Part II is below…
Categories
Category: Election 2008
Mark Leibovich has a long piece in this weekend’s New York Times profiling Chris Matthews, bloviator extraordinaire and Holy Cross grad. This last fact is especially relevant because I tend to have a slightly irrational affection for prominent Holy Cross grad. ((For those unaware, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA is my alma mater.)) Chris Matthews is no exception. Despite the attacks on him from various liberal sources including Media Matters and despite the fact that a number of liberal thinkers I admire point to Chris Matthews as exemplifying what is worst and most destructive in today’s media, I still like the guy. Of course – I don’t quite buy the premise – let’s call it the Glenn Greenwald premise – the blames the media more than any other source for our dysfunctional politics. I’ll be writing more about that as time goes on.
I’m a big fan of Mr. Greenwald – and even as I agree with most of the individual points he makes, and with his overall view of the larger political dysfunction, I disagree with the central thesis – of his blog and apparently his new book. I plan on reading his book in the next few weeks and posting my thoughts.
But for the moment, let’s appreciate one of the more entertaining characters in cable news, Chris Matthews, with a few excerpts from the Times piece:
There is a level of solipsism about Matthews that is oddly endearing in its self-conscious extreme, even by the standards of television vanity…
Sometimes during commercial breaks, Matthews will boast to Olbermann of having restrained himself during the prior segment. “And I reward him with a grape,” Olbermann says…
“I remember we were out hitchhiking once,” O’Regan told me. Matthews started arguing about Nixon and Vietnam. “It was just like watching his show today. Chris would ask a question, then he would answer it himself and then the person was invited to comment on Chris’s answer to his own question…”
By contrast, Matthews has called Obama “bigger than Kennedy” and compared the success of his campaign to “the New Testament.” His reviews of Obama’s speeches have been comically effusive at times, as when he described “this thrill going up my leg” after an Obama victory speech. (“Steady,” Olbermann cautioned him on the air.)
With more policy discussion than most articles out there:
[reddit-me]On the Ellen Degeneres Show, the host gave Ms. Clinton a chance to show off her own bowling prowess after she challenged Mr. Obama to a bowl-off:
(h/t to Joy for the link)
Maybe that challenge doesn’t look so bad for Mr. Obama after all.
(For those following the daily “freak show” less than myself, the Clinton challenge is below the jump.)
[reddit-me]From End Politics as Usual:
In a move that’s sure to be seen as controversial, Hillary has contacted the NCAA Board of Directors to argue that Memphis is actually better qualified to be National Champion.
Ms. Clinton stated that Memphis, while losing the game, had actually shown more ability to act like a National Champion on Day One.
The comparison helps put Sean Wilentz’s attempt at creating a coherent argument in his recent Salon article, which has been skewered all over the blogosphere for its circular firing squad of arguments, in perspective. Mr. Wilentz asks midway through the article:
[W]hy are the rules suddenly sacrosanct and the popular vote irrelevant [to the Obama campaign]?
It might be an interesting point to make – about how Obama’s campaign uses whichever rationale is best to make it’s case. Except Mr. Wilentz forgot to lead up to that turn by mentioning that the Obama campaign was promoting a view based on the idea that the rules were unimportant – or even point to a single instance in which the Obama camp was arguing that the rules for the contest were irrelevant. There’s a reason for this. Mr. Obama decided to run his campaign according to the rules set down by the Democratic National Committee. He had his staff analyze every contest, every primary, every caucus – and he began organizing and strategizing for the contest last year. He decided to play by the rules and win by the rules – and he’s done a good job of it. Ms. Clinton on the other hand was unaware of the rules of the Texas caucus-primary a week after her husband had said it was essential for her to win there and a week before the caucus-primary itself.
Mr. Wilentz – in trying to defend Ms. Clinton – fails to make a coherent argument – seeing in the Obama campaign’s consistency a reflection of his own attempts to defend a candidate with mangled rationales, conflicting and conflating. Mr. Wilentz is typical of many of Ms. Clinton’s supporters – who at this point are stuck attempting to flesh out the arguments behind an increasingly discordant set of talking points:
Meanwhile, below the jump under the fold if you click the “More” link if you read on you can find ((These edits are an attempt to conform this site to the “Reddit Style Guide” culled from numerous reddit comments.)) , a video parable of “The Logic of Hillary ’08″… (h/t The Grandest Panjadrum.) Enjoy.
Jonathan Raban writes an excellent reflection on Barack Obama for the London Review of Books. (Hat tip to Kate Stone.)
Despite the extensive quotations here, Mr. Raban’s piece is essential reading as a whole.
Mr. Raban writes of the unsettling experience of an Obama rally:
Politicians who receive mass adulation are a suspect breed, and it’s natural to feel pangs of disquiet at an Obama rally in full cry: the roaring thousands, the fainting women, the candidate pacing slowly back and forth, microphone in hand, speaking lines that have become as familiar as advertising jingles but are seized on by the audience with ecstatic shouts of ‘I love you, Obama!’, to which the candidate replies, with offhand cool – ‘I love you back.’ Lately, I’ve been listening to ancient audio recordings of Huey Long exciting crowds as big as these with his pitch of ‘Every Man a King,’ also to Father Coughlin, the anti-semitic ‘radio priest’ from Michigan, just to remind myself of the authentic sound of American demagoguery. But to see a true analogy for an Obama rally, one need only attend almost any large black church on a Sunday morning, and listen to the preacher, his sermon kept aloft by the continuous vocal participation of the congregants.
But the heart of his argument is this insight:
Those who hear only empty optimism in Obama aren’t listening. His routine stump speech is built on the premise that America has become estranged from its own essential character; a country unhinged from its constitution, feared and disliked across the globe, engaged in a dumb and unjust war, its tax system skewed to help the rich get richer and the poor grow poorer, its economy in ‘shambles’, its politics ‘broken’. ‘Lonely’ is a favourite word, as he conjures a people grown lonely in themselves and lonely as a nation in the larger society of the world. (Obama himself is clearly on intimate terms with loneliness: Dreams from My Father is the story of a born outsider negotiating a succession of social and cultural frontiers; it takes the form of a lifelong quest for family and community, and ends, like a Victorian novel, with a wedding.)
The light in Obama’s rhetoric – the chants of ‘Yes, we can’ or his woo-woo line, lifted from Maria Shriver’s endorsement speech, ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’ – is in direct proportion to the darkness, and he paints a blacker picture of America than any Democratic presidential candidate in living memory has dared to do. He courts his listeners, not as legions of the blissful, but as legions of the alienated, adrift in a country no longer recognizable as their own, and challenges them to emulate slaves in their struggle for emancipation, impoverished European immigrants seeking a new life on a far continent, and soldiers of the ‘greatest generation’ who volunteered to fight Fascism and Nazism. The extravagance of these similes is jarring – especially when they’re spoken by a writer as subtle and careful as Obama is on the printed page – but they serve to make the double point that America is in a desperate predicament and that only a great wave of communitarian action can salvage it.
By contrast, Clinton wields the domestic metaphor of the broom: ‘It did take a Clinton to clean up after the first Bush, and I think it might take a second one to clean up after the second Bush.’ It’s a deliberately pedestrian image, and it has defined her campaign. Stuff needs to be fixed around the house, but the damage is superficial, not structural. She has a phenomenal memory for detail, and, given half a chance, reels off long inventories of the chores that will have to be undertaken – the dripping faucet, the broken sash, the blocked toilet, the missing tiles on the roof, that awful carpet on the stairs. Clinton tends to bore journalists with these recitations, but her audiences seem to like them: after the visionary but catastrophic plans of the neoconservatives, the prospect of a return to common-sense practical housekeeping has undeniable charm. Swiping at Obama, she says: ‘I’m a doer, not a talker’ (a phrase with an interesting provenance – it goes back to the First Murderer in Richard III, by way of Bob Dole in his failed bid for the presidency in 1996). But it’s a line that unwittingly draws attention to the intellectual as well as the rhetorical limits of her candidacy.
‘We can get back on the path we were on,’ she promises, meaning the path from which we strayed in November 2000, as if the 1990s were a time of purpose, clarity and unswerving Democratic progress, as well as a period of largely coincidental economic prosperity. Memory’s a strange thing, and Hillary Clinton’s own most notable contributions to those years – the absurd mess of ‘Travelgate’ (widely held to be a factor in Vincent Foster’s suicide), her imperious management of her healthcare plan, whose ignominious defeat contributed to the Republican landslide in the mid-term elections of 1994, her invocation of a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ at the time of the Lewinsky allegations – say a lot about her intense personal involvement in projects, good and bad, but hardly speak well for her judgment or diplomatic talents. On the campaign trail now, she presents herself as ‘a fighter’, battle-hardened and combat-ready, prepared to take on the Republicans ‘from Day One’, thereby reminding everyone that, from January 1995 until January 2001, a state of war existed between the Clinton administration and the Republican-controlled Congress, and that, of the many memorable battles in which Hillary Clinton herself was directly engaged, it’s hard to name one she didn’t lose.
And finally, Mr. Raban speaks summarizes the unique-ness of Mr. Obama’s particular politics:
Obama is that exotic political animal, a left-of-centre empiricist. The great strength of his writing is his determination to incorporate into the narrative what he calls ‘unwelcome details’, and you can see the same principle at work in the small print of his policy proposals. Abroad, he accepts the world as it is and, on that basis, is ready to parlay with Presidents Ahmadinejad, Assad and Castro, while Clinton requires the world to conform to her preconditions before she’ll talk directly to such dangerous types. At home, Obama refuses to compel every American to sign up to his healthcare plan (as Clinton would), on the grounds that penalising those who lack the wherewithal to do so will only compound their problems.
[reddit-me]In the aftermath of Ms. Clinton’s “3 AM” ad, this photograph of Barack Obama began to circulate with this message:
When you are faking a pose for a camera photo opportunity, at least you can get the phone turned in the right direction! And Obama wants to be President??????
I got it in an email a few weeks ago, checked out Snopes and other places to see what the real deal was and found nothing.
Today, my dad emailed me with this reference to Snopes. As suspected the photo has been altered. The original:
Snopes points to a very interesting difference between the photos. The altered photograph has the time on the clock changed to 3 AM.
So to be clear: a viral email conveying a very Clintonian message began to circulate in concert with Ms. Clinton’s ad campaign underlining the message of the campaign itself.
This email comes after a series of emails earlier this year and last year. At the time of the previous emails, I asked:
The real question this email should bring up is this: Who is making this stuff up, and who are they trying to fool?
The claims behind the email are demonstrably false, and have been widely reported as such. These smears have appeared in a number of emails, although they all follow the same story line. Someone is obviously deliberately perpetrating a falsehood – and the lies have come up during the Iowa caucuses, as well as from a campaign staff of one of Obama’s rivals.
Someone is betting on the laziness and gullibility of the American people. The question is: Who?
It’s still the question.
Andrew Sullivan nails it. He compares whether Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama would better be able to withdraw troops from Iraq, but then issues this damning and dead-on projection of a Ms. Clinton presidency:
The one thing I do know is that Clinton would be paralyzed. Unable to withdraw swiftly for fear of looking like a “weak” leader, and unable to unite the country behind staying, a president Clinton would mean the status quo in Iraq indefinitely. She is tough when resisting attacks; she has never been tough and effective in forging difficult new policy. On that score, she is merely ideological and brittle and unpersuasive. Like Bush.
[digg-reddit-me]The Charlotte Observer headlined ((Or is subheadlined more appropriate?)) an article yesterday:
Bill Clinton: N.C. now crucial
He says wife’s bid to get nomination will hinge on Tar Heel state
Like it did in Texas and Ohio, the Clinton campaign for president has drawn a line in the sand, down the middle of the Tar Heel state.
Donklephant interprets this to mean Mr. Clinton is saying that if his wife doesn’t win North Carolina, she’s out. As Mr. Obama is ahead by high double digits in most polls, this line in the sand is surprising. Donklephant asks:
One can’t help but wonder if Hill and company have a big endorsement announcement up their sleeves if Bill is drawing a line in the sand like this.
A prominent North Carolina Democrat who has not yet endorsed anyone and whose opinion might have significant weight – perhaps enough to throw the state to Ms. Clinton. That narrows it down to this list:
- Former Senator John Edwards (D-NC).
With the recent revelations by John Heilmann that caused a stir a few weeks ago that Mr. Obama offended Ms. Edwards by objecting to both Ms. Clinton’s and Mr. Edwards’ health care mandates too strongly while Ms. Clinton charmed both of the Edwardses after Mr. Edwards dropped out. I’ve also heard the rumor that Mr. Edwards demanded the position of attorney general to endorse Mr. Obama; but that Mr. Obama refused to give it to him. Regardless, there is some sort of bad juju between Mr. Edwards and Mr. Obama since Mr. Edwards suspended his campaign. It’s enough to overcome the natural alliance that should exist between the two men with similar diagnoses of the nation’s problems, and the alliance that did exist while both tried to catch up to Ms. Clinton.
But for Mr. Edwards to endorse Ms. Clinton would be to go against his rationale for running in the first place, and would elevate his personal feelings over what he knows to be best for the country and for the Democratic party. In his own words:
In the end, I don’t think John Edwards will endorse anyone until after the last primary. He can’t choose Ms. Clinton because of his politics; and he doesn’t want to choose Mr. Obama for mainly personal reasons.
Categories
The Obama Girl Effect
When I first posted this video, I found a few elements of it cringe-worthy, but overall, I thought it was weirdly effective.
A female friend wrote to me about the video though: “What is wrong with [Obama girl]? Watching that video made me embarrassed to be female.”
Apparently, a lot of women feel that way. I’ve seen quite a few videos rated using this method before – and the female line for this video is the most negative trend I have seen on any of them.