Brilliant Politics

Anger is not a governing strategy, and Republicans have proposed no plan to turn the economy around. They offer only anger, delusions, and paranoia. Andrew Sullivan digs beneath the surface of the current foul public mood:

But it seems pretty clear to me that he [Scott Brown] will win, which means that the FNC/RNC machine has succeeded in perpetuating the meme that somehow Obama is a communist elitist out of touch with real Americans who want their government slashed, while they want no cuts at all in any entitlements, who want the budget balanced without any tax hikes or spending cuts, who demand access to unrestricted healthcare for ever, but refuse to support ways to reduce soaring costs. They want an end to crippling occupations overseas, but they also don’t want to retreat or surrender to terrorists. They want to restore America’s moral standing but retain the torture camp at Gitmo. And when told they cannot have all this, they vote for someone else who can promise it, however utopian their plans are.

A politician cannot change this mood. But Obama now has a clear warning that he must adjust his program for change in a more populist direction. How to do this will not be easy. But the attempt to offer a centrist path against a populist wave on both right and left has clearly been overwhelmed by the passion and anger of the moment and the barrage of lies and propaganda promulgated by a shameless GOP and a pusillanimous media.

But we know where we are now. Obama’s George H W Bush-style focus on the merits of government has served the interests of the country well, in my judgment. But it has met the fury and shamelessness of the hard and ever more extreme right and the staggering amnesia of the electorate. With one major propaganda channel perpetuating an alternative reality and an opposition party motivated by anger, rage and populism, Obama’s careful centrism is the right path but a tough sell. That tension – between substance and politics – will define the rest of his first term.

From UCAR:

Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb….This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Each bar shows the proportion of record highs (red) to record lows (blue) for each decade. The 1960s and 1970s saw slightly more record daily lows than highs, but in the last 30 years record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole.

Happy Holidays! Brilliant Politics is under reconstruction. Everything should be in order by early January.

Here is the list of the immediate benefits of health care reform that will start in 2010.

This photo essay is a retrospective look at my time on the campaign trail as a blogger during Barack Obama’s campaign for president. I am suspending operation of Brilliant Politics with an eye toward reviving it during the 2012 presidential campaign. I was happy to have my great friend, collaborator, and photographer, Martin Saunders, with me on some of those trips. His political photography of our two trips to Iowa can be seen here and here.

Brilliant Politics was always a part-time and intermittent blog, given my time limitations. But I have to say that our timing was perfect. I was one of the first persons to publicly suggest that Barack Obama should run for president in this commentary on public radio, “My Daughter the First Black President,” although I did so with a heavy dose of irony. About seven months later, I wrote this justification for starting Brilliant Politics:

It might seem oxymoronic to some to seek brilliance in contemporary politics. We will, nevertheless, undertake this daunting task because the United States, now suffering through a bipartisan endarkenment in the early years of the 21st century, so badly needs the light of brilliant ideas and the radiance of brilliant leaders.

Well, I think I hit the bullseye, and that we all got lucky because we elected a brilliant president. Some of us worked harder than others to ensure that outcome. Now let’s make sure he follows through on those ideas.

I have started a new blog, The Unimaginable Life, about the transformation of American culture. Come on over.

-CDP

Matthew Alexander, a senior military interrogator in Iraq, tells the truth about torture:

As a former senior military interrogator, it’s deeply troubling to me after reading the recently released torture memos that we doubted our ability to win the battle of wits in the interrogation booth and resorted to torturing and abusing prisoners. There is no profession that is successful 100 percent of the time. Doctors can’t cure all patients….

As a senior interrogator in Iraq, I conducted more than three hundred interrogations and monitored more than one thousand. I heard numerous foreign fighters state that the reason they came to Iraq to fight was because of the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. Our policy of torture and abuse is Al-Qaeda’s number one recruiting tool. These same insurgents have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of our troops in Iraq, not to mention Iraqi civilians. Torture and abuse are counterproductive in the long term and, ultimately, cost us more lives than they save.

The more important argument, however, is the moral one. One of al-Qaeda’s goals is to prove that America does not live up to its principles. They assert that we are a nation of hypocrites. By engaging in torture and abuse, we are playing into their hands. This war has two fronts—protecting our security by thwarting terrorist attacks and preserving American principles. We cannot become our enemy in seeking to defeat him.