Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

I just got back from visiting family in rural East Central Minnesota.

My parents had been very Republican in the 80s and 90s, even being active in the county Republican party. Disillusionment began to set in, though, in the late 90s and 2000s, and not just with the Republicans, but with the whole political system–"nothing changes no matter who’s in charge".

Having personally bought into this presidential campaign to the point where I contributed money to a campaign for the first time in my life (and I’m in my mid-40s) I wanted to at least get a sense of where they were and maybe urge them to a little less disillusionment.

When I told them I’d contributed to Obama, my mother volunteered that she expected she’d vote for McCain, but she really kinda hoped Obama would win. I said what I could to encourage this, that it really looks like he wants to change the way politics have been done over the last two decades. Then she also told me that her sister-in-law had dropped in for a visit a couple weeks ago and told her "I don’t care, I’m voting for Obama!".

These women are very white, in their 60s, raised poor, made it up to working-class with their husbands, and are all now retired. And now looking that they might help carry Minnesota for Obama in the fall.

The Jed Report makes the case. The Clintons will never go quietly or gracefully. They couldn’t even leave the White House without pardoning a few sleazebags and stealing a few gifts. I know the dangers of provoking the wave of victimhood that Clinton will invoke if anyone dares to point out that she has lost. But at some point the sheer classless, graceless sore-loser tackiness of the couple requires an end to the enabling.

Obama, one fears, is too much of a gentleman. You can’t always maintain class with people who have none.

… now Sulu. George Takei has been with his de facto husband for 21 years. Finally, they hope to marry soon. Does the right really want them to be forced into a divorce a few months later?

Another nugget from that Patrick Healy story. He describes Oregon as a "largely, white, affluent state", compared with Kentucky which is regarded as "working class". But when you look at the census data, the similarities are as striking as the differences. Male median income in Oregon: $41,536; Kentucky: $39,595; Female median income in Oregon: $32,390; Kentucky: $29,392. Oregon is slightly more prosperous than Kentucky, but its share of blue collar jobs is not far off Kentucky’s. These caricatures are part of the Clinton camp’s bid to keep a certain line in the public mind. They deserve complicating, not reinforcing.

Pathetic reporting:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is entering the Kentucky and Oregon primaries on Tuesday with one of the most pugnacious political messages of her campaign: That she is ahead in the national popular vote when all votes are counted, including from the unsanctioned primaries in Michigan and Florida and that party leaders who have a vote as super-delegates should reflect this level of appeal.

This argument is of a piece with Mrs. Clinton’s increasingly populist image, as a fighter on behalf of average people, but it is also a debatable claim: Most tallies of the national popular vote put Mr. Obama in the lead, especially when Michigan and Florida are not counted.

Isn’t there an empirical issue here? If by popular vote, you mean actual votes, the only way this claim is credible is if you count all Clinton’s votes in Florida and Michigan and count no votes in Michigan for Obama. It is not hard for the NYT to explain this and show that Clinton’s claim is fallacious – not "pugnacious." So why do they punt?

A reader writes:

Last night I was clicking back and forth between the Mets/Yankees game The Empire Strikes Back on cable.  I hadn’t watched Empire in a long time.  There’s a scene where Darth Vader tortures Han Solo (which occurs off-screen, but Han’s screams are audible).  Han is then dumped into the room with Lando and Pricess Leia, and the Imperial thug says contemptuously, "Don’t worry.  He won’t be permanently damaged."  So include Darth Vader — Darth fucking Vader — among the prestigious company we’re keeping with our sure-it-hurts-like-hell-but-if

-it-doesn’t-leave-a-mark-it

-ain’t-torture approach to interrogation.

The Nazis came up with this argument first. It took half a century before Bush and Cheney followed their lead.

 

In Britain, the anti-incumbent mood, intensified by Boris Johnson’s win in London, is benefiting the Tories. The parallels with the US are too close for GOP comfort. And Blair, like Bush, got out just in time. Interesting to see this description from former Times editor, William Rees Mogg:

Mr Cameron is himself much more convincing and a natural leader of the liberal centre.

The latest poll is here.

Now from K-Lo’s in-tray:

In Bob Shrum’s memoir, he writes about his experiences with McGovern in 1972 as they crisscrossed ¾ of the country, skipping over the South. Nearly four decades later, and nothing’s changed.

South Carolina doesn’t count? And North Carolina? And Mississippi? Virginia? All states Obama won handily and campaigned in. I could go on. Sometimes, these people just seem to be talking to themselves.

Mark Levin:

How many people showed up for Obama’s rally in Kentucky?  Oh, he didn’t campaign there?

George Packer documents the fall of conservatism. Here’s a taste:

…the polarization of America, which we now call the “culture wars,” has been dissipating for a long time. Because we can’t anticipate what ideas and language will dominate the next cycle of American politics, the previous era’s key words—“élite,” “mainstream,” “real,” “values,” “patriotic,” “snob,” “liberal”—seem as potent as ever. Indeed, they have shown up in the current campaign: North Carolina and Mississippi Republicans have produced ads linking local Democrats to Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor. The right-wing group Citizens United has said that it will run ads portraying Obama as yet another “limousine liberal.” But these are the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that’s brain-dead.

Among Republicans, there is no energy, no fresh thinking, no ability to capture the concerns and feelings of millions of people. In the past two months, Democratic targets of polarization attacks have won three special congressional elections, in solidly Republican districts in Illinois, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Political tactics have a way of outliving their ability to respond to the felt needs and aspirations of the electorate: Democrats continued to accuse Republicans of being like Herbert Hoover well into the nineteen-seventies; Republicans will no doubt accuse Democrats of being out of touch with real Americans long after George W. Bush retires to Crawford, Texas. But the 2006 and 2008 elections are the hinge on which America is entering a new political era.