raf.fine

American Conservatives on Hillary Clinton (circa October 2007)

Con #1: I believe life under Mrs. Clinton will be very bad. Universal health care is one of her craziest ideas that comes to mind. She has no understanding of the Middle East. No understanding of economics.

Con #2: The real danger of Hillary’s election will be the undermining of the Republic. One or more ACLU lawyers like Ginsberg will be put on the court. Someone totally scary will run the justice department. And there will be nothing to stop the democrats in control of all branches of government from pushing the most far left agenda since FDR’s New Deal. If you think Healthcare is the goal, you’re not thinking big enough. This power grab will be the biggest in our lifetimes. Expect your taxes to go way up, expect your civil rights such as how you raise your children to be eroded. Expect us to give away more military secrets to hostile nations, etc, etc. You can expect something similar from the other democrats as well. Of all of these, I think Obama is probably the least of all evils, not because he has a single policy I like, but because I hold out hope that he does have a conscience.

Con #1: I remember when Mrs. Clinton talked about eliminating the Electoral College.Talk about a fascist. That could be our next president.

Con #3: The greatest concern I would have with a Clinton presidency would be Supreme Court nominations.

Con #4: Such as Lani somebody or other (I forget), a Clinton favorite who proposed proportional voting based on minority status?

Con #3: Lani Guinier, Gads, yes. Frightening. Although, Scalia would eat her for breakfast. That would be entertaining.

Con #5: There is good evidence that when the Clintons first took office, Mrs Clinton wanted to make a Communist Party fellow-traveller Secretary of Education. Of course, the Supreme Court nominations would be the worst aspect of a Clinton presidency, for sure.

Raffine: I’ve heard Hillary plans to abolish Christmas.

Con #6: Raffine, rather than pass on (or create) rumor and speculation, why don’t you reference news articles or reliable web sites that mention that tidbit. Frankly, I think it’s ridiculous.

Immigration, American style

Perhaps the ahistorical and, ultimately, utopian nature of the Romney proposal to seal the borders and compel undocumented persons to self-deport can be brought into focus via a discussion of apparatuses of security and the mechanisms of discipline conducted by the obscure Foucault. In his historical narrative, “the territorial sovereign became an architect of the disciplined space, but also, and almost at the same time, the regulator of a milieu, which involved not so much establishing limits and frontiers, or fixing locations, as above all and essentially, making possible, guaranteeing, and ensuring circulations: the circulation of people, merchandise, and air, etcetera.” He selects as an example of the “relationship of government to event” the problem of dearth or scarcity, defined as “’the present insufficiency of the amount of grain necessary for a nation’s subsistence.’” A typical pattern was assumed to develop from the scarcity of grain:

It is a state of scarcity, in fact, that raises prices. And, of course, the more prices rise, the more those possessing scarce objects are inclined to hoard them and monopolize them so that prices rise even more, and this occurs precisely when the most basic needs of the population are not being met.

 In seventeenth- and eighteen-century France, the goal of government was to avoid this cycle of events. Because urban revolts are “the major thing for government to avoid,” scarcity the “scourge of population” and the “catastrophe, crisis” for government.

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Two political and philosophical judgments go hand-in-hand with this scenario of scourge and crisis that must be avoided. First, scarcity is thought as “inevitable misfortune.” “Food shortage is misfortune in the pure state, since its most immediate, most apparent factor is bad weather, drought, ice, excessive humidity, or anyway everything outside of one’s control…So, scarcity appears as one of the fundamental forms of bad fortune for a people and for a sovereign.” Second, scarcity is viewed from a moral perspective as a punishment for man’s evil human nature. This evil nature “will have an influence on scarcity by figuring as one of its sources, inasmuch as men’s greed – their need to earn, their desire to earn even more, their egoism – causes the phenomena of hoarding, monopolization, and withholding merchandise, which intensity the phenomena of scarcity.” Fallen nature and (mis)fortune are, for Foucault, the two frameworks for thought about scarcity.

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The eighteenth-century governmental response to evil and misfortune in grain provisions is primarily juridical:

For a long time scarcity was countered by a system that I would say is both juridical and political, a system of legality and a system of regulations, which was basically intended to prevent food shortages, that is to say, not just to halt it or eradicate it when it occurs, but literally to prevent it and ensure that it cannot take place at all. This is a juridical and disciplinary system that, concretely, take the classical forms you are familiar with: price control, and especially control of the right to store; the prohibition on hoarding with the consequent necessity of immediate sale; limits on export, the prohibition on sending graind abroad with, as the simple restriction on this, the limitation of the extent of land under cultivation, because if the cultivation of grains is too extensive, the surplus from this abundance will result in a collapse of prices, so that the peasants will not break even.

If we substitute persons moving across the border for grain, how might Foucault help clarify the conditions that actually govern the situation? “Illegal immigration” or rather illegal movement of persons across the border is interdicted, viewed through a moral lense (as an evil), heavy apparatus, rules, controls to enforce, and thereby eradicate all illegal movement across the border. (Analogous discussion by Foucault of a town struck by plague: quarantine).

Who won yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling on ACA (RomneyObamacare)?

*Devastating loss on political grounds for Republicans. To have the the knife twisted into their backs by their golden boy and Federalist Society approved Chief Justice may even be worse. Let us see if they attack the Supreme Court for “judicial activism” this time.

*The Tea Party also received the middle finger salute from the SCOTUS.

*No matter how conservative pundits try to spin it, Romney loses on health care (he took a beating from Santorum already on this topic). He’d rather not talk about it since it detracts attention from his “job creator” bona fides with Bain Capital. The economy is his only plank (and he has to hope that the economic outlook worsens). Topics like foreign policy, immigration, marriage equality, “women’s contraception,” etc. do not help Romney outside the Republican base.

*In contrast, “repeal ACA” is a winning topic for Congressional Republicans, who are stricken by Tea Party fever. These Republicans have much narrower constituencies than the one Romney must reach.

*Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts loses: it won’t be long before Donald Trump asks to see his birth certificate.

Game Change is a pleasant way to spend two hours, especially if one likes to view train wrecks. Palinoconservatives will decry the film as a left-wing hatchet job. But aside from a few priceless scenes, such as one during which campaign advisors try to explain the combatants and outcome of WWII to Palin (Julianne Moore), the candidate is given an humane treatment. 

But in fairness to Palin, John McCain also was not a polished candidate. The film puts a light touch on McCain’s impulsive effort to stop the candidate debates around the time the Republicans in the House rejected Republican President Bush’s bank bailout plan (sinking the DJIA 700+ points in a single day) and airbushed out his petulant behavior during three way meetings with Bush and Obama. It also failed to depict McCain’s palpable anger at being upstaged by Obama, which was on display during the first debate with the Democratic candidate in McCain’s notable refusal to look at Obama.

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The film will rightly be viewed as the story of the rise of Palinoconservatism, but it is also the story of perhaps the most seriously flawed presidential campaign conducted by a candidate from either Party since American politics entered the television age. What one recalls from the Bush years, above everything else, is the generalized incompetence of the President and his Cabinet, and the Republican Party itself. The McCain/Palin campaign only reinforced this negative quality of the GOP, which stood in contrast to the competence of the Obama campaign. In other words, the charge against Obama of inexperience (wielded unsuccessfully by Hillary Clinton) was trumped by the aura of bad experience that enveloped Republicans at all levels.

In light of the premiere of HBO’s Game Change film on the McCain/Palin (or was it Palin/McCain) campaign in 2008, I’m reblogging myself from 2008 on this very topic.

the republican brand

The McCain campaign (if not John McCain himself) is as emotionally stable as Alex Rodriguez when he’s in a room with Madonna. It’s (he’s) angry and resentful at one moment, then respectful and civil at another. Which McCain will show up at the final debate? Palin is comfortable with an attacking style and doesn’t seem worried about the consequences (as her actions and inactions concerning the Alaskan trooper indicate). She is an appealing attack dog, whereas McCain comes off as a grumpy old man when he goes negative. For that reason, I suspect McCain will not try to ayersize Obama Wednesday night. If he does, it will be the final misstep in a campaign which will become the textbook on how not to run for president.

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It has to be dawning on McCain, the son and grandson of four-star Navy admirals, that he has a good chance to lose the race to Obama, raised by a single mother (who was an anthropologist). Can an October Surprise such as the capture of Osama Bin Laden reverse McCain’s fortunes?

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If Obama-Biden are elected I think the low level political slime artists will slink back to their safe houses: talk radio and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. In the face of a national economic emergency, FoxSpace might change its tune if Rupert Murdoch’s rapprochement with Obama holds and Roger Ailes is canned (not a likely scenario though). However, in the darkness of political defeat, a dozen foetid conspiracy theories take root. What is remarkable about the chattering class of Republicans is how they spent the 1990s trying to undo the outcome of two presidential elections. Will they spend their precious resources to undo this election if it doesn’t go their way?

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The Republican party would face a serious choice in the wake of a defeat. Does it become the party of Palinoconservatives, i.e.,  a party of anti-intellectualism, an anti-government party that gives people reason to be anti-government when Republicans are in charge, a party of unrealistic libertarianism, a party of moral minoritarians whose unchristian behavior belies their professed faith? Or does it move towards the center and reclaim for the Republican brand a more rational and less apocalyptic version of conservatism?

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Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh will continue to entertain their audiences and will be well compensated for it. But they don’t rise to the level of significance that someone like Father Coughlin did during the 1930s. I think more serious opposition to an Obama presidency could emerge from House Republicans (as it did in the 1990s). The Republicans also have two congenial figures to draw on to rehabilitate their brand: Huckabee and Gingrich (whose fall from grace seems to have been forgotten).

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Since economic issues will be central for the foreseeable future, I’d expect the moral minoritarians (i.e., James Dobson and Tony Perkins) to become increasingly irrelevant. Unfortunately for Obama (if he’s elected), the economic reality he’ll face is being shaped by Bush and Paulson.

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Alaska is a tiny state: population 670,000. Wasilla, AK is a blip on the Google Earth screen: population 9,780. 62,000 people live in my neighborhood; 2.5 million in my borough. Palin’s “executive experience” doesn’t qualify her to run a neighborhood block association much less the country if McCain were stricken.  Palin will have to add some substance to her record to be viable as a national candidate in 2012 (obviously she feels — erroneously — that running the Congress as vice-president would help on that front). She will remain viable within the Republican party no matter what she does. Every Republican fundraiser will want Palin on their program. However, if she remains governor (i.e., survives the abuse of power charges) she won’t enter the 2012 Republican primary season in the same position that Hillary Clinton did in 2007, as the presumptive favorite. I expect Huckabee, Gingich, and Romney to be back. Palin would face challenges from these types even if she is the sitting vice-president.