McCain's dilemma: conservation or conservative voters?

With energy emerging as one of the key issues in this election cycle, it is going to be interesting to see how McCain talks about the conservation part of the equation. One of the core conservative beliefs of the last 30 years is the idea that Americans' heavy energy consumption is a human right of sorts that should never be infringed. Some part of this belief can be traced to Dominion Theology, but it mostly seems to stem from conservative opposition to government regulation and environmentalism.

Recently, when Obama told a massive Portland crowd that the country should encourage bicycling and try to reduce excessive SUV and air conditioning use, furious conservative bloggers immediately compared it to Jimmy Carter's asking Americans to wear sweaters to conserve heat.

In his major address on energy last week, McCain distanced himself from the current administration's approach to conservation, referencing Cheney's famous comment that conservation is merely a "personal virtue" that should not be part of an energy policy: "In the face of climate change and other serious challenges, energy conservation is no longer just a moral luxury or a personal virtue. Conservation serves a critical national goal."

But note the extreme caution McCain used, saying that conservation is "no longer just a moral luxury or a personal virtue" - in other words, that conservatives had it right up until now. Clearly, McCain realizes that promoting energy conservation is a very risky stance when he needs the support of the GOP base. When you look at the rest of the speech, he gives almost no specifics about conservation, in contrast to his detailed discussion of energy production. I'm sure his campaign knows that if he gives specific examples of conserving energy, like Obama did, right-wing bloggers and radio hosts will ridicule him.

In fact, I will not be surprised if McCain abandons energy conservation as an issue completely, and tries to use Obama's comments about reducing energy usage as a rallying point for GOP support. I view McCain's offshore drilling proposal - which is being sold as a response to the current crisis, but would not produce additional oil for roughly a decade - primarily as an appeal to the conservative belief that we can produce as much energy as we need, if only the environmentalists let us. McCain himself admitted that the proposal would not have an impact on gas prices in the short-term, but defended it by saying it would have a "psychological impact."

This week, McCain went as far as to mock Obama's comments about energy conservation, saying: "Practical ideas are worth a lot more than uplifting lectures . . . It's not always a matter of making due with less energy. It's a matter of using energy in smarter ways."

That strange, contradictory quote (How could you use energy in "smarter ways" without the goal of using less overall? What would be the point?) sums up McCain's problem. He's trying to appeal to conservative Republicans at a point in history where many of their core policy stances are just completely untenable. Is it really conceivable, as we enter what may be a long-term energy crisis, that our next President will be someone who can't even tell his own party that we need to try to use less energy? The more McCain tries to reach out to conservatives, the harder it becomes to imagine him in the Oval Office in January 2009.

I was wrong about habeas corpus (thank God!)

After the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (hereafter MCA), I wrote a long post analyzing the law and the major criticisms of it. I used the New York Times' harsh editorial "Rushing Off a Cliff," which called the MCA "a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted," as a framework for analyzing the key issues. My conclusion was that, while the MCA had some major flaws, it represented an important step forward on the torture issue. Also, while I agreed with many of the Times' criticisms, I thought some of them were unfair (especially the claim that the MCA's broad provisions banning rape and sexual abuse were insufficient, an argument I have never heard anyone else make).

I struggled with the habeas corpus issue - personally, I thought extending habeas corpus to noncitizen detainees would help legitimize the system, without threatening important prosecutions too much, but the legal and political realist in me was not shocked that the MCA did not grant the right to noncitizens:

As for the habeas corpus issue, I do not think it was realistic to expect that the bill would grant habeas corpus to noncitizen detainees. Some observers assumed this was a "concession" by the Republican senators, but as discussed earlier, Graham has consistently said that he opposes habeas corpus for noncitizens. Moreover, only four of the nine Supreme Court justices have endorsed the view. And since Hamdi, Justice O'Connor, one of the four who supported habeas corpus for noncitizen detainees, has been replaced by Justice Alito, who holds an extremely broad view of executive power and has as an ultraconservative record on civil rights. Finally, the major historical cases involving the question, such as Eisentrager, have found that the Constitution does not grant habeas corpus to noncitizen enemy combatants.

For the above reasons, I do not know why Sen. Specter is so sure that the Court will strike the provisions denying noncitizens habeas corpus, but as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, his opinion is worth listening to. Legal issues aside, my personal view is that granting habeas corpus to noncitizen enemy combatants would improve the legitimacy of the military commission system, and frankly, I do not believe that there is much of a risk of the American federal court system becoming a "Get out of jail free" card for dangerous terrorists.

In the wake of the Supreme Court's Boumediene decision last week, it turns out that Senator Specter was right. The Court acknowledged that this decision departed from earlier caselaw (and that precedent was the main reason I was skeptical that habeas would be extended to noncitizens), noting that this was the first time it had ruled that "noncitizens detained by our Government in territory over which another country maintains de jure sovereignty have any rights under our Constitution."

This decision is definitely a win for the rule of law, and a huge step towards restoring the country's image as a leader in human rights. That said, the ruling leaves some loose ends untied.

First, the Boumediene ruling did not hold that the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT's) or the military commissions are illegal - instead, the Court just extended the habeas writ to detainees under the administration of these tribunals. The ruling actually dealt with detainees who have been designated as "enemy combatants" by CSRT's, but who have not yet been brought before one of the military commissions set up by the MCA. However, since the central holding of the case is that the Constitution's habeas corpus right does extend to Guantanamo Bay (despite it being outside of the country's borders - much of the majority opinion involves an in-depth look at the use of the writ by England in Scotland, Canada, and other former territories), the twenty detainees who have been charged with crimes before military commissions at Guantanamo should be able to bring habeas challenges.

Second, the ruling does not mean that these detainees will be tried in American courts. It leaves open the possibility that Congress could create tribunals or military commissions which provide a constitutionally-sound alternative to habeas, but as a column at scotusblog points out, "as a matter of political reality, a Republican President with only six months left in office and historically low popular approval ratings, and a Democratic Congress that is less and less deferential to the Executive even on war-on-terrorism issues, very likely will not be able to agree in the short time realistically available to find an alternative to habeas that has any chance of surviving a court test."

So this story isn't over. But thankfully, the practice of detaining enemy combatants for years, without even telling them what they have been charged with, is now a thing of the past.

"Justices Say Detainees Can Seek Release" [Washington Post]
Boumediene v. Bush [scotus.gov]
"What are detainee's rights now?" [scotusblog]

The U. of Chicago Democrat

Esteemed law professor Cass Sunstein discusses his former colleague Barack Obama's pragmatic, ideologically moderate approach to solving policy problems, which fits my personal philosophy almost to a tee. Here's an excerpt, but the whole thing is worth reading:

Some people are describing Obama as a conventional liberal, or as "the most liberal person in the Congress," but these descriptions are preposterous. Obama is a pragmatist, first and foremost, and he defies the standard political categories. In this sense, he is not only focused on details but is also a uniter, both by inclination and on principle.

He is strongly committed to helping the disadvantaged, but his University of Chicago background shows. He appreciates the virtues and power of free markets. In some of his most important disagreements with Senator Clinton, he suggested caution about mandates and bans, and stressed the value of freedom of choice.

Transparency and accountability matter greatly to him; they are a defining feature of his proposals. With respect to the mortgage crisis, credit cards, and the broader debate over credit markets, Obama rejects heavy-handed regulation and insists above all on disclosure, so that consumers will know exactly what they are getting.

Expect transparency to be a central theme in any Obama administration, as a check on government and the private sector alike. It is highly revealing that Obama worked with Republican Tom Coburn to produce legislation creating a publicly searchable database of all federal spending.

Obama's healthcare plan places a premium on cutting costs and on making care affordable, without requiring adults to purchase health insurance. (He would require mandatory coverage only for children.) Republican legislators are unlikely to support a mandatory approach, and his plan can be understood, in part, as a recognition of political realities.

But it is also a reflection of his keen interest in allowing people to choose as they see fit. He seeks universal coverage not through unenforceable mandates but through giving people good options.

"Obama: The University of Chicago Democrat" [The New Republic]

A party of one (demographic)?

With a substantial percentage of Clinton supporters telling pollsters they will vote for McCain, commentators and bloggers everywhere are trying to convince them why that would be a mistake (I should clarify that the voters in question are liberal or moderate Clinton supporters, like this letter writer, and not the more conservative element of her support, which consists primarily of registered Democrats in the South and Appalachia who usually vote Republican in presidential elections, and probably would be voting for McCain in this one regardless of who won the Democratic Primary).

The main argument is that voting for McCain would be voting against the very political values Hillary Clinton embodies, and that, after all, Obama and Clinton have similar stances on a majority of the issues. The best expression of this argument that I've seen might be the satire piece titled "Loyalty Oaths for Clinton Supporters Pledging Their Votes to McCain."

While this issue-based argument against voting for McCain is probably the best and most straight-forward one, I would like to offer a less philosophical, more realist reason this group should think twice about voting out of spite. A mass defection to McCain could seriously damage the Democratic Party - not just in this election, but in the long term. Clinton supporters vowing to back McCain should ask themselves if they really want to give everyone else the impression that, from now on, anyone who beats a white woman in a Democratic Primary will be accused of sexism and blacklisted by a segment of the party.

If Obama loses to McCain in a close election, and the key swing vote is liberal female Clinton supporters, the message these women will have sent to the rest of the country won't simply be that "it was our turn." The message will be that the Democratic Party is a party of white women, by white women, and for white women. Please don't let me be misunderstood - I don't have anything against white women, I'm glad they are gaining more major political positions, and I'm almost certain that we'll have a President from that demographic in the near future. But if Obama loses in November solely because he is not a white woman, the rest of us will be asking ourselves if the Democratic Party really represents our political values.

I'll start with my own demographic group. The Democratic Party already has a well-known disadvantage among white male voters. Bush won among white males by a 60-36 margin in 2000, and by a 62-37 margin in 2004. In most recent polls, McCain has roughly a twenty-point margin over Obama among white men (and the McCain-Clinton matchup numbers were similar). Do Clinton supporters really want to risk alienating the minority of white men who usually vote Democratic? It would be particularly short-sighted for the party to push away younger white men like me, who will permanently equate the Republican Party with the Bush administration, and have embraced Obama because he represents a revitalized, modern Democratic Party we are proud to be a part of.

And it is hard to imagine black Democrats of either gender reacting well to the news that liberal white women - people who have rallied behind the Democratic Party nominee in every other election since they came of voting age - had switched parties for the first time for the sole purpose of preventing a win for the first major black presidential candidate. Do Clinton supporters really want to risk alienating the Democratic Party's single most faithful constituency? By the way, if Clinton-McCain voters want to avoid accusations that race is a factor in their vote, they should find better reasons than "he doesn't have enough experience" (in light of the fact that Obama has four more years of legislative experience than Clinton and six more than John Edwards), and "he's too young" (considering that Obama is a year older than Bill Clinton was in 1992). This article discusses how the lack of good reasons given by Clinton supporters as to why they oppose Obama has spawned the assumption that racism in involved.

Finally, blocking an Obama victory could raise questions about party inclusiveness among members of other non-white ethnic groups, like Hispanics, Asians, and South Asians, which are emerging as major political forces. Would-be candidates from those groups - say, the Democratic Bobby Jindal out there who has been thinking about running for office in an area with a prominent Indian community, like Queens, Northern Virginia, or North Carolina's Research Triangle - might be discouraged from running as a Democrat if a large segment of the party refuses to rally behind Obama. He might ask himself: if a minority candidate with Obama's unbelievable political skills and charisma still can't pull it off, how can I?

In summary, liberal and moderate Clinton supporters have more than one reason to think twice about voting for John McCain. In addition to the fact that they would be voting against their own political interests, they should also realize that a Clinton-supporter-driven Obama loss could seriously damage the Democratic Party.

McCain just doesn't get it

Today, John McCain essentially reiterated the "100 years in Iraq" comment he made during the Republican primary. Here's the key part of the interview:

Q: If [the surge is] working, senator, do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?

McCAIN: No, but that’s not too important. What’s important is the casualties in Iraq. Americans are in South Korea. Americans are in Japan. American troops are in Germany. That’s all fine. [Think Progress]

This comment is significant because it reiterates what McCain had said about how he wouldn't mind troops being Iraq for another 100 years. The "100 years" line has already been the subject of an attack ad, and Republican pundits tried to accuse the ad of distorting what McCain had said. The GOP argument against the ad has been that McCain did not mean 100 years of war, but was just talking about having a military presence in Iraq - like the presence the US has maintained in Germany and Japan since World War II.

But anyone who thought that drawing a distinction between war and occupation would make the "100 years" debacle go away just doesn't get how most Americans view the situation in Iraq. Those of us who have been against the war from the start, and those who were for the war, but now realize that we were misled, don't want American troops in Iraq much longer - in any way, shape, or form. If John McCain loses in November, pundits will look back and say that his biggest mistakes were thinking that the surge would 1) somehow negate all the flawed/false arguments that led us into the Iraq War in the first place, and 2) somehow restore faith in the irrational neoconservative foreign policy that hastily created those arguments.

As I have written before, though I was not a big supporter of the surge, if it actually improves the long-term situation in Iraq, I am definitely willing to admit that it has worked. But there is absolutely nothing that could ever convince me that the decision to invade Iraq was a good one, or that we should apply an outdated post-World War II foreign policy approach to Iraq, and keep an expensive military presence there for another fifty or sixty years. McCain already faces a hurdle to his candidacy in the form of his advanced age; his advisers should try to steer him away from sounding like he's stuck in 1945.

"McCain on When Troops Can Come Home From Iraq" [Think Progress]

Sexism charges are dishonest and offensive

I understand the frustration felt by many Hillary Clinton supporters. This has been a long, hard-fought primary race, and both sides have had their share of big wins.

However, as an Obama supporter, there is a common complaint I want to address. Recently, Geraldine Ferraro called the Obama campaign "terribly sexist," and then, several weeks later, repeated her claim, calling for an academic study on whether either campaign engaged in sexism and whether the media was sexist.

The claim that Obama's primary campaign was sexist is completely unfounded, and considering how much more negative Clinton's campaign was than Obama's, it brings to mind the old saying about people who live in glass houses. Here's how weak the case is: the "best" evidence of Obama's alleged sexism is that he called a reporter "sweetie." The reporter yelled out a question to Obama during an appearance at a Chrysler plant in which he was not taking questions from the media, and he responded "hold on one second, sweetie" and said that he would be taking questions later. He called the reporter to apologize that afternoon, and the reporter in question has said that the comment did not offend her. In addition to the lack of convincing examples of Obama's sexism, his accusers have not explained his support among female Democrats like Claire McCaskill, Janet Napolitano, Caroline Kennedy and roughly half of white college-educated female Democrats.

What makes it even more absurd for Clinton supporters to claim that Obama's primary campaign was sexist is the relative tone of the two campaigns. Obama's campaign used kid gloves when it came to the Clintons' heavy political baggage, which would have been an easy target (and if she had won the nomination, easily would have provided the GOP with enough ammo to beat her in November). In a traditional campaign, a challenger facing Hillary Clinton would have hammered her on her husband's impeachment, Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, the myriad fundraising scandals, and the Clintons' associations with various controversial figures. In contrast, the Obama campaign actively avoided making these scandals into issues in the primary, to the extent that when a local campaign adviser in Iowa made a joke about Monica Lewinsky on his personal blog, it was a big deal (the Obama campaign immediately criticized the offending post, and the author apologized).

Meanwhile, Clinton's campaign took a "kitchen sink" approach to attacking Obama, which ranged from accusing him of plagiarizing from one of his closest supporters, aggressively selling the Reverend Wright, Rezko, and Ayers stories to the media, and perhaps at its lowest moment, leaking a photo of Obama wearing African garb to the Drudge Report, apparently in an attempt to prey on internet rumors that Obama is Muslim. At one point, the Clinton campaign's racially-charged tone prompted an article titled "Is Hillary Channeling George Wallace?" - and almost everyone I know agreed that it hit the nail on the head.

If Clinton supporters believe that aspects of the media's coverage were sexist, that's their right, and I would encourage them to get on the phone with the offending networks. But as I mentioned earlier, Ferraro and others aren't just complaining about the media - they have also specifically accused the Obama campaign of sexism. If Hillary Clinton really wants to help heal the Democratic Party, her first order of business should be to renounce and reject Ferraro's serious accusations about her party's nominee.

As for the separate claim that the media coverage of the primary was sexist, I would agree that some commentators have said things about Clinton that were inappropriate and/or ill-advised, but I don't think there is enough evidence to say that the primary coverage was marked by sexism.

Some of the coverage Clinton supporters have complained about involves things that just come with the territory when you're running for president. For better or worse, a candidate's appearance, image, and personal style have become a huge of part of American presidential elections, and in the last three or four, the scrutiny has become obsessive. If it was okay for commentators to say that Gore has a "boring" or "dull" speaking style, that Kerry's sounds "elitist" and "arrogant," and that Bush sounds "stupid," how is it sexist for commentators to say that Clinton's voice is "nasal" or "shrill"? And as for the claim that Clinton's gender is the main reason the media has discussed her appearance, one would expect that her diehard supporters, if anyone, would remember the incessant coverage of Bill Clinton's penchant for McDonald's, his weight gain, the way he aged dramatically over the course of his Presidency, and the bags under his eyes.

There is another category of complaints about the media coverage that involves the question of how to deal with the fact that Clinton's husband is a former president. Is it "sexist" to point out that Clinton's marriage to President Clinton was the major reason she had the political stature to win a Senate seat, despite that fact that she had never held an elected office? I would say that's a relevant issue, especially in a campaign where a candidate who has only held elected office for one-and-a-half terms is accusing her opponent of lacking experience.

Anyway, reasonable people can disagree on whether the media's coverage of the campaign was sexist. However, it is pretty clear that the deciding factors in the primary were Obama's unique appeal as a candidate and his masterfully run campaign. Here are several of the best recent articles about how strategic mistakes, various bad advice from Mark Penn, and a failure to understand basic aspects of the nomination process doomed the Clinton campaign (I still can't believe that Mark Penn didn't know that the Democratic Party uses proportional allocation of delegates, as the TIME and WSJ articles mention). Lest Ferraro accuse me of being sexist, I would point out that I just realized that all of the best articles I wanted to link to were written by women. Perhaps 2008 will be remembered not only as the first year in which a women was a major contender in a presidential primary, but also as a year in which a whole new class of female political analysts rose to prominence.

"The Five Mistakes Clinton Made" [TIME]
"Death of a Saleswoman: How Hillary Lost Me - And a Generation of Young Voters" [Slate]
"Clinton's Road to Second Place" [Wall Street Journal]
"Why Didn't More Women Vote for Hillary?" [TIME]