'Soft On Crime' Makes a Comeback

By TChris, Section Elections 2008
Posted on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 12:14:37 AM EST

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The McCain campaign has been rummaging through the Republican attic for old attacks to launch against Barack Obama. Tax-and-spend liberal didn't take, so it was only a matter of time before they dusted off soft on crime.

The flier sent by the Republican Party in Nevada and other states this week says Obama has voted against tough penalties for drug and gang-related crimes, and is against "protecting children from danger."

Obama voted "present" on a bill that would have prosecuted children in adult court when they are accused of firing a gun near a school. Keeping children in juvenile court, away from the possibility of an adult prison sentence, constitutes "protecting children from danger" in my world. [more ...]

Unable to convince enough voters that Obama has a secret plan to help terrorists, the McCain campaign now wants voters to believe that Obama is a better "friend to criminals than to cops." The message is ultimately the same: Obama is scary.

The piece describes Obama as "Not who you think he is."

The Obama campaign is on top of it.

The Obama campaign issued a statement Wednesday from Tom Nee, president of the National Association of Police Organizations, denouncing the mailer as the most dishonest attack "from an increasingly dishonest, dishonorable campaign."
"It's clear that Sen. McCain and his agents would rather distort facts and scare people than talk about his disastrous public safety and economic policies that offer no change from the last eight years," Nee said.

Voters will take soft on crime over stupid on the economy. After the election, we can encourage Obama to be smart on crime.

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'Soft On Crime' Makes a Comeback | 20 comments (20 topical, 0 hidden)

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protecting children (5.00 / 1) (#1)
by txpublicdefender on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 12:37:21 AM EST

Keeping children in juvenile court, away from the possibility of an adult prison sentence, constitutes "protecting children from danger" in my world.

Amen!

Bile and Vile (5.00 / 1) (#5)
by shoephone on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 02:32:41 AM EST

On the morning of November 5th McCain is going to want sympathy gifts. I'll send him a large spitoon. He's going to need it for all the bile he's been coughing up the last two months.

So maybe, (5.00 / 1) (#15)
by cal1942 on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 12:23:51 PM EST

as the Republican go through their dusty archives, the ghost of elections past, they'll come to the conclusion that they got nuthin.

The canards, lies, slight of hand, distractions, phony issues and divisiveness they've used with success in the past 28 years to sell a ruinous plutocratic agenda are HOPEFULLY proving useless in the face of what always does it; economic catastrophe. Catastrophe brought on by their own plutocratic agenda.

Ode to Autumn... (none / 0) (#2)
by marian evans on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 12:44:02 AM EST

Season of mists and hoary old chestnuts...

I wonder whether the Republicans (5.00 / 1) (#3)
by andgarden on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 01:02:57 AM EST

have anything else they want to burn in the fire?


Torquemada tendencies... (none / 0) (#4)
by marian evans on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 01:22:27 AM EST

need to be extinguished on all sides.

Democracy is the richer for letting dissenting voices speak. This has been one of America's greatest strengths.

True, you have your fair share of oddballs (quite a few of them in the Republican Party, seems to me!), but the great and complex conversation that America has had with itself these last few hundred years has been worth listening to.

It is one of the things you must protect most.


The conversation (none / 0) (#14)
by cal1942 on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 11:45:53 AM EST

has been warped the last two plus decades.

All voices have not been heard.

One set of voices was given a giant megaphone with the volume turned up to the max drowning to a barely audible whisper the heirs of the enlightenment.


The Enlightenment... (none / 0) (#16)
by marian evans on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 12:52:13 PM EST

can certainly teach us a thing or two about robust intellectual conversation.

We need a new Alexander Pope to write a Dunciad for our times...except with a political twist.

Who would deserve to get a starring role in it? There's a veritable host to choose from...to paraphrase another great poet: "So many I had not thought idiocy had undone so many".

This election cycle has revealed to us not only the dullness, but the truly monumental banality of the MSM.

Grub Street has become a very mean street indeed.


Wow, a literate poster! (none / 0) (#17)
by sarcastic unnamed one on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 01:39:04 PM EST

Nice to see!


Good conversation... (none / 0) (#19)
by marian evans on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 11:30:34 PM EST

requires a willingness to listen on both sides. Talk Left is one of the places where the great conversation, the discussion of ideas, is still being held.

I'm so grateful to have find this island of good sense, and good conversation, in a muddled world.


: typo.... (none / 0) (#20)
by marian evans on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 11:38:57 PM EST

"to have found"...sigh..
Conversation! The communication between my mind and fingers need more caffeine.
Preview, as they say, is your friend!

What's next? (none / 0) (#6)
by Left of center on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 03:49:26 AM EST

Willie Horton?

No Administration has been . . . (none / 0) (#7)
by Doc Rock on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 09:45:06 AM EST

... softer on white collar crime and especially business fraud than Bush-Cheney-Gonzales. Egads!

Original objection to Obama was that he was (none / 0) (#8)
by befuddledvoter on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 10:01:04 AM EST

too harsh with criminals. Here is my post on the issue from a couple of months back:

His track record in IL speaks volumes.
In an August 19, 2004 entry on Obama's website he bragged about being tough on drugs:
During 8 years in the state senate, Senator Obama has repeatedly voted for tougher penalties for drug offenders. [HB 3387, 5/13/03; P.A. 93-0546; SB 1793, 3/21/03; P.A. 93-0223; HB 2347, 5/6/99; P.A. 91-0336; HB 3170, 5/7/98; P.A. 90-0674; HB 1278, 5/14/99; P.A. 91-0403; SB 0105, 3/23/99; P.A. 91-0263; HB 2843, 5/20/03; P.A. 93-0596; 93rd GA, SB 2447, 3/25/04; P.A. 93-0884; SB 1578, 3/24/03; P.A. 93-0297; SB1028, 4/2/98; SB 1028, 5/19/98, SC HA1,4; P.A. 90-0775; HB 0070, 5/16/97; P.A. 90-0382; HB 2844, 5/13/03; P.A. 93-0340; HB 3073, 4/4/00; P.A. 91-0802; HB 0252, 5/7/99; P.A. 91-0366; HB 5652, 5/9/02; SB 1332, 2/24/00; P.A. 91-0899; HB 4245, 5/7/02; P.A. 92-0698; SB 0014, 5/20/97, SC HA1; P.A. 90-0397; SB 0003, 4/6/01; HB 2015, 5/9/97; P.A. 90-0164; SB 1011, 4/5/01; SB 1224, 3/24/98; HB 2030, 5/15/97; P.A. 90-0557]

He also voted "present" for a bill that allowed trying children, age 15, as adults, subjecting them to adult prison. The vote on the juvenile-justice bill appears to be a case when Obama, who represented a racially mixed district on the South Side of Chicago, faced pressure. It also occurred about six months before he announced an ultimately unsuccessful campaign against a popular black congressman, Bobby L. Rush

Just goes to show (5.00 / 3) (#9)
by CST on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 10:31:38 AM EST

No matter what your real record is Republicans will paint you however they want.

So they should stop trying to get their approval and just do what they think is actually right.


: Sounds like good advice for (none / 0) (#11)
by Wile ECoyote on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 10:42:42 AM EST

everybody no matter what.

How does failing to educate kindergarteners (none / 0) (#10)
by No Blood for Hubris on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 10:33:54 AM EST

about body privacy and resisting sexual predators constitute "protecting children'?

Oh right. Because that would really count as "sex education," and we're not having any of that, nosiree.

Friends of Criminals, Friends of Cops.... (none / 0) (#12)
by kdog on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 11:02:18 AM EST

too bad there isn't a "Friend of Liberty" between them.

Good point on protecting children accused (none / 0) (#13)
by MyLeftMind on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 11:37:11 AM EST

of crimes by keeping them in juvenile court. But that simply won't fly with parents who want their own children protected from very dangerous, repeat offender child criminals. When the severity of crimes escalates with a youth offender, it's reasonable for victims of those crimes to want better solutions that protect society. Case in point: mass shootings at schools, a parent's worse nightmare. If an offender has previous convictions and would have been prevented from committing the killings had he/she been treated as an adult, the public rightfully views the system as broken.

Clearly the juvenile system has failed in many instances, which is why we have people pushing for more serious treatment of juvenile offenders. Their solution is to treat them as adults when they commit very dangerous crimes (armed robbery, rape, murder, even bringing a gun to school). Our solution shouldn't be just keeping them in juvenile court, because that hasn't worked so far. We need to find better solutions. We need to address the valid concerns of our opponents regarding youth offenders committing more and more serious crimes leading up to killings.

In order to create better solutions, we need to balance the opposing viewpoints, not just pit them against each other. This doesn't mean looking for a compromise somewhere in the middle, it means actually finding common ground, acknowledging and reinforcing that shared perspective, and finding solutions that both sides will support. We all want the kids who are not criminals to be safe from other children who have the potential to hurt or kill them. Which perhaps means the juvenile system should work to ensure that young criminals are actually rehabilitated. Otherwise the juvenile system is rightfully viewed as coddling dangerous youth, and we're blamed for facilitating a dysfunctional system and being "soft on crime."

Consistently showing good results is where our focus needs to be.

"Tough on crime" = minority suppression (none / 0) (#18)
by SeeEmDee on Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 07:34:34 PM EST

In the Burkean Republican world view, 'order' is everything. Maintaining that 'order' (which benefits the top economic 1% of the populace at the expense of all other sectors) is a major priority...and the greatest threat to that order are all the marginalized, disaffected people that the economic system that benefits the Investor Class has discarded.

A lot of those faces are black and brown, and are seen as potential threats, regardless of a history of any such threat actually being present. Such have next to no stake in the system that has engaged in what amounts to social repression, largely through the agency of the DrugWar, which has politically disenfranchised millions of potential voters...and whereby helped maintain the status quo.

So, to a Republican mind, to be 'tough on crime' means to reduce the level of minority participation in the democratic process. But, in these economic hard times, that are rapidly getting worse, we can longer afford the machinery that being 'tough on crime' represents.

The bill is due, and nobody can pay it, even with a vastly inflated money supply, because that only devalues the currency that much more. Something's got to give, and soon. Which is why you're hearing such phrases as 'smart on crime' being bandied about, as test feelers before anyone finally openly recognizes the elephant in the room that being 'tough on crime' has placed there.