Jill and I were sitting together at the Presidential forum, and she liveblogged the whole thing. Check it out. Hillary Clinton got the worst of it, I think, because Edwards and Obama tagged her for taking money from Washington lobbyists and she couldn’t squirm out of it. That said, I felt that her first attempt to answer accusations about taking lobbyist money was honest and reasonable—she feels the system puts you in this situation and that it’s hardly a singular, personal failing. Fair enough, but in the end, she had a hard time convincing the admittedly tough crowd at Yearly Kos that she was sincere in wishing that it could be different. Then she blew it completely by denying that the money lobbyists spend has the amount of influence that it does, giving Edwards and Obama a chance to pounce and point out what’s obvious—lobbyists would not spend billions of dollars if they weren’t buying influence.
That was definitely the most exciting part of the forum. The smaller candidates that have very little chance of winning didn’t overly impress me. They’re running to get attention on progressive issues, but the audience here already knows these issues well. I think overall the candidates were energized by the opportunity to speak to an audience that had enough grounding in the issues that they could get into some detail on their stances. I liked seeing that. Reminds you that politicians get into politics for the same reason the rest of us have, which is that they love this stuff.
As for the rest of the day: I had a panel this morning called Blogging While Female, which discussed exactly what you’d think and focused strongly on online harassment issues. The other panelists were Jessica Valenti and Gina Cooper (who organizes Yearly Kos), and Garance Franke-Ruta moderated it. Like my panel yesterday, I felt really good about the way it went. The audience seemed eager for engagement and staying on topic, which made it a productive conversation.
Lauren came in last night, so we met for the first time. She had to leave before the forum, but she did stay overnight and so we had a good time hanging out. Jesse Taylor’s coming in, which is good timing, because everything is coasting downhill after the presidential forum. I’m spending most of tomorrow in some sort of transit back home, but I suspect I’ll be able to use airport wireless well enough to cram some more substantial blogging in.
37 Responses to “Yearly Kos Update #2”
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I’m amazed (actually, not really) by Hillary’s shifting rationale for taking lobbyist money. She tries to say want she thinks the public wants to hear. The result is often putting her foot in her mouth. She should have overcome this by now. It wasn’t like she decided to run for president yesterday.
Hillary Clinton got the worst of it, I think, because Edwards and Obama tagged her for taking money from Washington lobbyists and she couldn’t squirm out of it.
I want so hard for somebody different to be the president of the U.S. A woman, somebody of a different ethnic background…somebody progressive.
Anything.
I am so sick of these old angry white men trying to bully the rest of the world.
Sorry people. I’m in a bit of a mood.
Hillary was tag teamed by Edwards and Obama, but I thought she came out of it okay. She was honest about what she intended to do. She could have lied, but she didn’t — and I have to admire that.
She was excellent in her breakout session. And I must confess that I overheard a couple of women talking about her in the restroom, and how impressed they were with her. Neither woman had gone into the room a Hillary supporter, but both came out thinking she was intelligent and fully capable of running this country.
BAC
Yeah - for a long time I was die-hard Edwards, but I think, almost irresepective of specific platform, there’s great value in the President of the United States not looking like the other 43 presidents of the United States. It fundamentally changes something in American politics, and opens a lot of doors. So the Democrats’ top three candidates, I’m happy enough with. Perfect? Not even close. But this is American democracy, pretty good is pretty damn good.
“That was definitely the most exciting part of the forum. The smaller candidates that have very little chance of winning didn’t overly impress me. They’re running to get attention on progressive issues, but the audience here already knows these issues well… Reminds you that politicians get into politics for the same reason the rest of us have, which is that they love this stuff.”
Wow! As a female blogger, I don’t think I could feel any LESS solidarity with your inside-baseball crowd than I do right now.
Democrats have a woman who’s not feminist enough, a black man who’s not black enough and a poor peoples’ crusader with thirty millions dollars. Take your pick.
I was really impressed with Hillary today. I’d previously been fairly gung ho for Edwards, but I felt that Hillary and Barak both answered the questions that were asked where Edwards just seemed to be repeating talking points. I also think it is easier for Obama and Edwards to pure about money. Edwards has his own and Obama is much more recent to the game. Gravel is fabulously crazy and I didn’t appreciate that at all till I saw him in person.
I do think Hilary Clinton got a bit critically hammered during the debate, particularly by Barack Obama. Still, I was impressed by her performance; I forget what line it was, sadly, but she did have the audience cheering not long thereafter. Overall, I probably agree with her the least, but she did seem to acquit herself pretty well today. I think the top three candidates came away looking really good. And in general, it was refreshing to see a specific, informed debate given to an audience informed on specifics.
Still, my favorite activity of the night was waiting to see when Gravel would flip out, tell the kids to turn down the durned rock and roll music, and start yelling about the 16 to 1 silver standard.
Better than a fascist who’s not conservative enough, a fundamentalist who’s not Christian enough, and a Washington outsider with a thirty year history of lobbying and power brokering.
I don’t understand. Do you prefer surface-level discussions like “I wonder if we should have universal health care or not”?
I completely agree with BAC. I am a woman who wanted to be able to say I honestly considered the candidates on merit, not gender. This is to by no means indicate that gender and race aren’t relevant indicators of a person’s perspective, but I wanted competence, insight and vision. I feared that Hillary’s experience while Bill was president precluded that. I no longer think that. I fully appreciate her abilities, while accepting that her experience has made her ideologically practical. Now I think that practicality offers the extremely unique opportunity of not just “the first woman president”, but a woman president uniquely able to effect productive government.
Hee.
BTW, the DLC is jealous of Yearly Kos.
This probaly won’t go over well, but I’m becoming convinced that the usual Democratic obsession with administrative competence and the siren song of identity politics rewarded are going to hand us a president who is, in essence, a machine politican on a national scale. And I wonder if I’m really cut out for politics because I think a hack is a hack, political spousehood isn’t the same as governing experience, and carefully calibrated, audience-tailored performances don’t translate into a clear, consistent ideological commitment to the Constitution.
But what do I know?- guess the presidency is really just the mother of all management jobs, because that’s the way our party treats it. And maybe enough people really want to relive the nineties minus the tech boom.
This probaly won’t go over well, but I’m becoming convinced that the usual Democratic obsession with administrative competence and the siren song of identity politics rewarded are going to hand us a president who is, in essence, a machine politican on a national scale.
You know what? Considering who’s running the show right now…it would be a fucking treat.
Ah, latts, I trust we all know here that US politics is a mess. I’m way more impressed with what’s good about any of the major Dem frontrunners than what’s wrong with any of them.
Or should we be waiting around for Sir Galahad, Jeanne D’Arc, Clark Kent or Wonder Woman to run? (Of course every one of them would be excluded anyway, having been born outside the USA–Superman’s an illegal alien for crum’s sake, and what little I know of the WW mythos tells me she’s actually a foreign agent (of Atlantis or whatever Amazonian island she comes from. Oh yeah, she also has some of those “invisible weapons of feminism” the MRAs say makes feminists terrorists–I’m sure she can handle allegory, and she also has an invisible airplane.)
Our patriotic mythology revolves around “great Presidents” because we don’t want to face how our system really works. When it has worked well and accomplished great things, it has been because of activist citizens, not Great Men. Even Abraham Lincoln, the President I think best deserves the accolades (and that largely for having been assassinated for what he did accomplish) was profoundly flawed and compromised in his interests. Noam Chomsky writes rather witheringly about how overrated JFK is, arguing that he and Ronald Reagan had essentially the same policies and rhetoric. But I think it makes a difference that Kennedy was doing and saying what he did in the early ’60s whereas Reagan was following a script, “the second time as farce” at that, 20 years later when we all knew better. (Marilyn Qualye’s stupid hat at the 1989 Bush I inaugural seemed to clinch the case for me–those bozos were determined to shanghai us all into the Wayback Machine to 1961 and make us forget every damn thing any of us may have learned since then.) I’ve just finished rereading We All Lost the Cold War (forget the authors, Lebow and someone I think) which analyzed the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Yom Kippur War crisis between the US and USSR, and I am profoundly impressed by how much JFK ultimately responded in October 1962 with restraint, moderation, and eventual elevation of mutual respect and trust between himself and Krushchev. Both superpower leaders were guilty of bombast, brinksmanship, and stupidity, but both were human and humane enough to defy the hardliners in their own power base and tentatively try for mutual trust and understanding.
It paid off (then Nixon and Kissenger, after wowing the Politburo with their overtures, blew it all away in October 1973).
We aren’t auditioning for Emperor Superman, Savior of the World and paragon of all virtue, here. Any President we get would either have to be aggressively backed up if they somehow were this personal paragon, by mass populist activism, or more likely, criticized and pressured by that same kind of movement, or we can assuredly expect more decay on the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush trajectory.
Mark Foxwell, agree strongly. More to the point, I think latts seems to misunderstand what the President is. The Presidentcy IS just the mother of all management jobs.
We’re a free people living in a representative democracy, we neither have, nor need, rulers or even leaders. The President is, or at least is supposed to be, the *executive*, that means the job is simply to carry out the laws enacted by Congress. Not to lead. Not to rule. Not to inspire. Not to do any of the other stuff some people seem to read into the job.
Also, on a side note, I’d like to compalin about the catchpa. I’ve reloaded twice now and I’m not at all sure that I’ll get this one right either. Is it a 1 or a 7, a 9 or a g? Who knows? Don’t know if I’m just gettin the exceptionally bad ones, or if I’m stupid this morning, but sheesh.
Just FYI, I don’t think there are ever any letters in this captcha.
Though I have to say I can never tell the 6’s and 0’s apart, myself.
Also, more on topic in line with Mark and Brad, I think it’s important to remember that Teh Grate Preznidents of the past were not necessarily seen that way during the bulk of their presidencies, or presented that way during their elections. Which isn’t to give creedence to all that “History will remember me as a great man” hoohaa Dubya’s been spouting lately, more just to underline the fact that Roosevelt didn’t run on a “Jesus/Superman ‘32″ platform.
I have to zoom in to 125% in order to clearly read the captcha. And even when I type the numbers I see, I still get blocked.
Democrats have a woman who’s not feminist enough, a black man who’s not black enough and a poor peoples’ crusader with thirty millions dollars. Take your pick.
That’s extremely clever-sounding, but I don’t get your point. Clinton is not progressive enough, but that’s not a knock against her feminist credentials, which are pretty solid in the voting sense. (Now I think a smart feminist grounds her values in the larger scheme, but on strictly “women’s” issues, Clinton has a good track record.) The “Obama’s not black enough” thing is unbelievably insulting, and I think was quite likely started by right wing hellions to bait liberals. And since when is being rich an impediment to caring about the poor? Another right wing meme, the idea that there’s something “hypocritical” about caring about others than yourself.
I’m not rushing to their collective defense, either. Each candidate has things that make him or her less than perfect to downright problematic, but these three things are not it.
Latts, if you’re referring to Senator Clinton in your “political spousehood” complaint, maybe you could explain why her husband trumps her years of experience as a lawyer and senator.
Dear opoponnax
I think FDR ran on the “I’m sorry we big shots screwed up your lives and I pledge to work for a New Deal of, for, and by you” platform. He also revived a lot of his elder cousin Teddy’s “malefactors of great wealth” rhetoric–while working his butt off to make sure that lots of people had chances to become greatly wealthy themselves. In new industries–new oil bidness; aviation (and military, esp naval, contracts in general), etc. He also pushed for Social Security as an alternative to “welfare,” in the sense of “the government promises to bail you out if you are in danger of going completely under,” which was a very popular word in politics during and for decades after the Depression, even in normally conservative Republican baliwicks. They went on electing Republicans in places like Ohio, they just wanted the Republicans to include policies the post-60s backlash “conservatives” would have labeled tantamount to Stalinism–you know, creepy scary stuff like seeing to it that out-of-work families had enough to eat, some kind of shelter, and other wacky evil schemes like that, in the form of grants and programs funded directly by legislative appropriation. And Republican governors and state leges and Congressmen were happy to oblige and take credit for strong “welfare” policies. FDR was actually the kind of conservative who seriously worried this would undermine our national moral fiber and make us bad capitalist citizens if continued past the immediate emergency, and so created a commission to draft a Social Security system that wouldn’t be beholden to the whims of legislators and governors and would be an entitlement–”it’s your money, not some gift from Big Brother.” He had to compromise with Congress that wanted support for actual welfare programs immediately; the way Perkins’s committee drafted the plan, no one would get paid until sometime after we (actually) won WWII, and those would be pittances until the 50s or so.
So, glass half-full or half-empty? The point is the system as a whole acted (slowly, with lots of reactionary reservations wherever people seemed powerless enough to be screwed over) rationally and creatively, and a morally ambiguous leader like FDR was perfect for the job of trying to coordinate consensus.
A “socialist” he was not.
Neither, would I say, is John Edwards.
If I could vote in the primary in some kind of instant-runoff system today, I’d rank my choices:
Kucinich
Edwards
Obama
Hillary
I’m wide open to suggestions as to who I might want to add to the list below Edwards, or arguments as to why I ought to promote Hillary higher (but she’ll never get past Edwards in my ranking). If someone like Gore or Wesley Clark throws their hat in the ring then it’s a different ballgame too.
Kucinich would clearly be the best, but everyone says “he can’t win” and that is probably a good barometer of how well he’d be able to bring the capitalist interests into some kind of cooperative detante if by some political miracle he did. If he’s still in the running when the California primary rolls around, and I don’t judge that Edwards or Obama need my pivotal vote to perhaps beat out someone below on the list, I’m voting for him, prospects of immediate victory be damned. That’s what I always do in primaries anyway. I expect Edwards to be competitive even as late as our delayed election, though by then he might just be taking Kucinich’s place as the “register your views for the record” candidate.
But whoever wins (looks highly likely to be Hillary, or maybe Obama, at this point) I’m backing them 100 percent in fall of 2008.
Hillary continues spewing the most outrageous shit: first the lie that she pushed hard for diplomacy during the 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq invasion (she voted for *no* diplomacy); she insists that we’re safer today than we were before 9/11 (at YearlyKos she cited lame examples about first responders and airline security exemplified by taking off our shoes before boarding); and she claims that lobbyist money doesn’t influence her vote (bull fucking shit!).
This woman is beyond the pale. Worse, I am beginning to doubt Obama will get his act together, especially during debates, to beat her. How the hell does she get away with broadcasting her credentials of “experience” and “strength,” yet Obama has still failed to knock her out on the Iraq vote (in addition to other issues)? If she’s so experienced and tough why didn’t she 1. read the damn intelligence report prior to her vote; and 2. stand up to the chickenhawk masses instead of pandering to the most hawkish right-wing?
Needless to say, I can’t stand her. Believe it or not, once I dreamed of her running and now I’m scared she’ll actually win.
Am just watching the republican candidates debate and it’s very depressing. Right now they’re trying to outdo each other in praising Bush, fear mongering over ISLAMIC terrorism, and talking about getting rid of the “death tax” or eliminating the income tax entirely and replacing it with a national sales tax. The depressing thing is that one of these creeps will most likely get elected either through voter fraud, or the democrats blowing it again.
pablo,
I had to turn that debate off. My cat is far more interesting and intelligent.
OK, I know I’ve said this a few times before, but if the Democrats blow it, I am seriously leaving the US. Seriously. Really, for real this time.
Third time’s the charm, right?
Not sure we should count Joe Klein as the TIME house liberal to trust.
WORD.
CNN reported Hillary said the country was “safer now.”
That makes my eyes bleed.
??? Governor is much closer to presidency than senatorship. WTH? Look at LBJ.
And that’s why I hope she doesn’t get the nom. It’s one thing to be pushed in certain directions by the system. It’s another thing to bent into funky shapes by it.
He was a political spouse?
The “Obama’s not black enough” thing is unbelievably insulting, and I think was quite likely started by right wing hellions to bait liberals.
Shouldn’t we be talking about a candidate’s qualifications. Do people want the theme music to Shaft everytime Obama takes the stage.
Note: personally I think that would be cool as shit if Obama used the Shaft theme.
Saw a clip of Obama taking it to Clinton on the lobbyist question on TV this morning; he did very well and she looked uncomfortable. I would have been happier to have seen the entire exchange to put into proper context instead of a snippet- thanks to both you, Amanda, and Jill for the liveblogging! Definitely made a difference.
“The depressing thing is that one of these creeps will most likely get elected either through voter fraud, or the democrats blowing it again.”
That’s my fear as well. I won’t be optimistic about the general election, even if my candidate of choice is the Dem nominee. Because I suspect that no matter who we nominate, the Rethugs will rig the election and “win.”
Edwards gets all of his money–well, most of it–from rich trial lawyers. He’s not a representative of the roots. He’s a special interest boy.
LOL… told you it wouldn’t go over well. It’s funny how we heap contempt on GWB for running the country like it’s a campaign, but accept that campaigning– which, let’s face it, is the only thing candidates’ spouses do in any meaningful sense– counts as governing experience when it’s Hillary. Her experience is certainly no more meaningful wrt the presidency than Liddy Dole’s was (Cabinet secretary, head of the Red Cross, senator from her home state), but I don’t remember anyone cheering the Dole candidacy last cycle as any kind of feminist breakthrough. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of rather high-profile female lawyers in this country who sit on boards, chair commissions of one sort of another, appear on panels, work for unimpeachably noble causes, etc.– but they’re not married to former presidents, so let’s not pretend that her marital connection isn’t the key factor in her current comfortable position.
I still suspect that the Hillary Cinton candidacy has a lot of support among married women because Bill’s paying her back for her sacrifices (moving to Arkansas, supporting him financially, enduring the many public humiliations he heaped on her), and so few husbands ever really even acknowledge the huge compromises their wives make, much less help them grasp the golden ring.
But whatever… I know the nineties look pretty good from here, but I can’t say that I want a repeat of the nonsense for miniscule policy initiatives.
Like it or not, Hilary Clinton was completely right in her remarks about lobbyist cash.
Lobbyists don’t fund candidate campaigns in order to influence or change their minds about things, and the lobbyist that forks over 250,000 to a campaign in hopes the candidate will come around to their position is one that will be out of a job very soon. Most of the time, when Lobbyists give money to candidates, they are giving to people who are already sympathetic to the lobbyist’s cause in hopes that it will aid their successful election or re-election. Not as some pathetic attempt at a bribe. Most of all, except in cases where it pertains to a large industry that employs a lot of people and is a significant part of the economy in a representative’s district or state, most lobbyist cash is for nil. Russ Feingold still recieves (and accepts) donations from AIPAC, I seriously doubt the McCain-Feingold “Kill the Arabs” bill is on the horizon anytime soon.
But whether or not you agree with that, Clinton’s rejoinder was an important one. Lobbyists may be very politically unpopular people but they are not free agents. Lobbyists are in Washington because people/companies/corporations hire them to be there. It’s pretty hypocritical to grandstand against covorting with lobbyists and accepting their donations whilst taking no stand against taking direct payment from the institutions the lobbyists work for, which both the candidates do (Kucinich asked Edwards whether he would continue recieving donations from Hedge Fund managers and he only stuttered and stopped.) Clinton was brave to point this out, but it was also a remark ripe for biting into in a forum which was basically a contest for who could best out grandstand his/her opponents.
I still love me some Obama but I think Clinton is the sharpest and most fascinating of all the candidates.
Amanda, I was being snarky as usual. I like all of them. What I meant was
Our party is so interesting. The mainstream or even mainstream progressives think Clinton is not feminist enough, Obama not black enough, Edwards too rich. It’s very interesting we have a gender, race and class candidates.
As people should know by now, interesting = good, to me.
I will probably vote for Clinton.