Politics and Culture

About a month ago, I mentioned how Democrats aren't even defending Obama anymore. Two recent articles in The New Republic demonstrate this trend:

How does Noam Scheiber respond to the charge that Obama is not only a "typical pol," but a downright weasel? With pol numbers:

The easiest way to see this is to consider one of the most persistent poll results of the campaign so far: The percentage of voters who identify themselves as Democrats is eight to 15 points higher than the percentage who identify as Republicans. Even if the GOP were to somehow convince Americans that Obama was typical, they would have to paint McCain as phenomenally atypical to overcome this disadvantage. (An eight-to-15 point deficit in party ID means you have to clean up among independents.)

Then, we have Jonathan Chait. I thought by "Obama flip flop fallacy," Chait meant that Obama is being falsely accused of pandering. No, Chait only means that it won't matter because McCain is also a "flip-flopper:"

From a substantive point of view, McCain accusing Obama of making politically calculated policy reversals makes about as much sense as Obama accusing McCain of lacking experience. Obama may have trimmed his sails a couple times, but McCain has the longest and deepest list of flip-flops of any major candidate I can ever recall. He has completely reinvented himself, changing his mind on the most basic questions like progressive taxation, torture, the role of the religious right, and on and on and on. But very little of this has penetrated the basic McCain narrative in the media, and I don't expect it ever will. Wednesday's Washington Post story on McCain focused on his willingness to take unpopular stances, and included his self-aggrandizing statements ("I take stands on principle, and I don't switch positions depending on what audience or what time it is in the electoral calendar") without any skeptical context by the reporter.

The thing is that Chait is lying about McCain. McCain's opposition to high taxes didn't have to do with progressiveness per se so much as the impact on the deficit; he's against it now because he's against any tax increase. The role of the religious right? McCain isn't thinking that philosophically; he likes some preachers and dislikes others. And Chait's torture charge is an outright lie. McCain voted against a particular bill, not said that he now favors torture. Does he have to vote for bad legislation just to satisfy Chait?