betsy from oklahoma
In the morning.
Wait. What?
Oh. I forgot… where I was for a second. Sorry.
I meant… ON Morning Joe. Last Thursday. The coming out party that seems to have never happened. That might be your perspective if you happened to think, as I did, that Elizabeth Warren’s every public utterance since taking the job as President Obama’s Special Advisor for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be Breaking News across the political airwaves.
What did she say? Lots of stuff like this.
For 30 years, we have watched a financial services industry that has figured out new ways to squeeze money out of middle-class American families.
Good stuff there, huh? But maybe the Tea Party terrified media has been slow to get going on this story because Elizabeth Warren, the name, sounds so… oh I don’t know… Hahvahd. Doesn’t it?
Are the American people, the ones who now have every right to permanently hate anything and everything that carries even a whiff of that button down eastern establishment culture, are they ever really going to accept an Elizabeth Warren from Harvard as someone who is truly looking out for their interests?
Maybe we would do well to remind the American people as much as possible, and keep in mind ourselves, that Elizabeth, according to her Wikipedia page, is an ex-Sunday School teacher who cites Methodist John Wesley as an inspiration.
In other words… Betsy from Oklahoma. That’s who she really is.
And where has she been all our lives? Isn’t she exactly what this country has needed for so long? A good solid woman with those hard-working, dawn-to-dusk, down-on-the-farm middle-American values we can all be proud of? Someone we, the American people, can trust?
We all know the answer to those questions. So let’s get on with, as Betsy from Oklahoma puts it, The People’s Business.
This is about fine print. It’s about tricks and traps. It’s about a whole industry that has grown around the notion that ‘we will pretend to sell you things at one price but ha ha HA… just wait.’
Okay that sounds great! That’s what I call hitting the ground running. But wait a minute.
That warm tingly sensation so many of us get at the thought of someone of Betsy’s caliber taking on the evils of the banking industry will DUH! not be universally shared in all parts (read: sectors) of the country.
Especially you know where.
Just listen to what the financial sector, for one, tried to do to Betsy’s agency before it could even get off the ground. I’ll give you a hint. They tried to KILL it. Yes they did. Just listen to Betsy. She’ll tell you all about it.
A lot of people fought this agency, I mean they fought it tooth and nail. The industry did. They spent tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. And they said, we will kill this agency. And they didn’t. There were a lot of folks in political campaigns who were trying to kill this agency.
And no surprise, it sounds like the hell hounds will be on Betsy’s trail for the foreseeable future.
We finally got this agency into law, but let’s face it. There are a lot of people who still would do it harm. In the industry, and on Capitol Hill.
Stay safe, Betsy. We’re all counting on you.
Tricks And Traps
‘we will kill this agency’
We Will Kill This Agency 2
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if you thought the tea party sensation’s self admission that she “dabbled into witchcraft” on an episode of politically incorrect from way back in the late 90s was a hot mess, you’re going to LOVE her foray into matters of science as recently as november of 2007, here on bill o’ really’s show (which I will not name) on faux-news.
american scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains.
oh no she didn’t.
christine o’donnell you did NOT say that!
welp, as my mother would say, she most certainly did.
here’s the 12 seconds of audio proof and i’m not going to add another word.
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Tags: candidate, Christine O'Donnell, controversial, Delaware, democrat, foxnews, obama, politics, rebublican, senate, senate race, tea party, witchcraft
“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asked. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”
“This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president,” Gingrich added.
“I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true,” Gingrich continues.
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Tags: jammerbirdi, Newt, obama
waking up a blog
been so long, I know. but the new wordpress iPhone app threatens to remove a mental impediment, real or imagined, to my process of blogging. oh, and then there’s the displeasure with how things are shaping up, or not, in the world of big time politics.
So…
I could be back.
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the gospel, according to mary
Numerous publications digging deeper this week into why New Mexico Governor and former Clinton Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson turned on his old bosses and endorsed Barack Obama. The Los Angeles Times piece is here.
Nothing new or surprising in any of the reports that I can see. Richardson was moved by Obama’s speech on race, didn’t particularly like the Clintons’ approach.
There was that “3 a.m.” TV ad, in which Clinton questioned Obama’s personal mettle. “That upset me,” Richardson said.
There were some ham-fisted phone calls from Clinton backers, who questioned Richardson’s honor and suggested that the governor, who served in President Clinton’s Cabinet, owed Hillary Clinton his support. “That really ticked me off,” Richardson said.
But what’s largely missing from the public record since Richardson announced his endorsement of Senator Obama, amid all the finger pointing by both sides regarding who said Obama couldn’t win and the numerous op-eds defending both side’s positions, is a more fleshed-out version of events regarding what could possibly have led the Clintons, and their surrogates, James Carville most notably, to push back with such hostility at Richardson’s endorsement of Obama.
Missing until now, that is. Carville’s wife and former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, Mary Matalin, speaking on the born-again Imus in the Morning radio show, now simulcast on RFD-TV, last Friday morning offered the following:
I think what got everybody most juiced up… is when he asked President Clinton to come out and fundraise for him on the Super Bowl (??) and the President said…
“Don’t ask me to do this… I’m on the road with Hillary… if you’re going to go support Obama.”
And he gave to President Clinton and many other fundraisers his assurance on the grounds that Obama wasn’t experienced enough and he was going to support Hillary.
Matalin adds, “It’s just over the top.”
I would have to agree with her assessment.
Listen to an audio mp3s of Mary Matalin speaking of Bill Richardson’s endorsement of Barack Obama on Imus in the Morning right here.
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Tags: carville, clinton, democrats, hillary, imus, matalin, obama, president, primary, richardson
On a video feature in the Bloggingheads section of the New York Times website there is a discussion with Robert Reich, formerly a Clinton administration labor secretary. The teaser reads like this.
Robert Wright of Bloggingheads.tv, left, and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich discuss the possibility of superdelegates giving the election to Hillary Clinton.
The video begins with the text overlay of this question. Verbatim.
Unless Hillary Clinton wins landslide victories in the upcoming primaries she will likely finish with fewer pledged delegates than Barack Obama. What will happen if the superdelegates override the voters?
My question is this. When suddenly did the mainstream media, made up of so many who have gone to school at places like Harvard and Yale, begin to emulate this dishonest three card Monty style of question construction that would make a hack car salesman proud? (Mr. Wright’s Wikipedia bio boasts a Princeton education.)
I have an alternative question which I believe to be more honest.
If Hillary Clinton overtakes Barack Obama in the popular vote, what will happen if arcane and varied Democratic party rules as to how primaries are carried out and how pledged delegates are allocated are used by the party to override the will of the voters?
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jesus or no jesus
Barack Obama himself has said that the speech he heard from his Pastor and mentor Reverend Jeremiah Wright was reprehensible. But he says that he can’t turn away from his pastor because this is the man who led him to Jesus Christ.
This is something that has me shaking my head in the context of the godless left’s support of Obama in this campaign. The candidate sits under a racist pastor who espouses hate speech for twenty years and then asks us to accept that because this guy led him to Jesus?
And that’s okay with Air America?
Hate speech is okay with the left because of Jesus? That makes me dizzy. Where are the ideals of the left and how can this possibly be acceptable coming from a candidate who is endorsed by the left? It’s just amazing. Ralph Nader calls Obama the liberal evangelical.
Obama is a lefty atheist coming out of Ivy League schools who attaches to a church and finds Jesus… but THIS is okay with the left because Obama’s pastor is really some kind of radical closet black power demagogue?
Oh shoot, I’ve got it backwards.
But does it matter? Is hate speech okay because of Jesus or is Jesus and hate speech BOTH okay because of the Pastor’s politicized left-leaning rants?
Jesus, there’s something for everyone on the new Religious Left.
Except for a plurality of the American people’s votes come November.
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the ‘out of context’ myth
I’ve listened to two of Pastor Jeremiah Wright’s sermons in their entirety. The sermon from Sept. 2001 twice.
I don’t agree with those who are claiming that the offending comments were taken out of context. That’s a specious claim. They are taken out of context only literally and the traditional usage and implications of the term taken out of context is not that something has been literally excerpted. When it is said that something is taken out of context it means specifically that comments or quotes are pulled in a way that distorts their meaning or intent.
Pastor Wright was PREACHING that American foreign policy led to 9/11. There’s certainly some truth in that and most on the left would agree that there’s some factual basis to Pastor Wright’s perspective. But it is certainly an accurate portrayal of Pastor Wright’s perspective and he was forcefully and emotionally offering that perspective from the pulpit of his, and Barack Obama’s, church, just a week after 9/11.
That is going to be offensive to many people in this county, even if they tend to agree with the Pastor’s point. And most won’t.
The excerpts do not in any way distort the intent of Pastor Wright’s comments. In fact, the opposite is true. They reflect his political feelings quite accurately. To say that he was taken out of context is just simply false. It is not a distortion of Pastor Wright’s position that is reflected in the excerpted videos. Those are his feelings and they are offensive and hostile and damaging, as are many of the controversial things that he has been caught preaching to his church and writing in the church bulletin.
It’s wholly irrelevant that in this case he preaches peace and love for most of his sermons. The negative moments are like a window opening up where he lets the congregate experience his real feelings and rage. There is no context wherein his sort of divisive and racist rage is acceptable and to suggest otherwise is wrong on so many levels none the least of which is simply the blind denial of the damage caused by having someone stand up there preaching in this way.
For the people in those pews, the message of negativity is very damaging. It’s old school poison like what you’d hear from that angry uncle. It’s destructive and negative and it holds people back which is completely counterproductive to Pastor Wright’s intent, I’m sure.
That is the danger of subjecting yourself to the teachings of a Pastor Wright and the danger, always, of such a highly politicized religious experience.
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a short superdelegate rant
Superdelegates announcing their support for Barack Obama are making the biggest mistake in the history of the Democratic party. Not because they will ultimately cast their vote for Obama. When the time comes it’s their duty to support who they see fit to be the nominee of the party.
But that they are starting to break now for Obama, before this last set of primaries, is spitting in the face of half the Democratic party and potentially reducing future primaries, which have generated great excitement in at least one coveted swing state, to being totally irrelevant afterthoughts.
All the money and all the donors sending that money to Hillary Clinton to carry on the fight?
These superdelegates are saying to those very people that their contributions to the Democratic party’s primary process are a waste. Because superdelegates going for Obama now, in concert with the calls for Hillary to quit the race, threatens to literally turn those campaign contributions into money down the drain.
Way to go, Democrats. Way to treat nearly half your own loyal check writing base.
All Hail President McCain.
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night of the living democrats
Democrats who really want to win the White House, now or ever, should take note of something.
On the one side of the push to get Hillary Clinton to quit the race you have the party’s perennial LOSERS at presidential politics. Howard Dean, Chris Dodd, Bill Bradley, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Bill Richardson.
On the other side you have this party’s ONLY winners. The Clintons. Bill Clinton is the only two term Democratic president since Harry Truman. The Clintons didn’t just win the White House twice but presided over, by any measure, the most successful administration in half a century.
The Clintons tackled the problems of this country with supreme confidence and competence and peace reigned and the budget deficit, the NUMBER ONE Republican issue of the early 90s, was turned to a surplus.
And now here comes the tone deaf left wing blogosphere, repeating the same old anti-Clinton bile while siding with this party’s presidential ex-wannabes against the only real winners the party has had at presidential politics in many long decades.
I’m not surprised at all at those on the left siding with Obama and participating in the trashing of the Clintons. You can have a superior education and a nationally famous political blog, but that doesn’t mean you have a drop of political insight or the slightest notion of what one looks like.
What disturbs me is the Democrats falling in step with the party’s losers at presidential politics. For primal screaming out loud, Howard Dean couldn’t even lose in Iowa without also losing his composure and destroying his presidential aspirations.
And what does the Democratic party do?
They make Howard Dean chairman.
Because Howard Dean was able to raise money on the internet and, it seems, young people like him. I’ve heard left wing bloggers lament that Howard Dean’s fall from electability was for the stupidest reason ever in the history of American political falls. But that perspective is the result of so many of these people being themselves absolutely tone deaf.
The fact is that it was a fitting take down and the truth is that the left and the Democratic party are both rapidly becoming an extension of Howard Dean’s ghastly and unelectable roar that night in Iowa.
Great rallying cry there.
And what does Howard Dean know anyway about avoiding catastrophe?
His LAST chance of avoiding what is already upon the Democratic party was when the Obama campaign began to play the race card against Dean’s own party’s version of the Reagans. He could have sat the Obama campaign down and said… no… we’re not going to do this. This IS a two term Democratic president and his first lady. They ARE the Democratic party. You can’t destroy them. It WILL end in disaster for all of us.
But, people. Howard Dean wouldn’t have known. He doesn’t have that kind of political insight or instincts. Howard Dean helped create this mess by not having the sense to perform a function the leader of the party should be there to perform.
And with so much of Obama’s support coming from the old Dean democrats from 2004, it’s easy to believe that Howard Dean, like these other castoffs from elections past, would like nothing more now than for the party’s only champions and proven winners to step aside for a guy who was an Illinois state senator a little over three years ago?
Yes. Coming from the man infamous for making impolitic noises, and the party that made him its leader, this all sounds about right.
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shutting democracy down
Just a KTLA 10 PM newscast poll here in LA.
Should Hillary Clinton drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination?
21.2% Yes (129 responses)
78.8% No (479 responses)
608 total responses
There is also the now well publicized poll that produced 22% each wanting either Obama or Clinton to quit and 66% wanting the race to continue.
The Democratic party is imploding. Not because of the fact that we have a close race. But because of both the very real and the very imagined perceptions of unfairness and of party ideals being thrown over the side for political expediency. This 2008 Democratic party is piling up crimes against democracy by people who couldn’t care less as fast as the Republican party did in 2000. By party rules they’ve eliminated the participation of millions of voting Americans in Florida and Michigan.
How many are combat veterans, I wonder? (Makes me shudder to think about that.)
CNN did a great piece, along with the help of the Detroit Free Press, in pinpointing how two Obama campaign chairmen in the Michigan state senate blocked the revote effort there. This is all about those two states voting too early. But now another group of Obama supporters wants Hillary to quit before the last round of states has a chance to vote. Because, presumably, they are voting too late. Millions of Americans being denied their elective voice and an attempt to deny millions more their chance to be heard as well.
The leadership of this party, and I include the frontrunner among them, have shown themselves to be tone deaf, unable to ascertain or understand the prevailing will of the people of this country and unable to prevent themselves from participating or even precipitating a disaster. They don’t get even that Florida and Michigan Democrats will be sufficiently outraged, which they are, at being shut out of this primary process. That’s denial, plain and simple. But what they’re also missing is that Florida and Michigan has and will outrage voters, not JUST Democrats, ALL OVER the country.
It’s as if these people looked at what happened in Florida and have decided that not counting votes is not such a big deal after all. All the efforts the politically passionate left have taken in developing nations to try to spread democracy by ensuring fair elections where all the votes are counted and counted correctly, those principles… we don’t need them here in America any more. We have RULES.
And Air America cheers on.
The solution to this catastrophe in the Democratic party isn’t to call upon Hillary Clinton to get out. Way over half the people in every poll taken on this question points to a solid majority that wants no such thing. But I wouldn’t expect the Democrats supporting Barack Obama to care or even understand any of this, or the seeds of a November defeat they are sowing right now.
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things that make you go hmmm…
There are quite a few states left that haven’t voted, including some fairly large ones in PA, Indiana, etc.
The Democratic party could look at the calender in advance and see exactly how spread out and long their primary season was going to be. I’m trying to imagine a closer primary race scenario wherein these later primaries would not be seen, as has been suggested to be the case now by so many, as being unnecessary, extra, superfluous, etc.
If not in this race, then when would these primaries be relevant and when could all these voters expect their votes to matter to the Democratic party?
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the pastor comes home to roost
Pastor Wright is now officially a cancer on the presidential aspirations of Barack Obama.
How about William Kristol’s referencing Marc Antony’s Brutus is an honorable man riff. Does it get any better that this in politics than calling upon Shakespeare to DAMN a modern politician?
“It wasn’t when he posed the rhetorical questions: “Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?”
The real question, of course, is not why Obama joined Trinity, but why he stayed there for two decades, in the flock of a pastor who accused the U.S. government of “inventing the H.I.V. virus as a means of genocide against people of color,” and who suggested soon after 9/11 that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
But orators often ask themselves the convenient questions, not the difficult ones. And Barack Obama is an accomplished orator.
Nor was I shocked when Obama compared Reverend Wright, who was using his pulpit to propagate racial resentment, with his grandmother, who may have said privately a few things that made Obama cringe, or with Geraldine Ferraro, whom “some have dismissed … as harboring some deep-seated bias.”
After all, politicians sometimes indulge in ridiculous and unfair comparisons to make a point. And Barack Obama is an able politician.
And I didn’t shudder when Obama said he could no more disown Reverend Wright than he could disown the black community. I did think this statement was unfair to many in the black community, and especially to all those pastors who have resisted the temptation to appeal to their parishioners in the irresponsible and demagogic manner of Reverend Wright.
But ambitious men sometimes do a disservice to the best in their own communities. And Barack Obama is an ambitious man.
Not a fan of Kristol to put it mildly and the most unpleasant times in American politics are when the conservatives are the only ones who dare speak the truth.
Such is the grip that political correctness and identity politics has on the left.
Kristol’s piece was brilliant and I think his this isn’t the time to have a discussion on race theme is simply a controversial hook.
His central point is really something else and that is that Barack Obama may not be the person to lead us in this discussion, that in his speech he stepped too cute by half into something he had actually been pushed into dealing with by a firestorm, and that many Americans might not look at him as having the moral capital to be our national race guru, coming from this particular church and having sat under this pastor for so long.
And, by association to all that, of course, the piece begs the question as to whether this guy is presidential material. Because if there’s any unspoken implication to Kristol’s commentary it is that a lot of this clumsiness and political posturing by Obama doesn’t really recommend him for the job.
Add to all that the fact that it is certainly a political non-starter for the Democrats and that either of these candidates are probably not going to help themselves in the general election by having to engage, with Pastor Wright raging in the background, on the topic of race, when the hearts and minds of most Americans are somewhere else.
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the judas endorsement
Let’s review. Richardson goes against the political Godfather that MADE him the Ambassador to the UN and Secretary of Energy. He goes against the expressed will of the voters in his state who went for Hillary Clinton. And he goes against Latinos around the country who have largely gone for Hillary.
None of which is honorable.
Richardson is simply rolling the dice to get back to Washington. He waited until the Florida and Michigan re-vote idea appeared to be finally dead and looked at the math and determined that Hillary’s chances are slim to none but if he were to come out for Obama now, during this darkest of hours for the Obama campaign, that Obama would owe him some kind of major appointment.
Now a question. Why isn’t John Edwards endorsing anyone?
Here’s the answer.
Because there’s NOTHING in it for him. And here is why.
It appears that Hillary can’t win the nomination. So an endorsement of her is out of the question. But John Edwards isn’t going to burn that bridge for absolutely nothing. He’s looking at Barack Obama and he’s seeing someone that he doesn’t believe can win in November. So don’t expect him to endorse Obama ever. He’ll work for Obama in the general election, they all will. There’s no downside to that. But there’s no way that this guy, who is a United States Senator and a fairly young and ambitious one at that, is going to attach himself to someone that he might feel is a shooting star and now a controversial and divisive one at that, rolling over on a Clinton in the process.
Think he wants to be Obama’s VP? If he ever did, and I don’t think so, he sure doesn’t want to now.
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but why did you stay, barack?
This and similar questions aren’t just being asked on Fox News. Richard Halperin of Time Magazine and The Page is asking it. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, who only a month ago wrote a have-you-no-shame piece imploring Hilary to GET OUT of the race, now he’s on MSNBC asking the question.
Fox News is only an indicator of how the Republicans will run against Obama in the general election. If you want to know if the Wright controversy has traction beyond the right wing media, watch something else.
One of Obama’s core constituencies is coming unraveled. Not white men or the better educated, etc. Not a voting bloc at all. I’m speaking of the elite print commentators at the New York Times and the Washington Post. It’s happening slowly. A half a Maureen Dowd column at a time. But they’re jumping off.
Richard Cohen hates Hillary Clinton and his columns were shrill humiliations of her. He admits to writing “fawningly” of Barack Obama. Now he’s talking about Obama like Obama was playing grab ass at a state dinner. Whatever is said on Fox that HAS merit, also has legs with the rest of the press corps.
Why did he stay at this church when he knew about anti-American and racist hate speech? Why didn’t he answer that and throw the reverend over in his speech on Monday? What does any of that say about his leadership and judgment?
This is obviously HARD for these people who were in the tank for Obama. But their support of him now is like a ball of yarn slowly unraveling. And every one of these people… the Mark Halperins and Richard Cohens… are saying that this is ALL that people are talking about. Meaning the people they talk to… other big time journalists.
Not FOX. And not the blogosphere. I’m talking about the savants and opinion makers and shapers from the most important publications in the country. Quasi-liberals who have been in the tank for Obama from day one. They may be watching Fox, like so many of us after the Wright story broke, to see how the Right wing would run with it, but they’re taking AWAY from Fox any valid perspectives or questions that are made by the right.
Chris Wallace, of Fox, said this on Imus the other day. (And Imus is very much pulling for Obama to take out Hillary Clinton, who he still refers to as “Satan”.) But when Wallace said this, everyone just doubled over laughing, including me, because he kind of just exasperatingly said it, and yet it was SO true and so cuttingly spot on, that it came off as hilarious. He was talking about how the conservative democrats probably wouldn’t be very understanding of a potential president sitting in a church under a pastor spewing this anti-American and racist junk. CW said, exasperated:
“….because if there’s ONE person who you’d expect to STAND UP for America, it’s the President.”
Very simple statement. But it cuts so deeply into the meat of this controversy that you shouldn’t gloss over it. It speaks to the head scratching that will go on in households and bars and bowling alleys and Walmarts all over this country. It’s hard to put the two unlike things together. The President of the United States of America. And Barack Obama sitting for 20 years under Pastor God Damn America.
You can talk about transcripts and actual attendance all you want. Those are valid topics for an in depth analysis of the matter. But this is a POLITICAL campaign to put Barack Obama in the Oval Office. The political ramifications are separate issues entirely than these details. The conservative Reagan democrat, the Republican who LIKED Barack Obama and might have voted for him. Scores of other white Democrats who are seething about Pastor Wright’s racist rants. These people are all politically in play and they’re sitting back and saying… [i]how COULD he have sat there and how could he claim to not know of this stuff when here I am sitting having a beer at the Elks club in Altoona and I know about it?
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obama’s speech on race
I heard someone describe it as towering. I think that’s accurate. Tremendous potential for this country to move somewhere it has never been inherent in the characterizations he made of race and even the tolerance of people who have racial anger on all sides… all the way up to your racist granny! That’s pretty groundbreaking.
Whether it solves the short term pastor problem in everyone’s eyes was relegated to something that is pretty much beside the point. General election politics from here out is going to come down to something like a battle between good and evil. Obama set himself historically on the right side in that struggle.
All of that stuff is important. But maybe one of the most important aspects of the speech is that it called upon the better natures of everyone in a fractured Democratic party. Lot of wounds on both sides. He stood there as a leader of the Democratic party and said don’t forget what we are all about, what we should be all about, what we claim to be about as Democrats and liberals.
There was an opening or an opportunity there for a true leader to step up in the Democratic party and Obama showed that we don’t need an Al Gore or someone like that, or one of these losers like Howard Dean or Nancy Pelosi to step up and lead the Democratic party and constituency out of this primary mess. He is that leader or one part of that co-leadership.
But make no mistake, Obama set himself apart from everyone with this speech.
Personally, he spoke about the America I’ve dreamed about my entire life. So hearing a potential President of the United States articulating what I think and feel this country should be about was a watershed moment for me. I support Hillary Clinton for president and I will continue to do so until the day when she is no longer a candidate. And I hope that day doesn’t come in this campaign.
But I’d like to think that Barack Obama could be the President of the United States. I’d like to think that people everywhere in this country could watch and hear this speech and want a Barack Obama to lead us all to being the kind of America I’ve always dreamed of.
I can only hope that the vast majority of people who saw this speech, and a plurality of voters in November, all want the same things.
Hillary made a speech today not long after Obama’s. She certainly didn’t talk about gender politics. It was actually hard to listen to after Obama’s speech and one network cut away from it after a bit and as they did the anchor only commented on the fact that she mentioned Obama’s speech and that she hadn’t seen it.
Hillary was droning on endlessly about a couple of real snoozer issues in comparsion to Obama’s historic address on the issue of race in America. Those being the economy and the war in Iraq.
Now I also have to add something else. As far as the economy, personally, we’re doing fine in this household and we’re going to be doing fine (almost) no matter how bad the economy gets. And the truth is, as these Cali home prices tumble, in a couple of years we might pick up a dream house here on the Westside of LA at something like 1997 prices. So I’m not connecting on the economy like I’m sure many Americans are.
As far as the war… jeez… I’m sensing that something fundamental has shifted in Iraq. After all that we’ve done wrong… things might finally being going in our direction there. This is something that is being whispered at the New York Times and from people like Robin Wright of the Washington Post and many others. It’s kind of getting obvious at this point. I’ve said repeatedly that the war in Iraq could be a liability instead of an advantage for these two anti-war Dems come the general election.
So as far as these two biggest issues of the current political climate… I’m kind of disconnected. On the other hand, race, racial politics, racial injustice… this stuff taps into my deepest political core. So maybe it was just ME who found it hard to listen to Hillary Clinton following Obama’s historic and inspirational speech.
Problem is, politically, only a sliver of the Democratic party and even less of the country at large wants to enter into a soul wrenching national dialog on RACE RELATIONS in this election cycle. The last thing the democratic party would have wanted is a black candidate squarely focusing the country on racial injustices and an effort at healing divisions. I think, after this magnificent speech, however, that this where we might be heading. I hope Obama’s speech puts the issue of race to rest as far as public discourse till a Democrat has won in November.
But right now, that election victory seems a long way off.
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Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are key swing states in a general presidential election and likely will be for many election cycles to come. Even the slightest or casually spoken dismissal of the importance of either of those three states is really naive on many levels.
That anyone can be comfortable with having voters locked out of this primary election for ANY REASON whatsoever just scares the hell out of me. The entire political dream of this country is based upon the sanctity of the vote and the ability of the voter to express that vote and to be confident that his or her vote will be counted.
Beyond the violation of democratic ideals is the simple political impracticality of disenfranchising voters in a key swing state like Florida.
We are talking here about determining the Democratic nominee and potentially the next president of the United States. The votes in Florida and Michigan could help swing the election TO the candidate who is in second place right now. Without them, it is practically impossible for that to happen.
For the Obama campaign and his supporters to oppose a re-vote in Florida and Michigan and to relish that as an impossibility because of the potential for Obama to lose his lead over Hillary, is absolutely no different than improperly expunging voters from voter rolls, placing a police barricade around a precinct, denying suffrage to a minority, etc. It’s all the same.
Here we are, Democrats, once again begging for the votes to be counted in Florida.
But this time, it’s Democrats, who it turns out are no better than Bush’s 2000 campaign staff lawyers and hooligans, trying to block those votes from being counted or stave off a re-vote.
That Obama himself and his campaign and his followers are either standing mum or hiding behind Democratic party rules in an effort to get past Hillary Clinton, and participating in or quietly acquiescing to the disenfranchisement of the voters in Florida and Michigan is something that taints him, his campaign, and all who are arguing against a process that would bring these voters back into play.
This really DOESN’T speak well of the democratic ideals of any of them.
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the ferraro furor
How does any white politician running against a Clinton in a Democratic primary garner close to 85% of the African American vote nationwide while simultaneously pushing African American participation to record levels?
It might be possible for someone to concoct a tortured explanation as to how that could happen… but it would be bullshit.
So if that’s the context and the basis for Geraldine Ferraro’s comment, if that’s what she meant, then she simply was speaking the truth.
What is the average now of African Americans voting for Obama? Mid or high 80s? People are running from the truth here. Because it might be embarrassing to them or it might help them prove that they’re less racist than the next person or group? I don’t really know. I can only guess as to why people turn their noses up to the truth.
In my life I was taught and learned from being a child of the 60s, a watcher of the Civil Rights movement, and a participant of it in my adolescent heart, that bias is an abhorrent and DESTRUCTIVE thing when it comes to race or skin color. To be racially biased is a mark of bad character.
But it is also an often subtle obstacle in everyone’s hearts and minds.
Bias FOR someone because they are the same race as you are is still racial bias. And it is destructive. The mainstream media, which hasn’t wanted to touch this since CNN got hammered for their beauty salon question put to AA women in South Carolina, explains it this way. It’s okay that blacks are voting FOR Obama because he is black, because they see him as being more likely, due to his racial makeup, to see things their way, etc. as long as they are NOT voting against Hillary because she is white.
Which is something that would get you howls of laughter in a freshman philosophy class.
I saw this coming late last year. For black voters in this primary season, this became very much about Obama’s racial makeup very quickly. Every other demographic has crossed over at some point to vote against their own demographic. Everyone except African Americans. (I’m practically quoting CNN’s Roland Martin on that.) Going into every one of these states the African American vote is predetermined to be in the area of 80%+ for Obama.
The position that African Americans are voting for Obama because they like his programs better or the way his experience stacks up against Hillary Clinton’s is both untenable and diversionary.
And racial bias is destructive. Is destructive. Is destructive.
There is a post I read regarding racial identity politics in this primary. It struck me. It was from a woman supporting Hillary. She said:
“All my life I’ve worked for Civil Rights. I feel so betrayed.”
The hurt feelings in this election go both ways.
Regarding Ferarro. She said some things that were true. And then she said some things that were fucked up and destructive. And now people are even further apart. I’m glad she’s gone. Although I think she was right about a couple of things and those things needed to be said, overall she was the wrong messenger and she made matters worse.
But it’s important to note something here.
You have life long liberals screaming that the Obama campaign has been playing the race card against Hillary Clinton. The response to that has been to combat it. Demean it. Downplay it. Or even call the perspective itself racist and question the integrity of those claiming it regarding race.
Hillary Clinton NEEDED the African American vote to win this primary. The Clinton campaign had no reason to play the race card. That would have been suicidal to her chances of getting past Obama and winning this nomination. African American voters could not be hoodwinked by a white politician to vote against a black man. There was no race card to play. There were simply statements made by the Clintons and their campaign that GAVE the Obama campaign and Obama supporters an opportunity to play the race card against her.
They did. And it worked. He has a lead in pledged delegates. But the collateral damage is that there are devastated feelings on all sides now, except the Republican side. The party and the democratic voting base is being split between very angry Hillary supporters who have watched the MSM take her apart with whispers from the Obama campaign, and Obama supporters, including this 80%+ African American voting bloc, who are on the defensive and having their anger stoked by someone like Ferarro, who is herself angry but on Chinese herbs or something and talking out of her ass.
In the end, if Hillary wins, she’s not going to get elected because of the hurt feelings in the Obama camp. And if Obama wins, he’s not going to get elected because of hurt feelings on the Clinton side of things.
I’ve blamed the Obama campaign before. I blame them now. And I will blame them until the end of my days. When the Clintons inadvertently gave them something to work with, they POUNCED on the issue of race. Obama should have issued an edict to his campaign and supporters, don’t TOUCH race. Don’t take what you perceive to be bait. Don’t accuse this former First Lady’s campaign or her two term president husband of anything that smacks of race. Leave it alone. He might not have had the same chance of winning the primary. But he would have had a MUCH better chance of getting elected president should he have won the primary and he might have won it anyway.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it now. Obama used RACE to get past Hillary Clinton. That’s WHY he’ll never be President of the United States. And that’s why the democrats will lose the White House once again.
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the vice-presidential insult
It is the end of the 3rd quarter in this primary. The nomination of her party for president is still very much within Hillary Clinton’s reach.
Recommending, at this point in a campaign, that your opponent would look good at the bottom of the ticket with yourself on top, no matter WHO is ahead at the time, but especially in an election this close, has nothing to do with skin color or race or racial politics. It is standard political gamesmanship and yet once again it has put the Clintons at the center of charges of, at the very least, being racially insensitive, and at worst, of being guilty of out and out racism.
I’m sorry that any African American has experienced hurt or anger over the Clintons’ suggestion of Barack Obama for the bottom of the ticket. The reaction to the Clinton’s suggesting Obama for Vice President of the United States has been characterized by some as the Clintons pushing Obama to “the back of the bus.”
I see it as quite a job recommendation for a guy who only four years ago was an Illinois state senator. But that back of the bus characterization is a very clear example of the 8-ball the Clintons have been behind since the beginning of this campaign when it comes to running against a) a black man and b) a black man whose campaign and supporters are looking to play the race card against them at every possible opportunity.
In publicly floating the idea of a unified Clinton/Obama ticket, Hillary Clinton is talking about unifying what has become a split Democratic constituency. She’s also, I believe, speaking to the Democratic leadership who are nervously looking for exactly this kind of compromise before one or both of their candidates takes on permanent damage.
Hillary has consistently smiled affably and shown a gracious and favorable attitude towards the IDEA of these two running on the same ticket… and that was BEFORE Obama became the frontrunner, back when it looked like she the most likely candidate. Then and now, Obama’s response had been an unsmiling gloomy and somewhat arrogant dismissal of the idea.
Hey. This is politics.
The Obama campaign has some real problems and finally the national news media is articulating those problems. In all these red states he’s won so convincingly, in open primaries and caucuses, the Democratic party has NO idea how many Republicans crossed over simply to knock off their version of the anti-Christ, Hillary Clinton. He’s not winning ANY of the big blue Democratic states where the Democratic party has a stronghold.
The Obamas have treated the Clintons like they are NOT our (the Democrats’) Reagans. But they ARE our Reagans. The Democrats have no one else in modern history to point to and the truth is that our Reagans our better that the real Reagans. The arrogance and disrespect towards these party icons from a man, and his wife, who a little over three years ago was an Illinois state senator and a complete unknown nationally until he made one speech at the Democratic convention in 2004.
When asked if she would support Mrs. Clinton if she were to become the nominee of the Democratic party, Michelle Obama answered coldly, “I’ll have to think about that.”
There’s no question Barack Obama has tremendous base of support in the Democratic party. But what I would like to know is where is Mr. Obama’s famous talent for reaching across a political chasm and building a bridge?
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the other obama (is a hot mess!)
The New Yorker can certainly project the snootiest tones in a put down piece and as a long time subscriber I know that. I was nevertheless shocked to come away with that impression after reading their profile of candidate Barack’s wife entitled, The Other Obama.
I have to say, I like her. But it’s not my perspective that I’m thinking about. I don’t want to say that Obama is over because of who is wife is and how she comes off in a magazine article. It also makes me seem so negative and an audacious hope crusher.
But just ask Theresa Heinz Kerry about the unforgiving scrutiny a presidential candidate’s wife can expect. Ask Hillary Clinton! You can’t get elected in this country with your wife out there saying the things that Michelle Obama is saying. She will be taken into account almost as much as the candidate.
Add her comments to his liberal credentials, his church, etc., and you have the ingredients for a toxic cocktail.
This is political cyanide coming from the mouth of a would be First Lady.
“Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents.”
Regarding the man who would be president’s views of marriage, she paraphrases her husband.
“He was, like”—she broke into a wishy-washy voice—“ ‘Marriage, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s really how you feel.’
That’ll pay the bills on Fox News for a month.
This is the nose in the air New Yorker style that signals a writer’s disapproval.
“The self-assurance that colors Obama’s assumption that her personal feelings are some bellwether of American achievement is also palpable in her forceful declarations that her husband is the only person who can solve the country’s problems.
There is a hectoring, buy-one-while-supplies-last quality to Obama’s frequent admonitions that Americans will have only one chance to elect her husband President. Someone who has spent a good portion of her life gaining purchase has suddenly been asked to sell something, and she seems to find it slightly beneath her.”
It’s the “good portion of her life gaining purchase” comment. The writer seems to me to be saying that Obama has successfully pulled herself up (gained purchase, traction) from some less-than background, made it to Princeton and Harvard, and yet isn’t sufficiently grateful to society or to the nation.
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No disrespect to the activists and Air America and everyone else on the left who support Barack Obama. I’m decidedly on the left and these voices have had my devotion in the past and I personally share mostly the same wishes and the same enemies.
But if that progressive perspective was at all tenable in presidential politics today, Ralph Nader would be a national hero (he should be) and a very large number of Americans would be clammering for him to run for president instead of hoping he doesn’t and he would be pulling down numbers that suggest that he’s a viable contender.
None of that is reality. (The man is even being bashed by Obama, who knows NO respect for these ideological icons and party elders.)
We all have to live in the real world with all the people who don’t believe everything that we believe and who would like nothing better than to win every election. Personally, I can’t postpone my hope for progress to some day down the road in the distant future when the people rise up and see the light and truly progressive politics moves into the mainstream.
Because while we’re all waiting for that to happen, the greater of two evils is taking us into an era of electronically rigable elections, wars based on false information, the pissing away of the national treasure to fatten the wallets of corporate war machine buddies, and the taking away our protections under the Constitution.
I’ll take the Clintons over another 4 or 8 years of a Republican in the White House, because that kind of choice is the only reality that exists in my opinion.
In America, we elect Republicans to the White House. Period. If the Dems nominate Barack Obama for president, America is going to once again elect a Republican to the White House. I believe that.
If by some miracle Obama wins in ’08, his liberal heart will quickly be exposed by those who hate liberals and the right wing attack machinery will have this relatively inexperienced Washington newcomer on his back for 4 years and then America will correct its “mistake” and elect another Republican to the White House.
Clinton is the only Democrat who has a chance, in my opinion, of being an effective competent, authoritative leader as President. Someone who has a better chance of both withstanding the assault that will be thrown at her while being competent enough to mount up a series of programs and initiatives that are designed cleverly enough that they might actually make it through and become actual change.
In my heart, I will always be a progressive. But in 2008, I am once again a Clintonista.
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no obama bias in press… honest
CNN had a mini-round table last night where they discussed this very question of harsher treatment of Hillary Clinton vs favorable treatment of Barack Obama. It was discussed by, summinagun, regular members of the Best Political Team on Television.
Their conclusion? NAH.
Turns out they get emails accusing them of harsh treatment of both candidates and therefore people see coverage of their candidates as being harsher. OR, if you don’t buy that narrative, there was the one about the frontrunner getting more “scrutiny.”
CNN prides itself on being there 24/7 to get the story out there fast but somehow they seem a little late to the realization that Obama has been the frontrunner for almost a month.
But whatever. I just take them at their word.
So, conversely, I don’t know WHAT Paul Krugman is talking about in his New York Times piece today.
“Yes, I know that both the Obama campaign and many reporters deny that he has received more favorable treatment than Hillary Clinton. But they’re kidding, right? Dana Milbank, the Washington Post national political reporter, told the truth back in December: “The press will savage her no matter what … they really have the knives out for her, there’s no question about it … Obama gets significantly better coverage.”
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two pinocchios
What seemed like a wild unsubstantiated rumor last week has now blown up overnight. AP has a memo. Names, dates, and the written summation by the Canadian official of the substance of his meeting with the Obama campaign’s economic adviser. This latest aspect of the story hasn’t even hit the web versions of the New York Times or CNN, although CNN, MSNBC, is reporting it, CNN, at least, in detail, with the text of the memo.
Huge story here. Obama campaign reassures nervous Canadian officials that his NAFTA campaign rhetoric about renegotiating is just that, campaign rhetoric and they shouldn’t be concerned that he would attempt to initiate a change in policy if he were to be elected. Flies in the face of Obama’s stated posture regarding, not only the status of NAFTA, but his promise of a new kinds of politics, wherein politicians are straight with the American people and do what they say they’re going to do.
This is reliable and not a fake story or meeting in the least.
This may not have broken in time to change Texas. Ohio is already turning in Hillary’s favor and this story will spread like wildfire from CNN into the craw of everyman (and woman) in the Buckeye State. But this a blow like no other to the Obama campaign. Pennsylvania is out of reach after this and national polls are probably going to reflect the duplicity of the Obama campaign within a week or so. At any rate, if you thought Hillary was going to bail if she lost Texas, guess again. This is exactly what they’ve been hoping for. Something big, thrown at Obama, that finally stuck.
Here’s the New York Times story for tomorrow, election day. From the headline to the last line, it’s beyond grim in tone and content. Starting with the characterization that it the memo gives “Canada’s Account”. lol! The press cracks me up but it’s about time this started going the other way so I’ll take it.
March 4, 2008
Memo Gives Canada’s Account of Obama Campaign’s Meeting on Nafta
By MICHAEL LUO
++The denials were sweeping when Senator Barack Obama’s campaign mobilized last week to refute a report that a senior official had given back-channel reassurances to Canada soft-pedaling Mr. Obama’s tough talk on Nafta.
++On Monday, a memorandum surfaced, obtained by The Associated Press, showing that Austan D. Goolsbee, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago who is Mr. Obama’s senior economic policy adviser, met officials last month at the Canadian consulate in Chicago.
++According to the writer of the memorandum, Joseph De Mora, a political and economic affairs consular officer, Professor Goolsbee assured them that Mr. Obama’s protectionist stand on the trail was “more reflective of political maneuvering than policy.”
++It also said the professor had assured the Canadians that Mr. Obama’s language “should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”
++the controversy, which drew fierce attacks from Mrs. Clinton and Senator John McCain, the likely Republican nominee, put Mr. Obama’s campaign on the defensive at a crucial moment.
++The memorandum exposed Mr. Obama to accusations of hypocrisy on a touchstone issue…
++The memorandum raises questions about the transparency and the ability of the campaign to address problems before they grow.
Not to be outdone, the Washington Post has banished this story to the Fact Checker page where the Obama campaign earns two of the highly coveted Pinocchio noses.
The Facts:
Courtesy of Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press, we now have a contemporaneous account of what took place at the Feb. 8 meeting between a senior Obama campaign official, Austan Goolsbee, and the Canadian consul-general in Chicago, Georges Rioux. The AP obtained a 1300-word memo describing the meeting by a Canadian consulate official, Joseph DeMora.
In an interview with the AP, Goolsbee contested a portion of the DeMora memo that quotes him as saying that campaign rhetoric “that may be perceived to be protectionist is more reflective of political maneuvering than policy.” He acknowledged telling the Canadians that Obama’s position on NAFTA “is less about fundamentally changing the agreement and more in favor of strengthening/clarifying language on labor mobility and environment and trying to establish these as more ‘core’ principles of the agreement.”
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have I got news for you
I said earlier here that, in November, the more fervent than thou anti-war rhetoric that Obama has used to build a huge and enthusiastic base of anti-war young people, instead of being his ace in the hole as it is now against Hillary Clinton, will get turned around on him in the general election and become a big big problem.
My warnings on this are heretical in the minds of so many, I’m sure, but just take a look at where this is going.
From the Swamp:
In the Democratic debate the night before, “Sen. Obama made the statement that if al-Qaeda came back to Iraq after he withdraws . . . then he would send military troops back,” McCain said.
“I have some news,” McCain continued, “Al-Qaeda is in Iraq. It’s called Al-Qaeda in Iraq.”
Obama shot back.
“I have some news for John McCain,” Obama said. “There was no such thing as al Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush” took the country to war there.
It’s heartening to see that other people have responded to Obama’s rejoinder the way I did. It’s completely beside the point to say that Al-Qaeda wasn’t there before we invaded.
There’s almost universal agreement that the war was a bad idea, disastrously prosecuted. But the question was as to whether Obama would go back in if Al-Qaeda re-established itself in Iraq and both he and Clinton failed to mention the sobering truth that they are there now.
But Obama’s campaign rally comeback was exactly why I don’t support Obama. Couldn’t be a clearer example as to why this candidate doesn’t connect with me.
But I must also say that I am in total agreement that Obama has grown exponentially in the last few months in terms of his performances during the debates. I see that and acknowledge it. But he can’t answer John McCain on a war question with what sounds like a teenager’s smart-assed response and stand there beaming with pride while the audience whoop-whoops.
The majority of the American people, including many who had become hopeless and had turned on the war in Iraq the last few years, those who YOU may be counting as being on your side come a general election between an anti-war candidate and a stay-the-course (finish-the-job) candidate… DO NOT WANT TO LOSE THIS WAR!
If there are any signs, and wake up, people, because there are, that we might actually be able to win this war, and overcome the insurgency and Al-Qaeda in Iraq, then this general election will come down to being Barack Hussein Obama or Hillary the Liberal She-Devil Clinton, versus the Red, the White, and the true Blue, John McCain.
Unless the war in Iraq begins again to look like the endless bloody quagmire that it was looking like a short year and a half ago, with no hope of a military solution, the American people, and enough of them to make an anti-war Democrat’s task very difficult in a general election, will be inclined to want to finish the job in Iraq.
That’s painful to type and painful to accept. But McCain is already running on the war, and the flag. Obama’s staunch anti-war position as well as his being a newcomer to Washington, these things that recommend him for the job as president in so many people’s eyes, are going to come back at him in a tidal wave of patriotism.
There are a lot of people out there who can not accept the idea of America losing another war. This war in particular was called the war we cannot lose before we went in. Losing this war, in that part of the world, was unthinkable after 9/11. Now we’re actually engaging Al-Qaeda there and it appears we’ve tamped down the worst of it.
Now here comes Obama reminding America of what? That it’s all been a disastrous failure?
I predict that’s going to be a very hard sell.
This isn’t the Dems’ fault. They’ve been on the right side of the war in Iraq. But what if, suddenly, there were no more bad guys over there for us to kill? What if it starts to look to everyone that we’ve actually won this war or are decidedly winning it?
Between their own anti-war base and the Republican base which will clobber them for flip-flopping for/against/for (Hillary) or against/for (Obama) they just won’t be able to get any wiggle room on these very huge war questions with their huge implications for the country.
I am predicting here and now that whomever wins this primary and goes on to the general election is going to be scrambling for some wiggle room if the situation in Iraq remains status-quo throughout the rest of this year. And all this fervent anti-war rhetoric that Obama is spouting now is going to have a blow back that will split this country into the same old red state/blue state stand-off.
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the cost of obama’s war
The Democrats have had only one two term president since Harry Truman. That would be Bill Clinton. The nation enjoyed peace and prosperity during the Clinton years. We had a First Lady who broke the mold in her approach to that position. The Clintons came in as progressives and were whacked into a more centrist position.
They were the biggest and best thing in Democratic politics since the Kennedys.
And now, that Clinton legacy, as well as their reputation in their own party, is in tatters. The most divisive primary I’ve ever seen has taken them and cast them into the trash pile of party politics in the name of change. They’ve been charged as race baiters and as deranged and damaging figures to their own party.
In short, from within the Democratic party itself, the Obama campaign, the movement of supporters, and the news media, has accomplished what the Republicans and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and the Rush Limbaughs and Bill O’Reillys and Sean Hannitys… what they all could not do. They’ve pretty much destroyed the reputation and legacy of the Clintons.
That’s a lot of Democratic party glory thrown over the side of the boat. Barack Obama will have to be a VERY successful president indeed to make all that have been worth it.
And if he doesn’t even win the election… then what?
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the msnbc ambush
I never saw a “debate” quite like this one. MSNBC’s moderators hit Mrs. Clinton hard and fast, with audio-visuals, playing every single unflattering moment from this past weekend in the first 50 or so minutes of the debate. They asked her to respond first to 3 questions before asking Obama to respond first to a fourth, then they asked Hillary to respond first to the fifth.
Look, going first CAN be a tougher spot. It doesn’t matter that she’s quick on her feet and has seemed to not mind going first, enjoying the advantages of it. You ask tough pointed gotcha questions and hit her over and over again, and certainly in the aggressive manner that Tim Russert was doing, at the beginning of such an important debate, you COULD take a person out of his or her best mindset, knocking them off their game.
Not only that, but watching someone as eloquent as Hillary go off on NAFTA or health care primes her opponents, stimulates his thoughts, reminds him of key points. It allows him to counter punch OR… as Obama did tonight… simply AGREE.
I’ve never seen a questioner in a presidential debate as aggressive as Tim Russert was with Hillary tonight. I don’t even know what to think or say about it. The candidates are there to debate each other and FIGHT their OWN battles. They shouldn’t have to fight the moderators or have the moderators scoring the biggest HITS against them. This election has been contested through the looking glass. This debate was another surreal moment.
Even Maureen Dowd’s pal Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times was compelled to address all this in her wrap-up of the debate.
Mrs. Clinton wanted the world to understand that the press is tougher on her than on Barack Obama. And she made her case by citing a sketch on last week’s “Saturday Night Live” that showed mock debate moderators grilling her, but fawning over Mr. Obama.
And for the rest of the evening, the MSNBC debate did look a bit like the “S.N.L.” parody.
Mrs. Clinton was under attack, but the toughest blows came not from Mr. Obama but from Mr. Russert, who fiercely questioned her about her past positions on Nafta, Iraq and even a campaign promise from 2000, in her first Senate run.”
Ya think, Alessandra?
What I think is that the system finally ate our candidates. Tonight was grueling. Although substantive debate at times did break out, overall the evening was repetitive and pretty much pointless.
If Clinton had planned on truly confronting Obama regarding his campaign’s tactics, something that I think if done properly could have worked in her favor, she was either too weary or too off-balance to muster that offensive. And that was really the only excuse for this debate to have existed. Obama is treading water while the media is throwing the book at Hillary.
She didn’t have the energy to overcome all that tonight and re-assume her posture or stature as the seasoned best-choice-for-president and she didn’t have the fire and eloquence to tear Obama a new one regarding his campaign tactics.
And that all allows the media to envelope her like water over a sinking ship.
Here’s an example of where she should have had the fire and the fight. When Obama so successfully turned the Farrakhan denounce or reject theme into a moment to flash his charm with a chuckle, dismissing the point as pointless semantics, she should have pounced.
(What follows is NOT a quote from the debate. It is a suggested response.)
Actually, Barack, you’re chuckling, but there’s nothing at all funny about this. You were asked point blank if you reject Minister Farrakhan’s endorsement and support and you demurred, citing your past positions, possibly because you don’t want to reject or offend, along with Minister Farrakhan, his supporters who might yet cast a vote for you. I think you need to answer the question in plain English. Do you REJECT Minister Farrakhan’s endorsement and his support?
POW. He then looks foolish for prematurely and immaturely injecting levity into something that some people take very seriously. She would have exposed, finally, Barack Obama for what he is… a politician who cleverly avoids making emphatic, and thus potentially problematic statements, in effect, pandering and side stepping, just like the Clintons, who have been derided for doing it for almost two decades.
This was a very bad night for the Democratic party. As Rachel Maddow said, John McCain was the winner tonight. We’ve run this primary into the ground. Even Barack Obama looked like he was tired of hearing himself talk. This thing almost looked like a wax museum display where there are actual recorded voices inside the wax figures, debating about things that people have long ceased caring about.
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a super super-delegate rant
Surely one reason the Democratic party created the super-delegates was to prevent Republicans from impacting our party’s choice for president.
Here’s what I wrote in another post. (any day I can quote myself is a day above ground.)
And this super delegate thing. Obama doesn’t want to change the rules in mid game by allowing Florida’s delegates to be counted… but in his calls for the super delegates to FOLLOW the will of the people he’s calling for a change in the rules mid game. He’s in the Democratic party. The super delegates were created for a specific purpose and that is to negate what might be the undesirable effects of the Democratic party’s OPEN style of primaries wherein REPUBLICANS and independents can vote in OUR primary, possibly skewing the results. The super delegates are there to correct the weird results from the proportional allocation of delegates, maybe the Texas craziness etc. The super delegates are a device of the party. They are part of the rules. Now Obama wants them simply to GO ALONG which is exactly what they are there NOT to do.”
Texas has a crazy system that might award more delegates to the candidate who gets less votes. And the Obama campaign has been happily pointing this out with no apparent issues in terms of it not reflecting the “will of the people.”
Think about this scenario. Republicans want nothing more than to make sure that Hillary Clinton doesn’t win the White House. (If you don’t accept that premise then don’t waste your time reading any further because that’s a given as far as I’m concerned.)
Their race had essentially been decided weeks before this latest string of primaries that saw Obama go on his winning streak. Certainly McCain had the nomination well in hand before Wisconsin. And now, suddenly, Obama is pulling in voters from across the demographic spectrum. All of a sudden like.
And… look how few people voted in the Republican primary in Wisconsin. Look at Republican participation in this entire primary season. Very weak turn out. I know. They’re not motivated.
I’m not saying there’s some massive Republican voter conspiracy to knock off Hillary Clinton. But don’t you think that Republicans are crossing over to cast a vote against one of the most reviled politicians (by Republicans) in the history of American politics?
I do. I think Republicans are crossing over to vote for Obama NOW because voting against Hillary is something they can’t resist doing. And when the choice is between a Republican and Democrat they’re going to vote for the Republican. Yet they will have helped chose a weaker Democratic opponent. (That’s debatable of course, but maybe not in their minds. And not in mine.)
That’s why the super-delegates are there. It is an ABSOLUTE FACT that Obama calling for them to vote the will of the people is, to some degree that none of us might ever know, asking the Democratic Party to rubber stamp the electoral wishes of Republicans who voted in this election for Obama and who will cross right back over in November.
Really now. Somebody should be paying me for this stuff.
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Clinton Unloads on Obama’s ‘Destructive’ Tactics
“In one of her sharpest attacks of the 2008 race, Clinton blasted two mailings Obama’s campaign has put out criticizing Clinton’s views on health care and trade, accusing him of “using tactics that are straight out of Karl Rove’s playbook.”
He says one things in his speeches and then he turns around does this. It is not the new politics the speeches are about. It is not hopeful. It is destructive.”‘
Shame on you, Barack Obama.It is time you ran a campaign consistent with your messages in public. That’s not what I expect from you. Meet me in Ohio — let’s have a debate about your tactics.
Enough about the speeches, and the big rallies, and then using tactics right out of Karl Rove’s playbook,” she said angrily. “This is wrong and every Democrat should be outraged.”
Anyone on the left over a certain age who cares about providing health care to everyone who needs it will look at that image on the flier Hillary Clinton is holding up and see red. Every democrat should be outraged. It’s a cheap tactic to employ a redo of the infamous Harry and Louise imagery that was used by the health insurance industry to take down Hillary’s first initiative to provide universal coverage to now attack her current health care plan in the 2008 Democratic primary.
And this is FROM the guy who says we need to turn a page from the divisive politics of the PAST?
Obama is not JUST a phony. He’s a treacherous phony. The flier says this:
“Hillary’s health care plan forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can’t afford it.”
Obama’s campaign has stooped so low as to borrow tactics used in the health insurance industry’s efforts to derail First Lady Hillary Clinton’s initiative to provide universal health care coverage in the United States. I don’t expect young Obama supporters to care about that. I expect them to carelessly brush it off. But Obama doing this destroys party unity. It violates everything he said his campaign and his “new” politics were said to be about.
Starry eyed political neophytes? They’re not going to care. The rest of us democrats? Some of us are going to care.
That’s not phony outrage on Hillary Clinton’s face. She’s holding up the singular image that destroyed her health care initiative in the early 90s. It represents her own personal and political nightmare.
The Obama campaign has PLAYED the Clinton campaign. They set them up by saying that he was going to run a clean campaign and they’ve done the exact opposite. And whenever the Clinton campaign strikes back the Obama supporters boo, the Obama campaign cries foul, and the media howls that the Clinton campaign is desperate.
What I’m wondering is where is the idealism in the idealists? They can’t all be phonies as well?
Who cares about when she saw these fliers? What about them, is the question? What should be made of the Obama campaign, liberal democrats, using the infamous Harry and Louise couple-at-dinner-table tableau in a negative ad attacking Hillary Clinton’s health care plan here in 2008?
We don’t have universal health care in this country BECAUSE of that exact imagery.
How many people have DIED in this country because they didn’t have all the benefits of insurance coverage in the last 16 years since this image effectively destroyed public support of the Clintons’ health care initiative? How many people have suffered simply because they don’t have a family doctor to visit when they’re sick? Liberals are supposed to care about that stuff. The Obama campaign is supposed to be made up of people who care about that. Supporters of the candidacy of Barack Obama for President are supposed to CARE about this stuff.
Obama has committed the kind of sin here that, should he lose his bid to win the White House, he will never live down. No democrat that I can remember has ever employed these kinds of tactics against their own party. I don’t expect Obama supporters to do anything other than shrug this off. But you’re shrugging off your own integrity and you better not expect all the rest of those who describe themselves as liberals or Democrats to do the same.
Here is a lone voice in the media who is outraged by the Obama’s campaigns reprisal of the Harry and Louise images.
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giving hillary the old one-two
Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd. Both sounding more vicious than any political commentary I’ve ever heard outside of Rush Limbaugh.
Rich sounds like he’s channeling Dowd.
What’s next? Despite Mrs. Clinton’s valedictory tone at Thursday’s debate, there remains the fear in some quarters that whether through sleights of hand involving superdelegates or bogus delegates from Michigan or Florida, the Clintons might yet game or even steal the nomination. I’m starting to wonder. An operation that has waged political war as incompetently as the Bush administration waged war in Iraq is unlikely to suddenly become smart enough to pull off that duplicitous a “victory.”
Dowd hammers away that Hillary has gender-envy issues.
Hillary was so busy trying to prove she could be one of the boys — getting on the Armed Services Committee, voting to let W. go to war in Iraq, strong-arming supporters and donors, and trying to out-macho Obama — that she only belatedly realized that many Democratic and independent voters, especially women, were eager to move from hard-power locker-room tactics to a soft-power sewing circle approach.
Both mention this horrible $1200 spent on Dunkin’ Donuts. Did campaign workers actually EAT donuts? WHAT a despicable waste. Good thing Hillary will never be president. People might eat donuts in the White House.
MoDo:
Hillaryland spent like a hedge fund manager in a flat-screen TV store. Her campaign attempted to show omnipotence by lavishing a fortune on the take-no-prisoners strategists Howard Wolfson and Mark Penn, and on having the best of everything from the set decoration at events to Four Seasons rooms. In January alone, they spent $11,000 on pizza, $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts and $95,384 at a Des Moines Hy-Vee grocery store for get-out-the-vote sandwich platters.
Hell hath no fury like an editorial board scorned.
I said a while back that the New York Times endorsement of Hillary Clinton was intended to give that newspaper’s columnists license, and their campaign reporters cover, to freely and viciously attack the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. What I’ve come to learn since making that statement is that newspaper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., overruled the Times’ editorial board on the endorsement of Hillary. The paper’s writers and editors choice for the coveted endorsement was Barack Obama and their work since the endorsement has been unambiguously pro-Obama.
I’m beyond caring at this point about what really goes on in newsrooms as it applies to fairness and objectivity. I’m sure I’m not alone in that regard. It’s what is ending up in headlines, hard news stories, and television reporting and anchoring, and commentary, in the actual content that is presented to the public… this is what so many (too few?) are outraged about. I went to colluge, peeple. I’ve studied the effects of the media’s choices in terms of presentation and slant on how the news or the story is perceived by the public… and I’m sure many others here have as well. It’s on every good poli-sci professor’s syllabus.
People have also been exposed to the many well documented and and researched media critiques in the form of books by those pointing out biases in the mainstream press. Thanks to, in the beginning of this sort of coverage of the news media, voices such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Ralph Nader, FAIR, etc. we have been provided with an education into the effect of perspective and biases in the media on how stories are presented and received as well as how all of that can effect world events.
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hillary’s stolen moment
Lot of people who watched the debate to the end saw something extraordinary. In her closing remarks, Hillary Clinton tapped into something that came from her soul.
I thought she had an uncharacteristically bad debate and at the worst possible time. On the other hand, I thought Obama showed me, for the first time, that he might be made of presidential material.
But her wrap up was such an electric minute or so that I think I was actually holding my breath. It was a stop the world moment, the best single bit of political performance she might have ever given. It resulted in a standing ovation, which, to be truthful, might have been somewhat directed at both candidates, given what she had actually said.
But make no mistake, it was her words that brought that crowd to its feet.
Now today, that sublime almost accidental moment of good fortune for Hillary Clinton has been turned into something else entirely. A negative. The result is that the candidate and her campaign has been on its heels all day.
What happened?
Every newspaper’s coverage of that moment has been characterized by conjecture that the media itself created and ran with as a pack. That is whether or not Hillary was signaling an end to her campaign. Right now, over 24 hours after the debate ended, there is STILL a link on the home page of the New York Times that says this
“Debate Close Wasn’t a Farewell, Clinton Says”
On the Washington Post there is a story on the home page that called Clinton Soldiers On. Here is the first paragraph from that story.
“COLUMBUS, Ohio, Feb. 22 — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton insisted Friday that she had not meant to signal surrender when she shook hands with Sen. Barack Obama during their Democratic presidential debate in Austin the night before. It was a measure of the dire circumstances her campaign now faces that she had to explain the gesture at all.”
It’s a measure of the dire circumstances her campaign now faces that she has to explain the gesture at all? What an irresponsible news story-creating self-prophecy fulfilling political press machine we have now in this country. They decide. And then they decide some more.
CNN’s coverage of this has been an abomination. Like every other news source’s coverage of the debate, their only characterization of Hillary’s great final moment was to dig and claw away at it, asking only if it was a signal of surrender.
The news media’s behavior regarding this point has been repulsive. THEY created the valediction angle of this story out of thin air and they turned THEIR OWN erroneous suspicion into THE story.
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the status-quo liberal
This primary isn’t about electing Obama. It’s about stopping Hillary Clinton. Because for many, the idea of the Clintons in the White House is a very scary thing. They might actually be effective at getting universal health care tabled and enacted. They might actually be effective at enacting loads of liberal programs that ultimately take money away from the rich and put services and help into the hands of people who need it.
That’s why Hillary Clinton is Satan and Obama is a gift to all those who don’t want change in this country.
The powers-that-be know that even if Obama is elected, he is green, knows nothing about Washington or the presidency, and will be as ineffective in that extremely daunting position as any outsider would be.
The irony is that once again those entrenched privileged elites living gloriously IN Washington will have taken advantage of the American people’s desire to change how things are done in Washington. It’s tragic.
People talk about competence like it’s the least we should expect from a president. Sorry. That’s a dream world. Competence in the White House is the Mt. Everest of expectations. Competence AND a benevolent administration is something we’ve pretty much rarely had in this country. Maybe the last 5 or 6 years of Bill Clinton’s administration was as close as we’ve come in decades.
Watch either what is done to Obama after he wins the nomination or (and I don’t think this will happen) watch what happens to him after he wins the White House. See if he is ever effective at enacting any of this stuff that he’s running on.
He’s Obambi. He came along at a perfect time and I don’t mean to be a doomsayer, and I hope for all the less fortunate people’s sake in this country, the world, and the environment we live in, that I am wrong… but I think Obama was a perfect storm of events, some innocent and understandable, and some despicable and intentional, on the part of both his campaign and the coverage of it, that took down a truly worthy candidate and replaced her with a weak untested politician who is far less likely to threaten that old thing President Kennedy called the status quo.
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who’s zooming who?
Interesting reading on the WaPo website. Anonymous suggestions from political insiders. But AFTER that… in the comments section, there are also some very interesting points of view. This one is the first and I quote it almost in its entirety. Lest some of you think it’s only a handful of us who think that the Obama campaign is race baiting their way to to this nomination.
Barack will have to out race-bait McCain as his campaign and supporters so successfully did with the Clintons, manipulating them and successfully putting them on the defensive with specious accusations of intimidation race-bating. They were able to pull this off using the “Bill Clinton is a southern politician who knows what he is doing” foil. Barack and his supporters will then have to hang the millstone of fear and war mongering around McCain’s neck making a vote for McCain a vote for capitulating to fear and war ad infinitum.
McCain, on the other hand, will have to out race-bait Barack by calling Barack on what his supporters were so successful at doing to the Clinton’s. He will then have to hang the millstone of Muslim culture, islamofascism and terrorism around Barack’s neck making a vote for Barack somehow a vote for the terrorists.
McCain only need to be careful not to say anything Barack’s supporters can run with. If he does, it has to be calculated, possibly couched in patriotic terms where any accusation coming from the Barack camp can successfully be interpreted as unpatriotic.
David Brooks of the NY Times has stepped up the dismantling of Barack’s candidacy buy labeling Barack’s followers as cultists infatuated with the cult of personality and coining a new catch phrase, Obama Comedown Syndrome (O.C.S.) I suspect the cult of Obama is in for quite an education in the upcoming months. The right wing hate machine is itching to join the fray you can be sure. It should be mildly interesting.”
Ah the aforementioned David Brooks piece. I really dislike this guy. Him, Charles Krauthmauler (what-eva) and George Will make up an unholy trinity of right wing intellectual thought.
But I especially hate it when they’re right about something.
My opinion? They won’t have to be vicious when it comes to Obama. They only have to tell a simple story in detail, a story the press has been unwilling to explore while waiting patiently for Hillary to be completely and irreversibly gone. Then the endless torrent of inconvenient truths about Obama will rain down from the sky.
“Barack Obama vowed to abide by the public finance campaign-spending rules in the general election if his opponent did. But now he’s waffling on his promise. Why does he need to check with his campaign staff members when deciding whether to keep his word?
Obama says he is practicing a new kind of politics, but why has his PAC sloshed $698,000 to the campaigns of the superdelegates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics? Is giving Robert Byrd’s campaign $10,000 the kind of change we can believe in?
If he values independent thinking, why is his the most predictable liberal vote in the Senate? A People for the American Way computer program would cast the same votes for cheaper.”
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I’m thinking of how either of these candidates should lose at this point and it’s a difficult subject made more difficult by the competitiveness of the race. But I have an idea.
I believe that neither a woman nor an African American should quit this race even after it is apparent that they can not win it. I think an agreement should be struck that allows the loser to “fight” to the end. Dignified, united, respected, and respectful, but still there. I think that’s the special burden of the gender and race perspectives in this election. To me, it would be unthinkable that either of these two candidates could quit at this point.
As far as seating the Mich/Fla delegates. In the case of Michigan it would be just flat wrong because Obama wasn’t on the ballot. But, on the other hand, my strong opinion is that it would be just as flat wrong to not seat the delegates in Florida. Federal election laws, I’m sure, restrict a lot of things that the parties would like to do. And in a country that is ruled by a two party system, that’s completely appropriate. This election should open up a number of things for re-evaluation by those who make election laws. The Democratic Party should not be able to do anything like this in the future.
It’s really outrageous to think that a state as large and as populous as Florida especially, but ANY state, should have its voters ignored at any point in the process of choosing a president. This election will help determine that president for the people of Florida and the people of Florida’s vote will help decide the leader of the free world. I hope the party wakes up on Florida. They, and their current frontrunner, are talking out of both sides of their mouths on this one.
I’ve heard the general dismay that Clinton wants to change the rules after agreeing to abide by them. What I’m saying is that we should step back from a concern about Democratic Party rules and look at what this says about our democracy if the State of Florida has NO say so in this presidential primary.
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Another despicable anti-democratic piece by Adam Nagourney of the New York Times.
“For weeks, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama had approached this race the same way: as state-by-state trench warfare, in the belief that the nomination would go to whoever got the most delegates.
But the results in the past week suggest that the race might be tilting back to a more normal form, where the goal is achieving a series of splashing victories and thus momentum.”
Momentum is the deciding factor?
This is just an overtly out there but telling example of the main stream media telling you what THEY think of the democratic process of voting in elections. All that voting stuff is secondary. It’s really about MOMENTUM. And who decides what momentum is but the MSM? Obama had momentum after the Iowa Caucuses. This newspaper said so. The Times may have endorsed Hillary Clinton, but it has nonetheless printed an endless series of pieces just like this one.
Newspapers like the New York Times MAKE public opinion. They have the power to manufacture it out of thin air. And that’s a real big part of what has happened in this election. Patrick Healy and Adam Nagourney have so thoroughly erased the Times’ endorsement of Clinton they should be on the Obama payroll.
More:
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers dispute that, noting that his victories have come in relatively small states and that she has invested most of her attention in two big contests coming up on March 4: Ohio and Texas. Her aides have long argued that by the end of the voting, the difference between the two candidates in delegate count would be minimal, leaving the final decision to superdelegates, who in their view would favor Mrs. Clinton.
For one thing, if this is an election where a candidate wins by virtue of being seen as winning — a definition of momentum — that would mean that voters in coming states would be influenced by the outcome of earlier races. And Mr. Obama might then be in a position to encroach on Mrs. Clinton’s firewall of Texas and Ohio.”
Is he changing the definition of what a win is here or what? I know the Times endorsed Clinton. But I’m not sure at this point whether or not the Times endorses free democratic elections. We still have what is pretty much a dead heat and they’re trying their best to make the case that Obama has made a case for this to be wrapped up before Pennsylvania or Ohio votes. This reporter is shifting, or aiding the shift from delegate count totals, to momentum as the determining factor in the outcome of this primary. What a SCARY country this is.
And I wonder if Obama, who said today how much he wants the outcome to be decided by the people, will explain his desire to wrap the election up before so many Americans, in some very large and populous states have voted, based on how a bunch of LESS populous states have voted?
Can anything else happen to piss all over the other half of the Democratic party?
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krugman springs eternal
We’re all so very aware that we’re witnessing history in this primary. First time this far for a woman as well as for an African American. This breaking-new-ground aspect to the history we’re all witnessing has been presented like it’s the first man to climb Everest or the first woman in space.
We’re all proudly marking this “event” as a groundbreaking national moment.
Well. Maybe not everyone.
I predict that this will be the least interesting aspect of the 2008 presidential race to historians and analysts, many of whom are already at work trying to figure out, or straighten out, what is going on here and why, and later, answer the all important question as to what really happened in this election cycle. God forbid McCain wins the election in November.
I can hear the grim narrator’s voice as Frontline takes apart the Obama campaign and the “movement.” The too numerous to laugh off Republican Party spokespersons and other voices from the right saying that Obama is the stronger candidate and, by the way, a likable enough fellow; that they were hoping to run against Hillary Clinton, who would fire up their base and go down in flames. The anti-Clinton bias at the Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times (with the exception of Krugman) and throughout the establishment press, and on and on.
The better part of the journalistic profession, the progressive and far left press, is going to be running this tape back for the rest of our lives if John McCain is elected president and they’re not going to give a shit about these impressive national firsts.
They’ll be interviewing Paul Krugman in these pieces.
Here (actually, in his column) Krugman laments something I pointed out here first around a week ago. That is, how disturbing it is that the Obama campaign, the candidate himself, and his followers, have gleefully taken up the tactics and exact charges the right wing has been using to attack the Clintons forever. It was a ready made arsenal.
Hate Springs Eternal – Paul Krugman
“I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again.
What’s particularly saddening is the way many Obama supporters seem happy with the application of “Clinton rules” — the term a number of observers use for the way pundits and some news organizations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent.”
A Calumny a Day To Keep Hillary Away – Stanley Fish
“These Clintonphobes said things like “there’s nothing to like about her”(394) and wrote at length about her clothing, her voice, her laugh, her arrogance, her “countless plastic surgeries” (an inference it would seem from the fact that at 60 she still looks good), her insincerity, her stridency, her ambition, her love of power, and her husband. In their view, the hatred they expressed was not irrational at all, but was provoked by record of crimes and character flaws they are happy to rehearse. Their mirror image on the left objected to my saying that President Bush fills the same role for liberals that Clinton fills for her detractors. No, no came the protest. However free-floating hatred of Clinton may be, hatred of Bush is firmly grounded in the record of a disastrous presidency that has left us at war, in debt, and in bad odor throughout the world. The two groups differed only in the bad qualities they attributed to their nemesis. Bush haters derided him as stupid. Clinton haters complained that she is too smart (the word “brilliant” is used as a pejorative), seems to know it all, and makes those who hear her speak feel they are less intelligent than she is.”
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obama’s world of pain
I think Obama’s strategy throughout the primary has been to go nuclear in order to upset Hillary Clinton. That’s what I maintain will be the subject of analysis for years to come. He will possibly succeed in doing that. But he will be ill-equipped to win the general election and withstand what is going to follow, and, honestly, he will have, in the process of pulling out the stops needed to undermine Hillary, be sowing the seeds of his own defeat later on.
What do I mean by ill-equipped to win the general election?
He’s said to be an even more liberal senator than Hillary Clinton. Maybe not hard to do. Thrill pointed out his tougher stance on gun control. Uh… has the NRA anted up yet in this election? The answer to that is no. They’re saving it. When they push the button, every Republican on their dole out will make Obama a dirty word in many parts of this country. Questions about Rezko will be hung around Obama with the threats of years of investigations into his past in Chicago politics. The Obama campaign has, after South Carolina, succeeded in making going after their candidate the politically incorrect thing to do. The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy isn’t PC and they are going to Swift Boat this guy right into being the George McGovern of his generation.
What do I mean that he has sown the seeds of his own general election defeat in this primary?
By playing racial politics. Obama’s stump rhetoric is resplendent in the language, catch phrases, and slogans of the Civil Rights movement. (there were TWO big pieces, one in the LA Times the other in the NY Times, in just the last two days, that offer themselves as a look INTO the Obama campaign’s “delicate” tightrope walk on the issue of race. Neither article mentions AT ALL the Obama campaign’s heavy use of Civil Rights movement language.)
It has worked perfectly on African American voters which, of course, was the exact idea. As I predicted weeks ago, the margin of black voters going for Obama has rarely dipped below 75% in every state and often has been over 80%. Said to be close to 90% in today’s Virginia primary. That took away THE most important base constituency of the Clintons and it will probably cost her the nomination. Good strategy in the primary if that’s as far as you plan on going.
Is this country ready to elect a black man president? I think so. Is this country ready to elect a black man president who is on the stump hollering Yes We Can and Our Time Has Come? I don’t think so. But… he’ll have a check from me and my vote in November.
I think this general election is going to break a lot of people’s hearts. I think if McCain wins, the Democratic Party is going to be looking at this historically divisive and poisoned battle between Clinton and Obama and asking itself, what happened to our presidential hopes in ’08? How did this thing turn so ugly so fast? How was it that iconic leaders of our party came to be also-rans if not entirely tarnished figures in the eyes of their own base constituencies?
The answers I have to those questions number two.
1. A cynical Obama campaign that played race early and often to shore up the black vote.
2. An anti-Clinton bias, call it Clinton fatigue or out and out hating, in the punditocracy and walking the halls of some of the most important newspapers in the country.
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moving the goal posts
This is an excerpt from an interview just aired on CNN with Barack Obama. He says more than the first quote, but there are no edits in the tape itself, the interviewer’s question comes while Obama is wrapping up his comment. Point being, he says B within 60 seconds of saying A.
I find this to be very typical of Obama’s cherry picking of anything he can use and the discarding of what he can’t use even if he is advocating, as in this sort of breathtaking example, FOR something as a basic principle and then, almost in the same breath, dismissing it.
I’m transcribing this.
Obama:
We’ve got to make sure that, whoever wins the most states, the most delegates, that they are the nominee. I think it would problematic if either Senator Clinton or myself came in with having won the most support from and that that was somehow overturned by PARTY insiders.
Interviewer:
What do you think should happen then to the delegates in Michigan and Florida? You talk about voters not thinking that their votes are going to be counted in this process.
Obama:
Well, you know. All we’ve done in this process is follow the rules as they were laid out. I love the voters in Michigan and I love the voters in Florida and I want them to participate. We abided by the rules that had been set up by the DNC.
Yeah. Can some Obama idealist please explain how this kind of duplicity is acceptable to them? Can we pull up some nifty political websites that will explain it all to us heartbroken old liberals? Because this is coming from the guy who is running as a guy who wouldn’t. Run. Like. This.
Obama doesn’t want to change the rules in mid game by allowing Florida’s delegates to be counted… but in his calls for the super delegates to follow the will of the people he’s calling for a change in the rules mid game.
He’s in the Democratic party. The super delegates were created for a specific purpose and that is to negate what might be the undesirable effects of the Democratic party’s open style of primaries wherein Republicans and Independents can vote in our primary, possibly skewing the results.
The super delegates are there to correct the weird results from the proportional allocation of delegates, maybe the Texas craziness etc. The super delegates are a device of the party. They are part of the rules. Now Obama wants them simply to go along which is exactly what they are there NOT to do.
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I hate to harp on this point, because I think that criticism of Obama anywhere is met with the same response that the Clinton campaign gets from the Obama campaign, that it’s unfair, politics-of-destruction, or something much worse. But I think there is a basic dishonesty in the behavior coming from the Obama campaign and it’s coming from a movement that has been fueled by the idealism of so many.
Although I think these two will end up together and, I hope, elected, and although I think they could do incredible things for the country if that happens, there are so many issues I have with Obama personally and his campaign that are stealing from me the joy and excitement that others have when considering the remarkable achievement that his candidacy represents.
I think his campaign has been cynical and dishonest even about how it represented what its own tactics and philosophy were to be going into his effort to win the nomination. In the context where a basic tenet of the campaign was to put the divisive and destructive personal politics aside, and appeal to the better natures in all of us… this has become a bit reprehensible. If something can be described as a “bit” reprehensible. Cynical, even. And the result has been a more destructive primary than any of us can remember.
I don’t like Obama. I wish I did. I sincerely would love to love this guy. But while so many people see good, I don’t. I see something different. I see arrogance where I wish there was confidence. And I hate to say this… but it was pointed out by someone else and hit me like a ton of bricks… but it is a MALE arrogance. Executive arrogance. TV lawyer arrogance.
Obama comports himself without humility. I don’t see how people aren’t seeing that. McCain. Huckabee. Mitt Romney. Yes, even the Republicans come to the stage with some humility. Obama doesn’t have that. He sort of allows a self deprecating moment once in a while. His entire personality was summed up in that “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” comment. The thing that I don’t understand is how people aren’t seeing that this is who this guy is all the time. Why does it take one overt moment to open people’s eyes, and then only for that moment?
I see that person every time Obama is on my TV screen. I don’t WANT to see him like that. I want to see Bobby Kennedy, like so many other people do. But I’ve been listening to politicians for a long time. Listening to leftists on Pacifica Radio alone for damn near 20 years. If I thought this guy was the real deal I would have thrown Hillary Clinton over months ago.
I see impatience and an air of entitlement. I don’t see ANY candor. Except maybe when he uses it for humor. Everything else is canned. As far as political talents, undoubtedly he has considerable political talent. But it reminds me of Reagan’s political talent in that so many other people are moved by it, but not me.
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the divisive mrs c.
Sadly, so many Obama supporters and even Obama himself view Hillary Clinton as “too divisive” and are describing her in this fashion to the American people in an effort to win a presidential primary.
Where did they get this perspective on Hillary Clinton? Who put those words in their mouths?
I know the answer to that! I’ve been right here, watching them do it for the last decade and more. Long before there was an Obama or a movement or his supporters the charges that Hillary was a polarizing, divisive figure (those exact words) were the the first things out of the mouths of the right wing Republican attack machine from Fox News to George Will. And now, all that right wing seed work has finally given fruit, but sadly, it’s in the hearts and minds of people who should know better.
In all the primaries and caucuses so far, excluding no one, how many people have voted for Hillary Clinton in 2008? She’s so hated in this country. Right? Well how many people have voted for her?
Primaries and caucuses to date: (my adding, apologies in advance)
Clinton = 8.9 million
Obama = 8.4 million
McCain = 4.9 million
Here’s a news flash. I don’t think Hillary Clinton is as hated in this country as she’s being portrayed by those out to defeat her in elections. And I don’t believe that she is one bit more politically divisive than she needs to be. According to some people on the left, she’s actually a sell out. I don’t think she’s in the divisive universe of those on the other side who have painted her as being such a divisive figure.
Not only don’t I think she’s as widely hated as has been alleged by her political enemies and opponents, I actually think she’s a lot more popular than anyone is allowing. Again, look at how many American voices are being denied by this claim, 8.9 million through the primaries and caucuses so far. More people have voted for HER than any other presidential candidate in 2008, while she is YET being painted as divisive and unlikable by Obama, Fox News, The Washington Post, etc.
The Kool-aid is being passed around by Dems now, but they should be careful because this particular Kool-aid was brewed up in Rush Limbaugh’s basement a long time ago.
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gettin’ shakesperean on y’all
I’ve been thinking about these two remarkable candidates and I’ve been unable to shake this very haunting line from Julius Caesar. Marc Antony has been asked by Caesar’s murderers to go out and calm the mob gathered outside the Forum. But by employing veiled sarcasm and a brilliant reverse psychology riff that only Shakespeare or Karl Rove could have cooked up, he does the exact opposite and whips the mob into a frenzy to avenge Caesar’s murder.
He ends this most incredibly shit-stirring speech by waving his arm over the murdered emperor’s bloody body and asking…
Here was a Caesar. When comes such another?
Here we have a woman and an African American and both closer to being president than any woman or African American has ever been before. The woman does not stand up there in strict Republican party approved red or blue suits out of the 1980s. The African American isn’t some J.C. Watts Republican party trophy sell out. They are both, I believe, committed, left leaning politicians. Both incredibly talented and attractive candidates and champions of the causes that they believe in.
But I’m thinking about what comes after all this if somehow they cancel each other out and fail to win the presidency this time around. Thus, the line from Shakespeare.
Here was a woman for president. When comes such another? Here was a black man for president. When comes such another?
What bothers me so much… is that I really and truly can’t imagine this happening again in my lifetime. Not like this. If not THIS woman, Hillary Clinton, then who will be the first woman president, and when? If not THIS black man, Barack Obama, then who will be the first black president, and when? I can’t see anyone out there on the horizon on the Democratic side who can and will energize and excite to the extent of rising this far and having a shot.
But I do see something in my crystal ball. The NEXT time a woman or black man gets this close, I promise you the woman will be wearing a blue or red Republican approved suit and the black man will be a an ultra-safe Republican sell out. People will look back on this election year and say, oh a woman was okay, but not THAT woman, and a black man was okay, but not THAT black man.
That’s why I don’t want to see these two canceling each other out. There’s nothing in our political universe right now remotely like them, or this. Two terms of one and two terms of the other? Back to back. Starting here and now. Not down the road many years and with safer more conventional and acceptable, less divisive, less polarizing, female or African American candidates. Whatever happens, whoever comes out on top, these two need to come out of this together, as a team, both names, genders, and races, united on the ticket as one.
That’s the only chance the Democrats have of winning this election and the only chance we’ll have a female or black president who isn’t firmly in the pocket of the Republicans and the right wing.
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the right lesson of ’04
While it’s true, you don’t have to be a war hero to win the White House, that’s not the lesson that should be taken from Kerry vs. Bush in 2004. The lesson of that election is that even if the Democrats run a decorated combat veteran against a service dodging coward, they, the Republicans, have effective tactics at their disposal for negating what should be a clear advantage for the Dems on military issues and experience.
Another way of stating the lesson is this. You can NEVER out-flag wave the Right. No matter what.
You can’t ignore the context of the parties and their traditional postures vis a vis the use of the military etc. Hawk vs. Dove ideologies. Bottom line, McCain and the Republicans are going to be able to hammer either Hillary or Obama very effectively on national security and military issues because he has been to hell and back in the service of his nation, etc. God and Country and all that.
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Because over the course of two administrations, Bill Clinton extracted, like a dentist tugging on a rotten molar, THE major political base-rallying cry issue from the other side’s cantankerous mouth.
Anyone who was politically aware in the later years of the Reagan Era and into and coming out of the Bush I administration should remember that the budget deficit was THE flagship issue of the Republican party in those days. The Religious Right was still a loosely knit bunch of peripheral oddballs. Fiscal responsibility trumped everything back then, every social issue, including abortion. That’s why we could have a Republican president in Bush I who had to be coerced into being anti-abortion.
The deficit was blamed on the tax and spend democratically controlled congress and electing Republicans was seen as the solution to this gravest of national threats. That was to be the rallying cry for decades if not centuries. But Clinton’s presiding over the elimination of those deficits took away their big stick and they had to revert back to God and Country politics, and embrace the loony bins of far religious right.
The fucked up thing politically? For all of us and the world itself… is how well that worked for the Republicans. They took over Congress on a wave of social conservatism and GWB mumbled in a fake Texas drawl all the way to two disastrous terms. The US has essentially gone back in time to the old days of Father Coughlin right wing radio demagoguery. What are Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter but modern day Father Coughlins?
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The establishment media’s loathing for the Clinton’s that is. But this time it’s being identified early. Called out from within by an increasing number of big time voices.
Paul Krugman in yesterday’s New York Times. With a warning to all you political junior achievers who think that, somehow, it is just HILLARY who is devisive and unlikable. Oh that you could see what an Obama administration would REALLY be like, from the perspective of the right wing. Paul Krugman knows. He’s telling you right here.
First, those who don’t want to nominate Hillary Clinton because they don’t want to return to the nastiness of the 1990s — a sizable group, at least in the punditocracy— are deluding themselves. Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1).
Craig Crawford of the Congressional Quarterly. (quote transcribed from MSNBC)
You know, I have sat down here in Florida for the last month. And I have watched the coverage, and I really think the evidence-free bias against the Clintons in the media borders on mental illness. I mean, I think when Dr. Phil gets done with Britney [Spears], he ought to go to Washington and stage an intervention at the National Press Club. I mean, we’ve gotten into a situation where if you try to be fair to the Clintons, if you try to be objective, if you try to say, “Well, where’s the evidence of racism in the Clinton campaign?” you’re accused of being a naïve shill for the Clintons. I mean, I think if somebody came out today and said that Bill Clinton — if the town drunk in Columbia [South Carolina] came out and said, “Bill Clinton last night was poisoning the drinking water in Obama precincts,” the media would say, “Ah, there goes Clinton again. You can’t trust him.” I really think it’s a problem. You know what? You guys make him stronger with this bashing. This actually is what makes the Clintons stronger.
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the kennedy family endorsement
I love the Kennedys. They are a political family and no one in politics doesn’t play politics. There’s something here, however, that no one has mentioned. I’m not watching TV today or yesterday so I don’t know if anyone has touched on this, but I doubt it. I’m never shy about pointing out that you all might be hearing this from me first and maybe only from me.
Here it is. The Kennedys were the most beloved white political icons in black and brown America. Then the Clintons came along. First black president and all that. And it was bullshit and the reasons that he acquired that title should have been insulting to everyone, including Bill Clinton. But it’s politics and it’s about legacy and core constituencies and all that so it was warmly welcomed and embraced and Clinton ran with it.
But even then, I used to wonder how the Kennedys felt about this. Seeing JFK and Bobby not pushed aside, that would never happen, but simply seeing them joined in that very special place by this slick centrist policy wonk. And, in a world where so many people weren’t alive then and can’t recall the Kennedys at all except at pictures on the wall from history, the Clintons were IT. Like the New Kennedys.
Now there’s a crack in all that, at least between African Americans and the Clintons. In fact, it looks like it has crumbled into dust permanently.
And then there’s the Kennedys, once again, sitting in that special beloved iconic place. Alone. And to make sure that the difference between the Kennedys and the Clintons is forever historically imprinted in the hearts and minds of anyone black, brown, liberal, or on the left, Ted and Caroline endorse Obama OVER a Clinton.
It’s fucking beautiful is what it is. I admire it. With two simple endorsements of a presidential candidate over another one, you RESET your family as THE one and only great white benefactor of modern black America.
BUT that’s not all. Policy wise, there’s not a hill of beans difference between Obama and Hillary. It’s an ideologically safe place for the Kennedys to go. Can’t fault them there at all. BUT… they carry great weight with the Latino community where the Kennedys are also beloved icons. This undermines the Clintons to some extent with that Latino community and could potentially throw primaries in a number of states to Obama. Thus helping to insure that the Clintons don’t end up back in the White House where they could, potentially, work their way BACK into that special place where the Kennedys are now once again the sole occupants of.
Anyway, that’s the first thing that popped into my head when I saw that Caroline Kennedy was endorsing Obama.
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that MLK remark… explained
I know exactly what Hillary meant when she said this. It’s just basic politics but it’s politics that people outside of politics, that would be voters, don’t understand. But OH how the Clintons DO understand it and that is WHY they are so feared by the right.
I understand it because my mother was in politics. She worked for a Pennsylvania state senator in the late 1950s and early 60s. She operated within the Democratic machine in the county we lived in that, of course, still holds power today. She worked locally for JFK’s election, as did every democrat involved in party politics in the county. I have a great story about that, by the way.
But my mother used to tell me that the first rule of politics is this: You can’t do NOTHING, unless you WIN that election. (double negative excused) That is something the Clintons understand so well. if you’re not sitting in that office, with that power, you are nothing more than Michael Dukakis, or hundreds of thousands of others who ran for any political office and didn’t win. You’re on the outside. Put up a website. Write a book. You’re not a player.
Martin Luther King’s efforts in the civil rights movement began in earnest in the early 50s. There were significant moments on the ground in that struggle during the Eisenhower years just as their were in the Kennedy and Johnson years. But Ike resisted all of that and kept civil rights out of the Oval Office. Kennedy was the first president to confront this issue with the nation in his very famous televised civil rights address of June 11, 1963. He might have been hesitant to do that, as revisionists love to point out, but he DID it, and what he said changed this country forever. No president had gone anywhere near where he went in that nationally televised address but no body OTHER than a president could have.
That’s one of the things that JFK did with the power of the presidency while he held it, before they blew his brains out. He didn’t have to do that. Had that been Richard Nixon, the entire civil rights movement would have been handled much differently. MLK’s greatness notwithstanding.
LBJ was very cognizant to the point of obsession of the dead president’s popularity. He decided to use HIS experience in the senate to take Kennedy’s civil rights perspective and turn it into hard legislation. He did that and did it TWICE. Maybe even Kennedy wouldn’t have been able to do it. It TOOK, it appears, the ‘king’ of the Senate, LBJ, and his expertise in that body, but now deployed from the Oval Office, to actually get laws written and passed that put the power of the United States federal government behind the movement that was started by MLK back in the 50s, and given a heartbeat on the governmental level by President Kennedy.
None of this happens if the men who were sitting behind that desk from 1960 to 1968 hadn’t have WON their elections. Because it took a president with the power inherent in that office to turn these things into law. You could actually multiply MLK’s power and influence in the Civil Rights movement 10 times, it STILL would have taken someone sitting in that office who was not resistant to these changes but actually in favor of them.
Clinton was, in a moment of candor, in my opinion, saying that, MLK was important, but a president had to be there to push the buttons in the government to make the changes into law. How she was applying this to Obama and her… I don’t know for sure but I would agree with the more forgiving conventional wisdom that said that SHE is a more capable policy person who understands the details better and is more apt to be effective than someone who makes great inspirational speeches.
Whoever took that and turned it into a slight by Hillary against MLK is the person or group who first played the race card to any significant degree in this election. That person or group is GUILTY. If it’s Obama’s campaign then they are guilty of playing race against Hillary Clinton.
This, to me, is the toxicity of political correctness finally coming home to roost in a presidential primary election and being used in a very vile way. Whoever took this comment and morphed it into what it has become, is scum who… duh duh! will do or say ANYTHING to try to win an election.
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may we borrow your poison?
You know what’s tragic? People are voting for Obama, due to substantive ideology, and yet they are BASHING the Clintons with talking points right out of the right wing play book of the last 16 years. I’m not saying these Obama supporters are all insincere. I’m saying that too many of them have either bought or borrowed the Republican line on the Clintons and are gleefully repeating it, all in an effort to support their candidate and oppose Hillary Clinton. The work of right wing radio, Fox News, all that vitriol and all those seeds of scorn and doubt planted, it’s all now paying off big dividends.
Now people who share the Clinton’s ideology are repeating what the Republicans have always said. And the Republicans are bragging about exactly this. I heard Bill Bennett saying it just the other night. “Heh, heh. Now you democrats are seeing what we’ve been saying about the Clintons all these years.”
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I was anticipating this would provide the newspaper the political cover for a fresh round of attacks by their writers and columnists on Hillary. Here’s something from a piece by E.J Dionne at the Washington Post, and he ought to know bumping around the water cooler with Sally Quinn.
Let’s grant the Clintons their claims: The press is tougher on Hillary Clinton than it is on Barack Obama; the old, irrational Clinton hatred is alive and well in certain parts of the media; Hillary Clinton gets hit harder when she criticizes Obama than Obama does when he goes after her.
Didn’t take long for the Newspaper of Record to start spending that capital.
The Billary Road to Republican Victory – Frank Rich
In a McCain vs. Billary race, the Democrats will sacrifice the most highly desired commodity by the entire electorate, change; the party will be mired in déjà 1990s all over again. Mrs. Clinton’s spiel about being “tested” by her “35 years of experience” won’t fly either. The moment she attempts it, Mr. McCain will run an ad about how he was being tested when those 35 years began, in 1973. It was that spring when he emerged from five-plus years of incarceration at the Hanoi Hilton while Billary was still bivouacked at Yale Law School. And can Mrs. Clinton presume to sell herself as best equipped to be commander in chief “on Day One” when opposing an actual commander and war hero? I don’t think so.
Desperate Husband – William Kristol
So Bill Clinton has been playing the race card, and doing so clumsily. But why is he playing any cards? He wasn’t supposed to be in the game. But just as Hillary was supposed to be finding her own voice, Bill decided to barge in, and to do so with a vengeance. This has been no favor to Hillary.
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bring her on… cough, choke
The biggest fear in the entire Republican universe is that Hillary Clinton will be elected president. They have feared that since before Bill left office. But she is as vilified as she is by that grass roots Republican base simply because they have been programmed to hate her by the Republican power brokers and opinion makers who themselves fear and dread the Clintons like no politicians since the Kennedys. If they can stop Hillary right now… before she can emerge from the primary season with her own party’s nomination… that is their DREAM scenario. They can then bash this Clinton as a loser forever, the Clinton threat will have been permanently neutralized at the presidential level, and the right can claim to have had nothing to do with it.
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Hillary’s Iraq war vote isn’t a liability. Except now, in the primary, when she’s under attack from her left flank.
The painful truth is that it is an essential component of what makes her electable in November. That’s what so many young people speaking up now for Obama don’t understand and what the establishment press and the Republicans are keeping mum about. 80% of America was in favor of invading Iraq. Everyone remembers whether they were or weren’t. That’s a lot of Americans who might identify with Hillary Clinton and the position she was in and and sentiments and VOTE she expressed at that time.
These independents who are so angry at Hillary for her war vote? They’re going to have two choices, which they may certainly abdicate by throwing their votes at a third party candidate.and potentially the election to the Republicans. The choice they have is between this person who they revile and can’t forgive for her war vote… and a Republican who is unabashed in his support for the war and the surge. If it is McCain, then he will have voted for the war just like Hillary did. And he just won the New Hampshire primary.
The anti-war movement wing loses its strongest advocate(s) the second the democratic nominee becomes Hillary Clinton. Because then the attacks on the democratic nominee in the GENERAL election will be coming from the RIGHT, and then, believe it or not, facing an unabashed war supporter on the other side, her OPPOSITION to the war will actually provide an opening to the Republicans to attack from and trust me, there will be some Swift Boat Captains of 2008 or Desert Tank Commanders or SOMEONE who will drive right through that opening. You just watch and see if I’m right.
Just like 2004. Just like 1972. If Independents don’t see that and simply stand by their principles they’ll simply be contributing to another 4 years of a pro-war Republican in the White House.
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This Slate article‘s ass is mine, as is the New York Times article from Dec. 26th that this piece relies heavily upon (as if the New York Times is the word of the Truth God.) Both are studies in a well-presented bullshit that in this case is based on a single assumption, taken as an unquestioned, un-argued given, that the technical fact that Hillary Clinton has only served in elective office 8 years represents the singular definition of experience, and therefore she has little or no more qualifying governmental experience to claim as it applies to the job of President than does Barack Obama.
First off, government work and politics are two different things, but the job of being a successful elected official, especially a President, requires a mastery of both. And I would venture to say that political experience and acumen, as long as a person is not an idiot regarding the workings or possibilities and limitations of a governmental position, is by far the most important quality of the two. Political chops will allow an elected official to operate effectively to get what he or she wants or needs. It is the juice by which people on the Hill or around the world are influenced and it is the talent that will allow a president to sell his ideas to the American people.
It’s Fucking Politics, Stupid.
When Obama was a mere 13 years old, doing the same shit I was doing when I was 13, Hillary Clinton was a lawyer in Washington working in the halls of Congress on the impeachment committee that was investigating the President of the United States for high crimes and misdemeanors. That is high heels on the ground, front row and back room room experience in one of the great dramas of presidential politics in the country’s history. What can a president do and what can’t he do and can and will articles of impeachment be presented against him? And ALL the politics in play in all this?
That people are out there making the case that this is not valid experience, EVEN in the face of a direct comparison to Barack Obama, is astounding.
But let’s move on. Hillary hooked up with Bill Clinton while he was making an unsuccessful bid for Congress. No experience there, I guess. Then, after they were married, he ran successfully for Attorney General of Arkansas. Again, no experience for Hillary? (Why don’t you just stop reading this right now if that’s what you believe.)
Let’s look at what she was doing at this time. Because it’s VERY easy to confuse the social work lawyering both Clinton and Obama have done and turn it into a wash. Sorry, this is from Wikipedia, not the New York Times.
Rodham joined the venerable Rose Law Firm, a bastion of Arkansan political and economic influence,[62] in February 1977,[63] specializing in patent infringement and intellectual property law,[30] while also working pro bono in child advocacy;[64] she rarely performed litigation work in court.[65]
In late 1977, President Jimmy Carter (for whom Rodham had done 1976 campaign coordination work in Indiana)[67] appointed her to the board of directors of the Legal Services Corporation,[68] and she served in that capacity from 1978 through the end of 1981.[69] For much of that time[70] she served as the chair of that board, the first woman to do so.[71] During her time as chair, funding for the Corporation was expanded from $90 million to $300 million,[64] and she successfully battled against President Ronald Reagan’s initial attempts to reduce the funding and change the nature of the organization.[64]
In 1978, Barack Obama was in his last year of being a teenager. At that time Hillary was about to become first lady of Arkansas. That’s another political campaign, and a successful one, that Hillary was INTIMATELY involved in. During the next SIXTEEN years, she would go through three more gubernatorial campaigns, two successful and one not, and spend a total of 12 years as… let’s put it this way if the derision of it makes some of you happy… The Governor’s Wife. Before leaving Arkansas, Hillary will have participated in 5 or 6 state wide campaigns as a confidant and, you better believe it, silent political operative and advisor, and a full 14 years as the intimate partner of the attorney general (2 years) and governor (12 years).
Then came two primary and general elections for president. Many states, many ups and down. But again, no experience for Hillary there. It was BILL running for president, jammer. Don’t you GET IT? Hello. Hillary Clinton’s hands are all over Bill Clinton’s political careers and never more so than when he is running for something. The story whispered then was, as it was later on and I’ll get to that, that Hillary had the last word in all major campaign decisions. She managed his runs for the White House in stealth mode. Everybody knows this who knows anything. Hillary’s micro managing of Bill Clinton stories are LEGEND and they’re all over every insider book on the Clinton’s starting with the first by Stephanopoulos.
After leaving the White House (actually before in the first case) Hillary then ran two successful campaigns for the US Senate. For the last 16 years Hillary Clinton has either been the First Lady of the United States, living AT 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, or as a United States Senator, and/OR running or intimately involved as a political operative in the running for any of the above.
From DAY ONE of the first administration, when they rolled out the Gays in the Military Thing, the Clintons have been operating under the most intense bombardment from their political enemies, the sole purpose of which was to keep them off balance and derail what was sure to be an unacceptably ambitious and liberal set of initiatives and programs coming from a Clinton White House. And the press was right there banging away JUST AS THEY ARE NOW. Just two years into the first term the LA Times ran ike a five page feature that revolved around the question and reasons for the fact that the Clinton White House was the most unfavorably scrutinized and pilloried administration in modern times.
This woman was withstood all of that and has been successful in spite of it all. She’s sat under the klieg lights and answered questions about her personal life, her political life and, ALWAYS, to what extent, exactly, was her role behind the scenes in the Clinton White House.
Let’s go there now and, while I’m at it, let me stick it in the ear of the prick at the New York Times, which is something I promise on my life I had been planning to do here on this board since I read his piece the day after Christmas.
Upon moving in to the White House, Bill handed Hillary what would be the biggest and most ambitious single policy initiative of his entire two terms in office, the idea of which was to somewhat nationalize health care in the United States of America. The New York Times says this:
“Mrs. Clinton’s role in her most high-profile assignment as first lady, the failed health care initiative of the early 1990s, has been well documented.”
Is this the newspaper of record? Because dismissing the initiative as “failed” and then curtly claiming that it all “has been well documented” is the kind of creepy informational gloss-over you might see from a Soviet-era state news source.
What “failed” the Clinton’s plan for national health care coverage for everyone was the efforts of the health insurance industry and their Republican friends in Washington, WHERE, you had better believe, the Clintons were most decidedly OUTSIDERS. Specifically, it was a group of TV ads run around the country featuring an attractive and thoughtful couple sitting in their living room ruminating over the potential disaster of a health care system run by the government. Those ads were so effective that on their own they killed this program.
But the ads had help. Because simultaneous to all this, the Clintons, and their plans to nationalize health care, were also being bashed on a totally NEW front, the burgeoning Right Wing Radio Dynasty, led by Rush Limbaugh and people like G. Gordon Liddy, etc.
Now let me ask you. Do you think Hillary Clinton picked up some experience through all this? Maybe? Just a little?
Here is the line in the New York Times’ piece that so pissed me off. And I have to say, this is a supremely well written and documented piece. You’re not going to get the quality of writing or the research of this article from me here today, for crying out loud. I’m in my fucking pajamas. But it is a house of cards that is based on one single premise and that is that if Hillary Clinton served in no OFFICIAL documented capacity during the two Clinton administrations then she has no claim to the benefit of experience that she alleges to have gleaned from her years as First Lady.
Here is the line.
In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton lays claim to two traits nearly every day: strength and experience. But as the junior senator from New York, she has few significant legislative accomplishments to her name. She has cast herself, instead, as a first lady like no other: a full partner to her husband in his administration, and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her “eight years with a front-row seat on history.”
There is a revisionist aspect to this that flies directly in the face of the realities of the era. Word of Hillary Clinton’s unnofficial role behind the scenes was leaking out of the Clinton White House in a steady stream causing the Clinton enemies THEN to deride her as the Co-President.
This is even noted on her Wikipedia profile.
She was also the initial first lady to take up an office in the West Wing of the White House,[45] first ladies usually staying in the East Wing. She is regarded as the most openly empowered presidential wife in American history, save for Eleanor Roosevelt.[106]
Some critics called it inappropriate for the First Lady to play a central role in matters of public policy. Supporters pointed out that Clinton’s role in policy was no different from that of other White House advisers and that voters were well aware that she would play an active role in her husband’s Presidency.[107] Bill Clinton’s campaign promise of “two for the price of one” led opponents to refer derisively to the Clintons as “co-presidents”,[108] or sometimes “Billary”.[109]
Yes, before Bill Clinton was ever elected president he was ALREADY telling the world that this woman was nearly his equal partner. Some marriages are just like that. Intellectual equal partners. Who the FUCK knew? But America was not ready for this and when the usual suspects came after him and her for something the Clintons naively saw as a PLUS, the Clinton spin machine had to from then on downplay her role and influence. It was all pushed under the rug and out of sight. (That is, as much as Hillary’s ego could stand.)
And now… I’m laughing as I type this… and NOW… the press is trying to claim that Hillary was just another ceremonial First Lady and that a senator with just TWO years in Washington DC has as much qualifying experience to recommend HIM as president as she has.
It’s so ludicrous… that it can’t be ANYTHING other than politics.
American Politics 101.
The left hates the Clintons because the left is peopled with idealists and the Clintons have unforgivably cast themselves as centrists. And the right hates the Clintons because they know what beats in the Clintonian heart is a practical liberalism which will rear its ugly head in a Clinton administration in the form of ANYTHING they can manage to squeak by the Republicans.
And the media loves a horse race and would love the excitement of a Obama general election campaign during which time they will contribute mightily in the taking apart of Barack Obama (they’ll politely call it vetting) and then, when they decide that he doesn’t quite measure up, they will then congratulate themselves on the fact that a black man was the nominee of a major party for president and don’t we all live in a great country and what time does the dry cleaner drop off my sequined gown for President McCain’s Inaugural Ball which I have the pleasure of covering tonight.
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BET founder and prominent Hillary Clinton supporter Bob Johnson said Sunday he is ‘insulted’ with the Obama campaign’s latest criticisms of Clinton, and appeared to take aim at the Illinois senator for his admitted drug use as a young man.
“As an African American, I’m frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won’t say what he was doing but he said it in his book…”
This is not going to be pretty. Not after Iowa. The Clintons are party players and they wouldn’t have gone after Obama, or any other Democrat, in a primary election unless they really REALLY came to a moment of desperation. But Obama has attacked Hillary and he has beaten her in Iowa and that has scared the living shit out of them.
Using a prominent black person, especially this guy, to bash another one, again especially this guy, is the first major Clintonesque moment in this election year. But this stuff is part of their legend. Not this incident itself but this all reminds me of Primary Colors (the Mike Nichols/Elaine May collaboration which was a very thinly veiled film about Bill Clinton’s first presidential primary season in 1992) in that if you are the type of person who loves the Clintons for their core ideology and all the tremendous potential to do good with that office, and I think at this point a Hillary Clinton administration has the potential to make changes the proportion of which would be like a “new” New Deal, but if YOU are the type of person who loves them for all that… you are PRECISELY the type of person who’s going to want to sit in a pickup truck somewhere and put a magnum gun to your forehead over the rest of this stuff.
It’s too bad, really. Because this isn’t the way the democratic primary should be going right now with hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and this country in deeper economic doo-doo than it has been in in decades. We have a majority in the Congress. We have a CHANCE at the White House. We don’t need Clinton vs. Obama. We don’t need black vs. white, not while the right and the republicans and the conservative talk radio dynasty and Big Energy and the insurance companies AND the pharmaceuticals and the military and security contractors, Halleburton and Blackwater, ALL sit back licking their chops at the potential REALITY of another 8 years of Republicans in the White House.
But like it or not, this is where it is. Hillary Clinton has one thing on her mind now and that is Barack Obama. He tried to throw mama from the train but she hung on. Look out mr. junior senator.
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How about this? Jeffrey Toobin on CNN the night of the New Hampshire primary said that the music selected for the post election party at Obama headquarters was Stevie Wonder’s Signed, Sealed and Delivered.
There is a brashness factor here that borders on ridiculous and it really begins with a guy running for the United States senate and within a year of taking that very high office setting his sites on a run for president. That’s a sort of high foolishness. People serve in the House for decades and lose their bids for the Senate. Happens all the time. Not saying Obama couldn’t win the election in November, anything is possible in this country, however unlikely. But sitting back and looking at the rapidity at which he became as senator and went from senator to presidential candidate, just rationally, it’s really kind of astounding. I think in a general election, knowing republicans and how and what they use tactically in ads and their talking points and what works to manipulate to their base… this is going to be very fertile ground for planting the kinds of seeds of doubt that will make their candidate look like the kind of elder statesmen this country needs at this time.
TRUTH is… anyone who picks Obama as his or her running mate in a general election would also be making a foolish move and for the same reasons. The opposing party loves to bash running mates as being not ready for the top job. They’re going to hold him up to the same scrutiny and criticism they would if his name were at the top of the ticket. Obama and his lack of experience and his sudden rise will make him a tremendous liability in the general election.
Hard to imagine him getting past Clinton now that the gloves are coming off. But she might select him as a running mate and that would be a huge mistake in my opinion and it’s really not going to take more than one big mistake to lose this election.
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Lumping the Clinton administration between the two Bush administrations and characterizing it all as a two family dynasty is the non-issue du jour. Hillary has a long way to go before she might take the presidential oath, and in comparison to the 11+ years of Bush, Bill Clinton’s 8 years were characterized by blissfully intelligent and responsible leadership. Comparatively speaking.
Linking the Clintons to the Bushes is either the mindlessly innocent regurgitation of a buzz-concern or the not so innocent work of people who just don’t want to see the Clintons back in the White House.
The Clintons will always be the biggest enemy of the right because they are liberal POLICY WONKS and they know how to win elections and work the system. The only way to stop them is a) prevent them from getting elected in the first place and, if that fails, b) whack them hard with something every single day they’re in office.
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the clintons are so over
Here’s what the newspaper of record is saying today.
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in career-threatening scrapes before, but never quite like the one they face in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, when nothing less than their would-be dynasty will be on the line.
Nothing less? Hillary could be over that quick? Wow. I guess if the New York Times, not to mention so many other newspapers and network pundits, say so, it must be true. And just like that, too. Snap! This controversial liberal candidate’s (and couple’s) bid for the White House will have been upended by a run through some heartland states who would be among the least likely places to have given her a first place finish now or ever.
When the process of choosing a US president begins with a staggered calender of election-like events in sparsely populated non-representative and conservative states, under mysterious arcane processes that are barely understood by people who report on them (let alone the average American) and these election like events can and, in this case, DO, actually change the course or alter the choices by shaking up the order or weeding out candidates entirely, then that is one very unacceptable and really outrageous part of the process that has so often put bad bad candidates on the ballots in November and put bad bad presidents in the White House. With disastrous results.
But that the media gleefully participates by VALIDATING the effects of these early primaries and caucuses? That’s yet another broken part of the process. The New York Times shouldn’t be asserting that New Hampshire could destroy Hillary Clinton’s chances at the White House. That’s not meeting its Fourth Estate responsibilities. A responsible press would be saying some thing like this.
Early States go to Underdogs, Frontrunners
Await Super Tuesday
That’s the way it used to look, the way it used to be not-spinned. Anyone other than me remember?
In results that give little hint as to how the rest of the rest of the nation’s primaries may go, Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are the respective choices of Democratic and Republican participants in the arcane and little understood Iowa caucuses.
That’s how these early results should be characterized in a responsible national press. Mathematically in their place within the context of the bigger picture. It’s a MUCH bigger picture, people. The wacky Mike Huckabee won Iowa with less votes than most large county election losers get.
I think some of you are misunderstanding me and this thread. I’m not the one saying the nominating process ends for Hillary Clinton with losses in Iowa and New Hampshire. CNN takes a self serving oh-that-it-were-so wish of John Edwards and turns it into something else. And now the bloody New York Times IS saying that the White House bid of Hillary Clinton WILL likely be over with a loss in New Hampshire falling on the heels of Iowa.
This is “nothing less” than a media misrepresenting the significance of some early minor results in sparsely populated small states to contribute to, for what reason I can’t even fathom, an unwarranted shake up in the field and, seems to me if I’m still able to read English, the casting aside completely of the person who was the national frontrunner prior to these two states’ events. Pointing out that winning in Iowa has often been meaningless is just adding to my point. It STILL should be considered as meaningless.
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With the help of our English to English translators, the writers and editors at CNN…
Clinton Out of It, Edwards Suggests…
(CNN) — Democrat John Edwards seemed to suggest Friday Hillary Clinton’s third place finish in Iowa may have rendered the New York senator effectively out of the presidential race.
Speaking at an early-morning campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, Edwards pointed to entrance polls indicating Iowa voters overwhelmingly listed “change” as the most important attribute they are looking for in a candidate. That means, he added, there are now only “two choices.”
Now he either seemed to suggest it… or he SUGGESTED it. Which is it, CNN? Make up your mind so your headline is in agreement with what you’re saying in the body of the article.
Far more people voted in the 2005 Allegheny County-wide general elections (Pittsburgh area) than in the Iowa Caucuses and yet here is Edwards mildly suggesting that Iowa has dealt Clinton the death card.
And then, our responsible friends at CNN are taking that extremely self-serving suggestion and re-writing it, expounding upon it, and then chiseling it all into stone and shooting it out across the airwaves and cyberspace. Words become thoughts and now you have a couple hundred thousand people and an irresponsible media making the decision for the rest of this very large and diverse country that the double digit national front runner is no longer even in the race.
That’s the absurdity of these early primaries and caucuses that the larger states tried unsuccessfully to save us from. It’s why any talk about what Iowa meant, from who the candidates were able to cross over and appeal to, etc. and on and on, is just careless acquiescence that actually contributes to and sustains this atrocious bullshit.
But by taking it as far as it is being taken here by CNN, and, from what I can read, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and every other major publication and network, by saying that “the field has now been shaken up” … is outrageously undemocratic. It’s a state franchise for Iowa and New Hampshire and without some federal action to stop them from moving their elections up six weeks before the rest of the country votes, they’re never going to give up that franchise of their own accord. It’s actually understandable. Pitiful. But understandable.
But the reason you’re never going to see a media driven public outrage that corrects this situation is because this is also the news media’s chance to make critical adjustments to their programming for the coming year. They could have a yawner of a 2008 wherein the two nominees are determined early and the whole primary process is over before they can package and sell it and profit from it… where the entire country just sits around waiting for November to heat up.
Or they can have it this way… The Big Shake Up That Changes Everything!
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the iowa problem
After other states moved their primaries up to try to diminish the ridiculously undemocratic power that two small conservative states wield over a country of 300 million people, both Iowa and New Hampshire responded by moving their votes up in a desperate but, unfortunately, thanks to horror show we call a news media in the US, perfectly successful attempt to hang onto their power to, along with the media, unduly influence presidential races.
The media should have called these two states on their actions and maybe forced the issue to the point where there would be pressure to have a national primary election day so that Iowa would be as irrelevant as it deserves to be and media as un-influential as it should be. Because a one day national primary election day wouldn’t simply diminish the influence of Iowans on the presidential race. It would diminish the news media’s influence as well. They can trump this up any way they want to now. They can, and WILL, diminish Clinton’s 20 point national lead and USE the results in Iowa to build up Obama in order to create the appearance of a close race where there isn’t one.
That said, it’s a beautiful thing that a African American man could win the nod of any state’s party in an presidential election primary. But all Hillary has to do is not make any mistakes. Handle all this with grace. When the rest of the country votes the inevitability factor will kick in and trounce the odd duck state’s wacky results. Had Howard Dean done the same the night he was dissapointed in Iowa he wouldn’t have gotten himself bounced out of the race.
But the media… they’re the big winners tonight. They got what they wanted: a race. That’s all they give a shit about or they would have hammered Iowa and New Hampshire for moving their election days up like this. This country takes one step toward’s a more democratic system and a bunch of cornfed yahoos knock the most power country on Earth two steps back.
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those san francisco nights
Comments like this have tremendous political ramifications. Republicans destroy Democrats with far less potent ammo than this c-4 that Obama spews. Look how Republicans are already using Obama’s remarks in down ticket races.
From The Washington Post’s The Fix page.
Oh and let’s define antipathy since the degree of intolerance it suggests has been questioned.
an•tip•a•thy, noun
1. a natural, basic, or habitual repugnance; aversion.
2. an instinctive contrariety or opposition in feeling.
3. an object of natural aversion or habitual dislike.
—Synonyms 1. disgust, abhorrence, detestation, hatred. See aversion.
Obama was standing before a crowd of upscale left coast liberals, people who had maxed out their contribution to his campaign of $4600 and were sitting at this couple of thousand dollar-a-plate dinner… so that they could contribute even more money to his campaign…. in San Francisco… and he was explaining another group of very far less well off Americans TO them… like a sociology professor would explain the behavior of some far off indigenous tribe of people to a classroom of well off university students.
Did I say this happened in San Francisco?
This happened in San Francisco.
The Illinois senator said that “these people” away back in the Midwest CLING to religion and guns and explain or essentially blame their own frustrations and bitterness with life on “those not like them” for whom they, apparently, have a shared antipathy.
He’s saying to these left coast liberals who, from San Francisco, already look down their noses at the ignorance of people not like them, that these Pennsylvanians and Midwesterners have GOOD reason for being the God and Guns, anti-immigration xenophobic bigots that they are.
Thanks a lot, Senator. With friends like you…
You see, that’s the problem here. He didn’t just say they were bitter. This one rambling sentence is an absolute buffet of problematic assertions to emanate from the mouth of someone who wants to actually win an election in this country.
But Obama steps into this mess largely because he is unseasoned and untested by being a presence on the national stage for any significant length of time.
He obviously doesn’t know that the inability to shake this effete out-of-touch elitist image that these very people he is talking about DO have of Democratic politicians has been the downfall of the party in presidential elections past and has enabled the Republicans to define themselves, incredibly, as being more in-touch with these vast numbers of middle-of-the-road Americans.
This is like that old family poison for the Democratic party. It’s literally an image that helped create the Reagan Democrat and it’s how and why Ronald Reagan won two elections and why his VP, George H.W. Bush, was able to extend the Republican reign to twelve long years by winning in ’88.
I said Obama will be the easiest take down in the history of American presidential politics. We’re all watching that happening whether we know it or care to admit it.
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