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John Chuckman, The Smirking Chimp, January 9, 2008

“Americans are the only people I know who believe their own propaganda.”

                                                        — Deborah Eisenberg, American writer

I think relatively few observers appreciate the severe limits of America’s 18th-century Constitution, the document shaping offices which so many now scramble to fill. Change does not come easily, no matter how eloquent the speeches, how worthy the promises, or how great the need. It would be easier to raise the Titanic intact than to make one authentic change of consequence in America.

The only exception is war, a form of destructive change which occurs with about the same frequency as elections in America. Most members of both parties unfailingly vote for it, support it with additional votes, make no apologies, and utter drivel about fighting for freedom. To do otherwise is regarded as unpatriotic and, in many parts of America, as downright dangerous.

America stopped declaring war after 1941 because it was too inefficient. War was put on an assembly-line basis. Now, senators and others briefly huddle before the Pentagon is ordered to bomb the shit out of some unfortunate people. In the process, the president is elevated temporarily to Caesar, never to be seriously questioned before the corpses are all counted. It is an unfortunate matter of style in Bush’s case that Caesar more closely resembles Garfield Goose than Augustus, so treating Bush with imperial reverence always has a certain absurdity about it, but absurdity is never allowed to get in the way of some serious destruction.

Barack Obama is said to be about change, and I think that he is, but the change he represents is in his thoughtfulness, tone of voice, and eloquent selection of words, important enough after seven years of Bush’s visceral stupidity and consistent appeal to the lowest human instincts. Obama is a decent, thoughtful politician, something not seen in the White House for a long time, and there is no more powerful argument for the importance of intelligence and reflection in high office than the grim reality of Bush.

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James Kirchick, The New Republic, January 8, 2007

If you are a critic of the Bush administration, chances are that, at some point over the past six months, Ron Paul has said something that appealed to you. Paul describes himself as a libertarian, but, since his presidential campaign took off earlier this year, the Republican congressman has attracted donations and plaudits from across the ideological spectrum. Antiwar conservatives, disaffected centrists, even young liberal activists have all flocked to Paul, hailing him as a throwback to an earlier age, when politicians were less mealy-mouthed and American government was more modest in its ambitions, both at home and abroad. In The New York Times Magazine, conservative writer Christopher Caldwell gushed that Paul is a “formidable stander on constitutional principle,” while The Nation praised “his full-throated rejection of the imperial project in Iraq.” Former TNR editor Andrew Sullivan endorsed Paul for the GOP nomination, and ABC’s Jake Tapper described the candidate as “the one true straight-talker in this race.” Even The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of the elite bankers whom Paul detests, recently advised other Republican presidential contenders not to “dismiss the passion he’s tapped.”

Most voters had never heard of Paul before he launched his quixotic bid for the Republican nomination. But the Texan has been active in politics for decades. And, long before he was the darling of antiwar activists on the left and right, Paul was in the newsletter business. In the age before blogs, newsletters occupied a prominent place in right-wing political discourse. With the pages of mainstream political magazines typically off-limits to their views (National Review editor William F. Buckley having famously denounced the John Birch Society), hardline conservatives resorted to putting out their own, less glossy publications. These were often paranoid and rambling–dominated by talk of international banking conspiracies, the Trilateral Commission’s plans for world government, and warnings about coming Armageddon–but some of them had wide and devoted audiences. And a few of the most prominent bore the name of Ron Paul.

Paul’s newsletters have carried different titles over the years–Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report–but they generally seem to have been published on a monthly basis since at least 1978. (Paul, an OB-GYN and former U.S. Air Force surgeon, was first elected to Congress in 1976.) During some periods, the newsletters were published by the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, a nonprofit Paul founded in 1976; at other times, they were published by Ron Paul & Associates, a now-defunct entity in which Paul owned a minority stake, according to his campaign spokesman. The Freedom Report claimed to have over 100,000 readers in 1984. At one point, Ron Paul & Associates also put out a monthly publication called The Ron Paul Investment Letter.

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Maureen Dowd, New York Times, January 9, 2008

When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes.

A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the “humanized” Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. “We are at war,” he said. “Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-il?”

Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships.”

Bill Clinton was known for biting his lip, but here was Hillary doing the Muskie. Certainly it was impressive that she could choke up and stay on message.

She won her Senate seat after being embarrassed by a man. She pulled out New Hampshire and saved her presidential campaign after being embarrassed by another man. She was seen as so controlling when she ran for the Senate that she had to be seen as losing control, as she did during the Monica scandal, before she seemed soft enough to attract many New York voters.

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Paul Krugman, The New York Times, January 7, 2008

The unemployment report on Friday was brutally bad. Unemployment rose in December, while job creation was minimal — and its highly likely, for technical reasons, that the job number will be revised down, showing an actual decline in employment.

It’s the latest piece of bad news about an economy in which the employment situation has actually been deteriorating for the past year. It’s no longer possible to hope that the effects of the housing slump will remain “contained,” as one of 2007′s buzzwords had it. The levees have been breached, and the repercussions of the housing crisis are spreading across the economy as a whole.

It’s not certain, even now, that we’ll have a formal recession, although given the news on Friday you have to say that the odds are that we will. But what is clear is that 2008 will be a troubled year for the U.S. economy — and that as a result, the overall economic record of the Bush years will have been dreary at best: two and a half years of slumping employment, three and a half years of good but not great growth, and two more years of renewed economic distress.

The November election will take place against that background of economic distress, which ought to be good news for candidates running on a platform of change.

But the opponents of change, those who want to keep the Bush legacy intact, are not without resources. In fact, they’ve already made their standard pivot when things turn bad — the pivot from hype to fear. And in case you haven’t noticed, they’re very, very good at the fear thing.

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Robert Parry, Consortium News, January 8, 2008

Sen. Hillary Clinton is telling Democrats that they shouldn’t let their hearts run away with their heads by embracing the lightly experienced Sen. Barack Obama for President. She says she is the battle-tested one who can best carry the Democratic banner.

“Some of us are ready and some of us are not,” she said in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Jan. 7 as tears welled in her eyes. “Some of us know what we will do on day one and some of us haven’t thought it through enough.”

Yet, despite Sen. Clinton’s insistence that she’s the responsible choice, there is logic to “Obama-mania.” Indeed, he may be the only Democrat in the race who can transcend the expected dirty politics of the Right and achieve a victory that can transform American politics for the better.

While Sen. Clinton says she knows how to combat the right-wing attack machine, the truth is that she and her husband most often ended up on the losing end of those fights.

Under fire from the Right, they botched the best chance in decades to enact universal health care; they oversaw devastating Democratic congressional defeats starting in 1994; Bill Clinton became the first President since Andrew Johnson to be impeached by the House though he managed to survive after the spectacle of a Senate trial; and their missteps set the stage for the restoration of the Bush Dynasty in 2000.

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