Category: The Dish

He sees what he wants to see.

A disgusted liberal pro-choicer switches from Clinton to Obama.

Fight back, Barack. This is a start.

It’s about honesty:

The [Clintons’] ad takes one line from an Obama interview — "The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years" — and juxtaposes it with GOP policies that Obama has never advocated.

"Really?" a voice-over says. "Aren’t those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we’re in today? Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street. Running up a $9 trillion debt. Refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis. Are those the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about?"

The Clinton campaign argued that it was simply quoting Obama. But in the original context, Obama was describing the dominance of Republican ideas in the 1980s and 1990s, without saying he supported them, and asserting that those ideas are of no use today.

Yesterday was revealing for me. The blog had a post linked on AOL’s Welcome screen page – and I received hundreds of emails from people I don’t normally read and who often don’t read blogs that are as consumed with daily politics as the Dish. And what I heard overwhelmingly was a very simple message: We remember the 1990s fondly; we associate them with the Clinton family; it would be great to restore the family who last took care of us so well.

This very basic association – especially among loyal, working-class and middle class Democrats – is what the Clintons are appealing to. What they convey is simple competence and practicality. And they are definitely, wittingly or not, appealing to a more primitive style of dynastic politics, more associated with places like Pakistan and Argentina than the US. They figured that this was all they’d need. It’s their party, after all.

The Obama phenomenon rattled them, and their strategy is to quash it, by any means and at any cost. They know that they do not need to win so much as they need to make Obama lose. That’s the game-plan. The same emailers seemed unusually convinced that Obama was a closet Muslim and that a black man could never be elected in America. The most depressing tendencies from the right and from the left.

The more I witness this campaign, the clearer it is to me that it is not only important that Obama and McCain now win; it is a moral and political imperative that the Clintons lose.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

The chart above shows the remarkable polling similarities in John McCain’s recent primary successes. After a slow decline, at some point late last year, voters sensed he really was their best bet on character, policies and viability. And so the battle now is really one between the worst base instincts of both parties and their most promising candidates for the general election. It’s about the defensive figures of the past defending their turf and power against their own parties redefining themselves for the center. I’m hoping McCain and Obama manage to defeat these forces of entropy. A McCain-Obama fight could be as tough as it would be civil and extremely helpful in providing a mandate for a course of action in Iraq. 

In fact, the stronger McCain gets, the clearer it is that he represents an opportunity to move past the bitter, angry elements in today’s GOP – elements that have made it very difficult to give a positive case for conservatism’s merits as a governing philosophy. On spending, immigration, climate change and torture, he is the reform candidate – a chance to turn the page on the unconservative spending insanity, climate denialism and detainee indecency that have scarred conservatism’s reputation under Bush and Cheney and Gonzales And Yoo.

No, I don’t agree with McCain on everything. But if it’s a choice between him and Limbaugh, there really is no contest. McCain makes all the right people on the right angry. McCain represents a chance to remake the GOP on reformist lines, just as Obama represents a chance for the Democrats to escape the sleaze and cynicism of the Clintons. Maybe the Republicans, unlike, it appears, the Democrats, have the courage to choose the future over the past, to break a dynasty rather than entrench one. I sure hope they do.

"I didn’t think that there was a way Democrats could fail to win the Presidency in 2008. But I underestimated us… Virtually the entire campaign against Obama has been smear and innuendo with a racial subtext.

It better stop, but I expect it won’t. It won’t stop because after Iowa it was decided that Obama could not be defeated fair and square. So fair and square went out the window. The result?

A Republican victory especially if McCain is the nominee and pledges to serve only one term," – M.J . Rosenberg, TPMCafe.

Artist Juan Francisco Casas uses a bic pen to create stunning, photo-realistic drawings.Think Chuck Close meets that kid in high school always doodling on his notebooks. Casa’s work is currently up at the Galeria Fernando Pradilla in Madrid.

More images after the jump.

Casa’s work is yet more proof that Bic is, indeed, the perfect ballpoint pen. Other creative uses for Bics here. 

An NPR report on Latino voting – especially in the South.

And about time. From Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay on the decline of reading:

Over the years, books kept in print may earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for their publisher and author. A few steady earners, even though the annual earnings are in what is now dismissively called “the midlist,” can keep publishers in business for years, and even allow them to take a risk or two on new authors. If I were a publisher, I’d rather own J.R.R. Tolkien than J. K. Rowling.

But capitalists count weeks, not years. To get big quick money, the publisher must risk a multimillion-dollar advance on a hot author who’s supposed to provide this week’s bestseller. These millions—often a dead loss—come out of funds that used to go to pay normal advances to reliable midlist authors and the royalties on older books that kept selling. Many midlist authors have been dropped, many reliably selling books remaindered, in order to feed Moloch. Is that any way to run a business?

Hat Tip: Scott Esposito

Thomas Golianopoulos profiles Joel Osteen, leader of the biggest congregation in America:

“The reason [Osteen is] so popular is because of the spiritual infantilism of America. Not just spiritual, the infantilism of American culture,” [Ole] Anthony [president of the Trinty Foundation] says. “And he feeds the Paris Hilton, Britney Spears culture. It’s all me. Benefit me. What can I do for me? How can I feel better? What can I do about me? How you can get the best of your life? It’s all me-centered.”