Month: January 2008

Really, you shouldn’t have:

I went to see a medley of Shakespeare scenes tonight rather than live-blogging. Oberon vs Titania. Lady MacBeth vs MacBeth. Richard III vs Lady Anne. When I watched the debate, it seemed weirdly familiar.

Mark Kleiman wants Hillary to deliver on a debate promise. Good luck. Here’s another clip:

Is Obama tough enough? Money quote:

Hillary can be relentless and like a sledgehammer delivering tendentious but probably effective attacks. But whatever you think of those attacks, Obama isn’t very good at defending himself. And that’s hard for me to ignore when thinking of him as a general election candidate.

On the other hand, Ambers:

Obama spent the first forty minutes of the debate defending policy. On the one hand, the more Obama debates policy, the less he has to argue that he has the substance to match Clinton. On that same hand, the debate was also helpful to Obama in that it gave him a chance to answer a month’s worth of charges from his opponents… charges he answered more or less effectively… certainly effective enough to the voter unfamiliar with the ins and outs of policy…

A passel of tough questions were posed, and he seemed to nail just about every one of them.

I fall in between. Obama did great, but he’s a cool character, with a wry sense of humor. He’s not made for brawling. And sometimes, you’ve got to brawl in politics. Stylistically, he’s a one-off. I like that about him.

A debate judgment from Jon Cohn. Clinton was pushing it.

Jennifer Rubin:

By the way, every Republican watching this must be thinking "Wow, I’m glad Hillary cried in NH." Obama is, for all his inexperience and lack of realism in foreign policy, a far more compelling candidate. When he says he could get a 60% share of the electorate for the Democrats I believe him. You go, girl!

I missed the event in real time, but I’ve been catching up with clips and rehashes on TV and online. All I can give is my impression of the various clips I have now seen. Two things stand out to me: the first is that finally, this race is out in the open. It’s between three people: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton. The Clintons attacked tonight with a vehemence that is usually reserved to candidates who are struggling. The nature of the attacks was also deeply partisan: the assault on Obama’s kind words for Reagan’s transformational presidency and the scorn for his ability to respect the ideas that have emerged from the right. This was an attempt to anathematize Obama with the core Democratic base. That’s now the Clintons’ central strategy: to rally their core voters against the pretender to their throne.

The second is that Clinton now automatically uses the first person plural. It’s not the Royal "we". It’s an empirical "we":

The facts are that he has said in the last week that he really liked the ideas of the Republicans over the last 10 to 15 years, and we can give you the exact quote. Now, I personally think they had ideas, but they were bad ideas. They were bad ideas for America. They were ideas like privatizing Social Security, like moving back from a balanced budget and a surplus to deficit and debt. And with respect to putting forth how one would pay for all of the programs that we’re proposing in this campaign, I will be more than happy, Barack, to get the information, because we have searched for it.

Yes, this "we" implies a team behind a candidacy. But it also reflects the unitary thinking of the biggest power-couple in America. Obama showed – in a way never before asked of a presidential candidate – that he could take on both a major rival and the last president of his party. To win, he has to take on and defeat them both. That’s a tall order.

But yes: he can.

War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Clinton Is Change.