Month: January 2008

Readers may have noticed that I have found myself slipping. I no longer refer to Clinton’s candidacy. I refer to the Clintons’ candidacy. This was always the case, of course. They have been professionally joined at the hip for their entire careers. Their marriage, among other things, is a power-move – for them both. But I never expected Bill to show his hand this crudely and this unpleasantly so soon. I’ll bet he didn’t either. But that’s how close Obama has come.

At least now we know what this race is about: Obama versus the Clintons. Both of them. Their dynasty. Their power. Their methods. Their character. And so the question becomes: does America really want a Restoration? And if Hillary is this beholden to Bill in the campaign, what will his role be in the White House? I’ve long hoped he’d be given a clear job, accountable to the president and the public. But that isn’t their style. When you re-elect royal families, you get their family dynamics as well. What we’re seeing now is a small glimpse of what we would be dealing with for at least four years.

They can still be stopped.

(Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty.)

I’m going home. Bainbridge pulls a Cartman on the GOP race. Joyner demurs.

I’m with McWhorter. Yeah: the Clintons are back to Inevitable again. But that could be a good thing for Obama. In this fast-changing race, there’s plenty of time for another plot development. Especially when we all see where this is looking to end, and so few people actually enthusiastically, in their hearts, want that.

Some readers open their eyes:

Just a very short note from an ex-Clintonite  to say that I finally get what you’ve been trying to tell us about the Clintons.  I see what they’ve been doing to undermine the Obama campaign. It reeks of Rove and the worst kind of machine politics. I can’t face the prospect of another four (or eight) years of what Bill Clinton insists on referring to as "we". That "we" lets me know all I need to know.

Another:

I am a registered Latino Democrat and have been reading your blog for years.  I have never really understood your animosity towards the Clintons and dismissed it as part of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that is out there…to some degree.  After watching what is taking place with our former president and reading some of the accounts of what occurred in Nevada, I understand.  It is unfortunate that in a drive for power and power ( there is no other word for it) these people whom I used to think were the leaders of the modern democratic movement, have been exposed for what they really are.  The anger that I felt yesterday is palpable and real.  I really want Barrack to win, as I believe that he can take this country where it needs to go.  However, I am finding myself not being able to vote for Hillary in the General if she wins the nomination this way.  I would actually vote for McCain (oh, my God) or Bloomberg.

There does not seem to be any shame in the Clinton camp.  At any level.

There is nothing that they would not say or do to get the nomination.  That to me reminds me of Willard "Mitt" Romney and his ability to try and be everything to everybody.  But  I am struck by how betrayed(?) I feel and how let down I feel by some of the people that I thought could do no wrong.  How could I not have seen it more clearly before?  As far as the former president, I am ashamed of his behavior and if I had a chance to tell him, I would do so.  He has turned himself from a respected elder statesman to a rabid attack dog no better than any of the Rove minions willing to do or say anything to have the ends justify the means.  It is a very dark day for me and I know that I am not the only democrat/progressive that is out there that feels this way.

Not totally fair comparison but here’s a video of Obama in the pulpit yesterday and Clinton last year.

Commenters on the Democratic race at TPM:

"I am coming to the grim realization that Billary will likely win the nomination (all the while laughing at myself for ever thinking that that was in doubt). I – (a lifelong liberal Democrat who luuurved Bill Clinton in the 1990s) am now relishing the thought of voting for McCain or, hopefully, Bloomberg in November. Like Larry David said, "Just for spite." (I do not vote for racebaiters as a matter of principle.)"

"I’m not sure if this a smart move. That kind of talk might hurt him with African-American voters in South Carolina. I can guarantee you Hillary will avoid using the word "gay" for the next week."

"Reagan loving Obama is such a hypocrite. Like as if he has any part of the Southern Black Experience."

"Obama featured anti-gay Donnie McClurkin in his gospel tour in South Carolina in the fall, but now he’s denouncing homophobia? Once again, Obama is all talk, no action."

This race is tearing the Democrats apart. But if that’s what it takes to put the Clintons back into the White House, they’ll manage.

Just who exactly is running for president again?

A fun blast from the past from P.J. O’Rourke. Money quote:

There could be a more concrete reason for Bill’s appeal to black voters. I felt as if I’d been at this gala before, forty or forty-five years ago. The women wore important hats and serious dresses. The men’s dinner jackets were shaped at the shoulders and nipped at the waists. Their dress shirts and bow ties were splendid in color and form. This was very different from going to, for instance, a political-wife-in-a-sack and bag-o-tuxedo event on Capitol Hill. But it was not very different from going to a party with a family full of harps. My uncle Mikey-Mike, my cousin Slats, my Aunt Bridget, and her husband, Louie, who once ran the local pinball rackets in Toledo, had more "flava," as they say today, than their egg-salad-sandwich-with-the-crusts-cut-off neighbors. Grandpa J.J. was one generation away from illiteracy and, I suspect, not as distant as that from running booze during Prohibition.

But by 1960 O’Rourkes had marched up the social stairs into the world of "some white Rotary Club." Like contemporary middle-class African-Americans, Irish-Americans had to find a palatable way to edge to the right. Casting ballots for Bill Clinton allowed blacks to vote Republican without throwing up.

An Atlantic archive classic from 1902 for MLK Day:

Slower of growth, and devoid altogether of the many brilliant qualities which his rival possessed, Lincoln nevertheless outreached him by the measure of two gifts which Douglas lacked,—the twin gifts of humor and of brooding melancholy. Bottomed by the one in homeliness, his character was by the other drawn upward to the height of human nobility and aspiration. His great capacity for pain, which but for his buffoonery would no doubt have made him mad, was the source of his rarest excellencies. Familiar with squalor and hospitable to vulgarity, his mind was yet tenanted by sorrow, a place of midnight wrestlings. In him, as never before in any other man, were high and low things mated, and awkwardness and ungainliness and uncouthness justified in their uses. At once coarser than his rival and infinitely more refined and gentle, he had mastered lessons which the other had never found the need of learning, or else had learned too readily and then dismissed. He had thoroughness for the other’s competence; insight into human nature and a vast sympathy for the others’ facile handling of men; a deep devotion to the right for the other’s loyalty to party platforms. The very core of his nature was truth, and he himself is reported to have said of Douglas that he cared less for the truth, than any other man he knew.