ELECTION NEWS: Florida will require I.D. match for all would-be voters.
Archive for 2008
September 10, 2008
ON THE ISSUES: Dale Amon compares Obama and McCain. They don’t look as different as you might expect.
TEAM CLINTON SAYS PALIN is In Obama’s Head.
UPDATE: “Palin panic.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Camille Paglia on Obama and Palin as feminist icon. “Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did — which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.”
MORE: Anne Kornblut, in the Washington Post: Palin Energizing Women From All Walks of Life.
STILL MORE: “Rattled.”
POLITICO: E-mails, conspiracy rumors plague Palin. “With good reason, Sarah Palin has been touted as the right’s answer to Barack Obama. And in one especially important way, her abrupt rise from obscurity has given her something else in common with the Democratic nominee: she has catalyzed a fevered subculture of forwarded e-mails and viral conspiracy theories.” Yeah, I got the bogus Palin book-ban list via some librarians last night. Kind of ironic.
JIM BENNETT: “It is clear that few in America, let alone Britain, have any idea what to make of Sarah Palin. The Republicans’ vice-presidential candidate confounds the commentators because they don’t understand the forces that shaped her in the remote state of Alaska. . . . Focusing on the exotic trappings of Alaskan culture may make Palin seem a quaint and inexplicable choice. But understanding the real background of her steady rise in politics suggests that Barack Obama and Joe Biden are underestimating her badly. In this, they join two former Alaskan governors, a large number of cronies, and a trail of enemies extending back over a decade.”
BOY, THAT WAS FAST: The McCain folks have this rapid-response thing down. But is this worth an ad?
PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD: World wants Obama as president: poll.
September 9, 2008
THE HUNT FOR Sarah October.
MICKEY KAUS: “Is McCain scared of campaigning without Palin? If they ‘split off,’ as candidates usually do, the crowds will go with Palin, no? McCain will be left looking unexciting. “
VIDEO: Jetpack in flight.
MORE ON IKE, FROM BRENDAN LOY: Ike reaches the Gulf; could be a “worst-case†storm for Texas.
SO DOES THIS HELP, OR HURT? Sarah Palin defended by Mike Gravel.
DID OBAMA MEAN TO CALL SARAH PALIN A PIG? It’s probably just a slip, but . . . “The crowd apparently took the ‘lipstick’ line as a reference to Palin.”
Reader David Schlosser emails: “This will endear him to all those disaffected Hillary voters.” And former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift is calling on Obama to apologize.
All I can say is, some pig.
UPDATE: “Lipstick on a trainwreck.”
Plus, Tom Spaulding: “This is a major gaffe from Obama.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Marc Ambinder doesn’t think Obama was talking about Palin.
But reader Mark Martin emails: “This was just plain stupid on Senator Obama’s part. It must be due to Karl Rove mind rays or something.”
MORE: A reader emails: “Surely a man smart enough to be elected president should have foreseen how these remarks would be taken. Don’t Harvard law grads know the impact of words?” Everybody stumbles now and then. I say, don’t make any more of it than if McCain had said something similar.
On the other hand, reader Alin Corle emails: “I think if you look at the entire quote, you realize that Obama was referring to Palin in the ‘pig’ comment. In the next phrase, as reported by Politico.com, Obama referred to ‘old fish’ wrapped in a paper of change that still stinks, a clear personal attack on McCain. I think both comments taken together are quite outrageous.”
Stay tuned.
MORE STILL: Reader Meryl Jefferson emails: “Palin is, quite obviously, getting inside Obama’s head. This was beyond stupid! This will be played by McCain quite easily: Sarah will continue to bait him and he just goes for it. Remember the Wyle E. Coyote/Roadrunner meme that Ann Althouse set up when Palin was first rolled out? Well, she was right!”
Meanwhile, David Winslow invokes Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond:
Seriously, nobody with half a brain thinks Obama was referring to Palin.
But, nobody with half a brain thinks a basic compliment at your friend’s 100th birthday party belies veiled racism.
Just saying it would be nice to have these things treated consistently for a change. Consistently sane.
Hmm. As a Lott critic on that issue, I’m not sure how I should take that, but okay. And reader Tim Ryan reads the whole Obama statement and says: “He’s a skilled orator, and he brings it all back around to McCain and Palin. It is absolutely clear that he is tying Palin to the Pig and McCain to the Old Fish. He didn’t construct this accidentally or innocently. Unless you think that he isn’t skilled or smart, and we all know that he is. He tries to create some plausible deniability, but there are only two explanations – he is either a mean-spirited p***, or he’s an idiot. And the latter simply isn’t true.”
Meanwhile, Barry Dauphin writes: “Obama was inelegant in his comment. He was referring to Palin. Although it was not a good comment, getting hysterical about it is not smart. Put it this way, Obama’s comment was hardly post partisan. He’s usually a better speaker than this. He and his campaign must be quite rattled. They are playing to their base instead of going after independents. Why are they doing that, unless they are worried about their base? Do they have internal polling showing things to be worse for them than the MSM is reporting?”
Yeah, other people are wondering that, too.
And reader Alan Jan calls it “An Obama Macaca Moment. It’s the judgement stupid. You’ve got to be smart enough not to offend African-Americans by dropping a Macaca reference and you cannot drop a Pig reference if you are having problems with women in a presidential race. Could have the same impact as Allen’s misstep that cost him a close election.”
And here’s what Megan McArdle said about Trent Lott: “But it doesn’t really matter, does it? In politics we go by what they say, not what they wanted to say.”
Charles Austin weighs in: “So let me get this straight, Senator Obama is too smart to call Sarah Palin a pig but not smart enough to realize how bad this comment is going to sound to anyone not basking in the glow of his halo.”
And G.M. Roper is mailing Obama some lipstick.
STILL MORE: C.J. Burch emails: “Informal survey of the women in my house…very offended. The men…not as much. Odd.”
And Scott Llewellyn writes: “Um, you’re kidding right? a slip? a gaffe? Obama just innocently and/or randomly used images that invoked Palin (lipstick) and Mccain (age)? Someone lauded for his rhetorical skills didn’t see where that was going? Someone lauded for his intelligence couldn’t foresee that, even if innocent, his images would be interpreted as references to Palin and Mccain? This is not even a close call (my wife gasped when i told her what obama said about pig/lipstick, without knowing any context or having me prime her with a reference to Palin), and Obama can’t have it both ways (I’m a brilliant speaker, but not responsible for the obvious implications of the images I use).”
Here’s the video.
And Jim Treacher emails with a suggested McCain-Palin response:
They haven’t demanded an apology for any of the other garbage being thrown the last 11 (only 11!) days. They’ve either hit back or ignored it, and it’s worked. She hasn’t played the victim, which makes Obama look even dumber when he whines.
If I were in the McCain camp, I’d use this thing to get even further inside Barry’s head:
“We’re pleasantly surprised by Senator Obama’s newfound sense of humor, and look forward to watching it develop over the coming weeks and months.”
Heh. Jonah Goldberg has similar advice.
FINALLY: Les Jones thinks it’s much ado about nothing: “I don’t think Obama was referring to Palin as a pig. He was using a common expression (‘putting lipstick on a pig’). I say that as someone who likes Palin and who thinks Obama is a gaffe factory. There have been lots of hits on Palin. I don’t think this is one of them.” Ann Althouse more or less agrees.
And Vic Sapphire writes: “I christen this affair ‘SWINEGATE’ You heard it from me first, and I’m sure you’ll agree that the way it rolls off the tongue is delightful!”
THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT? I FEEL FINE. 5 Things You Need to Know About the Large Hadron Collider.
UPDATE: Reader Andrew Lloyd writes: “No, the LHC probably won’t blow up the world, but I’m still going to
open up that bottle of 30-year old Laphroaig tonight I’ve been saving… you know… just in case.”
Yeah, no point taking chances.
JIM TREACHER: Where did Abraham Lincoln go to college?
“STRONG AND DECISIVE.” Plus, what happened to Andrew Sullivan?
A LOOK AT THE NEW SEASON OF Sarah Connor: The Terminator Chronicles. I Tivo’ed the episode last night, but didn’t have time to watch it. Maybe tonight.
SOME THOUGHTS ON FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC, including this point: “The claim that this represents the failure of markets is more than a tad silly. Fannie and Freddie weren’t truly private companies, didn’t act like truly private companies, and wouldn’t have been allowed to so dominate the market if they had been. This is yet another failure of a government program.” A corrupt government program.
A GLOOMY LOOK AT THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY: “The resulting dynamic is a value-destroying feedback loop: Declining ad revenue and readership necessitates cost-cutting. Cost-cutting inevitably affects content. Diminished content, whether real or perceived, alienates readers, who become more likely to cancel their subscriptions and seek out alternative news sources. This accelerates the migration of readers to online sources and the decline in ad revenue, which will necessitate even more cost-cutting. We think the cycle will feed on itself.”
FIRST PUBLIC FUNDING, NOW A 527 FLIP-FLOP:
There’s been a spurt of 527 activity on behalf of Sen. John McCain, but Barack Obama campaign has suddenly gone silent on the subject.
That’s because, after a year of telling donors not to contribute to 527 groups, of encouraging strategists not to form them and of suggesting that outside messaging efforts would not be welcome in Obama’s Democratic Party, Obama’s strategists have changed their approach.
An Obama adviser privy to the campaign’s internal thinking on the matter says that,with less than two months before the election and with the realization that Republicans have achieved financial parity with Democrats, they hope that Democratic allies — what another campaign aide termed “the cavalry” — will come to Obama’s aid. . . . The money is there. The top two 527s — the Service Employees International Union and America Votes — are liberal in orientation.
Meet the new politics, same as the old politics. Plus, what do Obama’s campaign troubles say about his executive ability?
REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.
ANOTHER STATE WITH UNDERFUNDED PENSION OBLIGATIONS. This is just another harbinger of things to come elsewhere, I suspect. And I’m not at all sure that Nevada is really unusually bad.