Exhibit 18.12

On Switching Parties

(I haven't done any political posts since the election. Consider this a shameful, one-time revival. I apologize).

Obviously I'm happy with Senator Specter's decision though it's important to note that in practice it won't mean nearly as much as we think as long as Franken isn't seated and some moderate Democrats like, oh, let's say Nebraska's own Ben Nelson, insist on throwing their weight around. Not to mention that fact that the senator already votes blue on a number of key issues and the one issue you might expect him to now come out in favor of--the Employee Free Choice Act--he's already said he will continue to oppose (we'll see).

Which means we might not see Senator Specter sticking around past the election in 2010. There are a whole lot of Pennsylvania Democrats, many of them union members, who will need to vote for guy they've spent decades voting against without any incentive for changing their minds. In other words, the only person happier than Harry Reid today is Ed Rendell who basically came back from lunch to find a senate seat waiting for him. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has said they won't support any primary challenges to Specter but if a popular Democrat like Rendell wants to enter the race, there's nothing they can do about it.

(Rendell's just an example. I doubt he runs now--he's a party-line guy--but there was talk of him before Specter's defection).

Honestly, unless Specter really does move to the left, it probably won't even take that great of a candidate. I don't know anything about Pennsylvania politics--here's how much I don't know: I initially misspelled Pennsylvania there--but it's a pretty safe bet that 100% of people who voted in the last Democratic primary didn't vote for Arlen Specter. Some surely came around in the general election, but against any credible opponent, Specter is going to have to cobble together a majority of voters starting near zero. One would think any well-funded yinzer who supports EFCA would be even money against an 81-year-old ex-Republican who stands on the wrong side of what will likely be the electorate's key issue.

This is more or less always the rub with switching parties which is why it so rarely works, at least for anyone who expects to get reelected (even Jim Jeffords, who would have been a hero for switching control of the senate in 2001, decided against running for re-election as an Independent or a Democrat). It highlights the sad truth of our system of government: for as much as we might like politicians to vote their conscious and do the right thing regardless of party, the intricacies of governance are such that the letter next to a name really can be more important than the name itself. And if the people of Pennsylvania want a 'D,' presumably they'd prefer a capital D to a lowercase one.

Maybe Specter will move to the left. Maybe--and hopefully--the Democrats won't be so quick to purify the party as their competition. Maybe Specter's cancer comes back and none of this matters. But for the moment it looks like this is going to hurt Republicans more than this helps the Democrats. As of 2010, the holder of that seat was either going to be Arlen Specter or some random Democrat and that's still the case today.

As for the Republicans, well, what can you say? This one has to hurt, but anyone dancing on their grave should remember the state of the Democratic party in 2004 and how quickly they bounced back. Still, the fact that a 30-year member of their caucus left because he was going to face yet another primary challenge from a right-wing operative who has no chance of winning the general election...well, it's an issue. I'm no expert, but it seems like they should be taking what they can get at this point instead of shooting everyone in the foot until only Rush Limbaugh and Pat Toomey are left.

At a time when even a state like Iowa seems fairly blase about allowing gay marriage--as if it's the most boring thing in the world when 10 years ago there would have been riots--their rush to force out moderates like Specter is inexplicable.

It comes from a play that what's left of their party would rather ban than see, but it's a lesson they need to learn: The world only spins forward.

Exhibit 13.9

Debate Thoughts

* Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber.

* As always, Obama was good. Calm, composed, and able to sit back and be the only real adult on stage. I had a moment where I worried that he might be laughing at McCain a bit too much, but McCain's exaggerated gestures, strange faces, and repeated references to a certain plumbum in Ohio meant that Obama was really just playing along with the audience.

* It's hard to say what's going on with the McCain campaign at this point. On one hand, Republicans did win the last presidential election by going solely for their base on policy while publicly flogging the other guy's patriotism and character. On the other hand, this obviously isn't last election and it should have been clear since before the conventions that this strategy wasn't going to work in an environment that is far more favorable to Democrats than any election since Watergate (not to mention the massive charisma disparity between Obama and Kerry [or Obama and McCain for that matter]). Why, in their last decent chance to win over the American people on Wednesday, they decided to fall back on Republican talking points for the Rush Limbaugh set is beyond me. Here, let's see if I can break down why this is stupid: (all paraphrases)

Economy= "This guy wants to redistribute your wealth." Um, John, on a day when the stock market dropped another 700+ points, people are far more concerned with maintaining modest wealth than worrying about the scary march of communism across the globe. For every "Joe the Plumber" who apparently thinks he's going to be making more than $250,000 soon, there are a lot more Americans who simply want a firmer foothold in the middle-class. If your opponent keeps saying, "95% of people get a tax break," and you keep playing to the 5%, you're going to lose.

Abortion= "Health of the mother is code for the pro-abortion crowd." Not according to a vast majority of Americans, the Supreme Court, and, in the last major attempt on an outright abortion ban, the state of South Dakota. Let me say that again: South Dakota voters rejected an abortion ban because it didn't contain exceptions for health. If it doesn't play in Yankton, it's not playing anywhere else. If your opponent follows up your craziness with a compassionate, rational defense of Roe v. Wade that gives Americans a way to compromise and get past this issue, and you sound like you want to throw fake blood on a teenage girl, you're going to...well, you know.

Education= "Vouchers, blah, blah, vouchers." Because clearly a lot of non-religious families out there want the chance to pay for private school right at the moment. Even if you ignore the obvious reasons that have nothing to do with education why religious leaders want programs like these, there are so many ways a nationwide voucher program doesn't make sense economically that it's not even worth going into. Thankfully, that's painfully obvious to anyone paying the least bit of attention to the candidate who also, bizarrely, claims he can have a "spending freeze."

Healthcare= "If like Senator Obama's plan, you'd love Canada and Great Britain." Way to misread the mood of the country, Mr. McCain! Do you honestly think a majority of Americans wouldn't take Canada's healthcare system straight up if they could? Jesus. At this point, I think there are more people upset that Obama's plan doesn't mandate coverage than there are upset by the spectre of universal healthcare.

* All of those positions are very hard right which is strange because McCain presumably chose Palin to lock up those voters while he moved to center. Picking Palin, which undercut experience, possibly his only winning argument against Obama, should have allowed McCain to revert back to being the moderate senator he was pre-2000 while Palin winked--literally it seems--to the right. This, um, didn't end up being the plan. Apparently his advisers accidentally opened the folder marked "GET 40 PERCENT OF THE VOTE" instead of the "WIN THE ELECTION" folder. Oops.

* It's obviously not over, but it's worth wondering at this point if McCain ever had a chance to seize the momentum in this election. To me, a winning strategy would have meant choosing a V.P. like Huckabee (personable, Christian, populist), immediately and publicly renouncing Bush (oddly, McCain has an ad out today that does just this, far too late), and making the maverick brand come alive with policy ideas rather than just repeating the word until it became an SNL joke while giving everyone the normal low-taxes, no abortion talking points.

* Going after women was clearly a mirage the Obama campaign was begging McCain to pursue. Within a month of making that demographic his biggest priority with the Palin pick, he had turn around and ambandon them completely because women seem to dislike Palin more than the average American and McCain himself has given up what was previously a moderate stance on abortion in order to please a base that no longer needs pleasing.

* It's also likely that McCain himself just isn't a very good politician on the national stage. He's not proving to be one of those candidates who can say one thing to his base and another thing to the public (by which I mean he's not a winning candidate). There's a way to placate conservatives on topics like abortion without alienating the rest of the country--here's a hint: don't mock the health of mothers--but again and again McCain only makes argument in black-and-white and not grey which should be his strength as a "maverick" and "an outsider." If McCain's advisers aren't dumb, and presumably they aren't, it's likely a lot of the blame falls on McCain himself for not knowing when to use which set of talking points.

* Mercifully, this is my last thought: I think McCain took the wrong message from 2000 when he decided he needed to tack right. There are a lot of reasons why candidates lose elections and to seize on the failure to placate the base as the cause was a misinterpretation of what really happened against Bush. Using the lessons of a primary election from 2000 in a general election in 2008 seems to have been where his campaign started to go wrong.

Exhibit 7.9

I realized I had an error in my pointless numbering system. This issue has been corrected.

Exhibit 7.5

An announcement from The Cupboard:

The Cupboard would like to apologize for the lack of pamphleteering we’ve done recently. As always, The Cupboard has excuses and plans.

Since we began, we’ve being trying to find ways to deal with the problematic business of publishing a monthly anonymous online and in-print literary pamphlet. Unfortunately, while we’re proud of everything we’ve printed, getting the quality of submissions The Cupboard hopes to print has been difficult. Perhaps not surprisingly, anonymity is a deal breaker for many writers and while most journals are awash in submissions, we get shockingly few.

So we’re going to change. The Cupboard will still be a pamphlet, only of much greater quality and design than the current model. No longer will we be anonymous, but will instead feature a single author of prose each volume. You might even call these new, nicely printed, single author pamphlets chapbooks. We won’t—The Cupboard is a pamphlet—but you might.

Longer and greater announcements are forthcoming, but just know that The Cupboard will continue. We hope you’ll consider submitting and subscribing once everything is settled. We’ll be in touch.

Warmly,

The Cupboard

Exhibit 5.6

T H E C L E A N P A R T

Cynthia Arrieu-King
Jason Bredle
Jen Tynes

6:30 tonight at Jones Coffee
(11 & G)

Note the time, venue, and font change.