'Return to Normalcy'

I don't get the McCain reference, though - Kaus is going to vote for him (fuck you!), but Bob Wright doesn't like him either? is he referring to something you have to watch his tv show for? and do we have to see his stuffed animal if so?

http://www.highereducation.org/crosstalk/ct0404/images/mark_warner.jpg

WARREN G, regulatin'

http://www.historylink.org/db_images/Harding.jpg

he solved the problem of getting elected in a red state

re: return to normalcy, I agree with some of it, but as a "strategy" I think it's a non-starter. Seems like the counterattack is too obvious -- "Normal, are you nuts? We're at war!!"

http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/wftwarch.pl?110205

i take it you think we should have declared war on timothy mcveigh?

What I meant is that we should nominate someone(s) who, while passing the competence/trust test, is/are the things McCain is not - youthful, tall, relaxed, optimistic/forward-looking, humorously self-effacing. Not that I, uh, have anyone in mind or anything. I think it's even possible to pair that dude with someone tougher/more vigorous-seeming than McCain. Again, specifics are so gauche.

oh and when do we get to talk about elliot spitzer for governor??

another McCain is not is Southern

and for enders. plus, it didn't really do shit.

Who on earth still "trusts" the Chief Executive? It's a chimera created by pollsters.

"The essential premise is that Bush has stretched the military, the Constitution and the civility of our politics to the limit in reaction to the threat of future 9/11s. All this fevered straining and leveraging may have been appropriate at the time, but there's no real need to keep running in hyperdrive."

But that is precisely the tack that Kaus is arguing against. He doesn't want a bitter confrontational stance against Bush's tactics - that's what the Dems are doing now. He wants a much more conciliatory and centrist appeal to common sense.

I think the Dems need to go trife: Obama or Murtha or Reid or SOMEBODY equipped to take a leadership role that isn't compromised from the get-go ought to just come out and say "you colossal fuckup" to Bush's face, and Delay's face, and Cheney's face. I mean yeah why is it big news that Cheney shot his friend in the face, we knew he was a total incompetent at everything else. An incompetent lying fatso who barely knows how to dress himself. Well, it's the truth.

The dems can't pick any leaders worth getting behind and it frankly looks pathetic (yes gabbneb whatever I am right and you are wrong) so it doesn't matter what line of TPs you take going into 2008, the party is just weak right now, for lack of a better word. You can be a minority in both houses and still be strong.

Well to be fair, Kaus doesn't actually advocate the phrase "overdoing it" - that was my own paraphrase. He pretty much sticks with the phrase "Return to Normalcy" and the implication that Bush's War on Terror is, well, not normal. Kaus seems to think that's a pretty strong critique.

"The idea that Bush has gone a bit crazy trying to remake history after 9/11 incorporates a fairly severe critique of his presidency, all the more powerful because it is accurate"

Kaus sees to think that RTN could be a theme that both Democratic camps (the conciliatory centrists and the angry liberals) could rally around. However a phrase isn't a campaign - a criticism that is doubly true in this case, since even the phrase itself isn't usable as it stands - and it's not at all clear that Kaus's clever ambiguities would be sustainable over the course of a campaign.

i guess that's anything but "return to normalcy," but it sure as hell is more of a "return to actual americans" rather than more old-spice pampered scrotum-necked oil elites

Barkley's gonna defect from Edwards? Swann has to get over his not-voting-for-the-last-24-years-thing, though I doubt that'll be too big a deal, even though it plays into a dilettante approach.

I think the Dems need to go trife: Obama or Murtha or Reid or SOMEBODY equipped to take a leadership role that isn't compromised from the get-go ought to just come out and say "you colossal fuckup" to Bush's face, and Delay's face, and Cheney's face.

Isn't this pretty much what we've been doing constantly since 03? Not in the same language of course, and I'd love to say worse stuff to Bush's face, but that sort of language doesn't seem to serve politicians well (Cheney doesn't exactly have the highest approval ratings), though it might not be terrible for one part of our image. But to be real here, what opportunity does any Democrat have to get in Bush's face on camera? If you do it from afar, doesn't it look like throwing rocks at the throne?

And I'm mostly thinking about '08 here. You know, when we won't be running against Bush. We'll be running against McCain, who it's going to be very hard to paint as a "colossal fuckup" (please lord send us George Allen), and who won't be too easy to tie to Bush either, even if he picks Condi. Kaus begins with the principle, right or wrong, that there's no way we beat McCain on national security, so try to change the game to one we can win. Which also makes the actually important point that we're sitting around here fighting the last war while ignoring what's over the horizon. You might call that defeatist, but Kaus sees it as losing your dangerous illusions. It's also sort of what Kerry tried to do, admittedly, but he did a horrible job of it, at a different time.

but you have to pick a stance and get behind it, not completely abandon Murtha after he makes a completely reasonable comment that could have been the strongest issue for Democrats in YEARS

it was nice that Murtha reminded the public that there are tough heartland Dems, but, as Kaus has pointed out (citing Charlie Cook and others), his venture off-message (the reaction to which he claimed not to expect at all) stopped Bush's rather serious misuse-of-intelligence hemorrhaging. the distrust line of attack is the most effective against BushCo, and Murtha both changed the subject and allowed the Iraq question to transition without much effort from Bush from was-it-a-bad-choice to the much Bush-friendlier (not that the Dems aren't responsible in part) what-do-we-do-now.

I can't actually believe Hillary is the front-runner. There's no way she'll make it through the primaries, though, so no worries.

it's pretty much name recognition right now. I think it's quite likely that Hillary would be a disaster of a candidate, and I don't see her getting anywhere in the primaries either. I like Schweitzer as the tough veep (I could take some Murtha-style House dudes too, or maybe even Jane Harman), but Obama is getting a little tough these days too.

I for one think that what-do-we-do-now is a much better ground to wage a campaign on than was-it-a-bad-choice. Backwards-looking finger-pointing vs. realistic leadership - I know where my vote would be.

xpost

Believe me, I wish it were true. I'd love to see an election in which the worst possible outcome was a McCain presidency. I just think McCain is too far to the left within his party to make it through the primaries.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007600

But Mr. McCain is no antitax supply-sider himself. He grandstanded against the Bush capital-gains and dividend tax cuts and even co-sponsored an amendment with Tom Daschle to scuttle the reduction in the highest income-tax rates. Why? "I just thought it was too tilted to the wealthy and I still do. I want to cut the taxes on the middle class." Even when I confront him with emphatic evidence that those tax cuts have been an economic triumph and have increased revenues, he is unrepentant and defends his "no" vote by falling back on class-warfare type thinking: "We have a wealth gap in this country, and that worries me."

...

But here in a nutshell lies the danger of the McCain view of the world. Where some see the vast virtue of entrepreneurial wealth-generators and job-producers, he too often sees "robber barons." He seems forever in search of the next Joe Camel, Charles Keating, Ken Lay or Jose Canseco (Mr. McCain has been a prominent crusader against steroids in baseball).

He views himself, I believe, as a kind of modern-day Robin Hood, a defender of the downtrodden and tormentor of the bullying special interests, which is endearing and unquestionably a big part of his broad political appeal, but often leads to populist and parasitic economic policy conclusions like higher taxes on the rich and attacks on "huge oil profits." He wants to be the caped crusader against corruption. The buzzword for the McCain Straight Talk Express in 2008 will be reform: "I want to reform education, reform Medicare and Social Security, reform lobbying and campaigns. Reform immigration. Reform. Reform. Reform."

When I ask him about America's remarkable income mobility, he responds, "Yes, but I keep seeing the thousands of faces of those poor people who were left behind in New Orleans," as if this was a failure of capitalism, not a failure of government. And with this, he gobbles down the last bite of his unpretentious lunch--a hot dog and chips--shakes my hand warmly, and sprints off to his next appointment to clean up whatever the latest mess is in Washington.

I come away believing that if I'm ever in a knife fight or in a foxhole, there is no one I'd rather have next to me than John McCain. Whether he's someone who should be steering the rudders of the American economy is a different issue altogether.

If the WSJ doesn't trust him, that's got to be a good sign.

RTN408: A couple of obvious points in defense of "return to normalcy" as an overarching theme** for Democrats, against criticisms from Roger Simon and his commenters:

To Roger's commenters: RTN can be a statement of strength, not a proposal for retreat to a pre-9/11 mindset. The struggle against Al Qaeda is now up to speed, the argument goes. It can now become--or, rather, we are now strong enough to have it become--one of the normal jobs of government, as standing off against the Communists was for four decades during which Americans managed to pay attention to other issues and lead normal lives that were only occasionally punctured by a sense of crisis (e.g. Cuban missiles).

To Roger: We even elected Democrats during those decades, yet somehow Communism was still contained and then defeated. Even accepting your assertion that Al Qaeda is an enemy that's less "normal" than Russian Bolsheviks, it's not our enemies I'd have the Dems "normalize," but the fight against them (including all sorts of additional eavesdropping, provisions of the Patriot Act, etc., if necessary). Do you plan on keeping the country in a permanent state of forget-all-else crisis until Al Qaeda (and its inevitable imitators) are completely defeated? Then the terrorists will have ...

Nor do Dems have to use the actual phrase "return to normalcy," of course. Preferably not, in fact. But that's the gist. ... Bonus: The theme is one of the few that might be effective against John McCain, whose highly advertised flaw is that he's a hothead, who will probably have a tumult-inducing domestic reform agenda, and whose less highly advertised flaw may be that he's "never seen a war he didn't want to start." [v] ... 1:01 A.M. link

I think there are lots of ways in which McCain would be an improvement on Bush - he's more open, less political, more libertarian, more pragmatic. But he is nevertheless an ideological conservative, and it's possible that he'd in fact be worse in effect than Bush on socioeconomic stuff because he'd have less other baggage to stand in his way - because he doesn't come off as much of an asshole as Bush does, he may well be able to do a lot of what Bush can't. And, as Kaus points out, he's probably more a warmonger than BushCo is.