Narrative correctness

Why is Rand Paul's Republican Teabagger victory in Kentucky CNN's top story on the political ticker? In the home state of Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning, no amount of ideological extremism should be a surprise, and Paul's victory was so widely expected that it barely qualifies as news.

There was real news yesterday:

• Mark Critz (D-Murtha) unexpectedly beat Tim Burns (R-oops), which CNN gives one line.
  
• Joe Sestak (D-reality) ended the (elective) political career of Arlen Specter (DINO-opportunism).
• Richard Blumenthal (D-Apocalypse Now) ended his own political career.
• Bill Halter (D-semi-reality) forced Blanche Lincoln (D-subsidiary) into a runoff.
  

But CNN is wasting its pixels on teabaggers. It's not that CNN is filled with teabag sympathizers. But the "TRENDING" tag ought to be a clue.

Big media no longer wants to report what happened today. It wants to develop a story arc. That makes writing and editing easier - and laziness is the great inertial force in human behavior. But it also leads to all the really good gigs:

• Slots among the shouters on TV
• Big stories that the Pulitzer Committee might look twice at
• The change to cast a story into book form (or maybe that's just my dream)
  
• Hollywood (in their wildest TV movie fantasies)

Electorally, it was a pretty good day for Democrats. Why couldn't that have been the narrative? Pasting up a new narrative is hard work!

I suppose I should be happy that the media didn't go with its bullshit false equivalence reflex to claim that both Republican and Democratic extremists won. Maybe calling Sestak, Halter, and Critz extremists was too obviously nonsense even for the (non-Fox) media.

Pander with the best of them

Arlen Specter is now an ardent advocate for labor unions.

Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pennsylvania, fighting for his political life in Pennsylvania, kicked the session off with a question about the "trade imbalance" with China and how that hurts union workers.

Oh, bullshit. From RINO to DINO in one election cycle. Specter's stock in trade for years has been pandering. I don't think it'll work this time. What Pennsylvania gets may be much worse.

Family of man

Forty-some years after the integration of American schools, the same racist dynamic can still play out. Only this time, African-American teenagers have beaten minority Asians.

When whites attacked blacks in Little Rock and Memphis and Boston, that was a hate crime (even though the legal definition didn't exist then). When blacks (or anyone, for that matter) orchestrate attacks on Chinese and Vietnamese in Philadelphia, it's a hate crime again.

Time and again, when an out group gets in, it forgets the moral lessons of its own oppression and learns only the tribal lesson that the in group can oppress the out group. The ugliness is part of who we are. But just part of us.

Best of both worlds

With a little help from the Republicans, maybe we Democrats can hold the hot Pennsylvania Senate seat with the current DINO until 2010 and then elect a true Democrat.

Yeah, probably a fantasy...

It's entertaining how comfortably Republicans can make both sides of an argument to different groups of people:

After Arlen Specter bolted the GOP Tuesday, Republicans like party chair Michael Steele attacked him as a "leftist" with a history of "left-wing" stands.

That was yesterday.

Twenty-four hours later, his former colleagues in the Senate GOP are rushing to embrace Specter's past in a new campaign designed to highlight the consistency of his Republican record.

You really can't believe a single word that comes out of their mouths.

Expecting a different result

The Republican Party still hasn't become accustomed to resounding rejection. There is a huge amount of keening, wailing, and breast-beating over Arlen Specter's marriage of convenience to the Democrats. No self-examination other than Olympia Snowe's, however, just more kowtowing to Rush and his doughy [sic] band of ditto-heads.

What does this mean for Democrats? This is good ... for Arlen Specter. It trades now for later. Specter probably would have lost to a real Democrat in 2010, if he didn't lose in the primary to Club for Growth ideologue Pat Toomey. On the other hand, 2010 nationwide looks damn good so far (subject to change with events), so sacrificing a future win for a better chance to pass Obama's agenda now is probably a good trade-off. Atrios hates it, but he's from Pennsylvania and no doubt tired of being represented by Arlen's frequent poses of moderation, belied by later actual votes.

Snowe and Susan Collins are probably pissed that they didn't make a deal. They've been joined at the hip for a while, though, so Specter was probably easier to peel off than the pair of them.

Not enough

They sentenced juveniles to lockup for money. A more appropriate sentence than 7 short years would be the sum of all the unjust detention orders and sentences they handed down and the forfeiture of every cent, including salary, benefits, and retirement accounts, not to mention the kickbacks.

Incredibly, it took ten years from first reports until this corruption in plain sight was stopped.

Naturally, these judges were conservative hanging judges who ruled by fear and fiat. Their light sentences are another case of double standards for the rich and powerful - and that's the real standard of their view of law.

Penned up

Frank Rich notices McCain's failure in Pennsylvania and fleshes it out with some cool numbers. Any column that refers to a Democratic surplus of a million voters is a cause for some happiness amidst all the current gloom, mine included.

The national pundit's cartel is going to have to take away his membership for going against the received and conventional wisdom, especially since he confesses to heterodoxy in paragraph 2.

Well buried but worth getting to is this slam at McCain:

The “action” the candidate outlined in the text of his speeches may strike many voters as running the gamut from inaction to inertia.

If he would stay in Iraq for his entire less-than-century-long presidency, there's no money to do anything else. He's not going to raise taxes for love nor the deficit.

So all he has is recycled photo op compassionate conservatism. He'll be happy to emote and sympathize, as long as we don't ask for anything more.

Unreported story

Republicans still aren't united behind their nominee. Pennsylvania Republicans dealt unopposed John McCain a blow by denying him more than a quarter of their votes.

Don't expect McCNN to notice. They're too busy with amateur colonoscopy.

Solid Clinton win

After a solid 10-point win in Pennsylvania, Hillary thinks she can still be the nominee by running the table. Obama retains almost all of his delegate lead, which appears insurmountable given the Democratic allocation rules. But he still needs to win somewhere to regain campaign momentum.

The superdelegates are going to have to choose, but they'll be back to choosing based on electability, and I suspect they won't choose Obama if he can't break through again somewhere, hence probably his quick departure for Indiana.

Only real bright spot for Obama: Voters saw the manufactured charges of elitism as bunk.

Polls close at 8:00

Pennsylvania predictions? I got nuthin', at least not about the results. Bill Schneider has predictions, one for each of three scenarios. Covers all the bases.

On process, though, there are some sure things:

• Analysts will make statements in serious tones, but their claims will either be blindingly obvious or partisan cant that they pretend they're hiding.
• Both camps will play expectations games. The only outcomes that can't be spun are over 60% for Hillary or a win by Obama.
• The sanest way to get the results will be with the sound off on your TV.

Please, god, can we have something definitive? Another prayer that will probably remain unanswered, but at least the answer on this side is not John McCain.

Bitter truth

It's no accident that the elite media is combining with the elite candidates to tar the one non-elite candidate with the brush of elitism. It's the Rovian method.

Obama's in trouble over something he said, and the trouble doesn't have even the slightest bit of logic. He spoke the truth to his California contributors:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Working class voters, in and out of Pennsylvania, who for some reason have gravitated to Hillary, are suffering. Read the income stats; they prove it. Yet, the Clinton campaign and the McCain campaign have jumped on any acknowledgement of this as elitist and condescending.

Huh? The millionaires in the race are telling us that it's condescending to express sympathy for the exact people that the consensus of late 20th century economic elites - including both of them - has beggared and left unrepresented.

A McCain spokesman, Tucker Bounds, makes this bullshit claim:

Barack Obama thinks he knows your hopes and fears better than you do. You can't be more out of touch than that.

No? How about not knowing their hopes and fears at all?

Hillary claimed that Pennsylvanians are persevering, as if Obama had said anything to the contrary. She calls his remarks "demeaning". Uh, how? Does she believe that it's wrong to identify people who need help? That it's condescending? That it's demeaning?

It's bullshit, intended to cripple the Democrats' effort, started by John Edwards, to recapture their natural class-based constituency. It's another thing that Hillary has done that's bad for whoever the Democratic nominee eventually is.

First draft of hysteria

Click image for full John Cole/Scranton Times-Tribune cartoon.

You can't handle the truth

Obama gave a speech on race from the heart. It was honest and frank. It was fair-minded and clear-eyed and filled with exactly the reason, understanding, and sympathy that America needs in its leaders. Above all, it was authentic.

There is no Republican in public life who could deliver such a speech, much less write it himself, as Obama did. There are precious few other Democrats, if any. Even Bill Clinton couldn't do it.

Yet, instead of judging the speech on its own considerable merit, Katharine Seelye of course judges it on the basis of how others are spinning it. This is par for the course for Seelye, who always spins to the detriment of Democrats. Here she's spinning for Hillary, but, come the general, that won't last.

Seelye poses as wanting to know whether the speech was effective in the white working class, or whether, in a formula she adopts straight from Rush Limbaugh, 'whether the speech cements Mr. Obama as the “black candidate” in the minds of blue-collar whites'. What she appears to want, really, is simply to put out the narrative that these voters won't accept Obama, that it wasn't "effective".

Seelye quotes a bunch of Democrats who supposedly have working class cred (even though several are academics), and only one of them has a concrete criticism - and that's that the speech didn't contain enough policy. Shit, not enough policy! What will we do? We'll have to listen to everyone else's dry policy dissertations to see how it really ought to be done.