Electoral shift more about embracing Democratic values than transcending race

Last Thursday, I wrote that Obama’s path to victory in this election—a strategy that embraced core Democratic values instead of pandering to the center-right—had left me feeling validated if not vindicated for two decades of advocating just such an approach.

Well, thanks to Stanley Greenberg, writing in today’s New York Times, you can now color me vindicated, too. Greenberg, who was Bill Clinton’s chief pollster and one of the men most responsible for reinforcing the notion of “Reagan Democrats,” has decided to finally lay that frame to rest:

I’m finished with the Reagan Democrats of Macomb County in suburban Detroit after making a career of spotlighting their middle-class anger and frustrations about race and Democratic politicians. . . .

For more than 20 years, the non-college-educated white voters in Macomb County have been considered a “national political barometer,” as Ronald Brownstein of National Journal described them during the Democratic convention in August. After Ronald Reagan won the county by a 2-to-1 margin in 1984, Mr. Brownstein noted, I conducted focus groups that “found that these working-class whites interpreted Democratic calls for economic fairness as code for transfer payments to African-Americans.” So what do we think when Barack Obama, an African-American Democrat, wins Macomb County by eight points?

I conducted a survey of 750 Macomb County residents who voted Tuesday, and their responses put their votes in context. Before the Democratic convention, barely 40 percent of Macomb County voters were “comfortable” with the idea of Mr. Obama as president, far below the number who were comfortable with a nameless Democrat. But on Election Day, nearly 60 percent said they were “comfortable” with Mr. Obama. About the same number said Mr. Obama “shares your values” and “has what it takes to be president.”

I was never comfortable with Greenberg’s attributing all of the Democrats’ problems in Macomb to what is, not to put too fine a point on it, racism. Though I don’t doubt that this segment of voters contains racists, I’ve often thought that this rationale sells these people short, and lets the Democrats off too easy. Pardon the pun, but I felt that the racism Greenberg measured in Macomb was only skin deep.

Missing from Greenberg’s old equation were Democrats able and willing to sell the Democratic brand. It was easy for white voters in Macomb to feel that the Democratic Party had turned away from them because in many ways they had. Running scared since 1972, and more so after 1980, Democrats kept quiet about or even abandoned many of the policies and programs once championed by the party—programs that directly helped working class voters like the ones Greenberg studied.

The void created by the Democrats’ ambivalence to their own legacy was exploited by the continuance of the Republican’s infamous “southern strategy,” and filled by rightwing myths like “the Cadillac-driving black welfare cheat”—myths that were allowed to metastasize into full-blown frames. By the time Greenberg brought his white suburban voters into a focus group, the Democrats were no longer the party of New Deals and Great Societies so much as they were the party of over a decade’s worth of government’s failures. That these failures—especially as they intersected lives in Macomb—owed much to the budgetary, trade, and labor policies of Republicans notwithstanding.

So, naturally, to Greenberg, what he heard in the focus groups throughout the 1980s and ‘90s expressed itself as racism (I’ve moderated enough focus groups to easily see how this “finding” could have emerged). And, naturally, as Macomb voters moved to a place of trust vis-à-vis candidate Obama, Greenberg sees this as an evolution away from that racism.

I don’t believe that adequately explains the shift any more than I believe that the election of America’s first bi-racial president means that racism is no longer an American problem. And I think I now have some statistics to back me up.

If last Tuesday was all about America getting comfortable with one candidate’s race, and little else, then Barack Obama should have outperformed other Democrats running down ticket—many of whom are still the plain old white guys that Greenberg’s groups had rejected. Fact of the matter, however, is that down-ticket Dems did better than Obama.

Paul Krugman highlights the work of Andrew Gelman, who demonstrated that congressional Democrats averaged 56% of the two-party vote, while Obama netted 53%, and where Obama influenced a 4.5% swing when compared with John Kerry in 2004, Democratic races for Congress garnered an average swing of 5.7%.

Specifically in Greenberg’s favorite locale, Macomb County, MI, Senator Carl Levin—considered by most to be a liberal Democrat—grabbed over 63% of the vote. Obama managed 53.4% in the same county. (Of course, Levin had the advantage of incumbency, but it is hard to imagine that his visibility was any higher than Obama’s during the last year.)

The point of all this is to say that if all Barack Obama had to do for these lost Democrats was go on TV a few times and prove he wasn’t some scary hybrid of racial stereotypes, it’s hard to explain the performance of other Democrats this cycle. Even more telling, if previous Democratic deficits were about racism—implied or overt—then what explains how a man of color outperformed his white predecessor in a county that is almost 93% white?

I do not think that Obama’s win in places like Macomb is simply the result of his proving that he puts his pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else. Indeed, that is the added barrier that Obama had to overcome, and not some special advantage. For this demographic, or even for this psychographic, the difference in this race was not race, but reality. Voters like this group in Michigan have suffered badly under Republican rule; the change in this election is that Democratic candidates were not afraid to explain this.

Barack Obama and most of his party’s candidates did something Democrats had failed to do far too often in the last three decades: they criticized Republican ideology while embracing traditional Democratic values. Dem candidates attacked tax cuts for the rich, corporate favoritism, and the cronyism and corruption that have been the hallmarks of Republican rule. Democrats then offered an alternative that emphasized tax equity, and policies that could benefit the many like universal healthcare, energy innovation, green jobs, reinvestments in infrastructure, better-funded schools, and more college aid. In short, Democrats returned to campaigning as Democrats.

Don’t get me wrong, as I said up top, I am thrilled that Stan Greenberg has chosen to put his “Reagan Democrats” to bed. But when Greenberg goes to sing his lullaby, it would be beneficial for future Democratic candidates if he made sure he knew the right tune.


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

“Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Torture

I’m mixing my movie metaphors, I’m afraid. The headline is a reference to Dr. Strangelove, but an article in today’s New York Times is more reminiscent of The Manchurian Candidate.

Well, part of it, anyway.

The part where the Chinese commandant brainwashes Americans such as Laurence Harvey (never mind that accent) and Frank Sinatra.

I don’t know if Richard Condon had seen the article titled Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War which was published two years before his novel The Manchurian Candidate came out in 1959, but I could not read the Times article without flashing on the 1962 film.

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The chart was part of collection of documents made public a couple of weeks ago at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, but the connection to the Chinese version was not realized till an independent interrogation expert pointed it out to the New York Times. This chart, mind you, was taken verbatim from the Chinese version as published a half-century ago—only the title at the top was changed before the thing was brought down to Guantanamo to train interrogators there.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Is it historical amnesia, or is it willful ignorance? I gotta ask, because this is hardly the first piece of evidence we’ve had that the Bush Administration adopted a policy of torturing detainees using techniques repeatedly proven to be ineffective, and, most likely, counterproductive. Techniques that were also known to be in direct conflict with standing American policy and the Geneva Conventions. Techniques that were repeatedly labeled as torture and/or “brainwashing” by the US government throughout the previous six decades.

And, perhaps it is not only the administration apparatchiks who have pretended that they know nothing.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

Every American—and apparently Senator Levin—would be shocked, shocked, to discover that there is torture going on in American-run establishments.

Would be shocked? Who is going to make sure that they are shocked, Senator? Who is going to shout it from the highest hill? Who is going to cut off funding to the prisons and programs that practice these cruel and inhuman techniques? Who is going to hold the perpetrators and their bosses accountable for this historical amnesia? Who is going to overturn the now thoroughly discredited Military Commissions Act? Who is going to restore Habeas rights so that more about the sub-human practices inside the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld gulag system can come to light?

I’m sorry, I’m being a little rhetorical. Perhaps I’m overacting a bit. Just imagine I’m Sinatra in high dudgeon, rendered in Black and White (lord knows I do sometimes).

The bottom line here is that the Bush Administration’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” were never about keeping America safe—there was far too much evidence in the public and classified record that demonstrated just how counterproductive this torture was and is. Maybe it was about an executive power grab, maybe it was done out of cowardice, panic, or shear vindictiveness, but let no one claim it was done to gain the advantage in the War on Terror™—that just isn’t credible.

As fans of the book or movie know, things in The Manchurian Candidate don’t end well. The “brainwashing” is exposed, there is a psychotic break or two, much Oedipal drama, and a great deal of blood is spilled. After seven-and-a-half years of torture, bloodshed, and Oedipal drama, is it really so shocking to discover another disgusting misuse of executive authority? And, is it really too much to ask that someone in the loyal opposition takes to heart Laurence Harvey’s final words? (No, nut-o-sphere, not his final deeds—just his words.)

You couldn't have stopped them, the Army couldn't have stopped them. So I had to.

(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

Our Man in Baghdad

Gallons of cyber ink have been spilled about how he who did not learn history, George W. Bush, would now mangle and distort history on his way to repeating it. The idea that the Vietnam war was a noble fight, and one that was winnable (whatever that means) had it not been for those lily-livered Americans who just “gave up” after roughly a dozen years and 60,000 deaths, would be laughable, and not worth a comment, were it not for a concerted effort by a cadre of neocons to rewrite history in just this way.

Of course, we don’t really need a rewrite, we already have Karnow, Sheehan, Halberstam, and Shawcross. . . and, for today, anyway, me.

(Not to imply I’m in a class with those four—I’m not.)

Before we get to my bright, shining two-cents, let me throw a couple of other coins in the fountain of blood first.

When Bush chose to recount the horrible echoes of Vietnam that would befall us should we bring a quick end to his Iraq fiasco, he said this:

One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “re-education camps” and “killing fields.”

Of course, the price of America’s prolonged involvement in Vietnam was paid by millions of innocent citizens, too, and so much of what happened after the US withdrawal would not have, had the US pursued diplomatic, rather than military, options. And, to this day, Vietnam suffers the aftereffects of the indiscriminate bombings and defoliation that were an integral part of what our current president seems to think was a brilliant strategy to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.

Speaking of bombings. . . I have not heard nor seen one reference to this—which amazes me—but the exclamation point on Bush’s litany of historic horrors—“killing fields”—well, that wasn’t in Vietnam.

Nope. The killing fields were in Cambodia—a little “sideshow” (as William Shawcross called it) to the Vietnam War. The US, in its infinite wisdom, secretly conducted massive bombing raids into Cambodia—and also sent in ground troops—because it felt that the Cambodian government was aiding the Vietcong. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, I know, but it has to be noted that, a) roughly 800,000 Cambodians were killed by American bombs, and that, b) the events that led to the killing fields of Kampuchea (where an additional 2 to 3 million died) can be directly—directly—traced to the US actions in the region.

I would also like to point out that the US wasn’t the country that put a stop to the killing fields. No. The Khmer Rouge was ousted by the armies of Vietnam—the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

But, believe it or not, all of this is just a sideshow to what I really wanted to talk about today. Seriously. What really set me thinking about Vietnam was not Bush’s brain-dead speech, but rather the noise coming from several other noted national figures.

I have been quite disturbed for some time by the apparent ease with which we have all come to blame the Iraqi “government” (for want of a better term) for so many of the problems we now see over there. Granted, these so-called leaders have not done very much to make things better—in fact, they have made things worse—but do we really need to be reminded that a) the mess was not of their making, and b) this leadership was essentially hand-picked by the US.

Do I think that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a hood? Yes, I do—but he’s our hood. Which is why I have to shudder when I hear the likes of Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton hopping on the “hey, hey, ho, ho, al-Maliki’s gotta go” bandwagon.

It is all the more chilling to discover, as we did this week, that said bandwagon is actually powered by a US consulting firm closely allied with another American “friend.”

The powerful Republican lobbying group of Barbour Griffith & Rogers is plotting an effort to displace Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and supplant him with former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. IraqSlogger reported:

BGR’s work for Allawi includes the August 17 purchase of the Web site domain Allawi-for-Iraq.com.

In recent days, BGR sent hundreds of e-mail messages in Allawi’s name from the e-mail address DrAyadAllawi@Allawi-for-Iraq.com.

BGR’s staff is stacked with conservative operatives with extremely close ties to the White House. Its president is Bush’s former envoy to Iraq, Ambassador Robert Blackwill. Philip Zelikow, a former Counselor to Condoleezza Rice, serves as a senior adviser to the firm. Lanny Griffith, chief executive officer, is a Bush Ranger having raised at least $200,000 for Bush in the 2004 presidential election. And Ed Rogers, chairman and founder of the firm, has been a reliable political ally for the Bush White House.

Yes, that is the same Iyad Allawi that was hand-picked by “Viceroy” Paul Bremer back in 2004 to lead the interim government of Iraq, but lost his post in the “democratic” election that President Bush likes to talk so much about. The same one that was once described as “Saddam lite,” the one that came to the US during the ’04 presidential race and campaigned for Bush’s stay-the-course “strategy,” the one that has decades-old ties to the CIA, and the one that published an op-ed in the Washington Post last Saturday calling for the Iraqi parliament to oust al-Maliki and work more closely with the American government.

Of course, journalistic integrity requires me to point out that late Thursday, a Bush Administration official denied any White House involvement with the Allawi putsch. Which reminds me of another war. . . yes, that would be Vietnam.

Ngo Dinh Diem was fervently anti-communist and a Catholic in a country that was overwhelmingly Buddhist. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration picked Diem to lead the southern half a newly partitioned Vietnam. A year later, Diem rigged an election, and assumed the Presidency of the Republic of Vietnam (aka South Vietnam). By 1961, Vice President Lyndon Johnson was hailing Diem as the “Winston Churchill of Asia” and promising him increased military aid to fight the communist influences of the North.

But, by the Summer of ’63 (and, again, I am over-simplifying here), Diem’s increasingly violent suppression of the Buddhists, and the self-immolation of monks in Saigon, made the Kennedy Administration back in DC nervous. While never publicly advocating Diem’s removal, parts of the Kennedy Administration got cozy with ARVN generals who were spoiling for a coup.

When November started with US ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge refusing to see Diem, it was seen by the generals as an endorsement of action (there may well have been many stronger signals behind closed doors); by the evening of November 2, Ngo Dinh Diem was dead—murdered in the back of an armored car that was supposed to take him to General Headquarters.

Current history tends to surmise that President Kennedy didn’t think Diem would be killed after the coup, likely because he didn’t think much about what would happen at all. Three weeks later, JFK was dead, and a new administration would make a mess of cleaning up after the US-sponsored bloody overthrow of the United States’ hand-picked leader.

It is interesting to note that John’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, is said to have expressed his doubts about the coup this way: “I mean, it’s different from a coup in Iraq. . . we are so intimately involved in this.”

Which brings us right to the present, doesn’t it? Not so much with regard to the White House denials of any “coup plotting”—though I have no doubt whatsoever that they are very capable of making such a move—but with regard to the Democrats, who seem all too willing to help ease the way for al-Maliki’s unceremonious exit. I have to say: be careful what you wish for.

Be careful, and not just because, with another regime change in Iraq, the Bush Bunch will buy themselves another Friedman Unit to make “progress.” Be careful because we know our history—president and neocon cronies excluded—and we know where the Vietnam analogy does apply.

We know our history, and we know what we are damned to repeat. And how we are already damned.


(cross-posted to Daily Kos)