July 6, 2008
May 10, 2008
May 8, 2008
Rush Limbaugh Urges Dittobots to Vote for Obama in Remaining Democratic Primaries
Alexander Moody, CNN, May 8, 2008
WASHINGTON — He has publicly urged Republicans to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton to keep the divisive Democratic nomination fight alive, but talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday he really wants Sen. Barack Obama to be the party’s nominee.
Rush Limbaugh urged listeners in states with open primaries to cross party lines and support Hillary Clinton.
“I now believe he would be the weakest of the Democrat nominees,” Limbaugh, among the most powerful voices in conservative radio, said on his program. “I now urge the Democrat superdelegates to make your mind up and publicly go for Obama.”
“Barack Obama has shown he cannot get the votes Democrats need to win — blue-collar, working-class people,” Limbaugh said. “He can get effete snobs, he can get wealthy academics, he can get the young, and he can get the black vote, but Democrats do not win with that.”
But Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist and Obama supporter, disagreed, saying the Democratic Party has “the best coalition to go out and talk to people across racial lines, which are the unions.”
May 7, 2008
May 6, 2008
May 4, 2008
Maureen Dowd: This Bud’s for You
Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 4, 2008
Barack Obama is going to get down if it kills him.
Bleeding white voters in North Carolina and Indiana, the Illinois senator headed Thursday evening to V.F.W. Post 1954 in North Liberty, Ind., consisting of a bar, a pool table, a Coors Light clock and a couple of dozen curious white guys.
Checking out what the vets were drinking, he announced, “I’m going to have a Bud.” Then, showing he’s a smart guy who can learn and assimilate, he took big swigs from his beer can, a marked improvement on the delicate sip he took at a brewery in Bethlehem, Pa.
Obama is also doing his best to impress hoop-crazed Hoosiers with his passion for basketball. On Thursday night, in shirt and tie, he took on an eighth grader named Aaron at a backyard picnic in Union Mills in an impromptu game of P-I-G. “You know, he’s tough,” Obama laughed about his 14-year-old opponent. “He’s like Hillary Clinton.”
The lioness of Chappaqua is hot on the trail of the Chicago gazelle, eager to gnaw him to pieces, like a harrowing scene out of a George Stubbs painting.
Proclaiming that the upcoming elections in Indiana and North Carolina would be “a game changer,” Hillary and her posse pressed hard on their noble twin themes of emasculation and elitism.
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Brayan Zepp Jamaison: Hillary: No
Bryan Zepp Jamaison, The Lonesome Mongoose, May 4, 2008
If there is one advantage to the protracted campaign of this strangest
of elections, it’s that we’ve gotten to see how either of the Democratic
candidates perform under fire.
This is particularly true of Barack Obama, who has had to face hostile
fire, not only from the far right, but from the sad joke that is known
as “the mainstream media” and the Clinton campaign. So far, it’s been
harsh, but not beyond the normal boundaries of roughhouse presidential
politics. Later this summer, when the right wing smear-and-hate machine
kicks in with the cheerful acquiescence of the mainstream media, acting
as an echo chamber, it will get far worse. But both Democratic
candidates have demonstrated that they can fight.
One sneer from the right that we’ve heard since the early days of the
Clinton presidency is that if they can’t handle the Republicans then
they can’t handle the demands of the presidency. Actually, the opposite
is true; Bill Clinton never had to endure as much animosity, treachery
and savagery from al Qaida, China, or North Korea as he did from the
Republican party.
It was during the Clinton years that we learned that Republicans will
cheerfully destroy their own country in the name of more power and
money. During the Putsch years, they’ve gone a long way toward doing
just that.
If Bill Clinton had one big mistake that hurt his presidency, it wasn’t
Monica Lewinsky or gays in the military. It was that he tried to
accommodate the far right in the first year of his presidency. He wanted
to reach out and embrace them, and pull them into his grand vision for
the country.
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May 2, 2008
What Orwell Can Teach Obama
Jeff Greenfield, Slate Magazine, May 2, 2008
Elitism has bedeviled American liberalism for the better part of four decades. It undermined the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry, and now it’s making mischief in the Obama campaign every bit as much as the omnipresence of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
The charge that liberal candidates don’t connect with or understand the values and beliefs of regular Americans is embedded in old epithets like “limousine liberal,” which I first heard aimed at New York Mayor John Lindsay in 1969. It was also at the core of “radical chic,” the phrase made famous by Tom Wolfe in his savage 1970 account in New York magazine of a fund-raising party for the Black Panthers thrown by Leonard Bernstein and his wife in their Park Avenue duplex. (Wolfe didn’t invent the term, but he gave it currency.)
There’s also an even older and more illuminating antecedent from across the Atlantic: the writings of George Orwell in England in the late 1930s, which describe a version of elitism that echoes powerfully in our current political battle.
Orwell’s 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier is an account of his travels to England’s industrial North, to the towns of Barnsley, Sheffield, and Wigan. Orwell—once a scholarship student at Eton—wrote of everything from conditions in the coal mines to the homes, diets, and health of desperately poor miners. He himself was a socialist who could also turn a critical eye on the British left, and in the middle of the book, he devoted a chapter to the failure of socialism to gain a foothold among the very citizens who would have seemed to benefit most from its rise. Substitute liberal or progressive for socialist, and the text often reads as though Orwell were covering American politics today.
“Everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, is a way out [of the worldwide depression,]” Orwell writes. “It would at least ensure our getting enough to eat, even if it deprived us of everything else. Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such an elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already.” And yet, he adds, “the average thinking person nowadays is merely not a Socialist, he is actively hostile to Socialism. … Socialism … has about it something inherently distasteful—something that drives away the very people who ought to be flocking it its support.”
April 30, 2008
April 29, 2008
April 25, 2008
Paul Krugman: Self-Inflicted Confusion
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, April 25, 2008
After Barack Obama’s defeat in Pennsylvania, David Axelrod, his campaign manager, brushed it off: “Nothing has changed tonight in the basic physics of this race.”
He may well be right — but what a comedown. A few months ago the Obama campaign was talking about transcendence. Now it’s talking about math. “Yes we can” has become “No she can’t.”
This wasn’t the way things were supposed to play out.
Mr. Obama was supposed to be a transformational figure, with an almost magical ability to transcend partisan differences and unify the nation. Once voters got to know him — and once he had eliminated Hillary Clinton’s initial financial and organizational advantage — he was supposed to sweep easily to the nomination, then march on to a huge victory in November.
Well, now he has an overwhelming money advantage and the support of much of the Democratic establishment — yet he still can’t seem to win over large blocs of Democratic voters, especially among the white working class.
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April 24, 2008
April 23, 2008
April 18, 2008
Paul Krugman: Clinging to a Stereotype
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, April 18, 2008
Will Barack Obama’s now famous “bitter” quote turn out to have been a big deal politically? Frankly, I have no idea.
But here’s a different question: was Mr. Obama right?
Mr. Obama’s comments combined assertions about economics, sociology and voting behavior. In each case, his assertion was mostly if not entirely wrong.
Start with the economics. Mr. Obama: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration.”
There are, indeed, towns where the mill closed during the 1980s and nothing has replaced it. But the suggestion that the American heartland suffered equally during the Clinton and Bush years is deeply misleading.
The Tattlesnake – Drowning Down at the Old Rumor Mill Again Edition
From Everybody’s Favorite: Various Possibly Reliable Sources Who Wish to Remain Anonymous:
– China has already given the back-channel ultimatum to the Bushites – attack Iran and interrupt the flow of Iranian oil vital to the Asian nation’s economy and China will interrupt their loans and imports to the US, causing the American markets to crash even further and faster. The question is: will the mad Bush-Cheney neocons, drooling over an assault on Persia before Junior leaves office, pay attention?
– It’s a done deal: Bill Clinton has allegedly started secretly raising money for a run at the New York Governorship in 2010. Not only is Big Dog tired of campaigning for other people, he also sorely misses having political power. And he wouldn’t mind a spot in the record books as the first president to also be elected governor of two different states, one prior to the presidency and one after.
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