Austin, TX - The Administration agrees to a "time horizon" for removing our troops from Iraq. A senior diplomat is sitting down with an Iran nuclear negotiator. Secretary Gates publically calls for troops to be moved from Iraq to Afghanistan. The EPA releases a report confirming the very real and imminent threat of climate change. Bush agrees to cut greenhouse emissions at the G8. Taken together, this seems like an across-the-board repudiation of many fiercely held Bush Administation positions, all closely associated with the Vice President.
Where's Dick and his team of neocons in all this? There are of course many areas where the Administration seems deeply dug in, but change has come to the White House. Why, for what reasons, this is all happening now, it is too soon to tell. But change nevertheless has come to the White House in the final months of the Bush Administration.
1030am - Lots of talk here about Maliki's endorsement of Obama's timetable for withdrawal. What an extraordinary moment in what has been a remarkable political year, and what will no doubt be an important, even historic, trip abroad by U.S. Sen. Barack Obama. Even Maliki has joined the neocon repudiation chorus.
1035am - Speaker Pelosi is doing a remarkable job here at Netroots Nation. I am very proud of her for recognizing the importance of this gathering, and her thoughtful and powerful presence here this morning.
1050am - Asked about her agenda, the Speaker said health care, her innovation agenda, infrastructure and green energy. And throughout her 10-ten talk, her language was modern, her understanding of the issues detailed, her ability to weave a narrative compelling. I'm not sure too many politicians of either Party could have done as good as a job as she is doing this morning.
1120am - Gore has arrived, and is just knocking the ball out of the park. He is as good as I've ever seen him. He has captured the room, and I have to believe has now officially engaged/involved the netroots in his crusade. This is an important day in the development of a national movement to solve the climate crisis.
Amazingly, Gore and Pelosi are now just sitting and taking questions. This has been a great morning. Kudos to Gina for her stage management of this powerful session.
San Francisco — Yesterday we saw the release of a whole slew of political video (thanks to Mark Halprin's The Page for always keeping me up to date). Here's a look at a few of them.
U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's campaign will begin airing "Changing World," another national security ad (you can watch the previous one here). In 30 seconds the ad goes from defining the problem, to highlighting the candidate's record on the problem, to outlining solutions. As someone into all things tech, I was particularly happy to hear that "cyber attacks" made the list as one of the threats we face, reminding me once again of the enormous technology gap between the two leading presidential candidates (see Maggie Barker's recent post for U.S. Sen. John McCain's latest luddite internet comment). Also, I found the tenor of his solutions particularly refreshing. Signaling a departure from the brutish militarism that has most recently been the pillar of our national security strategy, the ad invokes an emphasis on multilateral engagement as well as a change in energy policy as means to address the external threats that face our country. And while I realize this isn't necessarily a new policy stance for the candidate, the ad does a good job of instantiating some of the change Obama is promising.
The ad will begin airing on national cable today. Have a look:
MoveOn.org and Planned Parenthood are set to air ads both of which target John McCain. In a $100,000 national cable buy, MoveOn.org continues to focus on the war in Iraq, hammering McCain on his opposition to a timeline for withdrawal. You can watch the ad here. The centerpiece of Planned Parenthood's ad is a video clip featuring a beleaguered looking McCain taking painfully long to provide a non-answer to the question, "It's unfaiir health insurance companies cover Viagra but not birth control. Do you have an opinion on that?" Watch the ad here.
JibJab, the same people that brought us the wonderful web video "Our Land!" in 2004, released a new parody set to the tune of Bob Dylan's "The Times They are a Changin'." It's good for quite a few laughs regardless of your political preference. Take a look:
Over the last several months, I've written a series of essays about how U.S. Sen. John McCain was turning out to be one of the worst candidates we've ever seen run for President (for the latest see here and here). His montrous flip flops, the serial mistatements about enormous issues like the difference between Sunni and Shiite, the number of troops in Iraq, his position on Social Security, his vote on the 1986 Immigration Act, his position on Immigration Reform today, his admission that he doesn't know how to use a computer. The list seems endless now.
Add that he loaded up his campaign with active lobbyists, certain to draw negative attention, his bumbling of the rehiring of Mike Murphy, and the new extraordinary set of things this week - well chronicled here by Max Bergman on the Huffington Post - and it all adds up to a man simply not up to the job of running for -- or actually being -- President of the United States. In a recent appearance, I even surmised that the GOP would become so concerned with his performance that there would start to be a quiet movement to replace him at the Convention with another candidate. This moment may be upon us as the media, and the public now has no choice but to confront that there is a man running for President who seems so out of touch with basic facts, reality, his own voting record that one might even conjucture that it would be a grave risk for the United States to put him in charge of the country.
After a Republican era where governing always played 2nd fiddle to politics and power - resulting in one of the worst governments in our history - we all hoped McCain would represent a break from the truly disapointing politics of the Bush era. But his performance these last few months shows that his lack of seriousness and knowledge about policy - even running an ad saying that his energy and drilling proposals would immediately address high gas prices when everyone knows this to be, let us say, not true - shows that the McCain candidacy has itself become an extension of this awful Republican era that did so much to harm the national interests of the United States, leaving us less prosperous, less powerful in the world and certainly less free here at home.
In putting Steve Schmidt, a Bush/Rove protege, in charge of his campaign, McCain has told us all exactly what kind of man he has become, and what kind of Presidency we can expect.
Peter Beinart, from a nifty op-ed in the Washington Post:
In "The Best and the Brightest," David Halberstam chronicles Lyndon Johnson's absolute terror of appearing soft on Communism. Having seen fellow Democrats destroyed in the early 1950s because they tolerated a Communist victory in China, Johnson swore that he would not let the story replay itself in Vietnam, and thus pushed America into war. The awful irony, Halberstam argues, is that Johnson's fears were unfounded. The mid-1960s were not the early 1950s. The Red Scare was over. But because it lived on in Johnson's mind, he could not grasp the realities of a new day.
In this way, 2008 is a lot like 1964. On foreign policy, many Democrats live in terror of being called soft, of provoking the kind of conservative assault that has damaged so many of their presidential nominees since Vietnam. But that fear reflects memories of the past, not the realities of today. When Democrats worry about the backlash that awaits Barack Obama if he defends civil liberties, or endorses withdrawal from Iraq, or proposes unconditional negotiations with Iran, they are seeing ghosts. Fundamentally, the politics of foreign policy have changed.
David Broder takes a deeper look at John McCain's dangerously stupid comments about the nature of the Sunni-Shiite struggle and the overall geopolitics of the Middle East.
We weighed in about his astonishing statements yesterday. Watch the video of his remarks here.
Should the Senate Foreign Relations Committee ask the Canadian PM to come to DC and explain the Canadian governments intervention in an American election?
It sure appears that the multiple leaks out of the Canadian government were targeted to tank Barack Obama. The GOP in Washington would much prefer to run against Senator Clinton, and these leaks appear to be an effort by conservatives in Canada to help their ideological cousins in the US by hurting Obama at a critical point in the election.
Josh Marshall has new information showing definitively that the Canadian leaks were designed to hurt Obama. New news accounts show the Clinton camp had similar conversations with the Canadians as the Obama camp - but only the Obama conversations were leaked. What makes this particularly gauling is that Senator Clinton has been much more critical of NAFTA than the junior Senator from Illinois.
Lots of news reports today about renewed fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
As I wrote in a recent essay, the Bush Legacy in the Middle East, the people of Israel and the emerging Palestinian state continue to pay the price for the horrendeous Bush decision to allow Hamas to participate in the recent PA elections without giving up their arms, and recognizing the right of Israel to exist. As long as Hamas is in Gaza, and as long as it continues to deny the legitimacy of the Israeli state, it is hard to see how peace will come in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While no one can be happy with what is happening in Gaza today, the world cannot expect Israel to sit by and allow regular rocket attacks against its people from a neighnboring power bent on its destruction. Progress and peace require an immediate cessation of the rocket attacks from Gaza.
In our paper, A Laptop in Every Backback, which we released last year, Alec Ross and I wrote:
It is the core premise of this paper that the emergence of a single global communications network, composed of Internet, mobile, SMS, cable and satellite technology, rapidly tying the world's people together is one of the seminal events of the early 21st century. Increasingly, the world's commerce, finance, communications, media and information are flowing through this network. Half of the world's 6 billion people are now connected to this network, many through powerful and inexpensive mobile phones.
Each year more of the world's people become connected to the network, its bandwidth increases, and its use becomes more integrated into all that we do. Connectivity to this network, and the ability to master it once on, has become an essential part of life in the 21st century, and a key to opportunity, success and fulfillment for the people of the world.
We believe it should be a core priority of the United States to ensure that all the world's people have access to this global network and have the tools to use it for their own life success. There is no way any longer to imagine free societies without the freedom of commerce, expression, and community, which this global network can bring. Bringing this network to all, keeping it free and open and helping people master its use must be one of the highest priorities of those in power in the coming years.
An article from the Economist this week reviews the remarkable and historic progress made - and the challenges that remain - in bringing more people on to this global communications network. It begins:
THE mobile-phone industry returned from its mammoth annual trade show, 3GSM, held earlier this month in Barcelona, gloating over its successful year. More than 3 billion (almost half the world's population) now have mobiles, and the price of a phone has sunk as low as $25. There are now more mobile-phone subscribers in poor countries than rich ones. That would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
Mobile phones have improved poor people's lives tremendously, from providing political news and health-care information in remote areas to fuelling commerce. Enthusiasm over bringing technology to the world's poor has been matched in the computing industry, with many companies now selling low-cost laptop computers (so far around $200, but poised to drop much further). But the next digital hurdle-providing internet access-will be much harder to surmount, for both economic and geographical reasons.
The article's findings are based on a new report from the OECD, GLOBAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR INTERNET ACCESS DEVELOPMENTS.
In the coming year I hope that our community can make this conversation about providing all the world's people access to the global communications network a much higher priority for our nation's leaders. These are extraordinary times, full of possibilities for America and the people of the world. In years since the fall of the communism more people have been lifted out of poverty, ignorance, dispair and isolation than perhaps any other time in human history. But as this article lays out there is still much to do, more people to engage, more countries to help in making the difficult transition to a modern state. And however these nations and peoples move closer to adopting the American formula - democracy, free markets, liberty, the rule of law - they will also need to embrace the transformative power which access to this global communications brings for their societies and citizens.
We will be looking at ideas and initiatives like these at our March 12th conference in DC, A Moment of Transformation? - I hope you will join us.
