From TPM Reader S …

As someone who regretfully contributed to George W. Bush’s victory in 2000 and was unpersuaded by John Kerry in 2004, I feel as though we’ve been waiting for this moment to arrive. I have a hard time not thinking of present events in their inevitably historical context. And having just finished reading “Slaughterhouse Five”, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that we had to tolerate the abominable Bush for eight years so that we might finally be ready to elect a man capable of inspiring the broad-sweeping changes that politicians like Kerry could only pontificate about. That Barack Obama was written in the stars of our nation’s history, as much as, for some dumbass reason, George Bush was.
But what I’ve been thinking about this past week, is how the story of Captain Sullenberger seems to be a divine metaphor for the situation we’re in now. We as a nation have been flying along fine in history until the flock of geese that was the Bush Adminstration, got sucked through the jets of history and although this plane is going down and the landing may be rough, with the right pilot at the helm, we can all expect to be okay in the end. I mean, when’s the last time a plane crash on the news has given us hope?

From TPM Reader MAB …

To me this inauguration means we have a chance to return to the country I grew up in and lived in until 3 assassinations and one terrible war left me feeling like part of me had been killed as well. I have never waited so desperately to vote for the candidate of my choice, never so dreaded the awful wait for him to assume office, never so joyfully anticipated every iota of an inauguration – in my whole life. Every time I consider the arc of this man’s life, I get choked up and I’m torn between kneeling in gratitude and shouting hopeful words from my roof. My heart is full of all these emotions.

From TPM Reader AR …

So this is why Al Gore had to lose. Had he won, we might have been witnessing the inaugural of President Joe Lieberman. Or, worse still, President Jeb Bush. True, we may have avoided 9/11 because a President Gore would have read and acted upon the Presidential Daily Brief that warned of an impending attack by Osama bin Laden, and because he would have heeded Richard Clarke’s dire, “hair on fire” warnings about Al Qaeda. True, we would not have gone to war against Iraq had 9/11 occurred, a conflict that has benefited Iran (and thus Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood) more than any other nation. Instead, we would have gone into Afghanistan with Pakistan’s help – notice Pakistan’s new found lament that it is a “victim of terrorism” – and rounded up Osama bin Laden and his henchmen, ending the scourge that is Al Qaeda. True, Hurricane Katrina would have been handled with competence, the capital markets would not have collapsed as a consequence of deregulation run amok, and global warming would have been arrested if not reversed. But, we would not be inaugurating President Barack Hussein Obama’s first term.

And this is why John Kerry had to lose. Had he won, we might have been witnessing the second inaugural of a Kerry administration, or perhaps the first inaugural of a McCain/Lieberman administration. True, the Iraq war would likely be over and a few thousand American soldiers and private security contractors would consequently be alive and in good health. And, the markets and health care and roads and bridges and our other national ailments would be just that – ailments, rather than the debilitating trauma that they are today. But, we would not have had eight years of experimenting with the extreme ideology that the Bush administration has inflicted on the United States of America. And, it is this experiment that has provided cold hard empirical evidence that the blind obeisance to free unregulated markets that is the hallmark of contemporary conservatism, coupled with the unilateral, muscular, “shoot first and ask questions afterwards” foreign policy that is at the core of neoconservatism, is as bankrupt a governing paradigm as the centrally planned economy of socialism. Had it not been for the second Bush term, we would not be inaugurating President Barack Hussein Obama’s first term.

From the depths of our despair that can be graphed as a downward sloping straight line starting with the Florida electoral recount, and running through 9/11, Enron, the anthrax case of domestic terrorism, Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, the politically motivated firings of U. S. attorneys, the creation of “free speech zones”, Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of Wall Street, and the replacement of the Clinton budget surplus with record deficits, all occurrences on George W. Bush’s watch, there now emerges an historically singular opportunity. A brown man whose middle name is Hussein is taking an oath to preserve, protect and defend the constitution, something that would have been inconceivable had George W. Bush not been the 43rd President and something that takes on more than symbolic significance in light of the defilement the Constitution has suffered under the administration of the 43rd President.

In India, the country of my birth, we would call this sequence of events “Karma”. In the United States of America, the country of my adoption, we should call this sequence of events “opportunity”. An opportunity to restore America’s brand abroad, by serving as a beacon of hope rather than as an object of fear. An opportunity to remind the world that American exceptionalism is derived from our charter documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – not from our ability to instill fear. An opportunity to restore the rule of law at home, by eschewing torture as state policy, and restoring order to markets run amok. An opportunity to credibly put to rest a legitimately paranoid world’s fear about America’s imperialistic ambitions. An opportunity to again be the greatest nation the earth has ever seen. In Riyadh and in Rawalpindi, in Kabul and in Kyoto, in Madrid and in Mumbai, in the slums of Dharawi and in the streets of Dacca, the world will watch the improbable inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama and know that, once again in America, anything is possible.

From:
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 15:21:35 EST
Subject: Barack Obama
To: joshua@
X-Mailer: 6.0 sub 10582

Hello Joshua,

My name is [ … ]. I’m Sen. Barack Obama’s press secretary. [ …] passed along your email address. As [ … ] may have told you, Barack will be in DC Sunday-Tuesday, March 28-30. Ben thought that you might be interested in meeting with him during that time. Barack’s schedule is getting pretty booked so I’d love to set up a time if that’s something you’d like to do. Please let me know what day/times work for you.

Thanks very much,

[ … ]
(312) [ … ] cell

I think I’ll put this down as one of those meetings I should have taken. It’s a funny thing. I cannot say this email hasn’t bounced around my head now and then as Obama rocketed to the pinnacle of political power over the fewer than five years since that email was written.

As people who know me well know I’m not the best on staying on top of my email correspondence. And at the time I was deep into reporting what seemed like the story of a lifetime and in some ways was though we were never really able to bring it together. And as best as I can remember I don’t think I ever even responded.

A few months later I was down on the convention floor in Boston when Obama was giving that speech. When I got a floor pass during that convention my usual practice was to work the floor and pretty much ignore who was speaking. And I was doing that for the first several minutes of Obama’s speech, listening to it out of one ear but not focusing on it. And then at some point it all registered and I stopped and just listened. Something entirely different than I’d heard before.

How did we get here from the late 80s to this moment? Matt Cooper speculates.

After I read Matt’s post it occurred to me that I hadn’t given this particular slice of this moment that much thought. The comparisons to fifty years ago seem like the more obvious ones. But while I’m five or six years younger than Matt my recollections are similar. Twenty years ago was a very different time in America in racial terms.

Some of this, I think, is simply time. Some people and some ways of thinking will never really change until the people themselves move off the stage. In a political sense I think a lot of the jagged coalition politics in the Democratic party were assuaged in the 1990s and then that less divided state was locked in during the Bush era. One thing I don’t think we can ignore, though, is that American mass culture found a more useful scary other: Arabs and Muslims. That’s a key thing that isn’t pretty but I think is also true.

With all that said though, it is amazing to me, when I think about race relations and gay rights, how benighted and archaic even the 1980s looks to me now when I think back on it.

I’ve been talking a lot over the last couple days of the folly of buying back the banks’ ‘toxic assets’ in order to relieve them of the consequences of their bad decisions and get them back to the regular business of being banks. Mind you, my idea is not that we should let the banks collapse. I think there’s likely no alternative but to spend a lot of public money to stabilize the financial system. My beef is that we appear likely to fund the banks through what is effectively a bankruptcy proceeding while still allowing the current owners to remain the ones who own these institutions. And that doesn’t make sense to me. Now, this morning TPMDC’s Elana Schor spoke on a number of topics with Rep. Barney Frank, who is not only Barney Frank but also Chairman of the House Banking Committee. You can see the different portions of the interview in several posts at TPMDC. But I wanted to focus on this passage in which Frank talks about this issue precisely.

The gist of Frank’s comments are that he thinks it might simply be necessary but that the argument he is making within the counsels of power is that if ‘elites’ want the public to pony up their money in cases like this, they, the aforementioned ‘elites’ need to get serious about repairing and expanding the social safety net in the country …

Theda Skocpol responds to Rep. Frank …

The idea that “elites” will “get serious about repairing the safety net” if they are FIRST given billions of dollars of payoffs to shareholders who made bad decisions is the height of naivete. There are no corporatist institutions in U.S. politics that can enforce this kind of bargain, that can corral all the interests and get them to carry through on mutual promises. That is why Obama and the Democrats will get for the people in general exactly what they push through right now and will squander opportunities if they give money and leverage to “elites” first!

This is what Ira Magaziner imagined with health care back in 1992 — that he could get up front understandings with powerful interests by giving them concessions in the Health Security proposals, and they would let it get through Congress later. (I remember sitting in his office as I took notes for BOOMERANG and having him complain to me that he could not understand why the business roundtable types “lied” to him about what
they would do!) Of course, they turned on him the moment Congress got ahold of things. Same thing will happen here.

The banking/Wall Street interests will sucker Obama and Barney Frank into giving them yet more (unpopular and ineffective and very expensive) handouts — and, then, when the improvements to health care, college funding, etc. come up later they will suddenly be fiscally responsible with the public’s money. And, of course, they will have plenty of blue dogs and small business lobbies and others to hide behind as they make this manuever. Mark my words, this is my prediction…. U.S. institutions frustrate bargains and can only be moved by big pushes of popular leverage at key moments of crisis.

I have to say, my read is very, very similar to Theda’s. I hope Frank was speaking in a more general sense rather than one of literal grand bargains or broad political economic quid pro quos. In fact, I agree so much I think I’m just going to leave it at that and assume that Frank was talking about equitable social bargains rather than an actual process of bargaining. Because Theda’s right.

As most of you likely know, the inauguration committee sold HBO the exclusive rights to broadcast yesterday’s inaugural concert festivities. I don’t think that was a good idea since certainly not every American subscribes or can subscribe to HBO. But they at least had it available free on their website. But now it seems that HBO is going over Youtube with a fine tooth comb and having all clips of the event pulled under copyright claims. Want to see the special moment where an 89 year old Pete Seeger sang This Land Is Your Land on the footsteps of the Lincoln Memorial? Tough luck.

Now, logically, the one follows from the other. They claim a copyright in the video of this event. And so they can prevent anyone from uploading it to Youtube — though I’d be eager to see someone challenge them legally on it because I’m not sure how strong their claim really is against the use of short clips. But the fact that Americans can’t show other Americans brief segments of these events because HBO owns the event in perpetuity just puts in much higher relief how ill-conceived a decision that was.

Late Update: A reader points out, and I think I’d heard this, that HBO descrambled their channel during the presentation itself. So basic cable subscribers still got to see it. I don’t think that changes the thrust of what I said above. But it’s an important detail.

Later Update: Alas, okay, another important qualifier. It turns out HBO does not own the copyright. They have a six month license. The inaugural committee owns it. Not as bad as I thought.

Why is he still on my TV?

From TPM Reader CB …

I am looking forward to having a president whose memoirs won’t be ghostwritten. Other than that, minimal competence and relatively low levels of avarice will do just fine, thank you.