paying-attention

In a column on her website today, Arianna Huffington notes that 'Republicans are increasingly worried that McCain is losing in a way that "threatens to take the entire Republican Party down with him."'

I'm a fan of Huffington, although she is well to my left politically. And even if she doesn't say so, I think she understands that John McCain is not the problem. In fact, the original independent-minded McCain was probably the Republican who would have had the best shot at keeping the White House out of Democratic hands. No, it is the maverick McCain who has been dragged down by the knee-jerk, business-as-usual GOP establishment. You know, that guy who rejected all forms of torture and disagreed with tax cuts for the wealthy. Remember him?

If Obama wins, as everyone expects, the fear-mongering, negativity and dirty politics that have been so successful for George W. Bush will have defeated John McCain once again. The sad part is, McCain went along with it this time.

By the way, Democrats need to take a break from chicken-counting and take better care of the eggs. This is not yet a done deal, and premature triumphalism is a good way to let it all out of the bag. (There, did I mix enough metaphors to be considered a pundit?)

Labels: Arianna Huffington, John McCain, republicans

This week the Huffington Post has dueling op-eds from the Goldwater family. First, granddaughter CC Goldwater weighed in with why her grandfather, an old-fashioned libertarian-style conservative, would be unlikely to vote for Republican John McCain this year.

Then, today, Barry Goldwater, Jr. (CC's uncle) had his say in a piece titled "Why Barry Goldwater Couldn't Support Obama." I was going to post a comment on the Huffington Post site, but they keep losing my login. So here is what I think, based on the two Goldwater columns:

If Barry Goldwater, Sr., was alive today, I would like to think that he would be among the people who had been keeping the GOP from becoming the hyper-partisan, religious right, borrow and spend smear machine that it has become in the past twenty years. I would like to think that the small government ideals espoused by Ron Paul would still get respect from the mainstream of the party. I would like to think that John McCain would have been elected president eight years ago, retaining his own deeply held views on personal freedom and national defense, instead of being forced into this total sell-out that he has gone through in the last four years.

This year it has been tough to remember, but I started out as a Republican myself. Actually, my first registration was as a Socialist Worker but that was because there were some really attractive men in the SWP. We all have sins to answer for in our youth.

I was never a Democrat, and I'm still not. As far as I know, being a Republican does not mean I'm required to vote for whatever people or policies that the current party bigwigs choose to impose. I think that was what CC Goldwater was trying to say. If I order a green shirt on the internet and they send me a black one, I'll send it back for a refund. That doesn't mean I'm rejecting the color green. If I am in favor of small government and personal privacy and my GOP government sends me bedroom monitors and the Patriot Act, I'm not picking up that tab either.

I was interested to see what CC's uncle had to say about the current GOP candidates and why we should choose them over Obama and Biden. As far as I could tell, he was telling me to wear the black shirt in support of party unity. Party unity? They threw people like me out years ago. Meanwhile, the Democratic store over there is selling some pretty nice green clothes.

Labels: Barack Obama, Barry Goldwater, CC Goldwater, John McCain, The Huffington Post

A few months ago I wrote about three of Hillary Clinton's financial backers. They seemed to feel entitled to control the decisions of U.S. voters, and I called for them to be ignored. At the time I also claimed that the three of them "meant well."

Pictured: Lynn Forester and husband Evelyn de Rothschild.
At the time of their marriage, Forbes Magazine noted: "Forester now heads the Luxembourg-based wireless broadband venture FirstMark Communications Europe. The startup launched in 1998 with great fanfare, raising $1 billion in funding and landing former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Washington consigliere Vernon Jordan as board members. But with losses piling up and a public offering pulled, investors are now disgruntled. Not to worry--there's no better backup plan than the Rothschild name."

Now we know better. You see, one of these three committed Democratic activists has just endorsed John McCain. Turns out she's not so comfortable with a Democrat in the White House if that Democrat is not also a personal friend who owes her numerous favors.

The donor in question is a certain Lynn Forester, also known as Lady de Rothschild. I cited this description of her from the Oct 5, 2007, Conde Nast Portfolio:

"When 67-year-old British banking scion Sir Evelyn Rothschild first set eyes on 44-year-old Lynn Forester at the 1998 Bilderburg conference—the matchmaker was none other than Henry Kissinger—she was already a woman of major means.

A corporate lawyer and telecommunications entrepreneur, the sparkly blond ex-wife of former New York politician Andrew Stein had made more than $100 million from the sale of cleverly acquired wireless broadband licenses. She was also sexy, charming, and dazzlingly well connected. Two years later, after the smitten Sir Evelyn divorced his second wife, Victoria Schott, the mother of his three children, Forester became the third Lady Rothschild. After marrying in November 2000 at a London synagogue, they honeymooned at the White House, guests of Lynn's good friends Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Today the New Jersey-born Lady de Rothschild—the flashiest hostess in London—is mates with Tony and Cherie Blair, among other topflight Britons. She's also mistress of the former John Singer Sargent home in Chelsea and of Ascott House, the 3,200-acre Rothschild family estate in Buckinghamshire, and the chief executive of E.L. Rothschild, the holding company that she owns with her third husband to manage investments in the Economist and various enterprises in India. Those include Fieldfresh, a startup that will grow and export Indian fruits and vegetables for markets in Europe and Asia, and a soon-to-be-announced retail venture aimed at the exploding Indian middle class."

The Conde Nast article gets much worse -- and much more revealing. Lady Forester de Rothschild also offered these tidbits:

"First of all, Hillary will be good for America. And so if we care about our country —which all of my fellow capitalists do —we'll be very pleased that she's president. And second of all, if we look at what is best for the economy, remember, she is a Clinton, and our economy under Clinton was strong, dynamic, productive, exciting. And the same kinds of people who advised Bill Clinton will be around Hillary Clinton. And she understands the importance of the business community, and it's not going to be about raising taxes or doing any one specific thing. It's going to be, What is in the best interest of all Americans? And I think if history is our guide, we've had stronger economies, more wealth creation, under Democratic presidents than we have under Republican presidents. So I don't understand why all my capitalist friends aren't Democrats...

They're all going to take whatever questions we have. She's going to listen; they're going to listen. She can't be there the whole day, but it's so quintessentially Hillary. Politics is so boring, where they ask for your money, you get a glass of cheap wine and a biscuit, and then when you say, "You know, I have an idea about health care or I have an idea about inheritance tax," nobody wants to listen to you, because what they really want is your money. Hillary is the opposite. Obviously there aren't enough hours in the day to listen to every idea, but she is listening, and she is responding."

Translation: She will let me and my rich friends steer her economic policies.

To be fair, I don't think Hillary Clinton was ever going to be as easy to control as Lady de Rothschild expected. The quote reveals very little about Clinton's plans, and a whole lot about the assumptions of her so-called friends.

By the way, how did Lynn Forester de Rothschild make her first few million? She acquired assets for free from the U.S. federal government, and then sold them at an enormous profit.

"I realized that frequencies were a limited resource and that there would be a big business at some time around that, and so I was the first person to apply in the United States for wireless-broadband licenses. And yeah, I sold them for a lot of money."

Forester de Rothschild sold her interest in that company a couple months before the economic crash of 2000, and left her investors holding the bag. Anybody who takes investment or political advice from this character seriously needs psychiatric care.

Watch closely next time you see John McCain or Sarah Palin out in public. Are they scratching? It just seems like they've been lying down with so many dogs lately, they've just got to have fleas by now.

Labels: democrats, hillary clinton, John McCain, lynn forester de rothschild, republicans

I don't think there is much more to be said about Sarah Palin. Is she a bad mother? Not as far as I can tell. Is her son Trig really her grandson? None of our business.

Sarah Palin is a likeable, camera-friendly evangelical woman and committed lifestyle conservative. That means that philosophically she has no problem making it illegal -- or at least legally uncomfortable -- to be different than she is. It is no surprise to see a candidate with these views on the Republican ticket. She is a smart choice for McCain if only because her judgmental take on many issues of personal choice is infinitely more palatable coming from a young attractive woman instead of a dour middle-aged man.

So let us move on or, in this case, go back to a previous issue. Why is it that women who call themselves feminists are so hung up on legalized abortion? There is a whole spectrum of opinions about whether Roe v. Wade is a good thing for women. Even if you subscribe to the Clinton formulation that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare," you can be unhappy about the absolutist implications of the so-called right to privacy. The fetus is human, and is alive. The only dispute is about whether, or at what point, it is a separate entity with rights apart from those of its mother.

Before any of us had heard of Sarah Palin, i.e. a couple of days ago, I was still curious about whether the die-hard Hillary Clinton supporters were going to join the push to elect Obama, or at the very least shut up. It troubled me that so many professionals and citizen commentators kept falling back on the Emily's List mantra of "You can't vote for McCain because he might be pro-life." There are many other reasons that a supporter of either Clinton would be crazy to vote for any Republican, but that one seemed to trump all other arguments in the hearts and pens of the Democratic Party faithful.

The thing is, and I'm sure I'm repeating myself here, many Americans are ambivalent about the right to choose. We aren't comfortable criminalizing it, but we'd really rather address the issue of unwanted pregnancy at a different point. Maybe there should be better access to birth control. Maybe young women should be raised to value themselves beyond their sexual desirability. Maybe boys as well as girls should be taught to take responsibility for their behavior. Maybe fathers as well as mothers should be encouraged to take time out to raise children. Maybe we should stop treating young parents as social failures.

There are lots of maybes that could reduce the interest in abortion on demand. If the "war on drugs" has taught us anything, it is that making something difficult or illegal doesn't make it go away. The first thing we need to agree on is that abortion, even as a choice, is usually a bad one. I know it is boring and long-term and might make people have to talk to and associate with those they don't currently respect. Maybe the answer is in the gray areas.

Maybe it does take a village.

Labels: Emily's List, John McCain, pro-choice, pro-life, Sarah Palin, Trig Palin

This year's presidential election will not be decided by negative campaigning. For the first time in years, Americans have a choice of two positives. If McCain wins, it will be because people trust him and want the kind of governance he stands for. If Obama wins, it will be because people trust him and want the kind of governance he stands for.

The McCain campaign and the Republicans in general have plenty of material -- much of it spurious -- to aim against Obama. I hope they realize that this year that isn't the path to victory. (As an Obama supporter I'm not hoping too hard.)

The Democrats, even in the Obama campaign, seem to be relying on an even more dangerous mantra: "A vote for McCain is a vote for a third Bush term." Really? They really can't see the difference between McCain and Bush? No matter how energetically McCain panders to the so-called Republican base, he will never resemble George W. Bush.

The New Republic's Jonathan Chait is on to the problem. He writes,

" ....even though Democrats are extremely enthusiastic about Barack Obama, that life-and-death quality is absent. I think the reason is that a lot of liberals kind of like John McCain. I know I do.

Eight years ago, I was a hard-core liberal McCainiac. Here was a Republican saying things no other Republican would say and fighting, Teddy Roosevelt-style, to wrest his party from the hands of the plutocrats who controlled it. And, in the years immediately following that run, McCain established himself as perhaps the country's foremost progressive champion. He was an opponent, on moral and fiscal grounds, of tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the rich. He was also a fierce opponent of the extreme elements of the religious right. He was a proponent of global-warming legislation, the Law of the Sea Treaty, a moderate immigration bill, expanded public financing of elections, a tobacco tax, and many other liberal reforms....

....Where Bush is peevish, entitled, and insecure, McCain's charming, ironic, and self-deprecating. Bush's path to public life was trading on his father's name to run a series of business ventures into the ground before being handed a baseball team. McCain's was an episode of awe-inspiring perseverance...."

We should celebrate the fact that each party seems to have chosen its most original thinker, and best listener, as its candidate for president. Whichever way this election goes -- and I'm confident that Obama is our next president -- Bush will be history.

Labels: Barack Obama, George W. Bush, John McCain