Category: politics

I’m not sure how she’ll feel when she wakes up tomorrow, but tonight Sarah Palin agreed with Joe Biden to extend to gay couples full civil rights equivalent to marriage; to allow the federal government to renegotiate not only the interest but also the principal on mortgages in danger of foreclosure; to cap carbon emissions; and to slam a windfall profits tax on oil companies.

I got the impression that Palin didn’t know what an Achilles heel was. But the possibility seems almost too meta . . .

I learn from Stone the Crows, the just-released second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, that some people in the 1930s exclaimed “Gordon Bennett!” to express their astonishment or exasperation. The words are taken from the names of the disreputable father and louche son newspaper editors James Gordon Bennett Sr. and Jr. The expression was derived from “Cor blimey!” which in turn was a corruption of “God blind me!” Alas, the dictionary gives no usage examples in this case.

(In other entries, though, the usage examples are plentiful and highly readable, as for example: “There’s some blooming Parisian couturier coming to see her. . . . To hear her talk you’d think a bunch of corn slicers and foreign poodle-fakers was more important than solving the crime of the century.”)

UPDATE (2pm): Lance Knobel of Davos Newbies writes that “You don’t have to go back to the ’30s. I lived in London 1980-2005 and there were certainly instances where I heard ‘Gordon Bennett’ used as a substitute for something harsher.” And Knobel emails a few recent examples:

Some nice uses:

• In a Guardian minute-by-minute account of a football game (soccer) — see ET8 minutes
• Also in The Guardian, a debunking article on a sham technology company

• A lovely line from The Daily Telegraph, reporting on hostility in genteel Southwold to Gordon Brown’s holiday plans: “Gordon Brown? Gordon Bennett!”

It’s clear that it’s still in frequent use.

This is brilliant. My own research into James Gordon Bennett leads me to feel there’s something very fitting about his becoming, in his afterlife, an expletive.

FURTHER UPDATE (4pm): A poodle-faker, by the way, is defined as “Someone who cultivates female society, esp. for professional advancement.” Will Chandler writes:

The corn slicers and foreign poodle-fakers in your Gordon Bennett post reminded me of a friend’s anecdote about his father and grandfather, who were wealthy New Yorkers (my friend still has his late mother’s 23-room apartment overlooking the Metropolitan). In the late 1930s my friend’s father was at Columbia, and he and his friends were very excited about Benny Goodman’s new arrangements. He invited his father to accompany them to the Carnegie Hall concert. His father declined the invitation with
some horror, and chided him for spending so much time with “that bunch of golden-armed, finger-popping jazzbos.”

To add my two cents to the potlatch of commentary on last night’s presidential debate . . . I thought both McCain and Obama communicated their essential positions on the economy and on foreign policy well. McCain, for example, displayed his belief in trickle-down economics and beast-starving, the theories that have guided the Republican party in theory, if not quite practice, since Reagan. He asserted repeatedly that the best way out of the current financial crisis was to lower taxes on business and to cut federal spending (that is, starve the beast). These have been the consensus Republican ideas about economics for a generation, and McCain stuck to them proudly. He believes that the market makes better decisions than government planners do, and he believes this in the somewhat absolutist way typical of the Phil Gramm crowd—he believes the federal government should have a much smaller role in economic life than it does.

Of course these ideas—or at any rate, an absolutist variant of them—are what got America into its current financial crisis, and Obama, for his part, made clear that he believes that trickle-down economics is nonsense. When McCain claimed that Obama wanted to raise taxes on people earning $42,000 a year, Obama retorted that that was a lie, and explained that in fact he was going to raise taxes only on those making more than $250,000 a year—and give everyone else a break. The contrast was straightforward: McCain wants to stimulate the economy by cutting taxes on big business. Obama wants to stimulate it by cutting taxes on the middle class and the working class. And Obama thinks there is a role for government regulation even in the best of markets, and pointed to the market breakdown of the last few weeks to prove his point.

In foreign policy, too, they did well at distinguishing themselves. McCain established that he wants to continue the all-black-versus-all-white way of looking at the world that guided George W. Bush in the first six and a half years or so of his presidency. McCain sees the world as axis of good versus axis of evil, and in such a world, a willingness to have diplomatic talks with Iran is prima facie evidence of moral compromise, if not taint.

Obama, by contrast, believes that the world is neither black nor white but rather full of colors. In his opinion, it is only possible to see a monochromatic world by selective blindness, the sort that Obama called out when he complained that

for 10 years, we coddled Musharraf, we alienated the Pakistani population, because we were anti-democratic. We had a 20th-century mindset that basically said, “Well, you know, he may be a dictator, but he’s our dictator.”

As Obama sees the world, a country like Pakistan has many people in it, with many conflicting natures, and it doesn’t make sense to treat a country as “good” merely because its leader has agreed to work as our ally, nor does it make sense to treat a country like Iran as monolithically “evil” just because its current leadership is reprehensible. Here, as in their beliefs on economics, there are fundamental differences of philosophy, and the debate helped to reveal them. If you believe America’s foreign policy should be a fight for virtue, vote McCain. If you believe diplomacy requires moral complexity, maybe even a touch of wiliness, vote Obama.

A related thought: I had the sense last night that on the subject of Iraq, McCain is in the grip of a repetition compulsion. He looks at Iraq through the prism of his experience as a soldier who returned from Vietnam, and that’s natural enough, given his experience. I wonder, though, whether the prism has grown cloudy—I wonder if McCain is capable of seeing through it any more, to see Iraq for what it is, beyond and apart from its parallels to Vietnam. The parallels exist, of course. Both wars were sold to America as moral causes against forces that threatened America from a distance. Both wars stirred up ambivalence on the home front. And both devolved into civil wars in which America was an interloper. But the differences between the two wars are substantial. The ambivalence on the home front today, for one thing, has a very different character from that of the 1960s and 1970s; no one today is trying to shame American soldiers; everyone respects their service, including those who worry whether the cause is worthy of it. The civil war in Iraq isn’t over economic ideology, it’s about religion (and potentially, if things don’t work out for the Kurds, ethnicity), and America hasn’t picked a side the way it did in Vietnam. America doesn’t face an enemy army in the country, poised to take over if we leave, so there won’t be a fall of Saigon in Baghdad. There might be a gradual descent into chaos and ethnic cleansing, of course—I’m not trying to claim that everything is hunky-dory there now, or will be hunky-dory when we leave. But I do think it’s important to say that Iraq isn’t Vietnam, and someone needs to point that out to McCain. McCain boasts of his experience, but in some cases experience overcomes judgment instead of enhancing it.

And while on the topic of trauma: The segments of Katie Couric’s interviews with Sarah Palin released to date are upsetting, for a number of reasons—not least what her incompetence suggests about McCain’s decision-making habits. But last night, while we were watching the presidential debate with friends, when the subject of Palin came up, several said they felt sorry for her, and it occurred to me that Palin looks in the Couric interviews like someone who’s been yelled at a lot lately. At the Republican convention she had what you might call unexamined poise; it seems gone now. Now she looks hunted, confused, wary. I wonder if she’s been on the receiving end of the some of the frustration the McCain campaign must be feeling.

Yesterday Yoli Cuello, an interviewer for Radio Caracol Miami, interviewed Republican presidential candidate John McCain (I learned about it from TPM). The interview was rebroadcast by Cadena Ser in Spain, where it made a stir, because in the interview McCain either failed to recognize the name of the Spanish president or implied that Zapatero was hostile to America. The faux pas instantly became news in the Spanish newspaper El País and elsewhere.

This morning, Cadena Ser released the original, undubbed version of the interview, which was conducted in English. A partial transcript:

Yoli Cuello, Radio Caracol Miami: Let’s start with Venezuela. What do you think you should do with Venezuela if you’re elected President?

McCain: I think Venezuela is a compelling argument for energy independence. I would not sit down with President Hugo Chavez, as Senator Obama said that he would do without precondition, and I would do everything in my power to support democracy and freedom and human rights in Venezuela. As we know, Hugo Chavez is moving towards autocracy in Venezuela and depriving people of their democratic rights.

Do you think the United States should ignore the comments that Hugo Chavez made every time he talk about the United States?

I think we should not dignify Hugo Chavez in any way and we should become independent of foreign oil and we should advocate strongly for the preservation of democracy in Venezuela.

What do you think about Bolivia, the situation that is going on right now there?

I think it’s very similar with Morales as it is with Chavez. They are very similar. And I would basically say the same thing. Our advocacy for democracy and human rights throughout the region means we should be paying a lot more attention to the region. We should be supporting President Uribe in Columbia, we should be in support of free trade agreements, and Senator Obama has opposed the free trade agreements. I support them. It would be good for the economies and good for democracy.

Many people have the feeling, Senator, that Latin America is ignored in Washington. If you’re elected president, what do you do to no forget Latin America?

Pay more attention. I know the issues, I know the leaders. Sen. Obama has never been south of the border in his entire life. I understand, and will pay much more attention to the region.

Since we are here in Miami, let’s talk about Cuba. . . .

I think that Raul Castro has just shown by refusing humanitarian assistance to his people, that he cares more about power than his people, and I think it’s very disappointing that he has done so and we have to maintain our advocacy of free elections, human rights organizations functioning and emptying the prisons of political prisoners.

Senator, finally, let’s talk about Spain. If you’re elected President, would you be willing to invite President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to the White House to meet with you?

I would be willing to meet with those leaders who [are] our friends and want to work with us in a cooperative fashion. And by the way, President Calderón of Mexico is fighting a very, very tough fight in Mexico against the drug cartels. I’m glad we’re now working in cooperation with the Mexican government on the Mérida plan, and I intend to move forward with relations and invite as many of those leaders as I can to the White House.

Would that invitation be extended to the Zapatero government, to the president itself?

I don’t, honestly, I’d have to look at the relations and the situations and the priorities, but I can assure you, I will establish closer relations with our friends and I will stand up to those who want to do harm to the United States of America. I know how to do both.

So you have to wait and see if he’s willing to meet with you—would you be able to do it, in the White House?

All I can tell you, I have a clear record of working with leaders in the hemisphere that are friends with us and standing up to those who are not, and that’s judged on the basis of the importance of our relationship with Latin America and the entire region.

Okay, what about Europe. I’m talking about the president of Spain.

What about me, what?

Are you willing to meet with him if you’re elected President?

I’m willing to meet with any leader who is dedicated to the same principles and philosophy of human rights democracy and freedom, and I will stand up to those that do not.

Finally, senator, can you say, um, dum, dum, I forgot the word. Say hello to the listeners of Caracol radio.

Thank you to the listeners and thank you all for being involved in the election, which is one of the most important elections in history. . . .