Dana Blankenhorn

How Long Has This Been Going On?

My 16-year old son and I got into a big fight this afternoon over the previous post.

Partly it was his exhaustion after a hard week of school. (Afterward he took a 3 hour nap.) Partly it was his natural inclination to play Argument Clinic over just about anything.

But he got me to thinking. Just how long has this been going on?

Unlike many trends this one -- calling the other candidate a danger to the planet -- can be dated precisely, at least in terms of mainstream use. The ad above ran once, and Lyndon Johnson was heavily criticized for calling out Barry Goldwater as an ignorant, war-mongering nutcase who might blow up the world.

But Johnson won, and the ad tapped into something in our lizard brain. Republicans, who had been thinking such things about Democrats since the era of Joe McCarthy, saw the ad as legitimizing the tactic, and have been impugning Democrats' patriotism ever since.

Today, of course, even Democrats use it against one another. Ads like Clinton's 3 AM ad are pernicious because they end discussion. They do not further debate. They call all those who disagree illegitimate, unworthy, and call their supporters traffickers in treason. Beneath that any kind of corruption may freely hide, since there is no such thing as legitimate dissent from its premise.

The Inside Game (Politics Disgusts)

If Barack Obama somehow loses this election, either in the primary or the general, it will be down to his failure at playing The Inside Game. (The discussion is continued here.)

The Inside Game is the disgusting side of politics. It's what we most hate about the process. Yet because it fascinates the press, and informs (deforms) their narratives, it's a game you have to win in order to create real change.

On the other hand, if you play it you are changed by it, and real change thus becomes impossible. This Catch-22 is the sick heart of the Nixon Thesis of Conflict, the line that connects us all to Spiro Agnew, and drags all of us -- no matter our party, our beliefs, or our position within the system -- down. It's the Lizard Brain which destroys the Better Angels of our Nature.

Win the game and it poisons you, or lose the game and lose everything. Refuse to play and you lose. Refuse the premise, back down in any way, and you lose.

This is why we hate politics in America, because this crap is still allowed to go on, enabled by a media elite determined that, whoever claims power in theory, they hold that power by the balls in fact.

The Virtuous Cycle of a War Against Oil

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 10 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Right now the U.S. economy, and the U.S. in general, is in a vicious cycle. (Picture from DC Fred  .)

Wealth is decreasing, so sales are slowing. Sales are slowing, so the economy is tanking. The economy is tanking, so the dollar is tanking. The dollar is tanking, so we're importing inflation. Prices are rising so we can't cut interest rates. High interest rates causes wealth to decrease...lather, rinse, repeat.

What if we could replace this vicious cycle with a virtuous one, as we had in the 1990s?

We can, but it can't be the same. Back then we were building the Internet. That's built. We could improve it, add lanes, add competition, and that would be a very good thing indeed, but it won't provide the kind of virtuous cycle we got back in the day. Sorry.

But we can get that virtuous cycle if we commit to a War Against Oil.

What does a War Against Oil mean? It means a total commitment, on the order of a real war (not the kind we've been fighting in Iraq) to eliminating the use of hydrocarbons in our lives. That's the clearly defined victory, and (as the current President likes to remind us) nothing less than victory will do.

How do we do it?

Becoming the Change

Here is a simple (sounding) way Barack Obama can win Pennsylvania, win the nomination, win the Presidency, do something powerfully good and illustrate his theme of Change. It's a follow up to my post of earlier today.

The opportunity is right in front of us, six weeks leading up to the Pennsylvania primary. And the mechanism is the old Dean Corps.

The Dean Corps was a clever idea concocted by Democracy for America, unfortunately just as the Dean campaign was folding in 2004. The ideawas that Dean supporters would volunteer to do work in communities that were about to hold primaries or caucuses -- like Iowa.

Now imagine what the Obama campaign, with its enormous database, its volunteer army, its energy, and its message could do in Pennsylvania over the next six weeks, based on that simple idea?

Imagine seeing white folks in inner-city Philadelphia helping reclaim a park, or black folks doing something similar in, say, Lancaster. Imagine helping people at senior centers, in those "white ethnic" neighborhoods Chris Matthews keeps yammering about.

All you need to do is collect a lot of projects, organize teams based in those communities, create sign-up lists, pick leaders who live nearby, and have the campaign provide snacks. If Clinton people show up, give them a shovel, a sandwich, a kind word -- draw them in. Same thing with McCain supporters. Same thing with the apathetic. It's politics as not-politics.

Only the Barack Obama campaign has the scaled Internet-based computing systems needed to organize this, to make this happen. This is how you capitalize on it.

What Change Means

Memo to the Obama campaign. (UPDATE is here.)

Rather than getting lost in the weeds of charge and counter-charge, or letting the media dictate a narrative, you merely need to put some meat on the bones of what change means to win.

Change, repeated often enough, just becomes another word. It becomes a brand, like Coke, which is fizzy water, not a solution to real problems.

There is plenty in Obama's current program to put the meat on changes' bones. I don't have to invent a thing.

I'm not a videographer. Maybe you can produce this. I'm going to describe it as a series of lines and scenes. See if it makes sense to you.

What Change Means (Voiced by the candidate)

1. Change means bringing our boys and girls home -- Pictures of troops returning to families, reunions, parades.
2. Change means engaging all our assets -- Pictures of Obama meeting foreign leaders, shaking hands.
3. Change means making things to pay our bills -- Pictures of people in modern factories making windmills, solar cells, computer chips, etc.
4. Change means serving one another -- Pictures of young people in nursing homes, teaching, etc.
5. Change means  consensus, our common humanity, living what we believe and seeking new mountains to climb -- A jumble of hopeful scenes.

Seeking Bottom

Markets are a lot like alcoholics. They can't start their recovery until they hit bottom.

In an auction market, like stocks, this happens fairly quickly. The buyers disappear, and sellers capitulate, those who were burned by the bubble lick their wounds.

The bottom is not reached until you have an honest "buying opportunity," based on fundamentals, usually at a valuation of about half what the commodity was worth before -- often less. Often this bottom will be tested, and for years after a bust your gains will be modest, even if you got what looked at the bottom like a bargain.

Lock in the Gains

With the price of oil now well over $100/barrel, the time has come for the U.S. economy to lock in its gains. (Tom Noddy does magic with bubbles.)

What do I mean by that?

There are a lot of energy saving, and energy producing ideas, which make no sense at $30/barrel but which make great sense at $80/barrel. But we can't make them so long as there is substantial risk that the price will go back to $30/barrel.

We were at a moment similar to this almost three decades ago. People were talking them about wind farms and wood stoves and all sorts of things, with oil at around $50/barrel. Instead of locking in those gains and letting innovation create a market, we decided on a strategy of killing the bastards standing between us and cheap oil. It worked. All those ideas disappeared.

The Money Trap

Hillary Clinton may be poised for a comeback on Tuesday.

The reason for that is a truth that even the Netroots have yet to acknowledge.

TV ads can be counter-productive.

This is an artifact of a changing media landscape. As the new medium rises, the old media is disbelieved. This is not news in the commercial world. It's only news to those who follow politics.

Remember 40 years ago when conservatives started railing against the "liberal media" and "liberal Hollywood," just as they were becoming a majority? Same thing. Agnew (and his muse, Safire) were reflecting attitudes which were already abroad in the world, in the new majority they spoke for, that TV was believable and "older media" was not.

The same thing is happening now. We believe what we see and read on the Internet, and discount what comes over the TV. Especially the ads.

Don't believe me? Then explain how John McCain, who was grossly outspent by his rivals, especially Mitt Romney (but before that Giuliani and even Thompson) rode to his party's nomination?