Category: Presidential Campaign

Krugman Nails it Again

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As usual, Krugman gets to the heart of the matter

The question Democrats, both inside and outside the Obama campaign, should be asking themselves is this: now that the magic has dissipated, what is the campaign about? More generally, what are the Democrats for in this election?

That should be an easy question to answer. Democrats can justly portray themselves as the party of economic security, the party that created Social Security and Medicare and defended those programs against Republican attacks — and the party that can bring assured health coverage to all Americans.

They can also portray themselves as the party of prosperity: the contrast between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy is the best free advertisement that Democrats have had since Herbert Hoover.

But the message that Democrats are ready to continue and build on a grand tradition doesn’t mesh well with claims to be bringing a “new politics” and rhetoric that places blame for our current state equally on both parties.

And unless Democrats can get past this self-inflicted state of confusion, there’s a very good chance that they’ll snatch defeat from the jaws of victory this fall.

His basic point is a valid one the voters are not looking for reform. They are looking for the policies that make their lives better.

To the degree that a candidate makes reform the message to the exclusion of policy, there is an emptiness that can be exploited.

Obama Just Did Something Mindboggling Stupid

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I don’t care what the calculus behind this is, his decision to appear on Fox News Sunday is very very stupid.

Because top line Democrats no longer appear on their show, Fox has lost credibility, and they know it, and now Obama is sitting down because he thinks that he’s somehow going to charm them into liking him.

Even if they weren’t dishonest excuses for journalists, this would not happen. Journalists are small people who hold grudges over stuff like this, and they buy ink by the hogshead,* so this is a lose-lose.

It’s sh%$ like this that makes me wonder if he’s not ready for prime time.

*OK it’s hundreds of TV stations, but the analogy holds….

Hillary is Raising Good Money, Will She Throw It After Bad Money

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First, we have Clinton raising $10 million in the day after the Pennsylvania, and from a few days before, we have reports of significant indebtedness to her coterie of advisors.

This picture is just the amount owed to Penn’s firm, which is money that has been supremely poorly spent.

I think that it is highly unlikely that Clinton will outraise Obama through the rest of the primaries, and so this sh$# needs to stop for her to be viable.

Truth to be told this this sh$# needs to stop for all Democrats.

There is a professional parasite class inside the beltway, and it is paid on commission, so we get too much advertising, not enough ground game, and no interest in being more efficient, since increases in efficiency reduce their paycheck.

Their names are Penn, Shrum, Brazile, Begala, Grunwald, Trippi, etc.

They go on press shows where they puff themselves, and their overpriced consultancies, up and do little for candidates.

They don’t have faces for TV. Mark Penn looks like a bloody poster child for sex without partners.

If there is one good thing about Karl Rove, it’s that when he worked for Bush and His Evil Minions™, he stayed in the background.

These people are part of the corrupt, venal, self serving, elitist, and incompetent DC beltway community, and the elected leaders Democratic party need to put a leash on these idiots.

The Republicans have done so for some time, starting well before Ed Rendell got purged for his walking around money comments.

It’s time for Democrats to start winning because of their senior campaign staff, not in spite of their senior campaign staff.

One Possible Answer to What the Republican October Surprise Will Be

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GMU Professor Jeremy Mayer suggests that it will be an overseas arrest for war crimes of some prominent Bush administration official.

While I think that they are war criminals and should be tried, the reaction of the American public will be bellicose and jingoistic, playing to the base lizard brain of hatred, bigotry, and fear of the other that is at the core of Republican electoral success.

Remember Lt. William Calley. A poor officer and a murderer who shot a little boy in the back, but to the American public, he was a hero.

Me Bad. Hillary Wanking on Autism Too

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You can read it here:

I am committed to make investments to find the causes of autism, including possible environmental causes like vaccines. I have long been a supporter of increased research to determine the links between environmental factors and diseases, and I believe we should increase the NIH’s ability to engage in this type of research. My administration will be committed to improving research to support fact-based solutions, and I will ensure that the NIH has the staff and funding to fully explore all possible causes of autism.

Just to be clear: the vaccine-autism link is a hoax.

The doctor who came up with it was in cahoots with the lawyers, and he had a patent on a junk science alternative.

He is now in the process of having his license to practice medicine stripped.

Obama Just Pissed Me Off

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I have been an involuntary student of conditions on the Autism spectrum by virtue of my son having Aspergers (see here, here, and here), so I have looked at the evidence (see here and here) and it is clear that there is no link.

I’ve also lambasted people who are putting their community and children at risk, because they are stupid and unthinking, which would, of course, include McCain’s claim that there is an explicit link.

Well, now we have Obama saying that the science is not yet settled on Autism and vaccines. While he does so in the context of promising additional funding for early interventions (BTW, Hillary was first on suggesting funding for this), by promoting this junk science, junk science that has sickenes thousands of children in the US every year, he pisses me off.

There are (very small) risks to vaccines, which is why the US government has a vaccine fund, but Autism is not one of them.

The anti-vaccine folks should be treated with nothing but disdain, much like the nut-job Mullahs in Northern Nigeria who sabotaged the polio eradication project because they thought it a secret plan to sterilize them.

Good Analysis of the Campaign

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Big Media Matt nails it, Hillary Clinton is a long shot, and so she will take some hail Mary’s.

When you consider the fact that Al Gore first raised the Willie Horton issue in 1988, and the shots that Gephardt took at Dean in Iowa, and the comments by Dean that Kerry was using Republican tactics, it’s still pretty mild stuff, but there will be some poo flinging.

That being said, every piece of poo flung by her is less likely to be a story in November, because it’s old news.

The Debates

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Switched over to them after 5 minutes from Olbermann, because I didn’t want to hear the intro.

Should have waited 10, but the whole Olbermann hatin’ on Hil is getting really old.

Then the questions. Stupid, really stupid vacuous question. Back to Olbermann. More hatin’ on Hil, back to the debate, and more evidence that Mike Judge was an optimist when he wrote and directed Idiocracy.

At the rate this is going I expect Gibson to ask about the designated hitter rule.

Can’t take it. I’m switching to Good Eats (Alton Brown) until “Bushed” on Olbermann.

I am not alone in my opinions, see here (“shoddy, despicable performances), and here (“perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years”).

I watched perhaps 15 minutes of the debate, it was all I could take.

Next time, I’ll do the home root canal kit instead, or if I can’t do that, then I’ll watch a Fox TV reality show **shudder**.

Obama Would Investigate Bush Law Breaking

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According to Attytood, in response to a question from Will Bunch, Obama replied that he, “would ask his AG to “immediately review” potential of crimes in Bush White House.”

That’s good, though I admit that there is a part of me that wants to see them all water-boarded, I know that this is wrong.

The question is how aggressively he will pursue people after the inevitable flurry of pardons in December and January, which will make this like peeling an onion.

Obama Delegate Purge in California

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Well, we’ve had some shenanigans in delegate selection in California, where there are more candidates for Obama delegates than there were spaces.

Theoretically, the actual delegates are chosen at caucus, but the campaigns can, and do strike names from the list before the caucuses.

Originally, the Obama struck some 950 potential delegates off the list out about 1700 (about 55%), as opposed to about 40 out of about 1000 (4%) for the Clinton campaign, including Marcy Winograd, who sits on the Executive committee of the CA Dems, and contested the primary against hawk Jane Harman.

Apparently, their justification was that they were concerned about Clinton poaching their delegates (the Bitch made me do it defense), but of note is the fact that the people remaining were the bundlers and their girlfriends, so it was payback for the morally repugnant policy of bundling donations, one which the Obama campaign says that they do not need because of their massive small donor base.

It’s payback to the big donors.

Of note, once this all hit the fan, the Obama campaign backtracked, but it’s both stupid and sleazy.

Just another group of supporters to be thrown under the bus, as Obama is now signaling over “Don’t ask Don’t Tell”, where he’s nominally opposed, but won’t consider the position of candidates for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which means that we will see a military man lobbying against this, just like Colin Powell did, which sounds an awful lot like the dog whistle gay bashing that he did with Donnie McClurkin.

Oh, well, I guess that I’ll be holding my nose when I pull the lever (metaphorically speaking, it will be either Diebold or Optiscan in November) for him.

My expectations are now low enough that I don’t think that I will be disappointed.

Rumors of 129915 Tons of Deadweight as VP

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Me bad, I’m confusing the Chevron oil tanker, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

There are rumors that McCain may pick her as a Vice Presidential pick.

I find this unlikely for a number of reasons:

  1. She is much too closely tied to Bush. It’s clear that she has a sort of fawning adoration about him, and the VP nominee needs to be McCain’s man, not Bush’s
  2. Republicans won’t vote for a woman.
  3. Republicans won’t vote for a black woman.
  4. The are consistent rumors regarding her sexual orientation.

I do no know, nor do I care, whether Condoleezza Rice is a lesbian, but it appears that a number of people in Washington do, or at least are very careful not to discuss this issue.

When the Washington Post decided not to kill 6 days of strips from Aaron McGruder’s strip The Boondocks, in which Huey and Riley decided that Rice needed to find a good black man, it published its reasons using remarkably circuitous language:

That was too much for the Post, which announced it would skip “The Boondocks” this week. “We had no way of knowing whether Mr. McGruder’s assertion that Condoleeza Rice had no personal relationship was true or not,” explained a Post spokesperson.

Emphasis mine

These rumors have dogged rice for some time, so absent her getting a beard (Yes, I know that this is the term for a gay man who marries a woman to cover up, but I don’t know the converse), I do not see her being on the ticket.

Of course, if you look at who seems to be McCain’s attack dog right now, which is generally the campaign role of the VP, and so would seem to have the inside track on the position, it’s Lindsay Graham, who has had rumors swirling around him for years.

Obama Preparing to Opt Out of Public Financing

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Barack Obama is looking at opting out of the public financing system for the general election, as he already has in the primaries.

I think that this is a good idea. He’s out raising John McCain to a degree that boggles the mind, but his argument, that because he is raising so much in small dollar donations, he is basically sticking to the spirit of the law, is asinine.

There are a number of reasons that this is stupid. The first is that it’s hair splitting that will have people bringing up his “pledge” on public financing, and the second is that he is missing a line of attack that is useful.

His pledge was not to go onto public financing, it was to enter into negotiations with the Republican nominee on a “fund raising truce”.

What he should have said was, “I would like to negotiate with John McCain about a fund raising truce in good faith, but I find no good faith on his side. John McCain illegally withdrew from the public financing system that he sponsored, and has been committing an ongoing felony since then, using the inability of the FEC to make quorum as a dishonorable cover for his law breaking.”

John McCain and his campaign staff are knowingly committing a felony right now. That’s a fact, and they know it, because John McCain was the guy who wrote the law.

Shift at Top May Mean Shift in Tone for Clinton – New York Times

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I think that Penn’s kind of sort of firing is unlikely to pull it out for Hillary Clinton at this late date, but Geoff Garin does seem to be a breath of fresh air.

That being said, Josh Marshall published a reader letter that nails the Penn problem on the head:

….increasingly I think Penn is the main reason. His faults suffused and defined her campaign – think small and narrow, don’t change anything that worked for Bill, don’t roll your proposals into a larger vision, don’t suggest that you bring anything to the table but stolidity and experience – and, for targeted voters only, emphasize your gender. Penn took one of the most popular Democrats of the last 40 years and made her into a one-note bore.

Mark Penn and his “microtargeting”.

Hillary is not Bill, and something sucked much the life out of her campaign.

It’s why she seems better in the debates, there, it’s just her and her knowledge.