Maureen Dowd of the NY Times weighs in on the Palin pick.
It’s easy to see where this movie is going. It begins, of course, with a cute, cool unknown from Alaska who has never even been on “Meet the Press” triumphing over a cute, cool unknowable from Hawaii who has been on “Meet the Press” a lot. Americans, suspicious that the Obamas have benefited from affirmative action without being properly grateful, and skeptical that Michelle really likes “The Brady Bunch” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” reject the 47-year-old black contender as too uppity and untested. Instead, they embrace 72-year-old John McCain and 44-year-old Sarah Palin, whose average age is 58, a mere two years older than the average age of the Obama-Biden ticket. Enthusiastic Republicans don’t see the choice of Palin as affirmative action, despite her thin résumé and gaping absence of foreign policy knowledge, because they expect Republicans to put an underqualified “babe,” as Rush Limbaugh calls her, on the ticket. They have a tradition of nominating fun, bantamweight cheerleaders from the West, like the previous Miss Congeniality types Dan Quayle and W., and then letting them learn on the job. So they crash into the globe a few times while they’re learning to drive, what’s the big deal? Obama may have been president of The Harvard Law Review, but Palin graduated from the University of Idaho with a minor in poli-sci and worked briefly as a TV sports reporter. And she was tougher on the basketball court than the ethereal Obama, earning the nickname “Sarah Barracuda.” The legacy of Geraldine Ferraro was supposed to be that no one would ever go on a blind date with history again. But that crazy maverick and gambler McCain does it, and conservatives and evangelicals rally around him in admiration of his refreshingly cynical choice of Sarah, an evangelical Protestant and anti-abortion crusader who became a hero when she decided to have her baby, who has Down syndrome, and when she urged schools to debate creationism as well as that stuffy old evolution thing.
It’s easy to see where this movie is going. It begins, of course, with a cute, cool unknown from Alaska who has never even been on “Meet the Press” triumphing over a cute, cool unknowable from Hawaii who has been on “Meet the Press” a lot.
Americans, suspicious that the Obamas have benefited from affirmative action without being properly grateful, and skeptical that Michelle really likes “The Brady Bunch” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” reject the 47-year-old black contender as too uppity and untested.
Instead, they embrace 72-year-old John McCain and 44-year-old Sarah Palin, whose average age is 58, a mere two years older than the average age of the Obama-Biden ticket. Enthusiastic Republicans don’t see the choice of Palin as affirmative action, despite her thin résumé and gaping absence of foreign policy knowledge, because they expect Republicans to put an underqualified “babe,” as Rush Limbaugh calls her, on the ticket. They have a tradition of nominating fun, bantamweight cheerleaders from the West, like the previous Miss Congeniality types Dan Quayle and W., and then letting them learn on the job. So they crash into the globe a few times while they’re learning to drive, what’s the big deal?
Obama may have been president of The Harvard Law Review, but Palin graduated from the University of Idaho with a minor in poli-sci and worked briefly as a TV sports reporter. And she was tougher on the basketball court than the ethereal Obama, earning the nickname “Sarah Barracuda.”
The legacy of Geraldine Ferraro was supposed to be that no one would ever go on a blind date with history again. But that crazy maverick and gambler McCain does it, and conservatives and evangelicals rally around him in admiration of his refreshingly cynical choice of Sarah, an evangelical Protestant and anti-abortion crusader who became a hero when she decided to have her baby, who has Down syndrome, and when she urged schools to debate creationism as well as that stuffy old evolution thing.
Hello everyone. First up, Obama has a new ad attacking McCain on energy. I could have sworn I saw this ad on TV last night. McCain has been in Washington for a little over 25 years, the ad says, but he voted against exploring alternative energy sources. He's part of the problem, not the solution.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHMbwk6CDLE&eurl=http://thepage.time.com/2008/08/05/obamas-up-with-second-negative-spot-on-energy/
Essence Magazine profiles both Barack and Michelle in the most recent issue. Here's an excerpt from Barack:
Bounding through the throng with a lanky ease, the junior senator from Illinois smiles broadly, kisses babies and basks in the praise of adoring strangers. “Everywhere we go we’ve been seeing these terrific crowds,” he exults to the lunchtime onlookers, pushing his voice past the limitations of a mild head cold. “Twenty thousand people show up in Atlanta. Twenty thousand people in Austin, Texas. We had 15,000 in Oakland. “People have asked me what accounts for all this,” he continues. “I would love to take all the credit myself and say it’s because I’m just so terrific. But I have to say it’s not about me. The reason people are coming out is they are burning with a want and a desire for change.”
And here's Michelle:
On her husband:“The authenticity you see is real, and that’s why I fell in love with him.”
The NY Times is reporting that the GOP is dropping in voter registration in many states this year.
Well before Senators Barack Obama and John McCain rose to the top of their parties, a partisan shift was under way at the local and state level. For more than three years starting in 2005, there has been a reduction in the number of voters who register with the Republican Party and a rise among voters who affiliate with Democrats and, almost as often, with no party at all.While the implications of the changing landscape for Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain are far from clear, voting experts say the registration numbers may signal the beginning of a move away from Republicans that could affect local, state and national politics over several election cycles. Already, there has been a sharp reversal for Republicans in many statehouses and governors’ mansions.In several states, including the traditional battlegrounds of Nevada and Iowa, Democrats have surprised their own party officials with significant gains in registration. In both of those states, there are now more registered Democrats than Republicans, a flip from 2004. No states have switched to the Republicans over the same period, according to data from 26 of the 29 states in which voters register by party. (Three of the states did not have complete data.)
Well before Senators Barack Obama and John McCain rose to the top of their parties, a partisan shift was under way at the local and state level. For more than three years starting in 2005, there has been a reduction in the number of voters who register with the Republican Party and a rise among voters who affiliate with Democrats and, almost as often, with no party at all.
While the implications of the changing landscape for Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain are far from clear, voting experts say the registration numbers may signal the beginning of a move away from Republicans that could affect local, state and national politics over several election cycles. Already, there has been a sharp reversal for Republicans in many statehouses and governors’ mansions.
In several states, including the traditional battlegrounds of Nevada and Iowa, Democrats have surprised their own party officials with significant gains in registration. In both of those states, there are now more registered Democrats than Republicans, a flip from 2004. No states have switched to the Republicans over the same period, according to data from 26 of the 29 states in which voters register by party. (Three of the states did not have complete data.)
Maureen Dowd has an interesting opinion piece on Obama and Hillary supporters:
Obama met for an hour Tuesday with three dozen top Hillaryites at a hotel here, seeking their endorsement and beguiling their begrudging. He opened the session by saying that he knew there had been frustration about what they saw as sexism during the primary. The Los Angeles Times reported that Hillary die-hards want to enshrine a whine in the Democratic platform about how the primaries “exposed pervasive gender bias in the media” and call on party leaders to take “immediate and public steps” to denounce any perceived bias in the future. That is one nutty idea.Perhaps it is because feminists are still so busy cataloging past slights to Hillary that they have failed to mount a vivid defense of Michelle Obama, who has taken over from Hillary as the one conservatives like to paint as a harridan.
Obama met for an hour Tuesday with three dozen top Hillaryites at a hotel here, seeking their endorsement and beguiling their begrudging. He opened the session by saying that he knew there had been frustration about what they saw as sexism during the primary.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Hillary die-hards want to enshrine a whine in the Democratic platform about how the primaries “exposed pervasive gender bias in the media” and call on party leaders to take “immediate and public steps” to denounce any perceived bias in the future. That is one nutty idea.
Perhaps it is because feminists are still so busy cataloging past slights to Hillary that they have failed to mount a vivid defense of Michelle Obama, who has taken over from Hillary as the one conservatives like to paint as a harridan.
Finally, here are some excerpts from Obama's energy town hall this morning in Youngstown, Ohio.
"And while Senator McCain’s plan won’t save you at the pump anytime soon, it sure has done a lot to raise campaign dollars. Senator McCain raised more than one million dollars from the oil industry just last month, most of which came after he announced his plan for offshore drilling to a room full of cheering oil executives."
That was the title of a story by Judy Rudoren, née Wilgoren, published in the NY Times on June 21, 2004. In it she breaks down the cost of certain items of Kerry's Father's Day weekend in 2004. She mentions the cost of some scallops at a restaurant ($36); the cost of kite-surfing equipment ($2,500); the size of his campaign plane, etc. To what end, you say. She compares Kerry's Nantucket weekend with Bush's Crawford TX ranch:
"It was reminiscent of President Bill Clinton's vacations in borrowed houses on nearby Martha's Vineyard, and a sharp contrast to President Bush's frequent brush-clearing forays on his sweltering ranch in Crawford, Tex."
This from a writer who grew up in a tony suburb of Boston, attended Yale, and worked in a cushy big-city newspaper job in Chicago. and who I'm sure lives in a house worth more than the 1.4 mil mentioned as the average price of a house in Nantucket. Who has to be so different that she combined her and her husband's surnames, and whom, I have no doubt, shops at Whole Foods.
Today, almost four years later, another NY Times writer puts out a piece on how the Democratic candidate is rich and belongs to the moneyed class. Maureen Dowd, who I'm certain, is no stranger to Louis Vuitton and Prada, and lives in a multi-million dollar Georgetown townhome in DC, wrote what amounts to a 'why-doesn't-Obama-eat-Velveeta-and-Hamburger-Helper-like-those-Rubes-in-the-sticks-do' piece. Here's the passage that is most representative of this offense:
"At Joe’s Junction gas station in Indianapolis, Obama did his best to shoo away the pesky elitist label. Accused by an Indianapolis reporter of looking like a GQ cover, he said he has only four pairs of shoes and buys 'five of the same suit and then I patch them up and wear them repeatedly.' But his campaign refused to reveal the brand, presumably because it’s not J. C. Penney."
What is it with these well-off Ivy League educated reporters and labeling Democrats who've been successful in life as elitist? Where do they get off exactly? Thanks Ms. I-plunk-down-5-large-for-a-designer-dress Dowd, for letting us know that Barak doesn't shop at JCPenny (I think she meant Wal-Mart, as even JCPenny is getting too expensive for most Americans).
I should hope Barack doesn't shop at JCPenny. Here you have, in Barack, a guy who grew up in a single-parent household, who’s mother was on food stamps at one point, and who’s become a successful upper-middle class individual, who's written a couple of best-selling books, and you're telling me Ms. I-own-a-luxury-townhouse-in-the-most-expensive-neighborhood-in-DC Dowd, that he's not allowed to wear an expensive suit. Isn’t he the very embodiment of the American dream, the kind of person who most Americans hope their own children become. I wonder if Ms Dowd even knows how to spell foreclosure, something many Americans are acquainting themselves with.
What do her working-class-Irish-by-proxy roots tell her about that? "But if they don't have homes, where will they park their Priuses, which I'm sure every working-class American owns."
Yet she doesn't mention how McCain, an Admiral's son, got into the Naval Academy, or that his wife is very rich, and that he doesn't exactly wear JCPenny suits either. No doubt she's waiting until the nomination is over so she can write her McCain hagiography, and how he's all salt-of-the-Earth.
What is it with these people. You'd think they, of all people, would be backing the progressive candidate. But I guess these reporters are rich snobs first, and Liberals second, and really they're financially better off under Republicans anyway, am I right.
I've 'invested' another donation to the campaign. This one has a more unusual 'payoff' other than to help get Barack elected - a chance for dinner with him and 3 other supporters. This serves several purposes: Keeps him connected with us "everyday people," lets us have a likely once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend some time (not to mention shaing a meal) with the next President of the USA, and acts as a darn good incentive to toss an extra donation into the pot for the greater good of the campaign.
Assuming I should be so lucky as to get an invite, if we can also get Maureen Dowd to cover the event- I'd be honored to meet two extraordinary people at one time. Of course, that's the candidate and the columnist. The really stupendous people would be my fellow other "everyday people," the heart and soul of this country!
This offering is good through 31 March 2008
To make a donation go here: https://donate.barackobama.com/dinner
Food for thought, for sure! With luck, maybe I'll meet you there! If not, maybe I'll get six numbers for the MegaMillions. In either case, hey, you never know...
Op-Ed Columnist
Haunting Obama’s Dreams
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 23, 2008
WASHINGTON
Maureen Dowd
It’s impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she’ll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama’s wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams.
“It’s like one of those movies where you think you know the end, but then you watch with your fingers over your eyes,” said one leading Democrat.
Hillary got a boost from the wackadoodle Jeremiah Wright. As a top pol noted, the Reverend turned Obama — in the minds of some working-class and crossover white voters — from “a Harvard law graduate into a South Side Black Panther.”
Obama blunted the ugliness of Wright’s YouTube “greatest hits” with his elegant and bold speech on race. But how will he get the genie back into the bottle?
Pressed about race on a Philly radio sports show, where he wanted to talk basketball, he called his grandmother “a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, well there’s a reaction that’s in our experiences that won’t go away and can sometimes come out in the wrong way.”
Obama might be right, but he should stay away from the phrase “typical white person” because typically white people don’t like to be reminded of their prejudices. It also undermines Obama’s feel-good appeal in which whites are allowed to transcend race because the candidate himself has transcended race.
Even swaddled in flags, Obama is vulnerable on the issue of patriotism. He’s right that you don’t have to wear a flag pin to be patriotic, and that Republicans have coarsely exploited patriotism for ideological ends while failing to do truly patriotic things, like giving our troops the right armor and the proper care at Walter Reed.
But Republicans are salivating over Reverend Wright’s “God damn America” imprecation and his post-9/11 “America’s chickens coming home to roost” crack, combined with Michelle Obama’s aggrieved line about belatedly feeling really proud of her country.
On Friday in Charlotte, N.C., Bill Clinton, the man who once thanked an R.O.T.C. recruiter “for saving me from the draft” during Vietnam, sounded like Sean Hannity without the finesse.
Extolling John McCain as “an honorable man,” and talking about McCain’s friendship with his wife, the former president told veterans: “I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country. And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.”
Some people consider the Clintons to be the “stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.” Tony McPeak, a former Air Force chief of staff and an Obama adviser, accused Hillary’s hatchet husband of McCarthyism.
After the Hillary camp lost — and trashed — Bill Richardson and was outmaneuvered by the Obama forces on mulligans in Michigan and Florida, Hillary’s hopes dwindled down to the superdelegates.
If Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi are the dealmakers, it won’t take Hercule Poirot to figure out who had knives out for Hillary in this “Murder on the Orient Express.”
Carter, who felt he was not treated with a lot of respect by the Clintons when they were in the White House, favors Obama.
“The Clintons will be there when they need you,” said a Carter friend.
Al Gore blames Bill Clinton’s trysts with Monica for losing him the White House. He resented sharing the vice presidency with Hillary and sharing the donors and attention with her when she ran for Senate as he ran for president.
“There’s no love between him and Hillary,” said one former Clintonista. “It was like Mitterrand with his wife and girlfriend. They were always competing for the affection of the big guy.”
Like Carter and Gore, Nancy Pelosi was appalled by Bill’s escapades with Monica. And, as The Times’s Carl Hulse wrote, the Speaker has been viewed as “putting her thumb on the scale for Mr. Obama” in recent weeks. As a leading China basher, the San Francisco pol tangled bitterly with President Clinton over his pursuit of a free-trade agreement with China, once charging him with papering over China’s horrible record on human rights. And she has been put off by the abrasive ways of some top Hillary people.
If Hillary’s fate falls into the hands of Jimmy, Al and Nancy, the Clinton chickens may come home to roost.
GREENVILLE, S.C.
If Bill Clinton has to trash his legacy to protect his legacy, so be it. If he has to put a dagger through the heart of hope to give Hillary hope, so be it.
If he has to preside in this state as the former first black president stopping the would-be first black president, so be it.
The Clintons — or “the 2-headed monster,” as the The New York Post dubbed the tag team that clawed out wins in New Hampshire and Nevada — always go where they need to go, no matter the collateral damage. Even if the damage is to themselves and their party.
Bill’s transition from elder statesman, leader of his party and bipartisan ambassador to ward heeler and hatchet man has been seamless — and seamy.
After Bill’s success trolling the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, Hillary handed off South Carolina and flew to California and other Super Tuesday states. The Big Dog relished playing the candidate again, wearing a Technicolor orange tie and sweeping across the state with the mute Chelsea.
He tried to convey the impression that they were running against The Man, and with classic Clintonian self-pity, grumbled that Barack Obama had all the advantages.
When he was asked yesterday if he would feel bad standing in the way of the first black president, he said no. “I’m not standing in his way,” he said. “I think Hillary would be a better president” who’s “ready to do the job on the first day.” He added: “No one has a right to be president, including Hillary. Keep in mind, in the last two primaries, we ran as an underdog.” He rewrote the facts, saying that “no one thought she could win” in New Hampshire, even though she originally had had a substantial lead.
He said of Obama: “I hope I get a chance to vote for him some day.” And that day, of course, would be after Hillary’s eight years; it’s her turn now because Bill owes her. “I think it would be just as much a change, and some people think more, to have the first woman president as to have the first African-American president,” he said.
Bad Bill had been roughing up Obama so much that Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina suggested that he might want to “chill.” On a conference call with reporters yesterday, the former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a national co-chairman of the Obama campaign, tut-tutted that the “incredible distortions” of the political beast were “not keeping with the image of a former president.”
Jonathan Alter reported in Newsweek that Senator Edward Kennedy and Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman and former Clinton aide, have heatedly told Bill “that he needs to change his tone and stop attacking Senator Barack Obama.”
In the Myrtle Beach debate Monday night, Obama was fed up with being double-teamed by the Clintons. He finally used attack lines that his strategists had urged him to use against Hillary for months. “It was as though all the e-mails were backed up,” said one.
When Hillary tried once more to take Obama’s remarks about Ronald Reagan out of context, making it seem as though Obama had praised Reagan’s policies, he turned sarcastic about getting two distortionists for the price of one.
“I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes,” he snapped at Hillary, obviously entrapped and psyched-out by the Clinton duo.
On a conference call with reporters yesterday morning, Obama did not back off from his more aggressive, if defensive, stance. The Clintons, he said “spent the last month attacking me in ways that are not accurate. At some point, it’s important for me to answer.” Recalling that Hillary had called mixing it up the “fun” part of politics, he said: “I don’t think it’s the fun part to fudge the truth.”
Bill has merged with his wife totally now, talking about “we” and “us.” “I never did anything major without discussing it with her,” he told a crowd here. “We’ve been having this conversation since we first met in 1971, and I don’t think we’ll stop now.” He suggested as First Lad that “I can help to sell the domestic program.”
It’s odd that the first woman with a shot at becoming president is so openly dependent on her husband to drag her over the finish line. She handed over South Carolina to him, knowing that her support here is largely derivative.
At the Greenville event, Bill brought up Obama’s joking reference to him in the debate, about how Obama would have to see whether Bill was a good dancer before deciding whether he was the first black president.
Bill, naturally, turned it into a competition. “I would be willing to engage in a dancing competition with him, even though he’s much younger and thinner than I am,” he said. “If I’m going to get in one of these brother contests,” he added, “at least I should be entitled to an age allowance.”
He said, “I kind of like seeing Barack and Hillary fighting.”
“How great is this?” he said. “Neither of them has to be a little wind-up doll who’s supposed to behave in a certain way. They’re real people, flesh and blood people. They have differences.”
And if he has anything to say about it, and he will, they’ll be fighting till the last dog dies.
What do you think of this? Two writers I admire have recently made the same observation about Senator Obama. In a recent review of Arthur Schlesinger's memoirs, Maureen Dowd said:
But [Adlai] Stevenson is stuck on the same mental pedestal that Barack Obama is on -- ''split between his desire to win and his desire to live up to the noble image of himself.''
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEFD71139F934A35753C1A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2
Then in an excellent essay on Al Gore's "The Assault on Reason," Michael Tomasky observed:
The sad irony of the 2000 debacle is not only that we've been stuck with George W. Bush, frightful as that is, but also that Gore, even with his limitations, could have been a great president. . . . But his ambivalence about electoral politics . . . seemingly prevented him from having the gusto to finish Bush off as he should have. (One senses a touch of a similar ambivalence in Obama, though not in Edwards and certainly not in Hillary Clinton.)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20593
Obama has rightfully asked to raise the bar on political discourse. So, why didn't Obama privately ask Geffen to apologize? And if Geffen refuses to apologize, why is Obama not willing to call him out on it?
I look forward to contributing some cheers and other pure support, but as a true supporter, I also plan to contribute costructive criticism. I hope that the campaign staff and other supporters appreciate this. It's going to be a long and grueling campaign, and we all have to live and learn if we are going to succeed.
