Dana Blankenhorn

What About Them?

This is unlikely to be a direct re-run of the 1966 election for House and Senate. (This illustration is of the 1966 House races, from Wikipedia. Note the biggest Republican swings were in the Midwest.)

It's going to be much, much worse for Republicans than that.

In 1966 Democrats lost 48 House seats and only 3 Senate seats. Such a result this time would give them a healthy House majority neutered by a Senate minority.

In that year, Democrats tried very hard to make Republicans the issue. They called them dangerous. They called them warmongers. They linked them to Joe McCarthy and Herbert Hoover. The trouble was both were dead. 

Republicans this year at least have live villains. The problem is the claims don't pass the smell test. And anger against the Bush Administration is becoming palpable. As angry as Republican rhetoric may be, Democratic rhetoric is angrier, and this is a new phenomenon. Even the Republican "Munich" argument is finally getting some serious push-back.

Hollywood Remake Time: Meet John Doe

You know how Hollywood loves to remake old movies, because it's cheaper than coming up with new stories?

Well here's one for our time. Meet John Doe.

This was Frank Capra's thinly-veiled attack on fascism, which he cleverly chose to set in the USA. Gary Cooper is John Doe, a man created by newspaperwoman Barbara Stanwyck as a circulation gimmick. Edward Arnold plays D.B. Norton, the newspaper owner, who wants to use Doe to make himself dictator.

How easy to update is that? Just turn the newspaperwoman into an afternoon anchor, set it at Fox News, and you don't even have to change the script.

The game for today is setting the new cast. For that let's play the I want, I'll take, I got game. You know that one. I wanted a big star, I'll take a TV star, I got me a nobody. That way we have some budget options:

Validation

One word explains both the growth of partisan blogs and my inability to get much traction in this new medium.

Validation.

Validation is what we seek in the blogosphere. We read things we wish to agree with. We go into a fantasy world where other people are like us, and we stay there as long as we need to in order to gain courage to face the crises around us.

This should not be a surprise. In fact, it's what has happened with every new medium in our past, in every run-up to a political crisis.

What do you think the Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan's Island and Green Acres were all about? They were TV fantasies, which parents of the time rushed to for validation. The same was true for the sitcoms of early 1930s radio, such as Amos & Andy and (later) the Jack Benny Show. They sold a fantasy in which there was plenty to eat and problems were solved in 20 minutes.

Another Win for Open Source Politics

One of the primary proofs of the Open Source Thesis is that, when issues arise which concern the Internet, Right Blogistan and Left Blogistan unite.

Such was the case when the Federal Election Commission tried to regulate Internet sites like Dailykos and Redstate. Such was the case in the network neutrality fight.

Such is the case again, today, over a "secret hold" placed on a bill aimed at making the government publish how it spends our money.

Once again, the right and left were together, both on the merits of the issue and on the need to uncover the Secret Senator. Instapundit and otheer conservatives initially thought it was Democrat Robert Byrd. Democratic sites seemed to think it was Sen. Mike Crapo or Sen. Orrin Hatch.

It turned out to be Sen. Ted Stevens. There may still be a Democratic Senator involved, and there will likely be no sympathy for that person from Left Blogistan when they are unmasked. (Especially since the Democratic National Committee has chosen to put itself on the line over the issue. )

UPDATE: DailyKos writes that the second hold was indeed placed on the bill by Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd.

Slaves to Munich

Why do we have crises every generation?

Because of assumptions that span generations.

The most famous such problem is slavery. It lay, in Lincoln's words, like a coiled snake under the table during the deliberations of the Constitution.

By the time of the Civil War, that snake had lain underneath our table for 72 years, protected and nurtured by the Constitution. This is why, in his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln dated the founding of America not from that document, but from the Declaration of Independence 13 years earlier, “four score and seven” (87) years ago.

He did this for a reason. He did it to overturn the powerful assumptions of his time. Old assumptions have enormous power over the future, even after they have become worthless.

The same was true for the problems of the 1890s which brought us Populism and Progressivism. Their root causes were to be found in Jacksonian Democracy, the lack of a central bank and the reliance on tariffs to fund the government. This meant there was nothing but gold on which to base our currency, and nothing but tariff revenue to fund operations. President Grover Cleveland was forced to borrow gold from J.P. Morgan to keep the government going following the Panic of 1893.

The causes of the 1960s crisis were of a similar age. From Cleveland's time, as Hofstadter wrote in books like The Age of Reform, America had stood for constant social, political, and economic change, always more tolerant, always more liberal, always more egalitarian. The Greatest Generation saw what this was doing to their children, freedom interpreted as license, and they said, as one, "enough."

Our crisis also has a cause, in the form of a generations-old assumption. People like Matthew Yglesias say they are shocked at government attempts to excuse and rationalize our Iraq disaster.

But if he listened to the Secretary of Defense last week, he would have heard it loud, clear, and proud.

Munich.

Dixie Holds Firm

While everyone in Left Blogistan is going through all sorts of gyrations to avoid electoral giddiness, let me tell you a different story.

In the ancient base of hatred, that base still holds. (That's the current Georgia flag to the left.)

I am speaking here of the Deep South, the swath of states across the Southeast that gave the Confederacy its last full measure of devotion. The states where the Klan first rose, where it rose again after the Leo Frank lynching. Jim Crow's hometown.

We like to pretend things changed a lot with the coming of the Sunbelt. Well, some things did. The old Democratic set-up of overt racism and no power sharing was replaced by something more akin to the 1870s, with Republican carpet-baggers (Newt Gingrich is from Pennsylvania) giving a few black satraps bits of power while they controlled the pursestrings and used that power just like in Randy Newman's 1974 classic song, Rednecks:

We're rednecks, we're rednecks
We don't know our ass from a hole in the ground
We're rednecks, we're rednecks
We're keeping the niggers down

This part of the Republican base still holds firm, and I've had the honor of covering it this year for Voic.Us. Want to take a tour? Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy trip.

Assuming the Worst

One mark of an approaching crisis is the projection of desperation.

This is now all over Left Blogistan. The most popular "October Surprise" at this point is a nuclear attack on Iran, perhaps on Halloween.

For this reason, and based on other paranoid fantasies, leaders of Left Blogistan are certain that the electoral football is about to be snatched from them, Charlie Brown style. Markos Moulitsas, for instance, is predicting just 7-10 seats will switch parties this November, giving Republicans a blank check to do whatever the hell they want to.

But that's now how these things work, historically.

At some point, inertia paralyzes the dominant thesis, which goes into auto-pilot just when its opponents are expecting some grand turnaround. Republicans were very cautious going into the 1966 elections (especially conservatives, since they had allowed most primaries to be won by more-liberal candidates), by Democrats in 1930, etc. etc. etc.

History shows opponents of the dominant Myth were giving its advocates too much credit. I think that is true in this case as well.

The fact is, a nuclear attack on Iran will not happen. We're talking Fail Safe territory here. Iran is awfully close to Russia, it's a lot closer to China than it is to us, and I feel it certain that diplomats from those countries will, if it comes to that, make their veto clear in no uncertain terms. And at that point, the American generals will simply refuse to comply, no matter how much King George may demand it.

The world, in other words, will not come to an end for anyone's political convenience.

Meg Whitman Earns Her Keep

While most analysts are looking at what the Google-eBay deal means for Google, I think it's time we look at what it means for eBay.

At a single stroke, eBay CEO Meg Whitman (left) has neutered all her main rivals. After signing Yahoo (which tried auctions) to run ads on its U.S. site a few months ago, it has now gotten Google to sign with it on a line which is dotted.

Since buying Skype for way-too-much money, Whitman has been holding one of the poorest hands among the U.S. Internet giants. Skype is proprietary, it still has a very limited business model, and eBay is not really known as a technology powerhouse.

But Google is. And now, with the Google Talk team yoked-on as support (supposedly), the company can get on with the hard work of delivering on its promises without worrying about what might be happening in other Internet boardrooms.

What happens next?

The Decade of Transparency

Sometimes a new trend can be forgotten, even rejected by its advocates,  due to the immense resistance to it coming from those in power.

Such is the case with transparency. Despite the jailing of journalists and bloggers, despite the murders of journalists in the Mideast, despite the Great Chinese Firewall, this decade will likely be known as The Decade of Transparency.

Secrets just can't hide. (Like the one the fellow on the right was trying to peddle about not knowing the guy on the left, whose picture was photo-shopped next to him by a Web site.)

We know far more about the run-up to the Iraq War than our fathers did about Vietnam in 1966. They in turn knew far more about Vietnam then, thanks to TV, than their parents did about the run-up to the Great Depression in the early 1930s. They in turn knew more about what was going on, thanks to radio, than their parents knew about the 1890s. And so on.

Of course, the medium of our time, what makes all this possible, is the Internet. Once one person gets something out, and assuming it is valid, it is repeated, and passed along. Not only that, but others seek out the same or supporting facts where they are.

The  conservative movement spent decades building this kind of capability (liberals call it the Vast Right Wing Noise Machine) yet bloggers have managed to copy its impact in just a few years.  This is important to know.

The same sort of thing is happening in the world I cover for a living, software. The open source movement has replicated most of the features of proprietary programs in a very short time, and they move ahead far more quickly than the proprietary behemoths can, because of transparency. You can see the code.

Thus we can make a direct connection between the worlds of business and technology on the one hand, and the worlds of journalism and politics on the other.

Every other political crisis in American history was marked by a similar technological shift:

• Books and newspapers in the 1850s. That's how we learned about slavery.
• Mass-market penny newspapers in the 1890s. That's how we learned about unions.
• Radio in the 1930s. That's how we learned about the Depression.
• Television in the 1960s. That's where we saw Vietnam.

Each medium had its own vocabulary, which became the dominant political vocabulary of the succeeding generation.

The War Against Journalism

The War Against Journalism is a lot like the Copyright Wars, or the War for Decency, or the U.S. government's War on Internet Gambling. Or the Chinese Great Firewall, for that matter.

A lot of casualties, but ultimately futile.

There is no doubt that a war against journalism is taking place. Iraq has been the costliest war in history, for journalists. Glenn Greenwald says journalists are now considered legitimate military targets, by both sides.

That's not all. The Judith Miller jailing sparked a new wave of government stifling of the U.S. media. Subpoenas are now regularly issued, and enforced. Journalists are jailed, sometimes, for what appears to be little reason. And there seem to be few complaints from the public.

Yet we are entering a Golden Age of Journalism. More journalism, real journalism, is being produced in this country and around the world than ever before.

The reason is simple. The Internet. This medium, the one you're reading, has revolutionized journalism by letting anyone and everyone participate in it.