Month: January 2008

“He’s Already Over”

Hewitt on Huckabee. You couldn’t make it up:

I’ll be listening to Rush, Sean, Laura and the rest (my friend Michael Medved has thrown in with McCain) and reading the blogs to see if surrender has set in, or whether the coalition that Reagan built is worth fighting for.

It’s the MSM’s fault, of course. But fear not:

The hundreds-of-thousands of individual donors to Romney, Giuliani, and Thompson haven’t agreed to the media’s rules for wresting the party away from them, and the voters of 1994, 2000 and 2004 certainly haven’t.

Really, most enjoyable.

Obama’s Disarming Of The Right

A very smart post from Steven Teles:

I think it’s probably the case that Obama is, in fact, the candidate that Republicans least want to run against. In fact, I think that it’s actually the case that where Obama is concerned, conservatives lack much of the gut-level animus that drives them to really hate HRC, Kerry and Gore. All of these Dems represented what conservatives most hate about liberals–they all represent a liberal style (as apart from substance) that looks down on and dismisses conservatives.

Obama, by contrast, comes from a generation of folks who, while certainly not conservative, have actually engaged seriously with them. Obama taught at U. of Chicago law school, and so he knows that conservatives are driven by a respectable set of ideas. He disagrees with those ideas, but I sense that he knows at least some conservatives who he believes are respectable interlocutors. And I think conservatives know this.

Watching Fox Last Night

A reader writes:

It was hilarious. They had no idea what to do. Rush Limbaugh was on and he was clearly annoyed that the Republicans did not vote the way that the establishment wanted. It was watching the machine Rove built begin to crumble. They didn’t know what to do about Huckabee, they didn’t know what to do about Paul, and they really didn’t know what to do about the fact that they might not have Hillary to attack come November. It was beautiful.

I did watch Fox. The one thing that kept striking me was that almost every single woman on the channel has been made to look like a Barbie doll (just not as articulate); and almost every man is old and white.

The Press Will Turn

Publius is right about the concept, but wrong about the timing:

The media loathes Clinton – and the feeling is mutual. The press has been waiting for this fall from grace moment, and now they have it. And so they’ll pound on her for the next few days, but then they’ll have it out of their system and her coverage might improve. At the least, they’ll want to keep the horse race going.

But it will be an Obama-love fest for a while. The only way for Clinton to survive the pro-Obama wave is to become the grinch. She has to be careful not to go too negative against Obama, but she can hardly leave him alone either. It’s a much tougher road than some seem to think.

Finally, A Midwesterner

After four terms of Southerners in the White House, maybe this is what we’re looking for:

When you listen to Obama, the substance of thinking, the cadence of his reasoning, his unassuming acceptance of people, you hear a Midwesterner.

"What I see in Iowa are a lot the qualities I love in Illinois," Obama told me in an interview. "I think there’s a truth to the idea that there’s a Midwestern sensibility and that people don’t like a lot of fuss, don’t like a lot of pretense, and I think are much more likely to think about things pragmatically and how do you get the job done as opposed to having a lot of ideology driving decision-making. And I think that’s what America needs right now."