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.

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.

In the last week, I’ve really been bothered by something. Arlen Specter has said that his vote on EFCA is a sign that he’s not going to be an automatic 60th vote for the Democrats. He’s cited that has a sign of his independence, said it’s a bad bill, and used the GOP talking point/lie about how it takes away the right to have a secret ballot election.

Two sessions ago, Specter was a sponsor of EFCA. In the last session, he voted for cloture on the bill. It’s quite obvious that he only came out against EFCA because he hoped doing so would help him against Toomey in the GOP primary. I’ve seen various reporters and talking heads mention this disparity. I’ve never seen a single one of them challenge him directly on it when they’ve interviewed him. Maybe someone has, but in multiple interviews I’ve seen on CBS, MSNBC, and CNN, it hasn’t been brought up. I might be willing to let it go if Specter didn’t so consistently cite this one vote in interviews. The hypocrisy is galling, but the media complicity is more so.

Specter may well be an important vote on getting good health care reform through the senate this year. I’ll take it if it comes, but if Joe Sestak ends up challenging Specter in the primary I’ll donate money to Sestak’s campaign.

I probably shouldn’t allow myself to watch any national TV news in the morning. It makes me cranky. We usually watch a local channel. That channel has genuine, if sometimes odd personalities instead of the usual plastic news people. They’re so unlike typical large city local news that we’ve taken to calling the broadcast “the island of misfit news”. I woke up this morning, made my coffee, etc then turned on the TV. It was still on MSNBC after last night’s post speech coverage. I watched Monica Novatny play a clip where Obama pledges to cut the deficit in half during his first term. She and an analyst then proceed to do an SNL style “Really?!” segment where they rant about how he can’t possibly cut the debt in half.

The federal debt and the federal deficit are not the same thing. How does someone without a basic understanding of our decades long political debate make it as a news anchor?

On the topic of the speech itself, I don’t have much to say. It was an okay speech. The novelty of having a president who is well spoken and knows what he’s talking about hasn’t worn off yet, but I’m sure it will. The news of the night should be that Bobby Jindal all but killed any chance he had of being president in 2012 last night. His speech sounded like he was reading a children’s story to a room full of kindergartners. Beyond the incredibly poor delivery, though, it was the same generic speech that every Republican has given for twenty years. Please let them continue to be just that politically tone deaf for the next four years. We just might increase our majorities in 2010 and 2012 enough to undo some of the damage that’s been done to this country since 1981.

…is the best way that I’ve ever heard anyone say that right wing economics is full of shit.

The media and, seemingly, much of the country has been having a good laugh at the Bush-Cheney legacy tour. At a certain level, it is laughable. Few people who have lived as conscious adults or adolescents through the last eight years, let along the better ones before them, would think this has been a good time in America or that Bush has been a good leader. Don’t count on that sentiment to hold over time. It might. The last eight years might turn out for many Americans to be an even worse time than we think it was and Bush may be widely vilified.

My favorite column from Paul Krugman starts out like this: “Historical narratives matter.That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal;they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, even eras from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.”

The Bush-Cheney legacy tour may be a ham-fisted start to the project of rehabilitating their legacies, but it won’t be the end of that project. Once the GOP has done whatever self examination it’s going to do, it will find ways to claim successes over the last few years. It will spin some of the things that we find most objectionable as being among those successes. You can be damn sure that they’re not going to give up on their “regulation is bad” philosophy even if they have to tone down the rhetoric for a while.

I ask this favor of anyone reading this. For the rest of your life, if you hear any mention of anything positive that came out of the Bush presidency and/or Republican control of congress during much of it, you jump on that. Be clear that these are lies. Point out just how bad the Bush presidency was for the world and for most Americans. The GOP already has a set of lying talking points that are meant to distort the achievements of FDR and keep us from ever going down the path of creating an even halfway equitable society. We’ve seen those trudged out during the current economic crisis. These guys play the long game. We need to, too. If not, you may live long enough to someday find yourself flying into George W. Bush airport in New York or celebrating George W. Bush’s birthday as holiday.

Someone needs to send NBC’s Lee Cowen a copy of the constitution.

You may well have heard that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has supposedly decided to appoint former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to Barack Obama’s senate seat. I just watched Lee Cowen speculate that the U.S. Senate may just have to accept this because, after all, Blagojevich is the legally elected governor of Illinois and he has the sole power to decide this, in spite of Harry Reid’s objects.

Um, no.

Given the nature of this scandal, one might have thought that reporters covering the story would take two minutes to brush up on the appropriate section of the constitution. Since Mr. Cowen didn’t bother, I’ll provide this to any member of the media who wants to comment on this news story. It’s Article I, Section 5 of the U.S. constitution:

Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members, and a majority of each shall constitute a quorum to do business; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the attendance of absent members, in such manner, and under such penalties as each House may provide.

Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.

Each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy; and the yeas and nays of the members of either House on any question shall, at the desire of one fifth of those present, be entered on the journal.

Neither House, during the session of Congress, shall, without the consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

Rachel Maddow takes apart the argument that Democrats should play nice with Joe Lieberman to get a sixty seat majority in the senate. Brilliant, but you really need to watch the whole six minutes.

Unfortunately the media plugin I’m using doesn’t seem to work with MSNBC’s embedded video code. Here’s a link instead.

I tried not to get too excited last night when Olbermann and Maddow were touting Mark Begich’s three vote lead in the Alaska senate race. Having gone from a 3200 vote deficit to a virtual tie was pretty impressive, but they had only counted about half of the early and absentee votes at that point. It was possible that the remainder could swing back in favor of Stevens.

This afternoon, it is being reported that Begich is now up by about 800 votes with about two thirds of those votes counted. I imagine this will go to a recount, but it’s damn nice to see a possibility of unseating that vile, old bastard.

Unfortunately, the possibility of pickups by Begich, Franken, and Martin makes Joe Liar-man a lot more important I’ll really hate it if he manages to hold onto the chairmanship of the homeland security committee.