Gipper

joeyboy says:

Huckabee is the scariest presidential candidate I’ve seen since Ronald Reagan.

Like Huckabee would say, he’s not mad about being scary. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is scary because he masks his unreasonableness with a honeyed tongue. He’s managed to get the so-called liberal media to fall in love with him. Out of boredom, more than anything else, the news mongers are keeping him afloat.

How ’bout this: what if McCain picks Huckabee as his running mate, wins office and promptly drops dead! Then, our nightmare comes true: President Huckabee.

He’s even more ignorant than George W. Bush and unabashed about it. Asked about his lack of expertise in foreign affairs, Huckabee jovially agreed with his questioner, then added: “but I stayed at the Holiday Inn Express last night.” Much hilarity. His glib, happy-go-lucky persona is winning over pundits and ink-stained wretches alike.

The Republicans running to succeed W. are uniformly worse than he was as president, if you can believe such a thing is possible. McCain is worse because there’s no principle that he won’t trim, if it’ll help him become president.

'Learnin' the Blues'

Photograph by Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald recorded a version of this song that is at once beautiful, sad, funny, and heartbreaking all at the same time. Today’s New York Times story about Sen. Barack Obama’s struggle with the issue of race in his campaign to become the Democratic Party nominee for president makes me feel all of those things.

Mr. Obama has largely succeeded in muting the issue of race in this campaign. He has succeeded in making the campaign not about his race, even as he has benefited from race (the whole ‘a credit to his race’ thing). The Clintons, Bill especially, recognized what was happening and quickly ended their subtle attempts to remind people that Mr. Obama is black. They, instead, took up a megaphone and blared it to anyone who would listen.

Photographs by Ozier Mohammed/The New York Times.

They earlier made the false claim to the New Yorker Magazine that Latinos don’t vote for blacks. When Sen. Obama won in Iowa, they became more daring and explicit in New Hampshire before going overboard in South Carolina.

Former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, (D-N.J.), was fond of saying (and I forget who he’s quoting here) that race is America’s original sin.

Nowhere is it more explicit than in this race. Mr. Obama’s campaign, as great as it has been, has had some significant failures. The deficits in his support now are testaments to those failures.

His seeming inability to craft a message that could appeal to lunch bucket, blue collar white voters is telling. It is my belief that Mr. Obama’s message benefits this constituency far more than the people who have been flocking to his campaign so far. He needs to find the language to talk to them.

As for Latinos, it is right that Sen. Obama has to work to earn their votes, just as he had to work (with no small amount of help from Bill and Hillary Clinton) to win over African-Americans. Latinos are diverse and not one single message will reach them. Again, reaching them is not an insurmountable challenge.

This just means Mr. Obama and his staff have to work harder to earn their votes. That is part of the promise of Mr. Obama’s movement. The solutions to our nation’s problems have to be deep and lasting. The blood, sweat and tears in this effort will only make sure both the achievements and the progressive coalition more enduring.

This is not to exclude Sen. Hillary Clinton. First, let me say that any other year I would be banging the drum hard supporting her. It is just a fluke that she is running at a time when her opponent is this remarkable man. She has taken some unfortunate steps in this campaign which she’ll ultimately have to atone for.

What must not happen is troglodyte John McCain winning the presidency.

That said, I will support Sen. Clinton if she wins the nomination. She will have the task of crafting the same progressive coalition, which I hope she is working on now, to carry her to the presidency.

Which is it?

This is a case of dueling columnists.

 

Paul Krugman says in his column today that “most of the venom is coming from supporters of Barack Obama, who want their hero or nobody. His campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.”

Writing a day earlier, Krugman’s fellow liberal on The New York Times Op-Ed page, Frank Rich, said “Hillary Clinton’s show on the Hallmark Channel was a preview of how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party.”

As commenter Todd Drew of Yankees for Justice pointed out, Krugman uncharacteristically failed to offer any examples of how the Obama campaign and supporters were doing what he said they were doing. Rich, meanwhile, cited chapter and verse about the Clintons’ perfidies, along with refutations from numerous and credible sources.

“The campaign’s other most potent form of currency remains its thick deck of race cards,” Rich wrote, adding later: “Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign’s attempt to drive white voters away from Mr. Obama by playing the race card has backfired. His white vote tally rises every week.”

These are good men, Rich and Krugman. Are they caught in the same dilemma facing every other voter in the nation, specifically figuring out who to chose among two equally competent candidates who, despite the similarities of their positions, have different attributes and different vision how to go about governing the nation?

Obama at Dawn

After a weekend rampage that saw him win all primaries, caucuses, and a Grammy, Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL), greets a new morn with the prospects of many more triumphs to come. Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, the so-called ‘Potomac Primary,’ promise more riches in votes.

Some of us are fixated on the historic meaning of his probable election to this forbidding office, the President of the United States. But Obama, as is his wont, insists that is only incidental to what could be achieved. Heal a nation; repair this world, he has said.

Great Day in the Morning

The ferry bobs violently on the surface of the East River before coming to rest against the pier.

The sun, glorious this morning, belies the bone chilling cold spell, courtesy of an arctic front that has descended over New York City and the East Coast. The sun is a tease but I avert my eyes, thankful the New York Waterway ferry, which I board in Hoboken, has the dirty Plexiglas windows, obscuring the sun further.

On the radio, somebody says the temperature is 11 degrees but that, with the wind, it feels like 10 below.

I ignore Lady Liberty. And the ache I usually feel at a view denuded of the Twin Towers, akin to the itch you feel like scratching where your limbs used to be, was absent this morning. I used to think them an abomination against nature. Until I started missing them when they were plucked clean out of the landscape. Such was my dread of the walk from Pier 11 to 125 Broad, at the southern tip of Manhattan.

The sun blazed but warmed nothing. The wind hits my face like a thousand needles. My eyes water. I don’t think about the crosswinds that will assault me shortly in the alleys.

I cocked my head so, lowered my shoulders, and, with a trot, pushed into the wind . . .

The News

Ozier Mohammed/The New York Times

Barack Obama campaigning at a diner in Maine, where Democrats caucus Sunday.

BREAKING NEWS 10:09 PM ET: Television Networks Project Obama Will Win Louisiana

Obama Wins Nebraska and Washington; uckabee Wins G.O.P. Caucuses in Kansas By KATE ZERNIKE and PAUL VITELLO 33 minutes ago

Barack Obama defeated his rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in Democratic contests in two states as Mike Huckabee showed that he is still attracting Republican voters.

The U.S. Virgin Islands also gave its vote to Obama.

The Other Party

This shows how little I know. I thought former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as Republican vice-presidential nominee answers all the problems that Sen. John McCain is having reeling in his party’s base. Mr. Pat Toomey, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who is now the president of the Club for Growth, thinks not.

Some have suggested Mike Huckabee. But that’s a legacy
of a hard fought primary season. Moving forward,
Mr. Huckabee on the ticket would be a disaster. The former
governor has a record of raising taxes and increasing
spending. Picking him would only make it more likely that
conservatives will sit on their hands come November.

Mr. Toomey would know better than I would, although you cannot discount that he and the group he heads have their own agenda. Club for Growth (CFG) bills itself as inheritor of Ronald Reagan’s “vision of limited government and lower taxes.”

It’s probably news to them that Reagan, among his many crimes against the American people, not only raised taxes, but he grew the size of government and the national debt beyond what was tolerable. Remember the national debt clock?
It took a Democrat, former president Bill Clinton, to erase the deficit and return sound fiscal management. Clinton left office with a significant surplus that another Republican president, George W. Bush, promptly squandered.

The Club for Growth advances this anti-government vision by supporting candidates for political offices who hew to its right-wing economic orthodoxy. It aggressively opposes moderate Republicans often to the consternation of GOP political leaders.

So who does Mr. Toomey think Mr. McCain should run with:

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford
South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint
Indiana Rep. Mike Pence
Former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm
Forbes Inc. CEO Steve Forbes

I don’t much about most of these people (Sen. Phil Gramm probably belongs in prison, so corrupt was he; and Mr. Forbes probably belongs in an insane asylum, probably a well-appointed one since he’s wealthy but certifiably insane) other than that they’re Mr. Toomey and Club for Growth’s suggestions for the GOP ticket.

Here’s my question: Should the Republicans be banned from a couple of election cycles, considering the horrible state that George W. Bush is about to leave our country?