Now John McCain has gone and done it! The Chinese have picked up on the fact that the Republican candidate for president has been misquoting the Great Helmsman Himself, Mao Zedong - and they are not pleased.
“In almost every campaign speech he mentions that, ‘It’s always darkest before it gets pitch black.’ In fact, the original from Chairman Mao was, ‘it’s always darkest before the dawn.’ It’s possible that the Chinese people will soon have had their fill of McCain’s quotes of Mao’s Little Red Book.”
If war wasn’t so serious. If the Iraq invasion and occupation had not been such a tragedy, and if the ongoing Georgia-Russia “conflict” had not already cost so many lives and did not have the potential of exploding into an unmitigated disaster, the following quote could almost be funny. For now, let’s say it is a most clever, imprecise, and incomplete statement
Our U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, is reported to have said during a lively exchange with Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin on whether the Russians had “regime change” in mind for Georgia:
“The days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe — those days are gone.”
It is clever, because Khalilzad slipped in the words “in Europe,” thereby excluding from the debate–by geography–the U.S. overthrow of Iraq’s leader by military means, in 2003.
It is imprecise and incomplete, because if one does take into account–despite Khalilzad’s parsing–the overthrow of Iraq’s leader by military means, “those days are gone” should be: “We declare those five years, four months, and 20 days to be gone….until the next time we deem it necessary to install democracy anywhere in the world.”
If only it wasn’t so serious. And, how much more moral, diplomatic and “honest broker” authority we could have in helping to resolve this grave conflict over South Ossetia, if only “those days” were really gone.
The president manqué [Democrat John Edwards] gives Rielle Hunter, formerly Lisa Druck, more than $114,000 to shoot vain little videos for his Web site (even though she’s a neophyte), one of which is scored with the song “True Reflections” about the Narcissus pool, which goes: “When you look into a mirror, do you like what’s looking at you? Now that you’ve seen your true reflections, what on earth are you gonna do?”
He has an affair with Hunter, while he’s honing his speech on the imperative to “live in a moral, honest, just America.” A married former aide says he’s the father when she gets pregnant, even though she’s telling people Edwards is the dad. And one of his campaign donors pays off Hunter to get her resettled with the baby out of North Carolina.
But the Breck Girl wants a gold star for the fact that he sent his marriage into remission when his wife was in remission. That’s special.
In his statement, he bleats: “You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself. I have been stripped bare.” Isn’t stripping bare how he got into this mess?
Indeed, and it ain’t over. This post is written from Afton, Wyoming where TV shows broadcast and cable newscasts covering the latest twist at the top of the hour — that Edwards’ ex-mistress says she will not take a paternity test for her daughter.
I’ve always said I would never EVER use the tiresome journalistic cliche that popped up the past twenty ears that something “doesn’t pass the smell test.” But here we go: This doesn’t pass the smell test. This story is very much alive — and ongoing.
Dowd also makes this intriguing observation:
For some reason, super-strivers have a need to sell what is secretly weakest about themselves, as if they yearn for unmasking. Edwards’s decency and concern for the weak in society — except for his own wife. Bill Clinton’s intellect and love of community — except for his stupidity and destructiveness about Monica. Bush the Younger’s jocular, I’m-in-charge self-confidence — except for turning over his presidency, as no president ever has, to his Veep. Eliot Spitzer’s crusade for truth, justice and the American way — except at home.
Edwards is likely finished on the national stage or perhaps for any future elective office for a variety of reasons. This scandal is the final blow. For one thing, his track record is not good. He didn’t spend much time in the Senate. He ran as Veep with Sen. John Kerry in 2004 amid great hype but his performance on the stump — and in his closely-watched debate against Vice Presidential winner Dick Cheney — was considered by many to be surprisingly tepid. The Kerry-Edwards ticket lost when many thought it should win. He reinvented himself as a more savvy, populist candidate for 2008, ran in the primaries and then petered out.
And there’s another reason why he’s likely through. This latest scandal adds to a growing narrative: Edward’s sincerity has been questioned before…
August 8th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
The Political Quote of the Day comes from Peggy, who in a Wall Street Journal column (that should be read in full) wonders whether what’s shaping up for Presidential election 2008 is Democratic Senator Barack Obama as losing 1948 overconfident Republican Presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey, Republican Senator John McCain as underdog-winner Democratic Senator and the bulk of voters as 1968 winning Republican Richard Nixon’s “silent majority:
Is Mr. Obama’s self-conception in line with his gifts, depth, wisdom and character? That’s the big question, I suspect, on a number of minds.
As for Mr. McCain, I think he had the best moment of the month this week at the big motorcycle convention in Sturgis, S.D., when he was greeted with that mighty roar. And his great line: “As you may know, not long ago a couple hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I’ll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day.” Oh, that was good.
There’s a thing that’s out there and it’s big, and latent, and somehow always taken into account and always ignored, and political professionals always assume they understand it. It has been called many things the past 50 years, “the silent center,” “the silent majority,” “the coalition,” “the base.” The idea of it has evolved as its composition has evolved, but the fact that it’s big, and relatively silent, and somehow always latent, maintains. And watching that McCain event—vroom vroom—one got the sense it is perhaps beginning to pay attention to the campaign. I see it as the old America, and if and when it reasserts itself, the campaign will shift indeed, and in ways you can even see from 10,000 feet.
Some initial reaction to this:
1. It is now become a truly tiresome cliche that every time a candidate who has been perceived or is behind in polls or early votes and then seems to gather strength it’s suggested that we are seeing a repeat of 1948. It’s always possible but the polity, economic conditions, country’s polarization hubris and countless other factors make the context of the vote far different. Still, 1948 was a case of overconfidence versus buoyant happy-warrior fighting. Who will emerge as the campaign’s true happy warrior? Who will emerge as the one who was overconfident? And will whoever wins have more than 50 + 1 in terms of a governing coalition? Remember: Truman’s 1948 victory did not exactly usher in an era of good partisan feeling. Will whoever wins simply sit in the White House as the polarization wars continue? Or will their campaign allow consensus building?
2. What has indeed changed is the “given” that it’s the Democrats’ year for the White House. Read the rest of this entry »
August 4th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
So was Democratic Senator Barack Obama’s week of playing defensive merely a little glitch because he’s running in a year when the mounting ills traced to the Bush administration seemingly multiply by the day? The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Dick Polman, in the political quote of the day, warns that Obama and the Democrats may be in greater trouble than they think:
The big question, however, is whether Americans in 2008 will vote their wallets and pocketbooks - assigning blame, as Fair sees it, to the incumbent party’s nominee - or whether they will continue to confound conventional wisdom, as they have so often in this campaign season.
Indeed, one of the key reasons for [Republican Senator John] McCain’s recent barrage of attacks on Obama is his urgent need to change the traditional paradigm. His strategists are well aware that the sour economy hampers their prospects, especially since McCain is widely perceived in the polls as ideologically sympatico with the incumbent president of his own party; and since McCain himself has admitted that “the issue of economics is not something I have understood as well as I should.”
Hence his need to make the voters focus on something besides economic anxiety. The obvious alternative - for a McCain attack team now dominated by Karl Rove alumni - is to shred the opponent’s persona…and suggest, for example, that Obama is merely an uppity arrogant airhead celebrity who wants to lose a war.
So should the Democrats and Obama supporters breathe a sigh of relief now that the week is over and they head into the convention, with a tough new Obama ad on energy policy blasting McCain’s ties to oil interests? After all, most of the news — particularly financial news — isn’t good for the GOP, and the Democrats are expected to win seats in Congress. Polman, in effect, says in your dreams. — the worst is likely yet to come.
And that’s just for starters. It’s August now, the traditional Democratic disaster month. Michael Dukakis was destroyed in August ‘88, when the GOP painted him as a water-polluting, insufficiently flag-waving, rapist-enabling wussy; his response at the time was zilch, because he refused to believe that voters would buy the caricatures. They did. And 16 years later, in August ‘04, John Kerry was transformed by the Swift Boaters from war hero to fraud; his response at the time was to embark on a wind-surfing vacation. His people said virtually nothing for several weeks, because they refused to believe that voters would buy the caricature. They did.
Obama now faces many potential dog day afternoons. His current line is that he is “disappointed” in McCain for launching such attacks, but I doubt that a mournful sigh is sufficient to stop further shelling from the McCain war room. Clearly he will need stronger weaponry if he wants to survive the ides of August. Contrary to what some of the economic forecasters believe, I find it hard to imagine, in this unconventional campaign season, that swing voters will tilt Democratic merely because of the sluggish quarterly growth rates in the GDP.
Read his article in full.
And that’s the dilemma that campaigns — and Americans who seek a shift in how we conduct our personality-oriented seek-and-destroy Presidential campaigns — face. These kinds of campaigns, with their synergistic tie-ins to sound bite mantras, imagery-stereotypes, slogans and attitudes quickly picked up by partisans via reinforcement on talk and cable opinion shows and the Internet, do work.
As Polman notes, the Democrats continually find themselves flat-footed and out of sync when hit by a barrage of GOP attacks, even if they run in years when there’s massive pundit hype about how THIS will be the Democrats’ year.
The question: do you play the game on the playing field where the game is conducted and officially-decided and play by the rules that teams use, or do you pick up and move to play the game on a field you choose by your own rules — while the other side is scoring points on the official playing field where the game is officially-decided?
The Los Angeles Times’ James Rainey argues that Obama is coming under fire from pundits for being overconfident because he’s acting Presidential. Fair enough.
But that may not be what winning Presidential campaigns require. President Dewey, President Dukakis, and President Kerry found that out. There’s even news that McCain is going to wait to let Obama pick his Vice President first (code words: so the Veep can come under fierce attack or mockery and McCain can then counter the selection).
One bit of conventional wisdom via critics is that Obama won’t be truly tested for President until he spends some time responding to a crisis in the Oval Office.
Actually, his first test will come this month to see how he, his campaign team and the often-politically-outfoxed Democrats, respond to the onslaught that is about to come.
Will this August be political as well as TV re-run season?
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows the race for the White House is tied with Barack Obama and John McCain each attracting 44% of the vote. However, when “leaners” are included, it’s McCain 47% and Obama 46%.
This is the first time McCain has enjoyed even a statistically insignificant advantage of any sort since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination on June 3 (see recent daily results). Tracking Polls are released at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time each day.
A week ago today, Obama had a three-percentage point lead and the candidates were even among unaffiliated voters. Today, McCain leads 52% to 37% among unaffiliateds.
We’ve repeatedly said here that a single poll is not as significant as a trend. Between this and the Gallup Daily tracking poll which basically puts the race as a dead heat, we are seeing a trend. The McCain campaign is now on the ascent; the Obama campaign is on the descent. Will this apparent trend continue?
The political Quote of the Day comes in two of Marc Ambinder’s three points about the Republican Senator John McCain’s Obama-is-a-callow-celebrity-just-like-Britney ad:
1. John McCain is the Republican least associated with the Bush brand of politics. His appeal is based on his independence, and particularly on his independence from partisan bickering. Eroding his brand could be really dangerous. The political cognoscenti thinks these new Marquess of Schmidtberry rules may work to McCain’s benefit in the short term. Longterm: tba.
2. Celebrity? How many movies and TV shows has McCain appeared in? How many SNLs has he hosted? Wasn’t a movie made about his life? Wasn’t McCain the original politician celebrity? Celebrity?
Even for second amendment supporters, there is a big difference between buying a gun for yourself and buying one for somebody else. With that in mind, your quote of the day:
Buying a gun for your wife is another way of saying, “You know, I’d kind of like to kill myself, but I want it to come as a surprise.”
The Quote of the Day via NBC’s Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, and Domenico Montanaro at First Read:
One more thought about the Landstuhl TV ad: Obama cancelling his meeting with US troops really seems to have bothered McCain and his campaign — personally. Do read this quote in the Washington Post from a GOP strategist: “‘They couldn’t help themselves,’ the strategist said, adding that the ad over the hospital visit is ‘churlish and unlike McCain, and hardly will resonate with the swing voters who are going to decide this election.’ The strategist continued: ‘They’re doing it because the candidate, and the campaign, is not happy with where they are and they’re lashing out.’”
Read this post we did yesterday. Yours truly is a “swing voter” who registered as a Republican in 2000 to vote for McCain in the California primary. This ad most assuredly did “not resonate” with me. It didn’t reflect the kind of campaign we have advocated seeing on TMV over the past nearly four years. It seemed to have the tone and accuracy of the kind of ad Karl Rove would have used against McCain in South Carolina in 2000.
Dick Polman has a MUST READ post on the Supreme Court’s decision on nixing Washington D.C.’s handgun ban. The first part deals with the McCain camp’s reaction but the broad and specific points he makes at the end is our Quote of the Day:
Have you noticed that, whenever Republicans don’t like a judicial decree, they complain about how “unelected judges” are “legislating from the bench” by ignoring the literal wording of the Constitution, thus imposing “judicial tyranny” on the people’s elected officials, who should be free to enact policy as they see fit without any meddling from the robed brethren?
Well, take a look at the ruling that overturns the D.C. handgun ban. The majority, led by Antonin Scalia, ignored the literal meaning of the Constitution. The Second Amendment has no wording whatsoever about an individual right to bear arms, or individual home-defense; the amendment talks only about the collective security of “the people,” led by “a well-regulated militia.” Having thus legislated from the bench, the Scalia majority threw out a law enacted by the people’s elected officials.
But since McCain and his surrogates got the policy outcome they desired, suddenly they have no qualms about unelected judges who stray from the literal meaning of the Constitution and appear to legislate from the bench.
Conservatives are also supposed to respect legal precedent, not topple it. Yet, in this ruling, the Scalia majority ignored legal precedent; dating back to 1939, the high court had never unearthed an individual’s right to bear arms in the Second Amendment language. Yet now it has. Again, not a peep yesterday or today from the right-leaning advocates of “strict constructionism.”
And he sees a side benefit for Obama:
In the end, however, Barack Obama might actually benefit from this hypocrisy. The Scalia majority has provided him with political cover. From this point forward, whenever anybody charges that Obama intends to take people’s guns away, he can merely reply, “Nobody can take your guns away. The Supreme Court has now ruled that it can’t happen.”
Polman is correct in pointing out the short shelf life of passionate principles in 21s century America. Positions painted as vital and sometimes “finessed” to advance specific political agendas now all the time. This is one reason why for several years independent voters have been the fastest growing segment of the electorate.
Some dismiss independent voters as wishy-washy, or unable to make decisions. NOT. Some independent voters, in fact, had belonged to one party or both parties and gotten all worked up about issues and principles — and then concluded that key core values become expedient to win elections and advance agendas. So they step out of the parties, concluding that the parties have become political branding organizations rather than serious ideological guardians.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has a MUST READ COLUMN today — pegged to GOP political maven Karl Rove’s assertion that Democratic presumptive nominee Sen. Barack Obama is like an arrogant country club member who hangs around the clubhouse smoking a cigarette with a beautiful woman on his arm making snide comments.
Read this in FULL because she notes at the beginning that, once upon a time (before he was the presumptive nominee), Rove said he was impressed with Obama. Read it from beginning to end. One thing her piece underscores again: as a campaign strategist (and he is an informal campaign adviser to GOP presumptive nominee Sen. John McCain) Rove will create and promote a caricature of a candidate that is then cloned on talk shows, partisan new and old media and in campaign ads.
But here’s our quote of the day — the end:
Charlie Black crassly argued in Fortune that a terrorist attack would “be a big advantage” for John McCain. And what’s scary is, Black is the smartest adviser McCain’s got.
It’s hard to believe that if Americans get attacked after all these years of getting strip-searched at the airport, they’re going to be filled with confidence at the performance of the Republicans on national security. And at least Obama wants to catch Osama and doesn’t think he’s getting his directions on war from “a higher Father.”
Rove’s mythmaking about Obama won’t fly. If he means that Obama has brains, what’s wrong with that? If he means that Obama is successful, what’s wrong with that? If he means that Obama has education and intellectual sophistication, what’s wrong with that?
Many of Obama’s traits are the traits that people in the population aspire to.
It looks as if Rove is on the verge of realizing his dream of creating a permanent position for the Republicans.
Former US presidential contender Mike Huckabee urged his fellow Republicans on Wednesday not to denigrate Democrat Barack Obama, saying they should celebrate the historic moment of a black candidate.
“Republicans will make a fundamental if not fatal mistake if they seek to win the election by demonising Barack Obama,” Huckabee told a news conference on a visit to Tokyo.
The former Arkansas governor said that, having grown up in the segregated South, he never thought he would see an African-American win the nomination of a major party for the US presidency.
“I do not want to have anyone misrepresent or miss the opportunity to celebrate what I think is a landmark achievement, not just for Barack Obama, but for the United States of America,” he said.
The country was able “to get to a point where we did not see his colour but we truly saw his charisma, his message and what he brought to the campaign trail,” Huckabee said.
Don’t look for him to get the Vice Presidential slot when he’s advocating anything less than total all-out political war…
The loss is still being measured — and with each day it’s clear it is even greater than originally imagined. From USA Today:
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says, “Russert was a political analyst more than a reporter. His commentary wasn’t based off opinions. He was assessing impact, direction and implications based off deep knowledge and deep research. … That is the kind of reporting that we don’t have enough of on network television.”
As a journalist who has watched Meet the Press almost every Sunday for as long as I can remember, I am shocked and saddened over the loss of Tim Russert. He was a journalist in the great tradition of Edward R. Murrow: fearless, polite and well-prepared, and concerned for the direction of our craft.
WORLDMEETS.US will be posting the global reaction to his loss over the next few days.
So, knowing this will anger some woman readers, here goes: Hillary Clinton didn’t lose the Democratic presidential nomination because she is a woman, and gender no longer is a big deal in American elections.
There are two basic reasons the most formidable front-runner in contemporary presidential politics failed: Barack Obama is a sensational candidate who assembled a campaign team, which out- thought and out-strategized Clinton at every turn; and Hillary Clinton, in the most important venture of her life, picked the wrong people and adopted the wrong strategy.
Unwilling to face this painful reality, some Clintonistas persist in the whiny complaint that it was all about sexism.
Wherever I go — from glittering dinner party to glittering dinner party — the famous and powerful people I meet (for such is my life) tell me how lucky I am to be a journalist in this the greatest of all presidential contests. I tell them, for I am wont to please, that this campaign is indeed great when, as history will record, it is not. I have come to loathe the campaign…
…..What is perhaps most surprising, and sad as well, is what can be seen in the rearview mirror. There, reduced to a speck, is the once-huge expectation that the next president would be a Democrat. The current president, after all, has started two wars and completed none, and presides over a palette of debacles that encompasses everything from a crashing economy to a housing catastrophe to an immense loss of American prestige around the world…… It includes, of course, a lack of trust in an administration that weaseled and fibbed and exaggerated and Cheneyed the American people — but has (and so the GOP will remind us all) kept the nation safe from another attack. No small matter, it will turn out.
So I see little to be happy about, little that pleases my jaundiced eye. Yes, voter participation is way up and in the end, the Democrats will choose a woman or an African American and, to invoke that tiresome phrase, history will be made. But this messy nominating process has eroded the standing of both candidates. It has highlighted the reality that racism still runs deep and that misogyny, although more imagined than real, is not yet a wholly spent force. This is an ugly porridge that has been placed before us, turned rancid since the cold, pristine days of Iowa only five months ago. We were, with apologies to Bob Dylan, so much younger then.
Make no mistake about it. The decision rendered today by the Democratic National Committee’s rules panel showed that Barack Obama has displaced Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, as boss of the party.
…..Losing what they needed today proves that for the first time in 16 years the Clintons are no longer in charge of the Democratic Party. There is a new boss in town.
Is the charge of sexism in the treatment of Senator Hillary Clinton something to be seriously ponder, or a basically political rationalization and a talking point?
It is insulting, because it asserts that those who supported someone else this year were driven by low prejudice and mindless bias.
It is manipulative, because it asserts that if you want to be understood, both within the community and in the larger brotherhood of man, to be wholly without bias and prejudice, you must support Mrs. Clinton.
It is not true. Tough hill-country men voted for her, men so backward they’d give the lady a chair in the union hall. Tough Catholic men in the outer suburbs voted for her, men so backward they’d call a woman a lady. And all of them so naturally courteous that they’d realize, in offering the chair or addressing the lady, that they might have given offense, and awkwardly joke at themselves to take away the sting. These are great men. And Hillary got her share, more than her share, of their votes. She should be a guy and say thanks. Read the rest of this entry »
With a big win in Puerto Rico, Clinton could possibly erase that margin (plus several thousand more that Obama is expected to net in Montana and South Dakota). She could then proclaim that with the help of Puerto Rican voters who cannot vote in a general election, she is the popular vote winner.
The shorthand many Clinton supporters are already taking into the summer is that she won the popular vote but had the nomination “taken away” (as Joy Behar said on “The View”) by a man.
What a helpful message for uniting the Democratic Party.
If the Obama people have any sense, they will demand in their negotiations with the Clintonites that Hillary cease and desist in her specious claim to have won the most popular votes.
Given that more than 35 million voters took part in the Democratic primaries and caucuses, the math games on both sides look awfully silly. Everyone should agree to call it a tie.
Alter is correct. More and more this is looking like 1968, and a year where some Democrats are determined to yank defeat from the jaws of victory. Clinton’s argument now is that unless she gets her way in Michigan and Florida whoever gets it (unless it is her, that is) will get a nomination that really is not legitimate. It’s saying Do it my way or I’ll split the party without actually saying those words. Will the Democratic party apparatus and superdelegates agree to that approach?
What she’s doing is not securing her the nomination. Rather, she’s gunning up a lot of her supporters to believe that the nomination was stolen from her — a belief many won’t soon abandon. And that on the basis of rationales and arguments there’s every reason to think she doesn’t even believe in.
UPDATE II: Steve Benen had defended Clinton but now has had enough.Read his ENTIRE post but here is a sampling (these are excerpts only):
By last night, Clinton had made my defense of her efforts look rather foolish. In fact, looking back, I’ve defended Clinton, more than once, when people said she was putting her own interests above those of the party and the nation. But after seeing her tactics yesterday, I’m done defending Hillary Clinton.
….For several weeks, I’ve appreciated the fact that Clinton considers herself the superior candidate, and has kept her campaign going in the hopes, from her perspective, of saving the party from itself. But after yesterday, it’s become impossible for me to consider Clinton’s intentions honorable. Her conduct is not that of a leader.
What’s so striking is the shamelessness of her reversal(s). When Florida and Michigan broke party rules and were punished by the DNC, Clinton not only supported the decision, she honored it and spoke publicly about those votes not counting. One of her own top strategists was responsible for making the decision in the first place. Now, Clinton is saying, “Never mind what I said and did before.
AND:
Instead of trying to help bring the party together — Election Day is 24 weeks away — Clinton went to Florida to argue that if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, his nomination will be illegitimate. And if the DNC plays by the rules Clinton used to support, it’s guilty of vote-suppression — comparable to slavery, Jim Crow, and Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe….Many Dems have been waiting for a soft landing, a graceful exit, a classy wrap-up. Clinton, for reasons that I want desperately to understand, has chosen to abandon these norms and instead choose a destructive, divisive path. She’s playing a dangerous game in which the only winner is the Republican Party.
Read it in its entirety.
In other words: Clinton had already lost many of the progressive mainstream journalists and bloggers. She had split the centrists, moderates and independents. Now she’s losing more centrists, moderates and independents NOT because of her policy stances (which centrists, moderates and independents may favor more than they favor Obama’s) but because of her tactics.
Dick Polman is one of the most perceptive and on-target political commentators on the journalism and blogging scenes today — and his quote of the day is one you should copy and save.
By tomorrow if, as expected, Clinton’s big Kentucky Democratic primary win will be offset in the media by Obama’s expected win in Oregon, more political eulogies for Hillary Clinton’s campaign will trickle in from pundits and some bloggers due to the pledged delegates totals.
Why couldn’t she clinch it earlier, since she had been the front-runner? Why haven’t the many arguments used by the Clinton campaign in recent weeks gotten much traction?
In the last part of his post today Polman hits the nail on the head and says what many other journalists have hinted at in recent weeks:
One feature of the slow-motion Clinton funeral ceremony is the ongoing procession of euologists, all of them offering reasons for the demise of the Clinton candidacy. Clinton herself, naturally, doesn’t believe it’s her fault; she blames it on sexism (”people who are nothing but misogynists”). Her husband doesn’t think it’s her fault; he blames it - naturally - on the press (he said in Kentucky, “this has been the most slanted press coverage in American history”). And her in-house loyalists - quoted not for attribution in perhaps the best article of all - pin the blame on various top aides for alleged messaging, tactical, and strategic deficiencies.
And yet, all these eulogies seem to overlook the biggest factor of all: Clinton fatigue. The inescapable truth is that a huge Democratic constituency was hungering for an alternative to the Clintons. I heard this repeatedly, as far back as 2002. While interviewing Washington-based Democrats, I was struck by how often they would trash the party’s golden duo. (I knew it was coming when they would preface their remarks by asking, “Can I go off the record for a moment?”) As one prominent party woman - this is someone who appears regularly on national TV, in a neutral mode - remarked to me in 2003, “We need to put the Clintons in a cage somewhere, with a blanket thrown over it.”
The point is, millions of Democrats were poised to support a strong not-Hillary candidate. Obama filled the bill, and the Clintons, convinced of their entitlement, were way too slow in taking him seriously - and in recognizing that his early support was, in some important ways, a referendum on them.
All of which leaves Hillary with basically one argument, and I suspect we’ll hear it again tonight: the notion that, in the wake of a Kentucky win, she is actually ahead in the national popular vote…as long as one ignores the party rules and counts Florida and Michigan. Right. And if she only had wings, she could win the Boston Marathon.
If there was latent Clinton fatigue out there (as I also believe there has been) Bill Clinton’s red-faced campaign appearances and controversies which helped Clinton with some groups could have sandbagged her in the long-run.
Of course, it isn’t over until THIS LADY sings, and she’s not singing yet.
Well, at least Barack Obama got the support of one white Southerner last week. John Edwards’ endorsement came one day after Obama got pounded in West Virginia. Maybe Edwards, a North Carolinian, saw something in this contest that made him queasy?
Some of Clinton’s supporters seem to be cultivating, for a purpose, a permutation of the entitlement mentality that many voters thought they discerned in her candidacy and found off-putting. She seemed to feel entitled to the Democrats’ nomination, and having been denied it, she may feel really entitled to be Obama’s running mate. But for him, choosing her would be even more dangerous than Bosnian sniper fire. She would solve none of his problems, and would create others.
….More than 300 million Americans living at this hour will never be president. They will never even be senator from New York. That office is not chopped liver. Neither is it a form of disregard.
