Andrew Sullivan wrote a column for The Atlantic called:
Top Ten Reasons Conservatives Should Vote for Barack Obama
You can (should) read it here:
As usual, I felt I had to add my two-cents worth:
Mr. Sullivan: As a Republican voter since 1971, I've spent the last 6 months writing blogs and posting comments on forums advocating that Republicans vote for Senator Obama. Nothing I've read has made the case better than your top-10 reasons. I would add however, that his conduct throughout this last month (October) provides the most compelling evidence in support of the proposition. It was a remarkable demonstration of his natural leadership ability, more by virtue of what he did not say and did not do, than what his opponent did do, and did say. I was angry at the bailout, and wanted Obama to oppose it. He was wise enough to recognize that it's better to pick your own time and place to fight a battle than to rush in, solely in defense of the principle, when there's little or nothing you can really do to influence the outcome. McCain on the other hand, did more damage trying to appear 'presidential' at that moment, than if he had done nothing at all. When McCain stepped up his attacks on Obama's fitness to serve as Commander in Chief, heaping ridicule on Obama in the process, I found it repugnant. It prompted me to go back and pore over the transcripts of the Cuban Missile Crisis (I was 10 years old at the time) that I found on-line. If ever there were an historical argument that proves the case for a President Obama, and against a President McCain, that was it. When I heard McCain declaring, in his most bellicose voice: "I was on an aircraft carrier during that crisis, I had a target and we were ready to go in...", I realized how fortunate we were that he was where he was: confined to the cockpit of his fighter jet, while JFK carefully navigated this country back from the brink of nuclear disaster, in part because he resisted the Joint Chief's pressure to strike at the Soviet missiles militarily. Ironically, in spite of Joe Biden's ill-advised commentary on the subject, he may be proven correct. The next President is very likely to face a serious test, one that might turn out to be the closest thing to a repeat since the Cuban Missile Crisis ended exactly 46 years ago. We've announced our intention to install defensive missiles in Poland, and Vladimir Putin has stated that if we do, Russia will remove them, by military means if necessary. I cannot imagine a more dangerous scenario than having our angry ex-fighter pilot, John McCain, occupying the Oval Office and determined to prove how tough he really is, if a confrontation materializes over this issue. Any Republicans capable of honest critical thinking should consider this, and ask themselves if they really want John McCain with his finger on the button in such a scenario. Yesterday, I filled in my Oregon ballot, voted for Obama and sent it in. To paraphrase Michelle Obama: this is the first time in eight Presidential elections I've voted that I really felt proud of the choice I had, and the choice I made. In my opinion, this election is the most important and perilous for the future of this country since 1860. Then, as now, voters had a choice between experienced candidates promoting the conventional wisdom, and inexperience, with a serendipitous helping of promise for a better future. They chose the latter, and we should too.
Bill Maher, always humorous and often ironically and politically incorrect, this time has it exactly right, and Andrew Sullivan agrees with him.
If you were horrified (as I was) with the meager response of the Bush administration to Hurricane IKE -- especially compared to the political pandering to the potential damage of Hurricane Gustav during the week of the Republican National Convention, where they attempted to portray themselves as reformed do-gooders, johnny on the spot (as opposed to their normal, do-nothing, epic Hurricane Katrina response) -- then you need to watch this footage of Bill Maher's REAL TIME.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmCC_jasq0E
Andrew Sullivan, the British born conservative blogger, was looking forward to an honorable campaign of real ideas between McCain and Obama. He's given up.
He had been worried about McCain backsliding and catering to what he calls the Christianists base. No more. The deal is done. John McCain just wants to win too much.
As a former distant admirer of McCain, I tell you he isn't the man he was in 2000. Heck, he isn't even the man he was in 2006. He just wants to win too much.
Check out Sullivan's blog entry for yourself.
Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic has a scathing article lambasting McCain's integrity. Here it is, in its entirety:
For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush's war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John Kerry in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country.And when the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to condemn and end the torture regime of Bush and Cheney in 2006, McCain again had a clear choice between good and evil, and chose evil. He capitulated and enshrined torture as the policy of the United States, by allowing the CIA to use techniques as bad as and worse than the torture inflicted on him in Vietnam. He gave the war criminals in the White House retroactive immunity against the prosecution they so richly deserve. The enormity of this moral betrayal, this betrayal of his country's honor, has yet to sink in. But for my part, it now makes much more sense. He is not the man I thought he was. And when he had the chance to engage in a real and substantive debate against the most talented politician of the next generation in a fall campaign where vital issues are at stake, what did McCain do? He began his general campaign with a series of grotesque, trivial and absurd MTV-style attacks on Obama's virtues and implied disgusting things about his opponent's patriotism. And then, because he could see he was going to lose, ten days ago, he threw caution to the wind and with no vetting whatsoever, picked a woman who, by her decision to endure her own eight-month pregnancy of a Down Syndrome child in public, that he was going to reignite the culture war as a last stand against Obama. That's all that is happening right now: a massive bump in the enthusiasm of the Christianist base. This is pure Rove.Yes, McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country's safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country's national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time. McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain - no one else - has proved it.
For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?
So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush's war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John Kerry in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country.
And when the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to condemn and end the torture regime of Bush and Cheney in 2006, McCain again had a clear choice between good and evil, and chose evil.
He capitulated and enshrined torture as the policy of the United States, by allowing the CIA to use techniques as bad as and worse than the torture inflicted on him in Vietnam. He gave the war criminals in the White House retroactive immunity against the prosecution they so richly deserve. The enormity of this moral betrayal, this betrayal of his country's honor, has yet to sink in. But for my part, it now makes much more sense. He is not the man I thought he was.
And when he had the chance to engage in a real and substantive debate against the most talented politician of the next generation in a fall campaign where vital issues are at stake, what did McCain do? He began his general campaign with a series of grotesque, trivial and absurd MTV-style attacks on Obama's virtues and implied disgusting things about his opponent's patriotism.
And then, because he could see he was going to lose, ten days ago, he threw caution to the wind and with no vetting whatsoever, picked a woman who, by her decision to endure her own eight-month pregnancy of a Down Syndrome child in public, that he was going to reignite the culture war as a last stand against Obama. That's all that is happening right now: a massive bump in the enthusiasm of the Christianist base. This is pure Rove.
Yes, McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country's safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country's national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time.
McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain - no one else - has proved it.
Anyone here read Thomas Frank's truly fab excerpt from his book, The Wrecking Crew, in Harper's? Anyone else here read about how ultimate loser, Ralph Reed, skipped his own McCain fundraiser?
***** How is it that the Right Wing has taken the lead re the language of both policy & social politics? Obama is our best hope since Kennedy & FDR to reverse this travesty.
***** Hate to come on like Lichtenstein, or a tired, old semiotics don, but, Democrats must learn how to use language better. Liberal should not be a swear word.
***** Andrew Sullivan on the Daily Dish today nailed it re McCain's torture. By Bush's, Cheney's, Rumsfeld's, Fleith's, Gonzalez's, Yoo's, HELL, even Mukasey's definition, McCain was not tortured. Of course, McCain was tortured. I would wish that hell on no one, but the double standard & Orwellian Newspeak of this administration is so disgusting as to make me ill.
***** Just for kicks: Time Horizon.
***** My idea of Freedom Fighter does not include Oliver North within its purview. I think more of John Henry Faulk, or Barbara Jordan.
***** I wish I was there at that meeting between McCain, Bush, & Rove, to hear the apologies for So Carolina 2000, & the grim mafia-like assurances re this current election. McCain is nowt himself anymore, a Faustian bargain made in order to win.
***** The McCain campaign's negative, ridiculous TV ads have had their effect & have since been toned down in order to absorb a backlash. They are desperate, Faustian howls at the moon; Rovian war games. There will be more ugliness from Camp McBush/Rove, for sure, but they have yet to define their candidate. Watch how the "Morning in America" McCain moments fall flat & Obama seizes the high ground & makes this country feel good again, & begin to squelch fear in their hearts & believe.
***** "Evrybody had a hard year ... Evrybody pulled their socks up/Everybody put their foot down."
***** All credit to Jon Stewart & his fab Daily Show for these "just for kicks" language notes. & here's another one: Enhanced Interrogation.
***** Michigan is ours, but it will be tight. Colorado is ours, but it will be tight.
***** The convention will be magical. Clinton speaking on the anniversary of a Woman's right to vote, & Obama accepting the nomination on Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" anniversary. I cannot wait.
Let's win this thing folks. My polling station is within walking distance (by the way, I don't have a drivers license & have never driven!) & so is the Contra Costa County dem HQ! I'll be hitting the phone lines & the doors these coming months & I want you folks to do the same.
http://politicsofscrabble.org/?p=165
There is a lot of talk right now about to feel about the Clintons’ actions throughout this primary race. In this video, Andrew Sullivan, who has not been shy about expressing his distaste for Bill and Hill, engages in some venting with Marc Ambinder:
On the other side of the street is Ross Douthat with a helpful reminder:
It would probably been better for the party if Hillary had conceded defeat somewhat earlier (though there would have been the potential embarrassment of having the presumptive-nominee lose primaries to a rival who’d dropped out), or at the very least campaigned less fiercely against Obama once his victory became a near-certainty, and certainly her non-concession speech on Tuesday night was bizarre and faintly pathological. But I think that once a few months have gone by, at least some of outrage that Hillary Clinton has generated among liberal pundits by campaigning to the bitter end in a race that she ended up losing by just over a hundred pledged delegates and roughly half a percent of the popular vote will seem, in hindsight, faintly hysterical.
My take: I agree that Hillary and Bill have not lived up to their reputations (or have out done their reputations, depending on whom you’re asking) and have both done things in this race that are regrettable. But, that said, it seems like a lot of people’s outrage is a projection on to the Clinton’s about their general frustration about the ineffecitiveness of Democrats over the past eight years. Hillary, and by extension Bill, represents, in many people’s eyes, the failures of the past, of which many Democrats still feel impotent and and insecure, despite the fact that they are poised to clinch certain victory. Barack, obviously, represents a fresh break in many ways.
It seems like a lot of liberals are, at least in part, incensed that anyone would have the gaul to stand between them and new start for the Party/Country. Now, granted, Bill Clinton had something to do with getting Liberals into that past slump, but I’m just not convinced that the Clinton’s are the narcissistic demons that a lot of people have made them out to be and both have done a lot of good in their time.
I tend to agree with Ross, I think given some time and distance people will calm down a fair deal, Bill and Hillary included. I’m also reasonably convinced, after some reflection, that Hillary Clinton, despite the hard feeling, will come out and campaign hard for Obama, which will help to heal wounds all around (pundits included).
I posted an article this morning on my blog about Barack Obama and how he has developed a strong brand, thanks in part to the engagement of his supporters:
http://eyecube.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/barack-obama-dinu-brand/
To give some counterbalance to the alarming statements of Reverend Wright which are causing the current tempest, Andrew Sullivan has posted the full text of Rev. Wright's "Audacity of Hope" sermon from 1990. If a man can be condemned for a few comments inside a sermon, what are we to do when one offers a whole sermon in defense of that condemnation?
It’s alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover’s tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . .
Put your own movie analogy in here. Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction – whoosh! she’s back at your throat! – has often occurred to me when covering the Clintons these many years. The Oscars host Jon Stewart compares them to a Terminator: the kind that is splattered into a million tiny droplets of vaporised metal . . . only to pool together spontaneously and charge back at you unfazed.
The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: unkillable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy. You can’t escape; you can’t hide; and you can’t win. And these days, in the kinetic pace of the YouTube campaign, they are like the new 28 Days Later zombies. They come at you really quickly, like bats out of hell. Or Ohio, anyway.
Now all this may seem a little melodramatic. Perhaps it is. Objectively, an accomplished senator won a couple of races – one by a mere 3% – against another senator in a presidential campaign. One senator is still mathematically unbeatable. But that will never capture the emotional toll that the Clintons continue to take on some of us. I’m not kidding. I woke up in a cold sweat early last Wednesday. There have been moments this past week when I have felt physically ill at the thought of that pair returning to power.
Why? I have had to write several columns in this space over the years acknowledging that the substantive legacy of the Clinton administration (with a lot of assist from Newt Gingrich) was a perfectly respectable one: welfare reform, fiscal sanity, prudent foreign policy, leaner government. But remembering the day-to-day psychodramas of those years still floods my frontal cortex with waves of loathing and anxiety. The further away you are from them, the easier it is to think they’re fine. Up close they are an intolerable, endless, soul-sapping soap opera.
The media are marvelling at the Clintons’ several near-death political experiences in this campaign. Hasn’t it occurred to them how creepily familiar all this is? The Clintons live off psychodrama. They both love to push themselves to the brink of catastrophe and then accomplish the last-minute, nail-biting self-rescue. Before too long the entire story becomes about them, their ability to triumph through crisis, even though the crises are so often manufactured by themselves. That is what last week brought back for me. The 1990s – with a war on.
Remember: Bill Clinton could have easily settled the Paula Jones lawsuit years before he put the entire country through the wringer (Jones sued Clinton for sexual harassment alleged to have occurred while he was governor of Arkansas).
Recall: Hillary Clinton could have killed what turned out to be the White-water nonstory at the very outset by disclosing everything she could (the scandal centred on a controversial Arkansas property deal).
Consider: the Clintons could have prepared for primaries and caucuses after February 5 – so-called Super Tuesday, when 24 states held their presidential nomination vote – as any careful candidate would. They chose not to do any of these things. Not because they are incompetent. But because they live to risk.
Politics is also their life. They know nothing else. Most halfway normal people in politics could at some point walk away. Reagan seemed happy to. Not the Clintons. In the words of the American-based British writer Christo-pher Hitchens, these are the kind of people who never want the meeting to end. Hillary Clinton will never concede the race so long as there is even the faintest chance that she can somehow win.
They endure all sorts of humiliation – remember the taped Clinton deposition in the Ken Starr investigation (in which Clinton admitted to the inquiry headed by the far-right prosecutor that he had had an “improper physical relationship” with Monica Lewinsky)? Hillary’s dismissal of the Lewinsky matter as an invention of the right-wing conspiracy? – because they know no other way to live. They have been thinking of this moment since they were in college and being a senator or an ex-president or having two terms in the White House are not sufficient to satiate their sense of entitlement. Even if they have to put their own party through a divisive, bitter, possibly fatal death match, they will never give up. Their country, their party . . . none of this matters compared with them.
The patterns are staggeringly unaltered. Last Thursday The Washing-ton Post ran an article reporting on the almost comic divisions within the Clinton camp: how chaotic the planning had been, how much chief pollster Mark Penn hated all the other advisers, how even in the wake of a sudden victory most of the Clintonites were eager to score rancid points off each other.
The secrecy and paranoia endure too. Releasing tax returns is routine for a presidential candidate. Barack Obama did it some time back. The Clintons still haven’t – and say they won’t for more than another month. Why? They have no explanation. They seem affronted by the question.
When you look at the electoral map if the Clintons run again, you also see a reversion to the old patterns of the 1990s – the patterns that cynical political strategists such as Karl Rove and Dick Morris have been exploiting for two decades. The country – scrambled by the post-baby-boomer pragmatism of Obama – snaps back into classic red-blue mode, with the blue areas denoting Democratic-leaning states around the edge and true red Republican states in the heartlands.
The Clintons are comfortable with this polarisation. They need it. Even when running against a fellow Democrat, they instinctively reach for it. Last week, in response to the Obama camp’s request that they release their tax returns, Clinton’s spokesman called Obama a new Ken Starr. For the Clintons, all Democrats who oppose them are . . . Republicans. And all Republicans are evil.
And evil means that anything the Clintons do in self-defence is excusable – even playing the race card, and the Muslim card, and the gender card, and every sleazy gambit that the politics of fear can come up with. This is how they have arrested the Obama juggernaut. It’s the only game they know how to play.
One is reminded of the words of Bob Dylan: “And here I sit so patiently / Waiting to find out what price / You have to pay to get out of / Going through all these things twice.”
In his Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan sets out very clearly what is at stake in this election and the likely consequences of the Clinton campaign's negative attacks and old-fashioned politicking in the pursuit of power at all costs. For those of you who have become discouraged at the tactics of late, you will find your head nodding.
Andrew Sullivan's well-written analysis of Why Sen. Obama is the Ronald Reagan for Democrats ...
Obama Article in December 2007 Atlantic Monthly:
"Goodbye to All That" by Andrew Sullivan
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama
Is Iraq Vietnam?
Who really won in 2000?
Which side are you on in the culture wars?
These questions have divided the Baby Boomers and distorted our politics.
One candidate could transcend them.
Barack Obama on the baby boomer generation Audio from an interview with Andrew Sullivanhttp://www.theatlantic.com/audio/200712/obama.mhtml
A fascinating read from Andrew Sullivan on the current election cycle, and Obama's candidacy in particular, can be found online at The Atlantic.
A few excerpts:
...we are not talking about routine rancor. And we are not talking about normal times. We are talking about a world in which Islamist terror, combined with increasingly available destructive technology, has already murdered thousands of Americans, and tens of thousands of Muslims, and could pose an existential danger to the West. The terrible failures of the Iraq occupation, the resurgence of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, the progress of Iran toward nuclear capability, and the collapse of America’s prestige and moral reputation, especially among those millions of Muslims too young to have known any American president but Bush, heighten the stakes dramatically.
...Obama’s reach outside his own ranks remains striking. Why? It’s a good question: How has a black, urban liberal gained far stronger support among Republicans than the made-over moderate Clinton or the southern charmer Edwards? Perhaps because the Republicans and independents who are open to an Obama candidacy see his primary advantage in prosecuting the war on Islamist terrorism. It isn’t about his policies as such; it is about his person. They are prepared to set their own ideological preferences to one side in favor of what Obama offers America in a critical moment in our dealings with the rest of the world. The war today matters enormously. The war of the last generation? Not so much. If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.
...picking the next president will be in some ways a statement of America’s view of Iraq. Clinton is running as a centrist Democrat—voting for war, accepting the need for an occupation at least through her first term, while attempting to do triage as practically as possible. Obama is running as the clearer antiwar candidate. At the same time, Obama’s candidacy cannot fairly be cast as a McGovernite revival in tone or substance. He is not opposed to war as such. He is not opposed to the use of unilateral force, either—as demonstrated by his willingness to target al-Qaeda in Pakistan over the objections of the Pakistani government. He does not oppose the idea of democratization in the Muslim world as a general principle or the concept of nation building as such. He is not an isolationist, as his support for the campaign in Afghanistan proves.
To be black and white, to have belonged to a nonreligious home and a Christian church, to have attended a majority-Muslim school in Indonesia and a black church in urban Chicago, to be more than one thing and sometimes not fully anything—this is an increasingly common experience for Americans, including many racial minorities. Obama expresses such a conflicted but resilient identity before he even utters a word. And this complexity, with its internal tensions, contradictions, and moods, may increasingly be the main thing all Americans have in common.
Let's elect him to the Presidency.
ARTICLE- http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama
This has already been posted, but it bears repeating: This is a great article from this month's Atlantic. Discusses how Obama has the potential to transcend old-school politics and heal America.
Quote:
"At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable. We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama."
"At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.
We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama."
