Somebody please have Barack Obama hire Aaron Sorkin to write speeches. Please.
Substitute “Senator McCain” for “Bob Rumson”.
Archive for the 'Politics' Category
In his new ad about his Bush-style no care health care “plan”, John McCain identifies himself on screen as “President McCain”. I guess we just decided to call of the election and have George Bush designate his successor just like that?
Alan Keyes was unable to get the Constitution Party nomination for president. This can only mean one thing.
The Keyes Party.
WHERE DO I SEND MY DONATION?
Since I’ve been following politics closely and especially since I moved back to the DC area to work in the industry (more or less), one of the things I have never understood has been the liberal/Democratic reluctance to call something a lie. When Al Franken wrote his book Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them, I am certain that the forthright way in which he called out something as a lie was a pivotal element of its success. In 2000, and especially 2004, Al Gore and John Kerry drove me batty with their constant rhetoric that something was “a falsehood” or that someone “misled”. They just never came out and said George Bush and the Republican party and the conservative noise machine were just filthy liars.
So I’m mighty happy to read this quote from Sen. Obama in the course of discussing the phony flag pin flap pushed by the right wing.
Obama continued, saying “so I make this comment. suddenly a bunch of these, you know, TV commentators and bloggers (say) ‘Obama is disrespecting people who wear flag pins.’ Well, that’s just not true. Also, another way of saying it is, it’s a lie.”
It seems like such a small thing, but I’m so happy he said it.
In all likelihood, Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president. He will be the first black man in history with a legitimate, decent shot at being the leader of the free world. His candidacy will cause turnout among black Americans to go off the charts and more blacks - in raw numbers and in percentages - will vote than ever before in American history (we’ve seen the early rumblings of this in the primary process, but I think that America at large just has no idea how strong this thing will be in a general election).
In an environment like that, where the vast majority of blacks engaged in politics are moving forward you have a miniscule few who for whatever the reason (I tend to think its for them to adopt a contrarian pose) will vote Republican. As a result, they are outliers within their own race and essentially position themselves against the tide of black history. The tried and true response of black conservatives is to look at themselves as some kind of hero or martyrs. The larger conservative movement, unable to attract a sizable percentage of black votes, trumpets these kinds of stories again and again. Like this blog post from the hard-right Human Events:
Blacks who will vote for McCain this fall are some of the most courageous people on the planet, because of the extreme social scorn they will face from their left-wing black counterparts.
It takes courage to challenge the dominant social order. It took courage for Elia Kazan to battle pro-Communist sentiment in the 1950s. It took courage for Martin Luther King to fight Jim Crow in the 1960s. It took courage for Ronald Reagan to confront institutionalized liberalism in the 1980s. Likewise, it will take courage for black Republicans like [Michael] Steele to combat “Obama-ism” in the late-2000s.
Of course, a black person supporting McCain is not courageous at all. If you want to truly compare it to the 1960s its the equivalent of seeing Bull Connor sic dogs on people and saying “Hey guys, let’s cool it on all this civil rights stuff, we may upset some people.”
The funny thing is, its not even a conservative vs liberal thing. On a whole, black Americans are far more conservative socially than your average Democrat. The story the media refuses to cover beyond spectacle is the churchgoing socially conservative socially active black Americans that are the bedrock of the Democratic party. The problem for the press and the right is that those same socially conservative voters are by and large economic moderates to liberals. They don’t think that they should be distracted by politician’s latest song and dance on a social issue they’ll drop like a hot potato the day after they’re elected (ie George W. Bush and gay marriage) but instead they think that sane economics helps lead to cures for social ills (tax cuts for Paris Hilton don’t help teen pregnancy rates, but perhaps better funding for education does).
On paper, many of these voters should be Republican voters, and the few who are are overrepresented in the media (CNN seems to have a neverending supply of black conservatives) and for their contrarianism are paid handsomely. While they collect this money for espousing a minority of a minority opinion they treat any and all backlash as a sign of superiority. They see themselves as martyrs, but the only thing they do is prop up policies hurting black America that the vast majority of black America has rejected.
Neither side of the idealogical divide has an awesome record on racial issues, but only on the left would it even be plausible for a black candidate to be a presidential contender. Only on the left are their elected leaders at the federal level who are black. There is a reason for that, a reason why the party of the southern strategy and Macaca makes blacks sick to the stomach.
And a reason why black conservatives who help to prop up barriers to progress aren’t martyrs but fools.
She’s standing on a platform of Jello. Via MSNBC’s Verdict with Dan Abrams here is Sen. Clinton slamming MoveOn (and by extension everyone who’s ever had the desire to be a progressive/Democratic activist) and here is Sen. Clinton just a year ago saying what great work she thinks MoveOn has done. This of course is part of her ongoing argument versus caucusing because she does badly there, but it also shows us - like with her vote in favor of the Iraq War - how quickly she would have thrown the progressive base of the party under the bus had she been the nominee.
Luckily, we dodged the bullet.
Personally I find all the hoopla and presidential deference given to what is, essentially, the visit of a religious leader a little out of proportion, weird, and kind of troubling. I mean, Gordon Brown is a far more essential world leader and yet you don’t see the president coming to greet him on the tarmac.
I know I’m in a minority on this, but I just find it weird.
Related: I am curious, however, what the Pope plans to say about the child rapists his church helped to hide for all those years.
The media’s idea of the ‘Average American’
When I saw the Meet The Press lineup I IM’d my friend to express my disgust that Meet The Press was yet again getting elite pundits like Mike Murphy, Mary Matalin, James Carville and Bob Shrum to discuss the issues of the day rather than regular Americans and the officials we elect to represent us. I can’t think of a group of people less suited to the task. Robert Reich saw that too, though he mistakenly calls Tim Russert smart.
Tim Russert, one of the smartest guys on television, interviewed four political consultants – Carville and Matalin, Bob Schrum, and Michael Murphy. Political consultants are paid huge sums to help politicians spin words and avoid real talk. They’re part of the problem. And what do Russert and these four consultants talk about? The potential damage to Barack Obama from saying that lots of people in Pennsylvania are bitter that the economy has left them behind; about HRC’s spin on Obama’s words (he’s an “elitist,” she said); and John McCain’s similarly puerile attack.
Does Russert really believe he’s doing the nation a service for this parade of spin doctors talking about potential spins and the spin-offs from the words Obama used to state what everyone knows is true? Or is Russert merely in the business of selling TV airtime for a network that doesn’t give a hoot about its supposed commitment to the public interest but wants to up its ratings by pandering to the nation’s ongoing desire for gladiator entertainment instead of real talk about real problems.
Less than a generation ago people thought that by the sheer virtue of someone getting on tv they were smarter than those of us in the great unwashed. Thankfully we now know that ain’t the case by a long shot.
Clinton bloggers are just shocked as heck to find out that campaign events are stage managed affairs. This is either naive or stupid. Or both. But I guess you’ve gotta grasp at straws…
Next thing you know they’ll be shocked and appalled that those tv anchors aren’t just coming up with those thoughts off the top of their heads but are in fact reading.
God, please let this primary season end before people take complete leave of their senses.
UPDATE: A campaign stagecraft flashback.
On Friday, the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-New York, issued a statement to CNN in response to an article written by a college newspaper that included the accusation that the campaign suggested a student ask a certain question.
“On this occasion a member of our staff did discuss a possible question about Senator Clinton’s energy plan at a forum,” campaign spokesman Mo Elleithee said in the statement. “However, Senator Clinton did not know which questioners she was calling on during the event. This is not standard policy and will not be repeated again.”
The pro-Clinton blogs are flogging yet another “How about THIS!!!???” idea designed to present yet another laughable justification for Sen. Clinton to be awarded the nomination she is losing. You may remember it by its more formal name from when you were a small child: Let’s pretend.
Obama’s advantage hinges on a system that, whatever the actual intentions behind it, seems custom-made to hobble Democratic chances in the fall. It depends on ignoring one of the central principles of American electoral politics, one that will be operative on a state-by-state basis this November, which is that the winner takes all. If the Democrats ran their nominating process the way we run our general elections, Sen. Hillary Clinton would have a commanding lead in the delegate count, one that will only grow more commanding after the next round of primaries, and all questions about which of the two Democratic contenders is more electable would be moot.
It should come as no surprise that the piece is written by Sean Wilentz who while supposedly a historian should probably be described as a quasi-official flack for the Clinton campaign.
But the heart of the theory being pushed here is equally stupid. If Senator Clinton wished to run for the nomination of a party with a winner-take-all nomination process, she would be well within her legal rights to do so - she simply needed to have changed her party affiliation to Republican. Like it or not the Democratic party’s process is a proportional affair along with superdelegates. That is how it is. Nobody forced Sen. Clinton to design her campaign for a Super Tuesday splash where she would have the nomination wrapped up for the anointed one by early February. She has name recognition on par with Jesus and a campaign war chest ranking among the largest in history. Yet just like the sort of thinking we have come to identify with the Bush administration she failed to reconcile her fanciful plans with the facts on the ground. The Obama folks didn’t rely on stovepiped intelligence delivered to them by a sympathetic lackey, instead they read the intelligence reports and made the right decision.
Sen. Clinton should try that sometime before her career in public life is up.
Instead they are reduced to counting the amount of angels that can fit on the head of a pin. They come up with absurd scenarios to try and make their argument stick. It ranges from the idea of delegates not following the will of primary and caucus goers as they have since the nomination process began, to counting only states where Sen. Clinton won to counting only primary states and on and on. Yet Sen. Clinton did not express in any way her grave concerns over this nomination process when her husband won it in 1992 and 1996. When President Clinton won the Iowa caucus in 1996 we heard none of this discussion about how caucuses were not representative of the people’s will. Yet by her current standards (and they change from day to day depending on who is asking) President Clinton’s nomination was not legitimate. Heck, as late as a few months ago Sen. Clinton was more than willing to praise the entire process and abide by the DNC’s rulings against Florida and Michigan for their violation of party rules.
But then she saw it all slipping away and the entire nomination process became an unfair and untrustworthy thing whose rules should be changed when the process is 80% over in order to benefit her failure.
Senator, this is not Calvinball.
>> The glaring flaw in Sean Wilentz’s argument
>> Hillary Clinton a Victim of the System
>> Give It Up
>> If My Grandmother Had Wheels, Clinton Would be Winning
>> And if Hillary were Obama, she’d be winning
>> Wilentz Jumps the Shark
See here. Still no word on McCain’s missing returns, though the media is doing their best to cover for their boss.
I’m always amused by how the “independent” conservative opinionsphere - blogs, cable tv, and talk radio - tends to simultaneously come up with the same idea, usually bad. Today’s idea is for Mitt Romney to run as McCain’s running mate. Put aside the fact that I and many others think Romney is a supremely disingenous phony of the highest order, what would he bring to the McCain ticket? He has little to no electoral sway outside of Utah (he may help a little in Michigan and will be useless in Massachusetts) and his Mormon religion will likely do more to suppress the religious right vote for McCain than his candidacy already does. If anything, Romney’s relatively youthful appearance will reinforce on the populace just how old McCain is, especially compared to Sen. Obama.
He brings little of anything to the table and would in fact probably drag McCain down in the polls.
So as a loyal Democrat I say: Please, pick him.
Ok, the Clinton people aren’t even really trying now. This ad is stupid.
UPDATE: One of Ambinder’s commenters hits the nail on the head for why this ad stinks.
Did the focus groups really like this one? It makes no sense to me. Economic crises don’t come all of a sudden, they develop over days and even years. “Mrs. President, I’m sorry to wake you up, but a cell of bankers has activated and is foreclosing on millions of homes!”
It involves llamas.
Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal, a former Clinton administration appointee, announced Wednesday that he will support Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Freudenthal said he was impressed by the large, enthusiastic crowds that turned out to see Obama when he visited Wyoming ahead of last month’s caucuses.
“They paid attention and were riveted and reactivated, and trying to be part of an America that’s bigger than just their own self-interest,” Freudenthal told The Associated Press. “And you hope that can work. Because something has got to dig us out of this morass that we’ve gotten into, where it’s sort of gotcha politics.”
Jon complains that liberals see the hint of racial attacks in conservative actions. The problem is that the right has a history of racially based campaigning for over 100 years up until now. They’ve given no indication they have any desire to stop or slow down the process. They, in fact, rely upon it to keep their base intact.
Using the logic Jon Henke is advocating here, we should believe that all the people in prison are innocent. Why? Because they say so, silly!
The Washington Post is turning its editorial pages into the Jerry Springer show. Just days ago column inches were given to James Carville in order for him to defend his attack calling Bill Richardson a “Judas”. Now, the Post gave room for a rebuttal to Gov. Richardson.
Who f****** cares?
The spat between Carville and Richardson won’t stop soldiers for being killed for a lie, end global warming, ease poverty or rebuild our economy. We are all dumber for the press to keep fueling the “feud”. Personally I’m on the edge of political burnout here and its because of stupid crap like this.
Jo Dee Messina says it all: My give a damn, is in fact, busted.
I know I’m not the target for this ad from a teacher’s unions on behalf of Sen. Clinton - but I can’t help but feel that it’s not a good ad. It’s so morose and the voices so flat. I like to think I can take myself out of it and objectively review an advertisement - for instance, I think John McCain’s bio ad is pretty good, and the only ad I’ve seen so far this season that introduces the candidate as well as this Obama one (why does Sen. Clinton not have a single bio ad?) but this radio ad seems like a dud to me.
According to the Right Honorable August J Pollak
There is not a single instance of political discourse in the history of this nation in which the participants did not want to simply kick their opponent in the balls.
Verily, he doth tell the truth.
… delivers again in his promotion of Sen. Clinton?
I see no need for catfighting of the sort embraced by James Carville to be published in the “A” section of one the country’s top 5 newspapers. We have a war on, a fiscal crisis, global hunger, disease and murder, and that merits James Carville writing what amounts to a personal phone call or an e-mail in the news section of the paper.
Cajun, please.
I watched the first three episodes of HBO’s excellent John Adams series today, and while looking forward to episode four tomorrow, I thought to myself about Senator Clinton’s anti-intellectual attack on Sen. Obama’s oratory as “just words”.
Much of the first and second Continental Congress and its work product - the Declaration of Independence - was flowery and forceful debate and oratory. It happened to be about fundamental issues that caused a global earthquake that reverberated in the formation of America, but under the Clinton formula it would boil down to “just words”.
If “just words” resembles the following:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Shouldn’t every American be on the side of “just words”?
Add another to the list.
An aide to President Bush has resigned because of his alleged misuse of grant money from the U.S. Agency for International Development when he worked for a Cuban democracy organization.
Felipe Sixto was promoted on March 1 as a special assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs and stepped forward on March 20 to reveal his alleged wrongdoing and to resign, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said Friday. He said Sixto took that step after learning that his former employer, the Center for a Free Cuba, was prepared to bring legal action against him.
Stanzel said the alleged wrongdoing involved the misuse of money when Sixto was an official at the center.
