50 Years, 90 Miles

50 years ago today, as 1958 came to a close, so did one unpopular Cuban dictatorship, only to be replaced by a significantly more oppressive and longer-lived one. I fall squarely into the camp that believes that U.S. policy toward Cuba, particularly our mystifyingly anti-capitalist trade embargo in addition to restrictions on travel and currency exchange, has to at least a small extent exacerbated an awful situation and emboldened what ought to have been a weak regime, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union.

On this bleak anniversary I'm heartened somewhat by the fact that Barack Obama is making at least some motions toward easing some of the more ridiculous restrictions. To be sure, I'm less than thrilled by the fact that Obama has backed off his previous support of full trade normalization in order to, just like nearly every other mainstream presidential candidate in recent history, kiss some Floridian ass. However, were Obama to at least reopen travel for Cuban Americans (who, as per a George W. Bush-imposed limit that had a fairly decent level of support within the Cuban community, can currently visit Cuba once every three years) and remove the $300 limit on sending money to family in Cuba, that itself would be far more progress than any post-Cold War president has overseen. And that's not for nothing:

“U.S. Cuba policy has not been a foreign policy,” explained Shannon O’Neil, the Douglas Dillon Fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s been a domestic policy, based on the Cuban vote in Florida.” In 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush relied on the Cuban vote to carry Florida by narrow margins. Without the Sunshine State, he would not have won either election.

In 2008, however, the equation changed, as Obama won while carrying just 35 percent of the Cuban-American vote in Florida. “The Cubans voted overwhelmingly against Obama,” said Daniel Erikson, director of Caribbean programs at the Inter-American Dialogue and author of The Cuba Wars. “So what the November election shows is that he did not need the Cuban vote to win Florida, and he did not need the Florida vote to win the presidential election.”

While I take the point that Cuba policy for the last few decades has really been little more than thinly veiled electoral strategy (a tendency that Bill Clinton and other Democrats are as guilty of perpetuating as the Republicans who tend to benefit more from it), this is misleading. Erikson fails to mention that 35% is the largest proportion any Democrat has won from Cuban Americans in quite a long time: compare this with George Bush's haul of up to 76% of Cubans' votes in Florida in 2004, a year that Republicans experienced relative success up and down the ticket, including the election of the first Cuban to the U.S. Senate. Despite all that 2004 was was still a substantial improvement for Democrats as compared to 2000, when Bush picked up 81% (a figure that may be somewhat inflated due to lingering resentment toward the Clinton administration over the Elian Gonzalez ordeal in addition to Bush's particularly strong courtship that year of Cuban voters.) The fact is, if Cubans were to begin to split their votes any closer to down the middle (let alone joining other Hispanics' increasingly overwhelming break toward Democrats), Florida would be a fairly solidly blue state every time.

The purpose of bringing up Cubans' electoral history is to point out that these really is as good as circumstances will get for would-be Cuba policy reformers. Obama brings with him an unprecedented level of support (for a Democrat) from Cubans, particularly from the ever-growing, less ideologically monolithic group of younger, pragmatic Cuban Americans. And not only that, but, as my handful of loyal readers might recall, Cuban American support for an end to the embargo is at an all-time high.

With the Castros' time undoubtedly coming to its end, at this point an end to the embargo is very close to "too little, too late" territory. If Obama is serious enough about reform to salvage some semblance of American dignity in this area after 50 years' worth of embarrassing failed policy--not to mention the added bonus of garnering favor among a rising Cuban generation by encouraging American investment in a country that will face dramatic change soon--now's the time.

Photo by DCvision2006, released under Creative Commons.

I'm telling you, oh, it all falls down

Picking a single moment when the Bush administration truly lost all credibility is sort of like finding the episode when Springer jumped the shark--it probably shouldn't have been on in the first place and the badness is so regular that singling one episode out seems pretty silly. But if you've gotta do it, watching passively as a major American city falls apart within a week seems like a pretty solid choice. Kevin Drum:

I've long believed that what really killed Bush was the contrast between his handling of Katrina and his handling of the Terri Schiavo case, which had come only a few months earlier. It was just too stark. What the American public saw was that when the religious right was up in arms, the president and the Republican Party acted. [...]

And it showed that Bush could be moved to action if the right constituency was at risk. It wasn't just that Bush was mostly MIA during the early stages of Katrina, but that he was plainly capable of being engaged in an emergency if it was the right kind of emergency. But apparently New Orleans wasn't it. And that was the final nail in the coffin of his presidency.

That strikes me as more or less it. To that point, despite my opposition to many of the administration's efforts including the Iraq war, I never would've thought to criticize their enthusiasm--if anything, lots of critics would probably have noted that Bush suffered from an overabundance. If Dowd and Bartlett are right that it took Katrina to take the wind out of the administration's sails completely, Bush's second-term apathy and eventual near-invisibility would turn out to make a lot more sense.

Kanye West oversimplified it, I think: the issue is not quite that George Bush doesn't care about black people; it's that the plight of people afflicted by a problem he couldn't solve by flinging money or troops at it was so far off his radar that I don't think he knew that, as president, he was supposed to care about them.

Photo by SIR: Poseyal Desposyni Poet, released under Creative Commons

change some people might have trouble believing in

Sean Quinn:

After the rally, we witnessed a near-street riot involving the exiting McCain crowd and two Cuban-American Obama supporters. Tony Garcia, 63, and Raul Sorando, 31, were suddenly surrounded by an angry mob. There is a moment in a crowd when something goes from mere yelling to a feeling of danger, and that's what we witnessed. As photographers and police raced to the scene, the crowd elevated from stable to fast-moving scrum, and the two men were surrounded on all sides as we raced to the circle.

The event maybe lasted a minute, two at the most, before police competently managed to hustle the two away from the scene and out of the danger zone. Only FiveThirtyEight tracked the two men down for comment, a quarter mile down the street.

"People were screaming 'Terrorist!' 'Communist!' 'Socialist!'" Sorando said when we caught up with him. "I had a guy tell me he was gonna kill me."

Asked what had precipitated the event, "We were just chanting 'Obama!' and holding our signs. That was it. And the crowd suddenly got crazy."

Garcia told us that the man who originally had warned the two it was his property when they had first tried to attend the rally with Obama T-shirts was one of the agitators. Coming up just before the scene started getting out of hand, the man whispered in Garcia's ear, "I'm gonna beat you up the next time I see you." Garcia described him for us: "a big stocky man wearing a tweed jacket." He used hand motions to emphasize this was a large guy. We went back to look for the gentleman twenty minutes after the incident but didn't find him.

Even within my own family I've been called a Communist, a traitor, a disgrace to my heritage, a liberal motherfucker, and many others. Okay, those are mostly just this one uncle I have when he gets drunk, but still. Usually "naive" is the term used in polite company.

If the election, Florida in particular, goes the way it seems now that it probably will, the Cuban community in SoFla will be in for what could be a painful reckoning. We have to deal with the influx of non-Cuban Hispanics in Florida which will mean suddenly losing the status of Most Favored Demographic--brown people who hate Democrats. The fading of the Castros within the next few years. The loss of any or all of the Cuban Mafia in Congress (not to mention the possible upcoming rejection of Mel Martinez in 2010.) The rise of a newer, less politically monolithic generation, as exemplified by Joe Garcia, and generational clash that may only begin to materialize this Tuesday. The questioning of priorities of single-issue anti-communist voters in the face of wars and the economy pretty much exploding and God knows what else.

Cubans need to get their act together. If Quinn's story and my hunches are even the slightest indication, we're in for some nasty stuff, the likes of which we're not quite used to.

in the interest of fairness

I went all on a rant about Elizabeth Dole's arbitrary "atheist" namecalling against Kay Hagan yesterday, but I would be remiss not to call attention to it when Democrats (or Dem affiliates and surrogate groups) do it too.

Not that I'm overflowing with love for Mitch McConnell or anything, or that the actions of one Dixiecrat group are representative of the party as a whole, or that McConnell isn't responsible in his own small way for being a prominent promoter of that mindset that believes homophobic smears are A-OK. And also that particular blog entry smacks heavily of the kind of pox-on-both-their-houses disdain that tries to present a false equivalence between the practices of the right and the left, as though the slime-off is really even close. (He's kind of off his rocker by that last paragraph.)

Still. This sucks.

faster, atheist! kill! kill!

I would say that Elizabeth Dole's current ongoing line of attack against documented, totally for-real Christian Kay Hagan is as vile as the famed campaign to tie Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were. Of course, Hagan seems pretty likely to win at this point, and no one likes an ungracious winner, so it seems as though the left won't be spending the next few months in the kind of existential crisis that calls for the kind of navel-gazing that resulted from the returns in 2002 and 2004. Well, here's hoping anyway, but I hope history doesn't give Liddy a pass for so flagrantly scapegoating atheists. We already have way more scapegoats than we need.

But then again, it's gone over about as well as Michael Scott doing a Chris Rock routine so I guess that means it's not working.

Vote Against Florida Amendment 2: Because You're Not an Asshole

I put this in a Facebook note a few weeks ago and I'm reprinting it here just as a reminder. This also applies to the equally lame but more dangerous (since unlike Florida's version it can pass with only 50%) Prop 8 in California.

Early voting is open in Florida and I just got my absentee ballot and that's awesome. But I have a confession: if those of you who are Floridians vote this year for Amendment 2, the unfortunately named Florida Marriage Protection Amendment, I will think you're kind of an asshole.

Now, that's nothing personal, really. I respect your right to vote for Mr. McCain or Mr. Hussein Osama McBlackenstein or whatever they're calling him these days, I respect our differences of opinion and I will defend your right to the death to disagree etc. and so on. And I acknowledge that I have no right to tell you what you should do in what is supposed to be a supremely private civic duty, so try not to take this as me wagging my finger or anything.

Seriously though.

This amendment doesn't protect anything, despite the best efforts by highly paid right-wing PR consultants to convince you of such, because it's just frankly dumb to think that marriage faces some sort of existential crisis. Its effect is more like if I went up to my grandparents--okay, not my grandparents because they all got divorced, but you get the idea--and said "we don't recognize the way you feel about each other as valid." 'Cause unfortunately that's what this basically says to every loving and functional gay and lesbian couple in the state. (I don't think it's a particularly kind gesture to those not in a loving or functional couple, either.) And if you vote for this (and if I find out about it) I will assume you intend for that particular ideology to represent your own beliefs. And subconsciously, unintentionally, this will make me think that you are, in fact, an asshole, 'cause Amendment 2 is silly and wrong and I don't want to think the same of any of you.

So I hope you all vote, all of you in overwhelming numbers, for varying people and propositions in a manner according to your beliefs. But, sorry to say, despite the fact that you may be otherwise a perfectly decent person, I will think you are an asshole if you vote yes on 2. Please don't be an asshole and please don't vote for Amendment 2. Oh and also if those of you in FL-18 all wanted to vote for Annette Taddeo for Congress that would rock too.

"Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining," or some other appropriate Judge Judy-ism

There's a certain glee that politicians get whenever they come up with a line or a strategy they think is just the hottest shit ever. A lot of times in these instances, no matter how dark or blatantly false the implication they're trying to make, the way they present the fresh new attack strategies that present their opponent as a total loser homo has the air of a guileless kindergartner presenting his parents with a macaroni picture.

Look! they say. Lookit what I did! Isn't it cool? I did that!

As you might expect, the current undisputed master of this demonstration of giggly self-congratulation (the more giggly, the better, since the idea is to downplay the mean-spiritedness) has to be Sarah Palin. From here:

“I’ve really gotta hand it to Joe the Plumber over there in Toledo,” Palin said at a rally today in Lancaster, Pa., referring to Joe Wurzelbacher, who was made famous by Sen. John McCain in Wednesday night’s final presidential debate. “Somehow he got Barack Obama to finally state his intentions in really plain language.”

Ooh! Ooh! That! Ooh! See? See what I did there? That was good, wasn't it? Oh yeah. He's not getting up from that. Look how cool that was!

Now obviously maintaining a healthy facade of self-delusion for the sake of the remains of your own dignity is essential in a nosediving campaign, which is why Palin chose not to bring up the fact that they're getting their asses handed to them, and why they continue the endless JtP drumbeat even though no one gives a shit. I understand that need, but there's a limit.

Palin is so good at playing the role of the precocious child looking for approval because that's the approximate level of intellectual complexity she brings to her every stump speech, but for the sake of fairness, I'll note she's not alone. Remember, back when Barack Abdul Omar al-Blackguy wasn't yet being called a one-man latter-day red menace, how we learned that John McCain had like a gajillion houses?

By the way, the answer is, John McCain has seven homes. There’s just a fundamental gap of understanding between John McCain’s world and what people are going through every single day here in America.

Translation: aw, snap.

Now I know I'm biased because I voted for Obama and all but I find it slightly funnier to prod McCain with this sort of thing, because old, cranky guys who you could easily see literally throwing you off their lawn. I think, if nothing else, that that explains the recent resurgence of prominent McCain supporter Wilford Brimley.

When people talk about "the tone in Washington" it's usually in the middle of a finger-wagging session about how Republicans and Democrats say mean things to each other sometimes. All that stuff about "sticking to the issues" and bipartanship and all that crap is fine, but as far as "tone" goes, I would happily settle for wannabe elected officials acting just slightly less pleased with themselves.