Category: The Dish

Clinton pitches herself as the practical, working class, base Democrat candidate. Obama needs to do more of the same: more specifics, more policy, ore beer-track focus. He has the others. His poetry needs more campaign trail prose. And more door-to-door engagement with regular Democrats.

A really original and insightful column by Chris Caldwell in the FT on the melodrama of Clinton’s very public, and very scripted emotional "breakdown" before the NH primary:

The recent histrionics bring to mind the closing days of the Italian campaign of 2006, when Mr Berlusconi ruminated on his rapport with his nation’s telephone sex workers and stormed into a meeting of Confindustria to denounce the assembled businessmen for having “skeletons in their closet”. Mr Berlusconi’s 11th-hour antics brought him a political comeback as spectacular as Mrs Clinton’s on Tuesday. He narrowed a double-digit poll deficit to a few thousand votes and nearly won.

She’ll try anything. A blogger dissents here.

US Senator Barack Obama’s step-grandmother Sarah Obama stands in her house on January 12, 2008 in Kogelo, western Kenya. Barack Hussein Obama, father of US presidential candidate hopeful Obama, was born and raised in Kogelo. He died in a car accident in 1982. Senator Barack Obama’s parents separated when he was young. By Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.

Nebraska’s Ben Nelson is the latest to endorse. Kos compares Clinton’s and Obama’s endorsers here.

Some dissents from this dissent:

Perhaps Obama simply recoiled at the quid pro quo implied by Roberts’ meeting with Bush on July 15 2005 – the same day he overturned the Hamdan verdict – not to mention all that had gone before. Most people would regard it as unethical for a judge to have a private meeting with a plaintiff during a hearing, but Roberts thought nothing of meeting with Cheney, Miers, Rove and Gonzales during the arguments and deliberations of Hamdan.

And another:

I’m a lawyer, an economic & foreign policy conservative/social liberal (is that a "pragmatic liberal" or "libertarian conservative"?), who would have voted against Roberts in the Senate. Unlike your dissenter, I have probably voted for Republicans and Democrats equally. Roberts’ credentials are stellar, but his equivocal, perhaps ambiguous, answers at the hearings combined with features of his career in private practice sent up red flags.

Those same credentials also gave him something of a free pass through the hearings. In the few instances where he was actually made to answer the hard questions, he revealed himself to be exactly what he is turning out to be: a pragmatic conservative radical closely aligned philosophically to Scalia, but with more finesse and discretion.  The "blue dogs" who joined with the Republicans are, for me, the ones who betrayed their principles in the name of political expediency. 

Obama was in a better position than most senators to see through Roberts’ facade of reasonableness and recognize the essentially radical judicial philosophy driving him.  I view his vote on Roberts as an imprimatur of his balanced outlook and philosphical integrity.  Roberts is no friend of individual liberities.  He is a statist of Cheneyian dimensions. History will be the arbiter, but my bet is that Obama’s vote will be vindicated over time.  In close cases Roberts will prove himself an ally of the unitary executive – as long as that executive shares his agenda; he will uphold the right of government to legislate morality and limit personal liberty; he will, under the guise of theoretical pluralism, uphold in fact a favored position for Christians under the First Amendment.

Reihan explores Senator Clinton’s views of Martin Luther King Jr and Lyndon Johnson.

A very helpful summary of the challenges all the leading candidates face on both sides from Ron Brownstein.

A reader writes:

You write that Obama is "a pragmatic liberal," that "his judgments in the past have been largely practical and reasonable," and that he is neither "an ideologue" nor "an excessive partisan." And I, too, really want to believe this. But then I always come back to the John Roberts vote. Roberts was clearly an outstanding candidate, perhaps one of the best ever nominated. He had nearly universal support from the legal academy, including from two of Obama’s most liberal colleagues from the UC Law faculty, Cass Sunsetin and Geoffrey Stone. And he received "Yea" votes from both "pragmatic" Democrats like Lieberman, Jeffords, and Dodd, as well as principled liberals like Leahy, Feingold, Levin, and Kohl. Only the rank partisans cast "no" votes, and Obama was in that camp.

I remember being extremely disheartened by this vote at the time. I live in suburban Chicago, and I was a student at UC Law when Obama was on the faculty there. I have voted for one Democrat in my life, and it was for Barack Obama in the 2004 U.S. Senate race. Having Alan Keyes as an opponent didn’t help matters, but I was convinced then that Obama was a man of principle who would always vote his conscience, even if politically inexpedient. And in these times, I was more than willing to accept a principled liberal over a partisan Republican. But then the Roberts vote came, and Obama lined up with the hacks and cast the politically safe vote.

Some of your readers have suggested that Obama’s time on the UC Law faculty played an instrumental role in forming both his political optimism and his disregard for partisanship and cynicism. And there is no doubt some truth to this. Chicago is a place where ideas matter and are taken seriously, and where a philosophically diverse faculty regularly square off in a climate of friendship and respect. You can’t leave that place and "hate conservatives’ or "hate liberals." You can disagree passionately with your opponent’s ideas, but your opponent is just too damn smart and too damn nice to ever dislike personally. But this makes the Roberts vote all the more disappointing. The UC faculty lined up behind Roberts, a recognition of his obvious intellect and talent. I find it simply impossible to believe that Obama felt otherwise. And yet he voted "no."

Bottom line: Obama delivers a good message about ending divisiveness in Washington and working to find common ground. Perhaps the only opportunity in the last 4 years to test that message was the John Roberts vote, and Obama lined up with the partisans.

A fascinating quote from Republican South Carolina governor, Mark Sanford:

"What is happening in the initial success of his candidacy should not escape us. Within many of our own lifetimes, a man who looked like Barack Obama had a difficult time even using the public restrooms in our state. What is happening may well say a lot about America, and I do think as an early primary state we should earnestly shoulder our responsibility in determining how this part of history is ultimately written."

A Clinton-allied teachers’ union files a law-suit against voting in the coming Democratic caucus in nine Vegas Strip hotels. It would hamper the Culinary workers in supporting Obama. The usual campaign hardball, but a little strange for a candidate recently bemoaning "disenfranchisement."