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Allow Gay Marriage
Tweet Share on Facebook November 13, 2008 Comment (30)Keith Olbermann had a fine commentary the other night, on the passage of Proposition 8 in California, which denied gay couples to right to marry.
I had hoped to link today to a piece I wrote in 2004, as a columnist for the Denver Post, sharing my own thoughts on gay marriage. I wrote it after President Bush announced his support for a constitutional amendment, advanced by members of the Colorado delegation in Congress, limiting marriage to a man and a woman.
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In Defense of Sarah Palin
Tweet Share on Facebook November 12, 2008 Comment (31)Sarah Palin has been the target of a lot of cheap shots in the past 10 days.
Certainly, she was not qualified to be a septuagenarian heartbeat away from the presidency. The long and rugged American presidential campaign has the virtue of revealing such shortcomings, and it did.
But it's not just me being gallant, or contrarian, to wonder at the blithe way that the press is promoting anonymous Republican dime-droppers about her fancy clothes, or debate prep. It's a failing of Internet news that, these days, nasty tidbits appear to flow straight from "a source" into general circulation—seemingly without much verification.
Stories about Palin's considerable (albeit raw) political skills and accomplishments, meanwhile, are running against the powerful tide of conventional wisdom.
Today's papers, for instance, carried a story from Alaska, about scientific advancements that could provide Americans in the lower 48 with massive amounts of natural gas—a relatively clean and environmentally preferable energy source. Indeed, by one estimate, the new process could provide enough natural gas to the lower 48 states to heat 100 million homes for 10 years.
It will take a while to develop the new gas fields, and in that time, a pipeline will have to be built to convey the fuel to the rest of us.
Fortunately, a pipeline is in the works. But it is not until the final paragraph of the story in today's Washington Post that we learn that this would be the pipeline now scheduled to be built because of the foresight and diligence and negotiating skills of Alaska's governor—Sarah Palin.
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The Barack Obama Administration Should Make Change Gradual
Tweet Share on Facebook November 11, 2008 Comment (9)A few weeks after the 1994 election—the one in which the "Republican Revolution" ended six decades of Democratic rule in the House of Representatives—I got a chance to interview the new House speaker, Newt Gingrich.
The Republicans had seized the House, in part, because Bill and Hillary Clinton had failed to persuade the public and Congress to pass a comprehensive healthcare bill.
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Barack Obama Faces False Choices
Tweet Share on Facebook November 10, 2008 Comment (7)It is important for President-elect Obama, his policy team, and—perhaps most of all—the rest of us, to beware of false choices.
Left vs. right.
Main Street vs. Wall Street.
Stimulus vs. Thrift.
Big Government vs. Small.
These are the phony alternatives now being defined by Washington wise guys and the national media.
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Barack Obama Needs to Cut Taxes as He Promised
Tweet Share on Facebook November 6, 2008 Comment (1)Fired up! Ready to go! Cut taxes!
One would think that Barack Obama's vow to cut middle-class taxes is one of two inviolable promises he made in the campaign.
(The other being a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.)
But the ballots were not all counted before the big spenders in Washington—in temporary league with deficit hawks—have started grumbling about the wisdom and necessity of cutting taxes.
There are no signs of wavering in Obama HQ in Chicago. But should the members of the president-elect's economic policy team have any doubts that he needs to move quickly to fulfill his tax-cutting pledge, they should look to the Maryland suburbs, where liberal constituencies, with conviction, approved two antitax ballot questions Tuesday.
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President-Elect Barack Obama: Today We Corrected Our Historical National Flaw
Tweet Share on Facebook November 4, 2008 Comment (53)"The two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them." —Thomas Jefferson
We are confronted by enemies, sunk in war, bleeding gold.
And yet, our America is a finer place today.
It took 232 years; the loss of 600,000 lives in a horrible Civil War; the ugliness of Reconstruction; untold lynchings; a civil rights movement of 50 years; soul-crushing assassinations; church bombings and race riots; ruined presidencies; momentous Supreme Court decisions; and the consignment of the Democratic Party to minority status for four decades.
And that's just what is listed in the history books.
Unmentioned go the silent toll of crushed hopes, the forgotten bravery, the astonishing faith, and the awful sorrows of those black Americans who escaped the noose and the whip, but lived, generation after generation, as second-class citizens in a land that celebrated, each Fourth of July, a hollow proclamation that all men were equal.
And then, today.
Today, we got it done.
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The Emerging Democratic Majority
Tweet Share on Facebook November 4, 2008 Comment (6)A decade ago, ace political analysts Ruy Teixeira and John Judis foresaw a new Democratic coalition—of women, African-Americans, Hispanics, suburbanites, young people and professionals—that would form "The Emerging Democratic Majority."
Then came September 11, and history, for a time, seemed to have interrupted the inevitability of demography. Teixeira and Judis got a lot of ribbing.
But now, it's clear, they got it right. And that's what makes tonight's exit polls so very, very bad for the Republicans.
The GOP needs to move back to the center, quickly, and learn to compete for those bands of voters that Obama won tonight.
In politics, demography is destiny. Have Republicans learned that?
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Obama's Ohio Win
Tweet Share on Facebook November 4, 2008 Comment (2)In the words of Leonard Cohen:
"And it's hell to pay when the fiddler stops:
it's closing time." -
Barack Obama's Big Night Is Also Howard Dean's
Tweet Share on Facebook November 4, 2008 CommentOne of the night's big winners has to be Howard Dean. Four years ago, when no other major Democrat wanted it, Dean vigorously campaigned to be the national Democratic Party chairman. He'll end his term, it seems, having taken the House, Senate and (apparently the) White House from the Republicans, and seizing many major state houses. Dean's 2004 campaign was the pioneer that showed the potential of Internet organizing and fundraising to the Democrats. And his commitment, under fire, to a "50-state strategy" has been vindicated with Democratic victories in the last three years in the South, West and Midwest—and in Barack Obama's ability to widen the playing field tonight. Bravo, doc.
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African-American Voters Turn Out
Tweet Share on Facebook November 4, 2008 Comment (1)I'm sitting here watching the huge turnout numbers for black voters, and thinking of Lillie Mae Jackson, the great late civil rights leader from Baltimore, where I learned my craft as a political reporter.
Lillie Mae had a saying about African-Americans who didn't bother to register and vote. They were "beggars sitting on bags of gold," she liked to say. Somewhere, Lillie Mae is smiling tonight. Her beggars have found their gold.
