Category: Election 2008

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Election 2008 Obama

Al Hunt and Barack Obama

Did anyone else notice that Al Hunt of Bloomberg News has brought out two senior Democratic party statesmen as supporters of Barack Obama?  Senator Durbin did everything but endorse Obama this past Friday, and in August, senior statesman Brzezinski explicitly endorsed Obama.

Of course, it was also with Al Hunt that Bill Clinton made his remarks about his vast experience before running for president.

But if Al Hunt is the first to reveal that Al Gore or some other Democratic luminary also supports Obama in the next month, I’m going to claim vindication.

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Election 2008 Obama Politics The War on Terrorism

Pragmatic, Principled, Obama

A note on why this was written: I was challenged by a redditor about Senator Obama’s vote for the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The text of Obama’s speech on the floor of the Senate is here. Thanks to my challenger for the link. The actual back and forth is here. I’ve edited it a bit for posting.

———————————————————————————————

 

Obama’s vote in favor of the Military Commissions Act does disturb me greatly. More so than anything else about Obama as a candidate and future president.

However, I believe (and at this point it can only be a belief) that Barack Obama as president would restore habeas corpus and put an end to torture as a means of interrogation. He says so in his stump speech, but I do not blindly trust the words of those campaigning for public office.

After a cursory search of the web, I have not found a defense of Senator Obama’s vote. And given the two foundational principles – habeas corpus and the the responsibility of a government to treat those within it’s power humanely – that this bill in one way or another attacks (by suspending habeas rights for non-citizens with controversy over whether it applies to citizens, and by allowing testimony gained by means of torture)–it is difficult to see what a good man of principle may have been thinking. Even more, the MCA put into law the staggeringly flawed policy that is the Bush administration’s response to detaining possible terrorists.

But I do not merely admire Senator Obama because he is principled; just as important: he is both ambitious and pragmatic. Many principled men and women have broken their selves upon the system. I firmly believe it is possible to be both highly principled, and willing to compromise those principles at the right time, in order to preserve them.

As Lincoln did – suspending habeas corpus without calling on Congress; declaring slavery an evil, if anything is evil, yet not calling for its extermination.

I do not know what Obama was thinking when he cast that vote.

  • He may have been thinking that to be one of the very few voices speaking without a chance of success at this time might marginalize him for the 2008 election.
  • He may have been thinking that it was better to pass a flawed bill and begin to re-assert a weak role for Congress in these important matters than to dither about and have the president flout the ruling of the Supreme Court. Because if the president had just ignored the Court’s ruling, that may have damaged the balance of power more than this weak bill.
  • He may have been making political calculations about his future, or about the long-term interests of the country, or both.

But my point is this: as disturbing as it may be, it is conceivable that a good and principled man or woman could vote for such a flawed law as this.

Centrism is not a dirty word. It is not our salvation either. I do not believe however Obama is trying to be a centrist. Rather, it seems to me he is trying to find the best solutions, words, and actions in a flawed world. Unlike Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, he is willing to be pragmatic in order to achieve what he wants. As the Clintons are; as Lincoln, JFK, and MLK were.

For me, the difference is that I trust that Obama has principles. Every position seems to contain both pragmatic and principled stands.

When I see Clinton, I only see pragmatism. She seems to believe that elections are games to get power; and with her power, she will do certain good things. Her focus is on the ends almost exclusively.

Obama seems to believe that elections are about convincing the country that his principles are right where possible, and compromising otherwise. Power is about making the changes he has brought the country around to with his election and using his position in office.

Kucinich seems to believe that elections are only won by the corrupt, and power is guaranteed to corrupt. It does not seem to me that Kucinich wants to win.

Oscar Wilde once said: “It takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory and still to love it.” We are in a fallen world. I believe the institutions of our democracy are in grave danger. And I cannot countenance a leader who is unwilling to compromise in order to win.

Lincoln won his election on a platform of keeping slavery. And he meant it, it seems. Yet given the perspective of history, I would not have chosen another man to lead our country in that time – no matter how pure or how principled. Slavery was evil. Yet Lincoln’s decision, flawed as it may be, compromising his basic principles and the principles of our nation, still stands the test of time. It stands because he was able to bring the country to where he felt it should be.

And that is my hope for Obama.

Categories
Election 2008 Obama Politics

Why I Am Confident About Obama – Or a Roundup of Recent Election 2008 News

Much of the media has now pronounced Obama’s campaign all but hopeless and anointed Hillary the Democratic presidential candidate.  Why?  A national poll showing Hillary with a 20-point lead over all contenders and an Iowa poll showing her, for the first time, taking a slim lead in Iowa.  I am not sure Obama can win, but for me, this race seems far from over.  Even Michael Crowley’s piece in TNR with the hope-filled title: “Hope sinks” gave me some reasons to believe there’s more to come.  Here’s why:

Crowley in his piece used the same trope that the Hillary campaign has been handing out about Obama’s “new politics” – her campaign has tried to say Obama is caught in a catch-22, unable to criticize her or play politics without losing his mantle as the candidate of change, as the candidate of the new politics.  Based on Obama’s campaign team, based on what I have gleaned of Obama’s personality from the various profiles, based on the fact that Obama was a Chicago politician, it’s obvious he’s ready and willing to play hardball.  I frankly don’t see the contradiction being the politics of hope and political hardball.  To say that politics is more than a game where we pick our positions based on carefully polled tactical decisions does not indicate you won’t criticize your opponents.  It is one thing to say that politics has to be about more than character assassination, and another to be unwilling to take on your opponent’s positions.  Conflating the two is nothing more than a tactic to confuse the issues, or an indication that a reporter is confused.

Of course, Obama has fed into this by refusing to mention Hillary by name.  To me this seems like a tactical decision rather than a matter of principle.  The time will come, and it will come soon when he will start criticizing her by name – apparently starting with the New Hampshire editorial excerpted below.  He will call on her by name in a speech soon, after he begins to gain some points in the polls, at least in Iowa.  And it will be news and will help build his momentum.  For the past six months, I have been hearing about the fears from the Obama campaign that they will peak too early.  That’s why I give some credence to reports such as this one that indicate that they plan on coming from behind just before the Iowa caucuses.

Crowley reports that Obama has the team and the organization in Iowa to succeed, and that if he is able to get some younger voters to the caucuses, he might succeed.  Of course the youth vote always seems to disappear in elections.  But with the strongest Democratic organization in Iowa and a veteran political team, this seems very important.

Another reason to think all is not over: the moment Hillary was anointed the presidential candidate, she made two mistakes.  First, she voted for the Lieberman-Kyl bill that seems eerily reminiscent of the 2003 bill to authorize military force with Iraq.  And then she accused a questioner of being planted by an opposition campaign when he asked a legitimate questions about her support for the Liberman-Kyl bill.  This prompted the TNR blog headline “HAS HILLARY LET OBAMA BACK INTO THE RACE?”.  Obama took the opening with an article in a New Hampshire paper:

I strongly differ with Sen. Hillary Clinton, who was the only Democratic presidential candidate to support this reckless amendment. We do need to tighten sanctions on the Iranian regime, particularly on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which sponsors terrorism far beyond Iran’s borders. But this must be done separately from any unnecessary saber-rattling about checking Iranian influence with our “military presence in Iraq.” Above all, it must be done through tough and direct diplomacy with Iran, which I have supported, and which Sen. Clinton has called “naive and irresponsible.” Sen. Clinton says she was merely voting for more diplomacy, not war with Iran. If this has a familiar ring, it should. [my emphasis]

And now we also find that the Clintons are beginning to do what they are so good at doing: alienating their potential allies by attacking anyone who disagrees with them.  The Hillary camp is apparently put out by the quality of Obama’s foreign policy team and has asked Mr. Documents-in-my-Socks Sandy Berger to be an enforcer to let anyone supporting Obama know that they will have no place in a Clinton administration.  It’s called cheap; and it’s called hardball.  And Obama will hit back.

Clintonian hubris, an Obama strategy to put the pressure on Clinton late, with Iowa in a statistical dead heat, and a ton of other primaries following hard-upon Iowa.  It seems to me that Obama has a good chance of winning even if he doesn’t hit his stride.  And if he does, I feel this may be a short race.

Meanwhile, Ted Sorenson, close Kennedy confidante, makes a good case for Obama as the heir to JFK.

Categories
Election 2008 Obama Politics

The Next JFK?

Barack ObamaI’m not sure why Britain’s Telegraph or Matt Drudge consider this news, but Ted Sorenson, President John F. Kennedy’s speech writer and one of his closest aides, has declared Obama is the true heir to JFK’s legacy and a better candidate or president than Hillary or Bill Clinton, including this Obama campaign talking point:

“Judgment is the single most important criterion for selecting a president. At the time of the [1962] Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy’s powers of judgment were tested as no president has ever been tested. Fortunately for all of us, he really came up with the right answers. He was 45. Obama’s 46 so he’s an old geezer.”

The main reason I find the newsworthiness of this surprising is that Ted Sorenson made this explicit in an editorial for The New Republic [subscription required, as the article is in archives] in July, concluding:

[digg-reddit-me]Perhaps most tellingly, both [JFK and Obama] preached (and personified) the politics of hope in contrast to the politics of fear, which characterized Republican speeches during their respective eras. In 1960 and earlier, cynics and pessimists accepted the ultimate inevitability of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, much as today they assume a fruitless and unending war against terrorism. Hope trumped fear in 1960, and I have no doubt that it will again in 2008.

Although President Kennedy became the breakthrough president on civil rights, health care, and other liberal issues, he was not the most liberal candidate for the nomination in 1960. His emphasis on the importance of ethics, moral courage, and a multilateral foreign policy made him–like Obama–hard to pigeonhole with a single ideological label. His insistence that the United States “must do better” in every sphere of activity, including its cold war competition with the Soviet Union, caused some historians to mistakenly recall that he “ran to the right” of Richard Nixon on national security issues, forgetting his emphasis on negotiations and peaceful solutions.

JFK’s establishment opponents– probably not unlike Obama’s–did not understand Kennedy’s appeal. “Find out his secret,” LBJ instructed one of his aides sent to spy on the Kennedy camp, “his strategy, his weaknesses, his comings and goings.” Ultimately, Kennedy was both nominated and elected, not by secretly outspending or out-gimmicking his opponents but by outworking and out-thinking them, especially by attracting young volunteers and first-time voters. Most of Kennedy’s opponents, like Obama’s, were fellow senators–Johnson, Humphrey, and Symington–who initially dismissed him as neither a powerhouse on the Senate floor nor a member of their inner circle. That mattered not to the voters; nor does it today.

Above all, after eight years out of power and two bitter defeats, Democrats in 1960, like today, wanted a winner–and Kennedy, despite his supposed handicaps, was a winner. On civil rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the race to the moon, and other issues, President Kennedy succeeded by demonstrating the same courage, imagination, compassion, judgment, and ability to lead and unite a troubled country that he had shown during his presidential campaign. I believe Obama will do the same.

What seemed to me more newsworthy about the Telegraph article than the headline, and the bulk of the article which made this point:

The Kennedy legacy and the aura of Camelot have been powerful but largely unspoken themes underpinning the campaign of Mr Obama, another charismatic Harvard alumnus heralding a new era in politics.

Rather, Sorenson had some harsh words for each of the Clintons–however, nowhere near as harsh as the Republican candidate or Mike Gravel are and will be. He made all the main liberal criticisms of Hillary and Bill, saying that they had and will:

  • squandered talent and opportunity;
  • continued of politics as usual – “a continuation of the Clinton-Bush 20 years”;
  • triangulated positions and compromised on core liberal values;
  • compromised the honor of the presidency – “I don’t think that it was the noblest time for the White House when the Lincoln bedroom was rented out to donors and pardons were being issued to some truly dreadful people”;
  • and of course, that Hillary will lose to the Republican candidate because too many people don’t like her and she only appeals to people’s intellects.

That’s new and news to me. And it follows a trend of many of those in the Establishment who do not believe another term of the Clintons is the answer. Certainly an improvement, but far from the answer.

Continue reading “The Next JFK?”
Categories
Foreign Policy Morality Obama Politics The War on Terrorism

Under the Weather..

Sorry for the extra-light blogging these past few days.  I’m a bit under the weather and have no stomach for deep thoughts to intermingle my metaphors.  In lieu of actual thoughts on a page, here are some thoughts by others:

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Foreign Policy Obama Pakistan Politics The War on Terrorism

Pakistani Power Politics

For those of you paying attention, President Pervez Musharraf, who has been rulingBenazir Bhutto Pakistan for the past eight years, won the presidential election in a landslide yesterday despite being weakened by all sides by domestic insurgencies, international opprobrium, and several constitutional and other crises. He won because of a last-minute deal he struck with the exiled leader.

The alliance is one that seems destined to fall apart, as Bhutto and Musharaff detest one another and represent two very different Pakistans. Bhutto will be entering the country in the next few days, with all charges against her dropped. She has already publicly declared that her life will be in danger by returning–whether from the Islamic militants who despise her or the current president, she did not say.

But let me spin this back to how this affects the race for president of the free world. As most people know, a few months ago, Senator Barack Obama made some comments about Pakistan in a foreign policy speech:

Let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will. [my highlighting]

Bhutto, speaking at a public session before the Council on Foreign Relations responded:

Well, I wouldn’t like the United States to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty with unauthorized military operations. But the issue that I would like to stress is that Barack Obama also said, if Pakistan won’t act. And that’s the critical issue, that the government has to act. And the government has to act to protect Pakistan’s own serenity and integrity, its own respect, and to understand that if it creates a vacuum, then others aren’t going to just twiddle their thumbs while militants freely move across the border. [my highlighting]

Now let me highlight the significance of that: the former Prime Minister of Pakistan and current power broker in that country seems to believe that Senator Obama’s position is defensible–for America to violate her own country’s sovereignty. Senator Clinton on the other hand, does not engage in hypotheticals because that would reveal her thinking, her calculations and blasted Obama for his “irresponsible” remarks.

My question is: why didn’t Obama engage with Clinton–or anyone–more heavily on this issue, which ended up being talked up as a gaffe rather than a considered position?

Categories
Obama Politics

A true parable

A true parable about the difference between thinking conventionally versus thinking unconventionally.

The elements: a student, two professors, a barometer, a tall building, and a physics test.

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Domestic issues Election 2008 Foreign Policy Obama Politics The War on Terrorism

The Choice

[digg-reddit-me]Here’s the full transcript of Obama’s speech at DePaul University.

And a choice excerpt:

As Ted Sorensen’s old boss President Kennedy once said – “the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war – and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears.” In the fall of 2002, those deaf ears were in Washington. They belonged to a President who didn’t tell the whole truth to the American people; who disdained diplomacy and bullied allies; and who squandered our unity and the support of the world after 9/11.

But it doesn’t end there. Because the American people weren’t just failed by a President – they were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. By a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war. And most of all by the majority of a Congress – a coequal branch of government – that voted to give the President the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day. Let’s be clear: without that vote, there would be no war.

Some seek to rewrite history. They argue that they weren’t really voting for war, they were voting for inspectors, or for diplomacy. But the Congress, the Administration, the media, and the American people all understood what we were debatingBarack Obama in the fall of 2002. This was a vote about whether or not to go to war. That’s the truth as we all understood it then, and as we need to understand it now. And we need to ask those who voted for the war: how can you give the President a blank check and then act surprised when he cashes it?

With all that we know about what’s gone wrong in Iraq, even today’s debate is divorced from reality. We’ve got a surge that is somehow declared a success even though it has failed to enable the political reconciliation that was its stated purpose. The fact that violence today is only as horrific as in 2006 is held up as progress. Washington politicians and pundits trip over each other to debate a newspaper advertisement while our troops fight and die in Iraq.

And the conventional thinking today is just as entrenched as it was in 2002. This is the conventional thinking that measures experience only by the years you’ve been in Washington, not by your time spent serving in the wider world. This is the conventional thinking that has turned against the war, but not against the habits that got us into the war in the first place – the outdated assumptions and the refusal to talk openly to the American people.

Well I’m not running for President to conform to Washington’s conventional thinking – I’m running to challenge it. I’m not running to join the kind of Washington groupthink that led us to war in Iraq – I’m running to change our politics and our policy so we can leave the world a better place than our generation has found it.

I had read with a bit of skepticism that the Obama team was holding “the full Barack” back to avoid peaking too early as Howard Dean and countless other alternate candidates have. But this speech is something different. Clearly, succinctly making the case for an Obama presidency and one part of the tragedy that would be Clinton II. I bear no ill-feeling towards Hillary, other than a vague unease. And I admit that the more I have seen her, the more I have come to respect her. That said: she represents convention, political caution, and the establishment.

The Establishment

As someone who respects and studies the “establishment” – as represented by such elite opinion-makers as the Council on Foreign Relations, The New Republic magazine, the Brookings Institute, The Economist magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, and a few other odds and ends – I believe Hillary is the candidate who best embodies what they have stood for and what they stand for today. She gives the answers they have scripted. She embodies the middle-of-the-road ideology embraced by most of these organizations, an ideology that focuses on economic liberalization and projecting strength and American power. This group is socially liberal, economically conservative, and hawkish on foreign affairs. They supported the Iraq war, immigration reform, Israel, combating climate change, and fiscally responsible policies. They are not some evil cabal as maintained by some conspiracy theorists, but rather are those who have taken it upon themselves to think deeply about these issues, those who are powerful enough to pursue their interests in politics, and those who once were in positions of significant power. Their contribution to the public debate is enormous. Their experience and conventions are well-worth hearing: if Bush had listened to them, he would have had a much more successful presidency. They did not push the Iraq war, but they acquiesced to it. They encouraged respect for military estimates and have been astonished by the Bush administration’s hubris and incompetence. It is largely because this group has been convinced that some form of universal health care is back on the table.

Hillary Clinton is campaigning as their candidate. But the funny thing is this: they have not embraced her yet. And while Senator Obama agrees with them in principle on many issues, he believes that these wise old men and women are part of the problem. And the funny thing is: many of them agree. The informal system that in so many ways has determined the policy and actions of America is broken. Not only did they get wrong the most important issue in the past decade, but they have been marginalized by the Bush administration which has not sought the held wisdom of non-ideologues.

The Choice

We need a president who will seek to challenge, reinvigorate, and reinvent this informal system. As a nation, we are headed into a half dozen enormous disasters on our current track – from the entitlement crisis to an invigorated islamist movement. We have been on this path for some time. This path has largely been set by the establishment, although the scope and consequences of our problems have been exacerbated intensely by the current administration. The wise old men and women do not know how to get us out; Hillary doesn’t know either. And neither does Obama.

But Obama sees and feels the problem – and Hillary does not. The choice we face is this: do we need a president who will be competent and strong, who will make few mistakes in the execution of her plans, who knows rather specifically what she wants to do, and who will oversee the downfall of American preeminence in the world? Or do we need a president who will make mistakes, who does not know precisely what he wants to do, who is intelligent and strong, but who sees the enormity of the challenge, and who stands an outside chance of reversing the decay and restoring America?

This presidential election should not, cannot be about which candidate will be the toughest on terrorism. What this election must be about is which candidate can rescue America from the precipice we are barely balancing on.

Continue reading “The Choice”
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Obama Politics

“Fired Up. Ready to Go.”

Holy Cross Basement Rally

[digg-reddit-me]At my college towards the end of my senior year, someone began passing anonymous threatening and demeaning messages to a gay student who was a friend of mine. The messages read, “All fags will go to hell,” and “Fuck you fag,” etcetera. What was truly incredible was the person targeted by these messages. This student was one of the kindest people I have ever met. He volunteered in the community and on campus; he was generous; when I worked with him in the dining hall, he was always one of the hardest workers, even when he was running a shift; he is truly one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met. This made the attacks on him–some of which seemed to directly threaten his physical safety–all the more difficult to understand.

Responding to these harassing and threatening comments became a priority of the student leadership, of which I was a part. And I helped plan the events–a rally, buttons–with the innocuous and trademarked phrase: “Where is the Love?”; a petition in the campus newspaper. The rally was supposed to be held outdoors, but it was drizzling that day and there were concerns about the equipment, so it was moved to the basement of the campus. We had wanted a location that students would be walking by rather than one that they would need to find, and one of the dining halls was at the other side of the basement.

What I remember most though is one of the speeches given by a student who lived across the hall from my earlier in my college days and was also a friend. Everyone else had made their comments–well-meaning and well-put. But this student–Alex Cunningham–walked up, kind of slouched, wearing tattered jeans. He curled into himself, clutching the microphone, as if summoning something. And then suddenly, he started speaking loudly, in a totally different manner than any of the other students. He gave instructions, telling everyone that he was going to say a phrase and the crowd would repeat it back. And he started his chant.

It was both mesmerizing and powerful. A moment that I have felt the power of ever since.

Rally @ Washington Square Park

Last night, I went to see Barack Obama at Washington Square Park. I got there early and had to wait almost an hour and a half to get in. The crowd has been estimated between 20,00Rally @ Washington Square Park0 and 24,000–probably the largest campaign event of the year. The crowd was younger, but it was also diverse–with a number of the elderly, a few middle aged people, and lots of college and post-grad folk. Ethnically, it was as diverse as the subway.

I couldn’t see the stage from where I was–partially because I was short. I was actually pretty close to it. This was basically my view. However, some people were holding up cameras to record Obama on stage, and I could see him in the cameras.

The Speech

From what I could tell, this was Obama’s stump speech with a few add-ons. News reports indicated that he was tougher on his Democratic opponents, saying for example that he was the only one willing to speak tough truths and citing examples.

It was an effective speech–it dealt with the issue of experience masterfully, and on reflection, his comments on experience are even more compelling. His litany of things to change was good, and his tone was right. He explained that many people were there because they were fed up with President Bush. But that they also needed to be for something–and that something should not be just a more competent person to manage things as they are. What was needed was change–to change the system, to change the game, to create a new politics. A politics in which leaders were honest about challenges; in which real progress was possible; in which entrenched interests were not the biggest players.

It was a good speech and an effective speech, and it was delivered with a self-conscious charm that was very appealing. He ended it with a story about how one woman’s voice changed him. It was the best moment in his speech. He led the crowd in the chant “Fired up, ready to go.”

But something was missing.

A Television Show

Martin Sheen as President Bartlett in Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing is one of the great television characters. His President Bartlett is the kind of president only seen on TV.

At the beginning of the third season of the show, there is a series of flashbacks to when then Governor Bartlett was first running for president. He is shown answering questions at a political dinner. One of the characters–Josh, a Washington insider currently working for the Democratic party’s presidential front-runner played by Bradley Whitford–has been forced to attend the event by an old friend of his father’s. Barely paying attention, he grumbles about being there. Then the moment of truth comes: a farmer asks the candidate Bartlett why he supported a particular tax hike that hurt him. Bartlett answers, “Yea, I screwed all of you on that one. That one hurt a lot of my constituents. But I’d do it again and here’s why…”

For Josh, a hardened political infighter, this is one of those “A-ha!” moments and he knows he has found his candidate. He can see through the dismal setting and uninspiring performance to the President that Bartlett could be. Jeb Bartlett however is not ready. It is not that he needs more experience or that he needs seasoning or any such thing. What he is missing is something that everyone around him can sense–his audiences, his aides, himself. Perhaps it is a certain resolve to take on the responsibility; perhaps it is a sense of certainty that he will be able to perform the job. What is missing is both obvious and amorphous.

This is what I felt about Barack Obama’s speech. He is missing just this thing. He is not yet ready. But come January, I believe and hope he will be. If he is ready by then–if he is able to step into himself and be the leader he is able to project–we will have a great president.

Otherwise, we will have to make do. And America will be the poorer for it.

Categories
Obama Politics

“Senior White House Official” on Obama

Matt Drudge has this to say in one of his trademark “flashes” excerpting some breaking news from a new book to be published in which many “senior White House officials” were interviewed including Cheny and Bush:

As for Obama, a senior White House official said the freshman senator from Illinois was “capable” of the intellectual rigor needed to win the presidency but instead relies too heavily on his easy charm.

“It’s sort of like, ‘that’s all I need to get by,’ which bespeaks sort of a condescending attitude towards the voters,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “And a laziness, an intellectual laziness.”

In other news, Bush says that Hillary will win the nomination. But am I the only one to see the irony of a Bush official citing a candidate’s “intellectual laziness” as a reason the candidate cannot win office?