Blog: Politics

The Minnesota Monitor was able to obtain a secret list of questions that ABC had planned, but ultimately cut from the debate. As you can see, we're all poorer for their editorial decision not to tackle these key issues:

Gibson: There is ample evidence that the public is tired of all the partisan turf battles in Washington--all the red vs. blue, day after day. Are you prepared to tell the American people -- here, tonight -- that you will set aside the red and the blue and tell us what some of your other favorite colors are?

Stephanopoulos: Senator Clinton, if you win this nomination, you'll be running against John McCain, a man who once joked at a Republican Senate fundraiser that the reason your daughter, Chelsea, was so ugly was that Janet Reno was her father. She was just a child then, an awkward teenager in braces. Do you take pleasure in the fact that, these many years later, she's turned into a total hottie?

Gibson: Senators, let's talk about white-collar crime. Your opponent John Edwards, before he left the campaign, spoke tirelessly of the need to rein in the depredations of corporate America. Tonight ABC News has learned that Martha Stewart, who spent time in prison for insider trading, has lost her beloved Chow, Paw Paw, to kidney disease. Surely that must move you at least a little? I mean, her dog died.

Stephanopoulos: Some media critics have bemoaned a growing conflation of politics and of celebrity media culture -- a tendency, even on the part of ostensibly serious journalists, to see everything through the lens of personality and character and to ignore issues. My question for you is, what's your most trusted source of celebrity news? And are there some celebrities who interest you personally more than others?

I actually don't share many of my friends' reasons for disliking Senator Clinton. I don't approve of her war vote, but there are many areas in which she'd probably govern more progressively than Obama and many in which she'd govern more conservatively. For me, the choice comes down to one issue: I don't trust her senior advisors.

Her inner circle comprises the same people who invented triangulation and stopped trying to lead the public toward understanding progessive viewpoints. They're the same people who criticized the 50-state strategy, the idea of organizing in every state and every district rather than focusing on the narrowest 51% needed for victory while ignoring everyone else. The senior people running Clinton's campaign presided over a tremendous decline of the Democratic Party into a frightened, small-c conservative and in many ways large-C Conservative bunch who think if they say as little as possible (what Lessig calls tiny speech) and talk to as few people as possible, they can hang on to power just a little longer.

In The Nation, Ari Berman chronicles the Clinton camp's cold war with Howard Dean—undermining his efforts in 2006, preparing to build a parallel DNC last year. The DNC used to be nothing more than a fundraising machine that lost all its institutional memory every four years. Now it has built a powerful, ongoing base of funders and databases of voters to organize over the long-term. The fact that Clinton's people like James Carville and Rahm Emanuel would choose to throw away what so many have worked so hard to build shows how short-term and out of date their thinking is.

From their beginnings in the early 2000s, through the 2004 election, to the Congressional victories in 2006 and on to today, progressive political blogs have pushed many issues but one major narrative underlay them all: Democrats need to be less cowardly. When they speak up for what they believe and fight for what is right, people respect and vote for them; when they hide in fear, as they did on Iraq even with majorities in Congress and an unpopular President, they lose respect. Strength and conviction win elections. But the Clinton advisors do not believe this, and their ascendancy in the party would turn back the clock to old strategies and more failure.

We don't know for sure how Barack Obama will govern on the issues. But we do know he practices the strong form of politics. When Clinton attacked him with the "red phone" ad, Obama fought back—successfully. When Republicans attacked him for not wearing a flag lapel pin, Obama didn't race to get a flag tattoo, he explained himself coherently.

This is the kind of President we need. I don't know if Obama would appoint a bunch of Republicans to his cabinet. But I do know that his senior advisors won't tell him to half the states in the country, fire the new organizing talent in the party, and wish that blogs and grassroots activists would just write a check and shut up the way the Democratic rank and file did in the 80s and 90s with we-know-what success.

Watching CNN last night, I was struck by the lengths to which the commentators went to avoid talking about policy. It was all "the energy of the supporters" and Obama is young and about change and yada yada yada. The excerpt they replayed from Obama's speech was perhaps the most inane piece, the part about independents and Republicans coming together for him (huh?). In the speech, he did talk about policy (a little), and I believe that Hillary Clinton's war vote and ongoing support of saber-rattling in Iran cost her.

But CNN's Candy Crowley actively disagreed when Wolf Blitzer asked her if Clinton's war vote played a part, saying Clinton had changed her position and has been a staunch opponent of war with Iran. That's only true on the surface (she moves us closer while vehemently insisting on her opposition in carefully qualified language). But the surface is all that matters if you're CNN.

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On Thursday, William Beutler attended the Yahoo! conference "Citizen 2.0: Radically Rethinking Democracy in the Political Age," which showed a video that mentioned Drinking Liberally. In their subsequent keynotes, both Rove and Cleland referenced the clever name which had caught their attention.

A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that ... severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world.

That's why I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the "Soviet ministries." Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them.

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