Corey Mull's Evil Urges

Out of pocket

World events have conspired to keep me away from my blog - there's just something totally uncompelling about writing blog posts after spending 12 hour days reading other people's blog posts.

It might be like this for the next few days, but hopefully I'll be back sooner rather than later.

Random Questions

• In an election where the more liberal party decisively won the presidency and expanded upon historic majorities in both houses of Congress, and a majority of Americans desire more government involvement in the economy, how is the "center-right nation" meme getting any traction in the press? Liberal media, my ass.
• Why is my roommate, who is unemployed, obnoxiously singing Guitar Hero vocals in my living room instead of, you know, looking for a job? For that matter, why does he drink my beer and eat my food?
• Why doesn't NHL.com support embeddable video? I really wanted to share with my diminutive readership a beautiful Brent Johnson save against Chris Drury from last night's game, but I have to wait until the clip goes up on YouTube. Why doesn't the NHL site support Firefox? 20% market share, people!

Christ, now he's singing "Learn to Fly" for the third time. I'm going to escape to the basement.

Rahmbo

I just wanted to weigh in over the Rahm Emanuel appointment as Obama's chief of staff. The usual netroots suspects (*cough*Chris Bowers*cough*) are already wringing their hands over this idea, for no reason other than the fact that Rahm, as head of the DCCC in the 2006 cycle, advocated for legislation on explcitly electoral grounds, famously advising Democrats not to persue immigration reform on the grounds that it might leave conservative-district Dems out to dry.

Guess what? He was right, and the wave of Dem victories in right-leaning disticts in 2006 set us up for Tuesday's triumph. Now we have a Democratic president and Congress and can do real immigration reform. If the Bowers crowd had gotten their way, all three of those things would've been in real jeopardy, all over an ideological spat.

But that's beside the point. The people fretting over the Rahm appointment are ignoring the fact that the DCCC chair job is explicitly electoral in nature - the chair is judged on how well the party performs at the ballot box. It was his job to think about how legislation would play in November, and he advocated strategy based on how he felt the electorate would respond. To blame him for doing that is to ignore the realities of that job.

The chief of staff's job is not nearly as focused on elections, though. I mean, sure, the President will probably want to get re-elected at some point. But for the first two years at least, Rahm's job is going to be to help push the Obama agenda through Congress and to run the White House the way the campaign was run - tight, efficient, and drama-free. You don't need to be an ideologically pure progressive to do that effectively, but what you do need is a relationship with the man in the office and some hard-nosed Washington know-how. Emanuel has both.

I think the animus, especially with Bowers, is more personal than anything else. I'll never forget the petulant post he wrote in 2006 after the Chicago Tribune published a laudatory profile of Emanuel (who is from Chicago) that (rightly) credited him with helping foment the Democratic wave that year. Sounds like someone's little feelings got hurt.

None of that means that progressives shouldn't be prepared to ask a lot of Obama and friends once he takes office. Even though I hate online petitions, I think the current campaign against Larry Summers is a good start - here's a guy who was a deregulation advocate, a major player in the mortgage mess, a terrible president of Harvard, and an apparent misogynist to boot. He doesn't belong anywhere near the Treasury Department. I also like the campaign against RFK Jr - someone who has proven to be manifestly anti-science by fueling vaccine hoaxes - as head of the EPA.

But to get bent out of shape over a non-political, non-ideological appointee who possesses all necessary attributes for the job - only the Internet left could be so shortsighted.

A Preview of the Next Four (Eight?) Years

Yes, there is a black president now:

But that doesn't mean crazy people won't stop being crazy! Travis Kavulla at the Corner:

It must be the first time one country has celebrated the election of another country's president with a day off. But that is just what has happened here in Kenya, where President Mwai Kibaki, with all the caprice of an African leader, has declared today a public holiday in honor of Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan. Work is at a standstill, banks are closed, as are all government offices and most shops. (Ironically, Kibaki's 2007 campaign slogan was 'kazi iendelee' — let the work continue.) Bars, however, are open and people are still hawking Obama paraphernalia and stars-and-stripes apparel. And then there are the glue-sniffing street children, who continue to beg. Sad that the first concrete effect of an Obama presidency on Kenya would be to further depress the productivity of a country that could really use a booster shot in that department.

Hilarious.

Windows of Opportunity

Barring some kind of miraculous Republican comeback or some huge deficiency in every poll taken in the last month, America is going to experience something it has not truly experienced since 1932 - an overwhelming rejection of conservative Republicans in favor of progressive Democrats. Yes, Wednesday will bring Washington Posts and Wall Street Journals full of op-eds about how the Democrats better not overreach and actually enact their platform, about how this is fundamentally a center-right nation (etc.) but don't let that punditry fool you. For the first time in pretty much everyone's lifetime, Democrats are going to control DC, and we'll get to see if all the progressive rhetoric pans out when the party is actually in power.

A lot of commentators have said, quite prudently I think, that to have outsized expectations of Obama and the Democratic congress is a mistake. And we shouldn't forget that Obama is the guy who voted for the FISA bill last June, who proposed the least progressive healthcare plan of all the Dem candidates, and whose initially-measured response to the Georgian war was quickly walked back and replaced by one more militaristic than McCain's. To expect miracles from him is wrong. So too, I think, is it wrong for one to expect some great progressive agenda to come out of the upcoming Congress, which is only marginally less corrupt and conflicted than the Republican one it replaced.

So the question shouldn't be "What are Obama and Congress going to do?" Rather, it should be "What are we going to do?" Will the connective technologies embraced by Democrats this cycle remain relegated to fundraising and GOTV, or will they provide a platform for true citizen involvement in the highest levels of government?

I think the real value in this campaign isn't the actual policies that will come out of the Democratic government - instead, it's the people who are invested in the political process for the first time in their lives and won't go away without a fight. We can chalk this up to Obama. What are these people going to do or believe when Obama inevitably screws up? What if they find they disagree with him on something huge?

I don't know the answer to those questions, but it'll be interesting as hell to find them out.

I agree with John Cole, pt. 1

Just read this excellent post over at Balloon Juice and wanted to add to it. John is, of course, 100% right - that the "right-roots" wing of the Republican Party - the consultants and pundits with fancy conservative Web 2.0 sites - are focused on the wrong thing. The Ruffini/Douthat types are largely expending their energy figuring out how they can organize a new activist bloc around conservative ideas, and how to dress those conservative ideas in new clothes.

This completely misses the point for several reasons, the first of which is that the Republican Party has no ideas! I don't understand how anyone who has seriously followed this election could have possibly missed the fact that John McCain offers very few logical policy proposals (the only one I can think of is his stance on corn subsidies, which is the correct one on the merits) and has instead run on biography alone. That has worked for Republicans before, but not in a time of mounting global crises - now, people want to hear detailed plans and policies that address these global challenges.

Here's the problem: America, by and large, agrees on a few key things: first, that the country needs to move away from oil as an energy source; second, that the war in Iraq is not working; and third, that people should generally have equality of opportunity. The conservative stance on issues related to these broad themes (such as mass transit/sprawl, The Surge, federal student loan programs and health subsidies) are almost all wrong on the merits; indeed, the conservative ideology does not hold a place for the successful implementation of programs related to those broad themes.

This is in stark comparison to what the netroots did for the left in 2002-2006. Netroots bloggers took a Democratic party and literally changed its positions on big-picture issues. Remember the litany of Democratic senators who voted for the Iraq War? Almost all of them have apologized and changed their position. Remember the Blue Dogs in the 1990's who torpedoed health care reform? They're either gone or have changed their tunes. How about the Rubin types who argued that a laissez-faire Wall Street was the best thing for the country? Increasingly gone from the policy-making apparatus of the party. That's not to say that this process is complete - new movements like Better Democrats seek to continually challenge Democratic lawmakers to be true to progressive causes. But note the difference - when it came time for progressive activists to take over a corrupt, moribund Democratic party, they did so not by dressing up the old ideas in new clothes, but by changing the old ideas entirely. No conservative has ever suggested that they do anything of the sort with the Republicans.

Until the larger framework of conservatism can come up with policies that meet people's needs on big themes like the three above, they will continue to flail. And at the risk of concern trolling, I'd suggest that PR/"messaging" flacks like Ruffini shouldn't be the ones to lead American Republicanism into the wilderness - what's needed here are ideas, not messages.

More Crazy

More crazy. Money quote:

Did I mention this man hates me? You and me? Yes he does. Why? Because he can. Yes He Can. Beneath that cool persona is a megalomaniac. Cool? Like Stalin after a purge, emotionally and sexually spent. Like Saddam after a torture session, dozing in his chair with someone's genitals curled in his fist. Like Pol Pot after a petit mal seizure, mumbling a litany of the dead. Cool that way.

At this point, I don't think it's imprudent at all to ask what these people are going to do next Tuesday.

Drink in the Crazy

Here's Mark Levin's magnum opus of crazy at the Corner.

Read it. Read every word. Then sit back and think about how wonderful it's going to be to remove this backwards, tired ideology from power. 

I agree with Obama, pt. 1523

Driving up and down the East Coast through much of the past week I was, out of sheer boredom, exposed to a lot of conservative talk radio. These guys are throwing out anything they can to rally the base - the socialism card, the terrorism card, etc. But one thing they kept on hitting on was Obama's supposed embrace of the Fairness Doctrine, an old FCC regulation that required broadcasters to make an effort to balance political opinion on their stations. Since "balance" is an extremely difficult ideal to achieve, most broadcasters simply shied away from political commentary entirely. The rule was repealed under Reagan, which allowed the multi-billion dollar conservative talk radio industry to begin flourishing.

So it's not a huge surprise that Limbaugh, Hannity and Beck are squealing about the re-imposition of the doctrine - if broadcasters have to make an effort to balance conservative hosts, that's less airtime for them, and it's likely that radio stations would simply give up on supplying political commentary at all.

Intrigued at the efforts to tie Obama to the Fairness Doctrine, I did some good ol' Googling and found this:

"Sen. Obama does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters," press secretary Michael Ortiz said in an e-mail to B&C late Wednesday.

"He considers this debate to be a distraction from the conversation we should be having about opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible," Ortiz added. "That is why Sen. Obama supports media-ownership caps, network neutrality, public broadcasting, as well as increasing minority ownership of broadcasting and print outlets."

I agree with this entirely. Think about it this way: how do you "balance" Rush Limbaugh? Will any old Democrat do? How about a conservative Democrat? How do you "balance" Sean Hannity, who tells outright lies on his show? Is it possible to "balance" a lie?

All this talk about balance just reinforces a weird American belief that there are two sides to every issue - when, in fact, there might be six or eight or a hundred.

So the goal should be to let conservative yakkers keep their shows, but open up radio communications platforms to more people a la the internet. I'm way out of my depth when it comes to FCC policy, but it strikes me that the realities of radio broadcasting mean that a very limited number of programs on a limited number of stations are available to a listener at any given point. Incentivizing new stations on new ranges of the radio spectrum should be a goal for any administration to boost the number of viewpoints available through the air.

Plus ca change...

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