Yonatan Zunger’s Blog

The day’s primaries in Indiana and North Carolina are drawing to a close. In the large scheme of things, these probably aren’t going to shift the course of history; but the things I’ve been hearing all day today have made me angry, much angrier – and much sadder – than anything I’ve seen in the United States in a while. (And God knows, there has been plenty of competition.)

It started with the legal fracas (which started over the past week) over people tied to the Clinton campaign making fraudulent robocalls to black voters to falsely convince them that they weren’t registered to vote. I was willing to wait to see if this was isolated, but…

has been working for the Obama campaign in Indiana today, with a sharp focus on making sure people who can legally vote can actually do so. Take a look at his posts from today: 5:52 AM 7:55 AM 9:40 AM 11 AM 12:30 PM 8 PM. I should say that this is not a random poll worker; this is an attorney with an extraordinary record of public service and devotion to democracy. He is someone whose opinion on elections I take seriously. And I’ve heard similar things from other channels.

If this is really what happened — Clinton campaign workers systematically attempting to prevent voters that they see as likely to vote against them, attempting to prevent black voters from voting — then I think that this campaign has crossed a certain line which I didn’t expect that anyone on this side of the aisle would cross. It would represent a deliberate attempt to interfere with the basic operation of democracy for personal gain.

(NB: I didn’t say that Clinton personally authorized this, and I seriously doubt that she did. But something doesn’t happen on this wide a scale, in a state so closely watched by the candidate, without at least being tacitly condoned from the top. With something this serious, it doesn’t really matter; the simple act of having created an environment within a campaign where such a thing would be considered acceptable by field workers on a large scale is, in my eyes, a sign of a deep and pervasive moral failure of the people at the top. If it was with an actual explicit OK, which is unlikely, it would be such a reprehensible act that it doesn’t even bear mentioning)

Why does this make me so angry? I know this isn’t exactly unique in American history. But the scale of hypocrisy that would be required to do such a thing while preaching to the Democratic choir, while waving the flag of Bill Clinton’s “blackness,” and the simple fact that a Democrat would be willing to do this even in a party primary, seems to make what would ordinarily be a contemptible action far worse.

I think this is also why I find it worse than watching Middle Eastern politics. I don’t expect a Syrian election to be even vaguely legitimate. I expect the US to try to create a gold standard of how democracies are run.

So. I’m going to wait a while longer, to see if this is confirmed by further sources over the next few weeks. If (God forbid) this checks out, and Clinton does win the nomination, then I don’t think that I will be able to support her in the general election. Not that I’m likely to vote for McCain, whose policies I think would drag the country even further into the abyss¹; but I may simply abstain from the presidential election.

¹ Under the Bush administration, our country was led to the brink of an abyss; but under a McCain administration, we would take a great leap forward.

A very interesting US civics quiz. Difficult, and fun.

You answered 55 out of 60 correctly — 91.67 %
Average score for this quiz during April: 66.8%
Average score since September 18, 2007: 66.8%

At tonight’s Clinton-Obama debate, one of the hosts asked an almost inevitable question about Clinton’s “day one” rhetoric: “What would you do differently on day one than a President Obama would when it comes to managing the nation’s economy?” After both candidates answered, it was hard to avoid the impression that the real answer is “not much;” they both had fairly similar plans. And this was the case with a lot of what they said tonight; the policy differences between the two candidates seem relatively minimal, and I suspect that a lot of the places where they do differ are the sorts of things that would change after the election. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama’s health plan ended up taking on more aspects of Edwards’ as it got prepared; and I would be surprised if Clinton would really freeze the prime interest rate for five years, as she promised to do tonight.¹)

But this made me realize where I think the biggest difference between the two candidates is: Not on day one of a presidency, but on day sixty.

If a new president were to start to push the sorts of policies that both candidates have endorsed, about health care, the economy, or Iraq, they would start to run into serious resistance. Within two months, some very powerful interests would have marshalled considerable forces to oppose those changes. And on that day, what really matters is whether the president has the ideological leadership of the country; can he or she go out in public, make the case that This Is What We Need To Do, and cause people to form up behind the idea?

Simply having a sheaf of policy proposals, no matter how well-designed, is not enough. The power of the president isn’t in the passing of laws; it’s in the bully pulpit, in the power to set the policy direction of the country and rally the citizenry to do what needs to be done. Bill Clinton knew how to do that. Ronald Reagan did, too. Obama has often been compared to JFK, and I think the comparison is somewhat apt; he may lack experience, but experience has been a poor predictor of presidential success. But Hillary Clinton? After half a year of campaigning, I still don’t know what her grand vision is. From hearing her response and Obama’s to the question of meeting with Raúl Castro, I would almost think it was “cautiousness.” As she’s fond of saying, she has been tested before against strong Republican opposition — but she failed. Her health care plan went down in flames because she didn’t unify anyone behind it, and I haven’t seen any evidence that she’s gotten better at that. Plus, of course, there is a significant field of Republicans who would consider it their first responsibility to stymie anything Hillary Clinton does as a matter of principle; AFAIK, few feel similarly strongly against Obama.

So what I would foresee from a Clinton presidency is a mess. A lot of exciting proposals coming out on the first day, lots of big, thick bills going into the legislature, lots of lobbyists showing up, lots of sneaky ads and negative campaigns running around in the media, and ultimately her being forced to back down. Followed by four years of not being very effective, because the Democrats in Congress can’t get their act together enough to pass things even when they are in the majority unless they have a strong leader, and very likely a Republican president in 2012.

I don’t know what would happen from an Obama presidency, but it’s less likely to be that. Faced with a Day Sixty challenge, I expect that he would have been out there in front of the country for the entire time prior to that, forcefully making his case for reforms; the negative campaign is far less likely to even start, much less gain serious traction, if the people making it realize that public opinion is strongly against them to begin with. I don’t know if his policies would be as good in their details, but they would have a chance to pass.

So this past primary, I voted for Obama. I support his campaign and think he would make a genuinely better leader for this country than Hillary Clinton, a better leader than John McCain.

I don’t want a president with nothing more than policy papers; I want one who can help restore our vision of America as a country worthy of emulation.

One more thing…

Ah, Mike Huckabee. Favored candidate in Iowa because, as far as I can tell, nobody’s listened to him enough to realize why he’s a nut job. Here’s his Iowa campaign manager, Bob van der Plaats, explaining why he’s qualified to handle foreign policy — because he’s “a man who understands the theological nature of this war.”

Embattled Attorney General Resigns.

You know, I remember when Ashcroft resigned, that I wondered how exactly the administration was going to find someone worse. It didn’t take too long to find out — they hired a replacement whose biggest qualification had to do with writing memos justifying the use of torture. And this guy has really lived up to that; he’s spent the past two years expanding executive power beyond what King George ever claimed, aiding and abetting the administration to evade and ignore the law, lying outright to Congress whenever not under oath, and when under oath telling things which have only the most technical relationship to the truth, and working tirelessly, day in and day out, to dismantle the Constitution and replace it with an unquestionable single-man rule.

Hold on, I just realized that the past few news stories may give Orwell an unfair advantage. So here’s one more (although it’s good news, relatively speaking): The (very conservative and usually government-friendly) 4th circuit court of appeals in DC ruled today that the government must allow Guantánamo detainees who are challenging their detention to see the evidence against them. No formal response yet from the administration, but I’ll give you one guess as to what it will be.