Symptoms of a Diseased Punditry.

More recent signs of the freefall of journalistic integrity in the Beltway:

* Marc Ambinder, a thoroughly lousy blogging “journalist” in the Atlantic stable, chalks up prescient criticism of the Bush administration’s gaming of security alerts as solely the result of liberal fringe-hippy “gut hatred.” Says Ambinder in a burst of CYA blather: “Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit.” Way to speak truth to power, Marc. In other words, suck-up, spit-down, and let’s not let the facts — or god forbid, any attempted acts of daily journalism — get in the way of our obsequious administration boot-licking.

FWIW, after getting roundly slammed for this ridiculous understanding of what constitutes journalism, Ambinder walked back his comments…some. (It hasn’t caused him to deviate from his usual m.o., however, which is acting as stenographer to people in power and parsing the day’s news to find that exact comfortable midpoint where the CW resides. And sadly,he’s not even the worst blogger over at the Atlantic — that would be the former Jane Galt, Megan McArdle.)

* TIME’s Joe Klein has been on a bit of a losing streak lately. Ostensibly a “liberal” — at least the Village’s town crier, Howard Kurtz, considers him one — Klein is, like Ambinder and so many other of his ostensibly lefty pundit colleagues — really just an establishmentarian. He rolls over for the powerful and spends most of his copy and television appearances simply honing his “I’m a lefty, but I’m one of the sane ones” schtick. Take any given issue, look over Klein’s output, and you’ll usually find him, a la Howard Fineman, staking out that comfortable middle where roadkill dies and TV pundits thrive. (Most recent case in point: health care reform, where’s he’s for…something…but lately could really take or leave that goofy public option.)

Anyway, Klein recently made the mistake of mouthing off about those crazy lefties, and particularly Glenn Greenwald — whom he weirdly deems a “civil liberties absolutist” — in front of a very able blogger (and in a bit of grand historical irony, the granddaughter of I.F. Stone), who cut him short in hilarious fashion. Klein then took his anti-Greenwald crusade to Journolist, where his angry screeds and troubles with facts didn’t seem particularly well-received either.

So, now Klein has taken to ranting on Swampland about his recent troubles. Arguing that Greenwald indulges in “intemperate attacks in which he questions the character of — no, it’s worse than that: he slimes — anyone who has the temerity to disagree with him,” Klein also deems Aimai, the aforementioned partygoer/blogger, a “rather pathetic woman acolyte of Greenwald” — a bit intemperate, don’tcha think? As for Greenwald himself, Klein considers him “thoroughly dishonorable,” as well as — I kid you not — insufficiently pro-military. “I have never seen him write a positive sentence about the US military,” Klein declaims, a paragraph or so before he admits that “I am not a religious reader of Greenwald.”

Now, putting aside whether Klein’s blatant and bizarre Cheneyism is true — it isn’t — as well as Klein’s self-evident buffoonery here, how would penning enthusiastic copy about the US armed forces be in any way a reasonable evaluator of journalistic integrity? It’s like these pundits have so talked themselves into ignoring the grotesquely under-reported Pentagon pundit scandal that they’re starting to believe their own talking points. Screaming “You don’t love the troops!!” is a naked and craven attempt at ad hominem obfuscation pretty much every time a politician engages in it. But coming from the pen of a journalist, and a purported “lefty” one at that, it’s just plain ridiculous.

(By the way, Greenwald’s own thoughts on this are here, although the Swampland commenters do just as solid a job of eviscerating Klein for this disastrous posting. As does Aimai the Acolyte, who in her response gets in this certifiable zinger: “He’s not a public intellectual — he’s a f**king wind sock. And he knows it.“)

* Moving to another purported lefty of the establishment press, calling out the WP‘s Richard Cohen for dim reasoning and faulty logic these days is like calling the sky blue — it’s just the way it is. Nevertheless, his piece on torture today was particularly vile, and it’s a textbook case of two standard operating Beltway-pundit presumptions, also witnessed in the cases of Ambinder and Klein: [1] Establishment journalists are exceedingly special people, and [2] the height of wisdom is always to be found in the exact middle-of-the-road.

To take point one first, Cohen frets about Attorney General Holder’s new weaksauce-as-intended inquiry into CIA torture because of the outrageous and despicable violations of civil liberties committed upon…Judith Miller. He writes: “Special prosecutors are often themselves like interrogators — they don’t know when to stop. They go on and on because, well, they can go on and on. One of them managed to put Judith Miller of The New York Times in jail — a wee bit of torture right there.” Uh, no.

A few years after getting absolutely played by the powers-that-be and reporting lies about the existence of WMD in Iraq in the paper of record, NYT reporter Judith Miller spent three months in a comparatively nice prison cell because she refused to testify in the Plame investigation about one of those very same powerful people, Scooter Libby. Now, however you feel about what happened with Ms. Miller, she was not tortured. She was not waterboarded dozens or hundreds of times. She was not tortured for refusing to assert a false positive. She was never given the Room 101 treatment. And she did not die in our custody. So that truly bizarre analogy breaks down pretty quickly.

Even more irritating, however, is the hemming-and-hawing, “pox on both your houses” attempt at moderation Cohen tries to employ through the rest of this piece. “This business of what constitutes torture is a complicated matter. It is further complicated by questions about its efficacy: Does it sometimes work? Does it never work? Is it always immoral? What about torture that saves lives? What if it saves many lives? What if one of those lives is your child’s?” Cohen asks these questions as if they’re unanswerable profundities…or as if all of the considerable data showing torture is completely ineffective does not exist.

Then he plays the 24 game: “Ah yes, the interrogator must build rapport with the captured terrorist. That might work, but it would take time. It could take a lot of time.” Again, Cohen ignores the fact that the ticking-time-bomb scenario is a comic book fantasy with absolutely no application to the real world.

And he saves his worst for last: Torture, Cohen writes, “cannot be the subject of an ideological tug of war, both sides taking extreme and illogical positions — torture never works, torture always works, torture is always immoral, torture is moral if it saves lives. Torture always is ugly. So, though, is the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood. ” Did you catch that? Before Cohen took us to commercial with a resounding chorus of 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, he deemed that “torture never works” and “torture is always immoral” are now “extreme and illogical positions,” right on a par with “torture always works.” Say what?

It is exactly these types of false equivalencies, usually fostered by columnists these days to CYA and prostrate before power, that is killing what’s left of journalistic integrity in the Beltway. For some reason or another — most likely so as not to lose their privileged place of influence in the hive — “journalists” like Ambinder, Klein, and Cohen seem to think it’s their job finding, and then reporting from, the safe, non-threatening and perfectly vanilla midpoint between opposing political sides. The whole “holding up claims to independent, verifiable facts” aspect of journalism is a completely lost art among far too many of today’s pundit class. It gets in the way of their lazy sense of entitlement, I guess, and I’m sure it really cuts back on the talking out of one’s ass on TV for a living.

Put another way, it’s Paul Begala’s “Neil Armstrong principle all over again: “If John McCain and Sarah Palin were to say the moon was made of green cheese, we can be certain that Barack Obama and Joe Biden would pounce on it, and point out it’s actually made of rock. And you just know the headline in the paper the next day would read: ‘CANDIDATES CLASH ON LUNAR LANDSCAPE.’“

For all of Ambinder, Klein, and Cohen’s many faults, the problem with establishment journalism today is bigger than any of them — they’re just useful case studies in a diseased system. The values ostensibly undergirding the punditocracy — speak truth to power; check your sources, resort to facts; have some clue what you’re talking about — have been corrupted, and the whole rotten enterprise is now in an advanced state of decay. (For yet another example, see MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, who — as soon as he moved up a few pegs in the Beltway regime — started laughing off torture investigations as cable news “catnip.”)

This long post may just read like sarcastic score-settling, but this is no small matter. The desiccated values and m.o. of today’s Beltway pundit class are helping to kill off health care reform. They’re helping Dubya-era criminals get away with torture. And they’re going to derail any meaningful attempts at systemic political reform in the future…unless we start holding their feet to the fire. A republic needs no courtiers — it damn well needs good journalists.

The story of our journalistic establishment over the past thirty years is basically Bob Woodward, writ large: Beltway journalists and pundits used to challenge the politicians in power and serve as the public’s vital and necessary watchdogs. Now, like any old mutt, far too many just want to sit next to the masters, bark at those who would deign to threaten them, and try to get rewarded for their servility with an occasional scratch behind the ears. This will not do.

We’ll get you, my little pretties.

Y’know, after watching Wednesday’s RNC festivities, I’m rather annoyed with myself that I titled the post about Tuesday night “Chimps on Parade.” I mean, the dismayingly chimpy Dubya notwithstanding, at least Fred Thompson can sometimes muster up the ornery menace of an aging silverback. But it was last night’s warm-up act, with also-rans Romney, Huckabee, and Giuliani sneering and snarling with abandon at Obama, “liberals,” the “elite media,” the home television audience, and just about everything else that crossed their path, that felt like the real flying monkey attack.

Now, I can’t say I have my finger on the pulse of the nation or anything, but, in terms of the sheer quantity of vitriol, last night’s flurry of bad mojo felt quite a bit to me like Pat Buchanan’s disastrous 1992 “Culture War” speech all over again. (The fur flew so thick last night that even the AP felt compelled to mention the blatant untruths today.) We’ll see how it plays over the next few days and weeks, of course, but I get a strong sense that the Republicans didn’t help their cause much at all last night. (And, if you were to happen to infer that, by calling that ridiculous trio of GOP Pep Boys “flying monkeys,” I was implicitly comparing Gov. Palin, who later dripped with similar derision and contempt from her unfortunate sea of black, to Margaret Hamilton, well, that’s all on you…sexist.)

At any rate, to, take ’em in their miniboss order…

Mitt Romney: “Is a Supreme Court liberal or conservative that awards Guantanamo terrorists with Constitutional rights?” This one’s easy…Douchebag. [Transcript.] Is there anything else one needs to say about the man? It wasn’t so long ago even the GOP was united in their dislike of the guy’s patent insincerity. But last night, of course, Republicans hooted and hollered through his manifestly idiotic remarks about a “liberal Washington” like he was Don Rickles killing at the Palms. “Is government spending — excluding inflation — liberal or conservative if it doubles since 1980? — It’s liberal!” Of course, self-proclaimed conservatives, and darlings of everybody in that room last night, have run the White House for twenty of those twenty-eight years…but you already knew that. “It’s time for the party of big ideas, not the party of Big Brother!” Uh…I guess Mitt hasn’t been following the news all that much of late, nor did he seem to pre-read his own speech. (See the first quoted sentence above.) I could go on, but you get the point: Douchebag. Let’s move on.

Mike Huckabee: “John McCain will follow the fanatics to their caves in Pakistan or to the gates of hell. What Obama wants to do is give them a place setting at the table.” Alright, I feel a bit bad for lumping in Huckaboom with the rest of the night’s speakers. [Transcript.] He’s clearly a smarter, abler politician than 95% of the Republicans out there (even if his weird anecdote about veterans and desks barely made a lick of sense), and his remarks wisely eschewed most of the angry invective that marked all of the other speeches. (His early nod to Obama’s candidacy — “Party or politics aside, we celebrate this milestone because it elevates our country” — went over like a lead balloon in the auditorium last night.) Still, even with his friendly, aw-shucks demeanor, Huckabee laid on the finger-pointing pretty thick at times, particularly once he set his sights upon the “elite media, whose “reporting of the past few days has proven tackier than a costume change at a Madonna concert.“

Governor Huck probably trod onto the thinnest ice last night when he tried to portray the GOP as the “real” party of poor folk and ordinary working joes. This is wildly implausible for many reasons, not the least because Huckabee himself deemed the Republicans “a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street and the corporations” only a few short months ago. Plus, it’s really hard to buy into this sort of “broke-like-us” tripe when Cindy McCain is wearing $300,000 of bling to the big show.

Rudy Giuliani: “For four days in Denver and for the past 18 months, Democrats have been afraid to use the words ‘Islamic terrorism.’ During their convention, the Democrats rarely mentioned the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” 9/11, 9/11, 9/11? Mayor Rudy 9iu11iani, it seems, is not above living down to his caricature. Of the three Pep Boy speeches, this is the one that will probably be remembered as the biggest misfire for the GOP. [Transcript.] Even if Romney’s was more intellectually dishonest as written, Giuliani’s shrill anti-Obama screed was emphatically the most poorly delivered. (Not that Giuliani scrimped on the intellectual dishonesty. See, for example, his resurrection of the hoary “present vote” meme.) For whatever reason — some say pique at his speech being moved — Giuliani came across as even more weaselly and intemperate than usual last night, and — I say this as someone who, despite everything since, gave him much credit for his original handling of 9/11 — Rudy seems weaselly and intemperate on the best of days. In any case, however much it may have fired up the faithful, Hizzoner’s rant didn’t play at all on TV. (While I’m linking TPM, Josh Marshall got off a great zinger last night: “I think I preferred this speech in the original German.“)

And then the main event, Governor Palin. [Transcript.]

Over the past few days, I’ve refrained from posting every single revelation about the seemingly un-vetted Palin here, partly because I think little is gained by poring over the details of the awkward baby-momma story (even if the hypocrisy of the family values crowd has been stunning), and partly because keeping up with every facet of her creepy-craziness would’ve consumed the entire week. (If the Enquirer affair story gets locked down next week, that might well get a post here, tho’ — as did Edwards’ indiscretions. Also, a PSA for any kids who happen to stop by — watch what you write on your MySpace page, y’all. That’s one to grow on.)

So, how did Palin attempt to distract us, however briefly, from the fact that she’s an unqualified, un info rmed, scandal–ridden, pro-life, creationist, secessionist, wolf-massacring, book-banning Buchananite fundie? Well, mainly by channeling Rush Limbaugh for forty minutes: “When the cloud of rhetoric has passed, when the roar of the crowd fades away, when the stadium lights go out and those styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot. When that happens, what exactly is our opponent’s plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer — the answer is to make government bigger and take more of your money and give you more orders from Washington and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world.” Uh, yeah. 1988 called…they want their talking points back.

I wish there was more to Palin’s coming-out address to recommend it, but 99.44% of her speech was just this sort of smarmy, deeply-negative, over-the-top ridicule for Obama-Biden, delivered for the sole purpose of firing up the tired remnants of the fringe right. (Another case in point: “My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery.“) Even elements of her biography that I somewhat respect were grossly mismanaged. True, being the cleanest Republican politician in Alaska is kinda like being the world’s tallest pygmy — and, as noted above, Palin’s hands aren’t all that clean anyway. But, still, I’d have respected the Governor more this morning if she hadn’t openly lied to us last night about her reform credentials. (“I told the Congress ‘thanks, but no thanks’ on that bridge to nowhere.” — I believe Peggy Noonan has an apt phrase for this kind of blatant falsifcation. For shame.)

Update: “Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners…They hired Obama to help those stunned people recover and get the services they needed –job training, help with housing and so forth –from the local government. It was, dare I say it, the Lord’s work — the sort of mission Jesus preached (as opposed to the war in Iraq, which Palin described as a ‘task from God.’) This is what Palin and Giuliani were mocking. They were making fun of a young man’s decision ‘to serve a cause greater than himself,’ in the words of John McCain. They were, therefore, mocking one of their candidate’s favorite messages.” By way of DYFL, TIME‘s Joe Klein angrily rallies to the defense of community organizers.

Edwards Watch: Iffy. | No Gore ticket, period.

While Edwards donors have broken for Obama 2-1, current rumor has it that Edwards himself is inclined toward Clinton, mainly on account of his wife, Elizabeth. “‘She feels her husband should have been the man in the center of the presidential sweepstakes, rather than Obama,’ a source said.“

Well, if that’s true, it’s a remarkably petty reason to back the establishment candidate. Still, sour grapes or no, it’s hard to imagine Edwards coming out for Clinton at this late date anyway. Why would he obliterate all of his outsider-reformer cachet in one fell swoop, just to back a horse that’s already lost? If he endorses Clinton now, not only is his credibility in many circles effectively reduced to zero, but he’d be needlessly prolonging a primary battle that the rest of the party is trying to end ASAP. So, if anything, I expect he’ll remain neutral at this point.

Meanwhile, Al Gore reaffirmed he’s staying out of it for now, despite calls among some for him to break the deadlock: “‘What have we got, five months left?’ Gore told the Associated Press…’I think it’s going to resolve itself, but we’ll see.’” Well, it’s more like three months, if we go by the Dean standard. Still, I can’t say I’m surprised that Gore’s letting things shake out.

Which reminds me: There’s been some loose talk recently, most notably by TIME’s Joe Klein and Rep. Tim Mahoney, that the Dems could rally around Al Gore on top of a compromise ticket, a la John W. Davis in 1924. Now, maybe I’m in the minority these days in remembering that Al Gore was a thoroughly crappy candidate in 2000, one who — despite unprecedented economic good times — couldn’t even beat a congenial idiot like Dubya back in the day. Nonetheless, this notion of putting Al Gore atop the ticket is the Mother of all Dumb Ideas, redolent of the blatantly undemocratic, smoke-filled rooms of yesteryear, and if it happens, I’m walking. In fact, I’d rather have Sen. Clinton be our standard-bearer than Al Gore: At least, she actually procured a sizable number of votes this cycle.

Lies, Damned Lies, and “Dunce-Cap Dems.”

While the NYT, in venerable (and dismaying) establishment form, swung behind Senator Clinton (and John McCain) — despite contradicting their 2006 endorsement — this morning, others in the commentariat are not so sanguine about the prospect of a Clinton restoration:

“Obama’s best hope is that Democratic voters aren’t as dumb as Hillary and Bill Clinton think they are.” Newsweek‘s Jonathan Alter decries the Clintons’ cynical strategy of misinformation. “Obama is stronger among well-educated Democrats, according to polls. So the Clintons figure that maybe their base among less educated white Democrats might be receptive to an argument that assumes they’re dumb. Less well-educated equals gullible in the face of bogus attack ads. That’s the logic, and the Clintons are testing it in South Carolina before trying it in Super Tuesday states. They are also road-testing major distortions of Obama’s positions on abortion, Social Security and the minimum wage.“

USA Today experiences Clinton fatigue. “[H]is famous lack of discipline, angry outbursts on the campaign trail and habit of drawing attention to himself all suggest that voters have every right to wonder how this would actually work.“

But the NYT‘s Matthew Continetti senses a pattern, and calls shenanigans on red-faced Bill’s recent (and conveniently timed) public screeds. “It’s been said that Mr. Clinton’s recent feistiness has revealed a side of him previously unknown to most Americans. But this is incorrect: he is rather a master of what one might call ‘strategic emotion,’ the use of tears or anger to comfort voters or intimidate the press.“

Claiming “‘if Obama is a Reaganite, then I am a salamander,’ E.J. Dionne remembers when Clinton loved Reagan. “His apostasy was widely noticed. The Memphis Commercial Appeal praised Clinton two days later for daring to ‘set himself apart from the pack of contenders for the Democratic nomination by saying something nice about Ronald Reagan.’ Clinton’s ‘readiness to defy his party’s prevailing Reaganphobia and admit it,’ the paper wrote, ‘is one reason he’s a candidate to watch.’“

And, despite having written Primary Colors, TIME‘s Joe Klein just can’t wrap his mind around it all: “Let me get this straight: Obama wins Iowa. In a desperate move — unprecedented for an ex-President in American politics — Bill Clinton decides to impede Obama’s momentum by inserting himself into the campaign. He attacks Obama on an almost daily basis, sometimes falsely. He makes a spectacle of himself. And then he blames the press for not covering the substance of the campaign?”

Update: Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has had enough: “I write this more out of sadness than anger. Bill Clinton’s ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife’s campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party. While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it’s not fair – indeed, it’s demeaning – for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama’s anti-war position is a ‘fairy tale’) or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it…we’re witnessing a smear campaign against Obama that employs some of the worst aspects of the old politics.“

Barack Obama and the Generation Gap.

(Obama silhouette pic via a friend/colleague at Peasants Under Glass, where we talked about some of the following in the comments.)

Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? Let’s go back a few days to Friday, just after Iowa, at the 100 Club Dinner in Milford, NH: “What you need to understand about the dinner and the venue is this: it was supposed to be a Clinton room.” The Clinton advance people had secured the best tables at the front, so all the formidable Granite State luminaries who’ve backed Hillary could show their strength, and show the Iowa upstart how things work in “independent” New Hampshire. Meanwhile, the Obama voters had been shunted to the back of the room, far away from the podium, the cameras, and the action. All well and good…except it didn’t work out that way. The legions of Obama voters surged to the front just before his speech and, by most accounts, blew the Clinton operation out of the room. “‘I’m really worried about him,’ said [Beverly] Hollingworth, a member of the state’s Executive Council and a former state senator, as she headed for the door. ‘Other people have been working their whole life for change, and have made good progress. This is just rhetoric.‘” And you know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mrs. Hollingworth?

Fast forward to this morning, where George Stephanopoulos held his usual This Week roundtable at the site of last night’s Manchester debate: Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, George Will, and Donna Brazile. For his part, Will seems to be among the “national greatness,” “Morning in America” civic conservatives — such as Peggy Noonan and particularly Andrew Sullivan — who’ve responded to Obama’s candidacy, and see elements of their beloved Reagan in his crossover appeal. (No doubt anti-Hillary schadenfreude is playing a considerable part too.) Brazile, who worked the comment desks at CNN on Iowa night, had already said her piece last Thursday, and didn’t add much this Sunday morning.

But those venerable dinosaurs of the Beltway punditariat, Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson, were virtually beside themselves that the Insider candidate seemed to be going down in flames, and soon proved themselves absurdly in the tank for Clinton. Cokie sneered at the constancy of Obama’s youth appeal: “Young people, as much as we’d like to see them active in politics, are notorious for not showing up when you need them.” She then went on to parrot Clinton’s most recent talking points. (Consider “It’s a lot of talk, when the reality is, change will happen,” or “She embodies change just by being the first woman who might be elected president.”)

Donaldson, meanwhile, got bogged down in a wish-fulfillment metaphor about the old champ wearing down the young hotshot (i.e. The Hustler, with Obama as Fast Eddie and Clinton as Minnesota Fats) and huffed and puffed with aggrieved authority, “I agree with Bill Richardson, experience is not a leper!…She’s the only one who brought up the economy, did you notice? Anyone could’ve said look, we may go into a recession here, there’s hard times. Only Senator Clinton — with her experience, if you will — managed to bring it up!” (You heard it here first, folks. Obama is too inexperienced to have considered the possibility of a recession.) “We’re always looking for the non-candidate, the non-politician, and we’d think that’d be great, Donaldson intoned. “But, George, when you have a toothache, most of the people here go to the dentist that’s drilled teeth for a long time, I think that’s where the country could turn out.” (Note here that it’s Edwards, not Obama, running the standard outsider-against-the-Washington-ramparts campaign that Donaldson is decrying.)

Now, on one hand, who cares what Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts think? Not only are they so completely invested in the Beltway power structure that it’s in their very marrow, but they’ve been living the sheltered life of the television Green Room for decades now. (So, it seems, has ABC’s Charlie Gibson, who showed last night during the Manchester debate that he thinks a two-academic family makes $200,000 a year. Uh, Charlie, try $3,000 a class.) As I know from considerable personal experience, the higher echelons in Washington invariably turn up their noses at candidates with outside-the-Beltway appeal, and tend to view them as interlopers worthy of ridicule (or, if they catch a spark, vitriol. At its most extreme, this is how you get Senator Clinton angrily exclaiming in 2000 that killing Ralph Nader “might not be a bad idea.”) In short, Sam and Cokie, like countless other members of the Washington media machine, see themselves as bastions of the Beltway order, keepers of the flame, and they don’t like any provincial outsiders upsetting the established status quo. All the more reason why Obama is causing them great consternation: “You’ve been with the professors and they all like your looks. With great lawyers, you have discussed lepers and crooks. You’ve been through all of F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s books. You’re very well-read, it’s well known. But, something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is…“

On the other hand, if we peel away their affronted Beltway dismay about Obama’s upstart candidacy, Sam, Cokie, and Mrs. Holllingworth’s views speak to arguably the biggest open question about the Illinois Senator’s broad-based appeal, and the one demographic factor that most threatens his winning New Hampshire, and the nomination: the generation gap. Pulling up the Iowa numbers again: “Among all caucus-goers under age 45, a smashing 50 percent supported Obama, compared with just 17 percent for Edwards and 16 percent for Clinton. Among those under 30, Obama went even higher, to 57 percent. Among seniors, by contrast — nearly a quarter of participants — it was Clinton 45 percent, Edwards 22, Obama 18.” Obama pulled young voters out in droves in Iowa, and I think he shows every indication that he can do it again in New Hampshire and beyond. Still, as Cokie snarkily reminded us, older voters are consistent voters. And, allowing that individuals mostly defy easy groupings and follow the dictates of their conscience, the Boomers as a generation are clearly not sold on Obama just yet. So, what’s going on here?

Part of it, I think, was explained by Andrew Sullivan a few months ago in the Atlantic Monthly: “Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America — finally — past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us…If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.” Senator Obama has since furthered this line of argument himself, telling Newsweek‘s Joe Klein that he aims to move past “the dorm fights of the ’60s.” To younger voters, the culture wars that raged from the sixties to the nineties just don’t resonate. They seem like ancient history. To older voters, who lived through the experience and witnessed time and time again how low today’s GOP will sink in their pursuit of power, this past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.

This is why, Sullivan continued in the Monthly, Clinton’s methodical (some might say calculating) persona and incrementalist approach doesn’t seem to rankle older voters nearly as much as it does those under 45. “[S]he has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to advance their objectives. And so the less-adept ones seem deceptive, and the more-practiced ones, like Clinton, exhibit the plastic-ness and inauthenticity that still plague her candidacy. She’s hiding her true feelings. We know it, she knows we know it, and there is no way out of it.” To many older liberals and progressives, who’ve experienced one dismal setback after another since the heydays of the New Frontier and Great Society, the Clintonian brand of cautious pragmatism often seems the only viable approach to moving the country forward. Put simply, you get burned enough times, you stop using the stove. This time, irony isn’t the shackles of youth, but of their parents.

The sheer fact of Clinton and Obama’s presidential candidacies, I think, also plays a part in the wide generation gap. The great liberal and progressive victory of the Boomers, one that merits them the moniker “greatest generation” just as readily as fighting WWII does their parents, is the sweeping and (for the most part) successful cultural transformation of race and gender in American life. This is not to say that racism and sexism don’t continue to fester in America, both individually and institutionally — Of course they do, and they’re all the harder to root out for having gone underground. But, thanks to the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, younger people tend to view race, gender, and other issues of identity as much more fluid concepts than most Boomers do. While many older voters still possess vividly etched memories of separate drinking fountains, grotesque sexism in the workplace, and fire hoses trained on children, Generations X, Y, and Z grew up sharing a multiracial consumer culture of MTV, The Cosby Show, hip-hop, Tiger Woods, Eminem, etc. Similarly, I think it’s safe to say that people under 50 are much more likely to have had a female boss at one point or another. (Counting ’em up, I’ve worked under more women than men, and I doubt I’m in a slim minority on that point.)

Put simply, and while being careful not to overstate the case, categories like race and sex just don’t seem as defining to the youth of today. Boomers fashioned this new world through blood, sweat, tears, and sacrifice, but — like Moses at the Promised Land — they can’t enter it as readily as their children and grandchildren. This is part of the reason, I think, why, anecdotally speaking, older columnists seemed so much more taken aback by Obama’s victory in lily-white Iowa. This also partly explains why Clinton seems to enjoy the strong support of older women. They remember a considerably lower and less permeable glass ceiling — and the considerable struggle it required to break it — while many younger women seem to more readily presume (as I do) that sex isn’t really a barrier to the presidency anymore.

Now, the response to an older Clinton voter to all of these arguments thus far might be something along the lines of “Just you wait…We know better than you, sonny. Obama may seem like a rock star, but we can see there’s no substance to him.” But, it doesn’t do any dishonor to older voters to suggest in return that maybe this is the moment to forsake a lifetime of dashed hopes and bet on the possibility that the time for a new, expanded progressive coalition has finally come. This is not an easy thing to do. As accomplished and dedicated a reformer as Jane Addams, part of a progressive generation for which I have great empathy, couldn’t bring herself to vote for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and she was not alone.

Still, there’s something strikingly dismaying about watching Clinton and other members of her generation dismiss Obama’s message as merely “false hope” (a particularly vicious phrasing) and empty rhetoric. This is the same generation who recoiled from the tested, experienced establishment candidate in 1960, despite his considerable national security credentials, and flocked to the young, hopeful standard of Camelot. This is the same generation who, buoyed by the words of Dr. King, swelled the ranks of the civil rights movement, and who — disgusted by the continuance of a badly thought-out war overseas — was inspired by the moving oratory and surprising crossover appeal of Robert Kennedy.

Those leaders were all tragically taken from us, of course, two of them forty years ago this spring and summer. It’s maddening to think of how the past four decades might’ve played out had we the opportunity of their continuing leadership and inspiration. And it’s been a long time, far too long, since we’ve seen anyone on the left who can be mentioned in the same breath as those fallen leaders without hyperbole. But, look at those Iowa numbers again. Maybe, just maybe, that wheel has finally come full circle. Maybe, Senator Barack Hussein Obama is the real deal. Maybe he’s the candidate who can transcend the sad political paradigm we’ve been operating under since 1980 and bring about that long overdue progressive realignment. We’ve only seen one caucus, of course, but the game moves fast in 2008, and all the indicators seem to suggest he’s got “it.” If you’re not going to stake a chance on him now, what, then, are you waiting for?

I started this entry with a Bob Dylan song. I’ll end with another, one I listened to on Friday for the 1,000th time and “heard” like it’s the first time. (It sounds completely different when unburdened for a few moments by the ironic punchline of the years after 1968.) If it seems like GitM has become all-Obama, all-the-time since last Thursday, well, there’s a good reason for it. Right now, I truly believe we’re standing at a crossroads moment, one that could all too easily become evanescent, another missed opportunity in a political lifetime that doesn’t offer many of them. But if, on Tuesday, New Hampshire nurtures the spark set in Iowa last week, and Nevada and South Carolina kindle the blaze, we could be looking at a full-fledged progressive wildfire across the nation come SuperduperTuesday. So, to the older voters — and to any voters — who, for whatever reason, may be harboring doubts about Barack Obama, give him another look. We’re at the first hinge of 2008, and what we do in the next few days and weeks will echo profoundly throughout the next several years of our governance. The old road is rapidly agin’, y’all. So please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand, for the times, they could be a-changin’.

Middle of the Road?

“This was a big deal. Certainly, it was the end of George W. Bush’s radical experiment in partisan governance. It might have been even bigger than that: the end of the conservative pendulum swing that began with Ronald Reagan’s revolution.” Despite starting off well here, TIME’s Joe Klein reads the 2006 election as a call to centrism. Hmm. Well, maybe…I suppose we’re still parsing the results. Nevertheless, I’ll confess to being somewhat irritated by TIME’s “centrist” cover after last week’s historic rout of the Republicans, so I went ahead and ginned up my own, one I find more fitting for recent events (and, of course, that is more apropos for this blog.) Procrastination, thy name is Photoshop.

Coming In from the Cold (War).

“[F]or all their practical failures, conservatives have at least told a coherent political story, with deep historical roots, about what keeps America safe and what makes it great. Liberals, by contrast, have offered adjectives drawn from focus groups and policy proposals linked by no larger theme.” In keeping with the intellectual territory he staked out after the 2004 election, former TNR editor Peter Beinart makes the case for a return to Cold War liberalism in a NYT excerpt of his new book, The Good Fight (also discussed in the recent Atlantic Monthly.)

I couldn’t agree more with Beinart’s paragraph above, but I don’t think the lack of a sufficiently robust national security emphasis is really the defining element missing among today’s Dems. Are there really Democrats out there who don’t agree with Beinart’s three main assessments here, that (a) America faces a real enemy in Al Qaeda and other fundamentalist terror networks, (b) our foreign policy should be less hubristic and more attuned to both local contingency and international institutions, and (c) our national sense of self should emphasize our own fallibility at times? Beinart would probably target the MoveOn crowd, but as Eric Alterman noted in the last round of this back-and-forth, that’s just a DLC straw man, roughly akin to Joe Klein’s cadre of phantom lefty consultants in the last update.

Plus, I think there are two significant historical problems with the Cold War liberalism Beinart unreservedly espouses, which he fails to discuss here. For one, Cold War liberals could very easily be seen as best inattentive to and — at worst complicit in — the excesses of McCarthyism. If the enemy abroad becomes the central defining focus of your national narrative, then the enemy within is undoubtedly going to start eating at you as well. For another, (and as John Gaddis, among others, has pointed out) — for all its early sense of diplomatic complexity and limited, realistic goals — the Cold War liberalism Beinart promotes all too readily (d)evolved into the guiding rationale for wildly wrongheaded foreign policy interventions, most notably in Vietnam. (You’d think Beinart would pay more lip service to this issue, particularly as he himself made much the same mistake in shilling for the Iraq war in The New Republic.)

In short, I agree with Beinart’s assessment that the Dems lack a sense of usable past, but the problems with his argument can be encapsulated by his ideal of a what a good, hawkish, Cold War liberal Democrat should look like these days: That, if Beinart’s tenure at TNR is any indication, would be Joe Lieberman, a politician who’s not only been flagrantly cheerleading for the administration during the current war, but has exhibited little interest in today’s wartime civil liberties issues. Simply put, Joe Lieberman would hardly be my choice of template for the Democratic party. (Who would? That’s easy: Russ Feingold, who’s displayed a strong commitment to preserving both national security and civil liberties at home, while arguing for a more level-headed, less-in-your-face American foreign policy.)

Bleeding Turnip (Day.)

“Up until now, you have probably thought that when you saw Democrats dumping their traditional principles in order to run pallid, market-tested campaigns appealing to swing voters with rhetoric borrowed from the G.O.P., they were doing so because they had been listening to consultants, pollsters, focus groups and so on. Well — according to Mr. Klein, you have it precisely backwards. In Joe’s world, the consultants and the pollsters and even the money are all on the other side, forever driving the cowardly politicians to the partisan extremes. Consultants on the Democratic side seem always to turn out to be liberals in Mr. Klein’s telling, and liberalism itself is usually the sad result of a candidate listening to consultants.” By way of Ted at The Late Adopter, Thomas Frank of What’s the Matter with Kansas? eviscerates Joe Klein’s new book Politics Lost. I liked the TIME excerpt decently enough, but Frank pretty much takes the book apart here.

Primary Numbers.

“Roger Ailes was right when he predicted at the beginning of the television era that in the future all politicians would have to be performers. But politicians are, for the most part, lousy performers.Their advisers are pretty awful at what they do too. In the absence of inspiration, they have fixed upon the crudest, most negative and robotic forms of communication. They’ve made moments like Robert Kennedy’s in Indianapolis next to impossible.” TIME‘s Joe Klein laments the dawn of the soundbite-heavy, market-tested-within-an-inch-of-its-life consultants’ republic.

All Over You.

“You are able to take an idea and give it form: the idea that Harlem has hands, feet are flaming, lips are cracked and country, hail hammers and skies crack poems.” In a burst of NY Times Dylanania, Jonathan Lethem reviews Dylan’s Vision of Sin, the new tome of poetry criticism by acclaimed Oxford Professor Christopher Ricks, while Lucinda Williams pays her own respects to Robert Zimmerman. And, elsewhere in the music-themed Book Review this week, Time politico and Primary Colors author Joe Klein proclaims his fondness for Wilco.