politics.

The magazine predicts that "a new species of politician will soon arise." This species will put a greater premium on "honesty, intelligence, independence, courage, self-sacrifice and vision." This new species will replace the late-60s species that practices "the old politics of insult, gut-fighting and invective. Such tactics are euphemistically called 'going on the attack,' meaning the advance of the warrior-orator who disembowels his adversary and hoists the shredded corpse on a victory pike."

Yep, that old species will surely be doomed during the 1970s; after all, the magazine said, "the governed have become increasingly alienated, confused, and frustrated," and will no longer tolerate the gut fighters who "don't really care about us," and whose bad behavior "masks a poverty of understanding of us and the vast problems that confront us."

Take heart, said the magazine; some "powerful new forces" will help produce the "new political breed." Television, for instance. Television will nurture the new breed, at the expense of the old: "We do not like guests who shout, rant, and harangue us, who insult us or who strike a know-it-all stance in our living room. We expect the guest to converse with us, to seek to persuade us in conciliatory tones and to concede that he is less than fallible."

That forecast turns out to be as quaint as those old '60s sketches that show urban Americans in the year 2000 riding around on monorails. Imagine the despair of Look's forecasters had they known that television would become the home of the 30-second attack ad, in which gentle-voiced female narrators would intone lies and half-truths, with the tab paid by shadowy donors and special interest groups.

And speaking of donors, the magazine lamented about how the old species was beholden to "wealthy individuals and special interest groups, almost all with an economic ax to grind...As long as private money talks, politicians must heed the big talkers." But fear not, said Look, the sun was on the horizon: "There are indications that some kind of public financing of election campaigns is in the offing. If that occurs, the new politician, unfettered by campaign-fund ties to special economic interests, will flower."

Turns out, we got public financing of presidential campaigns in 1976, and today the whole system is basically kaput because the spending limits are too low and because the vast majority of Americans refuse to finance it by checking a box on their tax returns. The special interest money flows unabated, through the legal political action committees, and, meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court is reportedly considering an autumn ruling that could make it far easier for corporations to directly spend money on political candidates.

It appears that we will have to wait a bit longer for that new species of politician.

And Look won't be around for that elusively distant day. It died in 1971.

-------

But, for a bit of perspective, consider this anniversary:

Seventy years ago today - on Sept. 3, 1939 - Great Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany, in the wake of Hitler's invasion of Poland. Hitler welcomed the opportunity, declaring in his Sept. 3 proclamation that God was on his side and that anyone who threatened his government "need expect nothing else than annihilation." Such were the remarks that led to the deaths of 50 million people.

So while we grouse about health care and whatever, it's worth remembering that things could be far worse. Enjoy the holiday weekend. Back here on Tuesday.
 

»  More "A new species of politician"

 
We interrupt this vacation...

My vacation house, tucked against the side of a North Carolina mountain, does not have a television. This is a beautiful thing, because it reduces to zero the odds that some serial Washington dissembler will invade my space on Sunday morning. The Sunday shows habitually recycle the same bamboozlers - people like Dick Cheney - and it's frankly a bore.

Nevertheless, as I sat in a restaurant yesterday, sure enough, there was Dick Cheney grousing on the TV monitor, in a video clip from Fox News Sunday. I couldn't help but wonder what had sparked his ire (yet again), and what fact-challenged assertions he was undoubtedly inflicting (yet again) on the Sunday audience.

It turns out that Cheney doesn't like the Justice Department's decision to investigate whether CIA operatives broke the law while questioning suspected terrorists; in Cheney's words, "it offends the hell out of me, frankly."

That's a good one. Dick Cheney, who marched us to war with a litany of lies (many of them uttered on Sunday talk shows), declares that he is offended by the Justice Department's attempt to uphold the rule of law. Could attorney general Eric Holder possibly garner a better endorsement for his decision? 

Cheney argued yesterday that torture has worked. He told Fox News that his "sort of overwhelming view" is that torture has been "absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States." The torture, he said, has "worked very, very well."

It's amazing. This guy's credibility was shredded years ago, yet he still gets air time; indeed, his latest assertions were shredded before he even taped his Fox appearance.

A CIA Inspector General’s report on the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, authored in 2004 and finally released last week, identifies a series of "unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented” tactics, and fails to offer any conclusive evidence that such tactics yielded information that saved American lives.

In fact, the author of the CIA report stressed this point in an interview with the Los Angeles Times last Tuesday. In the words of former Inspector General John L. Helgerson, "You could not in good conscience reach a definitive conclusion about whether any specific technique was especially effective, or (whether) the enhanced techniques in the aggregate really worked."

Even Frances Townsend, who served as the Bush team's homeland security adviser, conceded on CNN the other day that the CIA report offered no documented evidence that torture worked. As she put it, "It's very difficult to draw cause and effect...The report doesn't say that."

Yet whereas the CIA inspector general said that he could not demonstrate "in good conscience" that torture yielded information that saved American lives, Dick Cheney was granted air time yesterday to once again stray far beyond the parameters of empirical evidence - and to demonstrate that, on this issue, he is actually far to the right of Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan, after all, who signed and championed the UN Convention on Torture, which decreed: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

Fox News didn't challenge Cheney on any of these points. Chris Wallace didn't ask him about the CIA Inspector General's comments, or Townsend's comments, or Reagan's legacy. By contrast, we had this scintillating Q&A exchange about the Justice Department's decision to launch its torture probe:

Wallace: "You think this is a political move, not a law enforcement move."

Cheney: "Absolutely."

Fox News critics are happy these days with the advertising boycott campaign against Fox host Glenn Beck - specifically, the news that roughly 40 advertisers have either pulled their spots from Beck's show or refuse to sponsor him. But Beck is merely one of the more extreme manifestations of the Fox formula. There will always be plenty of advertisers who have no qualms about indulging Dick Cheney's fabulist impulses.

»  More Dick Cheney is offended

We interrupt this vacation...

It's bad manners to speak ill of the newly deceased, and it's probably rude to intrude on Kennedy hagiography in a time of mourning. But here goes:

Edward Kennedy's last wish was a masterly bit of political gamesmanship. Well aware that his infirmity or death might deprive the Democrats of a crucial vote for health care reform this autumn on the Senate floor, he proposed last week that the Massachusetts legislature shelve the current state law (which requires that a vacancy be filled via a time-consuming special election), and replace it with a new state law (which would allow the current Democratic governor to instantly fill the vacancy by appointing a new Democratic senator).

Yet it was just a few years ago when Massachusetts Democratic lawmakers passed the special-election law. They did this in order to ensure that the Republican governor, Mitt Romney, would not appoint a Republican to replace Democratic senator John Kerry, in the event that Kerry won the 2004 presidential election. The law at the time allowed the sitting governor to quickly fill a vacancy via appointment, and the Democrats knew the law would work against them, so they changed it. Kennedy's last wish was that they basically change the law back, because this time it's the special-election provision that could work against them (by keeping the seat open for five months until special election day, thus thwarting the Senate Democrats' hopes of maximizing their floor votes for health care reform).

Dare we sniff a whiff of hypocrisy in all this? I don't intend to disrespect Kennedy's long and mostly admirable service to the nation by pointing out that these kinds of Bay State maneuvers have long characterized the Kennedy clan's power politicking. Indeed, Ted Kennedy never would have become a senator without the family's trademark gamesmanship. I'll tell you a couple of true stories:

In January 1961, JFK vacated his Senate seat and moved to the White House. The family patriarch, old Joe Kennedy, decided that the seat should go to young Ted. The problem was, Ted was not yet 30 years old, the legally minimum age for a senator. So the Kennedys prevailed upon the sitting Democratic governor to appoint somebody who would compliantly warm the JFK's old seat until Ted turned 30 in 1962 (under the rules at that time, a special election would be held that year.) And the Kennedys found the perfect person: an ex-pol named Benjamin Smith, who just so happened to be JFK's old Harvard classmate. Smith did the gig, and Ted won the special election at age 30.

None of that would have been possible, however, had JFK not won the Senate seat in 1952, by knocking off popular Republican incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge. JFK achieved this in part because he got some strong editorial assistance from The Boston Post, an influential newspaper of that era. The Post was expected to endorse Lodge, and Bostonians were stunned when it announced for Kennedy. Why did this happen? Because Joe Kennedy opened his checkbook and bestowed upon The Boston Post a personal "loan" totaling half a million dollars. News of the "loan" surfaced quickly, and Joe Kennedy denied that it had any influence on The Post's endorsement.

Yeah, sure. JFK himself knew better. Years later, while looking back at his '52 race, he remarked to journalist Fletcher Knebel, "You know, we had to buy that f-----g newspaper, or I'd have been licked."

The word now is that the Massachusetts legislature appears unlikely to change the law again. Perhaps it might be deemed rude to deny a dying man his last wish, and there is tragedy in the realization that Kennedy didn't live to vote on the fruits of his work on health care. But it would be wrong to again change the special election law for one party's short-tem advantage.

»  More His final wish

I'm embedded for the next 10 days in a southern mountain town, with every intention of ignoring the news. That’s the purpose of a vacation. I can’t get with the kind of vacation that Al Pacino had in the film where he played a CBS workaholic who stood in the ocean screaming into his cellphone...OK, Pacino is always screaming, but you get my point. In these mountains I can barely get my cellphone to work, which is fine by me.

Still, I'll undoubtedly write from time to time. Mostly small items and allegedly pithy musings.

The usual verbosity will return next Friday, Sept. 4.

-------

Speaking of small items...

A respected survey firm, Public Policy Polling, has unearthed a statistic that gives us yet another dimension on the ignorance that pervades our nation. The pollsters have been probing the "birther" phenomenon, the refusal of so many Americans to believe that Barack Obama was born on American soil. They solved part of the mystery the other day. Get ready for this one:

Ten percent of Americans don't know that Hawaii is a state.

You read that right. According to PPP, six percent believe that Hawaii is not part of the United States, and four percent are unsure.

Well, that probably explains some of the birthers; these would be the people who acknowledge that Obama was born in Hawaii, but apparently think that Hawaii is some exotic foreign land.

Seriously, 10 percent of Americans don't know that Hawaii has been in the fold for the past 50 years? There are 230 million adults in this country, which means that roughly 23 million of them wouldn't be able to pass a basic civics test. Ponder that one for awhile.

»  More Pithy vacation items

A tweaked and expanded version of the Sunday print column:


Is George W. Bush on the ballot this November in New Jersey? I recently saw a Democratic TV ad that invoked him as a bogeyman six times in 30 seconds.

Is Bush on the ballot this Novem"er in Virginia? I recently heard the Democratic candidate for governor declare, “Let’s be clear. George Bush is responsible for our economic problems."

The two marquee races of 2009 – Jon Corzine’s fevered bid to save his gubernatorial job in New Jersey, and his party’s ambitious bid to elect a third successive Democratic governor in Virginia - will demonstrate whether Bush-bashing can still sway the voters and deliver the goods.

After all, the tactic worked so well for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008. And let’s remember that running successfully against ex-presidents is a tried and true tradition. The Democrats thrashed Herbert Hoover in 1932, and then banged on him for the rest of the century.

The Republicans are no different. They racked up a landslide against George McGovern 37 years ago, yet they still circulate his name as a synonym for wimp. They ran against Jimmy Carter in 1988, even though he’d been gone for eight years; in TV ads, they dug up footage of cars waiting in gas pump lines during the ’79 energy crisis, complete with Johnny Mercer on the soundtrack crooning "I Remember You."

But I question whether bashing Bush will work this year.

It’s just as likely that the Republicans can win both races by framing them as referenda on Barack Obama – not necessarily by attacking the president directly, but by identifying and mobilizing those voters who seem particularly angry about his proposed policy overhauls (as well as those voters who have swallowed preposterous lies about his overhauls).

To grasp the opportunity, Republicans need only look at the polls. In blue New Jersey, a new Quinnipiac University survey shows that Obama’s approval rating has fallen 12 points in the past two months (from 68 to 56 percent), due largely to a plunge among swing-voting independents. And in Virginia, a new Washington Post survey shows that Obama is actually a drag on Democratic gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds; only 23 percent of swing voters said that Obama’s endorsement makes them more likely to support Deeds, while 37 percent said they were less likely.

A bit of perspective is necessary, however. If the new president appears to lack coattails, he would hardly be the first. Historically, the party that controls the White House tends to lose these New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races. The Republicans won both in 1997, one year after Bill Clinton was easily re-elected. Amd the Democrats won both in 2001 – a mere eight weeks after 9/11, when Bush was a war president at the peak of his popularity.

These "odd-year" voters tend to be contrarians who care little about the prevailing Washington powers; indeed, they often care more about quirky local issues. Virginia voters in 1997 got all excited when Republican candidate James Gilmore pledged to abolish the hated property tax on automobiles. They elected him on that basis, not realizing that the car tax was not a state levy, that actually it was handled by counties and municipalities.

But this kind of historical perspective won’t matter this year. Obama’s people recognize the potential spin problem: If Corzine and Deeds go down in November, their defeats will be widely interpreted (by the political media, with GOP encouragement) as a general thumbs-down verdict on Obama, thereby further imperiling his political capital.

That would not be fair to Obama, at least in New Jersey. Corzine’s woes are clearly his own; he was taking heat for the state economy, corruption among fellow Democrats, and the tax issue long before Obama broke big. Obama has been stumping for Corzine, and Corzine has put Obama in a TV ad, but in the end that race is a referendum on Corzine.

Perhaps Corzine’s best hope is to link Chris Christie, his Republican opponent, to a politician who is even more unpopular than he is. That would be Bush, of course. Hence the Corzine TV ad that seeks to weight down Christie with Bush baggage - noting that Christie raised money for Bush, that he allegedly awarded millions in no-bid contracts to "Bush cronies," that Christie is pushing "the same failed Bush economics," that he is "Bush’s friend."

The Corzine team also got some luck the other day, when the news surfaced that Christie, on several occasions, had discussed his prospective Republican candidacy with Bush political guru Karl Rove – while serving as U.S. attorney, a job that is supposed to be apolitical. On July 7, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on an unrelated matter, Rove said that Christie wanted to know "who were good people that knew about running for governor that he could talk to."

Corzine has tried to mine this news for its Bush connection, but the issue is whether New Jersey voters care more about Karl Rove than about their own property taxes. I suspect it’s the latter, and, besides, the Quinnipiac pollsters said last month that 77 percent of New Jersey voters want Corzine to focus on state issues in this campaign.

But it’s arguably smart politics (or perhaps just desperate politics) to link Christie to "failed Bush economics." Even though Obama has taken hits in the polls, people are still likelier to blame Bush – not Obama – for the nation’s economic woes. The latest Rasmussen poll reports that 55 percent of Americans cite Bush as the main culprit. The latest CBS-New York Times poll, asking a different mix of questions, reports that 30 percent blame Bush while only four percent blame Obama.

So it’s no wonder that Obama himself is trying to make the races a referendum on Bush. Not long ago, he headlined a Virginia rally for Creigh Deeds and sought to shift blame to the ex-president by lamenting "the folks who created the mess...When I walked in, we had a $1.3-trillion deficit. That was gift-wrapped and waiting for me when I walked into the Oval Office." He ratcheted up the rhetoric while recently stumping with Corzine in New Jersey, assailing Bush for "a recession that was caused by years of recklessness and irresponsibility."

In Virginia, Deeds himself sought in a speech last Friday to saddle his Republican opponent with Bush baggage: "Just recently, (Bob McDonnell) said he believes that President Bush did a good job and he created - and I'm quoting here - 'an economic revival in America.' The fiscal policies of George Bush doubled the national debt and resulted in over 300,000 Virginians losing their jobs and 48,000 Virginia families losing their homes to foreclosure. That's not a revival, and I will not let my opponent take us back to this economic approach."

These odd-year elections are all about passion. Since most voters tend to stay home, the trick is to crank them up and turn them out. With the Democrats playing defense in 2009, perhaps their best hope is to galvanize their people by banging Bush one more time (and if it works, notwithstanding Bush’s disappearing act, we’ll see the tactic again in 2010).

But, considering the sweep of Obama’s ambitious agenda and ubiquitous presence, it’s more likely that any ’09 referendum will be on him – or perceived as such. The past recedes, fairly or not. To borrow the president’s words, it’s all about "the fierce urgency of now."
 

»  More Bush versus Obama in 2009