Month: May 2011

Yes, being the first black president probably helps:

"Centrist voters and the ones who decide elections are still fundamentally rooting for the guy," [former New Hampshire Republican Party chairman Fergus] Cullen said. "People who don't view politics in ideological terms give him the benefit of the doubt, and that is an incredible political asset to have."

But Independents still view him negatively. Nonetheless, Obama is six points ahead of Reagan at this point in his first term, and a jot above Clinton before Clinton ran a classic Mediscare election campaign.

Estavayer-le-lac, Switzerland, 10 am

“What Nixon did – and what Ailes does today in the age of Obama – is unravel and rewire one of the most powerful of human emotions: shame. He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilizes it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin’s politics of resentment. He’s the golden thread,” – Rick Perlstein.

Marie Diamond seizes on Palin's perfect timing:

Ironically, the same day Palin professed her love of carbon emissions, the International Energy Agency issued a dramatic announcement on the same subject: greenhouse-gas emissions increased by a record amount last year to the highest carbon output in history. The watchdog group reported that despite the recession, global carbon emissions rebounded in 2010 to their worst levels ever. One IEA official warned that the startling new numbers should serve as “another wake-up call.”

According to the IEA, a record 30.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere last year, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels. In light of these shocking numbers, experts now fear that it will be impossible to prevent a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius — which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change.”

(Photo by Flickr user Dave77459)

"Isn't hacking PBS' website like beating up the second weakest kid on the playground to prove 'you mean business'?" – a commenter at Huffington Post, on LulzSec's attack on the PBS website, because of a critical Frontline story on Wikileaks.

Bruce Bartlett focuses on the latest Republican gambit to balloon the debt.

An insight into the mindset of Roger Ailes. Rolling Stone also has a great slide-show on how the propaganda factory rolls out anti-Obama memes, disguised as news.

Beinart spies an opening:

Maybe I’m giving Palin too much credit, and the GOP not enough. Candidate Palin might perform so hideously in debates and interviews (if she took part in any) that even her ideological soul mates would turn away. Certainly, prominent Republicans will scream that she’s unelectable. But it’s worth remembering that candidates rightly called unelectable have won nominations in the past. The GOP nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964; Democrats nominated George McGovern in 1972.

They did so at moments when traditional party elites were being disempowered by a cadre of ideologically zealous activists, as the Tea Party is doing in the Republican Party today. Goldwater and McGovern were far more substantive than Palin, to be sure. But they won because they inspired passion, because their opponents were weak, and because their party wasn’t in a tactical mood. Could that happen again in 2012? If I were Sarah Palin, I’d want to find out.

McGinniss on the use and abuse of children as political pawns. If Palin wants to guard her children's privacy, as she says whenever anyone writes about them, why is she still putting them on display?

Shushannah Walshe struggles to keep up with the Magical Mystery Tour of Sarah Palin. And, glancing at CNN last night, it was a little sad to see John King, sitting there at Gettysburg, waiting for Superwoman to show up, only to find she had retired for the night at a nearby hotel. So get ready for more:

According to a source with knowledge of Palin’s thinking, the tour is a test of whether she can do it “her way,” which the source described as “nontraditional, low-cost, high-tech…. The key is to be totally unpredictable and always keep her rivals off-balance.”

After two days on the road, Palin now realizes a campaign “could be fun and exciting,” the source said, and she’s getting “more into the swing of things” as she tours and realizes “the press is not hostile to her.”

Yep: there's been some unscripted (largely friendly) journalist-on-politician action! Imagine that. And the trip – an open attempt to coopt American patriotism for herself (and highlight Obama's alleged "otherness") – is clearly the laying out of a campaign theme. What would that theme be? Three Words: America, Fuck Yeah. The implication: the president doesn't get it:

She also made a slight dig at President Obama for saying Monday at Arlington National Cemetery that his “most solemn responsibility as president [is] to serve as commander in chief of one of the finest fighting forces in the world.” Answering a question about Memorial Day, Palin said, “This is the greatest fighting force in the world, the U.S. military. It’s not just one of the greatest fighting forces. And I sure hope our president recognizes that. We’re not just one of many. We are the best.”

The only hint of a policy beyond trumpeting American supremacy? "Big tax cuts" – as we face record deficits. The obvious theme: she is championing a "Fundamental Restoration of America" versus what she will call a "Fundamental Transformation of America" under Obama. That's all she really needs for a purely cultural campaign to eject the anomalous black Muslim Kenyan from the White House. And the kind of dedication and fanaticism from the Palin base can be seen everywhere:

By 6:45 a.m., two adoring fans were already posing for pictures in front of the bus. The young women, who refused to give their names, said they had waited for three-and-a-half hours on Memorial Day at a battlefield monument where Palin was ultimately a no-show for several hundred fans.

Then there's a campaign against the press:

“They want, kind of, the conventional idea of, ‘we want a schedule, we want to follow you, we want you to bring us along with you’ … I want them to have to do a little bit of work on a tour like this, and that would include not necessarily telling them beforehand where every stop is going to be,” she told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren, who traveled with her on the bus on Monday. “The media can figure out where we’re going if they do their investigative work."

Notice that van Susteren is rightly not regarded as press. Fox will act as Palin's campaign media outreach, and van Susteren as her media alter ego. Facebook will serve as her p.r. The very reason the Beltway has dismissed her is the reason she may well do well against the tired bunch of white guys she's running against: she doesn't have the core traditional machinery to run a presidential campaign.

But you know what? In the end, all you need is votes.

(Former U.S. Vice presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin rides on a motorcycle before participating in 'Rolling Thunder' rally May 29, 2011 in Arlington, Virginia. Although not an official guest, former U.S. Vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin is expected to participate in today's motorcycle parade from the Pentagon to the National Mall. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)