Footnote to a fact-checked false impression

The Note's Chris Good flags an anti-Obamacare ad aimed at young adults by Crossroads Generation, a younguns' auxilliary of Karl Rove's American Crossroads.  This 1-minute font of information nyaah-nyaahs that while Obamacare enables adults under 26 to remain on their parents' insurance, 

...actually, states already allowed kids to stay on their parents' insurance before Obamacare.

I want to add one key point and one minor to Good's debunk below:

Will debased politics hit the databases?

Politico's Kenneth P. Vogel today delves into the coopetition between the GOP fundraising empires of Karl Rove and the Koch brothers.  When the account turned to rival databases, I suffered a free association so sharp it was almost comic, as if the keyword word flashed in front of my eyeballs. Here was the trigger:

Earlier this year, operatives from both camps had conversations with the Republican National Committee about accessing its mega database of voter information, which is both a powerful organizing tool and a valuable asset used as collateral to secure bank loans and lines of credit.

“This is about getting a hold of the most valuable asset that the RNC has,” said former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, who asserted Rove’s allies have for years wanted to “get their hands on this list so bad they can taste it.”

The word was Stuxnet.  And no, I don't expect the Koch and Rove empires to sabotage each others' databases.  What I can easily imagine is Rove or other GOP operatives corrupting or stealing Democrats' data. It's so in keeping with the m.o. of the aging College Republicans who have directed GOP campaigns for a generation.

Karl Rove pimps out the swiftboat

Perhaps Karl Rove is running for Vice President. He's using his freehold on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page to test attack lines on Barack Obama that are, well, Rovian. Here's how he characterized comments by Obama attempting to place the threats posed by Iran and other 'rogue states' in context:

On Sunday at a stop in Oregon, Sen. Obama was dismissive of the threats posed by Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Syria. That's the same Iran whose Quds Force is arming and training insurgents and illegal militias in Iraq to kill American soldiers; that is supporting Hezbollah and Hamas in violent attacks on Lebanon and Israel; and that is racing to develop a nuclear weapon while threatening the "annihilation" of Israel.

By Monday in Montana, Mr. Obama recognized his error. He abruptly changed course, admitting that Iran represents a threat to the region and U.S. interests.

Conveniently, Rove neglects to quote Obama before slipping into a schoolmasterly lecture about the carefully prepared negotiations of Nixon and Reagan. Obama was not in fact 'dismissive' of the threats posed by rogue states; his aim was to defuse the hysteria of the Bush Administration's years-long effort to inflate these threats to the magnitude of those posed by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Here's a CNN digest of what Obama actually said:

"Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union," Obama said. "They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us, and yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we're going to wipe you off the planet.

"We should use that position of strength that we have to be bold enough to go ahead and listen. We might not compromise on any issue, but at least we should find out are there areas of potential common interest, and we can reduce some of the tensions that have caused us so many problems around the world," Obama said.

Obama said he was aware of the "grave" threat Iran poses to the United States, but that it was "common sense" that Iran is less of a threat today to the U.S. than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.

Nor did Obama "recognize an error" and walk these statements back the following day; he simply elaborated:

The Soviet Union had the ability to destroy the world several times over, had satellites spanning the globe, had huge masses of conventional military power, all directed at destroying us," he said. "So, I've made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave. But what I've said is that we should not just talk to our friends. We should be willing to engage our enemies as well. That's what diplomacy is all about...

Iran is a grave threat. It has an illicit nuclear program. It supports terrorism across the region and militias in Iraq. It threatens Israel's existence. It denies the Holocaust," he said. "The reason Iran is so much more powerful than it was a few years ago is because of the Bush-McCain policy of fighting in Iraq and refusing to pursue direct diplomacy with Iran. They're the ones who have not dealt with Iran wisely.

In his attempt to bring the rogue state threat to scale, Obama seems to be channeling in an argument spun out by Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria last October:

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

You don't have to think that the threats posed by Islamic extremism and nuclear proliferation are "overblown," as John E. Mueller has argued in a book of that title, to appreciate Obama's attempt to counter Cold War nostalgia that craves a superpower-weight enemy against which the U.S. can define itself.

As Obama fights to break the spell of Rovian fear-mongering, I do wish he hadn't weakened himself in the famous YouTube debate exchange last summer, when he responded "I would" to the question, "Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea?" Hillary was quite right to call him out on this. I thought at the time and continue to think that Obama didn't fully absorb the question and didn't mean to say that he'd meet all five personally within a year--just that, on principle, it makes sense to be willing to meet when there's something to be negotiated. But in post-debate dueling he went the other route and tried to suggest that Hillary wouldn't be willing enough to negotiate with rogues. This is one major instance of Obama's sometime tendency to dig deeper when he's in a hole.

Still, that error is as nothing compared to McCain's serial expressions of strategic incoherence. McCain's vision of a decades-long but casualty-free occupation along the lines of our presence in Korea and Japan betrays the kind of Cold War imprinting Obama is trying to defuse (our presence in those countries was part of global competition with the Soviets and their allies). His assertion that Iran backs al Qaeda in Iraq reveals a penchant for lumping all "Islamic extremists" together into one monolithic adversary, as strident Cold Warriors did with the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam. His "bomb bomb Iran" 'joke' is infinitely more "dismissive" of the nature of the threats we actually face than Obama's contextualizing.

Obama's Metapolitics

It's often said that Obama's speeches are stirring but unsubstantial -- long on hope, short on policy.

But Obama's pitch to the nation isn't insubstantial. It's meta-- a substantive critique of our political process, built on this core insight: "we need to do more than turn the page on the failed Bush-Cheney policies; we have to turn the page on the politics that helped make those policies possible."

A long train of politicians have told us that "Washington is broken." But Obama has put together a sustained critique of how the political process is broken, and how to fix it. Here, from a Jan. 30, '08 speech in Denver, is Obama's litany of the modes of political malfunction:

Lobbyists setting an agenda in Washington that feeds the inequality, insecurity, and instability in our economy.

Division and distraction that keeps us from coming together to deal with challenges like health care, and clean energy, and crumbling schools year after year after year.

Cronyism that gave us Katrina instead of competent government. And secrecy that made torture permissible and illegal wiretaps possible.

It's a politics that uses 9/11 to scare up votes; and fear and falsehoods to lead us into a war in Iraq that should've never been authorized and should've never been waged

Lobbying. Partisanship. Cronyism. Secrecy. Fear-mongering. Lying. Promising to fix these malfunctions can sound gauzy, because much of the cure lies in the power of example in the leader making the promise. You can legislate lobbying rules, and against secrecy -- but not against lying, or scorched-earth attack politics, or cronyism.

With regard to partisanship and honesty, Obama is his argument. His pledge to remain truthful, his manner of addressing the whole country, the support he's attracted from independents and Republicans while laying out a full "liberal" agenda, his record of moving bipartisan legislation on lobbying reform, videotaped police interrogations, Schip -- he seeks to demonstrate a transcendence of paralyzing partisanship without mincing on an agenda of progressive action on health care, tax policy, global warming and troop withdrawal. He says explicitly: this campaign itself embodies the politics I am promising:

And we are showing America what change looks like. From the snows of Iowa to the sunshine of South Carolina, we have built a movement of young and old; rich and poor; black and white; Latino, Asian and Native American. We've reached Americans of all political stripes who are more interested in turning the page than turning up the heat on our opponents. That's how Democrats will win in November and build a majority in Congress. Not by nominating a candidate who will unite the other party against us, but by choosing one who can unite this country around a movement for change.

With regard to Hillary, he seeks a delicate balance in responding to her (and Bill's) attacks on his record and leveling own critique of hers. Implicitly he's arguing that the attacks are different in kind, that she and Bill were distorting his record, but he's not distorting hers. Most delicately, he's incorporated his response to the Clinton smears of January into his critique of Clintonism:

Each candidate running for the Democratic nomination shares an abiding desire to end the disastrous policies of the current administration. But we must decide...just what kind of Party we want to be, and what lessons we've learned from the bitter partisanship of the last two decades. We can be a Party that tries to beat the other side by practicing the same do-anything, say-anything, divisive politics that has stood in the way of progress; or we can be a Party that puts an end to it.

The "do-anything, say-anything" tag is Obama's takeaway from the Clintons' suggestions that he was soft on opposition to the war in Iraq and in defense of abortion rights. Those attacks have become Exhibit A in his portrait of a broken political system. He is saying: you can't build a mandate, a lasting majority if you rely on Rovian campaign tactics. And he carries that attack on Hillary-as-part-of-the-problem into her policy choices, which he suggests are shaped by political calculation. Is this unfair, or a distortion? Judge:

If you choose change, you will have a nominee who doesn't take a dime from Washington lobbyists and PACs. We don't need a candidate who agrees with Republicans that lobbyists are part of the system in Washington. They're part of the problem. And when I'm President, their days of setting the agenda in Washington will be over.

If you choose change, you will have a nominee who doesn't just tell people what they want to hear. Poll-tested positions and calculated answers might be how Washington confronts challenges, but it's not how you overcome them; it's not how you inspire our nation to come together behind a common purpose; and it's not what America needs right now....

Finally, and most painfully, Obama suggests that Hillary Clinton lacked "judgment" and "courage" in her response to the rush to war in Iraq:

I will end the mentality that says the only way for Democrats to look tough on national security is by talking, acting and voting like George Bush Republicans. It's time to reject the counsel that says the American people would rather have someone who is strong and wrong than someone who is weak and right - it's time to say that we are the Party that is going to be strong and right.

It's time for new leadership that understands that the way to win a debate with John McCain is not by nominating someone who agreed with him on voting for the war in Iraq; who agreed with him by voting to give George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran; who agrees with him in embracing the Bush-Cheney policy of not talking to leaders we don't like; and who actually differed with him by arguing for exceptions for torture before changing positions when the politics of the moment changed.

We need to offer the American people a clear contrast on national security, and when I am the nominee of the Democratic Party, that's exactly what I will do. Talking tough and tallying up your years in Washington is no substitute for judgment, and courage, and clear plans. It's not enough to say you'll be ready from Day One - you have to be right from Day One.

This is tough but fair. As argued in a prior post, Hillary did fail in judgment and courage in the run-up to war in Iraq - not because she voted in support of the resolution authorizing force, but because she later failed to hold Bush to the conditions she laid out in her speech supporting the resolution: seek international support, try weapons inspections first, do not rush to war. When Bush cut the inspections short and prepared for invasion in February and March ''03, she offered her support. Why? She has defended her vote and speech in support of it eloquently, but not her conduct in the months following.

Obama needs to make this case, and he is not shying from it. Paradoxically, his primary proof of "a different kind of politics" is in leveling a devastating but accurate critique of Clintonism.

Rolling over for Rove?

Watching a Jan. 16 speech by Karl Rove to a Republican group on C-Span tonight, I got a sense of why the Dems keep rolling over for Bush on the FISA bill. Rove said that the leading Democratic candidates, Hillary and Obama, were in favor of preventing US intelligence from listening in on the conversations of terrorists if their phone calls passed through the US. That is of course a gross distortion of the position of those who are trying to maintain a modicum of FISA oversight over unchecked monitoring of Americans' phone and Internet communication. But the way it was framed - they want to keep those who are trying to keep us safe from tuning in on those who are trying to kill us -- seems to make the Democrats quake in their boots. Here's one more 'nod to Dodd,' who's vowing again to filibuster any bill that guts FISA and grants telecom immunity.

On the whole, Rove's criticisms of Hillary and Obama were so limp and familiar that I began to wonder if the Republican attack machine might be as tired as the party's policy precepts. But I wouldn't count on it.