Month: January 2008

A reader writes:

I live in Illinois and will be out of town on February 5th — Super Tuesday — when our state votes.  Our early voting opens tomorrow and I have been torn between voting for Obama or Clinton.  I have gone back and forth a number of times.  I watched Hillary’s MTP appearance today and was less than impressed.  Clinton was abrasive, defensive and brash.  What happened to the "human" Hillary we saw the day before New Hampshire?  More evidence it was all an act. 

She made a number of disingenuous explanations for her attacks on Obama, and I started seriously questioning her ability to be truthful.  After reading Robert Johnson’s veiled — and very tired — reference to Obama’s past drug use, I made up my mind.  I am voting for Obama.  He may not have Hillary’s experience, but he also does not have her constitutional inability to be honest, and for that I am thankful.

A reader writes:

I know you hate the Clintons, despite the fact that, all his failings aside, he was a good president who left the country in better shape than he found it. And he was able to achieve that despite the persecution (what else can you call the impeachment?) from the right. And Hilary does have her failings.

But you don’t put yourself in a good light when you write: "And has any former president, and titular head of his party, directly made fundraising pitches for one candidate before? The brazenness of it is classically Clinton."

I mean, come on. It’s his wife. Never before has an ex-president’s wife run for President. What do you expect him to do? Stay on the sidelines? And I don’t remember hearing similar criticism when #41 campaigned and fund-raised for his son.

Campaigning for your wife isn’t "brazen." And your characterization of it as such shows how you really have zero ability to be objective when it comes to anything related to the Clintons.

No. I’m not objective on the Clintons. But it’s an opinion gained from many years of observing their cynicism, shallowness, self-serving machinations and self-righteousness. And, no, I do not believe that Bill Clinton is doing what he’s doing out of marital duty either. Please. We all know what Bill Clinton believes he owes his wife as a wife. But what he owes her as a political device to regain power for the two of them is another matter. And the truth is: former president Bush never trashed his son’s rivals as Bill Clinton has Obama; and has kept an admirable arm’s length distance from his son’s administration. Bill Clinton is campaigning for himself as well right now, his own future power. He’ll be in a Clinton White House, ready from Day One. And if they get there for a third term, the marital psychodrama they inflicted on us for eight long years will be with us once again.

Worth checking in with Juan Cole for the customary skepticism:

The headlines are all saying that the law permits Baathists back into public life. It seems actually to demand that they be fired or retired on a pension, and any who are employed are excluded from sensitive ministries.

My attempt to make sense of it is here.

A reader writes:

Many of your recent posts on the Obama-Clinton contest are missing the forest for the trees. They are focusing on small annoyances from Camp Clinton. The big story of the last week is that the Clintons are trying to strip Obama of his rightful advantage on the Iraq war "judgment" issue and carry out the tactic from the Rove playbook that says, "Attack your opponent’s perceived strength." If that strength is merely "perceived" and not real, it’s a legitimate tactic, but Rove attacks even when the perception is justified, and the Clintons are now doing the same. 

Bill did this in New Hampshire when he contended that Obama was not really a consistent war opponent. Hillary put this tactic way out front on Meet the Press today. She said that Obama’s campaign is premised entirely on his October 2002 speech, and she said that Obama did nothing after that speech. This is just an out and out lie; there are no shades of gray here. Here are two examples of what Obama did after his October 2002 speech that I was able to find through a simple Nexis search:

On March 4, 2003, an AP story picked up by an Illinois newspaper, the Belleville News Democrat, states as follows: 

"Barack Obama  is criticizing the idea of war against Iraq and challenging his Democratic opponents in the U.S. Senate race to take a stand on the question….’What’s tempting is to take the path of least resistance and keep quiet on the issue, knowing that maybe in two or three or six months, at least the fighting will be over and you can see how it plays itself out,’ said Obama, a state senator from Chicago."

On March 17, 2003, the Chicago Sun Times reported this:

"Thousands of demonstrators packed Daley Center Plaza for a two- hour rally Sunday [two days before Bush issued his ultimatum against Saddam and four days before the invasion], then marched through downtown in Chicago’s largest protest to date against an Iraq  war. Crowd estimates from police and organizers ranged from 5,000 to 10,000….    State Sen. Barack Obama (D-Chicago) told the crowd, ‘It’s not too late’ to stop the war."

All of this is highly relevant, because Hillary’s account of her own actions in the October 2002 – March 20, 2003 period (March 20 being the day of the invasion) is that she voted, not to authorize war, but inspections, and that when the inspectors were there in March 2003, she, in her own mind, opposed the invasion and would not have carried it out had she been President.  A key point that has not been made is, if Hillary Clinton is telling the truth that she secretly opposed the invasion on March 20, 2003, then she cannot possibly claim the mantle of a leader, because she did not speak out against the prospect of invasion, even though she, due to her celebrity status, had one of the loudest megaphones to do so.

(Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty.)

I just watched the whole thing. I’d say this: the old pre-New Hampshire Clinton was back. I know I am a broken record, but bear with me. There were several moments when she could have said, even in a small way, that she misjudged the Iraq war. She could have conceded that, in fact, Obama’s judgment was actually better than hers at the outset. Heck, many of us have been able to say such a thing, and in the end, we take our lumps but move on. But she simply cannot.

If you want yet another president who cannot say he or she made a mistake, who can never cop to errors, and who uses everything as a political tool against his or her opponents, you have your candidate. And she is ready on Day One. Oh, so ready.

They can’t help themselves. Here’s Clinton surrogate Robert Johnson:

"I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won’t say what he was doing but he said it in his book."

I guess they’ve been told not to use the "cocaine" word any longer, but code will work just as well.

"Rhythmically, it’s quite alluring. It can make anything, even, for example, a simple chair, seem magnificent. Why vote for someone who says: ‘See that chair. You can sit on it’ when you can have someone like Obama say: ‘This chair can take your weight. This chair can hold your buttocks, 15 inches in the air. This chair, this wooden chair, can support the ass of the white man or the crack of the black man, take the downward pressure of a Jewish girl’s behind or the butt of a Buddhist adolescent, it can provide comfort for Muslim buns or Mormon backsides, the withered rump of an unemployed man in Nevada struggling to get his kids through high school and needful of a place to sit and think, the plump can of a single mum in Florida desperately struggling to make ends meet but who can no longer face standing, this chair, made from wood felled from the tallest redwood in Chicago, this chair, if only we believed in it, could sustain America’s huddled arse,’" – Armando Iannucci, the Guardian.

Ed Helms explains it all for you:

The conventional wisdom is not to make too much of endorsements, and the CW is basically right. But Josh is also onto something when he notes how many serious, senior Democrats have chosen to back Obama in the wake of a Clinton come-back. Yes, they’re mainly from the conservative wing of the party, and from the more purple end of the blue states or in red states. And yes, I think many are just voicing a genuine desire for the Democrats to regain their soul again from the calculations of Penn and Blumenthal and McAuliffe. But they are also politicians, judging the impact of their decision. I think they believe that Obama has already shown he is the future of the Democratic party. And Clinton’s surprise come-back in New Hampshire is the exception to her eventual defeat, not the rule of her imminent victory. One good cry does not a campaign win. And some Democrats are looking to their party’s future, not a dynasty’s ambition.