Like I’ve always said: Sometimes the mask slips and the truth comes out.
A 24-year-old Fox News Channel production assistant was fired this morning for something she said during the red carpet arrivals at the Time 100 Gala last night.
Insiders tell us the assistant, identified as Jennifer Locke, was on assignment with a camera crew to cover the entertainment angle of the event. When Sen. John McCain walked by, the assistant said, “I voted for you in the primary, you’re going to win.”
McCain was overheard saying to her, “You’re not supposed to reveal that.”
Sen. Obama already has begun pivoting toward the general election. Soon, he is likely to unleash attack ads aimed at defining Sen. McCain. With vastly more money, Sen. Obama will be able to flood the airwaves as voters are forming impressions.
This issue of Time is going to sell well. Mothers and fathers will get it to show their kids its not a pipe dream, it is no longer theoretical. I’ll be getting one to show the children I have in the future.
“I was there. I remember when it happened. Right at the start of it all. Obama.”
Jackie Robinson had to be bigger than life. He had to be bigger than the Brooklyn teammates who got up a petition to keep him off the ball club, bigger than the pitchers who threw at him or the base runners who dug their spikes into his shin, bigger than the bench jockeys who hollered for him to carry their bags and shine their shoes, bigger than the so-called fans who mocked him with mops on their heads and wrote him death threats.
When Branch Rickey first met with Jackie about joining the Dodgers, he told him that for three years he would have to turn the other cheek and silently suffer all the vile things that would come his way. Believe me, it wasn’t Jackie’s nature to do that. He was a fighter, the proudest and most competitive person I’ve ever seen. This was a man who, as a lieutenant in the Army, risked a court-martial by refusing to sit in the back of a military bus. But when Rickey read to him from The Life of Christ, Jackie understood the wisdom and the necessity of forbearance.
To this day, I don’t know how he withstood the things he did without lashing back. I’ve been through a lot in my time, and I consider myself to be a patient man, but I know I couldn’t have done what Jackie did. I don’t think anybody else could have done it. Somehow, though, Jackie had the strength to suppress his instincts, to sacrifice his pride for his people’s. It was an incredible act of selflessness that brought the races closer together than ever before and shaped the dreams of an entire generation.
The Economist responds to my post about how McCain’s trouble with the base is showing up in a 20% protest vote in the primaries. They don’t think it’s a problem, but if you look at the late 2004 Democratic primaries the only candidate getting a substantial vote other than Sen. Kerry is Sen. Edwards. But unlike the Huckabee/Paul vote that vote was not a rejection of Kerry. I was one of those who voted for Edwards, not because I rejected Kerry as the nominee, but because I wanted him to pick Edwards as his running mate.
So when John Kerry was the nominee and a move on to have Edwards as his running mate, their combined votes were 81-87% of the vote - not the kind of number McCain is getting.
Keith Olbermann is reporting that Howard Wolfson and Patti Solis Doyle are currently negotiating book deals about their time on the Clinton campaign. As Olbermann notes, you don’t negotiate for book deals in primary season if you think you’re going to be working a campaign in the fall.
On CNN today Barack Obama discussed how McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, has totally lost his bearings as he panders to the far right in his quest for the presidency and the McCain campaign sent out what has to be a historically histrionic memo.
In citing some study of donation patterns in the primary contest, Ross Douthat labels the GOP the “Party of Sam’s Club” citing donations from janitors, waitresses, etc. Sam’s Club? Perhaps Sam’s Club is different here in Maryland, but the Sam’s Club clientele trends upward - upper middle class suburban folks who have the cash and home storage space to buy goods in bulk.
I don’t think the lower end demographic Douthat is trying to associate with the GOP (and that’s flawed as well since most of those folks vote Democratic even if they’re not donating) is the Sam’s Club demo. Wal-Mart, more likely.
Viewed through my eyes, the likely Clinton wins in West Virginia and Kentucky are sort of like the touchdowns scored by John Elway in Superbowl XXII. They were nice and all, but they ignore the fact that this happened. For our purposes Barack Obama = Doug Williams.
MORGANTOWN, WV - Prospective voters in the upcoming Democratic primary here today revealed that they had no idea before today that likely nominee Sen. Barack Obama was, in fact, black.
“All this time I assumed he just had a serious tan”, said Susie Bilgebright of Huffington Gulch, “It wasn’t until Senator Clinton’s comments today explaining that he was a negro and therefore not someone I should vote for did I realize. What a relief, I almost voted for him based on what he stood for when all along it was clear that I should vote for Sen. Clinton, who is white like me.”
Other white voters in states like Virginia, North Carolina, California and New York expressed similar anguish over their votes. “I went into the voting booth thinking about character and competence when I know now that a vote for Obama was a vote against the white race,” said Ernest Schatter of Greensboro, NC.
In a hastily organized press conference with his wife at his side, Senator Obama came out of the closet and admitted “I am a black American”.
Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters — including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.
“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.
Indeed, a pattern has emerged some time ago. Boy, did we dodge a bullet.
“[W]orking, hard-working Americans, white Americans”. She really said that. Wow.
Congratulations, Hillary Clinton, you win the prize for the first Democratic Bigot Eruption since I’ve been keeping track of this. Even professional haters like Pat Buchanan and his ilk aren’t so balls-out about racism. You’ve been getting your ass handed to you and especially among black voters. This shows me once again that we - who are apparently lazy and shiftless non-Americans based on your definition - have yet again been a leading indicator.
There was maybe a slight chance Barack Obama might have been pushed to pick you as his running mate, but we can’t have someone spouting Klan-style talking points on the ticket. Heck, there’s a good shot with language like that you won’t win back your senate seat in 2012. I mean, a lot of those apparently lazy and shiftless non-American blacks helped you to win and they’d just as soon vote for someone else in the primary or the Republican in the election rather than someone echoing Bull Connor’s language.
“Working, hard working Americans, white Americans”, indeed.
UPDATE: Thanks for the link Americablog, and to make clear what I consider Clinton’s Klan-style talking point is her assertion that the hard working Americans are white Americans. That’s what I take offense to, and I don’t think you have to be black to feel that way.
WASHINGTON - After a daylong meeting between Senator Hillary Clinton and her campaign’s top advisors and staffers, this reporter has learned of a decision to portray the mathematically certain nomination of Senator Barack Obama as the byproduct of a time traveling DeLorean car that has created, in the words of communications director Howard Wolfson, an “alternate timeline.”
In extended comments Wolfson said, “we intend to show that sometime in late January of 2008 this time traveling DeLorean somehow altered history. In the original, true timeline Senator Clinton won all the states on Super Tuesday and quickly became the Democratic nominee for president. Yet, right now Senator Obama is going to be the nominee and that disruption of the space time continuum is clearly to blame.”
Top advisor Harold Ickes plans to show superdelegates a Powerpoint presentation set to a Huey Lewis soundtrack with what he claims is irrefutable evidence of a disrupted timeline. “On the left is Gov. Bill Richardson before the incident, and on the right is the more evil more bearded Bill Richardson now claiming to have endorsed Obama.”, Ickes said, “It’s obviously a paradox.”
In addition to the public relations outreach, Senator Clinton herself plans on Monday to introduce The Zemeckis Act into law. The bill is formally known as S. 1985 Authorizing the creation of a clock tower with which to harness the 1.21 Jigowatts needed to power a DeLorean in order to create some “serious shit”.
Attempts were made to contact former advisors James Carville and Paul Begala but friends and family reported that they had faded away as if ghosts. Mary Matalin repeatedly insisted she had no idea who James Carville was, acting almost as if the pundit and guru had been erased from history due to meddling in the time stream.
Senator Clinton refused to speak about the issue on the record, but her office issued a short statement indicating that she “gotta get back in time”.
Jonathan Cohn discusses one reason why Obama’s weakness versus Clinton won’t be as bad versus McCain.
Obama wants to invest heavily in better schools and public infrastructure? McCain says it will cost too much money. Obama wants to make sure every American has health insurance? McCain says it’s socialized medicine. Obama wants to make free trade more humane? McCain’s says no, no, no–that’s messing with the free market.
Even Obama’s calls to change political discourse for the better–the most familiar and, at times, most empty part of his pitch–play into this dynamic. When Obama says he wants to end the politics of division, McCain dismisses it as just a slogan.
Whether you think Obama is right or wrong about these ideas–and, yes, I mostly think he’s right–he’s setting up the fall as a debate between ambition and timidty, between hope and cynicism, between optimism and pessimism.
Clinton’s argument that occasionally worked versus Obama was that not only did she want change but that she has and would do a better job of making that change. McCain’s argument versus Obama will be against the very idea of making the change itself.
The people want blue. Obama is selling light blue, Clinton was selling dark blue but John McCain is selling puke green with neon pink polka dots.
I wonder if this could ever rise to the level of stripping the Patriots of their titles? At the very least I think the official record book should have a Roger Maris style asterisk. *
Former Patriots video assistant Matt Walsh sent the NFL eight videotapes that show New England violated league rules by recording opposing coaches’ playcalling signals.
The tapes include signals by coaches of five opponents in six games from 2000-02, but don’t include video from the St. Louis Rams’ walkthrough before the 2002 Super Bowl.
The NFL said it received a letter from Michael Levy, the lawyer for Walsh, detailing the tapes that were scheduled to arrive Thursday at the league’s New York offices.
* (Although technically there was no real asterisk for Maris.)
Following in the footsteps of other bloggers like Jeralyn Merritt and Armando, I must urge the superdelegates, the media and other creative class left blogs to be aware of something before it is too late. I’ve crunched the numbers, looked them over again and again, then again with a sprinkling of eye of newt and found the weakness in Barack Obama’s candidacy:
He’s getting too many votes.
In 32 out of the 47 contests more people have voted and caucused for Sen. Obama than for Sen. Clinton. Why is the media not reporting on this? They spend so much time on the slicing and dicing of the electorate highlighting ad nauseam which blocs are voting for and against a candidate when the writing is on the wall.
More people are voting for Sen. Obama and that’s a huge problem in the fall. If we extrapolate this trend, it’s possible that he could, in the general election, have more votes than any other presidential candidate in history! The nomination process will be a mockery of the highest order if Howard Dean and the DNC sit back and allow the person with the most votes and most supporters to walk away with the nomination. This isn’t what we all signed up for.
I hope the other hopelessly biased pro-Obama blogs like the sinister Josh Marshall, the Great Orange Satan, and Huffington Post all stop taking those bags of cash from David Plouffe and understand the path they’re marching down.
Do you really want to live in a country where the leading vote getter worms his way into the nomination for one of the two major parties in America?
