Reading Michael Crowley's Mark Salter profile in TNR, you wonder how real McCainiacs can really keep a straight face while arguing that the Obama campaign is the one driven by a cult of personality built around a narcissist who feels he's owed the presidency.  Salter is apparently livid that Obama has stolen McCain's themes of having matured out of a colorful childhood and been bettered by patriotism and commitment to public service.  Did Mark Salter make it through his top perch in John McCain's 2000 campaign without ever listening to a George W. Bush speech?  Salter even jokes

"I often regret that we didn't copyright 'serving a cause greater than your self-interest,'" he cracks.

And Barack Obama is supposed to have an arrogance problem?

Doing his best to sweet-talk electorally-ascendent liberals into hitching their wagon to the libertarian rickshaw, Brink Lindsey offers a list of shared victories in which liberals and libertarians can revel together:

an honest survey of the past half-century shows a much better match between libertarian means and progressive ends. Most obviously, many of the great libertarian breakthroughs of the era--the fall of Jim Crow, the end of censorship, the legalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce laws, the increased protection of the rights of the accused, the reopening of immigration--were championed by the political left.

If these are victories for libertarians, then this is a better argument for why libertarians should support liberals and leftists - the people who actually won each of these victories - than for why the left should turn libertarian.  But it's worth asking whether these markers of social progress even qualify as "libertarian breakthroughs" or "libertarian ends."

Here are the top three things that have genuinely surprised me listening to Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Laura Ingraham, and Dennis Prager on the local right-wing radio station the past month or so:

For an ostensibly uber-populist medium, there's sure an awful lot of complaining about the ignorance and weak will of the American people.  For every denunciation of the elitism of prayer-banning, lesbian-loving, terror-supporting liberal judges (who are just like the Islamo-Nazis in their lack of faith in the people, Laura Ingraham reminds us), there are two or three denunciations of the gullibility of our Bush-betraying, 9/11-forgetting, sacrifice-disrespecting electorate.  ABC's docu-drama, Hugh Hewitt insists, was assailed by the Democrats because it had the potential to remind an ungrateful citizenry of the risk posed by the bad men and the weak men who wouldn't fight them.

Another issue worth noting about the Lieberman-Lamont match.  Their race brings together two of the less popular archetypes in American public life: the incumbent creature of Washington and the guy with more money than God.

That's not a coincidence.

Under the "one dollar, one vote" system undergirded by the "money is speech" regime set forth in Buckley, the ability to raise and spend money ranks high on the already frightful list of institutional advantages held by incumbents.  The ability to raise money is the first mark of legitimacy in the eyes of the media and political establishments who too often serve as gatekeepers between  would-be challengers and the attention of the electorate.  Ostensibly liberal people pledge fealty to the doctrine that serious candidates should be able to raise serious money.

Some millionaire candidates, of course, fail spectacularly.  Some spend enough of their dough to leave the incumbent at a significant spending disadvantage.  Some do both.

But wherever one comes down on what we should or shouldn't assume about millionaires' character and suitability to represent us, the difficulty of unseating an incumbent without being one should concern us.

Josh

Here's ostensibly uber-media-savvy Chuck Schumer making the case that the problem with Republicans in Congress is that they don't do anything:

"When they (Republicans) get up and read their litany, it's things that only a few narrow special interests care about, like a bankruptcy bill or class-action reform," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "Anything major that affects average Americans and makes their lives better, they haven't been able to get done, and I think people know that."

Granted, people like for Congress to do things.  So when your opponents run the Congress, it makes sense to accuse them of not doing things.  But with this Congress especially, which has done all kinds of no good very bad things, it's worth actually pointing out how bad those things are.

Schumer is doing exactly the opposite.  He's taking two awful pieces of legislation passed by our right-wing Congress at the bidding of right-wing special interests and at the expense of everybody else and he's suggesting that no one other than those special interests are affected.  Conservatives have passed bills to make it harder for working Americans to lift themselves out of bankruptcy or to get just compensation for grievous corporate abuses, and Chuck Schumer doesn't find it worthwhile to make the case to the American people that these laws are bad - rather than distracting - for all of us.

This is the same kind of silly rhetoric we hear all the time from national spokespeople for the Democratic party about how gay rights and women's rights aren't the kinds of issues that actually affect people.  It's not an approach that seems to have sold too many people on the principled vision of the Democratic Party as of yet.

Last month, I argued that there was only room in media discourse for one "Un-Hillary," and that the lack of consensus about Hillary Clinton's political profile creates the potential for that "Un-Hillary" to emerge from the left or from the right.  Over at TNR, Ryan Lizza suggests, I think rightly, that John Edwards' star as a candidate for the Un-Hillary mantle is rising at the moment.  There's plenty to agree with in his analysis.  And then his piece ends with a peculiar turn of phrase:

An American worker who works at the current federal minimum wage - $5.15/ hour - for forty hours a week for fifty-two weeks, without interruption, would make $10,712.

The 2006 federal poverty line for the continental United States for a two-person family is $13,200 a year.

That means a family of one child and one parent who works full-time at the federal minimum wage is living at least $2,500 below the poverty line.

The reality faced by the working poor in America is somewhat different.  People struggle to find consistent full-time work.  People take multiple jobs adding up to well over forty hours without receiving the benefits of full-time work from any of them.  People get sick.

A decade ago, conservatives in Congress - with a good many ostensible liberals in tow - inflicted a harsh revision of the American social contract, tearing away the safety net from those who utilized its support for more than three or five years of their lives - even if they were using that time to gain the skills for a better shot at living-wage work.  

Apparently, Wal-Mart has discontinued its policy of aggressively pursuing prosecution of those who steal even the cheapest of goods from the store.  Now, you have to steal things worth at least $25 before the long arm of the Wal sets about trying to shut you down for good the way they would, say, a unionized store.



Some of Wal-Mart's critics are pointing to this new leniency on Wal-Mart's part - a policy which matches what most of the industry was doing anyway - as another example of what's wrong with the store.  Seems to me there's a better example of what's wrong with Wal-Mart: the fact that until a few months ago, it was aggressively pursuing the prosecution of people who shoplifted socks.