Dem Political Poker

In the last generation our Democratic card sharps have had a grand old time playing the race card, or the gender card, or the class card in the nation’s political card rooms. Time after time they cleaned the clocks of poor unsuspecting Republican fish. What great fun it all was!

Until now.

There was always the danger, of course, that one day some ruthless Democrat would decide to play the card on a fellow Democrat for crude political gain. But generations of Republicans have gone to their Maker without it happening.

Until now.

This morning, Rush Limbaugh was in full chortle, playing “Johnny Comes Marching Home” from the soundtrack of Dr Strangelove while he intoned about the Democrats’ Uncivil War.

We’ve got Hillary! playing the gender card, Obama playing the race card, and Edwards playing the class card.

The only thing missing is that nobody has played the gay card. Not yet.

The question is: Which one of them is bluffing?

Primaries Expose Party Splits

In a useful review of the campaign season thus far, Michael Barone finds that the candidates are exposing the fault lines in the two major parties.  First the Democrats:

One faction of the Democratic Party is relatively upscale, well-educated, young. This faction is supporting Barack Obama. The other faction is relatively downscale, less-educated, old. This faction is supporting Hillary Clinton.

The mainstream media loves to play the game of split-the-Republicans, but you have to wonder if the split between secular liberal university professors and single mothers isn’t a political tsunami waiting to happen.  Looking back to the days of FDR and JFK:

The Democratic primary electorate was heavily downscale, ethnic and religious. But now the two factions are roughly equal in size. The downscale constituency has tended to prevail, but not always and not inevitably.

Of course, these two factions are joined at the hip, because it is the hip professors and MPA graduates that administer and dispense the benefits of the welfare state to the downscale victims while reserving a reasonable and customary slice for themselves.  But sometimes people forget who their friends are.

The Republicans have more factions:

• Huckabee is the candidate of the “religious conservatives and no-one else.”
• Fred Thompson competes for the same plus the southern-accented.
• John McCain appeals to “the remnants and descendants of the historic Protestant Yankee base of the party.”
• “Rudy Giuliani, with his liberal positions on cultural issues... [appeals to the] ethnic and metropolitan.”
• “Mitt Romney’s appeal seems to be strongest among economic conservatives, impressed perhaps by his business record and untroubled by his switches on cultural issues.”

That’s the way it should be, of course.  Each of the factions puts up their own candidate.  But what does it all mean?

Barone thinks that the Democratic race could be decided by February 5.  But the Republicans are likely to take longer.

The problem is that the longer the party factions are fighting, the harder it will be to bring them together for the general election battle.

The primary battle is important.  The conflict is a test of strength and will, and it allows the factions to decide if they really want to belong to the party any more.

Usually they do want to stay.  But sometimes they don’t, and that is when the fun really begins.

The Bonfire of the Multicultural Vanities

Does New York Times columnist David Brooks nail it, or does he nail it?  This contest for the nomination of the Democratic Party between a white woman and a black man is turning into a bonfire of the multicultural vanities, he advises. 

Both Clinton and Obama have eagerly donned the mantle of identity politics. A Clinton victory wouldn’t just be a victory for one woman, it would be a victory for little girls everywhere. An Obama victory would be about completing the dream, keeping the dream alive, and so on.

As we wrote here yesterday.  It was grand fun to play the race card when a black man was running against an eevil racist Republican, or play the gender card when a white woman was running against an eevil sexist conservative.  Serve those dead white males right.  But now the game of identity politics is turning into a civil war in the Democratic Party

The problem is that both the feminist movement Clinton rides and the civil rights rhetoric Obama uses were constructed at a time when the enemy was the reactionary white male establishment. Today, they are not facing the white male establishment. They are facing each other.

I know what you are saying.  It couldn’t happen to more deserving people.  Let the feminist sexists and the black racists slug it out.  They deserve each other.  That’s what Brooks says, more politely.  And then he delivers the payoff:

The interesting split is not between the feminist and civil rights Old Bulls, it’s between the establishments of both movements, who emphasize top-down change, and the younger dissenters, who don’t. Second, this dispute is going to be settled by the rising, and so far ignored, minority group. For all the current fighting, it’ll be Latinos who end up determining who gets the nomination.

That’s a good point.  We haven’t heard from Latinos yet.  In fact, I should think it is insensitive of the two racist sexist combatants not to have considered the feelings of Latinos.   It is demeaning to conduct the contest for the Democratic nomination purely in terms of sexism and black/white racism.

What about La Raza?  What about La Reconquista?  What about the identity of the folks cruelly conquered and enslaved by dead white Spanish conquerors?

Liberal Fascism Over the Rainbow

Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high
There’s a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby

Somewhere over the rainbow
States aren’t blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true

Some day I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the libs are far behind me
Where programs melt like lemondrops
And shrink below the budget tops
That’s where you’ll find me

Daily when the netrooter
Lib’rals cry
“Fascist Neanderthaler”
Why then, oh why can’t I?

Some day I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the libs are far behind me
Where programs melt like lemondrops
And shrink below the budget tops
That’s where you’ll find me

In the faculty lounge when
Lib’rals cry
“Fascist bigot are you,” then
Why then, oh why can’t I?

If happy little lib’rals cry
“You know you’re fascists”
Why, oh why can’t I?

The World's Cheapest Car: Tata Nano

Some things are more important than politics, as we all know.  The children, for example.

Also personal transportation.  And today there was a milestone in personal transportation. 

You can get a measure of the excitement from Richard S. Chang of the New York Times reporting from India. 

Over the course of the New Delhi Auto Expo, which began this week, anticipation had grown to fever pitch.

And now it is here, the 4-passenger Tata Nano, available for a price of 1 lakh rupees later this year.

The Indian media is naturally very proud.  The Hindustan Times reports:

Nano, Tata Motors’ Rs 1,00,000 "people’s car" unveiled at the Auto Expo 2008 in New Delhi on Thursday will help the common man shift from two-wheelers to four-wheelers, Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said.

“This is a proud moment for India,” he said.

Unfamiliar with rupees and lakhs?  Oh, fie, what kind of a multiculturalist are you?

A “lakh” is 100,000.  The Indians also have another important number, the “crore.”  The crore is 100 lakh, or 10 million.  You can check out the Indian number system here.  One interesting aspect of this is that a crore is written as 1,00,00,000.  What do you think of that?

The confusion is that we have a mixture of Greek in “nano” and Indian in “lakh.”  Are you still with me?

OK, I’ll stop with the multi-culti stuff.  The Tata Nano comes in at $2,500.  Which is some kind of a price.

Some people are upset about this.  They are worried about saving the planet.  Imagine tens of crores of Indians driving around in these little Nanos!  It will kill the planet and cause glaciers in Greenland to melt.

But I am thinking of something more prosaic.  Right now, people of modest income in the developing world tend to ride around on 125ml Honda motorcycles.  Sometimes the whole family is draped across the bike.  This is not safe.  Now families can ride in their four-wheeled Tata Nano with its 2-cylinder 33 hp 660ml engine.  It will be much safer.

Other people are worried about “chaos” on the pot-holed rural roads of India.

There’s solution to that, of course.  Build more roads!  Most of the populated areas of India are dead flat, so it shouldn’t be too expensive.

Clinton Gender Card Threepeat

Nobody ever accused the Clintons of modesty.  So it is not surprising that, in the crisis of New Hampshire, they played the gender card.  They did it before, and it worked.

But to play the gender card three times in one weekend.  That’s positively Clintonian!

It even got to Andrew Sullivan:

The Clinton machine is now poised to pull every partisan lever and deploy every cheap tactic: the gender card, the elderly card, the 527s, the teachers’ unions, AFSCME, the Human Rights Campaign, the super-delegates, and the core Democratic base.

And you could tell it was all planned by listening to Bill on the morning after, retelling the story of Hillary tearing up.  Writes Toby Harnden, quoting Bill:

"She was genuinely moved that in the middle of a political campaign another person would actually express a genuine level of concern for her," he told Telegraph.co.uk after had she eked out a surprise two-point victory.

"It was quite touching. You know, people forget that the people that do this are human. She was just very moved by it."

Er, not exactly.  Many of us constantly marvel how candidates manage to keep going.  And we are especially aware that Hillary is 60ish and John McCain is 70ish.  What they forget is just how ruthless the Clintons can be.

As for me, I’d like to know who those “iron my shirts” chappies were.

I expect that there are several professional investigative reporters from the mainstream media interviewing them at this very moment. Not.

It’s time for Barack Obama to play the race card.  It’s not as if he hasn’t pulled any stunts in previous campaigns.

These guys deserve each other.

Is the Right Wrong?

Ten years ago, Daniel Finkelstein was an advisor to the doomed Conservative government of British Prime Minister John Major.  He knew that the Conservatives were going to lose, and that the Conservatives had to change.  “Then what are you waiting for?” said an American friend.

Now FInkelstein wants to return the compliment.

What do the Republicans do if they lose? They have to change, and change profoundly. They will have to move towards voters. And are they going to lose? It is extremely likely that they will. So what are they waiting for?

But this is to confuse tactics and strategy.

In the present US election cycle after Iowa and New Hampshire it is clear that the Reagan-Bush coalition is hurting.  One after another, Republican primary voters seem to be trying out the non-Reagan-Bush candidates.  First Mike Huckabee won in Iowa.  You could call him a social-only conservative.  Then John McCain won.  You could call him and national-security-only conservative.  The voters seem to be dancing nervously around Mitt Romney, the official candidate of the full-spectrum conservative right that includes the full menu of social conservatism, economic conservatism, and national conservatism.

But will it matter?  Chances are that the American people will choose “change,” either the meat-and-potatoes change of Hillary Clinton or the change-as-hope change of Barack Obama.

That’s what happened to the British Conservatives in 1997.  The voters were tired of the Conservatives and enamored of change.  So they voted for the charismatic Tony Blair.  It was Wordsworth time:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

They didn’t want Conservatives.  Anything but that.  And they loved Tony Blair.  “Education, education, education,” he said.  “Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime.”

Now we are ten years later.  The British people have had ten years of tax increases and ineffective government.  Education is in the toilet.  Crime is on the rise.  Welfare is in the toilet.

In response, the Conservative Party is coming out with a radical conservative program.  They just announced a radical welfare reform program and the media asked them why it wasn’t stronger.  They have a radical education reform program coming up that will feature choice.

What has happened is that the voters are fed up, and they are now willing to listen to the Conservative Party.  That’s the way the political system works.

Republicans have been in power on and off for 25 years.  They have made a lot of changes, and a lot of people are tired of it all.  They think it is Time for a Change.  They are right.

Of course, tactically, Republicans should keep in touch with the voters.  But strategically they should be planning for the next round of reform.  That will probably not come until Social Security and Medicare and the public schools “hit the buffers,” but that is the way the political system works.