Election 2008

Come on down to this blog’s sister on climate change where I’ve written about Tom Friedman and the Candidates, specifically about a suspension of the federal gas tax this coming summer.

We’re now into day four of the latest media-driven debate: Was Barack Obama “elitist” last Friday in talking about small town Pennsylvanians in front of Chardonnay sipping, brie-snacking San Franciscans? Wolf Blitzer, backed by his “best political team in television”(!) is still pacing about “The Situation Room” in search of an answer. The polls in Pa. are ambiguous, he tells us. Some put Obama only a few points behind.

But wait, what is the national impact? Hillary and John McCain are on the attack. Hillary has a new TV ad, with a few select Pennsylvanians saying how offended they are that Barack would say they “cling” to guns and religion because they’re “bitter” over the state’s economic woes. McCain says Obama must be “out of touch.” Legions of out-of-state spin doctors and media meisters are in their respective war rooms, doubtless sipping wine themselves, trying to figure out how they can keep this “issue” alive in the days leading up to next Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary. Stay tuned for more serious discussion of the issues!
Such is the state of Election 2008 that after countless debates, speeches, position papers, town hall meetings, and press conferences that the three remaining candidates have said all they can possibly say, and the media have reported about all they can possibly think of. All that’s left is to wait for events — be they slips of the tongue, polls or (finally!) the elections themselves. So much for reporting.
In San Francisco, where I write from now, the gotcha quote may have come at a fundraiser at this house, Gordon and Ann Getty’s, far from the rolling hills of Pennsylvania. Between sips of Chardonnay, or so one is led to imagine, one of the wealthy assembled asked Obama why it was so hard for him to reach blue-collar voters. To which he replied:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them — like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they’ve gone through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The SF Chronicle tells us that blogger Mayhill Fowler got in, carrying a concealed MP3. The rest, as they say, is history — because it certainly isn’t journalism, nor is it policy analysis.

Apart from the superficiality of this “issue,” the circumstances of the fundraiser in a wealthy West Coast community may tell us more about our failure as Americans to connect with each other, than an errant quote that is alleged to divide us.

I for one, as a former small-town Pennsylvanian and current San Franciscan, don’t see a contradiction between Iron City Beer and Mondavi Cabernet. Both go well with cheese. And the price of both is going up. And that gets my attention whether I’m in Pittsburg, California or Pittsburgh, Pa. It’s time for those promoting this story to crawl out of the newsroom bunkers and campaign war rooms and talk about some real issues.

If you look carefully, you can see that Barack Obama’s vulnerability in foreign affairs is not his inexperience. His questioning of General David Petraeus on Wednesday at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing was thoughtful and probing, focusing on whether the conditions set by U.S. commanders for withdrawal could actually be achieved. Obama also correctly points out that Congressional tenure alone is no guarantee of foreign affairs expertise (watching the hearings made this painfully evident). It is even plausible that Obama’s private travel abroad in Indonesia and Pakistan actually may have given him some insights that most Congressmen never gain. Maybe that’s why he spoke out against the invasion of Iraq in 2002 when Hillary voted for it.

No, Obama’s problem in foreign affairs is not his inexperience — it’s whether he will be opposed by supporters of Israel for his stance favoring talks with Iran. As Petraeus pointed out, Iran continues to assist terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and represents a major threat to Iraq’s security. Time/CNN correspondent Michael Ware, who interviewed Petraeus on Wednesday, was particularly adamant in stressing the now obvious point that the struggle for influence in Iraq is essentially between the United States and Iran. Given Iran’s Islamic fundamentalism (at least in its leadership), its virulently anti-Israeli rhetoric, and given Obama’s support for official US contacts with Iran — Obama seems to have staked out a politically vulnerable position. It is only a matter of time before Hillary tries to turn this into a “kitchen sink” to be thrown at him. If she fails, and Obama is nominated, McCain will pick up where Hillary left off.

Washington is still digesting Petraeus’ hours of testimony and interviews, but his assessment of Iran’s activities was impossible to ignore and in other times would be a clear casus belli.

Last October, here’s what General Petraeus said:

“[The Iranians] are responsible for providing the weapons, the training, the funding and in some cases the direction for operations that have indeed killed U.S. soldiers…There is no question about the connection between Iran and these components, (the) attacks that have killed our soldiers.”

This week, the general added that Iran is “funding, training, arming and directing” Shiite Muslim militias known as “special groups… Unchecked, the[se] special groups pose the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq,” Petraeus said.

Finally, Joe Lieberman asked: “Is it fair to say that the Iranian-backed special groups in Iraq are responsible for the murder of hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians?”

Petraeus’ response: “It certainly is. I do believe that is correct. Again some of that also is militia elements who have then subsequently been trained by these individuals.”
All this spells more trouble in Southwest Asia and the Middle East at a time when the American public is looking for relief from our foreign engagements there. As Senator Lugar (one of the rare foreign policy experts in the Senate and now about to retire) put it: “Simply appealing for more time to make progress is insufficient. Iraq will be an unstable country for the foreseeable future.”

Lugar’s candid comment had the intellectual honesty of someone not running for office. America is in a funk over the economy and over Iraq. It doesn’t want another four-letter word — Iran — added to its vocabulary of words best left unspoken. Congress’ fixation on withdrawal from Iraq and silent treatment re Petraeus’ warnings on Iran told Tehran all it needs to know. America will probably not attack Iran — not for killing our soldiers nor for resuming uranium enrichment — but Hillary will attack Obama verbally for being willing to talk to opponents of Israel. That’s good politics in Pennsylvania, but ignores the fact that by next January our willingness to talk may be totally undermined by our unwillingness to do anything else.