If Eugene Robinson’s op-ed in the Washington Post today somewhat states the obvious, it’s an obvious that needs stating: How are Obama and Clinton going to pay for universal health insurance if billions of dollars keep evaporating from the US economy? And how will old stalwart McCain fund his Hundred Years’ War in the middle east if Wall Street is in ruins? McCain recently admitted that “the issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.” He is now, however, finding time to dip into Alan Greenspan’s book.
Author Archive for Mary Fitzgerald
Michael Billington’s latest meditations on the Guardian arts blog merely underlines the case John Elsom made in this issue about British theatre’s left-wing blimps. Would Billington’s ‘concern’ for the future quality David Mamet’s work, after the dramatist’s self-declared swing to the right, have been quite so overwhelming if Mamet had instead confessed to joining the Socialist Worker’s Party?
Andrew Sullivan’s lead piece in the Sunday Times yesterday — “The Clintons, a horror film that never ends” —picked up on an idea that has gained swift currency in the past week: that Hillary Clinton is not just cold, calculating and impersonal, but she is in fact a creature of the Undead.
It’s a view that Christopher Hitchens certainly subscribes to: (watch the great public intellectual compare the Clintons to “zombies, vampires and werewolves” on the Morning Joe talkshow).
And another youtube clip from a slick impressario who calls himself ‘Reihan’ makes the case even more watertight.
While Sullivan’s marvellous thesis deserves to be read in full, here is the crux of it:
“It’s alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover’s tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . .
The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: unkillable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy. You can’t escape; you can’t hide; and you can’t win.”
Of course, all this demonology will probably play straight into Clinton’s hand—it won’t be long before we’re hearing the familiar “the boys are ganging up on me” refrain. Inevitably she will try and convert this into sympathy votes—we might even expect some more tears, to prove to us that she really is human after all, and not some ghoulish host who sleeps in a grave.
Of course, this isn’t a case of the “boys ganging up on her” at all. It was Samantha Power who coined that memorable epithet: “monster.” Meanwhile Hitchens explicitly analogises the Clintons (plural) and doesn’t exactly cheerlead for Obama either (in the same interview, he said the Illinois Senator belongs to a “dumb, nasty, ethnic rock ‘n’ roll racist church”). Sullivan’s diatribe also had an emphatically dual focus—it’s the bloodlust of both Clintons that keeps him awake at night, quivering with fear.
Do not expect this, however, to temper the howling accusations of sexism which will emit from Clinton HQ. As Hitchens puts it:
“[A]nyone who, like me, when they think about Clintons, thinks about zombies, thinks about the undead, thinks about stakes through the heart, silver bullets and so on, has just received confirmation. It’s as bad as we thought it was going to be.”
Without further ado, Sam Power has resigned as foreign policy advisor to Obama.
As a seasoned journalist herself, Power should have known to be more guarded in her comments, and her resignation may have been be the fair price to pay for them. However, also as a journalist, she might have have reasonably expected “off-the-record” to mean that very thing, as it usually does. Despite the explanation The Scotsman offered for printing her remarks, their reasoning leaves a lot open to question in terms of the broader ethics of reporting.
As all journalists know, off the record exchanges are an incredibly useful way to gather information. Political reporting simply wouldn’t exist without them. Unless something is pressingly in the public interest (and Power’s use of metaphor was manifestly not) it is in our collective interest not to abuse this basic rule.
Ms Power may rightly be feeling hard done by. But she is only 38 and has already had an impressive career—she is a highly successful author, academic and journalist, and will no doubt go on to achieve even greater things. On the other hand, the future looks less rosy for Scotsman hack Gerri Peev, who may soon discover that people aren’t so willing to talk to her anymore.
It’s been a week of collective foot-in-mouth for the once-dignified Team Obama.
Highlights have included the news – on the eve of the Ohio primary - that Austin Goolsbee, Obama’s top economic policy adviser, had told Canadian officials that Obama’s public pledge to force a renegotiation of Nafta was not sincere, and was “more about political positioning.” Cue Ohio, which has suffered huge manufacturing job losses, voting overwhelmingly for Clinton.
Then Obama’s foreign policy advisor, the usually eloquent and impressive Samantha Power (who seems to have never been able to escape a profile without being described as flame-haired), had a rather unsisterly outburst in an interview with The Scotsman:
“We f***** up in Ohio,” she admitted. “In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win.
“She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything,”
“You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh’… The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”
One of the much-touted qualities of Obama’s brand was that it drew together a broad church. Now, though, with a pastor with alleged links to an ‘Islamo-facism’, an economic advisor who may well have cost him a swing state, and a diplomacy advisor who has been anything but diplomatic, it is all starting to come apart at the seams.
In the Scotsman interview, Power said: “Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.” She was, for the record, referring to the Clinton campaign.
If the cacophony of pundits is to be believed, Hillary is now the Comeback Kid (I’ve lost count of how many times that mantle been passed between the two Democratic rivals), and we can expect a long slog, possibly stretching until the August convention. Super Tuesday Round 3 will be Pennsylvania on 22nd April, but this is only the first (or third, or sixth, depending on how you’re counting) in a series of past and future “final showdowns.”
What has tickled me most in the weeks since Super Tuesday Round 1 has been the increasingly high-pitched and, frankly, illogical noises emitted from the Clinton camp. As Obama’s 11-state streak gathered pace, Clinton HQ had even started making the baffling case that while the Illinois Senator was winning a lot of states, his victories were in states where Democrats had no hope of ever winning a real election (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, etc), and Clinton was therefore more legitimate because she could carry states “where it really mattered” - ie. where the Democrats were already likely to win in November.
Of course, this argument is absurd and I have no idea why it was not laughed at more at the time. The best candidate for the party would surely be the one who could entice the most people outside the natural Democratic constituency. But, as I will elaborate more on in a minute, logic has rarely been at the forefront of the Democratic mindset in this contest.
Now, with a convincing win in Ohio under her belt, Clinton’s electoral viability has genuinely begun to look more robust. Ohio is one of the big three swing states in US national elections —the other two are Florida and Pennsylvania. She is polling ahead in Pennsylvania (currently with a 9 point lead) and she won Florida. While her Florida victory was somewhat hollow because neither candidate campaigned there, all the data suggests she would have won in that state in a real contest too, because Obama is seen as soft on immigration, and willing to talk to foreign “despots” (not a popular stance among Florida’s vocal Cuban exile community).
But Florida is where the picture gets complicated, and where the real foolishness of the Democratic party begins to sink in. By breaking party rules, and having their state’s votes disqualified, the Democrats have made themselves very unpopular with a lot of Floridians—and this may well tip the knife-edge balance against them in the November election.
As Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once quipped: “the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” The same could reasonably be said for the Democratic party. They have already, utterly needlessly, shot themselves in the foot in the one state that could, and has in the past, decided the national election. And while the clear message from polls is that Obama is much more likely to beat McCain in an election than Clinton (in some surveys he has a twelve point lead against McCain, while she stands to lose against him), the majority of so-called Democrats voting last night still chose Clinton to represent them.
Polls can be unreliable. But the longer this race drags on, the more the Democrats appear disorganised and divided, and the more convincing McCain’s candidacy will seem—despite the fact that his own party is riven with deep ideological fault lines, and has given the country one of the most unpopular presidents in its history.
I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I’m starting to smell the whiff of deliberate self-sabotage.
Nicholson Baker has penned a comprehensive, if tongue in cheek, history of the charms of Wikipedia in the New York Review of Books this month: charting its journey from the beautiful idea a collective, not-for-profit resource, to the scourge of deletionists and the onset of wiki-vandalism. A must-read for diligent truth-crusaders the world over.
The furore caused by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s widely (mis)quoted comments on sharia law dominated the first in a series of RSA lunchtime events yesterday, held in conjunction with the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).
David Cameron gave the keynote speech, arguing, much as David Green does in this month’s issue, that accommodating sharia law in Britain (to any greater extent than it already is) would institute a “legal apartheid” —only reinforcing the “cultural apartheid” which already exists in parts of the country. Invoking testimonies from recent visits to Bradford and Derby, he claimed the “state multiculturalism experiment” has failed: it has resulted in the alienation of minority communities, and reinforced difference where there should be consensus. What we need instead, he said, is a more robust sense of shared national identity.
Despite his claim that such an idea comes “naturally” to Conservatives, there is of course virtually no distinction between the main political parties on this issue. Cameron himself praised David Blunkett’s introduction of citizenship ceremonies, and nearly all the points made in his speech echoed the noises that Labour policy wonks have been making for quite some time.
Indeed, there seemed to be more (polite) distance on the issues discussed between the members of the EHRC delegation than between the line taken by Labour and the Conservatives. The event was chaired by the EHRC’s new communications director, Kamal Ahmed, and led by Trevor Phillips, and the main feature of the discussion was a rather timid disagreement about architecture. Cameron (borrowing chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s metaphor), argued that Britain should not be like a hotel, as it is now, but a “house we build together”. Ziaddin Sardar took exception to the analogy, and proposed instead a “garden” – one that is not owned by anyone, and is able to grow organically, in any direction.
But in the end it was clear that everyone did at least agree on one matter: none knew what the Archbishop meant to say in his speech, nor in his subsequent “clarifications.”
In fact, the only real frisson worth mentioning came from the Conservatives’ own ranks, when, in the question and answer session, Cameron appeared to misspeak himself and come our in favour of polygamy—causing panic among the blue-rinse delegation in the audience. He quickly corrected himself.
What should have caused much more concern, however, was when the Tory leader argued we have “much to learn” about citizenship ideals from the America. The US is a country that is still deeply culturally segregated, and where the “value” of patriotism has been so deeply inculcated in its citizens that they dutifully re-elected their Commander-in-Chief, even after it was obvious he had led them into a disastrous war.
Then again, we British did the same, and we don’t even have the excuse that we grew up to pledging allegiance to our flag every morning.
The front page of the Guardian this morning—“Clinton moves to plan B, strategists may be sacked”—makes a good case for 24-hour news desks. So too does the title of Mark Steel’s comment in the Independent : “A few tears won’t make Hillary more electable.”
Even commentators like Daniel Finkelstein who argued that she “isn’t dead yet” were certain that Obama “is going to win New Hampshire, probably with a landslide.”
But Finkelstein et al worded their predictions more carefully than some—like former John Kerry strategist Bob Shrum, who wrote in the New York Daily News: “The Clinton industry, encrusted with the beneficiaries and acolytes of the first and probably only Clinton presidency, has turned Hillary into a product whose sell-by date has passed.”
This was echoed by Peter Wehner in even more apocalytic terms: The “Obama wave”, he blogged, is about to “submerge, sink and drown the Clinton campaign, and with it, the Clinton era will come, finally, to a close.”
Even those who were less keen to dance over the ashes of Clinton Inc were asking how it had all gone so wrong. Many in Hillary’s own camp (including her husband) had all but conceded defeat in New Hampshire, and James Rubin, a long-standing friend of the Clintons’, assumed that the state was lost even as he was defending her over-all electability on Newsnight.
While The New York Times was careful not to call the race, it was still busy speculating yesterday on who in her campaign team would get the axe. Would it be Mark Penn, chief strategist, Patti Solis Doyle, campaign manager, Mandy Grunwald, advertising advisor, or Howard Wolfson, communications director? Twenty-four hours later, of course, the newspaper was hailing the same campaign as brilliantly “retooled.”
Likewise, just two days after Guardian America editor Michael Tomasky testified first-hand to “Obamamania”—“a campaign that is on fire”, he was describing the turnaround one of the most “stunning results” he’d ever seen. “You mean the most stunning since a few days back in Iowa, surely?” quipped the first comment on his blog.
To be fair to Tomasky, he, Martin Kettle and many others have noted that the result paints everyone in the media in a rather unflattering light. Wrapping a story up before it is finished is an arrogant and dangerous strategy.
With that in mind, we at Prospect would like to (arrogantly ) point out that we—via our soothsaying Granite Stater—offered a far more prescient insight than any of the other aforementioned “experts.” And will, of course, continue to do so, unerringly.
According to chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks, our shared cultural inheritance—“predicated on the idea of a canon, a set of texts that everyone knew”—is being destroyed by multiculturalism and tecnology. In his essay this month, Richard Jenkyns questions the need for a strictly defined canon—where “the great books form a clearly determinate class.” Society does need shared references, he argues, but these need not be high cultural: “In their time, Morecambe and Wise did more than Milton and Wordsworth to make us feel one as people.” Disaffected young Asians are hardly going to feel more “British” after being force-fed Hamlet, Middlemarch and the Psalms.
Nevertheless, Jenkyns identifies a growing “canon anxiety” among contemporary intellectuals, and attributes this partly to the fact that our age lacks “cultural heroes”—giving rise to the tendency to venerate our inheritance from the past; indeed, to canonise it.
Yet heroism is itself a problematic and highly subjective term. Much as we might define the canon differently, might we not also find more “heroes” if we broaden the terms of reference? Or are both of these endeavours vain attempts to compensate for what, as Sacks argues, is being lost? Let us know what you think.
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