The Weekly Sift

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America – there’s the United States of America.

In this week’s Sift … the theme is partisanship. Barack Obama became famous by calling on America to unite and rise above it. In a campaign based on hope and change, that was perhaps the change that Americans hoped for most, the one that made Obama president. Is there any chance he can deliver on it?

• The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … look for Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. In addition to being the best explanation of the partisan divide that I’ve seen, it’s a fascinating retelling of the tumultuous period between Johnson’s Democratic landslide in 1964 and Nixon’s Republican landslide in 1972.
• Two Weeks. That’s how long it has been since George Bush’s last day as president. A brief recap of what we’ve seen since then.
• Obama Chooses His Opponent Carefully: Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh is emerging as the voice and face of the Republican Party. But that’s because the Democrats are choosing him, and the Republicans can’t afford to offend his audience.
• Short Notes. Rachel Maddow has no TV. The credit crunch of 33 AD. Blaming God for a Super Bowl loss. And talent appears off the beaten path.

… look for Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. Perlstein’s key insight is that the rift between Red America and Blue America begins with Richard Nixon. In the Johnson-over-Goldwater landslide of 1964, America seemed to have reached consensus around an idealistic liberal agenda: end poverty, rebuild the cities, give Negroes the full rights of citizenship, and much more. A mere eight years later, Nixon’s landslide re-election over McGovern exploited a broad-based resentment of all the groups who supported or benefited from that agenda: liberals, blacks, intellectuals, peaceniks, hippies, feminists, and anyone else whose patriotism was considered suspect. Nixonland is the story of those eight years.

The title is significant and well-chosen. The book isn’t called Nixon, because while Nixon is at the center of this change, the book isn’t really about him. It’s about Nixonland, which Perlstein defines as: “the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans.” The word itself was coined during the 1956 campaign, when Nixon was Eisenhower’s vice president and John Kenneth Galbraith wrote speeches for Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson:

In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; this is the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.

One event from Nixon’s college days provides a metaphor that stretches throughout the book. When Nixon arrived, Whittier College politics was dominated by an in-group known as the Franklins. Nixon became class president by establishing an out-group, the Orthogonians (literally at a right angle to the in-group), and cashing in on their resentment of the Franklins.

The Orthogonians’ base was among Whittier’s athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under the social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous strategy, is to concentrate on the nonspectacular — silent — majority.

Nixonland is the extension of this insight from Whittier to all of America. To pull it off, Nixon needed to properly identify America’s Franklins. He did, and his insight sticks today: The resented Franklins are not the rich (like John McCain) or well-born (like George W. Bush), but rather the sophisticated — the people with silver tongues and Harvard degrees (like Barack Obama). The Franklins are people who think they know better than you, people who make you feel ignorant or stupid. They’re elitists. They’re celebrities. Orthogonians, on the other hand, don’t have a lot of book-knowledge or the kind of experience that comes from foreign travel or from learning other languages and cultures. But they have small-town values. They’re hockey moms. Their good hearts (not their legal expertise) qualify them for the Supreme Court.

Resentment against the sophisticated Franklins has been carefully cultivated ever since, and was on display often during the fall campaign.

Nixon’s diabolical cleverness was matched by liberal blindness. One blind spot was about Nixon himself: Liberals had to admit that some people agreed with Nixon, but still couldn’t believe that anyone liked Nixon. (There’s a similar Palin blind spot today.) But the more serious blind spot was this:

It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble — whether instituting open housing, civilian complaint review boards, or sex education programs — when they presume that a reform is an inevitable concomitant of progress. It is then that they are most likely to establish their reforms by top-down bureaucratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.

They/we are too quick to assume that all intelligent well-informed people will see that they/we are right, and that no one else matters. The no-one-else-matters part is a fat pitch that Nixons have been hitting out of the park for almost half a century. Another lesson of the sixties is that liberals do not understand working-class patriotism. Americans identify with their country and will resist anyone who seems to be attacking it. Bad news about America — whether it’s My Lai or Abu Ghraib — has to be presented carefully, sadly rather than angrily. The perpetrators of such atrocities are an us, not a them.

Nixon’s insight crystallized when New York construction workers attacked an anti-war demonstration in 1969. Organized labor had been a key component of the Democratic coalition, and Republicans could not afford to alienate their corporate backers by appealing to workers’ economic interests. But if the white working class might vote on identity issues — short-hairs vs. long-hairs, pro-American workers vs. anti-American hippies and intellectuals — then economic appeals wouldn’t be necessary. That in a nutshell is the red/blue divide.

Violence is another of the book’s running themes. The sixties are remembered largely for left-wing violence, but Perlstein carefully documents the much more pervasive right-wing violence. Left-wing violence had a man-bites-dog quality that made it newsworthy. But the race riots, for example, were usually touched off by some egregious example of the everyday police abuse that was taken for granted in that era. One of the later Watts riots began when a black man was stopped for speeding and killed in front of his wife because he argued too vociferously. The speeding and arguing had a simple explanation: the wife was in labor and Watts had no hospital. White-on-black violence was often provoked by an “aggressive” act like moving into a white neighborhood or sending a child to a white school. The Walker Commission later characterized the violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention as a “police riot“. Nonetheless, the “law and order” theme that developed was conservative code for cracking down on blacks and peaceniks, not on police, lynch mobs, or construction workers — much less on state governments that defied the law’s promise of equal protection for citizens of all races.

Perlstein himself (born in 1969) has no personal memories of this era, but his book is steeped not just in the political history, but the social history as well. Apparently he has paged through every relevant copy of Life, watched all the movies, and listened to all the songs. (Occasionally, as George Will’s review notes, he gets something wrong. Straw Dogs, for example, was not a western.) For someone who did live through the era — I had just turned 7 when JFK was assassinated and had a precocious interest in politics — the book provides a continuous shock of recognition. It’s easy to forget how many events got packed into a small space, and even today the memories still come with a soundtrack: Vietnam (both pro and con), the Summer of Love, the King and Kennedy assassinations, Woodstock, antiwar demonstrations, Kent State, the Chicago 7 trial, the backlash against it all, and much, much more.

The question Perlstein never answers is: How can we leave Nixonland? That seems to me to be the key question of the Obama administration. Will further attempts to polarize America start to fall flat now? Or will we just run the script again, with a new generation of Franklins telling a new generation of Orthogonians that their country is bad, and that their feelings and beliefs and opinions don’t matter, because the facts (if they would only bother to learn them) are on our side?

Right now the focus in on the stimulus bill, which (despite many compromises) got zero Republican votes in the House, but passed anyway. Basically, the debate comes down to this: Democrats want to stimulate by having the government spend money; Republicans want to stimulate by cutting taxes, particularly rich people’s taxes (because we haven’t been trying that already for eight years).

The Republican plan is based on supply-side economics, which boils down to the idea that lower taxes motivate people to try harder to make money. The problem with this theory is easy to explain: Economics has two main motivators — greed and fear. Booms are dominated by greed; busts by fear. Supply-side economics is greed-based economics, and it describes pretty well how an economy will behave during a boom: Investors and entrepreneurs are just dying to buy more stocks and start more businesses, so if you give them an extra dollar, they’ll use it as collateral to borrow three more and invest it in something.

But in a bust, supply-side economics doesn’t work at all, because fear is dominant. Investors aren’t even trying to make money, really. They’re just trying not to lose their shirts. Cut the capital gains tax and most of them will say, “Blast from the past! I remember capital gains.”

That’s why the studies Republicans cite now to support a tax cut are all inverted in one way or another. The study shows, say, that raising taxes costs the economy jobs — so they draw the conclusion that cutting taxes will create jobs in an equal and opposite way. Hidden in that mirror-image reasoning is the assumption that greed will magically replace fear. But it won’t. Fearful people will sit on their tax cut, and do nothing to stimulate the economy.

In this period where the Republican Party seems rudderless and faceless, Democrats are happily promoting Rush Limbaugh as the opposition’s true leader. It’s a little like what the Republicans tried to do with Michael Moore a few years back. Obama himself kicked it off January 23rd. In addition to a number of carrots, Obama’s plea for congressional bipartisanship on the stimulus bill contained this hint of a stick: “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”

Limbaugh, naturally, is doing what he does, saying things like: “We are being told that we have to hope [Obama] succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.” And: “So I shamelessly say, no, I want him to fail.”

The American people are (justifiably) scared right now, and most of us don’t want to hear stuff like this. So Republican Congressman Phil Gingrey tried to distance himself from it, telling Politico: “it’s easy if you’re Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich to stand back and throw bricks. You don’t have to try to do what’s best for your people and your party.” But the next day “because of the high volume of phone calls and correspondence received by my office since the Politico article ran” he had to back down: “I see eye-to-eye with Rush Limbaugh … Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and other conservative giants are the voices of the conservative movement’s conscience.”

I don’t remember Michael Moore getting any similar apologies. Maybe Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party.

Now, after House Republicans voted 177-0 against the stimulus bill (and Fox News gave Limbaugh credit), Americans United for Change has upped the ante a little: They’re running ads targeting Republican senators: “Will Senator ____ side with Limbaugh too? … or will he reject the partisanship and failed economic policies of the past, and stand up for the people of ____.“

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker interprets all this as Obama taking Limbaugh’s bait, and warns: “Never let rabble-rousers get under your skin — especially those whose popularity in some circles compares favorably with your own and whose earnings make bailed-out bank presidents envious.”

But Obama knows exactly what he’s doing. The “some circles” where Limbaugh is more popular than Obama are all on the far right. The secret of Republican success the last few decades has been to court these extremists in ways that the general populace wouldn’t see. But if Limbaugh becomes the face of the Republican Party nationally, they will lose big — and they know it.

The lesson here is that Obama realizes he can’t just unilaterally disarm in the red/blue wars. It remains to be seen whether he can wind the battle down. The Limbaugh gambit isn’t a direct attack on Republicans, it’s a shot across the bow. “Don’t go there,” he’s warning them. But what if they do anyway?

Young people won’t remember, but this kind of remark was actually considered a clever comeback around 1970, when the patriarchs figured that the Women’s Liberation fad would burn itself out before long. They were sure that (deep down) successful women like Joan Walsh really wanted to trade it all to marry powerful men like Dick Armey. Pointing out that this dream could never come true was supposed to be devastating. (Walsh seems strikingly undevastated.)

We’re a country comprised of human beings that the Democrat Party and the left have attempted to arrange into groups of victims, and that’s who [Obama] appeals to … You put people into groups then you victimize them and give the victims power over the majority because they, they have grievances that … have been made up, and the majority gets cowed into fear because they don’t want to be complained at.

So, America, don’t be cowed. Join Rush and strike back at those so-called “victims” and their made-up grievances.

It’s no big secret that I’m a Rachel Maddow fan. I love the interview that 60 Minutes host Lesley Stahl did with her. Especially this part:

LESLEY: I have to ask you something that is apropos of absolutely nothing. But I did hear that you do not own a television set. It’s true, right?
RACHEL: Yes.
LESLEY: Yes. So before we get very far, I want to ask you if you have the foggiest idea who the hell I am.
RACHEL: I’ve Googled you extensively. Don’t worry.

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer has started a worthwhile series: The Bogus Trend of the Week.

Trend might be the most abused word in journalism. To write a typical trend-story, all you really need is one event to serve as an example, a just-so story about why this might happen a lot these days, and then some hand-wringing (or hopeful, if the trend is positive) quotes from people who claim to be be affected.

The tell-tale mark of a bogus trend story is the absence of meaningful statistics. As any fan of the TV series Numbers knows, we live in such a measured and quantified society that any trend worth writing about has to produce some statistics somewhere. We are snowed under by statistics. To steal an image from baseball stat-guru Bill James, believing in an important trend that produces no numbers is like believing that elephants have been dancing in that snow without leaving tracks.

Anyway, here are two samples of Shafer’s bogus trends:

• The recession is increasing church attendance. The NYT says so, but they don’t talk to the guy at Gallup who studies precisely this subject. He doesn’t see it in the numbers.
• Teens are getting increasingly involved with explosives. CBS reports this, but it turns out — I could have told you this — that young guys have always liked to blow things up. (Given an excuse to set one off, middle-aged guys love explosions too.) The trend is actually down, not up.

So far the bogus trends haven’t been earth-shakers, but Shafer may help you join the trend towards increased reader-and-viewer skepticism regarding stories the media creates out of nothing.

You had to wonder how long it would take for Bush-administration officials to flip from arguing for the supremacy of the Republican executive branch to sounding the alarm about the dangers of an imperial Democratic presidency. I was naive enough to think they’d wait until the inauguration. But no.

In a January 4 NYT op-ed, John Bolton and John Yoo write that we should “strike the proper balance between the executive and legislative branches” by making sure that any international agreements Obama makes go through the formal treaty process, requiring a 2/3 ratification by the Senate — a supermajority that allows any 34 of the 41 Republican senators to block whatever they don’t like.

The Constitution’s Treaty Clause has long been seen, rightly, as a bulwark against presidential inclinations to lock the United States into unwise foreign commitments.

If Yoo ever reminded President Bush about the constitutional limits on presidential power, the incident was not recorded. Instead, he wrote the famous torture memos, in which he argued that a treaty duly signed by the United States and ratified by the Senate — the Convention Against Torture (CAT) — was essentially meaningless. Under his constitutional power as commander-in-chief, Yoo claimed, the president can order torture without notifying either the Senate or the countries we made the treaty with.

Any presidential decision to order interrogations methods that are inconsistent with CAT would amount to a suspension or termination of those treaty provisions.

But the president was a Republican then, so the Constitution meant something completely different. Now Bolton and Yoo worry that Obama will commit the US to the Kyoto agreements against global warming, to the International Criminal Court, or to other agreements that subordinate America to international law. (Yoo ought to worry. If the US were subject to the ICC, he could find himself on trial there for his role in the Bush administration’s war crimes. It’s shameful that the Times presents Yoo as if he were a disinterested observer when he clearly is not.) Obama might attempt this purely by executive agreement, or by executive agreement supported by a majority-vote congressional resolution rather than a 2/3 Senate ratification.

This has been done in the past by Republican presidents, or by Democrats with Republican support (like Bill Clinton and the NAFTA agreement). But of course there’s a difference:

It is true that some multinational economic agreements, like Bretton Woods, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement, went into effect after approval by majorities of Congress rather than two-thirds of the Senate. But international agreements that go beyond the rules of international trade and finance — that involve significant national-security commitments, or that purport to delegate lawmaking and enforcement functions to international organizations, or that could fundamentally alter the American constitutional system of individual rights — should receive the intense scrutiny of the treaty process, regardless of their policy merits.

A few objections:

1. The Constitution never mentions a distinction between economic and national-security agreements.
2. Our trade agreements surrender sovereignty to international organizations (like the WTO) just as much as national-security agreements do.
3. The most outrageous abrogation of Congress’ role in treaties — the status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) that the Bush adminstration just signed with Iraq — goes completely unmentioned. The SOFA required extensive parliamentary debate in Baghdad. But (according to former Reagan deputy attorney general Bruce Fein)

Bush promulgated the SOFA unilaterally as an executive agreement. He neither sought nor received congressional ratification. … The enormously important international military pact was a unilateral diktat of the president, similar to the treaty-making power of British monarchs circa 1776.

But never mind. The SOFA happened before Obama’s historical inauguration, which will completely change the meaning of the Constitution — for some people, anyway.

Dianne Feinstein got a lot of attention by announcing that Obama didn’t consult her before nominating Leon Panetta to head the CIA, and that she’d rather have an intelligence professional for the job.

Other than Rachel Maddow, the mainstream media did a bad job of presenting the subtext of this conflict: Feinstein, like Jay Rockefeller and some other high-ranking Democrats, is tainted by the the Bush administration’s crimes. They didn’t torture anybody or tap any phones, but as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, they got enough information to know that illegal things were happening.

Nobody was in a better position to blow the whistle. Yes, the programs were classified, but Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution forbids prosecuting members of Congress for anything they say on the floor: “for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.” But they did nothing. They went along. That’s why DiFi and Jello Jay (nicknames I didn’t make up) want the CIA headed by “an intelligence professional” — someone who is similarly tainted, in other words.

One reason Dick Cheney is so certain he’ll never be brought to justice is that a full accounting of the last eight years would make a lot of Democrats look bad as well. Cheney et al assume there will be a gentlemen’s agreement not to look under too many rocks. In other words, mistakes were made, but no purpose would be served by spelling out what those mistakes were or who made them. (A Wall Street Journal editorial lays out this you’ll-go-down-with-us case.)

That’s a popular point of view in the establishment Village. Whether or not such a gentlemen’s agreement will stick is going to be one of the defining conflicts of the Obama administration. Virtually by definition, most of that conflict is going to take place out of the spotlight.

In contrast to the Feinsteins and Rockefellers, some people with a lot more at risk really did blow the whistle, and they’re paying the price. Newsweek tells the story of Thomas Tamm, the guy who told the New York Times about warrantless wiretapping.

The FBI has pursued him relentlessly for the past two and a half years. Agents have raided his house, hauled away personal possessions and grilled his wife, a teenage daughter and a grown son. More recently, they’ve been questioning Tamm’s friends and associates about nearly every aspect of his life. Tamm has resisted pressure to plead to a felony for divulging classified information. But he is living under a pall, never sure if or when federal agents might arrest him.

Glenn Greenwald comments at length. Fellow whistle-blower Jesselyn Radack wonders

how many taxpayer dollars have been spent “investigating” me, Tom Tamm, Sibel Edmonds and so many others who were simply trying to do their jobs, encountered gross wrongdoing, tried to correct it, and then were crucified with Javert investigations, criminal probes, professional assassination, character smears, astronomical legal bills, and the attendant health problems and family troubles that few could avoid under such circumstances.

The Gaza issue had me cruising a bunch of Jewish and Muslim web sites I don’t usually visit, and as a result I found some amusing links I wouldn’t usually find. Like this report from JewishJournal.com about a Santa Monica synagogue trying (but failing) to break the Guinness record for simultaneous dreidel-spinning. That near-historic event caused the Bintel Blog to link to one of the few Tom Lehrer songs I’d never heard: Hanukkah in Santa Monica.

I was skeptical, but I was too lazy to chase the links and figure out if he was presenting the research honestly. Nate Silver was less lazy, and guess what? Mankiw didn’t present the research honestly. The paper he referenced (co-authored by Obama advisor Christina Romer) was not talking about a tax cut as a counter-cyclical stimulus, but about a tax cut under different circumstances entirely. And then Nate answered Mankiw’s response.

No Sift next Monday; holiday travel and socializing is going to eat all my time this week. But the Sift will be back on January 5.

Thanks to all of you who have asked, but I’m faring quite well under Winter’s assault on the Northeast. My apartment (in Nashua, NH) hasn’t lost electrical power, and I’m getting a Currier-and-Ives view from my desk overlooking the Nashua River. Yesterday I got out and tromped around in the snow, which in our local wetland park varied from 1 to 2 feet depending on unpredictable wind patterns. The most amusing thing I saw was on Main Street. Some deceased local Nashua guy has a bust in the center of downtown. I’ve never learned his story and his full name always escapes me, but the bust is labeled “Larry”. Well, Sunday it looked like Larry had joined the KKK — the wind had sculpted snow into a peaked white hood over his head.

In this Week’s Sift

• The Torture Discussion Spreads. For the last few years, the easiest way to get yourself denounced as a wild-eyed radical was to claim that high-ranking officials who ordered torture — which is a war crime — should be investigated and maybe even prosecuted. But as the Bush administration goes out brazenly defending its legacy, more and more mainstream voices are calling for some kind of legal accountability.
• What’s the Point of a Stimulus? Recessions are a funny time: Individuals need to save more, but the economy as a whole needs to spend more. Government has to make up the difference.
• The Next Time You’re at the Book Store … look for The Army of the Republic, a novel about what can happen when legal accountability (and other democratic processes) break down.
• About Rick Warren. I seem to be the only liberal who likes the idea of him delivering the invocation at Obamas inauguration.
• Short Notes. Lots of them this week, but they’re short. Don’t miss Time’s Top 10s.

Now that a Senate report has made official what we all knew anyway, you can add the New York Times to the list of folks who want Bush administration law-breakers brought to justice:

We can understand that Americans may be eager to put these dark chapters behind them, but it would be irresponsible for the nation and a new administration to ignore what has happened — and may still be happening in secret C.I.A. prisons that are not covered by the military’s current ban on activities like waterboarding. A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse.

If things had played out like they usually do on 24 — if torture saved innocent lives, in other words — then we would need to have a real ethical debate. But a current Vanity Fair article sums up the tragedy of it all:

In researching this article, I spoke to numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence, they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts

So torture is not an ethical dilemma at all, any more than it was an ethical dilemma whether we should rescue the people at the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina. In both cases, having morally impoverished people at the top of our government led to big screw-ups with no redeeming features whatsoever.

Glenn Greenwald charts how the bizarre leftist idea that government officials should be accountable for their crimes is spreading in the mainstream media. And he notes one of the big roadblocks to be overcome: Any real investigation will show that top Democrats in Congress knew what was going on, but didn’t want to challenge Bush for fear of appearing unpatriotic. This, by the way, is why you should stand by your principles even when the wind is blowing the other way. If you don’t, and your principles turn out to be right, you look really pathetic. You end up having to let the bad guys escape just to save yourself.

Sign the petition to demand a special prosecutor.

Look for The Army of the Republic by Stuart Archer Cohen. It’s a very intelligent, very well written political thriller that captures a lot of the more extreme issues raised by the actions of the Bush administration.

A few years ago, during the Enron scandal, I had an intuition I decided not to talk much about: If a combination of smart lawyering and political influence allowed some big corporate malefactors (like Ken Lay) to walk away unpunished, that would create an opening for a left-wing terrorist group. In many segments of the population, assassinating a few such guys — guys the law apparently couldn’t touch — would have been very popular.

This novel begins with precisely such an assassination, by a group calling itself the Army of the Republic. (They have the coolest logo: Take the acronym AotR and merge the o and t to form the crosshairs of a rifle scope. Make the t-shirt red and the logo black, and you’d sell a lot of them.) The novel is set in an America where the excesses of the Bush administration became even more excessive: The government is run for the benefit of a class of plutocrats, who are making fortunes by privatizing public resources like water systems. There have been more wars. The media is manipulated by the government/plutocrat agenda. Elections are electronic, votes are counted by private corporations under government contract, and nobody trusts the administration’s “victories”. The administration has appointed enough judges by now that the courts will not stand against them. There’s a private security corporation called “Whitehall” (i.e. Blackwater) that operates under private contracts when it needs to do things government can’t do, and under government contracts when it needs to do things private companies can’t do; maybe it can do anything it wants.

The story is told in the first person, but the “I” shifts among three characters: a co-founder of AotR, a nonviolent liberal activist, and a plutocrat who didn’t set out to be a bad guy and is struggling hard to deny that he is a bad guy now. All three narrators are well-drawn characters and have an intelligent understanding of their strategies — you’ll learn a lot about terrorism, non-violent organizing, and manipulating a democracy for your own benefit. The author allows each narrator his/her point of view; Cohen himself is clearly on the Left, but the plutocrat is not always wrong, and exactly what Cohen thinks about the AotR is debatable.

The novel raises and explores big questions without claiming to settle them: What do you do when democracy starts to fail? What’s the role of violence? (The non-violent activist thinks that violent groups like AotR make it easier for the Regime to marginalize her. The terrorist thinks that nonviolent activism only works if there is also a threat of violence; he sees his group as the necessary Bad Cop that will cause the Regime to compromise with the nonviolent Good Cops.) When the justice system fails, is there a legitimate role for vigilantes?

In addition to the political insight, it’s just a good novel. I love the spycraft of the old John le Carre cold-war novels, and there’s plenty of that here. Also, Cohen writes good sentences. (That’s something I admire in a writer. I kept walking into the next room and interrupting my wife: “Listen to this one.”) He never settles for the cliche adjective or metaphor. And Cohen understands that you characterize a first-person narrator not by what he says about himself, but by what he says about other things: You picture the terrorist best when you ask “What kind of guy would use these words and think of these metaphors?”

With the elections of 2006 and 2008, you have to hope that the danger has passed. But if it hasn’t, if a Bush-only-moreso administration is in our future, then I could imagine The Army of the Republic playing a role similar to the one that Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang played (for better or worse) with ecotage groups like Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front.

It’s only fiction until somebody does it.

Interesting article in Public Eye about conservative “post-Palin feminists” and what the Sarah Palin candidacy means to them. On the one hand Palin represented “traditional family values”. But on the other hand, Dad was watching the kids and being an attractive prop behind Mom’s run for national office. It’s hard to picture that happening in, say, your basic suburban ranch-house family of the 1950s.

In general, liberals and conservatives alike tend to underestimate the extent to which the meaning of “traditional” shifts from one generation to the next. The article quotes scholar Bradford Wilcox saying that white Evangelicals “typically talk right and, often unwittingly, stumble left.”

While you’re at the Public Eye website, you might want to look at this critique of conservative “marriage promotion” policies as a way to address poverty.

Then we get to the real point: teaching. Higher grades in college, more education, higher scores on standardized tests — none of that predicts who’s going to be a good teacher. And good teachers really do matter. He claims that a really bad teacher gets half a year of progress out of an average student in a year, while a really good teacher gets a year and a half of progress — a 1 year-per-year difference.

Gladwell winds up with a completely different model of how we should hire and retain teachers: Lower standards, hire way more new teachers than we need, see who actually succeeds or fails in the job, fire all but the top performers among the new teachers, and pay the survivors well enough that it was worth the risk of failing. After all, that’s what we do with quarterbacks.

Any bailout that works is going to have to do something about those problems, not just front the companies some money or beat down the unions.

The Weekly Sift is taking a two-week post-election vacation. The next Sift will appear December 1. In the meantime, if you happen to be in Quincy, Illinois, you can hear Doug Muder preach at the Unitarian Church on November 23.

In This Week’s Sift:

• The Republicans. They’re working their way through the stages of grief, but most haven’t made it past denial yet. Eventually they’ll have to accept the reality that their jock/cheerleader ticket couldn’t beat a nerd. That’s a problem.
• The Democrats. Is it “overreaching” to do what you told the voters you’d do? Pundits seem to think so.
• Short Notes. I congratulate myself on my election predictions, then thank Nate Silver. The Constitution is back on top. Activist administrators in the Treasury Department hand bankers $140 billion Congress never intended. Why Obama is a headache for Iran. And more.

[I posted a snarkier version of this to DailyKos.]

As soon as the competition for votes ends, a new battle begins: The struggle to define what the election results mean.

To hear Republicans talk about it, Obama’s victory doesn’t mean much. They immediately began chanting “This is a center-right country” as if the Constitution said so and mere votes can’t change it. Most of these same people had been telling us (until Tuesday) that Obama is a socialist, so you’d think seeing a socialist carry states like Indiana and North Carolina would shake their world. But something about losing messes up your ability to draw logical conclusions.

The Kubler-Ross stages. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross called that something denial. It’s the first-stage reaction to extremely bad news, like Montana becoming a battleground state. So, for example, Christine Todd Whitman: “One pollster I heard zeroed in on people’s obsession with Barack Obama the person, not necessarily Obama the ideology, and I have to agree. When the dust settles, I don’t think we’ll find a liberal recalibrated nation on our hands.” (Somehow, Obama the person also elected at least six new Democratic senators and close to 20 new representatives. Maybe they’re just great people too.) Robert Novak: “[Obama] neither received a broad mandate from the public nor the needed large congressional majorities.”

Another form denial takes is to attribute losses — this is the second straight Republican thumping, remember — to one-of-a-kind causes that have no long-term consequences. So Charles Krauthammer can believe that the 2006 loss was all about Iraq, and 2008 was just the economic meltdown. And since the Iraq War and the meltdown are random acts of God, unrelated to Republican policies, nothing needs to change.

The folks inside McCain’s campaign probably knew weeks ago that they were going to lose, so they’ve moved on to the second stage, anger. How else to interpret their anonymous sniping at Sarah Palin? McCain aides charged the most incredible things about Palin: that she thought Africa was a country, didn’t know which countries were in NAFTA, spent even more than $150,000 of expense-account money on clothes, and lacked knowledge of basic civics. (That last one I had already figured out from her statement about the First Amendment. She thought it was supposed to protect her from criticism by the press, not free the press to criticize politicians like her.) Apparently an RNC lawyer has been dispatched to Alaska to retrieve Palin’s clothes. (No, that’s not a scene from Nailin’ Palin. It’s a news story. Really.) For her part, Palin charitably attributes the criticisms to “a small, bitter person” or to “jerks“.

Like most expressions of anger, these are appallingly self-destructive. If half this stuff is true, those same McCain aides have been lying through their teeth for the last two months about how qualified and capable Palin is. And their guy is the one who picked her to begin with, so they can’t sling mud at her without hitting him — and themselves.

The other odd thing here is that Fox News, the conservative movement’s version of Pravda, broke the story. And some folks on RedState.org, the flagship conservative blog, are so incensed that they are calling for a boycott of Fox News. Seriously. This can only mean a Republican civil war is starting, which you can expect more people to join as they get through the denial stage and move on to anger. (Should I make popcorn? With butter?)

The Wall Street Journal — always one of the most advanced conservative bastions — has made it all the way to the third stage, bargaining. They’ll accept that Obama has won on the condition that he agree never again to talk about racism in the present tense: “One promise of his victory is that perhaps we can put to rest the myth
of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country. Mr.
Obama has a special obligation to help do so.” (The best answer I’ve seen to this point is from Episode 12 of Elon James White’s This Week in Blackness: “I hate that people are using the Obama presidency as a get-out-of-jail-free card.” He mentioned newscasters talking encouragingly about how white voters “looked past” Obama’s race and “still” voted for him. “If you have to work past it,” White said, “it’s still a problem.”)

It’s hard to tell when the fourth stage, depression, has begun, because the depressed tend to hide from public view. Personally, I hope it holds off until Obama’s first bills arrive in the Senate. I picture Mitch McConnell getting up to start the filibuster, then saying, “Oh, never mind. It’s all hopeless.”

Eventually, though, nearly all the Republicans will reach acceptance. (Around 2016, most of them.) Here’s the reality that they will need to accept if they’re ever going to get back to power: The 2008 results are even worse than the 53-46 gap between Obama and McCain shows, because of who voted against them and why.

Neither black nor white. The worst news for Republicans is that Hispanics have started to identify with the Democrats. Obama won them about 2-1, and that made the difference in Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada — three states that used to be reliably Republican. (With a candidate other than McCain, Arizona might well have gone blue too.) Republicans wrote off the black vote when Nixon adopted his “southern strategy” in 1968; if the Hispanic vote (and the Asian and Arab vote, which also went heavily for Obama) hardens against them as well, they’ll start every campaign with a quarter of the country lined up on the other side. And that quarter is growing.

Worse, the racism-friendly (if not overtly racist) atmosphere of the Republican Party is precisely what energizes the conservative base. McCain had to back off of his reasonable immigration-reform position (to the point of saying he would vote against his own bill) because the electorate in the Republican primaries was so inclined to villainize Hispanic immigrants. Technically, candidates like Tom Tancredo only railed against the illegal immigrants, but they definitely appealed to the more general sentiment that there are just too many brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking people in America today. And when Republicans talk about “real America” or Sarah Palin tells lily-white rural crowds that they are the “pro-America” parts of the country, Hispanics (as well as blacks, Arabs, Asians, and Jews) all get the message that they’re not wanted.

Young people. The second piece of Republican bad news is the under-30 vote, which also went 2-1 to Obama. If the under-34 vote goes 2-1 Democratic in 2012 and the under-38 vote does the same in 2016, Republicans are toast. I’m not saying that will definitely happen, but what’s going to stop it? Again, current base-rallying issues are a huge part of the problem. Scapegoating gays and lesbians, for example, turns off young voters, who have grown up in a much less prejudiced world than their elders.

Another Republican tactic that is ineffective among younger voters is the elitism attack. To Republicans, elitists aren’t trust-fund kids like George W. Bush or Cindy McCain, they’re people like Obama, who worked his way up by getting an education. An elitist, in other words, isn’t somebody born to privilege, it’s somebody who’s smarter than you are. In high school terms, the 2008 elitism attack amounted to this: McCain and Palin were a jock/cheerleader couple ridiculing the idea that a nerd could be president.

It didn’t work this time, as Nicholas Kristof notes: “Yet times may be changing. How else do we explain the election in 2008 of an Ivy League-educated law professor who has favorite philosophers and poets?”

What changed? Well, pop culture for one thing. When 50ish people like me were young, action heroes were jocks. If the jock-hero needed smarts, he’d have a nerd sidekick. (Think Kirk/Spock in Star Trek.) But things started to flip around in the 80s. The second generation of Star Trek had Picard/Ricker — a nerd with a jock sidekick. In the 60s, Stan Lee created the comic-book Spiderman to be a hero for nerds. Now he’s a mainstream hero, the most successful movie action hero ever.

In the 21st century, in other words, smart can be cool. So when aging jocks and cheerleaders point to their opponent and jeer “He’s a nerd!” voters who were kids in the 80s (or later) say “So?”

Summing up. The Republicans face larger problems than just a bad candidate or a bad campaign. They can’t win in the future with the voters they currently appeal to, and the messages that best rally their current base turn off the new voters they need to reach. It’s not a hopeless situation, but it’s not going to fix itself.

If they’re smart — which they may not be — Republicans will run somebody like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in 2012. He’s a young non-white Rhodes scholar who did his masters degree in political science even though he’d been accepted by both law schools and medical schools. His conservative credentials are in order, and his biography alone would solve a lot of problems. Or they could nominate Sarah Palin and just underline everything they did wrong in 2008.

Scorecard: I have been annoyingly smug this week about the accuracy of my election night simulation, which predicted that Ohio would be called for Obama between 9 and 10, and that we could all go to bed at 11 when the networks called California. I was surprised that Virginia took so long to resolve and that Pennsylvania came in so early, but otherwise I had it about right.

Other bits of self-congratulation from the campaign: Catching on early (December 9) to McCain’s comeback in the Republican primaries, and realizing right away (September 8) that Palin would alienate more Republicans in the middle than she gained on the right. But let’s not talk about my prediction that Obama would do better than expected in the New Hampshire primary.

The law actually says that profitable companies can’t avoid taxes by acquiring companies with losses. But the Treasury has said, basically, “Oh, never mind.” The change is worth an estimated $25 billion to banking company Wells Fargo, which just acquired failing Wachovia. The overall benefit to the banking industry is about $140 billion, in exchange for which the public gets … well, nothing, actually. Think of it as a going-away present from the Bush administration.

This is the ironic part of all that conservative rhetoric about “activist liberal judges” who supposedly make the law say whatever they want. (I critiqued this myth back in 2005.) There are no activist liberal judges in that sense, but it is quite literally true that the Bush administration has been full of activist administrators, who make policy and then interpret the laws to fit.

President Bush has been fond of saying that his first duty is to keep Americans safe. But what the Constitution actually says is: “He shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” That’s what “executive branch” is supposed to mean.

If you’re a hard-liner in Tehran, a U.S. president who wants to talk to you presents more of a quandary than a U.S. president who wants to confront you. How are you going to implore crowds to chant “Death to Barack Hussein Obama”? … Obama just doesn’t fit the radical Islamist narrative of a racist, blood-thirsty America bent on oppressing Muslims worldwide.

Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at democracy’s heart: the importance of talking to as many people as possible in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others. The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation.