Ralph Nader Appeals to Disenfranchised Liberals “What,” editorializes U.S. News & World Report, “does Ralph Nader bring to the political dialogue this year? Answer: nothing except for his own inflated ego.” Dimestore psychoanalysis was the standard reaction to Nader’s third third-party presidential bid. “An ego-driven spoiler,” the Des Moines Register called him. “He seems to have a pretty high opinion of his own work,” jabbed Barack Obama. You see, other politicians who seek the presidency are like the Dalai Lama, humble and self-effacing. Obama and Hillary? Two sweeties. Not an ounce of ego between them. Even our former colonial masters put in their two pence. Nader’s “egotism and cult of left-wing purity has been an utter disaster for the values he affects to espouse,” railed the UK Independent. Nader’s values would fare better, apparently, were he to shut up and keep them to himself. Is Ralph really a spoiler? To answer “yes,” you have to buy three assumptions: First, that…

Puffing Up John McCain, POW “A proven leader, and a man of integrity,” the New York Post called John McCain in its editorial endorsement. “A naval aviator shot down over North Vietnam and held as a POW, McCain knew that freedom was his for the taking. All he had to do was denounce his country. He refused–and, as a consequence, suffered years of unrelenting torture.” This standard summary of McCain’s five and a half years in the Hanoi Hilton, repeated in thousands of media accounts during his 2000 campaign and again this election year, is the founding myth of his political career. The tale of John McCain, War Hero prompts a lot of people turned off by his politics–liberals and traditional conservatives alike–to support him. Who cares that he “doesn’t really understand economics”? He’s got a great story to tell. Scratch the surface of McCain’s captivity narrative, however, and a funny thing happens: his heroism blows away like the rust…

Open Primaries Are Killing Democracy Check out this political mystery: Liberals, a.k.a. the Democratic base, are angry. They’re so angry that they tried to unseat senior senator and former vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman in 2006, who had become synonymous with bipartisanship. Bipartisanship, hell. They’re in the mood for payback. So why is Barack Obama, a bipartisan accommodationist who promises to appoint Republicans to his cabinet and praises Ronald Reagan, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination? Why is Hillary Clinton, militant centrist of the DLC, running a close second? Mystery #2: Liberal primary voters are obsessed with choosing a nominee who can win the general election in November. And yet, according to a hypothetical head-to-head match-up, neither Obama nor Clinton qualifies. The most electable Democrat, found the most recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. match-up poll, is John Edwards. “Edwards is the only Democrat who beats all four Republicans, and McCain is the only Republican who beats any of the three Democrats…

Media Freezes Out a Threat to Corporate Owners In 2004 Democrats were determined to pick the presidential nominee who had the best chance of defeating George W. Bush in the general election. That man was the feisty former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean. One could easily imagine him mercilessly flaying Bush in debates before trouncing Yale’s least favorite son in November. Primary voters, mistakenly betting that blandness and moderation would be a better sell, chose John Kerry instead. The party of Hubert Humphrey and Michael Dukakis seems poised to make the same mistake again, whether with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Polls show that two-thirds of Americans think the country is ready for a female or black president. But I’m a glass-third-full guy. When a third of the electorate tells you “we’re” not ready for a woman or an African-American commander-in-chief, they really mean that they won’t vote for one. John Edwards is more likely to beat Romney or McCain…

Barack Obama, Empty Suit Barack Obama’s supporters compare him to John Kennedy, another great orator whose youth and short political resume opened him to complaints that he didn’t have enough experience to be president. But there’s no comparison. JFK served two terms in the House and won two terms in the Senate before asking us not to ask what he could do for us. If Obama wins, he will only have had four years in Congress, next to Kennedy’s fourteen. (Hillary Clinton, running as a grizzled veteran, would have eight.) Ted Kennedy is a better analogy. At the start of his 1980 Democratic primary challenge to incumbent President Jimmy Carter, Kennedy was riding high in the polls. But when Roger Mudd of CBS News asked him why he wanted to be president, he fumbled. “Kennedy’s problem,” Paul Waldman wrote in The American Prospect in July 2007, “was not that he didn’t have a good reason to run–he had plenty of…

The Media’s Dangerous Tolerance of Anti-Intellectualism Mike Huckabee isn’t qualified for public office. He may not be smart enough to hold a job. Yet he could become our next president. Huckabee’s upset victory in the Iowa caucuses is cited as evidence that American democracy still works. “At a Friday night event,” right-wing columnist William Kristol opined in the New York Times, “[Huckabee] played bass with a local rock band, Mama Kicks. One secular New Hampshire Republican’s reaction: ‘Gee, he’s not some kind of crazy Christian.” Huckabee is an affable, funny, ordinary Joe on a shoestring budget who trounced a slick multimillionaire. But he’s also a crazy Christian. And he won because crazy Christians motivated by anti-Mormon bigotry voted for him. In the Republican Party, hate trumps cash. If Huckabee were Muslim, he’d be a radical Islamist. Denying separation of church and state, he said at a Baptist convention in 1998 that he got into politics because he “knew government didn’t…

How American Democracy Relies on Fascism What would you do if you learned that Bush Administration officials wanted to round up thousands of Americans and throw them into concentration camps? For all we know, there is no slippery slope. It’s entirely possible that extraordinary rendition, eliminating habeas corpus, and the torture camps at Guantánamo and elsewhere are exactly what the government says they are–tools for fighting terrorists, not domestic political opponents. But how likely is it? History is clear: Over and over again, the U.S. government places fascists in powerful positions. Once in office, they exploit wars and national tragedies to roll back hard-won freedoms. They’re Democrats as well as Republicans. As has happened with increasing frequency in recent years, another blockbuster story revealing the anti-democratic impulse within the top echelon of the U.S. government has appeared and vanished overnight. According to Cold War-era files declassified last week, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly advised President Harry Truman to arrest…

Artsy Comics Are Alienating Readers Love them or hate them, people react to cartoons. Comic strips like “The Far Side,” “Peanuts” and “Doonesbury” inspire devotional cults. Political cartoons, such as the recent Danish Mohammed illustrations and my own post-9/11 Bush-bashing scribbles, can arouse hateful mobs. What’s weird is when cartoons elicit no reaction at all. Which is what has (not) happened since 2005, when The New York Times began running “The Funny Pages,” a literary supplement to its Sunday Magazine section that includes a full-page comic strip in every issue. First up was “Building Stories,” a graphic novel by Chris Ware serialized in 30 weekly installments. To call Ware an award-winning graphic artist is like calling a cockroach prolific; the only accolade he hasn’t won is the Nobel. Yet. Comic book fans had hoped that The Funny Pages would convince normal adults, who limit their graphic art consumption to political cartoons and comic strips, to buy graphic novels. (Articles espousing…