Monday’s campaign round-up

February 25, 2008

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:

* Hoping to find a line of attack that will resonate, Hillary Clinton gave sarcasm a try on the campaign trail yesterday: “Framing Obama as both a deceiver and a dream weaver, Clinton said ‘none of the problems we face will be easily solved.’ Then oozing derision, Clinton cracked, ‘Now, I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s just get everybody together. Let’s get unified. The sky will open. The light will come down. Celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.'”

* A new Quinnipiac Poll out this morning shows Clinton holding onto a double-digit lead over Barack Obama in Ohio, though the margin is shrinking. According to the poll, Clinton now leads, 51% to 40%. A couple of weeks ago, Quinnipiac showed Clinton’s lead nearly as twice as big, leading 55% to 34%.

* Good call: “Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told reporters today that the DNC will file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission Monday over Sen. John McCain’s recent letter to the FEC informing them that he is withdrawing from the public financing system for his presidential campaign. ‘We are in this complaint to the FEC asserting that the senator and his campaign are still bound to the conditions by matching funds including the spending limits of approximately $56 million dollars,’ Dean said.”

* Oddly enough, John McCain’s role in the 2005 “Gang of 14” continues to be a major point of contention in far-right circles: “The power to appoint federal judges is seen as one of the most crucial presidential roles by many on the right, and some continue to believe the agreement undermined the Republican leadership at the precise moment the party was about to eliminate the ability to use procedural tactics to block judges.”

* In addressing the annual State of the Black Union forum over the weekend, Hillary Clinton was asked about some of the racially-charged comments her husband made in South Carolina last month. “If anyone was offended by anything that was said, whether it was meant or not, whether it was misinterpreted or not, then obviously I regret that,” she said. “But I believe our task is to go forward with the agenda that all of us agree upon. That is what I have done my entire life, on behalf of civil rights and women’s rights and human rights.”

* The National Governors Association met in DC over the weekend, and apparently, about half the people in the room seemed to be positioning themselves for VP slots.

* This, apparently, was especially true of Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R), a long-time McCain ally: “He did numerous sit-down interviews with such heavyweight print reporters as the Washington Post’s Dan Balz and David Broder, New York Times columnist David Brooks and syndicated columnist Bob Novak. Pawlenty also did two Sunday shows — Fox News Sunday and CNN’s Late Edition. And, yes, he demurred on those shows when the Veep questoin came up.”

* Good news for Dems in Nebraska: “Former congressional candidate Scott Kleeb will run for the Democratic nomination for Senate in Nebraska, he announced Sunday on his website. Kleeb said he will file the paperwork on Monday to run for the seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Chuck Hagel (R). He will face a primary with businessman Tony Raimondo, who initially joined the race as a Republican but is now running as a Democrat. The winner is likely to face former Gov. Mike Johanns (R), who left his job as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture to run for the seat.”

Way to stay classy, Hillary.

Great news about Kleeb though. It’d be amazing to have Democrat Ben Nelson be the conservative senator from Nebraska.

  • The gang of 14 formed a reasonable compromise.

    I can’t wait to see how all the Republicans feel about the right to filibuster judges when President Obama is the one making the nominations/

  • “…Celestial choirs will be singing…”

    Clinton is so out of control that her behavior is making Huckabee look like a serious candidate. The potential for scorched earth tactics that many of us feared are not only coming to life, but revealing the ugly side of her that lies beneath her highly manufactured, tightly controlled image. This has got to stop.

  • Kudos to the DNC and Dean for taking McCain to task. Of course, if it weren’t or Bush’s scorched earth tactics, we’d actually have a functioning FEC to hear the case. The coincidence is remarkable.

  • If anyone was offended by anything that was said, whether it was meant or not, whether it was misinterpreted or not, then obviously I regret that,” she said.

    Wow.
    The non-apology apology.
    Classic.

  • i’m here in southeastern mass., watch broadcast tv (no cable). there have been frequent obama commercials on tv, few clinton commercials (rhode island votes on march 4). i must say, the obama commercials (maybe it’s even only one — i don’t pay particularly close attention) are quite good — they are very simple and make essentially an emotional appeal that is optimistic and assuring. he has a great voice. if for no other reason, i would be very happy to have him elected president on the basis that i could easily tolerate listening to him speak for four years. but the bottom line is that his commercials are effective while mrs. clinton comes across like somebody’s mother scolding you to get in the house and eat your dinner.

    btw, i’m a white female “baby boomer” with a good amount of worn tread. not that it makes any difference to me but some people appreciate context, so i’m providing it.

  • Hoping to find a line of attack that will resonate, Hillary Clinton gave sarcasm a try on the campaign trail yesterday: “Framing Obama as both a deceiver and a dream weaver, Clinton said ‘none of the problems we face will be easily solved.’ Then oozing derision, Clinton cracked, ‘Now, I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s just get everybody together. Let’s get unified. The sky will open. The light will come down. Celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.’”

    I think Frank Rich says everything that needs to be said about this obvious bullshit.

    The Audacity of Hopelessness
    By FRANK RICH
    Published: February 24, 2008

    WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.
    It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise —— the priceless value of “experience” —— was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination —— “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November —— she was routed by an insurgency.

    The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.
    That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.
    Clinton fans don’’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

    But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

    The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.

    In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall —— the March 4 contests —— she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices aa of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.

    This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.

    Given that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions —— laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their Web sites —— it’s not clear what her added-value message is. The “experience” mantra has been compromised not only by her failure on the signal issue of Iraq but also by the deadening lingua franca of her particular experience, Washingtonese. No matter what the problem, she keeps rolling out another commission to solve it: a commission on infrastructure, a Financial Product Safety Commission, a Corporate Subsidy Commission, a Katrina/Rita Commission and, to deal with drought, a water summit.

    As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and —— talk about bizarre —— against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.

    Bill Clinton knocked states that hold caucuses instead of primaries because “they disproportionately favor upper-income voters” who “don’t really need a president but feel like they need a change.” After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.

    The insults continued on Tuesday night when a surrogate preceding Mrs. Clinton onstage at an Ohio rally, Tom Buffenbarger of the machinists’ union, derided Obama supporters as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” Even as he ranted, exit polls in Wisconsin were showing that Mr. Obama had in fact won that day among voters with the least education and the lowest incomes. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Obama received the endorsement of the latte-drinking Teamsters.

    If the press were as prejudiced against Mrs. Clinton as her campaign constantly whines, debate moderators would have pushed for the Clinton tax returns and the full list of Clinton foundation donors to be made public with the same vigor it devoted to Mr. Obama’s “plagiarism.” And it would have showered her with the same ridicule that Rudy Giuliani received in his endgame. With 11 straight losses in nominating contests, Mrs. Clinton has now nearly doubled the Giuliani losing streak (six) by the time he reached his Florida graveyard. But we gamely pay lip service to the illusion that she can erect one more firewall.

    The other persistent gripe among some Clinton supporters is that a hard-working older woman has been unjustly usurped by a cool young guy intrinsically favored by a sexist culture. Slate posted a devilish video mash-up of the classic 1999 movie “Election”: Mrs. Clinton is reduced to a stand-in for Tracy Flick, the diligent candidate for high school president played by Reese Witherspoon, and Mr. Obama is implicitly cast as the mindless jock who upsets her by dint of his sheer, unearned popularity.

    There is undoubtedly some truth to this, however demeaning it may be to both candidates, but in reality, the more consequential ur-text for the Clinton 2008 campaign may be another Hollywood classic, the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy “Pat and Mike” of 1952. In that movie, the proto-feminist Hepburn plays a professional athlete who loses a tennis or golf championship every time her self-regarding fiancé turns up in the crowd, pulling her focus and undermining her confidence with his grandstanding presence.

    In the 2008 real-life remake of “Pat and Mike,” it’s not the fiancé, of course, but the husband who has sabotaged the heroine. The single biggest factor in Hillary Clinton’s collapse is less sexism in general than one man in particular —— the man who began the campaign as her biggest political asset. The moment Bill Clinton started trash-talking about Mr. Obama and raising the specter of a co-presidency, even to the point of giving his own televised speech ahead of his wife’s on the night she lost South Carolina, her candidacy started spiraling downward.

    What’s next? Despite Mrs. Clinton’s valedictory tone at Thursday’s debate, there remains the fear in some quarters that whether through sleights of hand involving superdelegates or bogus delegates from Michigan or Florida, the Clintons might yet game or even steal the nomination. I’m starting to wonder. An operation that has waged political war as incompetently as the Bush administration waged war in Iraq is unlikely to suddenly become smart enough to pull off that duplicitous a “victory.” Besides, after spending $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts in January alone, this campaign simply may not have the cash on hand to mount a surge.

  • “If anyone was offended by anything that was said, whether it was meant or not, whether it was misinterpreted or not, then obviously I regret that,”

    Ah yes, the Professional Non-Apology from the Professional Abuser.

    I think next Wednesday we’re going to have to drive stakes through both Hill and Billary and leave the bodies outside in the sunlight. It’s the only way I know to get rid of the monster for good and all.

  • Can I just hit one one quote from McCain which really, really bothers me?

    “It’s not a decision. It’s an opinion, according to our people”…

    Maybe a legalistic way of looking at it, but he, of all people, knows that the entire judiciary system deals in ‘opinions’. Even the Supreme Court only issues ‘opinions’– and those opinions are quite binding law.

    Maybe it’s just semantics, but this is the same argument made about evolution (e.g. it’s a ‘theory’ not fact). When I hear someone parsing language in this way, my hackles go straight through the roof (Possible conflict-of-interest: one of my Majors in college was English). People who have to parse the language like this are almost always trying to play games.

  • I’m still puzzled by Clinton’s rant. It seems like the angle they’re going for is the classic Rovian “attack the strengths” thing, but the idea of hope and change is so abstract and general you can’t attack it without looking incredibly bitter and cynical like, well, Hillary did yesterday. And unfairly or not, she’s got a decade and a half of caricatures by the right as an evil, controlling harpy, so that kind of rant just confirms an idea that people had in the back of their minds anyway.

    If anyone hasn’t had a chance to check out the video, I highly recommend it if you’re interested in flashbacks from your irate middle-school principal, complete with angrily waving around pieces of paper.

  • beep52:

    This has got to stop.

    It will not stop.

    Arguably, the Clintons are the worst thing that ever happened to the Democratic party. Many will shake their heads in denial. But point of fact: The party has been moribund since 1994. Only now is it showing signs of regaining its former power.

    And what happens just as spring shows some bloom? The Clintons enter the scene again. They are a wintry nightmare that knows no quit. And before this thing is over: they will prove it to all beyond all doubt.

    I expect her to go icy-insane Tuesday in the debate.
    All plastic pinched smiles and daggers.
    If she can not win she will attempt to destroy.

  • Re McCain’s press coverage

    This brief New York magazine article by Peter Keating, “Cindy McCain, Meet Everyone. Everyone, Meet Cindy McCain.”, epitomizes how McCain is covered in the media. Keating sounds like he was drooling over his keyboard as he typed.

    Cindy McCain is portrayed as bringing desperately needed youth and glamour to her husband’s campaign. Youth and glamour? Cindy McCain is 53 years old. She has a lot of health problems as a result of her 2004 stroke. She has short-term memory loss and, by her own admission, often can’t remember what she did last week. She has had a ton of surgery, the latest being knee surgery after a mysterious fall in a Phoenix grocery store last fall.

    Keating does offer an interesting glimpse on how the media view Cindy McCain:

    “The members of the media who fell so heavily for John McCain in 2000 developed a bit of a crush on Cindy, too. Her sophisticated presence was hard to ignore as he slogged his way through otherwise gray visits to snowy New Hampshire town hall meetings. (Some reporters covering that run still recall how they riffed on lines from his stump speech to compose lascivious — and unpublished — odes to Cindy.)…”

    Keating is right on the money when he says, “The reporters who liked her then aren’t likely to hold her husband’s flip-flops and hawkishness against her now.”

  • Hoping to find a line of attack that will resonate, Hillary Clinton gave sarcasm a try on the campaign trail yesterday:

    “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” – Mahatma Gandhi

    Good to see things are right on schedule.

  • Regarding my claim of Clinton’s icy-insanity reaching a critical stage:

    Check out this 47 second snatch of youtube video… But first recall she’s railed against both excitement and hope. Now watch her try to gas up a crowd and lead them in a chant. This has got to be one of the most embarrassingly flat moments in campaign history:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfa9XIJxdAg

    Frightening stuff.
    She is no longer tethered to reality.

  • Check out this 47 second snatch of youtube video… But first recall she’s railed against both excitement and hope. Now watch her try to gas up a crowd and lead them in a chant. This has got to be one of the most embarrassingly flat moments in campaign history:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfa9XIJxdAg

    Can’t watch videos at work, unfortunately, but is this when she tried to get the crowd chanting “Yes we will!”? That really did go over like a lead balloon and all the people looked more confused than anything else.

    But hey, at least she’s not biting the heads off puppies. Yet.

  • Castor Troy (9), Another reason to be bothered is that McCain doesn’t get to decide to drop out of public funding. He needs it approved by the FEC. Since they lack a quorum, they can’t issue a decision, so the “opinion” is irrelevant, even if it were to agree with McCain’s. Also he has already benefitted from his participation. He used the promise of funds to get a loan, and he bypassed obligations to get signatures to get on ballots in some states.

  • You really need to hear this, not read it:

    Then oozing derision, Clinton cracked, ‘Now, I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s just get everybody together. Let’s get unified. The sky will open. The light will come down. Celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.’”

    I have never heard anything more pathetic in my life. She’s a tired, old, dispirited, demoralized, defeated would-be Empress who now sees herself standing on the edge of the cliff.

  • The question is, how much damage will the overzealous Hillary and her supporters do to our party before conceding?

    Example: At the Youngstown, Ohio rally following Clinton’s Wisconsin defeat, International Association of Machinists President Tom Buffenbarger called Obama supporters “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies.” That’s despicable rhetoric, echoing the worst Limbaugh/Fox myths about limousine liberals, while it dismisses the majority of union members who just backed Obama in the Wisconsin and Virginia primaries, or the members of unions like SEIU, The Teamsters, and the United Food and Commercial Workers, who just endorsed him. It also happens to totally steal its language from the sleazy “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading” anti-Howard Dean ads of the right-wing Club For Growth, that helped give us the disastrous candidacy of John Kerry.

  • Oddly enough, John McCain’s role in the 2005 “Gang of 14_ continues to be a major point of contention in far-right circles….

    The Gang of 14 was a fraud. I have no idea why the far right was so upset by this so-called compromise, just like I have no idea why the Far Right has such a visceral hatred of Bill Clinton. But then, I consider myself to be basically honest and firmly grounded in the reality-based community, so I’ll probably never understand how they think.

    ”…the Gang of 14 unveiled their agreement, clearing the way for votes on three of five stalled appeals court nominees. They agreed that future filibusters could be waged only in extraordinary circumstances.” (NY Times)

    The only “extraordinary circumstances” that would cause a Bush nominee to be rejected by the seven Republicans and one “independent” in the Gang of 14 would have been photos of the nominee in Klan robes or an admission that they were homosexual. Anything else seems to have been acceptable to them.

    I still want to see the two Democratic presidential nominees asked whether they will nominate and fight for the confirmation of judges who are as far to left on the political spectrum as Bush’s nominees are to the right.

    “We had the votes to put both parties on the spot that whoever is president, Republican or Democrat, has a right to appoint and we have the right to vote up or down,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and a former Judiciary Committee chairman. (NY Times)

    This is particularly ironic, considering that Hatch was responsible for 63 of Bill Clinton’s judicial nominees being blocked — more than 40 of which were never even given a hearing by Hatch in the Judiciary committee. Of course, you’ll never see someone in the corporate-controlled media point out the irony. Sadly, you’ll almost never hear a Democrat point it out either.

    Will the next Senate majority leader demand that Obama or Clinton judicial nominees be given up or down votes? Will the Democrats demand over and over – until the corporate-controlled median is embarrassed enough to raise the question themselves — that the Republicans explain why a Republican-appointed nominee should get an up or down vote but a Democrat-appointed nominee should not?

    Doubtful.

    This is yet another example of where the Democrats are dismayingly, painfully incompetent at shaping the debate. Remember, while the Republicans , where sounding like a bunch of parrots:

    “Upordown…Upordown… Awwwwk!…Upordown”,

    and threatening their “Nuclear option”, the Democrats allowed the debate in the Senate to be over whether Abe Fortas, President Johnson’s nominee to be Chief Justice, had actually been filibustered or not. What the Democrats should have been doing is chanting:

    “Sixty-three to ten,
    “Sixty-three to ten,
    “Sixty-three to ten,”

    — comparing the number of Bush nominees that were being blocked to the number of Clinton nominees that the Republicans had blocked. The American public, even the non-Koolaide-drinking conservatives, would have responded to that request for basic fairness. Not ten people outside the Senate chamber, and not even all the people inside, cared about the legalistic minutia of what happened to Abe Fortas, so the American public tuned out.

  • Danp– The problem that I see with the whole McCain financing issue is that, well, he is going to get away with it. See, without a quorum, the FEC can’t release him from public funding, but they can’t find him in contempt of it. Now, I am not a lawyer, but, from what I have seen so far, without a finding from the FEC that he violated their rules, the courts aren’t going to touch the matter.

    …Therefore, absent a quorum (or, frankly, even with a quorum, figuring on how long it takes the courts to get through anything), McCain will be able to basically blatantly break the law throughout the campaign, spending whatever money he feels like.

    Sure, for him it’s a gamble– after all, if he loses the election, he might have problems down the road. But most likely, nothing more than a $500K or couple million dollar fine– nothing for the big leagues to worry about. If he wins, naturally, he will have all the power to take care of anyone caught up in the legal net… (ref: Scooter Libby).

    Literally, what we have is a situation where any candidate, from either party, can blatantly break the finance laws, and there is no recourse short of long Court appeals. Given the truncated time-span of a campaign, this is a serious issue. Sure, 2 years from now, a court will come solidly down on the side of Law, and determine that the campaign funds were illegal, but how does that help us in the now? The major parties can, and will, accept major court fines, especially if it helps them win… (I just read today that Obama has raised, over the course of his campaign, something like $140 million… do you think he would be worried about a couple of million having to pay a fine for something…? Maybe on moral grounds, but surely not on a lack of funds to deal with the problem…)

  • karen marie@ 6:

    he has a great voice. if for no other reason, i would be very happy to have him elected president on the basis that i could easily tolerate listening to him speak for four years.

    Not that anyone should vote for a president solely on the basis of their speaking voice, but I honestly feel this is an underrated quality. I too find Obama’s speaking voice wonderful, while Sen. Clinton has had a hard time modulating her voice properly throughout the campaign. She tends to yell when she’s trying to convey emotion, and she has a kind of unpleasant droning way opf speaking when she’s trying to come across as calm. We certainly can’t all be James Earl Jones, but if I were running for office I think I’d look into voice lessons to try to make the most of what I had.

    I’m an Obama voter, though not a true-believer – but his voice truly gives his attractiveness an enormous boost.

  • I think that the sarcasm works better than the “shame on you”

    THE POLITICAL SILLY SEASON HAS ARRIVED

    “Shame on you, Barack Obama!” Was this Hillary Clinton running for Scold-In-Chief? At a rally in Ohio, she showed this anger after an audience mamber handed her a copy of an Obama campaign e-mail criticizing her support of NAFTA. Could this scene possibly have been staged?

    Similarly, Senator Clinton attacked Obama for plagiarism by using lines suggested to him by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick because he had found them effective. She said this use was “change you can Xerox”.
    Not many would assume that this was her own original phrase and Mr. Obama noted the we must be going into a silly season in politics.

    Sunday, on Meet the Press, quadriennial nut case Ralph Nader announced that he again would run for President. Maybe he hopes to do the same damage as in 2000 when his votes in Florida in effect led to the election of President Bush. Showing a brain much smaller rhan his ego, Nader claimed that there was little difference between Bush and Gore. Maybe we should hold him accountable for the Iraq war and all of the other damage inflicted by Bush.

    The amiable, likeable Governor Huckabee continues his hopeless campaign to defeat Senator McCain. As long as he can keep appearing on Letterman, SNL, and morning talk shows, more power to him. It’s fun, even though a bit silly.

    I guess that all of this was to be expected from a campaign season that was graced early with the likes of Ron Paul and Mike Gravel.

    homer http://www.altara.blogspot.com

  • Is Hillary saying that our democracy is already dead? That an overwhelming(it isn’ yet, but who knows?) show of support for a candidate can give him no leverage with the beltway machine? That an electorate that stays active well after the election can easily be ignored? I’m not comfortable with such a defeatist even being a senator. Maybe we are being naive, but this is not yet North Korea; Good things can still happen. If Obama is not just a pied piper, if the people are driving him, who knows?

  • This should probably wait for open thread, but it pertains to campaigning.

    Short version: Nader is no progressive. That he is much harder on left-of-center candidates than he is on the Republicans shows he is little more than an angry, petty man flailing for the relevance of a microphone.

    Longer version, from Nader himself:

    In an interview with CNN on Monday, Nader accused Illinois Sen. Barack Obama of name-calling and challenged him to “address the issues.”

    “Above all, explain why you don’t come down hard on the economic crimes against minorities in city ghettos: payday loans, predatory lending, rent-to-own rackets, landlord abuses, lead contamination, asbestos,” Nader said. “There’s an unseemly silence by you, Barack — a community organizer in poor areas in Chicago many years ago — on this issue,” he said.

    That is harder than Clinton has ever hit Obama. And harder than Nader has ever hit a Republican.

    Hey Ralphie – short man syndrome much?

    What. An. Ass.

  • Can anyone point to anything in that statement by Clinton that wasn’t true?

    C’mon, stop making up excuses to hate her. She’s being honest. You can’t just sing kumbaya and think Republicans are going to join in and vote for your proposals.

  • “Above all, explain why you don’t come down hard on the economic crimes against minorities in city ghettos: payday loans, predatory lending, rent-to-own rackets, landlord abuses, lead contamination, asbestos,” Nader said. “There’s an unseemly silence by you, Barack — a community organizer in poor areas in Chicago many years ago — on this issue,” he said.

    Sure, Ralph, just what Obama needs when trying to win the presidency is to paint himself into a corner as “the black candidate.” I’m sure that would go over real big among our vast white electorate who are, at long last, finally starting to leave their antiquated racism behind. Get a clue!

  • C’mon, stop making up excuses to hate her. She’s being honest. You can’t just sing kumbaya and think Republicans are going to join in and vote for your proposals. -Crissa

    Give me a damned break. She wasn’t being honest; she was being childish. No candidate is advocating singing a round around the fire or anything like the insipid sarcastic bullshit she spewed.

    Like Clinton says, get real.

    Obama is a serious candidate, with serious plans, and serious appeal. I understand her frustration but there is no excuse for sinking to this schoolyard level, or for intelligent people supporting it.

    I don’t hate her (CDS is a trollish cop out with commenters of the caliber seen here), but what she said (and how she said it) was demeaning, not just to a fellow Democrat, but to the millions of people who support him.

    We’re not rats following the pied piper; we’re real fucking people who give a damn about this country and frankly she crossed solidly into asshole territory with these comments. I’ve been doing my best not to dislike her, but she certainly hasn’t made it easy.

    She should look in a mirror and speak very slowly so the words will sink in, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” What a disgrace she has become.

  • Can anyone point to anything in that statement by Clinton that wasn’t true? — Crissa, @25

    The statement was:

    ‘Now, I could stand up here and say, ‘Let’s just get everybody together. Let’s get unified. The sky will open. The light will come down. Celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.’

    and it is BS in its entirety; *she* can’t even inspire people to chant “yes, we will” with her, never mind get the celestial choirs as background music.

  • I actually think that her speech was great and hope she does more of it. It was brilliant and I can’t wait for the debate tomorrow to see Obama stutter some more about his health care plan. Or shall I say his non existing health care plan that is more of the same of what we have now. By the end of this year his health care plan will be obcelete because all children will be covered. Republicans will see the hand writing on the wall soon and will override Bushs veto on the CHCB

  • TomCleaver@7: You might want to refrain, in future, from reprinting entire NYT articles. Another forum on which I used to live had big time cease and desist grief from them, and of course, they nailed the freepers on it. A link to the material seemed fine, but I always wondered if that wasn’t the reason they went to paid subscriptions on there editorials for that year or so.

    (NN! Good ta see ya, sweetie!)

  • This needs to end. It used to be amusing and exciting, but clearly, Sen Clinton has lost her marbles…and she’s not even good at sarcasm.

    I’ve got CDS, but it has nothing to do with blowjobs or vast right wing conspiracies. I’ve had it since roughly 1993…and defended Bill anyhow. I continued to defend his congenitally lewd behavior even after i voted for the World Workers Party in 1996 (they nominated two women). It has everything to do with him having been a terrible, petulant, immature president given the greatest opportunity in America’s modern history and throwing it away completely.

    But i’m on board now. She wants it so bad, let her have it. Chances are good that militarily, economically, and even socially this country will fall flat on its face between now and the end of the next president’s term. As the Clintons are at least as responsible for the mess (maybe more, because we expect Bush to be a bumbling, conniving, thieving jackass) it would serve her right and well to get the shitstorm dumped in her lap.

    Let her have it. Fuck it, don’t even hold an election. She’s “entitled” to it, just give it to her. They both seem hell-bent on destroying the Democratic Party for sake of their own ambition; maybe that’s for the best. When they’re done we can rebuild it.

    • Comments are closed.