George Will finds a lot to dislike in Barack Obama’s opposition to the nomination of Leslie Southwick to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, an opposition Will apparently sees as evidence of Obama’s (previously unacknowledged) propensity for race baiting and identity politics.

Obama had outlined his opposition to Southwick’s nomination three weeks ago, via a little noticed five-sentence press release, in which the Senator said:

Judge Southwick’s answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee failed to excuse his disappointing record on cases involving consumers, employees, racial minorities, women and gays and lesbians. After reviewing his 7,000 opinions, Judge Southwick could not find one case in which he sided with a civil rights plaintiff in a non-unanimous verdict.

As Will argues:

Surely the pertinent question is whether Southwick sided with the law.

‘Tis true, though it shouldn’t be surprising that a Democrat of any persuasion, “new liberal” or not, would find it troubling that, in a caseload that large, “the law” never sided with a disenfranchised plaintiff. This type of populist suspicion of potential judicial activism really shouldn’t be seen as running counter to the “freshness” Obama brings to the table.

But that’s not really the problem; what is more disconcerting is the way in which Will uses this press release to paint Obama as some sort of race-baiting extremist, one more politician in a long line of tired liberal promoters of stale identity politics.

Will indicates that he had hoped Obama “would be impatient with the ritualized choreography of synthetic indignation that degrades racial discourse.” It’s odd, then, that, in attempting to determine whether or not Obama has lived up to this hope, Will concentrates on this minor press release (one expressing relatively routine Democratic opposition to a conservative Bush judicial nomination), while ignoring the many, much more bold, ways in which Obama has spoken with fresh candor on race and politics.

Barack Obama has suggested scaling back race-based Affirmative Action; he repeatedly emphasizes to black audiences the need for personal responsibility in struggling black communities, highlighting the “strong values and character component of educational achievement.” The catalog of column-worthy examples of Obama’s departure from the “ritualized choreography of synthetic indignation” is long and deep. And yet Will ignores them.

Not being able to paint Obama as an extremist using the Senator’s words alone, Will resorts to linking him to a series of unnamed “liberals,” expressing unattributed disagreeable positions:

To some of Southwick’s opponents, his merits are irrelevant. They simply say it is unacceptable that only one of the 17 seats on the 5th Circuit is filled with an African American, although 37 percent of Mississippians are black…. [B]ecause he is a white Mississippian, many liberals consider him fair game for unfairness.

Nevermind that Obama has never expressed these views, nor that his press release only cites race as one of five areas of disenfranchisement he suspected the potential justice of being prejudiced against.

I suppose in Will’s view, any black politician opposing a White judicial nominee is nothing but a stale leftover of the “long-running and intensely boring melodrama” of the legacy of the civil rights movement.

If only Obama were to have the racial cojones to release some more paradigm-challenging five sentence press releases. Anything less than that is nothing more than Al Sharpton genuflection.

I believe this Democratic exchange over our approach to terrorists in Pakistan may qualify as the highlight of Election 2008 thus far:

I don’t really follow Hillary Clinton’s line here:

“I do not believe that someone running for president should engage in hypotheticals.”

Like…really?

Elections are hypotheticals, campaigns are hypotheticals. You, the candidates, are asking us, the voter, to hypothetically imagine what it would be like were you to be in charge of this country. If we’re not going to engage in hypotheticals then there’s no point in even having an election at all.

Obama had a great line in response to this poo-pooing of hypotheticals, one that I think underlies an important aspect of American Democracy, an aspect Hillary Clinton’s role in national politics has certainly damaged:

“We’re debating the most important foreign policy issues that we face. And the American people have the right to know. It is not just Washington insiders that are part of the debate that has to take place with respect to how we’re going to shift our foreign policy.”

Wise words.

UPDATE:
John Dickerson at Slate made this same point a few days ago.

The soon-to-be presidential candidate demonstrates his impressive grasp over this most pressing issue:

NASA says the Martian South Pole’s “ice cap” has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter’s caught the same cold, because it’s warming up too, like Pluto.

…

Silly, I know, but I wonder what all those planets, dwarf planets and moons in our SOLAR system have in common. Hmmmm. SOLAR system. Hmmmm. Solar? I wonder.

So true, so true.

…And this is why I hate presidential debates.

Barack Obama says we should change current policy and be willing to meet with the leaders of rogue nations without strict “preconditions.” Hillary Clinton says strict preconditions are important when arranging diplomatic engagements as they prevent rogue nations from using meetings with the US President for “propaganda purposes.”

And yet this slight juxtaposition in foreign policy priorities doesn’t enter the blogo-punditsphere via a sober discussion on whose view may be right on the merits, but rather through a whole load of nerdy and useless political gossip over whether or not Obama made a “gaffe.”

All this brouhaha when both Clinton and Obama’s debate-time comments actually don’t really contradict each other—if anything, each answer represents a difference in emphasis; Obama would like to emphasize a drastic change in America’s approach to foreign policy and diplomacy, while Clinton looks to emphasize her experience on the nitty-gritty details of diplomatic engagements.

We should recognize that, as he himself says, Barack Obama’s not going to be inviting Hugo Chavez to the White House for tea and crumpets bright and early Wednesday January 21st, 2009. At the same time, Hillary Clinton, given the benefit of the doubt (not that I think she really deserves it), probably won’t abide by the same stifling “preconditions” as the current administration (ie we’ll only talk to you if and when you do everything we tell you to.)

There’s so much emphasis on “winning” in these things and yet winning has nothing to do with giving the most compelling arguments in support of your ideas, it’s all about “saying what you’re supposed to say” as part and parcel of a pre-scripted horse race. The first slight indication of a difference in policy thus becomes a matter of who made a “gaffe” and who didn’t, who “knocked one out of the park” and who didn’t, who manipulated the narrative well and who didn’t.

We go from substantive discussion on policy and judgement into an endless and obnoxious series of “gotchas” and gaffes, flubs and “slams.”

If this is politics, well then I freaking hate politics.

Moore calls truce on beef between he and CNN. This statement from the Moore camp is pretty spot-on:

CNN’s report attempted to challenge ‘SiCKO’ by arguing the film only used facts that backed up the movie’s thesis. In fact CNN, by creating confusion over the acceptability of using different reports and research, along with using a biased expert whose background was not identified, engaged in the very tactics it was attempting to accuse ‘SiCKO’ of using.

Of course, the glaring difference is that ‘SiCKO’ is a self-admitted opinion piece, whereas CNN is trying — in between the various ads for Cialis — to hide beneath the fig leaf of being an unbiased, neutral news reporting agency.

The true downfall of Gupta’s piece refuting SiCKO wasn’t the confrontational tone, the health industry-associated expert, or their oppositional facts, it was the self-professed notion that Gupta’s piece was the “objective truth” somehow above Moore’s opinion-based film. Neither piece can, or should, exist without the other, and both pieces “suffer” from the editorializing of information sources, as editorializing is the only way to tell a story.

No news report, documentary film, or non-fiction book can ever even hope to present “the whole story,” something which can only be collected over time through a variety of sources, of varying degrees of bias coming from a number of angles.

Good for Moore, good for CNN.

Matthew Yglesias stretches his foreign-policy bona fides:

Mostly, the paranoia of the national security apparatus — represented by the chief of Sector Seven and the guys who want to imprison Bumblebee — versus the correct liberal view that we need to widen the circle of allies, distinguish between good and bad alien robots, etc. Similarly, the Autobots have a minor conflict between the more hawkish Ironhide and the more dovish Optimus Prime on the subject of killing humans, in which Optimus’ more pacifistic stand gets a positive portrayal.

I love big fucking robots.

Ignore Andrew Sullivan’s oh-so-sophisticated analysis of this charged political exchange, but I think Michael Moore v. CNN & Sanjay Gupta provides some good insight not just into the current state of the American health care system but into conflicting states of American journalism as well:

On one level the exchange is a bit petty; both Moore and Gupta use facts from reliable sources, facts that, at times, somewhat disagree. The result is a quibbling back and forth that amounts to little more than “HHS is better…nooo, WHO, WHO!”, an impassioned dispute which may sound somewhat familiar to Billy Madison fans.

The most jarring point of distinction, however, is less over numbers and more over methodology and news-philosophy, as best illustrated by this comment from Dr. Gupta:

“[T]o just say to someone who doesnt have a sophisticated understanding of how health care works that its free is just not true.”

Who doesn’t recognize that “free” health care means tax-payer funded? Does Dr. Gupta really think we’re all that dense? (Moore himself actually raises the taxes issue directly in the film, going so far as to point out that France is “drowning in taxes.”)

This brings out my biggest beef with the most common criticism leveled against Michael Moore, the notion that the people who see his films aren’t adult enough to form their own understandings of the issues he presents without falling completely under the sway of his entrancing/brain-washing arguments.

Moore’s movies don’t exist in a vacuum and that’s why they work. As Gupta acknowledges, without SiCKO the current American discussion on the ongoing health care crisis wouldn’t be nearly as robust as it is right now. In-depth discussion and analysis has been popping up in local press, online magazines, and even on MTV (bringing truth to the youth, Ruth!). If anyone out there is basing their entire views on the health care industry solely on what they see in a Michael Moore movie then they’re clearly not getting the whole story. Taken as a part of a healthy media diet, however, SiCKO does a world of good.

The mainstream press insists on on-the-spot “objectivity” out of a condescending belief that the American people are incapable of fully informing themselves by seeking out a multitude of opposing viewpoints. MSM corespondents even go out of their way to deny their own convictions (a clearly impossible task) for the supposed good of the American discussion, a very pre-blog mindset that I’m hoping will soon dissipate.

This became abundantly clear in an awkward way earlier on CNN, where Moore went head-to-head with Wolf Blitzer on the Situation Room, remarking right at the close of the interview “And thank you, Wolf, for saying during the break that you liked my film” to which Blitzer awkwardly replied (almost apologetically) “I thought it was a powerful movie.” Saying something is “powerful” is a lot different than saying you “liked it”, a distinction Blitzer had to cling to for fear of coming across as “biased” toward Moore (which he clearly is, to some extent) by acknowledging on-air he thought he made a good movie.

Opinion journalism of the Moore-come-blogs variety does away with this annoying condescension by laying its balls right out on the table. Lou Dobbs is patently wrong on essentially every position he has ever held on any issue, from outsourcing to immigration, but I much prefer his “bias at the outset” form on news analysis and insight to the Wolf Blitzer “I’m Not Allowed to Say I Liked a Movie” kind.

Moore is in the same exact vein. To point out that Michael Moore editorializes the facts in order to support a central argument is really nothing more than to point out he is a prominent pundit with a political position. This is what the best in opinion journalism does, and it’s very much why Moore’s films are so successful, influential, and, yes, effective.

In a new column up on TNR, Jon Chait takes Mayor Bloomberg to task over his promises of non-partisanship:

“Any successful elected executive knows that real results are more important than partisan battles and that good ideas should take precedence over rigid adherence to any particular political ideology.” So declared New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg upon renouncing his membership in the GOP last week. The problem, of course, is that people don’t agree on what “real results” or “good ideas” are. Cutting taxes? Raising taxes? Funding stem-cell research? Banning stem-cell research? This is exactly why we have partisan battles in the first place.

Since when is partisanship synonymous with disagreement? Like Tom DeLay before him, Chait (and his party-happy buddies) seems quick to misconstrue just what “partisan” really means.

Politicians of the non-partisan stripe (Bloomberg, Obama, etc.) aren’t looking to do away with political disagreement (who would be? That shit would be undemocratic.) Like many Americans, they’re hoping to put an end to the ridiculous team-based political mindset—a debilitating process wherein a line is drawn in the partisan sand, on either side of which political players line-up and duke it out, concerned not with what’s working but more with who’s winning.

Pro-partisan gadflys like Chait (apparently) and Delay seem to enjoy this type of political “fighting” out of some sort of nerdy attraction to the gritty sport of it all (see Greg Sargent’s constant boxing terminology, and nauseating overuse of the verb “to slam”). But every sport has it’s own limited appeal, and the growing ranks of undeclared voters seems to indicate that a lot of Americans aren’t really into petty political bickering, especially not when such fights become less about differences in policy position and more on promoting party unity and winning one for the home team.

This type of misanalysis is especially puzzling coming from Brendan Nyhan, a guy who throws a weepy hissy fit anytime a political pundit tows the party line rather than speaking truth to ideological party power.

And what prompted Jon Chait to go from knocking the liberal blogosphere for its insistence on ideological purity to knocking Bloomberg for his insistence of not adhering to ideological purity?

People have been lamenting the death of hip hop for about half as long as hip hop has been around, a whiney autophobia that Mos Def best undercut with the right-on observation that “people talk about hip hop like it’s some giant living in the hillside coming down to visit the townspeople.”

Matt Taibbi’s current column up on ad busters on the supposed sorry state of American liberalism is one of those giant in the hillsides type crybaby laments.

The liberalism Taibbi objects to—snooty college kids in Chaiman Mao t-shirts and “noisy Upper West side cocktail parties”—has little, if anything, to do with the Democratic party or the current left-of-center punditsphere.

If anything, the overdeveloped self-righteous urge to Fight The Power that defines these groups (as Taibbi describes it) has turned off any of the smelly dreadlocked/snotty Banana Republic-frocked masses from supporting anything as The Man-ish as a modern day political party.

Ross Douthat’s not buying it either:

The right had the left on the ropes for a long time, but for now, at least, it’s the other way around. Public opinion is going liberalism’s way on everything from gay marriage to taxes to health care to poverty to global warming, and the Iraq War has temporarily undone conservatism’s long-running advantage on foreign policy.

I think they’re largely talking past each other. Matt Taibbi’s smelly liberal giant in the hillside just isn’t coming down to get with the townspeople anymore. The rising wave of public support of left-leaning policy has come about largely because the conservative equivalent of the Chairman-clad masses has taken over the Republican party, a rhetorical extremism that is fundamentally unpalatable to anyone to the left of Ann Coulter.

While the Republicans were staging wide-scale revolts against the likes of Lincoln Chaffee, the Democrats were busy embracing and celebrating guys like Barack Obama and Jim Webb, ideological liberals who approach their liberalism under fundamentally conservative world views of public restraint and personal responsibility. The lunatic fringe Taibbi rightfully finds so disagreeable is largely an isolated entity, with little to no bearing on the current political landscape (and let’s hope it stays that way).

Taibbi should stick to making fun of dying popes.

What planet is David Broder from?

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have abandoned their cautious advocacy of a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces and now are defending votes to cut off support for troops fighting insurgents in Iraq.

They are able to escape the charge of abandoning U.S. combat troops only because they knew when they voted that their Republican colleagues in Congress, joined by a few Democrats, would keep the funds flowing at least for a few more months. But if Clinton or Obama is nominated, that vote is certain to loom large in the general election campaign.

If President Bush was comfortable enough to veto the first war funding bill (due to what he perceived to be inadequacies of the legislation) without fear of jeopardizing the troops, then Clinton and Obama should feel just as comfortable voting against a war funding bill they disprove of for the same reasons. It’s not that the two relied on the generosity of their Republican colleagues to pass a bill they needed to vote against for political expediency—Clinton and Obama hoped this bill wouldn’t pass, such that another supplemental, one with clear benchmarks tied to an extended withdrawal, could be voted on and sent to the President.

That’s the way war funding legislation works, David. Unfunded troops, abandoned by legislators and forced to wage thrifty battle in the desserts of Anbar, was never an option and has never been an option, not during Bush’s veto nor during Clinton and Obama’s votes against the benchmark-free bill.

Andrew Sullivan raises a common argument re. the current immigration debate, inspired by a quote by Steve Sailer (ewww):

(N)ot enough attention has been paid to the altogether welcome move in the current immigration bill to put brains and talent before family connections in determining who gets to become an American. It’s long overdue.

It’s not long overdue, and it’s a terrible idea. Immigration policy should be set with an eye toward the future, not the immediate present. Sure, brainy Mexicans coming here for advanced careers in engineering and software development would probably provide a boon to our current economy and would most likely have a slightly easier time assimilating to American civic life. But what about the next generation, their sons and daughters?

It isn’t too controversial to note that children raised in stable, two-parent homes have a much easier time assimilating to life as US citizens, no matter how far back their American family trees may reach. This is even more so the case for the sons and daughters of recent immigrants—strong family unity produces strong American kids. Any first generation Americans coming of age in broken immigrant families (simply because their mothers or fathers or supportive grandparents weren’t “brainy” enough to make the cut) will have a much harder time developing into prosperous US citizens (attending American schools, becoming productive in American jobs) than would children born into thriving, uninterrupted families.

Preference for immigrant brains over family unity is short-sighted and wrong-headed; it’s the cultural and civic well being of the second, third, fourth and fifth generations we should be concerning ourselves with, and for those folks it’s a strong family structure, not a brainy skillset, that is the biggest factor in their early growth as productive Americans.

Ross Douthat is right to pick apart Dana Stevens’ strange analysis of abortion-politics ala Judd Appatow’s Knocked Up. And while I think his analysis of the film is pretty spot-on, he’s a bit off the mark here:

Stevens is right that a typical young, upwardly-mobile, apparently-secular female professional who gets pregnant from a one-night stand with a loserish guy is a prime candidate to get an abortion, and the Knocked Up scenario is, in that regard, sociologically unlikely.

Replace “upwardly mobile” and “pregnant from a one-nigh stand with a loserish guy” with “poor and struggling” and “victim of a date rape” and I think you have a clearer candidate.

Had Alison not had the steady, well-paying job, and the in-house support system of her sister and brother-in-law, I’m sure the decision to carry the child to term would have been a lot more agonizing.