Tfgray’s Weblog

David Souter hasn’t retired yet (not until the end of the Court’s season, next month.) Barack Obama hasn’t nominated anyone yet. But boyola, are the Republicans opposed to his choice.

I have a simple suggestion that will end this partisan rancor while elevating someone entirely appropriate to Judicial Heaven, a person who is skilled in the practice of law, has government experience at the highest level, has very publicly put his regard for the law and the Constitution above his own career, and is, by God, a Republican.

John Dean.

How could they possibly object to him? Actually, it might be amusing to watch the Republican Party fall all over themselves complaining that Obama’s nominee was neither a woman nor a person of color.

(If you’d like to see what Mr. Dean has been up to lately, click here.)

Just finished watching Obama’s speech and Jindal’s response. Even allowing for my pro-Obama bias, I think he hit a home run. By the end, even the Republicans were giving him standing ovations. He made his points clearly and addressed opposition concerns. He framed our current situation in terms of challenge and opportunity.

Bobby Jindal, not so much. The first detail I noticed, before he even made his appearance, was the Louisiana state flag on the right of the screen. It shows a pelican pulling feathers from her breast to feed her blood to her young. For those of you who did not have a Catholic upbringing, that is the symbol of Charity.  Just a bit of irony from the governor who is threatening to deny his citizens the benefits of their federal tax dollars. Ok, just those dollars that would put food on their tables while they’re hunting for their next job. Nice start.

Unlike the President, who is renowned for looking not only elegantly attired, but comfortable in his skin, Governor Jindal looked as nervous as a high school boy on his first date. He delivered his speech in a voice that reminded me of Mr. Rogers. On a Voice Thing (see previous post) scale of 1-10, I’d give it a 2.5.  He criticized statements Obama made a couple of days ago and soundly overwrote in this evening’s speech, making himself look out of the loop. He criticized FEMA’s conduct under Bush (without naming names, of course) giving it as an example of the way government must inevitably function.  After eight years of Bush secrecy (Remember Cheney’s Energy Task Force?) he slammed Obama for lack of transparency. Apparently he’s counting on a mass outbreak of Alzheimer’s.

He then went on to criticize Democrats’ refusal to include Republican proposals in the stimullus package, ignoring the concessions wrung by Specter and the good ladies from Maine, while proposing a continuation of Bush’s deregulatory policies. Oh, and he criticized the non-existent plans for that Disneyland to Vegas rail system before launching into what appeared to be his first campaign stump speech.

I’m with Annamarie Cox, appearing on Rachel Maddow’s show.

GAH!

Prediction:  Personally, I think Jindal scotched his presidential hopes in this speech, but I’m not a conservative Republican and have limited access to their thought processes. (See previous post What are Republicans Thinking? re Cantor’s braggadocio over his boys being resoundingly defeated in the stimulus package vote.) So maybe Jindal will get the 2012 nomination, unless he loses an arm-wrestling contest to Governor Palin. (Don’t bet against it).  The Republicans will allow their Right wingnuts the honor of losing to Obama in that cycle. This will have (from the country club Republican point of view) the benefit of discrediting their rightward fringe and not damaging the chances of any of their standard-bearers in 2016. Look for another ex-governor Bush tossing his topper into the ring then.

When my children were small, and wanted a friend to stay overnight, they would come to me and ask, “Will you call Jimmy’s mom and ask for an overnight, because, you know, you have the voice thing.”

They named it, but it’s a phenomena I’d noticed years before (and which really has nothing to do with the normal exchange of favors by grown-ups that got my kids the sleepovers they craved.)

Decades before I became a parent, I had a circle of friends that were a bit (well, a lot) to the Right of me. We’d sit and chat, telling stories and jokes, but I noticed that when one had something to say that he wanted to remain uncontested, he would use a certain tone of voice. It always worked, no matter who offered the opinion or what it was, although the most frequent practitioner was the son of an Air Force colonel. Years later, while driving cross-country, through a land of unfamiliar radio frequencies, I came across a station where the announcer talked in the same tone of voice. I had stumbled upon Right-wing talk radio, as I figured out after hearing one or two of the opinions the guy was spouting.

The Voice Thing.

I realized that some people are trained to respond to particular tones of voice. In some cases, it’s the gruff, confident tones of Right-wing talk radio, modeled, I suspect, on the vocal patterns of a military officer. “…well you know, Bob, those pointy-headed liberals want us to believe that we’ll be better off with clean water. Well, anybody with his head on straight knows that if you have a job you can buy all the bottled water you want, and if we have all those stupid regulations, nobody will have a job.” 

Others are attuned to the cadence of the preacher. “If you believe-uh, you will receive-uh.” Anything delivered in the proper tone of voice produces an unquestioning wave of bobble-headedness among authoritarian followers.

George Bush, neither father nor son, has the voice thing, although W can put on a pretty good imitation when he’s, say, talking about WMD at the UN. Dick Cheney has it. In spades. He’s got a picture-perfect example of the Right-wing radio voice, and when he speaks even I, who have done enough research to trust him less than half as far as I could hypothetically throw him, find myself doubting my senses. Nixon was a master of the form. Sarah Palin thinks she is. For a series of examples, click here.

John Kerry didn’t have it. Neither did Dukakis. Al Gore had the timbre, but not the phrasing. John McCain? Nowhere close. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both have it, although not the right-wing variant. I recall reading some right-wing commentary during the election in which the poster was complaining, “How can we beat Obama when he sounds like a preacher?”

Teacher, more likely, yet another form of authority figure. Professor, actually, as he demonstrated in yesterday’s session with Republican members of Congress. Pay attention, class.

 They did.

So we need to pay attention. Are we listening to facts or letting things slide in under the radar because the delivery is one we have become attuned to? Can we use this technique, say, when talking to a right-wing friend or co-worker? Would their heads explode if they heard opinions they disagreed with in a vocal mode that they were programmed to accept unquestioningly? Would the alternative viewpoint sink in?

Has anyone else ever noticed this? Comments, please.

The first omen was small. The Steelers trounced the Redskins 23-6 on Sunday. For some unknown reason, the Redskins game the Sunday before the election has predicted the fortunes of the incumbent party in 15 of the last 16 presidential elections.

Then came Dixville Notch, NH, where midnight voting occurred before my West Coast bedtime. The 21 voters there split 15-6 Obama. The pundits warned that the results were “not predictive” as New Hampshire generally goes Republican, but the magnitude of the victory gave me cause to think of this as an omen.

The next was larger. I logged on to Huffington Post election morning and read that by 6 am, over 1000 Penn State students had lined up waiting for the polls to open at 7. All the conservative pundits’ predictions of “traditionally low turnout among young voters” evaporated. I teared up for the first of many times. By the end of the day, the sight of 30 Rock lit up in Red, White, and Blue was enough to set me off.

I was good yesterday, fighting my urge to obsessively watch the talking heads blather until they had something to actually talk about.  I vacuumed, did laundry, ran errands, called my kids and confirmed that they had all voted, two of them for the first time. I gave in at 3:30. Most Indiana polls had closed, so their might actually be some news, but the vote in that traditionally Republican state was so close that it was one of the last called by the networks.

We ate dinner on the sofa, watching the returns come in, listening to Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow remind us that Obama’s early victories were all in Kerry states, that he had yet to flip a Red State to Blue. Then Ohio went blue. “Yes!” my husband and I chorused, as if our team had scored a last-minute touchdown. The dog cringed, and had to be reassured that he hadn’t done anything wrong and we weren’t yelling at him. We celebrated with a mini-eclair each.

Two more rounds of mini eclairs and it was over. Barack Obama had won. The world rejoiced.

John McCain gave his concession speech, in my estimation his best speech of the campaign. He was once again the John McCain I remembered, who cared about his country, who told the truth, who worked with Republicans and Democrats alike. His supporters booed each mention of Obama’s name, underlining how petty and mean-spirited his campaign had become in its final throes, or perhaps how the petty and mean-spiritedness of the Base had drawn his campaign down to its level. Time will tell.  Obama gave his speech, and everyone cheered at his mention of McCain. Maybe that was because they were just in a better mood. Maybe it was because they had not been told, over and over, that John McCain was an evil terrorist who was out to destroy the nation.

And so it begins. We went to bed with Missouri still a toss-up. I woke in the middle of the night and took a peek at the tube. Some right-wing third stringer on Fox pontificated that it would have been wrong for McCain to run to the center because, after all, the centrists voted for Obama, ignoring the fact that McCain chose to demonize their positions, rather than court their votes. The next morning the rightward side of the airways was filled with dire warnings of a Reid/Pelosi agenda, no make that “a Reid/Pelosi left-wing agenda” that would cripple an Obama presidency, and the insistance that, since the Dems failed to win a filibuster-proof 60 senate seats, he would need to compromise with Republicans, specifically with the rightward edge of the Republican Party. Sure, just like Bush, with his razor-thin majority and questionable electoral mandate had to govern from the center.

Obama’s already way ahead of them. In his victory speech he reiterated his intention to listen to all positions and to make clear his reasons for his decisions, to support policies that actually work for America, not for one subset of Americans at the expense of the whole.  He’s technologically hip. I can see him giving a speech on taxation at a Chuck Todd-style touchscreen, showing how the Bush tax cuts not only ballooned the deficit but reapportioned American income and wealth into the hands of the top 5%. (And even more tellingly, the top .5%.) That’s what’s been lacking in these debates. Graphics.

After the Watergate hearings and subsequent Republican drubbing in the ‘74 and ‘76 elections, after Iran/Contra and Clinton’s victory, we cheered. We won! We stopped them! We went back to our day-to-day lives and left the governing to Washington. But they didn’t stop. The day-to-day lives of the Republican insiders, after all, involves pulling down a paycheck to think up ways to take power. Each time they came back. The same faces in bigger offices with fancier titles. Don’t get fooled again. They won’t give up this time, either.

Stay tuned. I really mean it.

I came across a news item yesterday that said that a California Republican committee chairwoman had been asked to resign for forwarding an email suggesting that Barack Obama was the Antichrist. Leaving aside that the email’s claim that the Book of Revelation says that the Antichirst will be of Muslim descent (The word “Muslim” does not appear in the Bible. Mohammad was born about 300 years after the last book was written.) The email raises an interesting theological point: according to Revelation, Jesus won’t return until after the Antichrist gets to run the place for a while.

So doesn’t that mean that all Bible believin’ folks should vote for  Obama?

No wonder they canned her.