The end of the beginning, and the beginning of the middle.

I'm still looking for the right language to describe the sense of victory/joy/success/affirmation/realignment/booyah to capture my feelings about the country and its choice of President a few days ago.

So this post will be short on that language.

But I do think it's important to chart the journey of Nation Indivisible over the past few months, and look at how my own thinking has been shaped by this blog, and others, since our first post in January.

This is the 105th post to the blog since that time, for an average of about one post every three days. That's about half of my ideal, and about ten times what I thought would ever happen. POHS and DMW have committed themselves to this idea and have always challenged me to come up with something to top their inventive, entertaining, and always perspicacious posts, and that teamwork is certainly at the root of our continued success at growing Nation Indivisible.

CTL, who as of yet hasn't posted to the blog (or even commented on it publicly), recently assured me that she reads it, and that we should keep going with it, and that's a huge help, too.

Looking back at the first entry, I remember the cold night in Concord when, warmed by the promise of an America driven by hope rather than fear, I started this blog. Or, more accurately, took this blog out of my head, where it had been regularly updating since November 2000, and made it slightly more tangible. I remember thinking about how wonderful it would be to see a country united again; a country that shared a sense of a brighter future; a country that got a little better every day. And, yes, it seemed like Barack Obama would be a good president, too, but this, for me, has always been less about Obama the man, and more about Obama the movement -- about people emerging from the politics of fear and choosing the politics of hope. That's not about one man, or one moment. That's about our national character and it's ability to shake off the last eight years of misdirection. And when we did that on Tuesday, I was the happiest I've ever been.

Now, certainly, that's mostly because so far I haven't done the really happy things: I haven't been engaged, or married, or had a child. So national pride can still register on my scale. But even so, I was surprised by the strength of my emotion, by the depth of my patriotism, and by the real sense of belonging to something greater than myself that I felt on that warm Tuesday night, just watching television with good friends.

To be sure, most of that something greater was a sense of kinship with this nation indivisible. But a good measure was a sense of having shared a more specific journey with some people who, though I've never met them, were my regular companions -- often for hours every day -- throughout this process. They're all linked over on the right: Josh Marshall and Greg Sargent at talkingpointsmemo.com, Nate and Sean at fivethirtyeight.com, Andrew Sullivan...they all helped me to shape my own ideas about this race with commentary that ran in almost real time, almost 24 hours a day. We crow about our 105 posts in a year -- these guys were getting close to that in a week (or, in Andrew Sullivan's case, a day). We're amateurs, they're pros, and the difference is clear.

Still, in the coming months, I hope that Nation Indivisible continues to provide it's unique voice to this new America. I hope that we are able to increasingly move from showing you what we're watching, to telling you what we're thinking, to describing how we're translating those thoughts into concrete action. Because if there is one thing that Tuesday made plain to me, it's that just watching, while sometimes very, very good, isn't good enough.

JEK
2.0

Poll Interpretation

Below are the results of a poll done by the NYT. The headline on the web reads: "Poll Finds Obama’s Run Isn’t Closing Divide on Race," with a subhead: "Blacks and whites hold vastly different views of Senator Barack Obama and the state of race relations, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll."

Now look at the results. To me, what they say is: "Poll finds heavy support for Obama among African Americans." Subhead: "Blacks less likely to support McCain, whites split almost evenly and ready for a black president."

Which is pretty different.

JEK
Armchair Pollster






Late update: Seems I am not the only person to think so. The Obama camp is making a similar argument, as reported at TPM.

What A President Should Do When Floods Occur

YouTube Moments

The link to the MoveOn site, which really is pretty amazing, is here.

JEK
Procrastinating for the future of our country

Free Obama Bumper Sticker

Get a free Obama Bumper Sticker from MoveOn.org. The first one is absolutely free. I gave a $20 donation and I'm getting 10 bumper stickers. Don't know what I'm going to do with them, but I'm so excited. I almost gave $25 and got 100 bumper stickers, but I really didn't know what I was going to do with 100 bumper stickers.

Tell all your friends who live in battleground states!

https://pol.moveon.org/obamastickers/

POHS

It's not a loss, it's a win.

So, since the big victory, the press has been full of news about the election. And it seems to me that almost all of that coverage has been about how Clinton lost. How her advisors failed her, her organization failed her, her Iowa strategy failed her, her fundraisers failed her, her husband failed her.

These post-mortems are satisfying, in their way.

But they seem to be missing one essential reason, every one of them, every time:

What if one reason that Hillary lost was that Obama was a better candidate?

After all these months, all these displays of great campaigning by how did we get back to the Clinton as Presumptive Nominee, upset through her own fault? This line of argument passively dismisses Obama's legitimacy as the strongest candidate, and I hope they fight this line of reasoning hard if it continues past the weekend.

JEK
Schadenfreude will only take him so far

The World's President

When I was in Italy recently, I was struck by the degree to which people were following the Presidential race here in the US. Everyone seemed to know the details of the Democratic nominating process. And everyone -- I mean, everyone -- was for Obama.

Which apparently reflects a broader trend, as shown by this poll asking Europe & the Russians who they would vote for. NB the Russians always liking the tough-talker.

JEK
European sensibilitized.

MoveOn.org Ad

MoveOn.org announced the winners of their "obama in 30 seconds" ad contest. All four winning videos are worth watching and you must do so now. I hope they all make it on the air.

www.obamain30seconds.org

POHS
which one's your favorite? Mine is playground politics.

Gas Tax

So, on the matter of the gas tax holiday. There have been a lot of arguments advanced against it. The Clinton camp has advanced a series of imaginative panderings for it. And I sorta got all caught up in it for a while. I think I have a pretty good handle on all the ways in which a gas tax holiday will not save anyone any money, but will lose lots of money for the government in favor of the oil companies. I think I have HRC's quote about how she doesn't put any stock in these new-fangled "economists" down pat.

What amazes me is that in the midst of all of this chatter, I allowed myself to be completely taken in. I never once, until this moment, realized the most important fact in all of this:

None of these people are going to be President this summer. This whole arguement is moot.

-JEK
Is pretty sure he hates the phrase "at the pump" even more than he hates the phrase "on Day One," which is a lot.

Hillary, No! Wait, I mean, Yes! Err, I'm confused. Let's just vote Obama.

I'll admit I was getting pretty angry at Hillary Clinton over her negative campaigning. And I still believe her campaign is unwinnable; the sooner she drops out the better. But watching this interview between her and Bill O'Reilly made me love her again!

She does a better job than anyone I've seen handling Bill O'Reilly's agressive style and making her points coherently. Suddenly, I'm glad we have Hillary around again. I still prefer Obama's message of hope and moving beyond partisan bickering, but maybe, just maybe, that's just because I thought democrats were bad at dirty political fights. Now here comes Hillary; she was naive and idealistic, but now she's tough. And I can only imagine if I were a woman how inspired I would be.

So much so, that it makes me wonder if O'Reilly isnt trying to help her prolong the democratic race. Oh, such insidiousness! (That would look great on a T-Shirt.) Moveon.org said the interview "does nothing more than legitimize a network that will then use that credibility to smear Democrats and progressive ideas in 2008." This is getting tricky. Damn, I can't even enjoy a good Hillary/O'Reilly interview without wondering about the politics. I'm tired of this junk.

I'm going to stick with plan A and support Obama. I like to believe it's possible to elevate the national discourse. If I'm wrong and Obama loses to the right wing attack machine, which is the only thing that really can defeat him, well, then next election cycle people will be even more eager, right?

Here's the video that inspired these thoughts, for better or worse.

POHS
Going to work everyday and home every night makes me feel like a goldfish circling a bowl.

Unspoken Speech

While I'm at it, check out this fanfic speech by Obama. Good stuff.

-JEK
Not getting a lot of work done at the moment.

Josh Marshall says it well

We've addressed this before, and now we're going to link to Talking Points Memo addressing it again: trying to correlate primary results with general election results makes no sense. People who vote in primaries are almost always going to vote for their party's candidate in the general election.

Yes, they get all hot headed and claim that they won't -- I myself used to say that I would vote for McCain if it came down to him vs. Clinton (I've now retreated to thinking I would abstain rather than make that Solominic choice, and come November would probably, if morosely, vote for Clinton. Though I would almost certainly leave the Democratic party, of which I have been a member only since the primary).

But really, Democratic candidated will get the vast majority of the committed, primary-voting Democrats. What matters is who draws the rest of the voters better. And I think the answer to that is pretty clear.

JEK
Really can't believe how much people go in for spin.

You heard it here first, or second, or eventually.

Further proof that the Obama campaign is taking their lead from Nation Indivisible.

And here's Maureen Dowd, saying something I agree with.

And here's the Editorial Board of the NYT, saying it better.

That is all.

JEK
On a power trip.

For example, he has the power to read the New York Times for you.

Obama & MoveOn

MoveOn ran this contest, which it would have been cool to enter if I could only have gotten myself organized. But if there is one message we as a society have learned from film critics, it's that the best thing is not to do, but to judge what others have done while filled with the knowledge that you would have done it better...if you'd only got around to it.

In that spirit, let's all join in the favoritism: [click the video below to go to the MoveOn site, where you can watch more videos and vote on them in a pretty addiction-forming way]




You can see why Clinton's not the biggest MoveOn fan...


-JEK
Knows deep down he's really just a surgeon, and a funny looking one at that...

Thoroughly Vetted

This is an interesting piece from the Huffington Post. It's a reminder of how the tables turn, but not just in showing the familiar, expected gradations of hypocrisy that attend modern political races. What's more interesting is the reminder, towards the bottom of the article, of another example of how the Obama campaign of 2008 mirrors, in many ways, the Clinton campaign of 1992. A young, charismatic leader, all about Hope, with no military experience and a dream of JFK steps out of obscurity to take it all...how can you expect the Clintons to counter that with anything other than hypocrisy. They're fighting their own past.

JEK
Believes in cycles of history and a deterministic universe with a good sense of narrative.

Case in point (and counter-point)

I think this sums up the Obama/Clinton race as well as anything.

Except for this:





Compared to this:




r

The Math

I am lazy. Lazy, and suffering a stomach ailment. Both prevent me addressing the election with anything more than vague qualitative methods. And certainly I am in no shape to do what I would otherwise do, with less laziness and more gastrointestinal reliability: go to the Clinton camp and challenge their senior advisors with delegate math. But the people at Politico have done the math, and have stronger stomachs, and have come out with this article, which says, in short: not gonna happen for Clinton, and they kinda know it. And the press is crazed for pretending otherwise. All of which, qualitatively, I agree with. The painting of this campaign as anything other than a very, very long shot for the Clinton camp is both irresponsible and commonplace. As the boys (and yes, they do all seem to be boys) at TPM acknowledge, theira culpa.

JEK
When a reporter, used to chafe at being told to create storylines that didn't fit the facts, but usually did as he was told. Does not believe a long Democrat nom process helps anyone except Rush Limbaugh + friends.

Yin and Dang

The full text of Obama's speech today on race and US race relations is worth reading in its entirety. Yet again, he's put a voice better than my own to thoughts I've had for a long time. Reading it gave me chills. Imagining those words coming from a sitting President made me want to cheer out loud, and imperil the pipetting of my colleagues.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that the soundbite of choice is the most mundane moment of all -- the part where he addresses his personal relationship to Wright, rather than the part where he puts the country front and center, and offers a prescription for faith and perseverance. But even that moment is pretty great, particularly if you watch it on the New York Times video website, and then let it fade into the next segment, which is GWB talking about the economic crisis and thanking his economic advisors for WORKING ON THE WEEKEND as the economy rains down around our heads.


JEK
Obaman(a)ut, believer in better things, under-invested in the Euro

MADE OF SKIN

So, it's not necessarily the case that ALL the authors and readers of this blog are Obamanauts (although, I guess, both posters so far are).  We understand that some people like different stuff, like maybe having a bunch of consecutive president names that repeat to make life mnemonically easier on future fourth-graders, and we're at peace with that.  As another example of our open-mindedness, I personally am aware that not everyone will find this dinosaur comic as stomach-unstaplingly hilarious as I do.  But I think that might be because not everyone is imagining the dinosaurs with Canadian accents.

DMW

(Dinophile, Obamaphile, Possible Canadian Sympathizer)

Proportional Response

The newest game among the campaigns, as we trudge dutifully off to Pennsylvania, is sniping off advisers and surrogates. Stephanie Power went, victim of jet lag, an abundance of honesty, and a reporter who had a funny sense of ground rules; then Geraldine Ferraro was hauled off the national stage, a bit too late for her own good. One all.

The laser sites and hollow points now seem aimed at Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor. He said some things that weren't very nice about America. And I think a week ago we would have seen Obama running scared at this...denouncing his church, joining some nice white denomination on the North Side of Chicago, perhaps, and certainly running away from this as fast as he could. But in a sign that maybe a little bit of sanity has started to prevail here, he is instead just saying this (via the Huffington Post): just because a guy is my minister doesn't mean I always agree with him. And besides, he's not my minister anymore. Done.

An additional plus: another chance to reinforce his Christianity, to those to whom it matters.

JEK
Can you be a lapsed Unitarian if you never really started; If he was held responsible for the things his close friends and relations said and did he would be writing this from prison.