The inauguration was awesome, and I’m personally looking forward to a photo of President Obama at the Resolute Desk.
I’m saddened to hear of Ted Kennedy’s collapse at the luncheon. That’s a sad note to the day, and it makes the other one sour note on the day, the ridiculous flub of John Roberts, seem quite trivial.
I’ve honestly been trying to avoid a lot of the news about the transition, just because so much of it was all the same old stuff. About two weeks ago I had on the TV and CNN started pimping an upcoming segment by proudly announcing that James Carville and Ed Rollins were coming up to give us their expert opinion. The TV went off and that was that.
But today I watched the inaugural concert via HBO.com (as my cable company wouldn’t carry it) and things started to finally feel pretty good. At one point some musicians in the Navy Band were in close-up and seeing the emblems on their hats kind of made it all seem real. Right, they are playing for Obama, we won the election, and good people have retaken the American government.
And then the pinnacle for me was seeing Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger singing “This Land Is Your Land” with the choir behind them. They even sang the verse that used to be banned. It was spectacular, and made it all feel like it wasn’t some good dream from which I would awake. It was reality, it was happening in Washington, and a hinge of history was swinging in the right direction.
The New York Times is reporting that the Village Voice laid off Nat Hentoff.
I have to admit I haven’t seen the Village Voice in years. There was a time when I picked it up every Wednesday, and Nat Hentoff’s column was always something reliable about it. No matter how flaky the rest of the paper became, Hentoff was a voice of sanity. You might not always agree with him, but he was smart and knew what he was talking about.
Everything is falling apart, and while an 83-year-old columnist losing his job isn’t a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, it does seem to be a metaphor.
The idea of Caroline Kennedy replacing Hillary Clinton in the Senate seemed at first like something people talk about just to have something to talk about (which is most of what’s on cable news anyway). But now it looks like it’s seriously moving forward, and people are popping up to slam Caroline Kennedy.
I get Jane Hamsher’s point that Kennedy hasn’t been fighting against the Republicans for the past eight years, but I also don’t know that everyone’s role has to be squabbling with wingnuts on television or in the blogs. Caroline Kennedy has been working on education issues in New York City, taking a dollar a year to work for the NYC Board of Education. I do recall hearing some criticism of the work she was doing in New York, but the point is that she did have work to do. It’s not like she was attending fashion shows for the past decade.
People have also called her unqualified for not having held previous elective office. If you’re a career politician you’re criticized. If you come to elective politics late in life you’re criticized. My suspicion is that Caroline Kennedy, by dint of having been close to her Uncle Ted all these years, knows a hell of a lot about how the Senate operates. And if you look at the Senators you see on TV all the time, who really thinks the job has such high qualifications? Hell, a vile character like Saxby Chambliss just got elected again to the Senate. And you could name at least 20 other jokes who hold Senate seats. Does anyone seriously think Caroline Kennedy can’t handle the job? Hell, she’s written a book on the Bill of Rights. There are probably Senators who couldn’t tell you what the Bill of Rights is.
Okay, that’s a low bar. But the point is that Senators all bring different things to the job. And one thing she brings, besides her brain, is the ability to keep the seat. Whoever gets named as Hillary Clinton’s replacement will have to win a special election in 2010, and then the regular term election in 2012. That’s going to require a lot of name recognition and money. The biggest disaster would be if a relative unknown is appointed now, runs in 2010, and loses. And then the Republican winner in 2010 runs as an incumbent in 2012. Nominating Caroline Kennedy and having her run in those two elections probably solves that problem.
I personally don’t care much either way whether Caroline Kennedy becomes a Senator, but I think a lot of the commentary and underlying resentment toward the Kennedy family misses the essential point. The Democrats want to hold that seat. And it seems that she can do that.
I was listening yesterday to some of the people who play journalists on TV carrying on about Obama having three press conferences in three days, and they were struggling mightily to come up with something, anything, to undermine his presidency before it begins. The myth the Republicans are having the broadcast knuckleheads propound is that Obama is basically betraying everyone who voted for him by appointing experienced people to critical jobs. Because, you know, the voters really wanted him to fill important posts with people he found on street corners.
And the whole thing made me think about how things would be if McCain had won. It’s hard to imagine what would be happening, but I think we can assume McCain wouldn’t be much interested in trying to salvage the economy. My best guess is that he’d be ignoring the financial peril the nation faces and he’d be trying to stir up a war with Iran. Or some other country. Any country.
So we’ve all got that to be thankful for. We have a president elect who knows what is important and he’s making a major effort to deal with it all.
From the Salon interview with William Ayers:
Which seemed more unlikely a few decades ago: that you would be the most famous graduate of 1960s radicalism in America or that you would appear on “Good Morning America” along with a segment about a pregnant man?
I really wanted a segment about the two-headed monkey to follow. That’s exactly how I think of most of the mainstream media. It’s amazing when you think about that this broad and amazingly diverse and committed and passionate antiwar movement of 40 years ago gets reduced in the narrative put up by the Republican campaign to a single organization which was tiny and on the margins [the Weather Underground] and a single individual who was co-founder of that and a single sentence that individual said. The parallel to that is that the powerful black freedom movement gets reduced to a single preacher in a single church and a single phrase.
Years and years ago, I lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn with a few roommates. Now and then we’d have a big party, and on the mornings after those calamitous events I’d wander down into the living room and always find a few people sleeping on the couches or in the armchairs. Or even on the floor.
I would usually would make coffee and people would come to their senses and my roommates and I would usually get organized to go out and buy bagels and maybe some fresh eggs and the party would morph into a hungover brunch. Some of those frazzled Sundays would then transform into football watching parties, and I think some Saturday guests only really rolled out of Park Slope on Monday morning. Alas, it was years and years ago and that’s the way things went.
I honestly used to kind of like the idea of a party that doesn’t really have a finite end, but sane people tend to like endings. Which is what makes Sarah Palin’s bizarre after-election performance fun to watch but also creepy and disturbing. It’s like finding a female version of a Ricky Gervais character in your living room on a Sunday morning after a big party. Just talking nonstop bullshit and hardly coming up for air. And with no one really having any idea how to get rid of her.
The other night, I swear, I was trying to avoid her and she kept popping up on any TV channel I chose. It was crazy. And apparently the Republican governors are pissed off at her for taking over their convention. I can’t blame them… they’re a pretty dismal crew, and she manages to make them all look like total assholes. You listen to her and you think, hey, any dipshit can be a Republican governor.
Part of me wants someone to tell her the party is over and to go home. But then the sick part of me just wants it to keep going on and on, through a long endless hungover Sunday.
Just amazing and gratifying to experience Barack Obama’s victory. I did what I could in the Florida ground game, making calls and knocking on doors, and the experience made me hopeful. I discovered that a lot of people supported Obama, and really believed in Obama, and even said they loved Obama, but you wouldn’t know it unless you talked to them. So while I always thought it was possible, it’s just awesome to actually see the history being made.
It’s a spectacular moment for America.
A few weird things jump out from clips of McCain’s rally last night in Ohio. First of all, the crowd had been supplied with stick-on name tags reading “Joe.” It’s a riff on the “we are all Joe the Plumber” nonsense.
What’s particularly bizarre about this is that McCain’s final campaign push all revolves around an unlicensed handyman (who is not a plumber) who no one knew about three weeks ago today. Think about how strange that is. The McCain campaign is trusting itself to a clod and a liar who admits he hates Social Security. That’s just creepy.
And then there’s Musclehead. The governor of California shows up and starts making jokes about Obama’s physical condition. Blah blah blah he’s a girlyman, he’s got skinny legs, he needs to do some squats. It’s actually pretty funny stuff, so Arnold deserves a little credit for his clowning. But does the McCain campaign really want to bring up the physical condition of the candidates?
The other day I watched a McCain speech and I honestly worried about his health. He seemed spent and exhausted and kept having to stop to blow his nose. It was almost painful to watch. Obama, on the other hand, has trained for this final sprint, and he seems to be loving it. And the Republicans are mocking his physical condition?
And then there’s the issue of Palin. She won’t release her medical records. Her campaign said they’d be released a week ago, and they never came out. They obviously think the issue has gotten lost in all the other news, and they’re probably right about that. The people who play journalists on tv don’t even seem to know that she promised to release her medical records and won’t.
The weird secrecy and hide-the-ball games with her medical records really do make you wonder. Why is that such a touchy subject?
I’ve always assumed that when Republicans talk about “elites,” it’s a code word for Jews. Just think about it. They rail about “coastal elites,” “Upper West Side elites,” “Hollywood elites,” and “media elites.” Not too hard to do the math on that.
And now the Republicans are claiming that Obama wants to “redistribute” the wealth. Which is based on a wildly out of context quote from Obama’s thoughtful answer to the scab who claimed to be a plumber in Ohio two weeks ago. What the Republicans are doing here is just a minor update to Ronald Reagan’s old racist tirades about “welfare queens.” Get it? Today McCain was shrieking about how Obama wants to take your wealth and give it other people.
Get it now? That’s right, he wants to take your money and give to people on welfare. Simple as that. So now they’re talking about “wealth redistribution” and “socialism” as code for something else. Obama is black and he’s going to take your money and give to someone else. It’s a disgusting strategy, but it’s all that McCain has left.
The truly weird thing about McCain’s campaign is that he’s stuck talking about “Joe the Plumber,” a fraud who isn’t named Joe and who couldn’t pass a plumber’s exam. After running for president literally for years, McCain has gambled everything on some guy in Ohio no one heard about three weeks ago. It’s so weird that it’s staggering.
Obama has run his campaign like someone who can look over the horizon. He has known, at every step of the way, where he should be at any given time and where he has to go. McCain has been rudderless, lurching recklessly from one stunt to another. And now, at the end, he’s down to using racially charged code words. It’s pathetic.
Like a lot of people, I worry about what could go wrong. Could everyone just decide not to vote and somehow McCain wins? I can’t see it happening. But that’s why I fear it. Because McCain, if put in power, would be far worse than even Bush. And that’s scary as hell.