Paul Krugman on Rove's Third Term.
Paul Krugman writes that the latest Republican smears on Wes Clark smack of Rove's handiwork and that a vote for McCain would be a vote for the disgraced formed Bush aide Karl Rove.
What General Clark actually said was that Mr. McCain’s war service, though heroic, didn’t necessarily constitute a qualification for the presidency. It was a blunt but truthful remark, and not at all outrageous — especially given the fact that General Clark is himself a bona fide war hero.
Yet the Clark affair did reveal something important — not about General Clark, but about Mr. McCain. Now we know what a McCain administration would represent: namely, a third term for Karl Rove.
It was predictable that the McCain campaign would go wild over the Clark remarks. Mr. McCain’s run for the White House has always been based on persona rather than policy: he doesn’t have ideas that voters agree with, but he does have an inspiring life story — which, contrary to the myth of the modest maverick, he talks about all the time. The suggestion that this life story isn’t relevant to his quest for office was bound to provoke a violent reaction.
And the latest smear on Obama -- that he has somehow turned into a serial flip-flopper -- also seems to have Rove's fingerprints on it seeing that has always been one of his favorite lines of attack. Krugman's point, that a vote for McCain would be a vote for a third term of Rove, undermines the Times' editorial board's own editoral claiming that Obama is backtracking.
The editorial claims that Obama is somehow on a "high roller hunt." First of all, Obama never said that he would get rid of high-end fundraisers; what he did promise was to give low-end donors much more of a stake than before. And there are practical reasons for what he is doing, based on past history -- Howard Dean ran a campaign in 2004 that was mostly small-donor based, and it wore itself out by the time the elections came around. By the time the first wave of primaries passed, the Dean campaign was out of money. There is only so much small money to go around, and the fact that Obama had a disappointing fundraising month last month suggested that he had to change course.
Then, the editorial takes aim at Obama for the FISA bill. The problems with the FISA bill are manifold -- even if Obama is right that it does not strip criminal immunity, it is unconstitutional because it amounts to an ex post facto law and it grants special rights to corporations that we would not have. It's not like you or I could break the law and then turn around and ask Congress to give us retroactive immunity. But the editorial still misses the point about Obama -- the fact of the matter is that he has always been a compromiser at heart; he even goes as far to say that President Bush is a good man. Thus, there is nothing surprising about what Obama did, even if he errs on the side of compromise in this instance. Whether the FISA bill actually accomplishes its goal of tracking terrorists while protecting civil liberties is debatable -- Obama says it does while Feingold says it doesn't.
The editorial continues:
The Barack Obama of the primary season used to brag that he would stand before interest groups and tell them tough truths. The new Mr. Obama tells evangelical Christians that he wants to expand President Bush’s policy of funneling public money for social spending to religious-based organizations — a policy that violates the separation of church and state and turns a government function into a charitable donation.
He says he would not allow those groups to discriminate in employment, as Mr. Bush did, which is nice. But the Constitution exists to protect democracy, no matter who is president and how good his intentions may be.
But as Obama stated in his own speech, from personal experience, there are faith-based programs that work. Under Obama's plan, money would not go towards ideological programs like abstinence programs that do nothing to prevent teen pregnancy; that was one of his main criticisms of the program. But there are plenty of programs out there that compliment the public school system; for instance, we have to remember that in many Black neighborhoods, the church is the center of community life. These churches have played a major role in revitalizing inner cities and keeping youth from falling through the cracks. Obama has always supported funding such programs both in his book and on the campaign trail.
And there is another reality that is changing -- evangelicals, as noted by the Times itself, if the editorial board would care to read their own paper, are shifting away from the lock-step Republicanism that characterized them before. It is not just good public policy to fund faith-based programs that follow government rules that maintain the wall of separation between church and state; it is good politics as well. More and more, you see evangelicals who see environmentalism as a matter of good stewardship or Iraq as a pro-life issue or taking care of the poor as a Biblical mandate that outweighs Rush Limbaugh's whines about people not working hard enough.
As for gun control, Obama has always spoken about the Second Amendment as allowing an individual right to bear arms as opposed to a collective right. Gun control is one of those issues that should be left up to local authorities because there are different dynamics at play. In rural areas, they might not want to have any regulations at all because people like to hunt. But in urban and suburban areas, most people know other people whom they would not trust anywhere near a gun. There are people who are from inner-cities originally who were glad to get away because they were in an environment where they were hearing gunshots on a nightly basis. The problem with the SCOTUS ruling is that there is no cookie cutter approach that can work for the whole country because different communities have different needs.
And Obama, in his book, has always been in favor of the death penalty for child rapists. Now, I would disagree with that because of the fact that death is final and it is still possible to convict innocent people wrongly. It can be argued that DNA advances mean that people could be convicted with a near absolute degree of certainty. But we have not gotten to the point where we can establish such standards. And as Justice Kennedy pointed out in his ruling, children will be more reluctant to testify against child rapists if they know that they would be responsible for their deaths. Juries might tend to acquit and let a guilty man go free if they think that he did it but that it does not warrant the death penalty. But that does not mean, as the editorial implies, that Obama backtracked on this issue; Obama has always taken this position.
Obamathon
