The Zeit Guy Chronicles

The title of this post is a bit on the dramatic side, but not inappropriately so, me thinks, given these all too interesting times. Good article by William Greider in The Nation on the Senate’s cloture rule, arguing for the necessity of changing it. Excerpts below. Emphasis added. Click here for the whole article.

If the Democratic Party intends to get serious about governing, it can start by disabling the Republican filibuster that gives the minority party in the Senate a virtual veto over anything it wants to kill. The chatter in Washington assumes that since Democrats failed to gain a sixty-seat majority, there’s nothing they can do. But that’s not true. Democrats can change the rules and remove a malignant obstacle from the path of our new president. Given the emergency conditions facing the nation, why should Mitch McConnell and his right-wing colleagues get to decide what the Senate may vote on? …

The last time the Senate changed the cloture vote threshold to overcome a filibuster was in 1975, when the Democrats reduced it from sixty-seven to sixty votes. This time, the level can reasonably be reduced to fifty-five votes to break the GOP’s stranglehold on major legislation. The argument for reform seems far more compelling now than it did in 1975. The filibuster ostensibly protects minority interests with the right to unlimited debate, but it has been used notoriously to accomplish the opposite.

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I guess it had to happen: prefabricated, easily personalized digital ads. And it’s happened for political as well as commercial ads. Check out this video from SlateV.

Why a landslide for Obama? That can be a long conversation, and I write short posts. So I point, first, to Frank Rich’s column in last Sunday’s NY Times. He provides a good and readable analysis for the forthcoming tsunami (switching to an oceanic metaphor). Rich also notes the mainstream media will not cover this interpretation of the election: It’s bad for business. A close race sells more advertising than a blowout. Click here for Rich’s article.

For my second illustration, I offer the video below which as of this writing has 2,353,851 views on youTube. If John Kerry was a “flip flopper” in the last election, worlds fail me in an attempt to characterize John McCain based on the evidence below. youTube + demographics = electoral nightmare for Arizona’s senior senator. Even if the major media continue their infatuation with the “maverick,” the web will show the world a different McCain.

Obama has achieved the nomination, “presumptively” of course. And Clinton, after her evening of “deranged narcissism,”* saw the handwriting all over the wall of the Media and Internet saying that her historic run had ended. What a bummer to go from candidate assured of being anointed to also ran…and also ran to such an upstart.

So it can be in life and in history. I remember a college professor of mine saying that the future can never be known because we cannot account in advance for “the genius, the prophet, the random event.”**

So while I do not claim to know the future (how could I if I can still remember that quote?), I will predict an Obama victory in November. Obama and David Axelrod, his head strategist, have laid out the emotionally compelling narratives for the campaign. Obama is telling some of them them now, as I write, in North Carolina, putting it into play for a Democrat for the first time in (almost) living memory.

Not only will Obama win, but he will win in an electoral landslide. The shouting-headed punditry will be as one shouting, “not since Ronald Reagan in 1980…”

These are changing times.

Fundamental text for understanding why people vote (and one reason why I am willing to predict a landslide): The Political Brain by Drew Weston. Click here to check it out at Amazon.

* Jeffrey Toobin. See the video below. Worth it for the triple take that David Gergen makes when the phrase is uttered. Click here for Toobin’s Wikipedia entry.

** Robert Nisbet. Click here for his Wikipedia entry.

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Eric Hoffer as quoted n the article that gave this post its title. The article is long, informative, and most readable. Written by George Packer, it can be found in the New Yorker at the link below.

The fate Republican Party of 2008 looks to be the fate of the Democratic Party of 1968. Click here for the article, “The Fall of American Conservatism.”