by Cliston Brown | Dec 13, 2012 | Political Commentary
United Nations ambassador Susan Rice took one for the team today, formally withdrawing from consideration to be Secretary of State after weeks of unending attacks by a swarm of Republican Senators led by John McCain (R-Arizona), Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire).
The criticism of Ambassador Rice, based on what I can see, was completely unwarranted and unjustified. The statement she made after the Benghazi tragedy was based on what the intelligence services gave her to work with. Perhaps she can take some small comfort in knowing that this really had nothing to do with her. This was strictly about politics. Unable to turn the tragedy in Libya into electoral defeat for President Barack Obama last month, the Republicans went after Rice in part so they wouldn’t come away completely empty-handed; they wanted a scalp, and they got one.
But this is also about ensuring that Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) becomes the next Secretary of State, so that his Senate seat can be opened up for a special election, possibly helping Sen. Scott Brown (R) return after his decisive loss to incoming Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D).
As much as I respect and admire Sen. Kerry, a great public servant and true American hero, I almost hope the president picks someone else, just to demonstrate that these kinds of antics by McCain and his fellow travelers will not produce the results they want. It would be terribly unfair to Kerry, whose qualifications for the job are unquestionable, but then, what’s happened here has been terribly unfair to Susan Rice, too.
Wouldn’t McCain, Graham, Ayotte and every Republican in Washington be taken completely by surprise if President Obama nominated outgoing Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) as the next Secretary of State? It is hard to imagine Lugar wouldn’t be unanimously approved, and nobody in America is better qualified for the job. He also has a history of working together with President Obama, who spent a great deal of time as a Senator accompanying Lugar on overseas trips to help lock down loose nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union.
We’d get a terrific Secretary of State who would inevitably be confirmed with the support of both Republicans and Democrats; there would be no chance that the Republican tactics would be rewarded with the return Scott Brown to the Senate; and Obama would send a message to the Republicans that he cannot be played.
Well, it’s just a thought.
by Cliston Brown | Dec 3, 2012 | Political Commentary
In the wake of the highly publicized gun deaths brought about by a Kansas City Chiefs football player who killed the mother of his child and then committed suicide, I’ve been thinking seriously about the issue of gun violence in America.
I’ll be honest: I don’t know what the right answer is on this issue. I am not a gun owner myself, but many of my male relatives are avid hunters and own plenty of guns. None of them have ever used any of their guns improperly, and I have no doubt that the same is true of the vast majority of gun owners.
That said, the statistics clearly demonstrate that this country has a serious problem with gun violence and gun-related deaths as compared to almost every other country on earth, and certainly as compared to other modern, advanced democracies. There are only a handful of countries that average more gun deaths, per 100,000 inhabitants, than the United States, and most of these are countries that have severe drug violence (such as Mexico and Colombia) or persistent civil unrest.
I’ve done some research online, and in recent years, U.S. gun homicides and accidental gun deaths average more than 4 out of every 100,000 Americans in a year’s time. This is compared to less than one-tenth of a person per 100,000 in England; slightly more than two-tenths of a person per 100,000 in Scotland; slightly more than half a person per 100,000 in Australia and about half that rate in nearby New Zealand; about 1 person per 100,000 in Canada; and just slightly more than that in Ireland.
I’ve often heard it said that “Guns don’t kill people; people do,” and that you can’t blame guns for the actions of bad people or those who are mentally ill. However, on a per-capita basis, we have anywhere from four to 40 times more gun deaths per year than other socially and educationally advanced countries that are very similar to us historically and culturally. Does that mean we have four to 40 times as many bad people or crazy people as our contemporaries? I don’t think so.
While banning guns is not the answer (and clearly unconstitutional), other post-industrial democracies are having much more success avoiding gun deaths than we are. We need to be having some discussions as a country as to why this is and what we can do. Can we make it harder for the wrong people (those with criminal backgrounds or a history of mental illness) to get guns? Can we at least regulate guns that have an exclusively military purpose? Let’s face it, folks, you don’t need an Uzi to shoot Bambi—unless you’ve got a taste for some Bambi McNuggets. And a shooter who needs to reload occasionally will be able to shoot a lot fewer people before he is stopped than he could shoot with an automatic weapon.
Unfortunately, because of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and its skillful lobbying and public relations efforts, we as a country are now afraid to even broach the subject of gun violence. Our politicians, both on the right and on much of the left, have been so cowed by the NRA (and its vast reserves of campaign cash) that even suggesting we might have a gun problem in this country has become politically problematic. As a result, we have closed our collective eyes to the fact that, statistically speaking, we clearly do have a problem. So the problem persists, and every time we have a highly publicized gun tragedy, we move on without even talking about how we can avoid similar tragedies in the future. This is shameful, cowardly—and bordering on criminal neglect.
America isn’t the only place where there are gun massacres. There have recently been mass shootings in Germany and Norway, for example, but those were notable because they happen so rarely. Here, we’ve gotten to a point where we barely even notice whenever we have a new Virginia Tech or Northern Illinois or Columbine or Tucson.
We’ve got a problem. I’m not entirely sure how we should deal with it, but we at least need to start by admitting a problem exists. We can’t just continue to bury our heads in the sand and hope that if we ignore it, it will go away. America has a problem with gun violence. What are we going to do about it?
by Cliston Brown | Oct 14, 2012 | Political Commentary
Last week, I cast my absentee ballot for President Barack Obama.
I have Republican friends, and I have Democratic friends. I have friends who don’t like either party, and I have friends who think politics is a waste of time. I’m sure I have some friends who are still conflicted about their choice in this year’s election.
I know some of my friends disagree with my politics, and they will disagree with what I have to say here. But I hope those of you who know me believe that I am a thoughtful person, and that I don’t make important choices without giving them a lot of consideration. And I hope that I can convince you to join me in voting to give Barack Obama a second term as our president.
I am going to take a few minutes here to tell you some of the most important reasons why I believe President Obama has earned a second term.
1) We are better off than we were four years ago. In the year before President Obama took office, 5 million U.S. workers lost their jobs, and in just the last month of the Bush administration, 839,000 Americans became unemployed. After President Obama and the Democratic Congress took over in January 2009 and implemented their stimulus program, the job losses began to dramatically reverse, and by April 2010, the economy began adding jobs, as it has done every month for the last two-and-a-half years. Since that time, the economy has added about 5 million jobs. Don’t take my word for it; if you want to see the statistics for yourself, go to the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Statistics report at www.bls.gov/web/empsit/ceshighlights.pdf. When President Obama ran for office in 2008, he promised he would take action to get Americans working again. President Obama is fulfilling that promise.
2) We are safer today than we were four years ago. President Obama saw that the large, costly invasions of other countries that took place before he came into office were not working. He shifted to a policy of targeted, special-forces strikes that ultimately culminated in the killing of dozens of leading Al Qaeda operatives, including Osama bin Laden. (Again, do not take my word for it; a fuller accounting can be found at http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/the-terrorist-notches-on-obamas-belt/). When President Obama first ran in 2008, he promised that if he had reliable intelligence that bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, he would send in a strike force to take him out. President Obama fulfilled that promise.
3) More Americans now have access to health insurance than at any time in our history. Although polling clearly demonstrated that the health care bill now known as Obamacare would cost the president and his party politically, they pushed it through. Two key benefits: nobody can be denied health care coverage anymore due to preexisting conditions, and the adult children of policyholders can stay on those policies until they are 26. (Want more information? Go to http://visual.ly/two-years-under-obamacare-look-whats-changed.) When he ran in 2008, President Obama promised to provide more access to health care coverage. President Obama has fulfilled that promise.
4) President Obama and the Democrats in Congress saved the U.S. auto industry (and 1.5 million jobs). According to the a Center for Automotive Research report quoted in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/a-million-jobs.html), the bailout—half of which General Motors and Chrysler have already repaid to taxpayers, according to politifact.com—directly contributed to the employment of a million-and-a-half Americans. President Obama promised not to let this industry die. President Obama has fulfilled that promise.
5) President Obama and the Democrats in Congress cut taxes for the middle class. We hear over and over again how the president and the Democrats have raised taxes. It just isn’t true. President Obama and the Democrats cut taxes for working Americans. (See the rundown at http://www.republicansforobama.org/firstterm.) The president and Congressional Democrats do propose to raise taxes on individuals who make more than $250,000 in order to help balance the budget and bring down the deficit. That’s a fact. But anybody who tells you the Democrats have raised taxes under President Obama is lying to you.
Is everything perfect or back to normal? No it isn’t. But it took eight years of extremely unwise economic and foreign policies to get us into the mess that President Obama inherited. How can we possibly expect him to fully repair eight years of damage in only four years?
The president has made a good start. We need to give him time to finish the job. That’s why I have already cast my vote for President Obama, and I ask you to join me in doing the same.
by Cliston Brown | Sep 15, 2012 | Political Commentary
The Romney campaign committed a huge error when it attacked the Obama administration as “weak” in the wake of the killing of four Americans, including our ambassador, Christopher Stevens, in Libya. But the biggest error Romney made wasn’t an error of fact (although it was, indeed, a factually challenged statement).
The biggest error was a tactical one: attacking the commander-in-chief in the wake of a tragedy for our nation. When we are attacked, most Americans rally around the president, whomever that may be. It happened after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
It is generally expected, at such a time, that politicians on either side of the aisle will refrain from attacking or blaming the leader of the nation. If the Democrats had attacked George W. Bush in 2001 for being caught flatfooted on 9-11, they almost certainly would have paid a horrendous political price.
While it remains to be seen how the public will react to this knee-jerk reaction by the Romney team, one thing looks crystal clear: the Romney attacks on this issue appear to be out of sheer desperation. The polling data has been breaking in President Obama’s favor ever since the Democratic National Convention kicked off in Charlotte nearly two weeks ago, and none of the Romney attacks seem to be taking hold.
When it became clear that the struggling economy alone would not get Romney over the top, the Romney campaign began throwing everything it could at the wall and praying that something, anything, would stick. The result has been a disjointed, unfocused, scattershot approach that has not helped Romney move the needle at all. Unless you count moving the needle in the wrong direction, that is.
As each new attack fails, the Romney campaign has placed itself on a hair-trigger setting to jump on every opening that appears like an opportunity to hurt the president politically. The attack in Libya and the unrest in the Muslim world over the ridiculous anti-Islam movie produced by some whackadoodle religious nut gave the Romney team another perceived opening to return to a favorite Republican attack line: that the Democrats are “weak” on foreign policy.
The Republicans have trotted this tired old meme out in every election for nearly 40 years, and they have grown accustomed to this ridiculous attack bearing political fruit. Their messaging on this issue had been so effective that, after 9-11, I heard even Democrats expressing gratitude that we had a Republican in the White House at that moment. (For the record, I was not one of them.)
So they’re trotting out the “Democrats are weak, weak, weak” line because it’s always been their go-to attack line in the past. But there’s a problem: it’s not working anymore.
The Romney campaign has found a lot of things to lie about this election year, and some of those lies have been fairly effective. Team Romney has run advertising claiming that the president robbed Medicare of $700 billion to pay for Obamacare, and that he took the work requirement out of welfare. These ads were nearly as effective as they were false. Romney’s polling improved after launching both of these attacks, even though they were roundly attacked by the news media as completely and provably false. But when it comes to these issues, as well as the ridiculous lies about health care bill (death panels, anyone?), they are so complex and murky that few average Americans even really know the truth. (Even some of the members of Congress who voted for the health care bill didn’t know what was in the thing.) As a result, a lot of average Americans—having no clear and easy proof that these claims are untrue—are susceptible to the lies.
The problem, conversely, with the “Democrats are weak” argument is simple. It’s a hard argument to sell when it is widely known that the Democratic president ordered in the Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden. This would be the same bin Laden, as is also widely known, who eluded President Obama’s Republican predecessor for nearly eight years.
Yes, I know that the right goes apoplectic anytime anyone says “Obama Got Osama,” but it is a fact. He who makes the call gets the credit, as inevitably would have happened had President Bush succeeded in getting bin Laden. The SEAL team went in on the president’s orders, as a result of the intelligence that the president’s team gathered. The SEALs could not have carried out the operation without the president’s order. It was a highly risky operation that included violating the sovereignty of a supposed U.S. ally, Pakistan, and if it had failed, does anyone doubt that it would have destroyed Obama politically? (I think it is clear that same people who refuse to give him any credit for the mission’s success would not have waited half a second to blame him if it had failed.)
To order the mission, against the advice of his own vice president and some other key advisers, took real guts on the president’s part (and of course, it must be said, spectacular courage and great work by the SEALs, who obviously bore far greater risk than the commander-in-chief did).
The mission that killed bin Laden is emblematic of the calm, cool and effective overseas policies of the president. Does anyone remember how he sent in special forces, early in his term, to kill the Somali pirates who had hijacked an American vessel? Or how our quiet leadership in the Libyan civil war resulted in the overthrow of longtime terrorist supporter Moammar Qaddafi?
These three missions all had two very important things in common: 1) they all succeeded and 2) not a single American lost his or her life as a result of any of these operations. If these are the results of a president’s supposed weakness in his usage of American military might, what exactly does it take to be considered strong?
The fact is, the Obama approach to foreign policy and his wise usage of our military—pinpointed, targeted special forces strikes as opposed to massive, scattershot overreactions with heavy losses of life—demonstrates that a cool hand is more effective than a hot head. And people generally know the difference. A measured (one might even call it “conservative”) approach that accomplishes the mission and prevents needless deaths is the smart move. It might not be very satisfying to those who want to go in with guns blazing to make a point. But it’s safe to say that the SEAL team mission to Pakistan made a much greater—and certainly more final—impression on Osama bin Laden than our invasion of Iraq did.
You know, I found it really amusing that the Republicans turned to Clint Eastwood at their recent convention in Tampa. While Clint has always been a tremendous actor and now a spectacular director, the fact is that the composed, cool and deadly upholder of justice he played in the Dirty Harry movies was just a role.
If you want to see a real-life Dirty Harry—the clear-headed enforcer who tracks down the bad guys and ensures they get what’s coming to them—you can find him most days at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
People know the difference between an act and the real thing. Our president, Barack Obama, may be many things, but he is clearly not weak. His results speak for themselves. You could even say he’s got more Clint Eastwood in him than Clint himself.
So, Governor Romney, you’ve got to ask yourself one question:
“Do I feel lucky?”
Well, do ya, punk?
by Cliston Brown | Sep 8, 2012 | Election Analysis, Political Commentary
I returned to Chicago yesterday from the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. After 13 hours of uninterrupted sleep, a few observations:
1) The Democrats are finally starting to understand that politics, for most voters, comes from the gut, not from the head. The average voter is much less interested in policy statements than how a candidate or party makes him or her feel.
I was in the hall for two of the three nights, and everything seemed geared toward maximum emotional impact. Michelle Obama’s speech emphasized: I’m a mom, I’m a wife, we’re a normal family, we’re just like you. Most importantly, she sought connection with the overwhelming majority of the voting public along economic lines: without mentioning Mitt Romney’s name, Mrs. Obama adroitly noted that when Barack picked her up for a date, the door of his modest car was rusted through, something we surely will never hear from Ann Romney. And her line about how it’s not how much you earn, it’s what good you do hammered the point home.
When the Democrats brought in Gabrielle Giffords to recite the Pledge of Allegiance on Wednesday night, I nearly cried. I’m sure there were others who shot right past almost.
Everything was perfectly scripted to provoke emotional triggers, and I think it largely succeeded. No high-minded logical arguments, no mind-numbing 23-point plans. If anybody could boil down the key message and tone of the Democratic Convention this year, it was basically this: We’re much more like you than the Republicans are (therefore we care about more about you than they do), and we’re nicer. The red meat for the delegates (and there was plenty, particularly in the speech of former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland) was largely confined to time slots that weren’t widely televised.
And while President Obama’s speech was panned by many pundits (and by me) as providing nothing we hadn’t heard before, its purpose, I believe, has been largely misunderstood. The president wasn’t attempting to impress the people in the hall. He was attempting to restore the emotional connection he forged with the voters in 2008, most of whom haven’t really been paying much attention since. The people I talked to who were in the building unanimously agreed with me that the speech wasn’t Obama’s best and that it was all basically rehashed, old sound bytes. But the people I talked to who saw it on TV really liked it, and that’s what mattered, because they are the people the president needs to reconnect with and win over again. You don’t use a speech to 35 million people to preach to the converted. If the speech was old hat to me and the other people I talked to on the way out of Time Warner Cable Arena, it wasn’t necessarily so to the viewing audience at home.
2) The Democrats won the two-week convention period and did so handily. Polling in the wake of the Republican event in Tampa demonstrated very little of a bump for Romney; to the degree that he got one at all, he went from trailing 49-47 to tied 48-48. While the effects of the Democratic convention will need a few days to fully develop, coming out of the conventions ahead, as he will, is a win for Obama. Very few candidates who aren’t ahead after both conventions are over ultimately win the election. I’d have to do some research to say this for sure, but I think the last one was Harry Truman in 1948. And Mitt Romney is no Harry Truman.
I’ve been saying for weeks that if Romney didn’t come out of the conventions ahead, he would lose the election (barring some unforeseen catastrophe for Obama). I see nothing at this point that changes my analysis.
3) The Democrats will make bigger gains in the U.S. House than people expect. I was fortunate to attend a Democratic briefing on the upcoming House races. Of course, I immediately dismissed a lot of what they said as biased and overly optimistic, and naturally so: you don’t tell a group of potential donors, “Hey, there’s no way in hell we’re going to reclaim the House this year, so you can put your money away, boys and girls.” But they did offer some convincing polling and fundraising statistics that led me to conclude there is at least an outside possibility they could wrest the House from the Republicans. Personally, I still wouldn’t bet a lot of money on that happening (despite their rather optimistic claims), but there are some races that are polling more competitively than anyone expected at the start of the cycle.
I’m not going to say any more, because it was a closed briefing and I don’t want to say anything that could tip off the other side. But I will say that I came out of the room slightly more optimistic than when I entered. I think the battle for the U.S. House will be closer than expected and that the final spread will be in the single digits.
by Cliston Brown | Aug 26, 2012 | Political Commentary
There is something about the liberal character, as it seems to be defined these days, that shrinks away from open political combat, even when it is clearly called for and necessary. Take, for example, the unwillingness of too many on the left to call out Mitt Romney’s recent welfare claims for what they are: lies.
Today, watching the Melissa Harris Perry show on MSNBC, I became positively irate when the aforementioned Melissa—a wonderful host and incisive political commentator—referred to Romney’s claims as “inaccurate.”
No. No. No. A thousand times, NO.
I don’t mean to pick on Melissa here. She’s wonderful, one of my favorite political talk show hosts. And in all fairness, she is not the only person on the left shrinking away from the “L” word. In fact, aside from Jamelle Bouie of The American Prospect, who explicitly called Romney a liar on the welfare issue in the Washington Post on August 20th, I can’t remember anybody on the left actually calling Romney’s welfare claims lies, although they clearly are, and I’ll explain this point further in a later paragraph. (I apologize here to anybody on the left whose public statements to this effect I may have missed.)
Sure, it’s technically true that Romney’s claims are inaccurate, as lies are, indeed, a subset of inaccuracies. But “inaccurate” is the wrong word to use here, and so sickeningly typical of shrinking-violet liberals who are more concerned with being polite than actually winning a damn election.
Here’s why “inaccurate” is the wrong word to use:
If somebody says something that is inaccurate, there could be many reasons for it. It could be, for example, that Governor Romney just misread or misunderstood what President Obama actually did. Poor Mitt, he just blew it.
The problem here is that using the word “inaccurate,” rather than calling it the lie it is, lets Romney off the hook. It implies he might have just made a mistake and that, if he knew better, maybe he wouldn’t be saying it.
The fact is, there is NO WAY Romney could possibly not know better. There is no reading of the president’s actions on welfare that suggests the president ended the requirement, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, that welfare recipients work. Romney is deliberately misrepresenting what happened here. What he is claiming, in multiple campaign commercials, is not merely inaccurate; it is a LIE.
The reason I state this so bluntly is that there is no way Governor Romney could not know that what he claims is not true. In addition to Bouie’s spot-on column in the Post, the Tampa Bay Times, in its acclaimed “PolitiFact Truth-O-Meter” on August 7th, explicitly and painstakingly explained why Romney’s statements were completely false.
There is a wealth of information out there, over the last two-and-a-half weeks, debunking Romney’s welfare claims. It’s impossible that Romney and his team are unaware that their claims are inaccurate (if you’ll pardon, for the moment, my own use of the word).
When it is impossible that you don’t know your claims are inaccurate, and you keep making them, you’re lying. And when you’re lying, you are making an intentional choice to steer people wrong.
It’s not a mistake. It’s not a mere “inaccuracy.” It is a lie, and there is a huge difference between an inaccuracy and a lie that speaks very distinctly about Mitt Romney’s character. If we do not make that case, we on the left hand Romney a gift. It is the electoral equivalent of what is known in sports as a turnover.
I know that we on the left would like very much to be high-minded and polite, and to win through the strength of our ideas and our appeals to the better angels of our fellow citizens’ nature. But in so doing, we allow the other side to resort to tactics, such as Romney’s outright welfare lie, without any consequences.
And lies, if not called out and knocked down, tend to work. Remember the unconscionable Swift Boat attacks against John Kerry that Kerry and the Democrats failed to knock down (and which probably cost him the razor-close 2004 election)?
How many times do we on the left have to get bludgeoned before we finally muster the intestinal fortitude to fight back?
It starts with calling a deliberate untruth what it is: a lie.
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