Road Map to Defeat By Bob Herbert
The Democrats are doing everything they can to blow this presidential
election. This is a skill
that comes naturally to the party. There is no such thing as a can’t-miss
year for the
Democrats. They are truly gifted at finding ways to lose.
Jimmy Carter managed to win the White House in 1976 by looking pious and
riding a wave of
anti-Watergate revulsion. After four hapless years, he dutifully handed
the keys back to the G.O.P.
Bill Clinton tried hard to lose, with sex scandals and whatnot, during the
1992 campaign. But
Ross Perot wouldn’t let him. Mr. Clinton won with a piddling 43 percent of
the vote. For eight
years, Mr. Clinton tried to throw the presidency away (with sex scandals
and whatnot), but he
was never able to succeed.
That’s been it for the party for the past 40 years. The Democrats have
become so psychologically
battered by these many decades in the leadership wilderness that they
consider the Clinton
years, during which the president was impeached and they lost control of
both houses of
Congress, to have been a period of triumph.
Now comes 2008, a can’t-lose year if there ever was one. A united
Democratic Party should be
able to win this election in a walk. The economy is terrible and getting
worse. The Republicans
are demoralized. John McCain is no J.F.K. And the country wants to elect a
Democrat.
So what are the Democrats doing? The Clintons are running around with
flamethrowers, gleefully
trying to incinerate the prospects of the party’s leading candidate,
Barack Obama. As Bill
Clinton put it last month: “If a politician doesn’t want to get beat up,
he shouldn’t run for
office.”
Senator Obama, for his part, seems to have lost sight of the unifying
message that proved so
compelling early in his campaign and has stumbled into weird cultural
predicaments that have
caused some people to rethink his candidacy.
While some of those predicaments raise legitimate concerns (his former
pastor, his comments in
San Francisco) and some do not (stupid questions about wearing a flag
pin), he has allowed them
to fester unnecessarily. The way for a candidate to eventually change the
subject is to offer
policy prescriptions so creative and compelling that they generate
excitement among the
electorate and can’t be ignored by the press.
Voters want more from Senator Obama. He’s given a series of wonderful
speeches, but he has to
add more meat to those rhetorical bones. He needs to be clear about where
he wants to lead this
country and how he plans to do it. That’s how a candidate defines himself
or herself.
Instead, Mr. Obama is allowing the Clintons and the news media to craft a
damaging persona of
him as some kind of weak-kneed brother from another planet, out of touch
with mainstream
America, and perhaps a loser.
Wednesday night’s debate in Philadelphia may have been a sorry exercise in
journalism, but even
many of Senator Obama’s own supporters were disappointed with his
lackluster performance.
The big issues of our time are being left behind as pettiness and
mean-spirited partisanship
carry the day.
Voters across the country seem disgusted with this state of affairs.
George Stephanopoulos and
Charles Gibson of ABC News are being pilloried for the way they conducted
Wednesday’s debate.
Hillary Clinton’s disapproval ratings have climbed into a zone that makes
it legitimate to
wonder whether she could defeat Senator McCain. And much of the excitement
and enthusiasm
surrounding Mr. Obama’s candidacy has cooled.
That raucous laughter you hear in the background is coming from the likes
of Karl Rove, Dick
Cheney, President Bush and Senator McCain. They can’t believe their good
fortune.
The issues still favor the Democrats. More and more Americans are losing
their jobs, and many of
those still employed are working fewer hours and cashing smaller
paychecks. Vacation plans are
being curtailed because of declining family income and sky-high gasoline
prices. The value of
the family home is eroding.
Instead of capitalizing on the political advantages presented by these
issues, the Democrats,
with their increasingly small-minded approach to this election, are
squandering them.
There was always going to be resistance in the U.S. to putting a black
person or a woman of any
color in the White House. To overcome that built-in resistance, three
things are crucially
important: new voters have to be brought into the process; the nominee
must have an exciting and
compelling message; and the party has to be extraordinarily unified behind
its standard-bearer.
It’s not too late for the Democrats to pull this off. But there’s already
blood on the floor
from the nomination fight, and the fight ain’t over. The G.O.P.’s fondest
wish is that the
Democrats keep doing what they’re doing.
Bob Herbert writes for The New York Times.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/19/8396/
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Finally, the campaigns of 1793 and 1794 set Clausewitz on the path of
recognizing war as a
political phenomenon. Wars, as everyone knew, were fought for a purpose
that was political,
or at least always had political consequences. Not as readily apparent
was the implication
that followed. If war was meant to achieve a political purpose, everything
that entered into
war — social and economic preparation, strategic planning, the conduct of
operations, the
use of violence on all levels — should be determined by this purpose, or
at least accord
with it. Even though soldiers had to acquire special expertise, and
function in what in some
respects was a separate world, it would be a denial of reality to allow
them to carry on
their bloody work undisturbed until an armistice brought their political
employer back into
the equation. Just as war and its institutions reflected their social
environment, so every
aspect of fighting should be suffused by its political impulse, whether
this impulse was
intense or moderate. The appropriate relationship between politics and war
occupied
Clausewitz throughout his life, but even his earliest manuscripts and
letters show his
awareness of their interaction.
The ease with which this link — always acknowledged in the abstract —
can be forgotten in
specific cases, and Clausewitz’s insistence that it must never be
overlooked, are
illustrated by his polite rejection toward the end of his life of a
strategic problem set by
the chief of the Prussian General Staff, in which every military detail of
the opposing
sides was spelled out, but no mention made of their political purpose. To
a friend who had
sent him the problem for comment, Clausewitz replied that it was not
possible to draft a
sensible plan of operations without indicating the political condition of
the states
involved, and their relationship to each other: ‘War is not an independent
phenomenon, but
the continuation of politics by different means. Consequently, the main
lines of every major
strategic plan are largely political in nature, and their political
character increases the
more the plan applies to the entire campaign and to the whole state. A war
plan results
directly from the political conditions of the two warring states, as well
as from their
relations to third powers. A plan of campaign results from the war plan,
and frequently - if
there is only one theater of operations - may even be identical with it.
But the political
element even enters the separate components of a campaign; rarely will it
be without
influence on such major episodes of warfare as a battle, etc. According to
this point of
view, there can be no question of a purely military evaluation of a great
strategic issue,
nor of a purely military scheme to solve it.’
Everyman’s Library, 1993 ISBN: 0679420436 On war /by Clausewitz, Carl
von, 1780-1831.
Knopf, 1993. From the introduction by Peter Paret, Pg7
_____________________________________________________________________
The U-2 is a jet-powered reconnaissance aircraft specially designed to fly
at high altitudes
(i.e., above 70,000 ft [21 km]). It was used during the late 1950s to
overfly the Soviet
Union, China, the Middle East, and Cuba; flights over the Soviet Union,
the primary mission
for which the plane was designed, ended in 1960 when a U-2 flown by CIA
pilot Gary Powers
was shot down over the Soviet Union. This event was a major political
embarrassment for the U.S.
http://www.espionageinfo.com/Te-Uk/U-2-Spy-Plane.html
Soviet Prime Minister Khrushchev's reaction to the overflights which
were discovered
just before a summit conference in Paris with President Eisenhower: "It
was as though the
Americans had deliberately tried to place a time bomb under the meeting" .
. ."How could
they count on us to give them a helping hand if we allowed ourselves to be
spat upon without
so much as a murmur of protest?" The only solution was to demand a formal
public apology
from Eisenhower and a guarantee that no more overflights would take place
. . .
But the apology Khrushchev was looking for would not come. Despite
having trespassed
on the Soviet Union for the past four years with scores of flights by both
U-2's and heavy
bombers, the old general still could not say the words, it was just not in
him. . . A time
bomb had exploded, prematurely ending the summit conference. . .
Back in Washington, the mood was glum. The Senate Foreign Relations
Committee was
leaning toward holding a closed door investigation into the U-2 incident .
. . In public,
Eisenhower maintained a brave face. He "heartily approved" of the
congressional probe and
would 'of course fully cooperate,' he quickly told anyone who asked. But
in private he was
very troubled. For weeks he had tried to head off the investigation. His
major concern was
that his own personal involvement in the overflights would surface,
especially the May Day
disaster. Equally, he was very worried that details of the dangerous
bomber overflights
would leak out. The massed overflight may in fact, have been one of the
most dangerous
actions ever approved by a president.
pg. 51-55 ~Body of Secrets; Anatomy of the Ultra Secret National Security
Agency
James Bamford
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of
the progress of
human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims,
have been born of
earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating,
all-absorbing, and for the time
being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does
nothing. If there is
no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and
yet depreciate
agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want
rain without
thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may
be both moral and
physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and
it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and
you have found out the
exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and
these will continue
till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The
limits of tyrants are
prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of
these ideas, Negroes
will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as
they submit to those
devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men
may not get all they
pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we
ever get free from
the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal.
We must do this by
labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the
lives of others."
http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm
Frederick Douglass, 1857
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