about McCain’s age:
How do you campaign effectively when people won’t stop joking about your age? And this is mild stuff, I think.
Senator Barack Obama at a rally in Houston on Tuesday night. Photo (From nytimes.com is by Rick Bowmer/Associated Press
An impressive tenth straight victory for Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL), in the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He cut across every demographic in Wisconsin and bested his opponent in areas that were once weaknesses.
The campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, (D-NY), hasn’t thrown in the towel. Not Yet. Remember the Alamo! She said. See you in Texas, she said. She’ll work the night shift, she said. It’s about deeds, not words, she said. Besides, don’t listen to those sweet words because Obama plagiarized some of them, she said.
Hmmnn.
An argument could be made that all these victories suddenly put Ohio in play and Texas may even be winnable for Sen. Obama.
Al Jolson, Elvis Pressley, Bill Clinton, just to name a few.
I’m sure I meant something by that list. But just what I cannot tell you because I am not really sure. The list is not random, however.
It took me a while to get to this Newsweek article by David Gates but I am glad I read it. Mr. Gates wrote a questioning and intelligent article about a sliver of American culture that is unstintingly honest.
I saw the contrasting pictures on the night of the so-called ‘Potomac Primaries’ and did not think anything of it until I read Frank Rich yesterday.
We don’t yet know who the Democratic Party nominee for president will be but, whoever it is, it is going to be a nice contrast with the presumptive Republican nominee. Come November, it will really be about the past and the future. Do we follow the same failed, ruinous policies that has driven the nation into a ditch, or strike out on a new path?
Is something else.
Mr. Daniel Henninger, who writes the Wonder Land column on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, has been listening to Illinois Senator Barack Obama and, surprise, surprise, he found Mr. Obama “insanely” eloquent but the message a downer. The America that Mr. Henninger knows is not nearly as bad off as the good senator makes it out to be.
As a result, Mr. Henninger has a hopeful message for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, (D-NY): Hang in there. America will soon get tired of the Obama message and then she can coast in to the nomination.
Mr. Henninger’s reason for this is that he found a poll that says Americans, especially those who are supporting Mr. Obama, are generally optimistic about the nation and, they will naturally reject Mr. Obama when they realize he has not been telling them the truth about their beloved country.
The conventional critique of Sen. Obama has held that his pitch is perfect but at some point he’ll need to make the appeal more concrete.
I think the potential vulnerability runs deeper. Strip away the new coat of paint from the Obama message and what you find is not only familiar. It’s a downer.
Up to now, the force of Sen. Obama’s physical presentation has so dazzled audiences that it has been hard to focus on precisely what he is saying. “Yes, we can! Yes, we can!” Can what?
Listen closely to that Tuesday night Wisconsin speech. Unhinge yourself from the mesmerizing voice. What one hears is a message that is largely negative, illustrated with anecdotes of unremitting bleakness. Heavy with class warfare, it is a speech that could have been delivered by a Democrat in 1968, or even 1928.
I have to say this is quite a novel take on the campaign, a trial balloon perhaps of how Republicans plan to attack the senator’s message in the fall. For instance, Mr. Henninger listened to another speech after Sen. Obama, this time by Sen. John McCain, (R-AZ), the presumptive Republican nominee. He found Mr. McCain speech more to his liking.
The contrast with Sen. Obama’s is stark. The arc of the McCain speech is upward, positive. Pointedly, he says we are not history’s “victims.” Barack relentlessly pushes victimology.
For Sen. Obama the military and national security is a world of catastrophe welded to Iraq and filled with maimed soldiers. Mr. McCain locates these same difficult subjects inside the whole of American military achievement. It nets out as a more positive message. Recall that Ronald Reagan’s signature optimism, when it first appeared, was laughed at by political pros. Optimism won elections.
Prior to reading Mr. Henninger’s column, the chief complaint I’d read and heard about Mr. Obama’s speeches were that they were relentlessly positive and that Republicans will swiftboat and make mincemeat of him in the general election because he’s too nice.
One shouldn’t blame Mr. Henninger for this column. After all, it was on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. It could have been worse. This was a good try. It must get tiresome hearing all those hosannas from Republicans and independents praising Sen. Obama, the so-called Obamicans, even calling him Reaganesque.
Mrs. Clinton has been tearing her hair out trying to figure out how to counter Sen. Obama’s positive mien. Up to now, she has had to settle for being the the anti-hope candidate. Here’s an answer. Why not accuse him of being too negative for being so positive?
(photo is a link) Don’t get me wrong, former Pres. Ronald Reagan did much damage to our nation. He devastated cities and set back the cause of justice in this nation. But he did it with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. He was an optimist and he believed in America. Today’s Republicans are all snarls, anger and hatred. They are afraid and they want all of us to be afraid. They serve the cause of the few at the expense of the majority.
Which is a reason to wonder whether Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL), can deliver when he would be relying on Republicans to change their ways. Mr. Obama deserves a chance to try to “heal a nation; repair this world.”
Leon Wieseltier over at The New Republic had heard Sen. Barack Obama’s song and he, for one, is totally immune to this call:
It is not “the politics of fear” to remind Obama’s legions of the blissful that, while they are watching Scarlett Johansson sway to the beat, somewhere deep inside a quasi independent territory we might call Islamistan people are making plans to blow them to bits. (Yes, they can.)
I have to say his play on the “Yes, We Can” rhetoric is quite clever. Sen. Obama, I believe, threatened to pursue Osama bin Laden into Pakistan, if necessary, and was roundly lambasted for rashness.
You cannot win against Wieseltier’s argument because he is refusing to be convinced about anything and there’s nothing a person could say to change his mind. Sometime this fall, expect the erstwhile liberal magazine, The New Republic, to endorse ultra right wing Republican John McCain for president.
Journalist Jonathan Chait did a re-examination (unfortunately, registration is required to read this content online) of Sen. John McCain in the Feb. 27th issue of The New Republic. In it he recalled an interview that Mr. McCain gave Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago. Mr. McCain told WSJ that he was in the process of drifting rightward in his various positions.
It occurred to Mr. Chait that he’d heard similar things from Mr. McCain before. Sure enough, when he checked, McCain had indeed told him in 2000 that his politics was evolving, this time leftward. When he asked why the change so late in his career, Mr. McCain gave a jaw-dropping answer that should have led to outright condemnation but instead is the sort of thing he says to journalists which leads them to sing his praises as a straight shooter.
“In the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t pay nearly the attention to those issues in the past. I was probably a ‘supply-sider’ based on the fact that I really didn’t jump into the issue.”
Mr. Chait: At the time, this was one of the most endearing things I had ever heard a politician say. He was candidly confessing his own failure, and he left me feeling that he was bound to move closer to my viewpoint as he studied the issue more carefully. But seeing McCain offer up almost the same line to Moore—and getting the same gratified reaction—was jolting.
By making himself available to anyone with a notebook or microphone, Mr. McCain endeared himself to journalists and they willingly acted as his mouthpiece time after time. He got the benefit of the doubt and had journalists coming up for excuses for him. He is the maverick who bucks Republican orthodoxies, the conventional wisdom goes.
Except that all McCain is and has always been is a right-wing politician. The media needs to stop covering for him.
Some people are trying to stop Arizona Senator John McCain from continuing on a path that says there’s no principle he won’t turn his back on if it’ll help him reach the presidency.
When the torture bill was going through Congress Mr. McCain spoke movingly about his experiences as a prisoner of war who endured torture for five years. He said America should pass the bill to explicitly forswearing torture because we, as a nation, do not do such things.
The first sign that the good senator was just playing a role that he had grown accustomed to playing all too well was when he raised not a finger of protest to the ‘signing statement’ President George W. Bush attached to the bill declaring that he reserved the right to violate the law he was signing at will.
And when the CIA said a few days ago that, yes, it had tortured a few prisoners and detainees, Mr. McCain was again silent. The last straw was when he voted last week against a bill to check the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of harsh interrogation tactics, disappointing human rights advocates who should have known better than to trust this man.
Torture is one of the pillars of the Republican Party and McCain could simply not allow himself to be seen coddling terrorists in the middle of a presidential race.
He’s always had the substance but got tarred with not providing details. The good news, according to The New York Times, is that he’s going into more details on the stump. The oratory may be less soaring, but . . .
“Don’t be fooled by this talk about speeches versus solutions,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of Wisconsin voters. “It’s true, I give a good speech. What do I do? Nothing wrong with that.”
To that confident strain of self-assessment, the audience roared with approval.
A shrug of the shoulders and a few deadpanned retorts, some of which stop just shy of mocking his rival, is the latest approach Mr. Obama has taken to respond to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s criticism that his words offer more poetry than substance.
Yet as he traveled across Wisconsin last week, Mr. Obama seemed to have let loose a little more of his inner-wonk, which his strategists had once urged him to keep on the shelf.
Even as he was dismissing Mrs. Clinton’s criticism, he appeared to be taking it at least mildly to heart — a suggestion that as a line of attack, she might be on to something.
Suddenly, he was injecting a few more specifics into his campaign speeches. Giant rallies that had sustained his candidacy through a coast-to-coast series of contests on Feb. 5, notable for their rhetorical flourishes and big applause lines, were supplemented with policy speeches and town-hall-style meetings, complete with the question-and-answer sessions he abandoned as he roared out of Iowa and into New Hampshire. (In hindsight, he conceded as he reviewed a defeat to Mrs. Clinton, that was a mistake.)
By every indication, this was not a random change in the Obama style. The senator decided to clue in his audience to the shift on a recent morning in Janesville, Wis., where he presented an economic proposal to create seven million jobs over the next decade.
“Today, I want to take it down a notch,” said Mr. Obama, of Illinois, standing on the floor of a General Motors plant. “This is going to be a speech that is a little more detailed. It’s going to be a little bit longer, with not too many applause lines.”
And so, on to the next complaint. Maybe, now, the complaint will be that he’s too tall, too good-looking, or smiles too much.
We must not let Sen. John McCain, (R-AZ), pretend that a vote for him in November is not a vote for a third term for George W. Bush. We must not let him pretend that he is not Bush’s heir. He begged for this, groveled, and bargained away his integrity to have it. Everyone must keep in mind that he sold his soul to get this nomination, that he has betrayed every last principle on which his reputation for moderation stood.
Sen. McCain will try to pull the wool over the voters’ eyes with the full complicity of the corporate-owned mainstream media.
The truth is that a vote for Mr. McCain this fall is a vote for a continuation of Bush’s disastrous policies that has put the United States of America on the precipice of ruin in more ways than we dare to count.
It is important that Sen. McCain owns every part of this administration’s legacy, including the abomination of torture that became its hallmark. McCain let Abu Ghraib happened. Guantanamo Bay happened with Bush in his embrace. We waterboarded alleged enemy combatants with his full blessing.
No matter who the Democrats nominate as their standard bearer, the nation has to keep that in mind. Do we want more wars, more torture, a blighted environment, a government run in secrecy, more distrust of us by our allies around the world, and an intemperate and angry man as the next person in the oval office?
We would be voting for all that when we vote for McCain.