It’s not terribly insightful, I suppose, but this post at MyDD reminded me how our considerations of candidates is shaped by our political memories and not just our philosophies about policy. The post is about a college student who is developing a Facebook network in support of Barack Obama.
The group had a celebratory conference call just now after they got their 100,000th sign-up, and I was on the call briefly. It was kind of silly, with college guys chit-chatting about the different candidates. There wasn’t a hugely passionate embrace of Obama and the discussion centered around ideas and information that aren’t on CNN and Fox News. These kids are talking to each other, swapping information easily and quickly. They also don’t really remember the bitterness of the Clinton impeachment, and they are not scarred by the politics and fear-mongering prior to the Iraq war that touches each of us, or the incompetence of the Kerry campaign angered all of us who tried to volunteer but were treated as an ATM. Politics for them can be hopeful and fun, as light as another Facebook group.
If I step back and take a look at my own political views, particularly on the national level, it’s tough for me to erase the stain of the Clinton impeachment when considering Republican candidates. Aside from a bit of volunteering for Bush-Quayle in ’88 and some enthusiasm for Perot in ’92 and to a lesser extent ’96, the impeachment was more or less my political awakening. It angered me deeply that the bedrock of our Constitution was being tampered with over something so frivolous and transparently political. Heap on that the toxicity of the Rehnquist Supreme Court stopping the vote count in Florida, and the Iraq War for good measure, and you have a big thumb on my own internal political scales for future Congressional and Presidential races.
Obviously, I’m aware of my own biases in this respect. What I tend to forget is that others have different political memories or (in many cases) no political memories. That goes a long way toward explaining why I can see a candidate much differently than another person, even where our analysis and opinions of the candidate’s policy choices are essentially the same.
The irony of listening to John Bolton talk on NPR about how the Democrats should not be political or partisan in their control of Congress is nearly overwhelming. The Clinton impeachment effort was indeed a low point in our Constitutional discourse, and the fact that it was brought to you by the same people who protected Mark Foley from his, um, interest in underage pages, makes you just shake your head in disbelief.
Although we all like to think of ourselves as the next generation, of course that stops being true after a point. My understanding of world events includes memories of friends at my junior high wearing MIA bracelets for soldiers in Viet Nam, and waiting for the hostages to come home from Iran, and watching endless Iran-Contra hearings on tv, and every morning brushing my teeth to reports of things that would end up being the fall of the Soviet Union….and there are now people active in politics for whom these things are only items mentioned in history books – as personally significant to them as Korea, Kennedy’s assassination, or the Tet Offensive was to me. (That is to say, not personally significant at all.)
Doug, I applaud this self-examination of your political views and the experiences that have shaped them. Karen’s experience described above is also shorter than my own, and we seem to have arrived at different points of view on several things. She mentions how John Bolton’s comments and the protection of Mark Foley make her shake her head in disbelief. It is Speaker Pelosi’s claims of cleaning out congressional corruption while supporting John Murtha for a leadership position that makes me shake mine. My memories of congressional scandal and corruption go back much farther than Republican control of the House of Representatives.
Isn’t this democracy thing interesting? It is useful for us all to remember that hypocrisy has no partisan limitations.
Doug:
The only issue I agreed with regarding the Clinton impeachment was that you can’t have the President lying under oath in court as it regarded a court case in which his extra-marital behavior was germane to the prosecution’s case. Sure, at the end of the day who he messed around with doesn’t have a true impact on how he runs the county, but you can’t have Presidents lying.
And yes, by that standard, I think Congress is doing America a great dis-service for not investigating Bush’s lies that have led to the situation in Iraq, because that sure seems to me to be impeachable for sure, if not convictable. After all, when Clinton lied, nobody died. The point of having three branches of government was so that they all keep each other in check. The Bushies want the other two branches to kow-tow to the executive branch, and the Democrats are more worried about “not squandering their political capital” than doing what they should do – impeach Bush.
I wouldn’t have been overly disturbed if perjury charges were brought against Clinton. Impeachment is an entirely different animal. I don’t even really support it for Bush based on what I know to date. I think impeachment is exceedingly disruptive to our democratic processes and should be used with the utmost reluctance.
Well, I gotta say I find this astonishing, or would if I didn’t run into it so often (as in “When are our politics going to stop being about Vietnam?” when a general understanding of Vietnam, as opposed to the faux-balanced mythology we peddle about it nowadays, could have prevented a repeat disaster in Iraq). It says, essentially, to me that I needn’t concern myself with the lessons of WWII, or the Great Depression, or the slave trade, since those matters were settled before I was born, and are now available as Cliffs Notes.
Now before someone replies in anger, I understand you aren’t offering this as a prescription, just as a description of how things are, but there cannot be an easy acceptance of the fact that college students do not know what was going on politically a mere ten years ago. The Civil War and the French Revolution affect you every day. Your great-granddaddy may have had his head broken by regular Army troops because he struck for an eight-hour day. The whole Republican “small government” canard is a rehash of the last stand of legalized Southern racism. If you know the Ronald Reagan of “Tear down this Wall,” but not the Reagan of “If it takes a bloodbath then let’s get started,” then you really don’t know what you’re talking about.
If Bush had been accused of what Clinton was accused of, a friendly court would have declared that a sitting president can’t be sued–and that would have been the end of it.
Also, was his behavior with Monica germaine to the lawsuit after all? Does receiving fellatio from a very willing woman in 1994 really have any bearing on whether or not he made an unwanted sexual advance years before on someone else–and more importantly whether her refusal led to adverse effects on her employment due to retalliation on his part? Her testimony was only allowed for political reasons. It came close to defining all sexual activity outside marriage as sexual harrassment.
Me, I started hating Republican environmental policies first. The impeachment was a joke. Add all the systematic attempts at voter disenfranchisement, the fox-guarding-the-henhouse aspect of having oil, gas, and timber execs manage our public lands, etc., and the Iraq War, and the squandering of the surplus and the opportunity we had to finance social security and alternative fuels, etc., and it has become unlikely that I will ever vote for any Republican from this generation of politicians, ever.
The Republican Party is beyond any hope of redemption, because it is philosophically, organizationally, and fiscally beholden to big for-profit corporations and large churches, the most anti-democratic instutions in our society.
The Democratic Party has many black marks to its name, but it at least seems capable of being reclaimed by the governed. The Democratic blogs I read have little love for John Murtha or William Jefferson, most have little for Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi (the two women GOP talking heads most love to hate), and there’s not even a rush to anoint Barack Obama as the Party’s lord and savior.
The way I see it, Democratic activists are, for the most part, focused on democratizing the party apparatus and increasing accountability of public servants to the people. They largely avoid the cultic personality tropes that are the meat and drink of the Republicans.
I do note that, from my perspective, the Democratic Party didn’t to used to work this way. FDR was elevated to the status of secular deity much as Republicans have tried to do with Reagan.
The GOP has mastered messianism; let them keep it. It is fundamentally undemocratic. Let them continue to trot out macho Top Guns who sob before the news cameras because they got caught with their hands in yacht-sized cookie jars.
Branden- I think you got it on the second try, when you cited Dems lionizing FDR. Just so happens that Zogby released a poll on 1/15 showing that Americans surveyed generally want a strong throwback president, that reminds Republicans of Reagan, and Democrats of FDR.
http://interactive.zogby.com:80/s/inew18.cfm?ID=471690&pass=mikekolein
As for me, I was a Democrat first, but was deeply alienated by Democrats on many fronts- first with Tipper Gore and the PMRC; later with my then-US Rep Dennis Kucinich endlessly pushing steel tariffs on the basis of helping the steelworkers unions… all while hurting the autoworkers unions by making that steel more expensive for American cars; then I finally gave up when after years of spouting anti-corporate rhetoric, I finally allowed myself to see that Democrats were no less beholden to corporate interests.
I began looking outside my box, but could not bring myself ever to embrace the Republican Party. They had just been the enemy for far too long for me to be able to. I discovered the Libertarian Party, and it rather sounded like it came from the mouth of my personal political hero, Thomas Jefferson. I’ve been there ever since.
I must say that I have begrudgingly accepted a small handful of Republicans as heroes, with Barry Goldwater at the top of the list. I was astonished when I read “Conscience of a Conservative”. It was nothing like any Republican I had ever encountered. It was a real eye-opener.
Ron Paul is another, but then, he did run for President on the Libertarian ticket. He is going to declare (if he hasn’t already) that he is running on the Republican ticket for 2008. I don’t believe he has the proverbial snowball’s chance, but until he’s out, and until the LP’s 2008 convention, it will be hard for me not to back him.
At the heart of this post, though, political parties are tools for getting ideas into policy. Personality has to be a part of it. Indeed, this is one of the primary lessons to Libertarian candidates who have run solidly on principle, but had the personality of a wood post. Ever since ’60, if you haven’t paid attention to that, you haven’t gotten very far. Ask Dole, Gore, or most any of the Libertarian candidates, I’m afraid. If a winning personality unites with a winning message, you have something. No matter what, though, after the convention, if the bases can’t get beyond the past, they aren’t going to move the team forward. Dems would be wise to forget about the Kerry campaign. Republicans would be wise to forget about the 2006 elections. Libertarians would be wise to forget any of their previous campaigns ever happened.
Mike Kole,
Er, you might want to change your password to Zogby Interactive’s site. It seems they encode your password cleartext, and pass it along in HTTP GET requests, which is two stupefyingly bad security practices rolled into one. Yeesh.
(For the geek readers, a challenge-response approach and the HTTP POST method are the preferred alternatives to the above.)
I don’t have a password that I’m aware of. I just click the form the send me. If it were any more difficult than that, I probably wouldn’t participate.
Mike Kole,
I was referring to this bit:
?ID=471690&pass=mikekoleinwhich was in the URL you posted. Usually, in my experience, “ID” and “pass” indicates a username/password pair.
If that’s not the case here, please accept my apologies for undue paranoia on your behalf. :)
Branden- To be fair, it could well be a password. It’s just that I would be unaware if it is. they send me their polls by email, I click, and I fill in the circles. For all I know, several people have hacked my computer today… but what a dull exercise that would be! :-D