Category: The Dish

The latest:

I stopped at the intersection of Lovers Lane and Greenville this afternoon, and immediately noticed people standing on each corner (and on a couple of the medians) holding Hillary Clinton signs. Another thing immediately apparent, especially because of the race and gender issues in this presidential election, was that each person holding a sign was black.

I rolled down the window to ask one of the men what group the sign-holders belonged to, and he told me Southern Fried Marketing. I asked if they supported Hillary Clinton for president, and he replied: "Paid for."

A reader points out that Harpers must have missed a line in scanning it. The final sentence has now been fixed – and makes more sense. Of course, it says something that when you don’t understand a piece of Buckley’s writing, you assume it was written opaquely in the first place.

The Clintons look as if they’ll win. Maybe if Obama had another week:

Obama tells African-American audiences to be better parents. You mean government can’t solve our problems? Money quote:

I spend my minute with Lois Roy, asking her what specifically she would like to see Barack Obama, if he is elected President, do for African-Americans.

‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘What needs doing, we got to do it ourselves. He just needs to be himself. Be a role model.’

To cite Reagan: We are the change.

Ambers unpacks his delegate math showing how very very difficult it will now be for the Clintons to claw back to victory.

Buried in the Atlantic’s archives is this interview with Garry Wills, author of Why I Am Catholic:

It’s our concrete experience of the local church that’s especially meaningful to us. There’s an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn’t something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don’t toe the line on abstract doctrine you can’t be part of the Church. But to a born Catholic, Catholicism means their parish, their priest, their fellow worshippers. It’s all very concrete. Papal directives usually seem kind of abstract and unimportant compared to that lived experience. […]

Catholics are living the faith of their shared commitment to the mystical body. Bringing the hierarchy into line with that is just a secondary step. And it’s bound to occur. I’m unhappy with the hierarchy, which is not the Church. It’s part of the Church—an important part, but it’s not the Church. People say the Church is out of touch. Well, it’s not out of touch! The Church is the people of God. It’s the hierarchy that’s out of touch with the people of God, and they’ve got to get back in touch. But that’s their problem.

Judah Grunstein:

The United States is now the thread that binds Iraq, and it is clear that a serious unraveling of the situation would occur were this thread suddenly to be pulled away.

In other words, instead of making it easier for us to leave Iraq, the Surge has made it more difficult. And if that doesn’t qualify a military tactic as a failure, I don’t know what does.

I’m not sure that the surge wasn’t in retrospect a deliberate attempt to make it all but impossible for the US to leave Iraq any time soon. And less out of a genuine security worry, than in order to save face for Bush and Cheney. But the whole gambit – and the underlying mission creep – leads to an obvious paradox of history:

As the glue that holds Iraq’s disparate parts together, the U.S. is now playing the role that Saddam Hussein formerly played in Iraq, and we’re playing it for the same reason that we were willing to tolerate Hussein for as long as we did: to contain Iran’s regional influence. What’s more, it’s a role that has once again led us to ally ourselves with some unsavory and unpredictable characters, all of whom have their own agendas that don’t always correspond to ours. And short of the improbable appearance of an Iraqi strongman in the the structural, functional (and moral) image of Saddam Hussein, it’s a role that only we can play.

Norwich, New York, 8.30 am.

Ross explains what he thinks is the risk of Obama:

[Obama] has the potential to do for the Democratic Party what Reagan did for the GOP in ’80 – to win a lopsided victory in which a slew of previously-wavering independents and politically-unformed twentysomethings end up branding themselves as Democrats for a generation. That’s the good news; the bad news is that if he doesn’t win a lopsided victory among independents and young voters – if the bloom comes off the rose or the glass jaw starts to crack – he has the potential to hemorrhage votes in key constituencies: among downscale voters; among seniors (where I suspect the "wouldn’t vote for an African-American" constituency is concentrated); among hawkish and extremely pro-Israel Dems; and even among white women. Which is to say, he could win in a walk, or lose thanks to heavy defections from groups that would have trended Democratic had Hillary been the nominee.

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that the more Obama campaigns, the more he seems to dispel these reservoirs of doubt. And I think the over-arching argument for an Obama presidency swamps these micro-issues. This is not a Mark Penn election.

There’s only one portrait extant – but computers do the rest.