BartBlog

As the elections approach and we are almost certain of our candidates, it is time to start asking serious questions. Ok, not of John McCain, because we already know his answer and its pretty much what he tells his Senate colleagues when he disagrees, “Go F***yourself.” But we do need to pressure our candidate and not let him assume he has our vote unless he can convincingly assure us of answers.

Other than healthcare, Iraq, the economy, we need ironclad commitments of a return to Democracy. (more…)

Allex, Koppleman, Salon, February 20, 2008

In December of last year, Matt Drudge reported that John McCain — who was then in the midst of a surprising comeback in the Republican presidential race — was desperately trying to convince the New York Times to kill a story about “charges of giving special treatment to a lobbyist,” and that McCain had hired a prominent attorney to work on his behalf. For the Arizona senator, who has built a good part of his reputation as a straight talker on his efforts toward campaign finance reform and cleaning up the lobbying culture in Washington, D.C., such a story could theoretically prove quite damaging.

Well, apparently we’ll see just what kind of harm the story will do to McCain’s campaign, as on Wednesday evening the Times published the article on its Web site. The Times piece, written by a team of reporters, suggests not just special treatment for the lobbyist in question — Vicki Iseman, 40 — but the possibility of a romantic relationship between the two, beginning in 1999.

“Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of [McCain's] top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block [Iseman's] access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity,” the Times reports.

Both McCain and Iseman deny that their relationship was romantic. But the Times describes McCain’s campaign at the time as being very worried about appearances when it came to the two. In February of 1999, the Times says,

Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman attended a small fund-raising dinner with several clients at the Miami-area home of a cruise-line executive and then flew back to Washington along with a campaign aide on the corporate jet of one of her clients, Paxson Communications. By then, according to two former McCain associates, some of the senator’s advisers had grown so concerned that the relationship had become romantic that they took steps to intervene.

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David Sirota, In These Times, February 20, 2008

During one of the mind-numbing arguments between the candidates, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) was fighting off the claim that his universal healthcare proposal might not cover up to 15 million Americans. As an academic issue, it was an important exchange. But I suddenly realized: In real-world terms, the back-and-forth didn’t much matter.

In this epic race for the Democratic nomination, the most minute policy differences are extrapolated into bombastic TV ads, direct mail pieces and debate one-liners. Amid the noise, few remember that what candidates say or propose can bear little resemblance to what ends up happening once they are in the Oval Office.

As proof, look no further than candidate Bill Clinton who said, “I’d be for [the North American Free Trade Agreement] but only-only-if [Mexico] lifted their wage rates and their labor standards and they cleaned up their environment so we could both go up together instead of being dragged down.” And yet, he subsequently steamrolled NAFTA through Congress.

Of course, every presidential election is, in that way, a leap of faith. But we can make an educated guess about what the different candidates’ relationship to Congress will likely be-and that relationship dictates the possibilities for progress far more than any campaign promises. For example, in 2000 and 2004, a vote for Bush was a vote to centralize more government power in the hands of the White House, and, just as importantly, to create a rubber stamp for an extremist Republican Congress. With Bush vetoing the fewest bills of any president since the Civil War, movement conservatives were emboldened by the Bush administration to wield as much raw legislative power as the president himself.

For voters trying to distinguish between Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Obama, the question should be who is more apt to empower a Democratic Congress whose seniority and power rests in the hands of committed progressives.

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