Month: January 2008

Fallows gives some institutional history behind the move. The NYT has a piece today on the Atlantic.com’s growing traffic.

Hilzoy:

We know about waterboarding. We know a lot of things. Apparently, policies condoning those things are OK with Clinton, since she says that whether or not she needs to change our policies depends on all those other, unknown interrogation techniques, not on the knowledge we already have.

If this is standing up forthrightly for Democratic values, then count me out.

Forget Democratic values. How about American values?

A reader writes:

I don’t know if you get any counter-emails, but count me as someone who hasn’t seen much  substance in any of the recent charges against candidate Clinton or spouse Clinton.  They all fall into one of two categories: tendentious-to-invented, and sour grapes. Clinton obviously knows how to run an American political campaign, whereas Obama doesn’t…which is hardly surprising, since he’s never had to, above the state senate level. There’s no shame in that, and it can certainly be spun as a point of moral superiority, but in the meantime he’s going to lose some primaries and caucuses.

Obama, in the end, is shaping up to be a fantastic candidate for people interested in “politics” in an abstract sense, whereas Clinton is scoring on either side of that concept: the daily grind of winning elections, and the daily grind (post-election) of trying to get good outcomes for people via the political system.  The middle is a super-noble place to be, but in an Olympian sense that requires a special and sustained set of circumstances to get you elected.  Clinton is the ideal foil for Obama (it’s hard to imagine he would have run against any other front-runner), and if he can’t kick her posterior up and down the length and breadth of the country, he can’t kick anyone.

Ambinder on the lessons of the Dem race so far. Ruffini concurs.

Paul Starr worries about both Obama’s and Clinton’s prospects up against McCain. I think McCain would beat Clinton. But the Democrats could always try this tack.

Fred Barnes outlines the Billary "buddy system" dynamic here. Here’s Obama’s attempt to respond while trying not to become the politician he doesn’t want to be:

Larison gets mean. Dreher piles on. I can’t imagine a post-campaign Romney taking on a big issue like global warming and changing the global dialogue. Gore is a blowhard and a little plastic. But he has convictions.

Pete Abel makes a good deal of sense to me:

1. McCain raises the ire of the contemporary Republican establishment because he rejects their meaner instincts. As I’ve written before, McCain decries torture while the Establishment excuses it. He fights pork-barrel spending while they enable it. He calls for policies to combat global warming while they deny it. He seeks reasonable compromises on immigration policy while they stoke fear and prejudice.

2. McCain represents for Republicans what Obama represents for Democrats: a meaningful step away from the last 15-plus years. I’m not saying either man will revolutionize partisan politics as we know it, but both promise (at a minimum) evolutionary progress toward a different America. And if we truly believe country is more important than party, then we owe it to ourselves to boost the two candidates who (among all their peers) represent the best hope for moving us in a post-partisan direction, regardless of our individual party loyalties.

Will this be Huckabee’s legacy in this campaign?

The Atlanta mayor takes on Bill Clinton.