And what causes the sari state? Saris do, that’s what.
Hemashree (24), the youngest contestant in the fray, is banking on her appeal as the host of a TV show that gives away saris to women.
I actually don’t find this deplorable at all. It is a given that voters will be bribed in elections, in different ways. How much I object to politicians depends partly on how much taxpayers’ money (my money) they offer as bribe. (Free TVs, saris, make-work employment schemes etc.) If this woman is cashing in on popularity that she has earned by giving away saris bought with private money, what’s wrong with that? It is at least, odd as it sounds, an honest form of corruption.
You don’t need to elect film stars to parliament to get full entertainment. CNN-IBN reports:
The much-delayed Bill providing 33 per cent reservation for women in legislatures was introduced in Rajya Sabha amid high drama and protests by Samajwadi Party (SP) members on Tuesday.
Law Minister H R Bhardwaj introduced the controversial Bill in the midst of Samajwadi Party members trying to snatch its copies from the hands of the Minister. But the Congress MPs formed a human chain around Bhardwaj as he introduced the Bill by a voice vote.
To protest against the Bill, SP members also reportedly threw papers at the Congress MPs. [...]
An agitated SP MP Abu Azmi said, “If given a chance I would have torn the Bill.”
However, Congress members intervened and Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chaudhary repulsed SP’s attempts by pushing Azmi away.
I was on NDTV’s show We the People once with Renuka Chaudhary as a fellow guest—we fought over the women’s reservation bill among other things—and I can attest to how formidable she is. Indeed, you put her and The Great Khali in a ring and she will wipe the floor with that bugger and have him curling up in a foetal position at the end of it and asking for Mummy. Still, parliament is not an akhada, and if we pay Rs 26,000 per minute for its proceedings, you figure out what this entertainment costs us, and whether it’s worth it.
“Had I pushed him, there would have been byelections,” minister Renuka Chowdhury, more substantial than Kamal Akhtar, her adversary from the Samajwadi Party, later joked outside Parliament after she and some fellow women members had fought off a brawny bid to stop the women’s reservation bill from being tabled today.
Note to the reporter: are you sure she was joking?
Hot vadapavs served in corporate style with a ‘Jai Maharashtra’ greeting from an assured Maharashtrian vendor - Shiv Sena will now take the popular snack to the Marathi Manoos their way.
Announcing a state-wide network of Maharashtra Vadapav Vikreta Sena, the party mouthpiece Saamna said on Tuesday that the Shiv Sena sponsored association of vendors would be selling the popular spicy preparation comprising bread and potatoes at various stalls in hygienic conditions matching McDonalds and international pizza outlets.
What a sentence! I’m not sure a business started by a political party can work, but I’m a huge fan of “the popular spicy preparation comprising bread and potatoes,” and wish them all the best. What’s more, I demand that the vadapav be served on pages of Saamna, so that the Maharashtrian experience is complete. Hokay?
The Marathi manoos knows who will safeguard their interests. Raj Thackeray is a fraud. At a time when Shiv Sainiks are working their socks off to instill Marathi values in people, Raj blatantly patronizes unhealthy western influences like ‘throwing cans’. He has joined hands with the bar girls’ union to promote cans and lure more Marathi manoos to vices like drinking. No Shiv Sainik will ever throw cans. We take pride in our culture. Throw eggs, tomatoes (no puree), chappals (only Kolhapuri), but no cans. Cans are American. This is my rallying call to all Sainiks. Come forward and empty every single can you can lay hands on, so that Raj and his goons don’t corrupt our traditions. Jai Maharashtra!
- Bal Thackeray (Saamna)
Ullas concludes his email: “After this inspiring editorial, Shiv Sainiks were seen heading to the nearest bar to ‘empty’ as many cans as they can.”
The following exchange, from an Indian Express Q&A session with Aslam Sher Khan and MK Kaushik, explains what is wrong with Indian hockey:
Deepak Narayanan: If there is a unanimous view that Mr Gill must go, why is it not possible for everyone to come together and fight an election and take control of the IHF?
Aslam Sher Khan: When Sanjay Gandhi was in politics, someone asked him why he didn’t go into sports. He replied, ‘too much politics’. That says everything. To win the IHF elections cost around Rs 1 crore. We can come together but we cannot afford to buy votes.
With that kind of money required to get to power, is it not natural that the winners then look for ways to recoup their investment? Indeed, would it not be surprising if that was not the case?
Raj Thackeray has a problem with people from Bihar and UP coming to Mumbai. And he uses the WTF analogy of the day to make his argument:
People tell me that any one can live anywhere according to our Constitution, but even in our own housing society, we disallow children from other societies. Aren’t these children also Indians? Then if I ask people from leaving my Maharashtra society, then what have I done wrong?
A housing society, of course, is private property, and its owners have the right to set whatever rules they want. So by Thackeray’s analogy, Maharashtra is his private property. Well, well, well…
And wait, there’s more. In a quote that takes WTFness to a new level, Thackeray goes on to say:
Amar Singh is a frog. He shoots his mouth off. My activists were accused of throwing bottles on Bachchan’s bungalow. If they have to throw something, they will throw cans, not bottles.
PS: Rediff quotes Thackeray as saying that his men would have thrown “not a single bottle but a whole crate” if they were so inclined. I suppose he’s confused by all the options open to him. What to throw?
I’d amend it slightly—in this race, Buffy is a vampire.
In other news, Joe Trippi says that John Edwards should have stayed in the race. The super delegates would then have crawled into a foetal position and bawled, no?
In an act that campaign insiders said indicated an irrevocable break with his former pastor, Sen. Barack Obama today de-friended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Facebook.[...]
At a press conference in Gary, Indiana, chief Obama strategist David Axelrod said that Sen. Obama had to de-friend the Rev. Wright on Facebook “because he was getting really annoying.”
“Every day, Rev. Wright was sending Sen. Obama new Facebook applications like ‘What Superhero Are You?’ and ‘What 1980’s Toy Are You?’” Mr. Axelrod said. “After awhile, enough is enough.”
I wonder what Barack Obama found out about Jeremiah Wright over the last three days that he didn’t know after two decades in Wright’s church. This certainly takes a bit of the shine off his words in his famous race speech, “I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can disown the black community.” Well, he can now, since it’s become politically necessary to do so.
As Jonah Goldberg and George Will point out, Wright’s a gift to John McCain. But will this help Hillary Clinton steal the nomination from Obama? I sure hope not.
Also read: Bob Herbert on why Wright is out “not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him,” and David Brooks on how there are two Democratic Parties, not one.
Posted by Amit Varma on 30 April, 2008 in
News |
Politics
Who does The Atlantic support in the 2008 US Presidential Elections? If this story is anything to go by, it’s whoever stands against John McCain. Nothing in the text indicates that, but the filename of the photograph on top does. At the time of blogging this, the URL of that picture is:
In response to a Congress sycophant referring to Rahul Gandhi as “a ‘Yuvraj’ (prince) of the common man”, Balbir Punj of the BJP said in the Rajya Sabha:
Somebody being referred to as Yuvraj in a democratic country has to be a joke.
Perhaps Punj misunderstood, and it was a cricketing reference. After all, Gandhi has also been compared to MS Dhoni. Would Punj ever say:
Somebody being referred to as Dhoni in a democratic country has to be a joke.
No, but seriously, every minute of Rajya Sabha proceedings amounts to large amounts of taxpayers’ money, and it is disgraceful that so much money is wasted on such nonsense. BJP’s goons and Gandhi-Parivar asslickers are quite welcome to bicker on their own money and their own time. But when the Rajya Sabha convenes, it should discuss matters of governance and legislation, and nothing else. No?
If Mr Obama truly seeks to rein in institutions that systematically reward bad behavior, he should scale back government and forget about intruding into the private sector. In private markets, Smith spends only Smith’s money. Smith profits or loses depending on the prudence of his choices. This tight connection between each person’s actions and the consequences that he or she bears provides remarkably effective carrots and sticks encouraging private persons to behave responsibly. In the so-called “public sector,” in contrast, Smith spends Jones’s money. Smith profits or loses depending on how effectively he uses Jones’s money to buy votes from Jackson, Johnson, Williams and other persons who are assured by Smith of their moral right to free-ride on Jones’s resources. Surely, there is no surer recipe than this for rewarding bad behavior.
There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government.
Check out this interview of Stephen Hadley, the National Security Advisor to George Bush, in which Hadley repeatedly confuses Tibet with Nepal:
SAJA has the transcript of the relevant bits. It’s quite disgraceful for someone who is supposed to be an expert on foreign policy: Tibet and Nepal don’t even sound alike, unlike EyeRan and EyeRack.
Note: I am by no means suggesting that this ignorance is a Republican speciality. Hillary Clinton struggled to name Russia’s new president recently, and if she was to become president I’m sure she’d run the country like she’s run her campaign, with lies and deceit. The problem here isn’t a political party, but the nature of politics itself. How to change that?
Posted by Amit Varma on 16 April, 2008 in
Politics
A socialist society typically redistributes wealth—reservations redistribute opportunities. Same difference.
You speak about “universities (and eventually the private sector, I hope)” being “forced” to implement reservations. Forced? So you see coercion as the basis of social justice? That sounds familiar.
You write at the end of your piece: “[A] day might come in the rest of India where you ask two young men on a college campus what caste the other is—and each will say he doesn’t even know.” Well, I wasn’t aware of my caste in my college years, or that of my friends. With prosperity and an open economy, barriers of caste gradually erode. Yes, India has a long, long way to go before we’re prosperous enough and open enough, but consider that reservations actually increase one’s awareness of caste, and exacerbate tensions between them. You cannot fight injustice with injustice.
Warm regards
Amit
*
Link via email from Nitin Pai. More open letters here.
Victor Davis Hanson’s question in that second piece is about classical liberals, which the American liberals haven’t been for decades now. So I’m surprised he should wonder.
No doubt the Left can spout rhetoric about sports and politics being kept separate, but here’s my question: Would Sitaram Yechury, D Raja and their band of jokers take a similar stand if these Olympics were being held in the USA and not China?
What a bizarre way to abuse someone. I wish the pilot had turned around and called him a glorified domestic servant. Indeed, the pilot’s taxes go into paying the MP’s salary; the converse isn’t true. I know which of them I think is a parasite on society.
Of course, had the pilot actually said that, domestic servants across the country would have been justified in feeling offended.
The notoriety of Abu Ghraib was enough to chill the fervor of even the most revolutionary citizens. It was said that thousands of men and women were crammed into tiny cells and that abuse, torture, and executions were daily occurrences. The regime tested chemicals and biological weapons on the inmates, and some prisoners were given nothing but scraps of shredded plastic to eat. Chunks of flesh were torn from the bodies of some prisoners and then force-fed to others. Gruesome tortures involving power tools and hungry dogs were routine, and thousands of people who entered the doors of that fearsome place were never heard from again. It was known that mass graves existed around the country, and it was known in general terms where they were situated; but of course nobody dared to hunt out the final resting places of those poor men and women who had become victims of the enthusiastic guards at Abu Ghraib, for fear of becoming one of their number.
The four AIDS-stricken women were dealt with in a fashion brutal even by the standards of the prison. Stripped of their clothes, they were placed, alive and screaming, into an incinerator so that they and their “vile disease” could be utterly destroyed. In this way Saddam “delivered” our country from the horrific infections of the West and from the inequities of the “evil Zionist state.”
This is part of an excerpt taken from Alsamari’s book, “Escape From Saddam.” It underscores something that many of us seem to have forgotten in our idealogical zeal: Iraq under Saddam was a hellish land. Yes, the Americans bungled their invasion, and with their arrogance created more enemies than the friends they expected. (I foolishly supported the invasion at the time.) But I’m not sure they made Iraq any worse off.
Just a few days after offering Barack Obama a vice-presidential nomination despite running second to him, Hillary Clinton has now come out with another 3am campaign ad against… John McCain. She is still, by the way, in second place for the Democratic nomination. I suppose this is an attempt to demonstrate than only she can take on McCain in the general elections, but supporters of Obama must be rather taken aback by her, um, audacity. Here’s her ad:
On 62 sandstone elephants in Lucknow. Their cost, according to CNN-IBN: Rs. 38 crore. They will be part of the Ambedkar Memorial, which, according to The Economic Times, is being built at “a whopping cost of Rs 7 billion.”
That’s Rs. 700 crore.
Yes, yes, I know that’s your money, and mine. But it’s not like we were planning to do anything useful with it. The nation needs an Ambedkar Memorial. And the memorial needs sandstone elephants. No?
(Link via email from Akshat Kaul. For more on how our government loots us, check out my Taxes Archive.)
Ah, April 1! It’s that day of the year again when one is wary of taking others seriously, so there is no better time for me to resume blogging. I’m going to be a little tight on time for the next couple of days as well, so here are some links to keep you going.
A couple of readers asked me for my reaction to the recommendations of the Sixth Pay Commission, as it’s my money being spent (not that anyone cares). I shall be lazy and point to Bibek Debroy’s excellent comment in India Today, in which he points out that the proposed hikes will effectively be “a transfer from 375 million who work outside the government to 45 million who work for government and quasi-government bodies.” Aroon Purie also has something to say about the “Rs 66,000 crore gorilla” that runs our country.
A recent example of government dysfunction was the Goa government’s handling of the Scarlett Keeling case: when ministers and top cops come on TV and blame a young girl’s rape on her mother because she left the kid alone, it makes the skin crawl. Devangshu Datta puts it in context of another “WTF moment” he once had on a ship.
Speaking of WTF moments, check out this Shashi Tharoor piece in which he argues that a study that shows “correlation between engineering and terrorism” (with no hint of causation, mind you) constitutes an “argument in favour of studying the humanities.” Lest engineer readers of this blog do something rash in dismay, let me point out that Tharoor does say: “I know a few engineers who wouldn’t harm a fly.” Isn’t that kind of him?
A few days ago I’d blogged about the great Tantra Challenge. Reader Ajit Joshi informs me that he has persuaded Rationalist International to put the videos on YouTube—so here you go.
Speaking of rationalists, Christopher Hitchens writes about Hillary Clinton’s “flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying,” and points out how she is guilty of both suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. Read the full piece.
Mr Rushdie ought to bear in mind that a novelist is at heart a storyteller, not a serial creator of self-delighting sentences.
What baffles me is that there are actually many people who love those self-delighting sentences, such as the good friend who sent me the above link, Manish Vij. I assure all pretty desi women in Boston and thereabouts—Manish was available last I heard—that he has no other bad qualities.
I’ve been a bit preoccupied the last couple of days, and blogging has been light. So a few quick links:
Rahul Gandhi, who is travelling through Karnataka, wants journalists to leave him alone. “I want to interact with people freely,” he says, “because I like to say many things off-the-record.” In other words, he doesn’t want to be accountable for his public utterances. He’s lucky he’s inherited India and not the USA, where virtually anything a politician says can end up on YouTube.
Mid Day mistakes betting for match-fixing. The headline mentions match-fixing, the text only speaks of betting and satta. Do they really think there’s no difference?
Rediff reports: “Britney’s pregnant teen sister gets engaged”. That’s too much information for one headline, no? By the time Rediff’s readers process it, the baby will out and cutting records.
Abdul Ghaffar, accused of stealing “two cans of groundnut oil 14 years ago,”, has been acquitted. There is no mention in the report whether the people who actually took that oil have been apprehended. I consider it likely that they’ve consumed the evidence.
And finally, check out this superb piece by one of my favourite columnists, Stanley Fish, on denouncing and renouncing. An excerpt:
This denouncing and renouncing game is simply not serious. It is a media-staged theater, produced not in response to genuine concerns – no one thinks that Obama is unpatriotic or that Clinton is a racist or that McCain is a right-wing bigot – but in response to the needs of a news cycle. First you do the outrage (did you see what X said?), then you put the question to the candidate (do you hereby denounce and renounce?), then you have a debate on the answer (Did he go far enough? Has she shut her husband up?), and then you do endless polls that quickly become the basis of a new round.
I am beginning to believe that the main purpose of elections is not to enable democracy but to provide newspapers with material to write about. And blogs, of course.
Blogging will continue to be infrequent for the next couple of days. I wish you happiness.
After the Ireland fiasco, I thought Clinton would have the sense to shut up. But no, on and on she boasts, as if a claim, by the virtue of being made by her, becomes fact. It’s like the old God proof: God says He exists; therefore He must.
As Dan Kennedy writes, “it’s possible that by the time this ends she’ll claim to have walked on water.” And if you ask for proof of that, you’re Ken Starr.
David Brooks speculates on why Hillary Clinton will do anything to win the Democratic nomination:
Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.
For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.
No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics.
The Clintons epitomize this machinery, but come now, isn’t this what all politics is about? As I never tire of saying, politics is not about public service, but about power; most politicians enter politics not to change the world but to rule over as big a part of it as they can; they will do whatever it takes to get power, for otherwise they wouldn’t have entered politics; and as we are a species hardwired by evolution for self-delusion, it is natural, after a point, for us to start believing in the lies we are living.
I have no doubt that Clinton is not a cynical woman trying to get to power at all costs. She really believes that America needs her. She really believes that she alone deserves to get the Democratic Party’s nomination. She really believes whatever she needs to. But that process, that level of delusion, is not unique to Clinton, or to her party, or her country.
Oh, wait, it’s not Sitaram Yechury, it’s some random woman in Germany. I suppose I was misled by the amount of hot air in this recent Yechury piece. Consider, for example, this line:
If India needs to insulate itself relatively from this [subprime] crisis, then it must abandon all such measures of financial liberalisation that will inexorably tie India to the growing global uncertainties.
Let’s all just stay poor then, so there’s no danger of losing the money we haven’t had a chance to earn anyway. Such logic!
Update: As some readers have pointed out, I made a mistake by attributing Yechury’s article to Prakash Karat when I made the post a few hours ago. I know, same difference, but it was a silly mistake I shouldn’t have made. Corrected now.
A bandit-infested region of India is trying to persuade men to undergo sterilisation by offering to fast-track their gun licence applications, an official said on Tuesday.
Officials in central Madhya Pradesh state’s Shivpuri district decided to adopt the policy—already tried out by some neighbouring states—to increase the low vascectomy rate.
“I came to know that it had to do with their perceived notion of manliness,” said Manish Shrivastav, administrative chief of Shivpuri district, part of the Indian Chambal region, which is famed for its lawlessness and bandits.
“I then decided to match it with a bigger symbol of manliness—a gun licence,” he said. “And the ploy worked.”
It’s innovative, and some would argue that more guns would also help lower the population. But flippancy aside, the problem with our country is not our population but our government. Our people, all of whom possesses the ingenuity, creativity and enterprise to put more into the world than they take from it, are constrained by a system of government that doesn’t allow them to fulfill their potential. India doesn’t need less people—it needs less government interference in our lives.
This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
More than a century after the company’s great forbear Jamshedji Tata scoured Ohio looking for steel expertise, India’s tech major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) opened a 1000-seat delivery centre outside Cincinnati on Monday, marking a small but significant counter to overwrought reports about job flight from the United States.
To be honest, I quote the only part of the Obama speech that made no sense. The rest of it was flat-out brilliant. He spoke of race in America with a nuance and subtlety that is rare in political discourse, but his rhetoric against free trade and profit, which are the driving forces of human progress, was archaic and befuddling. He was making a speech for posterity, not just for the Democratic Party nomination, and his populist pandering, which lacked the nuance that set the rest of his speech apart, struck a discordant note.
That said, even if he really believes his economic spiel and wasn’t just pandering, even if many of his ideas are wrong, I admire this man immensely. He could have taken the safe way out and “denounced and rejected” Jeremiah Wright. But instead, as the Philadelphia Inquirer put it, he “condemned the sins but embraced the sinner.” That takes courage and conviction, so hats off for that.
When someone is beating you over the head with a hammer, don’t sit there and take it. Take out a meat cleaver and cut off their hand.
That’s Bill Clinton speaking in 1981, as quoted by Karen Tumulty and David Von Drehle in Time Magazine. Things sure haven’t changed—even though Barack Obama doesn’t have a hammer, Hillary Clinton is certainly putting her meat cleaver to use.
In Slate, John Dickerson writes about the damage this is doing the Democratic Party. And Markos Moulitsas writes in Daily Kos that he opposes Clinton because “she cannot win without overturning the will of the national Democratic electorate and fomenting civil war, and she doesn’t care. [My emphasis.]”
Of course she doesn’t care. It’s all about her, her, her, and that’s somehow supposed to be empowering for women. Heh.
Posted by Amit Varma on 18 March, 2008 in
Politics
Taxpayer money running into several hundred crores is being splurged annually on the upkeep of bungalows in Lutyens’ Delhi.
These bungalows, used by India’s political and bureaucratic leadership, are white elephants in terms of running costs, thanks to their elaborate colonial style construction, huge lawns and staggering security paraphernalia.
[...]
The residences of the Gandhi family — Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka — saw a spend of nearly Rs47 lakh collectively during these three years.
I don’t have an issue with senior functionaries in the government getting perks with their jobs, but why on earth should the taxes you and I pay go towards Priyanka Gandhi’s plumbing and electricity expenses? Truly, the Gandhis are a royal family. I suppose I should just be glad that we live in the 21st century, or they’d have me hanged, drawn and quartered for my audacity in questioning their entitlements.
*
For more on how our government loots us, check out my Taxes Archive.
You begin to wonder, listening to Obama’s rhetoric, whether anything has changed in 20 years. “This is a defining moment in our history,” Obama likes to say; but that’s what Elizabeth Dole said when her husband ran for president in 1996. (They’re both wrong.) In 1992, Bill Clinton was complaining that “Washington” was a place “people came to just to score political points.” Eight years later Bush was complaining that “Washington is obsessed with scoring political points, not solving problems.” Now, in 2008, “Washington has become a place,” Obama says, “where politicians spend too much time trying to score political points.”
What’s to be done about all this Washington point-scoring? Bob Dole’s solution, 12 years ago, was to strongly favor “the things that lift this country up instead of dragging it down”; today Obama opposes “the politics where we tear each other down instead of lifting this country up.” Because Howard Dean failed in his promise in 2004--"we’re going to take this country back"--Obama revives the pledge, word for word, today. But like Gerald Ford, running against Jimmy Carter in 1976, he believes “we can disagree without being disagreeable.”
Onward they plod, these old warhorse phrases, until Obama climbs to the climax of his stump speech. Head bowed, brow furrowed, eyes flashing, he announces that we “will choose unity over division [Jesse Jackson, 1992]. We will choose hope over fear [Bill Clinton and John Kerry, 2004]. And we will choose the future over the past [Al Gore, 1992].” In so doing, we will overcome our “moral deficit [Bush, 2000; Gore, 2000; Newt Gingrich,1994]” by “bringing people beyond the divisions of race and class [Clinton 1992]” because the “story of our country [Ross Perot, 1992]” or the “genius of our country [Bush 2000]” or the “wonder of our country [George H.W. Bush, 1988]” is, as Obama says in 2008, “ordinary people doing extraordinary things [Perot, Bush, Bush, and Ronald Reagan, 1984].”
Talk like this is the elevator music of politics, soothing and inoffensive and unavoidable.
Well, few politicians come up with original rhetoric, and talk like this is inevitable given the limited range of sentiments that a politician can tap into. Should Obama be held to higher standards? I say yes, because those higher standards are an implicit promise of his campaign. The premise that he is different from the typical Washington politician lies at the heart of Obama’s appeal, and his oratory is a key part of that. If his policy proposals are template American leftism, and his rhetoric is borrowed, then where’s the “change we can believe in?”
Posted by Amit Varma on 17 March, 2008 in
Politics
The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.
A few readers have written in wondering why India Uncut is following American politics so closely. Well, what can I say? I’m a sucker for drama. And so here we go…
Geraldine Ferraro, who helped Walter Mondale lose 49 states in 1984…
The analogy of the day features in a Washington Post piece on the battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:
“This has got a heavyweight-fight tension,” says Angelo Dundee, the great trainer of such world champions as Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard. “The one with the toughest defense will win it,” he predicts. “The other guy gets worn out. That’s what Muhammad did against George Foreman in Zaire.”
The way Clinton is at it, I’m reminded more of Mike Tyson chewing on Evander Holyfield’s ear. Anyway, the quote of our time has to be the one uttered by Eliot Spitzer last August:
Driven by hubris, we become blind to our own fallibility and make terrible mistakes.
Just the first line of this report says so much about Indian politics:
CPI(M) members disrupted proceedings in the Rajya Sabha during zero hour, demanding that the BJP should not be allowed to explain its position on violence against CPI(M) offices in different parts of the country on Monday.
These are the kinds of choices we have. And then we’re lectured about ‘voter apathy’.
It took an outrageous amount of arrogance on Hillary Clinton’s part recently to suggest that she should head a Democratic ticket on which Barack Obama could be the vice-presidential candidate—after all, she’s in second place in this race. In a superb response, Barack Obama has put her in her place. Watch:
As I’d written recently, a joint ticket simply wouldn’t be credible after all that has happened recently. Obama, to his credit, seems to realise that, and isn’t playing the game of suggesting that she be his veep. As for the Clintons, well, they think they can get away with anything. No surprise there.
I had written an essay about a month ago about how India’s political parties don’t have the kind of internal democracy that the American parties demonstrate with such spectacular drama. Well, guess who agrees with me. The Times of Indiareports:
This is as candid as an Indian politician can ever get. According to Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi, there is no internal democracy in the Congress party, which is led by his mother, Sonia Gandhi. And the high command era has to end.
“India is a democratic country, but there is practically no internal democracy in any party, be it the Congress, BJP or any other,” Rahul said on Monday at the end of his four-day visit to Orissa.
Part of me wants to be cynical about this, and I could easily make a quip about the source of Rahul Gandhi’s power in his party and end the post there. But the fact remains that any change in the system can only come from an insider within it who benefits from the status quo, and Gandhi is perfectly positioned to push that change. If he didn’t intend that, why would he make such a statement? It doesn’t win him any brownie points from anyone. Perhaps there is hope.
More on Hillary Clinton’s 3am commercial: the girl who features in it supports Barack Obama.
And see this. It’s delightfully cheesy, and I can see why it won’t work for many voters, but which presidential candidate has ever inspired stuff like this?
(First two links via email from Sanjeev and Tushar respectively.)
All pundits know that political commentary is best done in hindsight. The ongoing primaries to pick presidential candidates in the USA bear that out. For more than 60 days now, the political stage has been beset by twists and turns that no writer of thrillers would dare use in a novel -which reader could keep track of so much? - and commentators have consistently read the tea leaves wrong, for no fault of their own. The real world is so complicated, with so much happening, that political analysis, when it is not safely in the past tense, is like predicting the weather by doing a survey of how flags are blowing.
Consider the primaries last week in Ohio and Texas. Hillary Clinton won those two states, thus keeping her campaign alive, and pundits are unanimous in agreement that this is significant for John McCain, who was confirmed as the Republican nominee on that day. But in what way?
It is possible that Clinton’s wins boost McCain’s chances. It ensures that Clinton and Barack Obama stay at each other’s throats for the next few weeks, damaging each other, as the Democratic Party gets more and more polarised internally. If Clinton is the nominee, many Obama followers, disgusted by the tactics of her campaign, won’t vote for her. If Obama is the candidate, many Clinton fans, who have been convinced that he is not worthy of being president, will withhold their vote. Even if they don’t vote for McCain, they do enough damage by not voting at all—such elections often come down to mobilizing the base.
This holds even if Clinton and Obama are somehow persuaded to come together on the ticket. After projecting himself as a harbinger of change, Obama will lose his campaign’s raison d’etre if he agrees to serve as the vice presidential nominee under someone he has painted as a Washington insider, representative of the same-old same-old. And after banging on for weeks about how Obama isn’t ready to be president, what pitiful rationalisation can Clinton trot out to be his vice-president?
There is also a view that the ongoing Democratic battle hurts McCain by denying him media attention. All the drama is now in the Clinton-Obama brawl, and that’s what the press will focus on, with McCain delegated to the inside pages. Also, by the time the Democratic nominee emerges, he or she will be battle-tested rather than damaged.
Both views could be wishful thinking, depending on which camp you’re in. Or they could be sage prognoses. We’ll know later.
Unforeseen
Only a high dose of a potent hallucinogen could have prompted a pundit to predict this scenario just two months ago. McCain, for one, had been out of the reckoning for months. His campaign had imploded around the middle of last year, and Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney had led the polls since. Thompson had fallen off a bit, but was the only credible conservative left in the race, while Mike Huckabee made a strong surge in the Iowa polls just before voting season began. Then the planets, no doubt with eyebrows raised, aligned themselves.
As the Economist wrote - in hindsight, of course - for McCain to win the Republican nomination, “Mike Huckabee had to beat Mitt Romney in Iowa, Rudy Giuliani had to pursue a deranged strategy, Fred Thompson had to contract narcolepsy, and the ‘surge’ had to go well.” Check, check, check, check. Send a Hollywood suit such a script and he will reply, “This is too far out, make it real.”
On the Democratic side, Clinton was inevitable before Iowa, and history after she came third there. But then she baffled commentators by winning New Hampshire, which some pundits ascribed to her tears on the campaign trail when asked about how she copes with the rigours of lusting for power. (Well, not those exact words, but you get the drift.) Apparently, she was ‘humanised’ by that.
It had been forecast that Bill Clinton would be Hillary’s biggest strength, but he charged onto the scene and cost her votes. He referred to Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War as a “fairy tale”, and by comparing Obama’s win in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s wins there, insinuated that like Jackson, Obama’s appeal was restricted to African-American voters. Condescending to Obama’s supporters wasn’t the smartest thing to do; neither was failing to plan after Super Tuesday, assuming that Clinton would be the nominee by then.
Brawling
Obama won eleven in a row after Super Tuesday, as Clinton became more and more desperate. But Obama was no more an unstoppable force than Clinton had been an immovable object. Clinton needed to win in both Ohio and Texas to stay in the hunt, and a series of events gave her an opening.
First, Obama was caught pandering, which should be as routine for a politician as swimming is for a fish - but voters mind when it is transparent. Free-market supporters had been worried at Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric, and had hoped that he was just pandering to the base, and would shift to more sensible policy talk after he won the nomination. Well, his chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, was revealed to have told a group of Canadian officials exactly this, to assuage their concerns. When the news became public, Obama’s campaign mismanaged it, at first denying that such a meeting took place, which was proven to be false.
At around this time, Obama’s controversial friendship with a shady Chicago real-estate dealer, Tony Rezko, resurfaced in the media as Rezko went on trial. And Clinton released a rather Republican commercial, claiming that if your kids were asleep at 3am and the phone rang in the White House, you’d want Clinton to pick it up, because she had the experience to deal with it. Obama’s campaign created a brilliant counter to this, pointing out that you’d want the phone to be picked up by someone who had made the right call on the Iraq War - but apparently that wasn’t enough.
Did Clinton win Ohio and Texas because of her negative campaigning, the Obama goof-ups regarding Goolsbee and Rezko, or because of the demographics, which favoured Clinton? Even in retrospect, it is hard to say - and the Obama camp is painting those losses as a victory for him, because he cut Clinton’s double-digit losses to much smaller margins. Still, one thing is clear - barring a miracle, or some seriously mischievous planets, Obama will have won more pledged delegates than Clinton at the end of this. So why is she still in the race?
Endgame
To win the nomination, Clinton will have to convince the superdelegates - Democratic Party officials who will effectively decide the nominee - to ignore the results of the primaries. She can give a number of reasons for this: If she manages to win the popular vote by then, which is possible if she wins the remaining races heavily, she can cite that as a reflection of the popular will; or she can point to the fact that she’s won the bigger states; or she can argue that the states that will be crucial in November are the ones which she has won; or she can point out that many of Obama’s wins came not in the primaries but in the caucuses, which attract a lower turnout and are, thus, ‘less democratic’; or she could ask them to vote with their conscience and select who they personally prefer; or, if push comes to shove, she could speak her mind and point out that she is a Clinton, she’s entitled to power, and anyone who stops her is part of a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Meanwhile, in the midst of the drama of last week, George W Bush endorsed John McCain for president, and no one noticed. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I’m sure the pundits are divided on the matter.
David Remnick, writing about how “it’s always been easier to contemplate a new master of the Kremlin by seizing on homey anecdotes,” tells us about Dmitry Medvedev:
Now comes Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, the next President of Russia. Five feet four. Forty-two years old. Lawyer. Friend and longtime protégé of Vladimir Putin. Husband (wife: Svetlana). Father (son: Ilya, age eleven). Nickname in the Kremlin: the Grand Vizier. Favorite book as a boy: “The Soviet Encyclopedia.” Understands “Olbanian,” the term of art for Russian Internet slang. Practices yoga. Swims each morning and evening. Big fan of seventies schlock bands. “I’ve loved hard rock since my school days,” he told an interviewer not long ago. “Today, for example, I can boast that I have the entire collection of Deep Purple.” And, if you’re still curious, Medvedev keeps an aquarium in his office at the Kremlin. He alone is permitted to feed the fish.
When Vladimir Putin came to power, on New Year’s Eve, 1999, we learned that he was a judo expert, that he had a poodle named Toska, and that his grandfather had been a cook for Lenin. But the most salient fact about him was that he was a career KGB agent. And, in eight years as President of the Russian Federation, Putin has been as true to his school as any Old Etonian. According to Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a well-regarded sociologist in Moscow, who studies the biographies of the Russian élites, Putin has filled the leadership ranks with former officials from the KGB and the FSB. As he once told an assembly of officers at Lubyanka, “There is no such thing as a former agent.”
The most salient fact about Medvedev is not that he will have been elected by the Russian people to be their President but that he was selected by Putin to be his junior partner. Medvedev, of course, understands his role. In the speech in which he announced his candidacy, he thrilled the spies, bureaucrats, and corporate barons who depend on Putin for their status and their wealth by declaring that, if, perchance, he was lucky enough to win, he would make Putin his prime minister. It was at that moment that Dmitry Medvedev became five feet three.
What a summary! What is there left to say about Medvedev after this?
I’ve read four books by Remnick, by the by, and recommend them all highly. (1, 2, 3, 4.) They are all exemplars of the art and craft of reporting and non-fiction writing.
The comment of the day comes at the end of a lovely piece by Gail Collins:
While Barack may understand the audacity of hope, only Hillary really gets the audacity of audacity.
Also in the New York Times, Bob Herbert explains how Hillary Clinton has opened a “trap door beneath her fellow Democrat” by insinuating that he would make a better president than John McCain. Such class.
The Washington Post has an in-depth story on how Clinton’s advisers spend much of their time fighting each other. An excerpt:
[Mark] Penn was growing increasingly aggravated by what he saw as an untenable management structure, which another aide described as an “oligarchy at the top.” Penn had no real people of his own on the inside and chafed whenever [Patti] Solis Doyle or [Harold] Ickes got involved in his sphere. At one point, he and Ickes, who have been battling each other within the Clinton orbit for a dozen years, lost their tempers during a conference call, according to two participants.
“[Expletive] you!” Ickes shouted.
“[Expletive] you!” Penn replied.
“[Expletive] you!” Ickes shouted again.
By the time it ends, if Clinton doesn’t get what she no doubt considers her due, you might see her doing this to Obama. [Expletive] you, Barama, or whatever your name is! Well, one can hope.
The Clinton team is setting the same trap for Obama my 4-year-old sets for her older brother. She hits him, knowing that he’ll get in trouble for hitting back.”
Posted by Amit Varma on 09 May, 2008 in
India |
News |
Politics
