It’s way too early to be writing an obituary for the Obama presidency. At this point in Clinton’s first term, he hadn’t even bottomed out yet. You have to remember that Clinton hit such a low that the much less fragmented national media of the time was talking about whether or not the very presidency itself was still relevant in the first half of 1995, but Clinton pretty much sailed through to a re-election in 1996 that was predictable quite a ways out from the first week of November. It’s reasonable to be a lot less optimistic about the continuation of Pelosi’s term as Speaker, though.

If I were going to do an autopsy on the Obama presidency today, though, the likely causes of death are simple.

1. He did not understand that his opponents would do anything to win, including intentionally hurting the country.

2. He did not understand how dishonest and vicious his opponents would be. That is just an unforgivable amount of stupidity or naivete after what they did to Bill Clinton.

3. He did not understand that in an economy this bad, people care more about results than about appearances of bipartisanship or about “the tone”.

My zombie blog is just for gloating today.

Back on April 30th, I wrote a post wherein I basically said that all of the rumors of Charlie Crist’s political demise were greatly exaggerated. At the time, The Times, The Post, and the networks were calling his impending and then announced run as an independent a desperate move to try to save his career. In one article I linked, a pollster from Mason Dixon walked us through how Crist couldn’t win. I disagreed and laid out why.

Yesterday, I got an email from a Democratic fund raiser who has put his law practice on hold to raise money for Crist. I also saw a couple different blog entries (one at the Post, can’t recall the other) that were surprised to see Crist back from the dead. This is the problem with the national media. Once they have a set narrative, the whole lot of them just gets on board and will usually stick with it until (and sometimes beyond) the point where they just can’t deny that the facts say something else.

I’m really not surprised to see Democrats supporting Crist, as I wrote in April. No Democratic governor ever had the guts to take office and then almost immediately restore the voting rights of felons. That’s, by far, not the only thing that a Crist did that a lot of Democrats wished Lawton Chiles or Bob Graham had done as governor. Conventional wisdom says that California is the trendsetter in American politics, but our current polarized climate started in Florida. In the late 80s, the state’s African American leaders in the legislature made a deal with the devil. They got districts drawn that gave them free seats for life (and in some cases now handed down to their kids) in exchange for making the rest of the state permanently Republican. Many of Florida’s districts don’t even field a challenger from the other party. This has lead to an entire state where most of the legislative and (to a lesser degree) the Senate candidates have pandered to the far right to win the primary, knowing they would probably not face a challenger (and not a viable one if they did) from the other party.

Crist has been a moderate as a statewide figure as Attorney General and as Governor. He’s really the first statewide figure since Bob Graham to try to appeal to the broad center rather than his party’s base. If I were still a Floridian and Crist were running for re-election as a governor, I very might well be placing my first vote for a Republican governor. Out of the three candidates running for Senate, he’s the one who would be most likely to get my vote right now. Some Democrats have said (and Rubio’s people made use of this) that Crist was the best Democratic governor of their lifetimes. I will not be surprised at all if it turns out that a big chunk of the Democratic establishment comes out publicly in favor of him and raises money for him.

I have decided to let this place go. I’m gonna renew the domain name for another year. If I think of some other vehicle for the domain in the next year, I may keep it longer than that. If not: ashes to ashes, bits to bits.

I’ve come to think that writing about social issues is also useless. That was the only possible other purpose I had in mind for the blog. I have found in my own writing and in reading some other more famous blogs that too much of how your writing is perceived comes not from the ideas in your piece, but from the biography of the writer. I don’t believe that my own words are ever either so vaguely stated or so poorly written as to allow for, literally, opposite interpretations. Yet I’ve found that to be the case at times. People who know me, know my family background, know my (admittedly lapsed) resume as an activist, etc will think I am saying one thing while people who don’t know or only know a portion of that will think I’m saying the opposite. If my writing isn’t that vague, then the reasons I’ve stated seem adequate ones for quitting. It’s the author, not the words that people are reading. If my writing is that vague, then I’m not suited to doing this.

I am thinking about abandoning this site. I’ve made four posts here in 2010. Two of them have been about politics. One of my earliest memories is of watching some coverage of the 1976 Democratic convention on TV with my dad. As a four year old, my fascination was with the hats they were wearing. It’s not exactly a political memory, but is something that I feel shows how early in my life I found myself influenced by or focused on something related to politics. I’ve been pretty well obsessed with politics ever since elementary school, though. I volunteered for my first campaign at 15. For the next decade, I volunteered for all sorts of city, county, state, and national campaigns. I was pretty sure that I wanted to run for and serve in elected office. That changed when I was struck with depression at 25. I emerged from that experience as an introvert. The outgoing, energetic me that relished the idea of campaigning was dead. I switched from a poli sci focus to a history focus for grad school partially as a result of that, but I never lost the interest in politics.

In the last year, I’ve found that I’m losing that interest. The environment is so toxic. The structure has been so altered by recent supreme court rulings that I don’t think we’ll have a functional political system again in my lifetime. I no longer really believe that much good can be done through the political system. At best, you can stave off some of the bad, maybe even roll some of the bad back at times. I think there are ways to do good and I’m kind of actively looking toward figuring one out that will work for me. I also kind of feel like blogging about politics is just an enormous waste of time. Unless you’re famous for doing it, I don’t think your words can ever establish a meaningful reputation or track record by which you’ll be judged. In a medium that is only words, your actions outside of it don’t matter either, again, unless you’re famous for them.

For the last six months, the fact that I actually use some email addresses associated with this domain has been the only thing that’s kept me from letting it expire. If I continue to feel about this site like I’ve felt for a while, this may be my last update. The domain expires in a couple months. I may renew it for one more year to have time to switch out the email addresses and archive some content. If I don’t see you here again, thanks for reading. Hopefully, I’ll see you somewhere else.

Stephen A. Smith starts this column by saying “If one thing is clear about Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, it is that it invites stereotyping and racial profiling…”, but then goes on to say that Major League Baseball should stay out of it. He, like every sports writer, is aware of the stand that the NFL took in Arizona over the MLK, jr holiday a couple of decades ago. It took some really tortured arguing to come up with a way of saying that the NFL took a stand over civil rights, but that “stereotyping and racial profiling” by a state government isn’t somehow a civil rights issue. This is the dumbest thing I’ve read today, for sure.

I’m pondering whether or not Stuart Green from Rutgers Law is a moron, a liar, or a hack. It may not be possible for me to know which category he falls into. His opinion piece at the Monitor is so full of errors and distortions that it certainly seems as if it could have been his intent to be dishonest. Though the simpler answer is that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Based on the accounts that I’ve read Brian Hogan went above and beyond the call of duty in trying to return that iPhone prototype. He had absolutely no way of knowing who the person who left the phone at the bar is. It’s pretty damn reasonable to assume that a person who leaves the phone they’ve been using at a bar is the owner of that phone. It’s not so reasonable to assume that the owner is the firm that manufactured the device. Mr. Hogan originally believed the device was an iPhone 3GS. The device had been disguised to give that appearance. When Mr. Hogan later examined the phone closely and found that it wasn’t a standard 3GS, he took the step of contacting Apple and telling them what he’d found. How much struggling to notify someone at an enormous multinational corporation do you have to do to have satisfied Stuart Green’s standards?

Mr. Green’s assertion that this is a clear case of theft couldn’t be more wrong. I see neither an intent to steal nor an act of theft. I see a young man who made reasonable attempts and then some to notify the owner of this property that he possessed it. If Mr. Hogan isn’t guilty of theft, then the entire “case” that Stuart Green makes against Gizmodo and Jason Chen falls apart. The California shield law should have applied to Mr. Chen’s home. He should not have had his home searched by the police. The judge who issued the warrant to do so and the police who served it, after being informed of the shield law’s validity in this case should be disciplined.

The GOP is trying really hard to convince people that Charlie Crist is a dead man. He might not win his bid for the senate this fall, but I think it’s going to be a much closer fight than a lot of observers do. I’m a little more optimistic about Crist’s chances than the Brad Coker from Mason Dixon is quoted as being in this article. If Crist can stay competitive in the money, I think he stays in this thing and Meek ends up becoming the distant third instead of Crist dropping off. A couple of months back in an article I read someone in the Democratic Party in Florida was quoted as saying that Crist was the best Democratic governor of the state in his life time. I’m not surprised to see Crist getting so much of his support from Democrats. He’s got the Police Benevolent Assoc. and the teachers unions behind him. If he pulls in a couple more well organized constituent groups that are good at putting feet on the ground in the state, he could still win this thing.

While most Floridians are going to get introduced to Kendrick Meek in the next few months, I know who the guy is quite well. I’ve never been particularly impressed with him as a candidate before. He seemed to have done little more than inherit his position from his much more interesting and dynamic mother. If he were Kendrick Smith, I doubt he’d have been part of the Lt. Gov’s security detail as a state trooper. He may well not have been a sitting congressman right now. The long and deep ties to Florida’s African American political class is absolutely and without a doubt that biggest asset he’s got. I don’t think it’ll be hard for Crist to peel away Democrats. Unlike every other Republican at the statewide level over the last two decades, Crist has pretty good relations with the African American and non-Cuban Latino communities in this state. I think Crist’s decision to stay in this thing as an independent (and the steps he’s taken in the last month to make that viable) have been really good for him. I saw mention of a poll today that has him with 56% approval ratings in Florida. That’s up 11 points from a month ago and makes him surprisingly popular for a governor in a state with such a bad economy. At a time when all the tea party sheep have been saying that trying to govern as a post-partisan has spelled the end of Crist’s career, it may turn out to have been the thing that saved it. I’d be surprised if Meek or Rubio has anything approaching a statewide 56% approval rating. I kinda doubt meek even has 56% name recognition. In addition to just being a big media story for the run itself, Crist has the advantage of being the sitting governor. He’s not going to need to do as much media buying as the other two.

“All politics is local” is one of the most unquestioned pieces of political wisdom in the US system. In pondering that phrase in the context of the last couple of years of US politics, I’ve found myself having walked into one of those media studies paradoxes. All politics is local. Yes, this is true. Simultaneously, in the age of the internet all politics is national. This is why 2008 and 2009 were such bad years for the GOP. They’re why 2010 might not be as good as the prognosticators are saying it will. It’s why, whether 2010 is great for the GOP or not, they have major long term hurdles ahead. You can’t pursue a “southern strategy” in American politics anymore. The racist thugs that show up at your small town or suburban rallies (and your tea parties) and the things you say to rile them up will show up on youtube before your rally is even over. You can’t smile and nod to these people and then play Mr. or Mrs. Moderate when the network news cameras are on you. Perhaps more importantly, you cant expect anything you say at even the most closed door, invitation only session to be private anymore.

I don’t know how long this moment, this particular overlap of the old and the new, will carry on. I do know that it’s a moment that works in favor of the Democrats generically, though. They’ve spent 100 years desperately trying to purge their left flank. The Republicans have spent several decades trying to do the opposite in the form of a winking, silent embrace of their right flank. These are deeply ingrained habits, instincts even, in the two parties.

I’ve read a bunch of editorials like this and this blog post from the Washington Post’s Jo-Ann Armao in the last couple of days. It makes me marvel that people with so little understanding of the first amendment can be in journalism. Of course, with the quality of journalism for the last decade, perhaps I shouldn’t marvel. No one is infringing Limbaugh’s free speech rights. There’s nothing “unamerican” about this as the Jackson Sun put it. This is the free market that conservatives worship at its finest. The NFL doesn’t want to alienate customers. Whether it would be Limbaugh himself (almost certainly) or his detractors–all exercising their free speech rights–having him as a part owner in the league would do that. The market spoke when it made Limbaugh the very wealthy drug addict that he is today. Likewise, it spoke when the NFL made a business decision not to invite him into their owner’s club. That’s why a lot of us don’t worship the market the way conservatives do. There’s no appeal to fairness or anything other than the bottom line.

A couple of days ago, Michael Moore gave a speech at Public Citizen’s HQ in DC. The whole thing is about 18 minutes with another 12 minutes where he takes questions. It’s worth a watch and you can find it here. But my favorite bit from it comes well into the speech part and it is this:

“To the Democrats in Congress, who don’t quite get it: I want to offer a personal pledge. I - and a lot of other people - have every intention of removing you from Congress in the next election if you stand in the way of health care legislation that the people want. That is not a hollow or idle threat. We will come to your districts and we will work against you, first in the primary, and, if we have to, in the general election. You don’t think so? You think that we’re just going to go along with you because you are Democrats?

You should think again. This is the No. 1 domestic issue on people’s minds right now. It’s the No. 1 cause of bankruptcies in this country. Medical bills. It’s the No. 1 cause of foreclosures in this country. Medical bills.

We will organize the thousands of people in your district who have suffered as a result of this cruel health care system that we have - we will organize them and we will come after you and we will remove you from office. Make no mistake about that. You had better get behind the President. If you think you were afraid of a few people at a town hall meeting, you haven’t seen anything yet. And let me just say, there are some people in this room, if you remember back to the election of 2000, that are fairly reckless individuals when it comes to politics. They don’t really care - when they see a hypocrite, when they see somebody who’s turned their back on the people who put them into office, they will be relentless, relentless in working against you. Even if it means that the Democrat doesn’t win.”

I still think that voting for Nader was an irresponsible act in 2000. Look at our Supreme Court today for my answer as to why. It’s the same answer I gave at the time. But knocking out some Democratic congressman and senators can be a powerful act and often has been in the last hundred years in this country.