Blogs are a convenient outlet for venting outrage. Reading so many I find it hard to spread my passion in so many directions and I often become numb to the steady flow of crisis. Then mainly for my mental health I try to shift focus to ponder constructive responses to our challenges.
I often wonder if the two party system is irretrievably broken and that special interests are so entrenched that pragmatic, open minded, reasonable deliberation and action is no longer possible. I consider the need for a new party with a platform made up of all the policies that are currently mired and diverted.
Then I consider if the members of this new party can actually agree on this new platform. And if they were to miraculously agree could they avoid the seduction of special interests to derail even this new noble attempt at progress? And if they avoided the seduction of money could they also avoid the traps of becoming fragmented, hyper partisan or inflexible?
I am dubious that a new party would be an improvement; and that if it failed it could cause another generation of jaded potential activists, (such was my concern with Unity 08).
And I find myself pondering what seems like a better use of our time and resources: To liberate the integrity, compassion and pragmatism of our politicians, both conservative and liberal, by freeing them from the influence of selfish interests and hyper partisan, inflexible, constituents and donors.
So while I empathize with the urge for a new Party, I believe that it would be far more efficient to focus on the few essential adjustments necessary to make the current system work. And we can do this by focusing on leveling the playing field by reforming Campaign Finance, Redistricting, and Elections. For far less money than it takes to organize and operate a new party we could refine that system we already have.
All it takes would be a few high profile champions like Mayor Bloomberg, the consolidation of most of the existing reform groups into a single focused force, and the creation of a Reform PAC to give us an outlet to turn our outrage into productive change.
Pennsylvania primary analyses show a clear divide: not only in Pennsylvania>, but in most states, older voters favor Clinton, younger voters favor Obama. Is it possible that the most telling demographic factor in the Democratic nominating process may not be gender, or race, but age?
All three are historic. Hillary Clinton would be the first woman candidate for president, Barack Obama the first black candidate, and the electorate would include its first viral constituency.
It takes on a science fiction aura. Out there in space somewhere, or in mySpace, are tens of thousands of young people who constitute the first generation of humans in history to be born and reared in the digital age. They are called the Millennials. “They’re so well connected that, if an employer doesn’t match those expectations, they can tell thousands of their cohorts with one click of the mouse,” says Claire Raines, a consultant specializing in generations in the workplace.
Or, if a candidate doesn’t match their expectations – or does – they can mobilize instantly with one click of the mouse. This is an unprecedented sort of power, in an environment where voter support until now has been drummed up one face at a time behind a screen door, or one voice on a telephone. If a viral constituency favors one candidate, or disfavors another, it must mean potentially that the favored candidate could flash a signal at his Website at noon, and have the viral constituency on the move toward the polling places by 12:15.
In stories from Pennsylvania, voters have acknowledged their age and experience – and hers – as factors in their choosing to support Clinton. “It’s not that I don’t like Barack,” one voter told The New York Times, “I just don’t think he’s seasoned enough.” Said another: “Barack Obama has no experience and no plans. He just works on emotions, and this is why young people like him. People who are more mature analyze things. They’re wiser.”
Marketers struggle with ideas for reaching the Millennials, who are indifferent to traditional media and are completely fragmented by their Internet environment. The only way to reach them en masse is not by going out to them, but finding some button to push that galvanizes them to connect and come in. Once that button is pushed, it only takes a click of a mouse.
These people are barely in their 20s, but they don’t fit the old American mold of kids who are better seen but not heard. They are described as eager for challenges, seriously self-confident, goal-oriented, optimistic, active in their communities, champions of diversity, environment-conscious, reality-based, conscious of their positions in a post-9/11 world, and advocates for change.
And they are totally connected. You can almost see one of them reading the comments of a more mature, wiser Pennsylvania voter, and saying, “Analyze this!” and reaching for the mouse.
Tomorrow’s Pennsylvania primary will most likely settle nothing, but there is an outside chance that the results could end it all. If Barack Obama wins by even one vote, it’s over.
The slice-and-dice demographics show Hillary Clinton running strong among blue-collar voters, gun owners and bowlers, but there is a less obvious layer of the electorate that could surprise the experts–the voters who were pre-pubescent when George W. Bush took power.
These 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds who are either in college or entering the work force into a dismal economy have been registering in large numbers, and despite all the negative ads and campaigning, may find Obama’s message of new politics and hope irresistible. He could win the nomination on their disgust with what eight years of the worst presidency in modern times has wrought.
At a rally yesterday, Obama said, “You have a real choice in this election. Either Democrat would be better than John McCain, and all three of us would be better than George Bush.
“But what you have to ask yourself is who has the chance to actually really change things in a fundamental way so that 10 years from now or 20 years from now you can look back and you can say boy we really moved in a new direction and we put the country on a better path.”
According to an AP reporter, “The comment threatened to undercut Obama’s efforts–and those of the entire Democratic Party–to portray the GOP presidential nominee-in-waiting as nothing more than an extension of Bush’s unpopular tenure. At the very least, it provides fodder Republicans can use to prop up McCain.”
But it may well be that the conventional wisdom of propping up McCain misses the point of this election. Pennsylvania’s youngest voters may settle that question tomorrow.
How can one account for Barack Obama’s truly astonishing success in reaching for the American presidency?
It isn’t his speechifying. He’s an excellent speaker, but Jesse Jackson in his time was better. It’s not his personal story, which though in many ways inspiring, can’t match the heroic realism of John McCain’s. It’s not his stands on issues that are not noticeably different from Hillary’s. Nor is it the populist edge that has creeped into his campaign in recent months. John Edwards was way out front in this respect.
No, it all comes down to that one word that appears in bold letters on all his literature and just over his left shoulder at every speaking engagement. Change. And the change hinted at here is not the kind of change this country has seen several times in recent decades. Not like, for example, the change when Republicans took control of Congress after 40 years of Democratic majorities, or when an undistinguished actor cemented the union of media and politics when Ronald Reagan won the White House.
This change is something far more basic, far more fundamental, than a mere shift in political sentiment. It represents the full fruition of what was predicted in the movie “Network.” The arrival of the time when not just a few Americans, nor even one or two large groups of Americans are mad as hell and not going to take it any more. But a time when the majority of the country is that mad, that determined not to take it for one more election cycle, that it is willing to reach for a very visible symbol of its frustrations and anger.
€ Americans are mad as hell about health care they are straining to afford.
€ Mad as hell about inflation that is only under control when government officials don’t bother counting the costs of basics whose price is rising at an unseemly rate.
€ Mad as hell about a foreign policy concocted by think-tank ideologues, for-profit contractors, and Washington special-interest groups.
€ Mad as hell about financial markets now so flagrantly-rigged that even the overwhelmed wizard behind the curtain who is doing the rigging no longer bothers to hide his shaky hand.
€ Mad as hell about working longer and harder than anyone else on the planet and still seeing their standard of living slide while Wall Street bunglers walk away from their failures with astronomical rewards.
€ Mad as hell that their religions, their core faiths, have been hijacked and manipulated by Beltway hucksters to retain their own political power.
€ Mad as hell that the infrastructure they depend on in their daily lives is slowly rotting away while huge sums are wasted trying to nation-build a country with which we have no historical or kinship relationship.
€ Mad as hell about spending on a vastly-overblown military that seems unable to put down gangs of fanatical yahoos.
€ Mad as hell that the guy who killed 3,000 of our people on 9/11 is still tweaking us on TV seven years after the crime.
€ Mad as hell that our natural environment is being trashed in frightening ways we have trouble even understanding but know in our gut are horrible.
€ Mad as hell that we have to borrow from foreigners to keep our government financially afloat and give them control of large pieces of our economy in payment.
So along comes a guy who not only talks change, but is so different from our usual leadership stereotypes that we think, maybe, just maybe, he will actually do something radically different when it comes to the things that are making us mad as hell.
You would have to have one very angry, one very ticked-off electorate, to even consider giving someone like this a shot at the Oval Office. Obama isn’t just a sop to unity or an instrument to narrow this country’s racial divide. He’s a cry from the nation’s heart for something dramatically new, fairer, more sane and sensible.
If he loses the nomination or the November election the winner had better understand this cry and its implications. Or things in these climes are going to get a lot more nasty in the very near future.
I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I feel Obama’s speech today was important, not only to me personally, but the country as a whole. And as I’ve been surfing the blogosphere and reading the various opinions, I found a word that pretty much sums it up. And all thanks to a title of one of Andrew Sullivan’s post that’s really only tangentially related to what I’m about to say. Because while one of Sully’s readers argues that Obama’s remarks prove that he will be able to effectively respond to attacks in the general election, I think he showed us is so much more than that.
What Obama demonstrated today is that he’s not afraid to stand up straight and talk about an incredibly difficult issue with the type of candor Read the rest of this entry »
Jeffrey Birnbaum of the Washington Post writes that these two liberal institutions are considering some kind of merger. Common Cause has a subscriber list that the Washington Monthly might use to build subscribers. And the Washington Monthly is a well regarded liberal institution that can add voice to the mission of Common Cause.
I am posting on this because it highlights one of my pet peeves that groups with similar missions don’t merge and take advantage of synergies to expand the leverage of their resources. Why do folks like me who support “Campaign Reform” have to chose which of a score of similar groups will get my donations? Why am I asked to help pay for dozens of leases, phones, ISPs, fund raising drives,etc?
I am sure that “control” has much to do with this. But I wish that the leaders of each group would have more commitment to the realization of their shared missions than to the aggrandizement of their egos.
Seventy-five years ago today, Franklin D. Roosevelt took office to end a Depression and face an oncoming war. Now, voters are choosing a President to resolve a war and stave off a Depression.
In these hard times, Americans will take their chances on the first woman or African-American or the oldest president ever. Back then, they were relying on the first Chief Executive who could stand only with braces on his legs and spent most of his time in a wheel chair.
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” FDR said in his inaugural address on March 4, 1933, but that night, two million Americans were homeless and banks in 32 states closed and could not reopen the next morning.
Compared to then, the choice now is less daunting, but it nonetheless marks another turning point in how the country is to be governed and who will lead the way and set the tone.
Roosevelt, despite his infirmity, brought energy and hope to the White House and changed the direction of American politics for half a century. Nothing that momentous may happen in this election, but after eight years of disastrous leadership, something important is at stake again.
Tonight, we will get a clearer idea of who will be entrusted with the job of leading us through the first hard times of this century.
Last March 4th, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, arms linked with civil rights leaders, were reenacting the 1965 march in Selma, united in declaring their debt to the non-violence of Martin Luther King. Today, they are at the precipice of divisions that could be suicidal for their party in November.
In Obama’s grasp for the nomination and Clinton’s last stand in Texas and Ohio, identity politics are threatening to tear the Democrats apart–accusations against him of Farrakhan sympathies to unnerve Jewish voters, paired with countercharges that the Clinton campaign is fueling them by distributing a photo of Obama in Muslim garb. Voters are being targeted by race, gender, ethnicity, economic status and any other demographic that could prejudice them.
February 24th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Onetime iconic consumer advocate Ralph Nader has announced yet another run for the White House — but past-campaign political hubris plus a loss of a big chunk of his previous voting constituency is unlikely to make him a major factor. Even so: his presence in the race threatens to siphon some votes away from the Democratic Party’s 2008 nominee.
Several factors have converted Nader from a onetime-youthful consumer advocate, idolized on college campuses, to what he is today: the modern Harold Stassen whose philosophy, resentment towards both major parties and apparent love of the national political spotlight probably means he’ll run again until his aging legs can’t carry him. The news reports give you some of the story and his prospects — but not all of it.
Ralph Nader said Sunday he will run for president as a third-party candidate, criticizing the top White House contenders as too close to big business and pledging to repeat a bid that will “shift the power from the few to the many.”
Nader, 73, said most people are disenchanted with the Democratic and Republican parties due to a prolonged Iraq war and a shaky economy. The consumer advocate also blamed tax and other corporate-friendly policies under the Bush administration that he said have left many lower- and middle-class people in debt.
“You take that framework of people feeling locked out, shut out, marginalized and disrespected,” he said. “You go from Iraq, to Palestine to Israel, from Enron to Wall Street, from Katrina to the bumbling of the Bush administration, to the complicity of the Democrats in not stopping him on the war, stopping him on the tax cuts.”
“In that context, I have decided to run for president,” Nader told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Nader also criticized Republican candidate John McCain and Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton for failing to support full Medicare for all or cracking down on Pentagon waste and a “bloated military budget. He blamed that on corporate lobbyists and special interests, which he said dominate Washington, D.C., and pledged in his third-party campaign to accept donations only from individuals.
The AP story also noted that Republican former Gov. Mike Huckabee said that GOPers will welcome Nader into the race, since he draws votes away from Democrats.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader said on Sunday that he is launching another long shot independent campaign for president of the United States.
Nader, who will turn 74 this week, announced his presidential bid on NBC’s “Meet the Press” saying that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are addressing the problems facing Americans.
Nader also ran for president in 2000 when he got about 2.7 percent of the national vote as the Green Party candidate and played a role in deciding the final presidential outcome. He also ran as an independent in 2004 and got only a tiny fraction of the vote.
Many Democrats blame Nader’s participation in the close race between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George Bush in 2000 for tipping the election in favor of Bush. They believe that but for Nader’s name on the ballot in Florida, Gore would have been the clear winner and president today instead of Bush.
Nader called Washington “corporate occupied territory” that turns the government against the interest of its own people.
The days of a third-party candidate claiming a large share of the American vote — such as the nearly 20 percent that H. Ross Perot won in 1992, playing a role that many Republicans will never forget — may be gone.
Yet, with elections contested on the margins in many states — from Iowa to Wisconsin, and from New Hampshire to Florida in recent years — any active third-party candidacy could have an impact on the Electoral College balance.
And already this year, sizable numbers of people have voiced discontent with the leading candidates — discontent manifested in the campaign of Republican Ron Paul, for instance. So the question looms this year: Might Nader play the spoiler once more?
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that current Democratic party primary front-runner Senator Barack Obama professes not to be concerned:
Barack Obama said today during a visit at the Ohio State University Medical Center that he wasn’t terribly concerned about the prospect of a Nader campaign. “I think the job of the Democratic Party is to be so compelling that a few percentage [points] of the vote going to another candidate is not going to make any difference.”
An email to supporters from Nader’s presidential exploratory committee ticked off a list of issues that have been “pulled off the table by the corporatized political machines in this momentous election year,” including defense budget cuts, opposition to nuclear power, and a single-payer national health insurance system.
Obama responded to criticism from Nader, who has suggested that the Democratic hopeful lacks substance, by noting that Nader has reached out to his campaign. “My sense is that Mr. Nader is somebody who if you don’t listen and adopt all of his policies thinks you’re not substantive,” Obama said, before praising Nader as a “heroic” and “singular figure in American politics.
So that gives a clue how Obama — if he wins the Democratic spot — will deal with Nader, respectfully but assertively. It sounds as if Obama won’t ignore the Nader challenge but won’t kowtow to it.
In realistic political terms, three party bids have been losing propositions in American politics because of our winner-take-all system. Third parties have (a) influenced the future policies of a major party, (b) didn’t have much of an impact, or in some close races (c) siphoned votes away from a major political party, often giving victory in some cases giving victory to the party the siphoning party’s voters agreed with the LEAST.
Even though his followers and third party advocates hate to hear it, there is virtually no chance Nader can win. And his influence on the American electoral scene has waned from the days when he was an iconic young crusading lawyer taking on the car manufacturing corporations in his landmark book Unsafe At Any Speed.
I was then a student from Connecticut — his home state. Nader would be often be on the radio, on TV talk shows — he was the epitome of the serious, incorruptible, idealistic young crusader with his devoted “Nader’s Raiders” followers all over the country.
What has happened to him since is sad because he became overexposed politically and weighted-down with hubris — so the most he will gain in 2008 would indeed be siphoning-off Democratic votes if it’s a razor-thin-victory-margin election. He is not an up and coming force — or even as respected as he once was — any longer.
This week’s debate pushed front and center the question of whether the Democratic Party can do what it did in 1960, nominate an inspiring young leader paired with a Washington veteran in the workings of government.
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson persuaded voters that they could open a New Frontier with the first Catholic president in American history. This year, the Democrats can offer a ticket with two firsts. (More about that here.)
In tone and substance, the debate in Austin suggested that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton together can restore the damage that George W. Bush has done to the American body politic and that John McCain might only prolong.
Their policy differences were invisible to the naked eye, and they ended up with the kind of hearty handshake that could be repeated to seal their designation as the 2008 ticket at the Democratic convention in August.
For Obama, it would be a demonstration of his claim that he can bring people together. On her part, it would take character for Hillary Clinton to accept the vice-presidency after leading in the presidential polls for more than a year.
But voters are rendering a different judgment now, and when the Texas and Ohio primaries are over, Obama should look back at how JFK in 1960 insured that his party ended eight years of Republican rule by teaming up with his opponent for the nomination.
If the ticket won, Hillary Clinton in 2016 would still be younger than John McCain is now.
February 18th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Having been eligible for the draft and an all-expenses-paid trip to Vietnam since I was 18, 1968 was the year that I turned 21 and finally was old enough to drink and vote, which I did in that order and with great enthusiasm.
I had a front-row seat for this year of great change — including antiwar protests, the King and Kennedy assassinations, and the coming of age of the civil rights and women’s movements — but nowhere were those changes manifested so powerfully than in the presidential race that year.
This presidential election year also is shaping up to be one of potentially great change, which begs the question:
Were the changes of 1968 more important than the changes of 2008 could be?
That is a difficult question because America and the world have changed (there’s that word again) in myriad ways over the last four decades, so for the purpose of trying to tease out an answer, I’ll reframe the question thusly:
Were Americans individually and the nation generally better off in 1968 than in 2008?
Thus framed, the answer to that question is a big fat “yes,” and so the answer to my initial question is that the changes of 2008 — at the very least the much anticipated end of the Age of Bush — may indeed be more important.
Since we’re looking at year versus year through the prism of presidential politics, it should be noted that there is an obvious similarity and two obvious differences.
The similarity is the looming presence of costly and unpopular wars in both 1968 and 2008.
The first difference is that unlike 1968, the U.S. today is the sole superpower, has an unprecedented global reach and is the subject of profound loathing abroad, notably among the people whose most radical elements can do the American homeland harm.
The second difference is that in 1968 most of the opposition President Johnson faced was from within his own party over his stewardship of the Vietnam War, which prompted him to opt out of running for reelection, while in 2008 President Bush has gotten a free pass from most of his prospective heirs apparent, who dutifully worship at his altar although he is extraordinarily unpopular and is the chief reason the Republican hegemony in Washington is coming to such an unceremonious end.
February 14th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Hillary Clinton is a notorious control freak. Fifteen years ago, that resulted in the Hindenburg-like crash of her national health-care initiative, while more recently it was planted audience questions.
After years of meticulous planning, Clinton launched her presidential campaign on January 20, 2007 with the words “I’m in. And I’m in to win.” It must have seemed to her like a can’t miss proposition or something awfully close as the strongest Democratic candidate and with the Republican Party in disarray. She could be forgiven thinking that it would be she taking the oath of office exactly two years hence.
Further down in a CNN story on her announcement it was noted that Senator Barack Obama was filing papers to form a presidential exploratory committee. That news probably gave Clinton little pause since she would face competitors who probably would be more challenging, including John Edwards, Christopher Dodd, Bill Richardson and Joe Biden.
Nor is it likely that Clinton was concerned when Obama threw his hat into the ring three weeks later, drawing on a strategy devised with David Axelrod, his campaign chief of staff, in stating solemnly that “I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness — a certain audacity — to this announcement. I know I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.”
In fact, Clinton probably viewed Obama’s message as rank naivete. The mainstream media certainly did not take him particularly seriously and many pundits dismissed the message as a rhetorical high-wire act.
But now, some 13 months later, Clinton the control freak has lost control of her own destiny and is paying dearly for the kind of arrogance and hubris that has been a hallmark of the Bush administration.
After Super Tuesday, John McCain told local supporters they were “a little bit closer to the day when mothers in Arizona might be able to tell their children that someday they could grow up to be president of the United States.”
That wry comment has a history with relevance to McCain’s situation today. Since Arizona became a state in 1912, the only other resident to win nomination for President was Barry Goldwater, who in 1964 lost to Lyndon Johnson by a crushing margin.
His defeat reflected both the mistrust of “extremism” at that time and the emergence of a conservative movement that culminated in Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and is now in crisis after George W. Bush’s two terms to start the new century.
As McCain moves toward becoming the second Arizonan to make a run for the White House, his candidacy reflects that history and raises questions about that other turning point in Republican history.
Goldwater aroused the fears of his party that he was too conservative. McCain is facing doubts over whether he is conservative enough.
Their Arizona temperaments are part of the equation–plain-spoken, proud and independent. Goldwater was just as mistrusted by the Eastern Republican Establishment of his time as McCain now is by the Evangelical Base today.
The results suggest that money and political muscle are not the be-all and end-all for getting to the White House.
John McCain now has a clear path to the Republican nomination, while Mike Huckabee remains to haunt his hopes for a unified Party and may very well end up as his running mate.
Barack Obama has leveled the playing field with Hillary Clinton, cutting into her lead in the delegate count to the point where the once-certain nominee is now calling for more debates to bolster her chances.
What Obama and Huckabee have in common is that a year ago they were candidates with messages who didn’t have the money, the name recognition or the organization to challenge the Clintons’ political juggernaut, Rudy Giuliani’s 9/11 aura or Mitt Romney’s wealth.
But somehow, in the face of those odds, they persuaded different segments of the electorate that they represent the best hope for change from the dismal Bush years.
Six months ago, McCain, better-known but not beloved by conservatives, had slipped off the radar in the polls. But here he is, the front runner as those with more money, celebrity and willingness to pander have gone under.
Super Tuesday doesn’t justify a Pollyanna vision of Presidential politics, but it does undermine the view of cynics who claim that it’s only about money and power.
In the desperation to be rid of Bush, this has become a year of imagery shorthand. While any Republican with a pulse claims to be another Reagan, Barack Obama is seen as a new JFK.
There are parallels. As Nixon did in 1960, Hillary Clinton is invoking her experience during the eight-year tenure of a popular president. But in both cases, the actual occupant of the Oval Office undermined the chances of his would-be successor.
Eisenhower did nothing as blatant as Bill Clinton’s campaign antics but, in trying to help his Vice-President in 1960, he asserted that Nixon played a major role during his terms in office. Asked at a press conference about any piece of advice he had heeded, Eisenhower answered, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”
In that campaign, as Frank Rich reminds us, neither could Kennedy point to any significant achievement in his brief Senate career, but what he offered was change in a time when Americans were ready but not as desperate as they are now for new, younger leadership.
I was all fired up to write a deep-thinking post on Barack Obama’s continuing indifference (or inability) to put meat on the bones of his otherwise captivating hope-and-change mantra after Daniel Larison cited this terrific quote from Joshua Foa Dienstag, a deep thinker whose specialty is the study of pessimism, which certainly would seem to be a growth industry in America:
“Since, unlike the present, tomorrow is always imaginary, such idolatry can be manipulated in many ways. On the one hand, of course, the Stalins of the world can demand the death of millions in the name of a future paradise. This is an especial concern of Camus, who complains of those who ‘glorify a future state of happiness, about which no one knows anything, so that the future authorizes every kind of humbug. . . . ‘
“Given the ironic character of history, we should, at the very least, make sure that our actions have some value in the present. The future that we imagine is unlikely to come about, if it does come about it will not last, and when it does come about we will probably despise it.”
Alas, I am not the same intellectual ballpark as Dienstag, let alone Larison, so I’ll merely belabor the obvious: While Obama excites the heck out of me and other voters in the abstract, how do we know whether he can deliver on his message since it is so lacking in substance beyond a welcome pledge to end the Iraq war?
The answer, of course, is that we don’t know and just like George Bush’s infamous “trust me” line, we’ll probably just have to trust him, although I’m far from comfortable with that.
Can Obama succeed without having a political philosophy? Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to name several notable presidents of the century past, all had philosophies that were their lodestars.
Back in the early days of the presidential campaign when Hillary Clinton was doing her Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm shtick, her supporters mewled that she was being treated unfairly by the media and the other usual suspects because she was a woman who also was being tarred with her husband’s transgressions.
That turned out to be a load of hooey. As the primary season hurtles toward the huge 22-state Super Tuesday showdown next week, Mrs. Clinton and her surrogates — chief among them that oxygen-sucking Big Dog himself — are waging a slimy, race-baiting, disinformation-filled campaign designed to divide and conquer.
It turns out that “Rebecca” is Ma Barker. Her gang is armed not with talking points but with Uzis, and even though this strategy appears to have backfired in the South Carolina primary and is leading Senator Ted Kennedy to endorse Barack Obama today, don’t expect a soul searching mid-course correction. The campaign’s assertion that “it will try to shift the former president back into the sunnier, supportive-spouse role” is only its latest empty mea culpa in response to the ongoing backlash over its tactics.
I have to admit that I’m chagrined the Clintons have calculated that it is in their best interests to campaign from the gutter – and make no mistake about it, the attacks on Obama that began with veiled suggestions from surrogates that he might have dealt and not merely done drugs as a teenager have been planned with the surgical precision of a blitzkrieg. That some of the surrogates in South Carolina were prominent blacks who should know better than to be anti-Obama shills shows astonishing loyalty but still is disappointing.
But then I realize that Hillary wouldn’t know the high road if it hit her in her sizeable backside, and that this chameleon will scratch and claw to attain a second Clinton presidency no matter how much dirt has to be flung.
* * * * *
It took a while for the mainstream media – which played perfectly into Mrs. Clinton’s initial strategy of running as an incumbent until Obama crashed her party — to realize that her coronation was premature and that she hadn’t just gotten around to taking off the gloves, but never had put them on.
A goodly number of liberal commentators are expressing disgust at not so much the race-baiting strafing runs on the first black to make a serious presidential run, but the repeated and gross distortions of what her opponent has said and done that would elate Karl Rove.
