Latest Racist Anti-Obama Forward

By Christopher Hayes

Delightful.

Wonder what this guy would make of it. (For background, read here.)

More on the latest anti-Obama smears here and an extended look at the phenomenon of right-wing emails here.

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March 24, 2008

The Goolsbee Problem

By Christopher Hayes

If you talk to economists, left, right, center, they generally express respect and admiration for the academic work of Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago economist who is Obama's chief domestic policy advisor. That said, Goolsbee is a straight, up the middle centrist Democrat in his politics.

He's not a "Chicago-school" economist, but he does work at Chicago and, well, that tends to exert certain pressures on one's worldview. For this reason I've always though Obama's selection of Goolsbee has his chief advisor was strange and disappointing. It's good to have sharp technocrats around you, but when it comes to economic policy, ideology isn't a bad thing. Many of the problems we face are problems of political economy, problems of distribution and not problems for which there are straightforward technocratic solutions. Goolsbee's a tax economist, which might explain Obama's frustrating tendency to talk about economic inequality as being caused by the Bush tax cuts, with the obvious remedy being to reverse them. But the problem is that there's been a consistent and troubling rise in pre-tax inequality, and the remedies for this are much more obviously political: strengthening unions, for one. But because of his beliefs and sociology of the profession and university to which he belongs, Goolsbee simply isn't going to invest tremendous energy in calling for stronger unions.

I thought about Goolsbee during the last few weeks and how much he must of been squirming as Obama attacked NAFTA in Ohio. And I think whatever was said in the meeting he had with the Canadian consulate in Chicago, the revelation of the meeting really did have an effect in Ohio.

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March 5, 2008

Kitchen Sink Working?

By Christopher Hayes

Check out this graph from Pollster.com. It shows Obama's numbers declining in absolute terms over the last few days in TX. This is the first time in the entire campaign that this has happened. The "kitchen sink" strategy seems to be working.

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March 4, 2008

Feingold Attacks Edwards' Record

By Christopher Hayes

One of the things that's most vexing about John Edwards is the disconnect between his current rhetoric, message and policy prescriptions (which are quite progressive, and excellent) and his six-year record as a US Senator which was neither of those things. In an interview yesterday, Russ Feingold went after Edwards for his record:

The one that is the most problematic is (John) Edwards, who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq war … He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even though he had the opposite voting record.

When you had the opportunity to vote a certain way in the Senate and you didn't, and obviously there are times when you make a mistake, the notion that you sort of vote one way when you're playing the game in Washington and another way when you're running for president, there's some of that going on.

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January 18, 2008

What Just Happened

By Christopher Hayes

Well, that was interesting. Here's a quick theory on what just happened: I was telling someone earlier today that to me the single biggest story out of New Hampshire these last five days was the press corps' evident glee in the Clintons' "demise."

There they stood on shore as the Titanic sank, waving sadistically as the passengers and shipmates scrambled for life rafts. To a lot of Democratic primary voters this no doubt stirred intense memories of the Kenneth Starr witch-hunt and the impeachment madness. I think it was so over-the-top, it changed some votes.

People didn't want to feel like they were endorsing this wholesale evisceration of the Clintons. Also, it's worth remembering that the most popular Hillary Clinton has ever been was during the Lewinsky affair, when she was a deeply sympathetic figure. From a feminist perspective, there's something a bit troubling about Clinton being most palatable when she's most vulnerable, but she was certainly vulnerable this week, and I think the over-hyped tears moment probably pushed a lot of voters (especially women whom she won handily) into her column.

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January 9, 2008

Political Tourism

By Christopher Hayes

CLAREMONT, NH -- After attending about 15 campaign events here in New Hampshire, I've noticed an interesting little trend: a surprisingly high percentage of people attending the campaign events are out-of-staters. I've talked to people from Massachusetts, New Jersey, Cleveland, New York City, and Washington DC. None of them are in New Hampshire for any official reason or in any official capacity. They're just there because they want to see the candidates and this is the only way to do it. I talked to one couple from the Cleveland suburbs who've seen Edwards, Clinton and Obama, another woman who was planning on doing the same. They're political tourists. It's like when people fly into New Orleans for a jazz festival, or New York to take in a few broadway shows over a weekend, except these are political junkies who fly to New Hampshire to take in a few stump speeches and soak up the atmosphere. It's kind of cool, except for the fact it highlights just how absurd our primary system is.

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January 7, 2008

What's The Mandate For?

By Christopher Hayes

LEBANON, NH -- At a town hall in a high school here, John Edwards organizers had to set up an overflow room, the event was so packed. During the Q and A, a woman got up and said: "I agree with you completely and I want to support you. But the special interests you talk about never seem to go away. What are the mechanism's you'll use to beat them?"

It was a good question. Edwards answered by talking about the need to fight, not just negotiate or "bring people together" and then segued into a conversation about public financing of elections. He also basically said he'd take his case to the people, get out of Washington and try to build public support as opposed to cutting deals in the Beltway. (Bush tried this when he tried to kill social security. He lost not because it was a bad strategy, but because the policy was wildly unpopular). It crystallized one of my most nagging doubts I have about the Obama phenomenon. It's clear what people are voting for when the vote for John Edwards, with Obama not so much. So if John Edwards is elected president he will have a mandate to take on the monied interests and revive economic democracy. If Barack Obama gets elected he'll have a mandate to be Barack Obama.

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January 5, 2008

"Festering"

By Christopher Hayes

The fundamental dynamic of the Democratic race changed when Obama started to make a different version of the same case Edwards had been making all along: that it wasn't enough to say that the last eight years were an aberration, a national nightmare, from which we could simply wake up, as Clinton was arguing. Instead, both Obama and Edwards argue that there's something rotten at the core of our politics (bitter divisiveness, and corporate power respectively), that requires a completely new approach. Given that, this line in Obama's speech at the Democratic dinner last night stood out to me. He talked about the problems the nation faces, problems that "George Bush made far worse, but that were festering long before George Bush took office."

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January 5, 2008

Why Campaign Coverage So Often Sucks

By Christopher Hayes

MANCHESTER, NH -- Before I post about dynamics of the race as it's playing out here, a quick thought about the psychology of the political press . Reporting at event like this is exciting and invigorating, but it's also terrifying. I've done it now a number of times at conventions and such, and in the past I was pretty much alone the entire time. I didn't know any other reporters, so I kept to myself and tried to navigate the tangle of schedules and parking lots and hotels and event venues. It's daunting and the whole time you think: "Am I missing something? What's going? Oh man, I should go interview that guy in the parka with the fifteen buttons on his hat." You fear getting lost, or missing some important piece of news, or making an ass out of yourself when you have to muster up that little burst of confidence it takes to walk up to a stranger and start asking them questions.

Of course, it's amazing work. But I realized for the first time yesterday, that this essential terror isn't just a byproduct of inexperience. It never goes away . Veteran reporters are just as panicked about getting lost or missing something, just as confused about who to talk to. This why reporters move in packs. It's like the first week of freshman orientation, when you hopped around to parties in groups of three dozen, because no one wanted to miss something or knew where anything was.

Then there's always the fact that when you go to one of these events as a reporter, there's part of you that's aware that you don't really belong there. You're an outsider, standing on the edges observing the people who are there doing the actually stuff of politics: listening to a candidate, cheering, participating. So reporters run with that distance: they crack wise, they kibbitz in the back, they play up their detachment. That leads to coverage that is often weirdly condescending and removed from the experience of politics.

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January 5, 2008

Clinton Campaign County Chair Pushing Obama Smear

By Christopher Hayes

The infamous Obama-is-a-secret Muslim smear (repeatedly shown to be false) has been winging around the internet via an email forward since late December last year. As I documented for the Nation, it's a permutation of a charge first leveled by a fringe figure in Illinois, but has since been forwarded around by ordinary people either out of ignorance, credulousness or malice. We now have the first example of the smear being forwarded by a someone tied to a rival campaign. Yesterday, Gary Hart, the Jones County Chair of the Democratic party in Iowa (and a Dodd supporter) wrote a diary on DailyKos saying he'd been forwarded the infamous email by an unnamed "Clinton county chair."

In a comment posted in response, the Clinton campaign's Internet Director Peter Daou, posted a statement from the campaign confirming that the email had indeed been forwarded by a "volunteer county coordinator," but said it was "wholly unauthorized" and that the campaign was "unaware of it."

"We are asking this volunteer county coordinator to step down," the statement continued "and are making it clear to every person involved in our campaign that this will not be tolerated."

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December 5, 2007