BartBlog

Jason Linkins, The Huffington Post, February 3, 2008

Candidates on the campaign trail are frequently faced with any number of tough questions and confronted on all sorts of difficult and divisive issues. But only Hillary Clinton has had to face down the harrowing prospect of earning the support of wackadoodle dandy Ann Coulter. When asked to respond to the news by George Stephanopoulos, Clinton was either forced to choke back a dollop of gorge or else found the prospect so amusing that it prompted a coughing jag. Anyway, who can blame Clinton for reacting the way she did? It definitely “humanizes” her!

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Frank Rich, The New York Times, January 3, 2008

Before John F. Kennedy was a president, a legend, a myth and a poltergeist stalking America’s 2008 campaign, he was an upstart contender seen as a risky bet for the Democratic nomination in 1960.

Kennedy was judged “an ambitious but superficial playboy” by his liberal peers, according to his biographer Robert Dallek. “He never said a word of importance in the Senate, and he never did a thing,” in the authoritative estimation of the Senate’s master, Lyndon Johnson. Adlai Stevenson didn’t much like Kennedy, and neither did Harry Truman, who instead supported Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri.

J. F. K. had few policy prescriptions beyond Democratic boilerplate (a higher minimum wage, “comprehensive housing legislation”). As his speechwriter Richard Goodwin recalled in his riveting 1988 memoir “Remembering America,” Kennedy’s main task was to prove his political viability. He had to persuade his party that he was not a wealthy dilettante and not “too young, too inexperienced and, above all, too Catholic” to be president.

How did the fairy-tale prince from Camelot vanquish a field of heavyweights led by the longtime liberal warrior Hubert Humphrey? It wasn’t ideas. It certainly wasn’t experience. It wasn’t even the charisma that Kennedy would show off in that fall’s televised duels with Richard Nixon.

Looking back almost 30 years later, Mr. Goodwin summed it up this way: “He had to touch the secret fears and ambivalent longings of the American heart, divine and speak to the desires of a swiftly changing nation — his message grounded on his own intuition of some vague and spreading desire for national renewal.”

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Robert Parry, Consortium News, February 2, 2008

Barack Obama argues that the Democrats will have a better chance for victory in November if they have a presidential nominee who opposed the Iraq War from the start and who can contrast that judgment against John McCain’s enthusiasm for a centuries-long U.S. occupation of Iraq.

What Sen. Obama didn’t say out loud, but what Democratic voters surely recalled was the endless baiting of John Kerry for having been “for the war before he was against it,” earning a place – as George W. Bush put it – “in the flip-flop hall of fame.”

Hillary Clinton would be open to similar attacks since she voted in 2002 to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq and remained a staunch war supporter almost until the eve of Campaign 2008, when she realigned herself with the anti-war sentiments of rank-and-file Democrats.

She was for it, for it and for it – before she was finally against it.

But another factor that plays to Obama’s advantage as the prospective nominee – when compared to Hillary Clinton – is that the Right’s powerful media apparatus and the Republican attack strategies appear less successful against Democrats with strong oratorical skills and the ability to inspire enthusiasm and passion.

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Nate Anderson, ARS Technica, February 01, 2008

Michael Weiner has a radio show. For obvious reasons, he has chosen to do the show under the name Michael Savage instead, and “The Savage Nation” attracts a few million listeners per week. They listen, in part, to hear Savage rant on conservative topics. On October 29, 2007, listeners were rewarded with this bit of enlightened monologue on the topic of Muslims:

What kind of world are you living in that you let them in here with that throwback document in their hand, which is a book of hate. Don’t tell me I need reeducation. They need deportation. I don’t need reeducation. Deportation not reeducation. You can take CAIR and throw them out of my country. I’d raise the American flag, and I’d get out my trumpet if you did it. Without due process. You can take your due process and shove it… Wherever you look on the Earth there’s a bomb going off or a car going up in flames, and it’s Muslims screaming for the blood of Christians or Jews or anyone they hate.

There’s more… much more (Savage believes that “90 percent of them are on welfare,” for instance), and it’s not surprising that the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) might have a different view. CAIR posted a four-minute excerpt of this show on its website along with a rebuttal, and Savage then filed a lawsuit against the group, alleging copyright infringement.

Savage’s legal filing stands in a class by itself. Little of the filing talks about copyright at all; the vast majority is an extended rant about “CAIR and it’s [sic] terror connections” and how the group was “tied to terror from the day it was formed.”

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