Centerblue.org

The blogosphere is on fire because of the recent brief submitted by Obama’s DOJ in response to a lawsuit, Smelt v. United States, seeking to overturn the federal Defense of Marriage Act that states marriage to be only between a man and a woman. The fires are being stoked by Americablog, which in my opinion twists what’s going on in the brief out of context for people who are not well-versed in the legal arguments being made. I’m not happy that Obama is defending DoMA, but let’s have a rational discussion about what’s really going on.

1) The President and Executive Branch have a duty to execute and defend the laws passed by Congress.

(A Republican) Congress passed DoMA in 1996, and Bill Clinton signed it lest he imperil his re-election. As such, it became the federal law of the land. The President and DoJ are required to uphold and defend those laws. It’s true that Americablog cites a couple of situations where the Executive Branch has declined to defend a law in the books. I have not had time to look up those cases to see what happened, so I will cede the point that it’s not 100% mandatory for the Executive Branch to defend every law in court. Nevertheless, it happens 99.9% of the time, including in situations that the Executive would prefer not to defend but does so because of its duty to execute the laws or because of some other policy reason.

2) Obama had two choices: do what’s done 99.9% of the time, or create a firestorm he’d rather push to Congress in repealing DoMA.

Obama had to make a choice: was this the time, the place and the manner in which to push for the repeal of DoMA? Had he done so, would it have been effective? Obama has indicated that he wants Congress to take the lead on issues like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (and perhaps by extension DoMA). We may not like it, but it’s simply politically smart to have the legislature that passed the law, un-make it. Neither he nor I have forgotten how badly Bill Clinton got burned when he tried to end the ban on gays in the military without having the assent of Congress. It bombed terribly. Obama the politican does not want a similar bomb to explode in his face.

Don’t like that Obama is a politician and acts out of self-interest? Who do you think he is..Jesus Christ? By insisting that such measures come out of Congress he covers his ass, and also ensures that he doesn’t end up weak and ineffectual like Clinton became when he was forced to sign the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell “compromise.” That’s politics, folks. Can he push Congress to repeal DODT or DoMA? Absolutely, and he should, and we should pressure him to do so. But this lawsuit was not that time.

So, assuming he had reason not to put a stake in the ground, he had no other choice but to defend the law in the books. And when you go to court to defend your position, you are required to do so vigorously regardless of what you privately think of the argument. You don’t go in there half-assed, with a little wink and a nod and hoping everyone understands.

3) The brief did NOT liken gay marriage to incest or pederasty.

Here’s the passage that has Aravosis and other people so outraged:

The courts have followed this principle, moreover, in relation to the validity of marriages performed in other States. Both the First and Second Restatements of Conflict of Laws recognize that State courts may refuse to give effect to a marriage, or to certain incidents of a marriage, that contravene the forum State’s policy. See Restatement (First) of Conflict of Laws § 134; Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws § 284.5 And the courts have widely held that certain marriages performed elsewhere need not be given effect, because they conflicted with the public policy of the forum. See, e.g., Catalano v. Catalano, 170 A.2d 726, 728-29 (Conn. 1961) (marriage of uncle to niece, “though valid in Italy under its laws, was not valid in Connecticut because it contravened the public policy of th[at] state”); Wilkins v. Zelichowski, 140 A.2d 65, 67-68 (N.J. 1958) (marriage of 16-year-old female held invalid in New Jersey, regardless of validity in Indiana where performed, in light of N.J. policy reflected in statute permitting adult female to secure annulment of her underage marriage); In re Mortenson’s Estate, 316 P.2d 1106 (Ariz. 1957) (marriage of first cousins held invalid in Arizona, though lawfully performed in New Mexico, given Arizona policy reflected in statute declaring such marriages “prohibited and void”).

OK, so let me explain something that Aravosis doesn’t. When you argue a case in court, you’re looking to make a point. When you try to make that point, you cast about for other cases that also make that point. Often times, you won’t find a case that is exactly (or even anywhere near) the same in terms of the facts, so you have to look for cases with dissimilar facts but which argue for the same conclusion. You do this in hopes of persuading the judge that the conclusion that happened in the other cases should be applied to your case too, even if the facts aren’t similar. This is totally standard procedure, and so is doing a quick summation of the different facts in the other cases for the benefit of the court.

This paragraph in the brief is re-stating a well known and rock solid tenet of “conflict of laws” (an area of law that dictates, roughly speaking, what happens when laws between states conflict.) The well known maxim is that a state is usually required to accept the rulings and laws of a sister state, EXCEPT when the sister state’s laws run counter to the current state’s public policy. So just to give a theoretical example, if one state allowed polygamy and a polygamous couple went to another state and tried to have their marriage recognized there, that state would not have to uphold the marriage if it provided evidence that polygamy runs counter to the public policy there.

The point being made in the paragraph is just as in the hypothetical: one state need not recognize another state’s marriage if it believes the marriage to violate public policy, with the underlying assumption that there are states out there that do in fact believe same sex marriage violates their public policy (strong evidence of which would be the various state level anti-marriage amendments and laws that have been passed).

In trying to back up the point, the brief cites other marriage-related cases. They probably couldn’t find other examples of same sex marriages in the books to cite as evidence since they’re a new thing. So they cast about for what they could find–and they came up with an incest case and a pederasty case with totally different facts but which argued the same conclusion: that State A can refuse recognition of State B’s marriages.

Arguing by analogy is not the same thing as arguing from belief or from current facts. The DOJ brief is NOT saying same sex marriages are like incest or pederasty. They’re just other cases that argue, by analogy, for the same conclusion being sought by the brief.

4) Much of the rest of the brief points cited by Americablog re-state existing law.

Americablog takes great exception that the brief argues that gay marriage should not be treated the same as race for equal protection arguments. But for decades the law has been clear that there are three standards of increasingly strict review–and that only race, national origin and religious affiliation receive the highest protection standard under the Equal Protection Clause (which is to say most laws regarding these classes will simply be struck down). Even sex discrimination isn’t treated as strictly as race, and gets an “intermediate” level of scrutiny/protection. Everything else has always been on the lowest tier, requiring merely that a law have some “rational basis” to avoid being struck.

That the brief argued that this lowest basis should be used for DoMA is standard practice when arguing Equal Protection cases. Arguing that homosexuality should join race at the top of the Equal Protection pyramid is a losing argument that probably wouldn’t fly even in front of a liberal court, and this brief was certainly not the right time to make that argument.

Yes, it’s disappointing that the brief would argue that same sex marriage shouldn’t be considered a fundamental right (a better argument for marriage equality advocates than equal protection). Yes it’s sad that the brief would regurgitate old arguments about equal protection and public policy. But if DoJ was going to have to defend the law, it could really do so only on those three grounds.

5) The brief does not re-state key anti-gay arguments made in such cases by the Bush Administration.

The Washington Post pointed out that the brief upheld the validity of same sex marriages performed in states that permit them, unlike Bush’s arguments that same sex marriage is never valid. The brief also did not use the incendiary argument that kids raised in heterosexual married households are better off than those in gay households.

It’s a relatively small point, but key in my opinion to my belief that the brief is dryly stating legalese instead of trying to damage the gay marriage cause.

——————————
Conclusion

I know everything above is wordy and dense, so here’s the summary:

We have a right to be angry and disappointed that Obama’s administration would put its name anywhere near supporting DoMA. Obama has not done enough on behalf of gay issues, for repealing DADT and DoMA and he should be taken to task for that. He has been a disappointment on civil rights issues generally.

But let’s not fan the flames of anger and turn them into hatred by finding malice where there is none.

a) Obama and the Executive Branch are doing what’s done 99.9% of the time in defending a law passed by Congress and signed by another President.

b) Obama had a choice, to be that 0.1% of the time and take a stand in what was likely to be a losing cause by refusing to weigh in on DoMA, or to support the law. Whether we agree with it or not, Obama decided that this was not the time or the place, nor did he have the means or the will or the political capital or what have you, to dictate an end to DoMA on his own. Call him a coward or a political pragmatist, but he is on the record as wanting Congress to take the lead on these issues.

c) OBAMA DID NOT EQUATE GAY MARRIAGE WITH INCEST OR PEDERASTY. The brief made an argument by analogy with other cases, to prove a point using cases that had dissimilar facts but came to the same conclusion wanted by the writer. This happens ALL THE TIME in legal arguments, it is standard practice and says nothing about the writer’s personal beliefs about the case.

d) If you decide to argue a case, you can’t do it half assed. You have to do so zealously. In so doing, the brief employed the standard equal protection, fundamental rights, and public policy arguments that always come up in these marriage cases. We may not like the other side of these arguments, but they are what they are.

What do we do?

I’m not trying to completely exonerate Obama here. We need to apply the nails to his nuts and start pushing hard for him to start coming through on DoMA and DoDT. He’s had a lot on his plate with the economy, but his silence on these issues is increasingly unacceptable–and the brief only inflames the splinter in the gay community’s mind about it all. He’s on the record as wanting repeal of these laws. Fine. Let’s ride his ass to get on the phone with Congress and GET IT DONE NOW. I’m confident that if DoMA is repealed and someone somehow sues on that basis, that his administration will take the other side of this argument and defend the repeal.

But let’s not mistake this brief for a President who would actively seek to write us out of the Constitution like the last one attempted. Wanting “cover” for his political ass may be cowardly or the sign of a man who prefers consensus, but it’s an entirely different animal from someone who actively hates us and wants to bow to the Radical Right.

Let’s be angry because he has not done enough to keep his promises yet and has forced himself into an embarrassing corner by having to argue this case. Let’s not pillory him for something he hasn’t done.

He’s not out to destroy us. He (and Congress) just need a good hard push.

UPDATE: DOJ spokesperson makes statement about Obama’s stance on DoMA:

As it generally does with existing statutes, the Justice Department is defending the law on the books in court. The president has said he wants to see a legislative repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act because it prevents LGBT couples from being granted equal rights and benefits. However, until Congress passes legislation repealing the law, the administration will continue to defend the statute when it is challenged in the justice system.

Spokesman also points to standard Executive Branch policy:

Executive Branch agencies will enforce federal statutes unless they are clearly unconstitutional and the Department of Justice will defend statutes against constitutional attack whenever reasonable arguments can be made in their defense.

This is probably the best, most intellectual article on politics I have read in years. It not only goes into Obama’s values and agenda, but also defines the core moral value differences between progressives and conservatives–and why the latter feel so threatened by the current economic crisis.

——————

The Obama Code

By George Lakoff

Berkeley, CA. February 24, 2009.

As President Obama prepares to address a joint session of Congress, what can we expect to hear?

The pundits will stress the nuts-and-bolts policy issues: the banking system, education, energy, health care. But beyond policy, there will be a vision of America—a moral vision and a view of unity that the pundits often miss.

What they miss is the Obama Code. For the sake of unity, the President tends to express his moral vision indirectly. Like other self-aware and highly articulate speakers, he connects with his audience using what cognitive scientists call the “cognitive unconscious.” Speaking naturally, he lets his deepest ideas simply structure what he is saying. If you follow him, the deep ideas are communicated unconsciously and automatically. The Code is his most effective way to bring the country together around fundamental American values.

For supporters of the President, it is crucial to understand the Code in order to talk overtly about the old values our new president is communicating. It is necessary because tens of millions of Americans—both conservatives and progressives—don’t yet perceive the vital sea change that Obama is bringing about.

The word “code” can refer to a system of either communication or morality. President Obama has integrated the two. The Obama Code is both moral and linguistic at once. The President is using his enormous skills as a communicator to express a moral system. As he has said, budgets are moral documents. His economic program is tied to his moral system and is discussed in the Code, as are just about all of his other policies.

Behind the Obama Code are seven crucial intellectual moves that I believe are historically, practically, and cognitively appropriate, as well as politically astute. They are not all obvious, and jointly they may seem mysterious. That is why it is worth sorting them out one-by-one.

1. Values Over Programs

The first move is to distinguish programs from the value systems they represent. Every policy has a material aspect—the nuts and bolts of how it works— plus a typically implicit cognitive aspect that represents the values and ideas behind the nuts and bolts. The President knows the difference. He understands that those who see themselves as “progressive” or “conservative” all too often define those words in terms of programs rather than values. Even the programs championed by progressives may not fit what the President sees as the fundamental values of the country. He is seeking to align the programs of his administration with those values.

The potential pushback will come not just from conservatives who do not share his values, but just as much from progressives who make the mistake of thinking that programs are values and that progressivism is defined by a list of programs. When some of those programs are cut as economically secondary or as unessential, their defenders will inevitably see this as a conservative move rather than a move within an overall moral vision they share with the President.

This separation between values and programs lies behind the president’s pledge to cut programs that don’t serve those values and support those that do — no matter whether they are proposed by Republicans or Democrats. The President’s idealistic question is, what policies serve what values? — not what political interests?

2. Progressive Values are American Values

President Obama’s second intellectual move concerns what the fundamental American values are. In Moral Politics, I described what I found to be the implicit, often unconscious, value systems behind progressive and conservative thought. Progressive thought rests, first, on the value of empathy —- putting oneself in other people’s shoes, seeing the world through their eyes, and therefore caring about them. The second principle is acting on that care, taking responsibility both for oneself and others, social as well as individual responsibility. The third is acting to make oneself, the country, and the world better—what Obama has called an “ethic of excellence” toward creating “a more perfect union” politically.

Historian Lynn Hunt, in Inventing Human Rights, has shown that those values, beginning with empathy, lie historically behind the human rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Obama, in various interviews and speeches, has provided the logical link. Empathy is not mere sympathy. Putting oneself in the shoes of others brings with it the responsibility to act on that empathy—to be “our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper”—and to act to improve ourselves, our country, and the world.

The logic is simple: Empathy is why we have the values of freedom, fairness, and equality — for everyone, not just for certain individuals. If we put ourselves in the shoes of others, we will want them to be free and treated fairly. Empathy with all leads to equality: no one should be treated worse than anyone else. Empathy leads us to democracy: to avoid being subject indefinitely to the whims of an oppressive and unfair ruler, we need to be able to choose who governs us and we need a government of laws.

Obama has consistently maintained that what I, in my writings, have called “progressive” values are fundamental American values. From his perspective, he is not a progressive; he is just an American. That is a crucial intellectual move.

Those empathy-based moral values are the opposite of the conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. They make it intolerable to tolerate a president who is The Decider—who gets to decide without caring about or listening to anybody. Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire “free market,” which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone’s interests. They oppose a purely self-interested view of America in foreign policy. Obama’s foreign policy is empathy-based, concerned with people as well as states—with poverty, education, disease, water, the rights of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and so on around the world.

How are such values expressed? Take a look at the inaugural speech. Empathy: “the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job, the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child…” Responsibility to ourselves and others: “We have duties to ourselves, the nation, and the world.” The ethic of excellence: “there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of character, than giving our all to a difficult task.” They define our democracy: “This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed.”

The same values apply to foreign policy: “To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and make clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.” And to religion as well: By quoting language like “our brother’s keeper,” he is communicating that mere individual responsibility will not get you into Heaven, that social responsibility and making the world better is required.

3. Biconceptualism and the New Bipartisanship

The third crucial idea behind the Obama Code is biconceptualism, the knowledge that a great many people who identify themselves ideologically as conservatives, or politically as Republicans or Independents, share those fundamental American values — at least on certain issues. Most “conservatives” are not thoroughgoing movement conservatives, but are what I have called “partial progressives” sharing Obama’s American values on many issues. Where such folks agree with him on values, Obama tries, and will continue to try, to work with them on those issues if not others. And, he assumes, correctly believe, that the more they come to think in terms of those American values, the less they will think in terms of opposing conservative values.

Biconceptualism lay behind his invitation to Rick Warren to speak at the inaugural. Warren is a biconceptual, like many younger evangelicals. He shares Obama’s views of the environment, poverty, health, and social responsibility, though he is otherwise a conservative. Biconceptualism is behind his “courting” of Republican members of Congress. The idea is not to accept conservative moral views, but to find those issues where individual Republicans already share what he sees as fundamentally American values. He has “reached across the aisle” to Richard Luger on nuclear proliferation, but not on economics.

Biconceptualism is central to Obama’s attempts to achieve unity —a unity based on his understanding of American values. The current economic failure gives him an opening to speak about the economy in terms of those ideals: caring about all, prosperity for all, responsibility for all by all, and good jobs for all who want to work.

I think Obama is correct about biconceptualism of this sort — at least where the overwhelming proportion of Americans is concerned. When the President spoke at the Lincoln Day dinner recently about sensible Midwestern Republicans, he meant biconceptual Republicans, who are progressive and/or pragmatic on many issues.

But hardcore movement conservatives tend to be more ideological and less biconceptual than their constituents. In the recent stimulus vote, the hardcore movement conservatives kept party discipline (except for three Senate votes) by threatening to run opposition candidates against anyone who broke ranks. They were able to enforce this because the conservative message machine is strong in their districts and there is no nationwide progressive message machine operating in those districts. The effectiveness of the conservative message machine led to Obama making a rare mistake in communication, the mistake of saying out loud in Florida not to think of Rush Limbaugh, thus violating the first rule of framing and giving Rush Limbaugh even greater power.

Biconceptual, partly progressive, Republicans do exist in Congress, and the president is not going to give up on them. But as long as the conservative message machine can activate its values virtually unopposed in conservative districts, movement conservatives can continue to pressure biconceptual Republicans and keep them from voting their conscience on many issues. This is why a nationwide progressive message machine needs to be organized if the president is to achieve unity through biconceptualism.

4. Protection and Empowerment

The fourth idea behind the Obama Code is the President’s understanding of government—“not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” This depends on what “works” means. The word sounds purely pragmatic, but it is moral in operation.

The idea is that government has twin moral missions: protection and empowerment. Protection includes not just military and police protection, but protections for the environment, consumers, workers, pensioners, disaster victims, and investors.

Empowerment is what his stimulus package is about: it includes education and other forms of infrastructure—roads, bridges, communications, energy supply, the banking system and stock market. The moral mission of government is simple: no one can earn a living in America or live an American life without protection and empowerment by the government. The stimulus package is basically an empowerment package. Taxes are what you pay for living in America, rather than in Congo or Bangladesh. And the more money you make from government protection and empowerment, the more you owe in return. Progressive taxation is a matter of moral accounting. Tax cuts for the middle class mean that the middle class hasn’t been getting as much as it has been contributing to the nation’s productivity for many years.

This view of government meshes with our national ideal of equality. There needs to be moral equality: equal protection and equal empowerment. We all deserve health care protection, retirement protection, worker protection, employment protection, protection of our civil liberties, and investment protection. Protection and empowerment. That’s what “works” means—“whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”

5. Morality and Economics Fit Together

Crises are times of opportunity. Budgets are moral statements. President Obama has put these ideas together. His economic program is a moral program and conversely. Why the quartet of leading economic issues—education, energy, health, banking? Because they are at the heart of government’s moral mission of protection and empowerment, and correspondingly, they are what is needed to act on empathy, social and personal responsibility, and making the future better. The economic crisis is also an opportunity. It requires him to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the right things to do.

6. Systemic Causation and Systemic Risk

Conservatives tend to think in terms of direct causation. The overwhelming moral value of individual, not social, responsibility requires that causation be local and direct. For each individual to be entirely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions, those actions must be the direct causes of those consequences. If systemic causation is real, then the most fundamental of conservative moral—and economic—values is fallacious.

Global ecology and global economics are prime examples of systemic causation. Global warming is fundamentally a system phenomenon. That is why the very idea threatens conservative thinking. And the global economic collapse is also systemic in nature. That is at the heart of the death of the conservative principle of the laissez-faire free market, where individual short-term self-interest was supposed to be natural, moral, and the best for everybody. The reality of systemic causation has left conservatism without any real ideas to address global warming and the global economic crisis.

With systemic causation goes systemic risk. The old rational actor model taught in economics and political science ignored systemic risk. Risk was seen as local and governed by direct causation, that is, buy short-term individual decisions. The investment banks acted on their own short-term risk, based on short-term assumptions, for example, that housing prices would continue to rise or that bundles of mortgages once secure for the short term would continue to be “secure” and could be traded as “securities.”

The systemic nature of ecological and economic causation and risk have resulted in the twin disasters of global warming and global economic breakdown. Both must be dealt with on a systematic, global, long-term basis. Regulating risk is global and long-term, and so what are required are world-wide institutions that carry out that regulation in systematic way and that monitor causation and risk systemically, not just locally.

President Obama understands this, though much of the country does not. Part of his challenge will be to formulate policies that carry out these ideas and to communicate these ideas as well as possible to the public.

7. Contested Concepts and Patriotic Language

As President, Barack Obama must speak in patriotic language. But all patriot language in this country is “contested.” Every major patriotic term has a core meaning that we all understand the same way. But that common core meaning is very limited in its application. Most uses of patriotic language are extended from the core on the basis of either conservative or progressive values to produce meanings that are often opposite from each other.

I’ve written a whole book, Whose Freedom?, on the word “freedom” as used by conservatives and progressives. In his second inaugural, George W. Bush used “freedom,” “free,” and “liberty” over and over—first, with its common meaning, then shifting to its conservative meaning: defending “freedom” as including domestic spying, torture and rendition, denial of habeus corpus, invading a country that posed no threat to us, a “free market” based on greed and short-term profits for the wealthy, denying sex education and access to women’s health facilities, denying health care to the poor, and leading to the killing and maiming of innocent civilians in Iraq by the hundreds of thousands, all in the name of “freedom.” It was anything but a progressive’s view of freedom—and anything but the view intended in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

For forty years, from the late 1960’s through 2008, conservatives managed, through their extensive message machine, to reframe much of our political discourse to fit their worldview. President Obama is reclaiming our patriotic language after decades of conservative dominance, to fit what he has correctly seen as the ideals behind the founding of our country.

“Freedom” will no longer mean what George W. Bush meant by it. Guantanamo will be closed, torture outlawed, the market regulated. Obama’s inaugural address was filled with framings of patriotic concepts to fit those ideals. Not just the concept of freedom, but also equality, prosperity, unity, security, interests, challenges, courage, purpose, loyalty, patriotism, virtue, character, and grace. Look at these words in his inaugural address and you will see how Obama has situated their meaning within his view of fundamental American values: empathy, social and well as personal responsibility, improving yourself and your country. We can expect further reclaiming of patriotic language throughout his administration.

All this is what “change” means. In his policy proposals the President is trying to align his administration’s policies with the fundamental values of the Framers of our Constitution. In seeking “bipartisan” support, he is looking beyond political affiliations to those who share those values on particular issues. In his economic policy, he is realigning our economy with the moral missions of government: protection and empowerment for all.

It’s Us, Not Just Him

The president is the best political communicator of our age. He has the bully pulpit. He gets media attention from the press. His website is running a permanent campaign, Organizing for Obama, run by his campaign manager David Plouffe. It seeks issue-by-issue support from his huge mailing list. There are plenty of progressive blogs. MoveOn.org now has over five million members. And yet that is nowhere near enough.

The conservative message machine is huge and still going. There are dozens of conservative think tanks, many with very large communications budgets. The conservative leadership institutes are continuing to turn out thousands of trained conservative spokespeople every year. The conservative apparatus for language creation is still functioning. Conservative talking points are still going out to their network of spokespeople, who still being booked on tv and radio around the country. About 80% of the talking heads on tv are conservatives. Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are as strong as ever. There are now progressive voices on MSNBC, Comedy Central, and Air America, but they are still overwhelmed by Right’s enormous megaphone. Republicans in Congress can count on overwhelming message support in their home districts and homes states. That is one reason why they were able to stonewall on the President’s stimulus package. They had no serious media competition at home pounding out the Obama vision day after day.

Such national, day-by-day media competition is necessary. Democrats need to build it. Democratic think tanks are strong on policy and programs, but weak on values and vision. Without the moral arguments based on the Obama values and vision, the policymakers most likely be unable to regularly address both independent voters and the Limbaugh-FoxNews audiences in conservative Republican strongholds.

The president and his administration cannot build such a communication system, nor can the Democrats in Congress. The DNC does not have the resources. It will be up to supporters of the Obama values, not just supporters on the issues, to put such a system in place. Despite all the organizing strength of Obama supporters, no such organizing effort is now going on. If none is put together, the movement conservatives will face few challenges of fundamental values in their home constituencies and will be able to go on stonewalling with impunity. That will make the president’s vision that much harder to carry out.

Summary

The Obama Code is based on seven deep, insightful, and subtle intellectual moves. What President Obama has been attempting in his speeches is a return to the original frames of the Framers, reconstituting what it means to be an American, to be patriotic, to be a citizen and to share in both the sacrifices and the glories of our country. In seeking “bipartisan” support, he is looking beyond political affiliations to those who share those values on particular issues. In his economic plan, he is attempting to realign our economy with the moral missions of government: protection and empowerment for all.

The president hasn’t fooled the radical ideological conservatives in Congress. They know progressive values when they see them — and they see them in their own colleagues and constituents too often for comfort. The radical conservatives are aware that this economic crisis threatens not only their political support, but the very underpinnings of conservative ideology itself. Nonetheless, their brains have not been changed by facts. Movement conservatives are not fading away. They think their conservative values are the real American values. They still have their message machine and they are going to make the most of it. The ratings for Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are rising. Without a countervailing communications system on the Democratic side, they can create a lot of trouble, not just for the president, not just for the nation, but on a global scale, for the environmental and economic future of the world.

George Lakoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of The Political Mind and Don’t Think of an Elephant!

Obama’s stimulus plan is ambitious, but it won’t be enough to get us out of the economic cesspool we’re in. It only addresses one of three areas of concern that absolutely have to be addressed in order for the economy to recover:

1) Nationalize the banks. Heaven forbid Americans should talk about nationalization! But the bottom line is that the major American banks are insolvent, and nobody wants to admit it. They’re carrying trillions of dollars in bad assets on their books, far more than we could ever throw money at through TARP. These banks made huge mistakes, and now they have to pay. If we keep propping up these zombie dead banks we’ll repeat Japan’s mistakes and stagnate for over a decade, because they’ll be in no condition to get credit flowing again. The government must take over these banks, wipe out every last shareholder, make the bondholders the owners of remaining assets, wipe the balance sheet clean, and ultimately re-privatize them. It has been done before, in Sweden in the ’90’s, to great effect. According to economist Nouriel Roubini the re-privatization could take place in as little as six months. We don’t even need to look to Sweden, we did something similar with Indymac recently–the FDIC took it over and recently re-sold it to private investors. Obama is obfuscating when he says we’re not like Sweden because we have thousands of banks–it’s the few huge banks at the top that are having the most trouble. Stop dithering, Obama–and just get it done!

2) Stop the foreclosures. The economy won’t improve until you stanch the bleeding at the source: people being tossed out of their houses by the millions. Obama recently revealed a foreclosure plan that would provide aid to some homeowners, which raised a huge hue and cry that financially responsible people will be subsidizing the houses of people who took out more mortgage than they could afford. It’s a fair argument–but let’s save the moral hazard arguments for BEFORE the crisis occurs, not DURING it when the rest of us are being shellacked in the stock market and elsewhere because of others’ bad housing choices. But there’s a better way to do this than just giving out money to homeowners: make them declare bankruptcy, and give bankruptcy judges the power to modify existing mortgages down to current market value rather than the ridiculous prices of a couple of years ago–thus letting people stay in their more affordable homes. So instead of people subsidizing others through taxes, they’ll subsidize them through house equity–because if your neighbor’s $450,000 house value just got knocked down by a judge to $100,000 and is later sold at that price, guess what your house is going to be worth. People and the banks can scream and shout and throw tantrums about these adjustments, but the bottom line is that houses were never worth the outrageous prices, and the quicker we bring them in line with their true value the sooner the economy will recover. Painful medicine, folks…

3) Stimulus. Only after these steps are taken can the stimulus plan really work and let the economy gain traction. It will provide jobs that people can use to stay in homes they can afford, bought with credit available from revitalized banks.

Failure to do this is like trying to do cardiac resuscitation on a dead patient–you may get a blip or two in response to the shock, but the corpse goes right back to its lifeless state as soon as the stimulus ends. That’s what’s in store for the economy, and Obama’s presidency, unless he gets it right.

I still have faith that he can.

“The United States will not torture. The orders that I signed today should send an unmistakable signal that our actions in defense of liberty will be as just as our cause and we, the people, will uphold our fundamental values as vigilantly as we protect our security.”

President Obama, on closing Guantanamo Bay Prison

It’s about damn time. I hope these words are chiseled in stone on a monument someday, so that people remember what America really stands for despite the stain of the last eight years.

“It’s sad to say, but we really went nowhere for almost ten years, after you extract the boost provided by the housing and mortgage boom. It’s almost a lost economic decade.” –Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, and an informal adviser to John McCain’s campaign.

That epitaph is as good as any for describing the eight-year nightmare called the Bush Administration, as we finally count down the seconds where we see him board a plane, turn around and wave good-bye one last time. The Bush years witnessed, like no other in recent memory, a strong America brought to its knees by corrupt ideology, economic incompetence, and the complete destruction of its image around the world. That’s what happens when you run this nation like a third-world despotic regime.

From pre-emptive invasion to torture, from “Mission Accomplished” to “heck of a job, Brownie,” from foisting an “ownership society” of McMansions on janitors to de-regulating a corrupt Wall Street to oblivion, from gutting environmental laws to ignoring global warming, from hundreds of billions in surplus to trillions in debt, from tax cuts for those who need it least to 500,000+ monthly job losses–in every single issue of importance to this nation and its people, George W. Bush and the years over which he presided will go down in history as the worst EVER to afflict our Republic.

It has been a profile in arrogance from a leader who could sincerely see no wrong in anything he did–a harsh lesson on the limits of a hyper empire that saw the post 9/11 world in harsh tones of black and white, good and evil, you’re either with us or against us. It has been an exercise in humiliation, as we have witnessed the destruction of America’s economic might and the consequent destruction of wealth all over the world as a result of our own government-pimped profligacy, our deluded belief that we could have it all without sacrifice–guns, butter, 25% of the world’s oil, an SUV in every garage.

No president since Herbert Hoover has left his successor with so many profoundly difficult problems to solve. Yet in spite of Bush’s incompetence he hands Obama an opportunity. If he plays his cards right Obama will have carte blanche to fix much of what ails America, providing jobs to renew our decaying infrastructure, fix our schools, upgrade our broadband capabilities to compete with the rest of the world, and eliminate our energy dependence on countries that despise us. The tab will be enormously expensive, and there is no guarantee of success–but it will be a down payment on an investment that will yield many times itself in future dividends if done right. That’s a much better use of money than handing it over to a financial industry that’s more like a black hole that swallows up every dollar, never to be seen again.

As the Age of Obama dawns amidst great hope and uncertainty, the world is happy to throw a huge collective shoe at Bush’s rear end as his plane’s door shuts behind him. Good riddance, and never may we see your face again.

I’m still having trouble not choking up when I think about what Obama achieved. His election reminds me with the force of a thunderclap that America remains the land of opportunity, the place where anyone can achieve what you put your mind to if you work hard enough. It brings to mind my youthful idealism as a college student, the firm belief that it is still possible to change the world despite the many obstacles arrayed against you.

But it would be a huge mistake to believe that the work is over…that we can pick up our Obama signs and lapel pins and go home for another four years. The struggle for Obama’s election was only prologue. Now comes Chapter 1, and the really hard work. If we become mistakenly complacent then the wondrousness of Obama’s election will go to waste, its promise unfulfilled.

So much work has to be done. Some of it is beyond our control–we can’t do much about Iran or the economic crisis, for example. But in almost every other thing in which Obama has promised change–energy independence, climate change, education, healthcare–he needs and expects that change will come from the ground up, not from the top down.

The passions of my choice are the environment and energy independence. Anticipating an Obama win and a new movement for change, earlier this year I got myself appointed to my County’s advisory commission on environment and energy issues, and also now serve on the Board of Directors for an environmental charity. I don’t know what form Obama’s call will take, but it will come. And when it does, I’ll be ready to take up his call….one person and one household at a time.

If every single household in America changed just one light bulb to compact fluorescent, we would generate enough surplus electricity to meet the needs of three million homes. Change, one person at a time, adds up to the gargantuan effect needed to solve our global problems.

So whether it be the environment, or Proposition 8 and gay rights, or healthcare, or education–what are you doing to make Obama’s call to change a reality?

If education is your interest, mentor a child or get involved with the local school board. If health care is your passion, volunteer at a community clinic. The environment? Volunteer for a local charity and help them clean up local streams, and change your lifestyle to be more environmentally friendly. Interested in policy? Go to City Council meetings and get appointed to their commissions.

Don’t make excuses. You don’t have to have a PhD or years of experience to join these local causes. They’re hungry for people to help them.

Get out there and get involved. If Obama issues a call to service on the subject of your choice, heed it. Otherwise, we’ll be sitting here reading and writing blogs four years from now, still complaining about wanting change and not getting it. Obama can get the ball rolling but the buck will ultimately stop with us.

Answer his call.

Obama won by a landslide. It wasn’t even close, and his perfect campaign will forever be the model of future candidates aspiring to the White House. He leveraged technology to the hilt for raising funds from millions of small donors and keeping them in constant touch with the campaign. His ground game and “get out the vote” effort was massive, second to none. He took the fight to many states that Democrats once feared to tread in, ensuring many possible paths to 270 electoral votes. From Virginia to North Carolina, Indiana to Florida, he cracked Republican dominance almost everywhere and reaped the rewards.

Four years ago, in the despair following Kerry’s defeat, I wrote in my personal blog about what I thought Democrats were doing wrong, and what the prescription was for fixing it. For years later, what’s the result? Let’s take a look.

“1) Acknowledge that values and security are the two most important things to the public in post-9/11 America.”

This is still true, but incomplete given the reality of the times. Obama worked very hard to convince voters that he shared their values, and that he would keep them safe. Republicans tried to paint Obama as foreign, as “other,” as someone with values alien to “real Americans” (whatever that is.) They failed. Nobody who saw Obama’s sheer pride and joy in swooping up his daughters to kiss them, or who saw him weep upon receiving news of his grandmother dying one day before his election, or who heard him speak thunderously about the need for us to take individual responsibility for improving ourselves and our communities, could argue that this man was alien to the values that we hold dear. He convinced people that he was just like them.

On national security, he took a tough stance on terrorism and Iran, making clear that America would not be pushed over under an Obama administration.

What I did not include was the focus on the economy, which always benefits Democrats. In 2004, few people suspected the depths of the economy’s underlying problems because of the illusion of surging housing prices. We all reached the edge of a cliff and looked over to what laid below economically just prior to the election, and we realized the tenious nature of our economic quality of life. The economy helped Obama a great deal, and future Dems will never let voters forget that our economy is a fragile thing that must be carefully preserved through good stewardship and common sense oversight of financial institutions.

“2) Stop ceding the entire South to Republicans; a party relegated to the two coasts cannot win.”

Dead on. We cannot and must not ever cede the South again entirely to Republicans. On the contrary, we must build on last night’s victory in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida–and work on “up and coming” states that didn’t quite make it over the top–Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas. In the reddest states like Alabama and Mississippi we can work on getting vote margins up and getting more Dems elected to local offices.

Democrats can win on values, as Obama proved. There is no need to fear speaking to Southern voters about family, about security, about responsibility, or even about guns.

In politics you’re either on offense or defense, and offense is unimaginably better.

“3) Come up with a simple, clear, easy-to-explain ideology that voters of all persuasions can agree are important.”

Easy. For Obama, one word: Change.

If you go for more than one word answers:

a) Ending our energy dependence.
b) Fixing our healthcare system.
c) Ending the war in Iraq.
d) Restoring the economy to health.

Simple, easy to understand and remember.

“4) Seize the banner of fiscal responsibility permanently, first suggested by Clinton’s balanced budgets, after years of horrendous deficits and potentially great impending economic harm under Republican leadership makes that party forever unable to re-claim their status as the party of fiscal prudence.”

I still think this is important, but I didn’t hear a lot about this from Obama (or McCain). The country has serious fiscal problems, from huge deficits to entitlement programs like Social Security that aren’t sustainable as they are in the long term. Baby Boomers will begin to retire en masse during Obama’s administration, and these problems are going to start to pinch–along with dealing with the huge economic bailout.

I still think this is an opportunity for future Democratic candidates to make further inroads. We must not cede the mantle of fiscal responsibility to Republicans, when everyone knows they wrecked any notion of fiscal prudence over the last eight years.

“5) Acknowledge charisma and empathy matter more than pure intellect, and nominate candidates that can connect with voters.”

In Obama we were blessed to have a candidate with the best of all worlds in this regard. He connects with voters, his charisma is undeniable, and his idealistic speeches can move grown men to tears. At the same time he is extremely intelligent and profoundly well-read. America couldn’t ask for a better combination.

I concluded my blog post for years ago by saying:

We can insist on pushing our candidates to stay on the far left, we can scream, we can throw tantrums, we can threaten to move to Canada, we can insist on intellect trumping emotion on the part of our candidates, and continue to lose election after election. Or we can acknowledge the reality that today’s America is relatively conservative, values-driven and security-obsessed, fight the Republicans on that turf, and win.

“This doesn’t mean that Dems have to become anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-environment, or pro-war. I think Mark Warner, governor of conservative Virginia, is an excellent example: he’s centrist, pro-gay, pro-choice, and doesn’t bend on his principles…Why is he so popular? He focuses on economic issues, he uses straight talk to speak to people’s hearts about what’s important, and he acknowledges the importance of values even if he respectfully disagrees with some of the positions of his constituents. Barack Obama used the same strategy to win over rural farmers in his own state of Illinois.”

Heh, pretty prescient in retrospect. Anyone want to offer me a job as a Democratic strategist?

Judgment Day has arrived. The day to finally repudiate the disaster of the last eight years is here. The moment of a new movement for progressive change is at hand–an opportunity for us to finally get serious about the crushing problems facing our nation. From the economy to healthcare, from environmental protection to education, the nuts and bolts of this country have frayed and broken for the last eight years and it is time to stop it.

People are hopping mad, and they aren’t going to take it anymore. They are tired of our great nation being ground into the dirt by failed governance.

To my conservative friends, don’t get in the way of today’s earthquake, and do not be on the wrong side of history. It is not conservatism itself that is repudiated today–a deep philosophy with much to recommend it in its purest form.

It is the Republican Party of today that is being executed, a party that is anything but conservative. What is being repudiated is the hatred; the wedge issues, the gay marriage and abortion culture wars; the incessant tax cutting for the rich without any benefits to the poor and middle class; the insistence on de-regulating markets to the point where they became nothing but puppets for the “smart money;” the promotion of a reckless “my way or the highway” brand of foreign policy that has bogged us down in war without end and with hatred for America felt around the world; the out of control spending without making the necessary sacrifices. There is nothing conservative about this litany of abuses.

The world will be a far better place with a President Obama, guaranteed.

As for me, I already voted two weekends ago–while efficient, I wistfully see the huge lines making history today and sort of wish I could be part of them.

Instead, I’ll be joining a friend to drive elderly and disabled folks to the polls.

On the cusp of this historic election I find myself walking down memory lane.

Sixteen years ago on election day 1992 I stood above a crowd gathered in front of Cornell’s student union building, Willard Straight Hall. As a student leader in those days I had been invited to speak by the Get Out The Vote group organizing the rally. It wasn’t long before I had tapped my inner wellspring of activist anger and was thundering to the crowd about how we stood on the brink of “ending twelve years of Republican tyranny” in the White House. The issues were different then: a nasty recession, the first war in Iraq (and consequent fears of a draft), huge Reagan deficits, Clarence Thomas. From the gay angle, there was the failure of Republicans to even say the word “AIDS” in public until hundreds of thousands of people had died, as well as discrimination against gays in the military.

Bill Clinton, the Man from Hope, stood poised to capture the White House and usher in a new era of more progressive and tolerant policies, including his pledge to end the ban on gays in the military. People were angry at the status quo, and were excited at the prospect of change. Much like today.

The sheer joy of celebrating Clinton’s victory was short-lived. Fast forward two years and I was in law school in Washington, DC. I remember gloomily passing by newspaper stands on my way to class that cold November morning after the 1994 election, all of which blared that Republicans had re-taken both Houses of Congress for the first time in decades–and that a new conservative revolution led by Newt Gingrich was on the rise. Clinton had made a strategic blunder in focusing on gays in the military and Hillarycare too quickly after being elected, before ensuring that the Congress would be on his side. My gloom was tempered by a bit of “serves you right” at the Democrats–I had been incensed by people like Sam Nunn who had displayed their homophobia and ruined Clinton’s effort to end discrimination in the military. I buckled myself in for what would end up being twelve very long years of political exile for progressive ideas and prudent government.

Four years ago I despaired that this country could re-elect such a vile and incompetent man as George W. Bush. My hatred for him was and continues to be visceral, representing a complete repudiation of a personal style that extols ignorance and anti-intellectualism while pushing a hard-nosed “my way or the highway” way of doing things. My fears have been vindicated again and again–from the never-ending disaster in Iraq, to Abu Ghraib, to Katrina, to his assaults on the environment and civil rights, to the mismanagement of the economy. Hopefully there will never again be another president elected that is so uniquely capable of turning everything he touches into garbage.

In the depths of my despair following Kerry’s defeat in 2004 I turned to a speech being circulated on the Internet, a victory speech by a heretofore unknown Senate candidate named Barack Obama. I didn’t hear it personally, only read it, but I found his speech utterly compelling, as he called out to not a Red America or a Blue America but a United States of America. It was chicken soup for the soul, and I wrote it into my personal blog as a bit of consolation. Little did I know I was pondering the speech of someone who is very likely to be elected president in 2008–in fact, I had forgotten I’d even heard of this man as early as 2004 until I recently dug back into the depths of my blog.

Now, here we are again–at another inflection point in history. The country is much the worse off than in 1992–having just suffered an economic crash, many people’s retirements impeded or ruined, bogged down by war without end in Iraq, with many jobs shipped overseas and never to return, hopelessly addicted to foreign fossil fuels, and increasingly threatened by worldwide climate change.

The Republicans are about to pay a heavy price for allowing the country to go to waste in the way it has under their rule, as they face not only presidential defeat, but a diminishing of their numbers in Congress not seen in over a generation. In troubled times people have woken up to the fact that the Republicans were very good at using cultural wedge issues to win elections, but were very poor at governing in accordance with their supposedly conservative philosophy. There has been nothing conservative about record levels of deficit spending and reckless wars. Republicans have lost the true soul of their party, and they are about to be cast into the wilderness until they find it again.

Once again, a man arises from the most unlikely background to bring a message of hope and change at a time of deep despair. Anyone who thinks that Obama is going to be a cure-all panacea for everything the nation faces is a fool–his power to change things will be limited by the sheer size of America’s problems and the rising price tag for resolving them. But at least the man has a vision for how to bring morning back to America after a very dark night.

Even if he lacks the power to do it all then he at least has the power to sit by the fireplace, just like FDR did in is fireside chats, and speak to my soul in re-assuring tones about how we as Americans are united and strong enough to withstand and overcome these difficult times. Obama has the power to inspire with his ideas and his rhetoric, something Americans very much need right now.

I look to the young people passionately criss-crossing every state looking for Obama votes, and I fondly see a younger side of me in them. I’m older now, busier, not as energetic or angry. As a friend of mine said recently, I’ve now entered the “donor” stage of activism. That’s ok, but I sometimes wish I still had the time, energy and passion as I did back then. What they’re doing is so damn important–not just for Obama, but they’re hopefully also re-igniting the youth vote as a powerful and continuing voice for change even after the election. As for me, I will happily fund their efforts as best I can.

And I will also drive old ladies to the polls for Obama come Tuesday. I’m not so old yet that I can’t put boots to the ground on the Day of Reckoning. My activism boots are old and dusty, but they still feel damn good to wear on occasion. I will help win Virginia for Obama.

GO OBAMA!

As the Obama juggernaut looms like a tsunami on the horizon, we are witnessing nothing less than the final, well-deserved, and overdue destruction of the Republican Party in its current form.

Not only is Obama ahead by double digits in the polls, he is strongly ahead in ridiculously red states like Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia–and may have brought the polls to a draw in ultra-conservative states like North Dakota and Montana.

His Congressional coattails are a mile long. Democrats are poised to possibly take a filibuster-proof 60 seat majority, and dire predictions for the House are that forty or more Republicans are about to be washed away.

McCain’s disastrously erratic campaign is now springing more leaks than a worm-eaten boat, with a long New York Times Magazine article detailing internal blow by blow accounts of how McCain’s campaign has careened from one campaign message to the next, unable to gain traction against Obama.

McCain, cracking under the pressure, let loose a barrage against the Bush administration that has been weighing him down like a millstone. Said the Washington Times:

Sen. John McCain on Wednesday blasted President Bush for building a mountain of debt for future generations, failing to pay for expanding Medicare and abusing executive powers, leveling his strongest criticism to date of an administration whose unpopularity may be dragging the Republican Party to the brink of a massive electoral defeat.

“Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,” [were among the issues cited by McCain].

It’s too little, too late. He needs to, and cannot, explain where he was and what he did while Bush and the GOP Congress unleashed these depradations on America. He was, under his own admission, voting for Bush’s wishes 90% of the time.

Bushites did not take McCain’s words lying down. A top Republican strategist issued a searing response:

“Lashing out at past Republican Congresses, … echoing your opponent’s attacks on you instead of attacking your opponent, and spending 150,000 hard dollars on designer clothes when congressional Republicans are struggling for money, and when your senior campaign staff are blaming each other for the loss in The New York Times [Magazine] 10 days before the election, you’re not doing much to energize your supporters.

“The fact is, when you’re the party standard-bearer, you have an obligation to fight to the finish. I think they can still win. But if they don’t think that, they need to look at how Bob Dole finished out his campaign in 1996 and not try to take down as many Republicans with them as they can. Instead of campaigning in Electoral College states, Dole was campaigning in places he knew he didn’t have a chance to beat Clinton, but where he could energize key House and Senate races.”

How did the GOP get to this point, poised to lose all of the power it accumulated over the course of a generation? In my view, primarily because of the imposition of ideology over intellectualism.

E. J. Dionne perfectly captures how ideology and pandering took over the Republican Party:

For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against “liberal elitists” and “leftist intellectuals.” Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity — and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.

The GOP became very good at convincing voters that their pocketbooks didn’t matter as much as God, guns, and gays. It degenerated from having thoughtful ideas about individual responsibility, limiting government intervention into citizens’ private lives, and a strong national defense–to a party dominated by bigots and ideologues hell bent on keeping power at any cost. Why come up with and sell good ideas when they could win elections by banning gay marriage, ending affirmative action under the guise of “quotas,” overturning Roe v. Wade, and the like?

Again and again, many Americans turned away from the cool intellectualism of Democrats like Dukakis and Kerry in favor of “sunny” and “folksy” actors who proudly proclaimed themselves to be the anti-intellectual, anti-elite Everymen. Even today, Sarah Palin pumps up her crowds by proclaiming herself to be proud to be a redneck.

The death of intellectualism in the GOP became a slippery slope, culminating in the twin debaucheries of slaughtering the economy on the altar of unfettered regulation on the one hand, and the evisceration of our Constitution and most profound ideas about human rights and civil liberties on the other.

People are finally waking up and realizing that rednecks and actors might make you feel good, but they have run our country into the ground. As the markets continue to plunge seemingly without end, we are remembering that there is a real value to ideas and the thoughtful men and women behind them.

In Obama, people see a mature, well-read, calm, intellectual opposed to McCain’s anger, inconsistency, and “shoot from the hip” gambler’s mentality. They realize that the gravity of the times needs a man of ideas, not a volcanically-tempered cowboy. And hopefully they have come to understand the connection between Republican ideology and the economic/cultural precipice upon which we now find ourselves.

Out of ideas and like rats abandoning ship, Republicans are now every man to himself. Like the last violinist on the Titanic, Charles Krauthammer eulogizes his movement as it faces the coming wave:

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe — neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) — yelling “Stop!” I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I’d rather lose an election than lose my bearings.

Well said, Charles. Too bad your party has not had the same integrity to risk losing elections over ideas, choosing instead to shred the Constitution, our economy, and our nation.