“Spun-Day” Brunch Menu
Appetizer: Hillary Clinton criticizes Obama for not committing to taking public funds in the general election, echoing John McCain’s salvo earlier in the week. Never one to pass up an opportunity for a snipe, campaign operative Howard Wolfson proclaims “That’s not change you can believe in,”
Of course, Mrs. Clinton has not made a commitment to public funds either, and Obama would be a fool to make such a commitment, given that he’s on track to raise another $30 million or more in the month of February, a little more than a third of the total available from public funds.
Salad: Voodoo, served with nuts on the side:
From Harold Ickes, long-time Clinton advisor, this gem::
A top Hillary Clinton adviser on Saturday boldly predicted his candidate would lock down the nomination before the August convention by definitively winning over party insiders and officials known as superdelegates, claiming the number of state elections won by rival Barack Obama would be “irrelevant” to their decision.
The nuts:
Even though averages of head-to-head polls on RealClearPolitics.com show Obama beating presumptive GOP nominee John McCain in a general election and Clinton losing, the Clinton camp is stressing the electability argument.
Just for giggles, here are the most recent national Gallup poll numbers: 49% Obama 42% Clinton. Not that I necessarily believe in polls as predictors, but many do, so take the numbers as you please.
Just the meat, please. Today you have your choice of three separate main courses.
Chicken, In Two Flavors
John McCain explains how the Bush tax cuts he denounced and voted against because the bulk of them “go to the wealthiest Americans” should now be made permanent because “the wealthy” aren’t the same “wealthy” he denounced from the Senate floor.
John McCain explains why he voted for the bill despite making several public statements condemning waterboarding and having endured torture during his time as a POW in Vietnam. Despite prior stances where he favored aligning CIA techniques with the Army Field Manual standard, he still voted to preserve waterboarding, explaining it this way:
The Army manual specifically bars waterboarding and seven other tactics: forcing a detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose sexually; placing hoods or sacks over the head of a detainee; beatings, electric shock, burns or other forms of physical pain; threatening detainees with dogs; the use of temperature extremes to cause physical trauma; mock executions; and depriving detainees of necessary food, water or medical care.
A McCain Senate aide said that his vote does not mean the senator endorses any of these tactics. Instead, the aide said, there are noncoercive interrogation techniques not used by the Army that could be useful to the CIA. The aide declined to provide an example, but said it made sense for the CIA to use tactics that are not widely known through the field manual, which is a public document.
Pork
The Bush Administration whines that the expiration of the Protect America Act means America is now unprotected. Fortunately, not everyone is so easily fooled, so the Administration issued talking points which, in essence, tell Americans that if we don’t grant immunity to unknown parties for unknown lawbreaking but we do know that the unknowns may have broken laws unrelated to electronic surveillance (because of course, we don’t know any details because to know details would put us at risk from those who are protecting us?)…are you following that? However, what we do know this weekend is that improper FBI access was granted to an entire domain’s email, because the ISP made a mistake.
As an added side dish, you may have the Telecoms whine saying they refuse to Protect America if they don’t get immunity. Like they have that choice, anyway, since a court order is a court order. But then, those talking points claim otherwise with Mike McConnell saying unofficially in an official capacity, “we are experiencing significant difficulties in working with the private sector today because of the continued failure to address this issue.”
I think I need a palate cleanser after reading that.
Where’s the Beef?
The “creepifying” of the Obama campaign, by Mainstream Media, including Joel Stein, David Brooks, Carol Costello, and Joe Klein, who wrote this:
And yet there was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism — “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” — of the Super Tuesday speech and the recent turn of the Obama campaign.
Yeah, you know that mass messianism thing, that thing where people (aka “we”) are empowered to participate.
Messiah, no. Beef, yes. Harold Pollack writes
If the Obama campaign is a cult, it includes a remarkable number of notably ungullible, notably non-follower-type people. His advisors and supporters include many of the nation’s most distinguished economists, legal scholars, and political scientists. It includes a striking number of policy experts and elected politicians who worked closely with both Clintons.
Did I mention that Pollack’s article includes the endorsement of many, many — too many to count — respected historians?
Here’s a little something extra from the New York Times:
The “cult of personality” is used in the pejorative. But recast as a different name — call it charisma — and, as Roosevelt and other examples show, it can be a critical element of politics and its practical cousin, governance. It just can’t be the only element.
“Today, attacks on the cult of personality seem really to mean attacks on the ability to make speeches that inspire,” Mr. Caro said in an interview. “But you only have to look at crucial moments in the history of our time to see how crucial it was to have a leader who could inspire, who could rally a nation to a standard, who could infuse a country with confidence, to remind people of the justice of a cause.”
Save room for dessert:
This remarkable post by Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program.
What Obama embodies is something different — a networked model of the relations amongst all of us who are involved in the process of transforming American society. The differences between Obama and Clinton have less to do with issues of policy but rather differences in process, in notions of governance, in cultural style, though the subtle differences in policy may reflect differences on these other levels, as when Clinton wants to require everyone to buy health insurance (top-down) and Obama seeks to make insurance accessible to everyone (bottom up). Those of us who are passionate about Obama (and yes, I’m an Obama boy) are responding to an alternative vision of the country — one based less on fragmentation around identity politics or partisan differences than one which values diversity of perspectives as opening up the possibility of refining our collective organization and enabling us to solve problems together which defeat us as individuals.
and
In Obama’s version, there are at once many Americas, each self contradictory and refusing to be reduced to stereotypes, and one America, a collective intelligence ready to process all of that diversity and arrive at shared solutions to shared problems. Obama is speaking for this ‘we generation’ in the closing moments of that speech…
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