The Dish

Matt Cooper’s two cents:

Hope is a great message. Math isn’t. Whining’s even worse.

My view is still that Obama should not go negative. His surrogates and supporters should – especially those of us who remember the Clintons’ sleazy, polarizing past. But he does need to become more aggressive and more direct. I should add: asking for the Clintons to release their tax returns is not negative. Pointing out that Clinton has very little experience in foreign policy is also not negative. It’s simply true. One way of not going negative while being aggressive would be to explain, along the lines of this post, why the Clintons represent the past and the Washington establishment; why they actually mean a third term of Rovism. He has to stop hoping that his veiled references to Rove-Morris politics somehow sink in with people, without spelling it out. He needs not just to resist the Clintons’ tactics, but to expose them. And show them as the bankrupt, irrelevant diversion that they are.

And then remind us whey we long to get past them; and why he alone can do it.

It’s Friday. It’s the Atlantic library. And Reihan’s head explodes:

Psychologist Ellen Ladowsky examines why Hillary Clinton remains so creepy to so many. I prefer Hitch’s formulation: the kind of person who never wants the meeting to end. If you’ve ever been on a condo board, you know the type.

A fantastic column, in my view. She’s one of the few conservatives with her eyes wide open. This was particularly good:

[Clinton] is hardy, resilient, tough. She is a train on a track, an Iron Horse. But we must not become carried away with generosity. The very qualities that impress us are the qualities that will make her a painful president. She does not care what you think, she will have what she wants, she will not do the feints, pivots and backoffs that presidents must. She is neither nimble nor agile, and she knows best. She will wear a great nation down.

Jon Chait on the fratricidal maniac that is Hillary Clinton. Money quote:

Pennsylvania is a swing state that Democrats will almost certainly need to win in November, and Clinton will spend seven weeks and millions of dollars there making the case that Obama is unfit to set foot in the White House. You couldn’t create a more damaging scenario if you tried.

If she cannot win the White House, she wants McCain to beat Obama. She is clearing the ground for him. A reader points out what the Clintons’ next move would be as McCain takes office:

She and her numerous supporters will view this as a repudiation of Obama, not Clinton. If he loses the general election as a result of this, it will prove her right all along—that the only way to further the Democratic agenda is to beat the Republicans at their game. New politics will have been a sham. If the victors write the history books, then the triumph of cynicism will not be cause for despair, but rather cause for celebration of the one cynic who saw all this, and tried to save us hopemongers from ourselves.

This is the Golden Rule about the Clintons – and take it from someone like me who actually endorsed the guy in 1992 and came to see what lies beneath: it’s always, always, always about them.

We’re beginning to understand why the Clintons refuse to release their tax returns:

Mr. Clinton had gotten the nonpublicly traded stock from Accoona Corp. back in 2004 as a gift for giving a speech at a company event. He landed the windfall by selling the 200,000 shares to an undisclosed buyer in May 2006, commanding $3.50 a share at a time when the company was reporting millions of dollars of losses, according to interviews.

This is just the beginning. But the Clintons – and their media lackeys – refuse to abide by the most basic rules of campaign transparency.

If you apologize to monsters like the Clintons, they just go in for the kill more. Once you blink in a war with them, it’s over. A reader suggests an alternative Power statement:

"Obviously, I am deeply sorry for calling a career public servant like Senator Clinton a name.  It was disrespectful and downright immature.  But it wasn’t untruthful.  Listen, a lot of people including myself have devoted immense time and energy to the Obama campaign because we firmly believe that a different kind of politics is possible.  And Obama’s lead in victories, delegates and votes makes us hope that this time, this year, after all of the swiftboating, that the old negative tactics aren’t going to win the day. So when Clinton runs fearmongering ads about sleeping children and when her husband dismisses Obama as a merely black candidate, when Senator Clinton herself says that John McCain is more qualified to be commander-in-chief than her Democratic opponent  … it just seems monstrous to me. 

And that sort of behavior is monstrous, it’s a sickness of our political system, one that we desperately hope to cure through our efforts in this election. Perhaps these despicable tactics will, once again, win the day, and perhaps I have contributed to their victory with my regrettable outburst.   But that doesn’t make them any less deplorable."

This is a good start:

By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party’s nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her.

That’s Gary Hart. What the Clintons are doing to Obama on national security will be Karl Rove’s trump card this fall. They know this. They don’t care. What the Clintons always do is reduce everyone to their mediocre, hair-pulling level. It’s essential that they drag the promise of politics down to their empty, careerist, poll-driven cynicism – or else they lose. That’s why, I think, Obama is right actually to resist any personal negative campaigning. The rest of us have to do that for him. If he is reduced to the Clintons’ level, the Clintons – and all they represent – win.

This is a generational struggle – although plenty of older folks get it completely. As such, it usually does take more than one insurrection to move past the past. Usually, we might wait for the forces of reaction and inertia and cynicism to fade away. The trouble is: we cannot afford more Rove-Morris politics given the enormous dangers we now face at home and abroad. And if you give the Clintons any power, we know they will use it to destroy – not just limit – any threat to them. They know the threat Obama and his politics present to them and their machine. They will never forgive his presumption. And you cannot assume they will at some point allow him to take over. The battle really is now.

A reader writes:

I’ve always been politically engaged (although this is the first time I’ve ever volunteered/organized/donated significantly to a presidential candidate), but I swear to Zeus, I can’t handle the thought of another 4 or 8 years of dynastic, cynical, politics-as-usual BS. Bush’s 2004 re-election already threw me for a major loop, and I think I will have to disengage from the process altogether if Hillary somehow wrests the nomination out of Barack’s hands. Mentally and emotionally, it’s like I can’t afford to care anymore. Even the thought of it is gut-punchingly devastating.

"I said to a producer once that I wanted to do a reality show called Project Britney instead of Project Runway, where I would take Britney for the next six months and I would do hair, makeup, wardrobe every day for her and become her personal staff every day. And then of course I would be, hello, the thanks that everyone has to give for saving Britney, ‘cause I would totally save her whole image and – oh my god, it would be flawless," – Christian Siriano, Project Runway winner.