BartBlog

Ted Rall, Google.alt.politics, February 13, 2008

HOUSTON–”The truly undecided voter is rare, say those who study the
psychology of voting,” Joe Garofoli wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle.
“Since neuroscientists say 90 percent of thought is unconscious, an
undecided voter may have already decided–he just hasn’t revealed his pick
to himself yet.”

Whether I’m a rare bird or a typical victim of self-denial, I didn’t know
how I was going to vote until election day–or, to be more precise, a
election minute. Roughly 15 to 20 percent of 2008 primary voters have had
similar trouble getting their unconscious to talk to them.

Most of the electoral procrastinators are conservative Republicans and
liberal Democrats–party loyalists whose influence has been diluted by
independents who vote in their primaries. As has been widely discussed,
conservatives were unhappy with the entire field of Republican presidential
contenders. Less noted but no less significant has been the effect of John
Edwards’ departure from the Democratic field.

Lefties don’t have a candidate.

Like most hardcore liberals, I had planned to vote for Edwards. I’m a
registered Democrat. I live in New York, a “closed primary” state. That left
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

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Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, February 17, 2008

Maybe we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Or maybe we are not.

Perhaps when Barack Obama uses that trippy line, he is just giving false Hopi, since the saying, which he picked up from Maria Shriver’s New Age-y L.A. endorsement speech, is credited to Hopi Indians.

The passionate palaver about Hillary versus Barry rages on, with each side certain it is right about our fate if we end up with a President Obama or another President Clinton.

Hillary says Obama is “all hat and no cattle.” You’d think she’d want to avoid cattle metaphors, so as not to rile up those with a past beef about her sketchy windfall on cattle futures. She could simply say he’s all cage and no bird.

But is she right, that he’d be a callow leader, too trusting of Republicans, dictators and terrorists? Is Bill right, that voters should not be swayed by eloquence and excitement? (Unless he’s running.)

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Frank Rich, The New York Times, February 17, 2008

The curse continues. Regardless of party, it’s hara-kiri for a politician to step into the shadow of even a mediocre speech by Barack Obama.

Senator Obama’s televised victory oration celebrating his Chesapeake primary trifecta on Tuesday night was a mechanical rehash. No matter. When the networks cut from the 17,000-plus Obama fans cheering at a Wisconsin arena to John McCain’s victory tableau before a few hundred spectators in the Old Town district of Alexandria, Va., it was a rerun of what happened to Hillary Clinton the night she lost Iowa. Senator McCain, backed by a collection of sallow-faced old Beltway pols, played the past to Mr. Obama’s here and now. Mr. McCain looked like a loser even though he, unlike Senator Clinton, had actually won.

But he has it even worse than Mrs. Clinton. What distinguished his posse from Mr. Obama’s throng was not just its age but its demographic monotony: all white and nearly all male. Such has been the inescapable Republican brand throughout this campaign, ever since David Letterman memorably pegged its lineup of presidential contenders last spring as “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

For Mr. McCain, this albatross may be harder to shake than George W. Bush and Iraq, particularly in a faceoff with Mr. Obama. When Mr. McCain jokingly invoked the Obama slogan “I am fired up and ready to go” in his speech Tuesday night, it was as cringe-inducing as the white covers of R & B songs in the 1950s — or Mitt Romney’s stab at communing with his inner hip-hop on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Trapped in an archaic black-and-white newsreel, the G.O.P. looks more like a nostalgic relic than a national political party in contemporary America. A cultural sea change has passed it by.

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Contemplating Bush’s $4 trillion dollar budget proposal and his $1 trillion dollar war and the recent AP poll where over half the people said ending the war would be a big stimulus to the US economy, this item is an illustration of just how big one trillion dollars is.

(Note: the figures are out of date (from 1995) but even adjusted for inflation they begin to suggest just what Bush’s five trillion dollars could do in better hands.)

$1,000,000,000,000.00

In an article that appeared in the Denver Post in September 1995, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm wrote:

“We are approaching a five trillion dollar debt. We tire of large numbers. My friend, Dr. William Fifer has figured out a dramatic way to explain $1 trillion. He says that for $1 trillion we could:

Build a $75,000 house, place it on $5,000 worth of land, furnish it with $10,000 worth of furniture, put a $10,000 car in the garage, and give this to every family in KANSAS, MISSOURI, OKLAHOMA, COLORADO, NEBRASKA and IOWA.

Having done this, you would still have enough left to build a $10 million hospital and a $10 million library in each of the 250 cities and towns throughout the six-state region.

After having done that, you would still have enough money left to build 500 schools at $10 million each for the communities in the region.

And after having done that, you would still have enough left from the original $1 trillion to put aside, at 10 percent annual interest, a sum of money that would pay a salary of $25,000 each per year for an army of 10,000 nurses and the same for 10,000 teachers.

You would still have enough for an annual cash allowance of $5,000 for each and every family throughout the six-state region not just for one year, but FOREVER!

This begins to suggest what American society has foregone in favor of Bush’s war.

(Perhaps someone with economics skills could update this and send it to members of Congress. They toss these huge numbers around so casually they seem to have mostly lost sight of economics “on the ground”.)

John Nichols, The Nation, February 14, 2008

JANESVILLE, Wisconsin — When I talked with Russ Feingold last week about what the Democratic candidates for president should do to win Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, he suggested that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should go to the senator’s hometown of Janesville and talk about trade.

Obama got the hint.

On Wednesday, the first full day of a Wisconsin primary campaign that he hopes will solidify his emerging lead over his once “inevitable” rival, the Illinois senator started in Janesville, where he delivered a rebuke to free-trade policies of the Bill Clinton and George Bush eras that sounded a little like a speech Feingold might have delivered.

“We are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control. The fallout from the housing crisis that’s cost jobs and wiped out savings was not an inevitable part of the business cycle. It was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington — the culmination of decades of decisions that were made or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy and the growing inequality it’s produced,” Obama told workers at the General Motors Assembly Plant in the southern Wisconsin city.

“It’s a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who’ve seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear; workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years,” continued the senator, who is suddenly very conscious of the need to appeal to working-class voters in Wisconsin and Ohio who have been battered by trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the decision the Clinton administration to extend permanent most-favored-nation training status to China.

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Joe Conason, Creators Syndicate, February 14, 2008

For the next month or so, the conservative valentines will arrive every day at the headquarters of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The Illinois senator’s image will be illuminated by the bipartisan aura of admiration from prominent Republican commentators and strategists, as they savor the promise of his victory over Hillary Clinton, long the object of their hatred. He may well imagine that they really like him – and surely some of them do, at least for now.

Such happy feelings are easily conjured these days, when William Kristol hopes Democratic superdelegates will do “the good deed” of pledging their ballots to Obama, when George Will urges Democrats to choose Obama as “the party’s most potentially potent nominee,” and when Peggy Noonan promises that Obama will be “bulletproof” against Republican attack.

Meanwhile, in the bleaker precincts of the blogosphere, lesser figures prepare to welcome the Democratic front-runner should he secure his party’s nomination. Evidently, they will celebrate his triumph with poison gas and bombshells rather than confetti and champagne.

If you listen closely, you can already hear the test rounds exploding.

The target is Obama’s favorable but hazy persona, which Republican operatives must redefine in negative and even threatening terms. Assuming that the Republican nominee will be Sen. John McCain, they will aim to contrast his tough, aggressive stance against Islamist terrorism with his opponent’s alleged weakness and naivety. But as usual, they will do worse, spreading slurs and smears that depict Obama as a dupe or even a sympathizer of Islamic radicals.

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