Month: January 2008

Guess who he thinks did well:

Oliver Wendall Holmes [sic] once famously remarked about FDR that the president had a A "second-class intellect but a first-class temperament."

Tonight’s debate – by far the best of this long campaign – allowed Mitt Romney to display not only a first class temperament but also a first class intellect.

But, hey, he might be right this time. Josh Marshall:

8:37 PM … Mitt’s a big improvement tonight in as much as he is avoiding utter humiliation.

8:42PM … Mitt actually has a pretty good statement of his qualifications for the presidency, as a governor vs. a senator. If you set aside what a complete phony Mitt is it was really convincing.

"I find the manner in which they’ve been running their campaign sort of depressing, lately. It was interesting in the debate, Sen. Clinton saying ‘don’t feed the American people false hopes. Get a reality check, you know?’ I mean, you can picture JFK saying, ‘we can’t go to the moon, it’s a false hope. Let’s get a reality check.’ It’s not, sort of, I think, what our tradition has been," – Barack Obama.

A reader writes:

I’ve just read the 24-year old college grad who shouldn’t be prone to the moment.  As a peer of his, I’m 27, and as someone who works to create such "moments" (I’m a political media consultant) I also shouldn’t be prone to "the moment."  And yet, like your reader, I am filled with a feeling I have rarely felt in my 7 years in politics: hope. Real hope, not manufactured hope or a belief that hope will manifest itself "later."

Your reader wrote, "Why, then, do I get sucked in by Obama?" Why? Because deep down this is what we all want.  From the earliest days of elementary school American history we are taught of the American dream. Of how this great experiment in self-rule was built on the hopes and dreams of the founding generation. This country is their dream, a living dream, more so than any other country is the dream of their founders.

In kindergarten we dream of being astronauts, firemen, ballerinas, super heroes and, yes, presidents.  Dreaming is our national narrative, it is one of the most basic things that makes us human and not animal.  We yearn to dream with our leaders.

President Bush never seemed to dream, and drew his power from our fears instead of hopes.  His predecessor seemed to be a dreamer, but never asked us to dream.  Nor did Bush the first.  After 19 years – a lifetime for many first-time voters –  we want what our American history text books promised us: we want to dream.  That’s why we’re drawn to Obama.

Whenever I hear Obama speak the way he did in Boston in 2004, at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa or during his victory speech on caucus night I dream.

(Photos: Jim Reany and Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

One small sliver of hope from Huckabee’s rise: many conservatives in the media may finally begin to see the perils of fundamentalist politics for what they are. A reader drew my attention to yesterday’s WSJ editorial:

[Huckabee’s] innocence (or ignorance) on foreign policy, penchant for borrowing liberal economic attack lines, and even his rejection of Darwin’s theory of evolution deserve to be understood by voters before they make him their standard bearer.

Back on August 13, 1999, they had this to say in the wake of the Kansas School Board’s move to abolish the teaching of evolution:

We wish we could work up more than a little sympathy for those scientists — from the most eminent to the lowliest Bio I teacher — who feel their life’s work is being pushed over the cliff by the creationists now growing in strength in many states. But we don’t have much sympathy at all for them.

They, and the secularist fanatics who’ve supported these establishment-clause decisions, were foolish enough to think that a Supreme Court waving its wand could actually eliminate something as fundamental as religious faith from a place where people put their children six hours a day, five days a week.

If you want to read a take on why fundamentalism is conservatism’s nemesis, my book is now in paperback.

Stuttaford has been diagnosing it for a while. Henry Olsen expains Huckabee’s message thus:

We can be more statist without being more secular or pacifist.

Bush’s third term. And the end of American conservatism in its Goldwater manifestation.

How Obama praised and then buried it.

Two candidates have momentum in New Hampshire.

It’s a conclusion to a devastating attack on Edwards and Huckabee. And it’s why in many ways, I think an Obama victory would be the best thing to happen to the GOP in a long time:

Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee — an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic "fights" against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.

Ross aired the possibility last November. I sort of concurred. But at this point, it surely looks like a way to hold the GOP together, and offer a real contrast with a possible Obama movement on the other side. The key would be McCain’s agreement to one-term. Huckabee is then the heir apparent, poised for 2012 with more national seasoning, and can complete the task of turning the Republicans into socially conservative economic populists. Both men like the power of the federal government, bait corporations, and back the Iraq war almost unreservedly. It’s not my style of conservatism, but it is a logical next step to the past several years in Republicanism.

A boy stands near a wrecked house and shop at Burnt Forest on January 6, 2008 near Eldoret, Kenya. After days of ethnic unrest, many Kikuyu people still fear for their safety and are seeking shelter in churches and police stations. Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.