Posted by Aaron

First, I have to say a few kind words about William Kristol.  Yes, the Bill Kristol I excoriated in my very first column in Today’s Lies, the one whose smirk alone can send me scurrying to the corner of the room, intoning “Redrum” to my finger.  It would be remiss of me, having pronounced him temperamentally incapable of raising valuable points or issues, not to acknowledge the overall soundness of his unfortunately-titled New York Times piece “Desperate Husband.”  To be sure, he comes down very hard on the Clintons—never a task that has wrung bitter tears from him—but his observations about Bill Clinton’s efforts to inject race into the South Carolina primaries are clear, forceful and well-reasoned.  Take, for example, Clinton’s comments about Jesse Jackson in the days leading up to the primaries. Kristol notes that Obama’s campaign has virtually nothing in common with Jackson’s, writing:

Clinton’s comment alludes to one thing, and to one thing only: Jackson and Obama are both black candidates.  The silent premise of Clinton’s comment is that Obama’s victory in South Carolina doesn’t really count.  Or, at least, Clinton is suggesting, it doesn’t mean any more than Jackson’s did.

It’s ugly, but it’s hard to refute.  It seems clear that the Clinton campaign has swiped pages from the Rove playbook; they can see that, in addition to his obvious charisma and his motivational gifts, Barack Obama’s image as a child (and standard-bearer) of a transformative, mult-racial, trans-national culture carries enormous appeal for many Americans.  So immediately, they work to turn this image into a negative, attempting to pigeonhole him as a “black candidate,” a label he has rejected over and over again.  They furthermore imply that to be a black candidate is to be a fringe candidate (something, incidentally, that wasn’t exactly true of Jackson in 1988).  It would be a disgraceful tactic for any politician to employ, but particularly for one who wishes to leapfrog onto the “change” platform and prove to her naysayers that she can be a viable progressive candidate.

It’s also, of course, a lie.  Obama has performed well with white voters in every state in which he’s competed.  As Kristol points out, Jesse Jackson didn’t win the Iowa caucus, or place second in New Hampshire—states where, if you’ll remember, people with darker-than-olive skin are about as common as talking snowmen.  Naturally, this didn’t keep the mainstream media from swallowing the Clintons’ invented storyline with gusto.  For a week, nearly every story I read about South Carolina contained the meme “racially-charged.”  Often, the modifier was tossed in with no effort at justification— not “Bill Clinton refers again to the racial dynamics of the race,” but rather “Obama leads polls in racially-charged South Carolina primary.”  Gee, haven’t we been told that it’s Republicans who simply repeat falsehoods until they seem true?  Bill’s absurd complaints about unfair media bias notwithstanding, one wonders if the AP has simply been taking dictation from the Clinton campaign.  The alternative explanation—that the MSM simply fall back on the racial tension=instant drama formula out of habit—is no less disturbing.  In any case, it wasn’t until the end of the contest, when Obama had claimed a whopping 55 percent of the vote, that the press began to coughingly adjust the narrative.  Er, yes, ahem, he actually won by quite a lot.  Essentially split the white vote with the other two.  Uh, momentum, maybe.  How about that shitty economy?

Which brings me, sadly, to Paul Krugman.  My go-to guy with the poop on progressive economic policy has been on certain topics (to mercilessly belabor the metaphor) not so much a stopped clock as a semi-fried digital clock reading EL:7P.  He continues to provide the usual brilliant, clearheaded analysis on everything from the Fed rate cut to the fallacy-ridden garbledygook that has led so many people in this country to take supply side theory remotely seriously.  His blog entry deriding the Times’ suggestion that Bush “doesn’t get credit” for his “economic successes” is a gem.  But every time my esteemed role model mentions Barack Obama, I wonder if he’s been hit on the head with a ball peen hammer.  In today’s column he seems to imply that an Obama presidency would mean a return to the furious right-wing flak-fest that was the 90s—because Obama, like Bill Clinton, seems to be running a campaign on hope.  While the main point of his column—“stick to substance, people, it’s where we’re strongest”— is valid enough, the notion that an Obama presidency would create a more rancorous environment than a second Clinton administration is sheer fantasy.  And while the level of hostility aimed at the Clintons during the 90s was indeed hysterical, unfair, and undeserved, I do think that their shared bunker mentality—one that Krugman seems to advocate—only made matters worse (see the excellent New Yorker piece “The Choice” for more on this).

Look, I’m the last person to defend the GOP’s policies or tactics; they’ve run on nothing but tax cuts, abortion, homophobia and terrorist-killing for the last thirty years. “Liberals hate America” and so on.  So naturally Krugman and others will bridle when Barack Obama offhandedly notes that the Republican Party was perceived as a “party of ideas” by many people.  But smart, reasonable fellows like Krugman don’t seem to understand that in politics, “the party of ideas” is always a euphemism.  That other stopped clock, David Brooks, is right to remind us (often) that the American voter is not a rational animal—that, like most other human beings, we tend to form snap judgments based on our deepest (often poorly-articulated) values and then seek a convincing-sounding rationale afterwards.  Democrats didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan in droves (and they did, folks, they did) because they liked his ideas; they did so because he projected an image of optimism and change.  Obama seems to understand this dynamic better than anybody.  And while it is sensible and just to demand that a political figure deliver on the energy of this image, it seems pointless to constantly criticize someone for making it the centerpiece of his campaign.

When major paradigm shifts are taking place, it’s just not enough to talk about policy alone.  Policy in the absence of a compelling narrative is easily undone.  This isn’t 1992, people; if anything, it’s a chance to recover from the great drawing back of the tide (to borrow from Hunter S. Thompson) that was 1968.  We need competent government, but just as badly, we need someone to forcefully tell the story that competent governing actually makes a difference.  I don’t think Barack Obama can accomplish this himself, any more than I believe he can leap to the surface of the moon.  But I do know the frisson of excitement that accompanies an unexpected twist in a well-told narrative.  And for the first time in years, I think people are leaning in closer, eager to hear the rest of the story.