Not easy to do:
Pay for everything in cash. Don’t use my regular cellphone, landline or e-mail account. Use an anonymizing service to mask my Web surfing. Stay away from government buildings and airports (too many surveillance cameras), and wear a hat and sunglasses to foil cameras I can’t avoid. Don’t use automatic toll lanes.
(Hat tip: kottke)
Clinton is ultimately responsible for putting her political fate in this fool’s [Mark PennClinton] hands. But this is a guy who has basically one big political win under his belt and whose record in seriously contested races, particularly Democratic primary races is one of almost constant defeats. Much of Clinton’s current predicament stems from Penn’s disastrous, glass-jaw ‘inevitability’ strategy and the mind-boggling decision not even to contest a slew of states where Obama racked up huge victories and many delegates.
Campaigns are about winning votes not making excuses. There are plenty of delegates still out there for Clinton to win — over a thousand left in the remaining primaries. But her efforts are being stymied by a campaign apparatus rooted in the belief that any new reality can be overturned by pretending it away.
This is quite a moment. Last October, the titan of the civil rights movement signed onto the Clinton machine. A month ago, he even had this to say about Barack Obama:
"He is no Martin Luther King Jr. I knew Martin Luther King. I knew Bobby Kennedy. I knew President Kennedy. You need more than speech-making. You need someone who is prepared to provide bold leadership."
This is what he’s saying now:
"In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit. Something is happening in America, and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap… I’ve been very impressed with the campaign of Senator Obama. He’s getting better and better every single day."
If Lewis’s original endorsement of the Clintons was a huge blow to Obama, then his reversal is an even bigger blow to the Clintons. The Obama campaign has now not only built a rival machine to the Clintons’, it is poaching loyalists. A figure like Lewis also brings, for good reason, a vast moral credibility with him. He gives permission – even encouragement – for other Clinton super-delegates to move to prevent a bruising and bitter fight through the spring. It’s a tipping point. I predict others will follow. And what both Clinton and Obama have to avoid is a polarizing racial divide.
Obama answers Clinton’s ad:
Barbara Ehrenreich on Clinton:
Clinton can put forth all the policy proposals she likes – and many of them are admirable ones – but anyone can see that she’s of the same generation and even one of the same families that got us into this checkmate situation in the first place. True, some people miss Bill, although the nostalgia was severely undercut by his anti-Obama rhetoric in South Carolina, or maybe they just miss the internet bubble he happened to preside over. But even more people find dynastic successions distasteful, especially when it’s a dynasty that produced so little by way of concrete improvements in our lives. Whatever she does, the semiotics of her campaign boils down to two words – "same old."
For Aaron, from our wedding ceremony:
"When a man meets the half that is his very own, then something wonderful happens; the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment. These are the people who finish out their lives together and still cannot say what it is they want from one another.
No one would think it is the intimacy of sex – that mere sex is the reason each lover takes so great and deep a joy in one another. It’s obvious that the soul of every lover longs for something else; his soul cannot say what it is, but like an oracle is has a sense of what it wants, and like an oracle it hides behind a riddle.
Suppose two lovers are lying together and Hephaestus stands over them and asks "What is it you human beings really want from each other?" And suppose they’re perplexed and he asks them again:
"Is this your heart’s desire, then, for the two of you to become parts of the same whole, as near as can be, and never to separate day or night? Because if that’s your desire, I’d like to weld you together and join you into something that is naturally whole, so that the two of you are made into one. Then the two of you would share one life, as long as you lived, because you would be one being, and, by the same token, when you died you would be one not two in heaven.
Look at your love, and see if this is what you desire: wouldn’t this be all the good fortune you could want?
No one who received this offer would turn it down. No one would find anything else more precious."
– The Speech of Aristophanes, The Symposium, Plato.
A reader writes:
Enough of this rah rah Obama crap. Yes, he’s a captivating speaker. He could potentially unite us, lead us, and revive our international reputation. We get it already. But of all the "pro-O" bloggers (and there are many), I was really hoping that you would be the one to really scrutinize his policy positions. What happens when when he turns to Plouffe on election night and says, like Redford in The Candidate, "What do we do now?" When are you going to stop cheerleading and start asking the tough questions? Get to it, man! The idol-worship is wearing thin!
I find this criticism bewildering. Obama has a host of policy positions, on taxes, healthcare, Iraq, Afghanistan, immigration, climate change, and this blog has mentioned or debated many of them. There seems to be a meme that because someone is inspiring, there has to be no substance. But they are not mutually exclusive categories. In the Democratic race, the only real substantive difference is healthcare mandates, which I’ve aired a great deal. And compared with McCain, Obama is a wonk.
The rhetoric is getting more toxic:
…what these people say about the zealotry behind the Obama campaign is not only alarming, but dangerous to our democracy. It is akin to emails I’ve received over the years from the anti-abortionist zealots on their own personal political war path. The insanely reactive, accept no compromise, unhinged religious fervor of a movement that was not only destructive to women, but to our politics. It is the same unbending group think that leads people off cliffs. That’s what I’m getting from Obama fans. It’s something that is unhealthy, even destructive to the Democratic party.
Then again, this is Taylor Marsh.
Not certain yet – but looking like a big endorsement, especially useful in Texas, could be imminent.
