Attacking Obama From The Right

I gagged when I read Bill Kristol warning of Obama’s "nanny-state" impulses. This from a Bush-supporter! I’m sorry but Kristol has no standing to defend a conservatism he largely ignored or trashed while he was close to the levers of power under Bush and Rove. Bruce Bartlett gets it right:

I think the standard answer to every objection to Obama by Republicans should be this:  He can’t be worse than Bush.

From a conservative perspective, on spending, debt, big government, regulation, which Democrat could be worse?
 

McCain On Obama

Sounds like himself a little:

"Knowing him well, as I do, I know he had great potential, but I wasn’t sure about, and I think all of us who indulge in the conventional wisdom didn’t know, is whether he could have success against what was basically very strong control of the party and its apparatus in Sen Clinton. It’s sort of what we faced in 2000 with Gov. Bush. He had the whole party apparatus behind him. I’m not saying she had all of it, but she certainly had a good part of it …

He is very articulate. He’s got a very strong message of let’s work together and get something done for the country. I think he has articulated that message very effectively. I think that he campaigns extremely well, and he’s able to motivate people, to say the least, very well. And I think he has a pretty good message."

Let’s forget he said "articulate" shall we? I’ve said it before, but a McCain-Obama contest in 2008 would bring out the best in us. It would be particularly instructive in grappling with the question of the Iraq occupation.

Obama and the Right III

A reader writes:

As an economic conservative, I’ve been wrestling for days with Obama’s appeal to me. The qualities he has that I keep returning to are: honesty and clarity, and therefore a tendency toward transparency of government. As shown in his debate response on the carbon tax issue, the man refuses to condescend to the right by hedging or qualifying his point of view. While I do disagree with Obama on practically every issue (with the noted exception of the Iraq war), I also believe that if he’s elected and manages to see his mandate through, America won’t have been hoodwinked into its future. We will have chosen it with open eyes.

Contrast that to Clinton’s "hard work" — her euphemism for politics as a dirty game in which she must attempt to smuggle in her policies behind our backs. That is the politics she would practice in office, and that is the chief reason she is much less appealing to me and others like me. I’m still not sure whether I would vote for Obama in a general election (I only know that I would vote for any Democrat against Huckabee), but I do like him a hell of a lot for being straightforward with me.

Clintonites Blame Iowa

From a Clinton campaign email list:

The Iowa caucus  process  is a broken and flawed process. It was designed to allow for the active party Dems generally known to one another to assign delegates and was not designed to handle a flood of students and independents. It was a system designed to give more power to Dem party loyalists. In the tension over whether the candidates should be chosen by the party or by the general public, the Iowa caucus was designed to give the party the advantage. For this reason, the Iowa system failed on Thursday.

Translation: we couldn’t control it. So it sucks.

Meet Obama’s Speech-Writers

Jon Favreau (not the "Swingers" dude) heads the small team:

Favreau and Obama rapidly found a relatively direct way to work with one another. "What I do is to sit with him for half an hour," Favreau explains. "He talks and I type everything he says. I reshape it, I write. He writes, he reshapes it. That’s how we get a finished product."