Philip, pardon me for registering a profoundly skeptical reaction to your assessment of John McCain as "the only electable candidate in [the GOP] once Rudy Giuliani's post-9/11 popularity vanished."
Both McCain and Giuliani are 180 degrees out of phase with conservatives on the issue of illegal immigration. The GOP elite loves open borders, but outside the NY/DC Republican Establishment, support for McCain's amnesty/"guest workers" policy is political poison. It's certainly a deal-breaker for blue-collar cultural conservatives in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky and West Virginia -- the very same swing voters in swing states who should otherwise be "in play" because of Obama's nomination.
McCain will speak to La Raza in July, indicating he still doesn't realize how vastly unpopular his immigration stance is in Middle America. And that's to say nothing of McCain's Green moves. By pushing pet policies of the elite, the Republican nominee is neutralizing whatever advantage he might have gained from Obama's own elitism.
The Boston Herald has apologized to the New England Patriots for its false "report" that the 2001 Patriots taped the Rams' pre-Super Bowl walkthrough. Says the paper: "While the Boston Herald based its Feb. 2, 2008, report on sources that it believed to be credible, we now know that this report was false, and that no tape of the walkthrough ever existed. Prior to the publication of its Feb. 2, 2008, article, the Boston Heraldneither possessed nor viewed a tape of the Rams' walkthrough before Super Bowl XXXVI, nor did we speak to anyone who had. We should not have published the allegation in the absence of firmer verification."
Uh, yeah.
It's one thing to rush forward with a story before having the facts. It's another thing to do it to the home team. But it's Sports Treason to log a false report, about the home team, two days before a Super Bowl that could have capped a perfect season. Belichick and the players would never admit it, but the report had to have caused distractions at the worst possible time.
While it's nice that the Herald was at least contrite in its apologizes on the back end, it would've been preferable to show some of those fabled "journalistic ethics" on the front end. Maybe have some real information to base stories on. The New England Patriots are well within their rights to sue, but they and the NFL probably want this whole SpyGate controversy behind them already.
Whether the Boston Herald will recover in the court of public opinion in New England is another matter.
In late 2006, Mark Warner and Evan Bayh, two red state Democrats,
suprised the political world by announcing they would not run for
president. Warner was a popular governor from Virginia who had a
successful business career before entering politics. Bayh, at a young
age, had served two terms as governor of Indiana and was in his second
term in the U.S. Senate. While both candidates would be quite electable
in the general election, they were scared off because they were too
centrist.
Ever since I've been covering the Democratic race, all the way back in
Iowa, I would speak to Democratic voters who were convinced that any
Democratic nominee would be a lock to win the White House. The problem
was, with all their overconfidence, they decided to get greedy. Rather
than settle for a moderate, boring white guy, they decided that they
would pick the most liberal candidate possible, and they got caught up
in the drama of choosing between the first viable woman candidate and
the first viable black candidate.
Republicans, on the other hand, however begrudgingly, ended up holding
their noses and going with John McCain, the only electable candidate in
their party once Rudy Giuliani's post-9/11 popularity vanished.
Don't get me wrong, the fundamentals are so strong for Democrats this
year that Obama still may pull it off in November, and still should
even be considered the favorite. But Democrats will be sweating it all
year. Does anybody doubt that if Democrats had acted like Republicans,
that Bayh or Warner would be coasting to victory right now?
Embattled Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann will be making an announcement to the press at noon. Democrats in the state legislature filed nine articles of impeachment against Dann yesterday. He is said to be looking for a face-saving way to step down and has been in talks with Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, himself a former attorney general. If Dann resigns, Gov. Ted Strickland will appoint a temporary successor and an election will be held in November. Fisher, Treasurer Richard Cordray, executive assistant attorney general Ben Espy, Strickland chief legal counsel Kent Markus, and Montgomery County Prosecutor Mat Heck are all considered possible successors. Former auditor and attorney general Betty Montgomery would be a possible Republican candidate in a fall election. I wrote about Dann's sex scandal earlier this month on the main site.
Hillary Clinton deadenders still hold out hope that perhaps the superdelegates will give the nomination to her if she can make Barack Obama look unelectable, which West Virginia helped do last night.
But despite of his thumping in the state, Barack Obama has picked up two more superdelegates, and has won over 30 in the last week. Clinton started the year with a superdelegate lead of 106, and still had a lead of 87 in February. Now Obama leads among superdelates by 13, according to RealClearPolitics, and by 166 overall. If the trend all year among superdelegates has been a move toward Obama, why on earth would anybody think that the remaining 240 or so superdelegates would go for Clinton at the more than two-to-one ratio required for her to overtake him?
Obama may have been embarassed ast night, but he's still the presumptive nominee.
If you were watching Idol last night -- and the chances that you were are declining -- you might have noticed the increasingly bizarre disconnect between the judges' comments and the actual performances. David Archuleta butchered "And So It Goes" and still received praise. Randy, Paula, and Simon even blunted their criticism of Archuleta's absurd rendition of "With You." If it were anyone else, Simon would have called it the trainwreck that it was. Meanwhile, Syesha Mercado was told she was in danger of going home after a performance of "Fever" that was ten times better than anything Archuleta pulled out.
The parallel to Barack Obama is irresistible. Hillary Clinton blew Obama away by more than 40 points last night -- and still didn't put the brakes on reports of her political death. And just as we will most likely learn in tonight's result show that Archuleta's teenybopper fanbase has propelled him into the final two, the superdelegates are still trickling into Obama's column today, even after last night's embarrassing showing.
Daniel Larison has another lengthy response to my long post , in response to his criticism of my article on Obama and Israel. I'll let my last post, and my article, speak for itself, and you can go ahead and read Larison. There will be more oppourtunities to revisit this over the course of the year, but I want to avoid turning this int an Obama, Israel and Larison blog since there are other issues to discuss. So I'll leave it at that for now.
Since James Taranto is on vacation this week, I'll call one of his "metaphor alerts" on Camille Paglia's Salon column this week. Not only does she open with a sequence of three (or is is four?) straight movie references, she follows up with passages like this one, describing the Clintons:
Why wouldn't they play smiley-face rope-a-dope now and smash-mouth alley-and-ambush fisticuffs right to the bitter end -- meaning the convention in August? It's now or never for Ms. Hill. Even if Obama loses this fall, there's no guarantee whatever that she would win the Democratic nomination in 2012. That hoss will have been around the rodeo way too many times. The infusion of fresh new blood into the party -- especially women governors -- has already started. Who will want to resurrect all those 1990s mummies?
Republican operatives have been salivating for Hillary to be the nominee. Her vainglorious claim to have been fully "vetted" is ludicrous. She and her husband left a mountain of manure in Little Rock and Washington that hasn't even begun to be thrown.
When the fire alarm went off in my apartment building about an hour ago, I figured it was a prank. In all my years in this world, I've experienced plenty of fire alarms, but no actual fires. In fact, during the day on Tuesday, there was a fire drill at the office building. So it was only natural that when the alarm went off at two in the morning, as I was ready to go to bed, my immediate impulse was to think that it was the work of some drunk dude and ignore it.
But then, just to be safe, I threw on some clothes and popped my head in the hallway. Sure enough, I did smell something burning, and decided to make my way down the stairs. The putrid smell became more pungent as the floors got lower.
As I emerged to the street, I ran into a guy who told me that his kicthen was on fire. I looked up to the second floor. Smoldering black smoke blew through the window and amber flickered in the background. Apparently, the culprit was a tray of cinnamon buns that turned explosive in the oven.
The DCFD soon arrived in real fire engines, and did their thing with ladders and hoses and other stuff. We had to wait outside for roughly 40 minutes as they made sure the fire was out and investigated. Nobody was hurt.
I'm back in my apartment, blogging while I wait for the last of the noisy fire trucks to drive away. So I guess the moral of the story is that if you hear a fire alarm go off in your building, it may actually be because there is a fire.
Mississippi elects Travis Childers to Congress, making it the third special election of the year in a heavily GOP district to go Democrat. As vulnerable as Obama may look, it's important to keep in mind what a tremendous headwind McCain is running against this cycle as a Republican.
Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee, and his loss in West Virginia will not change that. But wow, what a loss it was.
A few quick points:
---Last week, I wondered why there was no bandwagon effect helping Obama, as normally is the case when a candidate becomes the likely nominee of a party. We even saw this with John McCain earlier this year. The fact that West Virginia Democrats would turn out in such large numbers, after a week of media coverage touting Obama as the presumptive nominee, and deliver Hillary Clinton a victory by a whopping 41 point, 140,000-plus vote margin, is absolutely astounding. It's almost as if there is an anti-bandwagon effect.
-- One of the things I've been debating in my head over the past few weeks is whether these working class voters who won't support Obama in the primary will actually defect to McCain in the fall, or whether they'll ultimately vote for any Democrat over McCain. The sheer magnitude of the Obama loss in West Virginia may be the strongest evidence yet that the working class resistence to Obama is real, and will in fact carry over to the general election.
A 10 point loss, a 15 point loss, even a 20 point loss, okay, maybe you can explain that away. But Democrats turning out to deliver a 41 point embarassment to the likely nominee of their own party? That's really hard to for the Obama camp to write off.
Ramesh Ponurru reminds us that Bob Barr voted in favor of a Medicare prescription drug bill, though he left Congress before the specific Bush plan passed.
Daniel Larison, a paleoconservative critic of Israel who is out to prove that, as a supporter of Israel, I have nothing to fear from an Obama presidency, offers this lengthy response to my article from yesterday in which I raised questions about the sincerity of Obama's pro-Israel statements during the campaign, particularly with regard to Hamas.
Larison says that it's unfair to read too much into the fact that Robert Malley, an informal adviser to Obama, has been meeting with Hamas. He compares this to the fact that two McCain aides had to resign from the campaign for working on a lobbying firm that did work for Burma's junta. But there are several differences between the two cases. For one, McCain aides were serving in a domestic political context, not as foreign policy advisers, whereas Malley was advising Obama on Middle East policy. But beyond that, for anybody who has concerns about McCain's views on Burma, they have a 25-year foreign policy record to examine. And a quick Google search would show that last October, McCain proposed legislation aimed at cracking down on the Burmese government.
Meanwhile, when campaigning in New Hampshire that month – hardly a place in which getting tough on Burma would seem to be a hot political issue, he assailed the regime. The AP reported:
The Arizona Republican blasted the "military thugs" in Burma who are attempting to maintain their junta despite protests of Buddhist monks.
He also said "we should make the Chinese pay a price" for supporting the regime.
I remember participating on a blogger call in September in which McCain opened up his remarks with a heated tirade on the Burmese regime, and said "it's time for strong action against these thugs."
I really don't see anything in Obama's past on Israel that would offer me similar reassurance.
Larison goes on to make excuses for Obama in each of the litany of examples I cite in my long piece. You can read my article and his post and determine whether or not you think I am being fair. But here's the thing. If it just so happened that there was one adviser or one questionable statement by Obama it would be easier to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it seems that each day brings a revelation about another shady connection.
Larison also completely distorts my argument in order to make his point that I'm some sort of paranoid freak. He says I cite "reports of friendly relations with Khalidi," a leading anti-Israel intellectual, but he omits a key detail. In my article, I note that an LA Timesstory reported that he didn't just casually attend a party for Khalidi, but spoke at it:
His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases... It's for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation -- a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid's dinner table," but around "this entire world.":
Khalidi is a man who has called Israel an "apartheid system in creation." What kind of "conversation" was Obama talking about? What did Khalidi teach Obama about his own biases? I'd really like to know. And the Obama campaign was contacted for the Time story and they didn't dispute the fact that Obama gave such a speech, so I feel confident reporting on it as accurate.
Larison paraphrases both me and Obama incorrectly when he sarcastically says I criticize Obama for, "his acknowledgement that Palestinians have suffered (quelle horreur!)." But what Obama actually said was, "nobody's suffering more than the Palestinian people," which suggests not merely that he wants to recognize that Palestinian people are suffering, but that he thinks that Palestinians are suffering more than Israelis. Israelis who have lost loved once to suicide bombings would disagree. I also wondered, given the lessons he's learned from Khalidi, whether Obama was suggesting that U.S. policy was too focused on Israeli suffering. I included in my article Obama's clarification that he meant that nobody has suffered more from the failures of Palestinian leadership.
For Larison, the gap between Obama's statements on the campaign trail and what his advisers are saying and doing on issues such as NAFTA and Iraq suggest his ultimate bias is in favor of the status quo. But for me, such revelations undermine Obama's credibility overall. Larison doesn't think that it's likely as president Obama would move in a more pro-Palestinian direction than he has signaled on the campaign trail. But why not?
The desire to be seen as a Middle East peacemaker has, in the past, made presidents elevate terrorists to statesmen, as we saw with Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat. Now that Hamas has been democratically elected and controls Gaza, any peace agreement signed with Mahmoud Abbas would be meaningless if one didn't negotiate with Hamas. That's why I'm not a proponent of a "peace process" until Palestinians renounce terrorism, but Obama does favor more robust diplomacy in the region. One point that I make in my piece, which Larison conveniently omits, is that Obama has vowed to meet without preconditions, within the first year of his administration, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad has denied the Holocaust, threatened to wipe Israel off the map, and his regime has financed Hamas. So I just don't see why it's such a stretch for me to fear that circumstances would arise under which Obama would find it necessary to meet with Hamas to make progress in peace negotiations. Given his eagerness to meet with the leading state sponsor of terrorism, I just don't see why he'd draw a moral distinction at a democratically elected terrorist group that controls an area of diplomatic importance.
Larison, who is a critic of Israel, thinks that Obama is sufficiently pro-Israel -- good for him. But I remain suspicious.
Democrats are eyeing an almost complete takeover of my beloved New Hampshire in 2008. I'm no fan of McCain-ism, but I hope it has long, long coattails in my home state at least.
Granted, the choice of running mate won't be made for quite a while, but if this Newsmax story is true, McCain is leaning toward Huckabee. If he actually picks Huckabee, I will actively oppose the ticket and urge all conservatives to do the same. Look, McCain's greatest strength among independents is his reputation for integrity and reform. As I have written before, Huckabee is seriously "ethically challenged." The media would have a field day highlighting those ethical shortcomings, and McCain's candidacy would sink like lead. And deservedly so, because it would show that McCain himself isn't serious about ethics after all. I DO beleive McCain is serious about ethics. I do not want to be proved wrong. But a choice of Huckabee would prove McCain's ethical compass to be seriously askew. Askew enough to merit opposition to the ticket.
It's been around, but I'm just now seeing this Al Jazeera report of Palestinians in Gaza phonebanking for Obama. I hear that Hamas, which has endorsed Obama, has a bit of influence in those parts.
The Politico reports that megachurch pastor John Hagee is going to apologize to Catholics for his past anti-Catholic statements and William Donohue of the Catholic League accepted the apology in "a carefully-coordinated plan." It sounds like a bit of political theater -- as does McCain refusing to disavow the Hagee endorsement while saying it was a mistake to seek it -- but it is a very different reaction than Jeremiah Wright's. Whether it puts an end to Hagee-Wright comparisons remains to be seen.
On another note: Why is it that reporters so frequently misspell the name of a press release machine like Donohue? Many publications spell it "Donahue," as in Phil Donahue.
Ramesh Ponnuru points out that Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr voted for the Medicare prescription drug entitlement, which John McCain voted against, and to authorize the use of force against Iraq despite running on an antiwar platform. He might as well have brought up Barr's vote for the Patriot Act and record on the drug war. When it comes to third-party candidates with little or no chance of actually being elected, I'm less concerned about their past records than I am with their current platforms: While you have to worry about how a major-party candidate might actually govern, a vote for a third-party is a vote to make a statement. As long as the electorate and the media generally associate the candidate with his platform, then a vote for that candidate strikes me as making a statement on behalf of that platform.
Many people are not likely to see things this way. Unfortunately for Barr, one such group of people might be the Libertarian Party, which frequently prefers philosophical consistency to electoral viability (a significant minority of Libertarians found Ron Paul too conventionally conservative in 1988). Given the party's ideological and educational mission, Libertarians do have a legitimate interest in ensuring that their nominee is small-l libertarian. As I've observed on the main site, Barr's shifting positions might make him the Mitt Romney of the LP.
The second group of people who might object to inconsistencies in Barr's record are the disaffected hardline conservatives he would need in the general election if he became the Libertarian nominee. Barr, like McCain and the Republicans, may feel that these people have nowhere else to go. But right-wingers who want a presidential candidate who opposed the Iraq war, the prescription drug benefit, and the Patriot Act at the time might prefer Constitution Party nominee Chuck Baldwin.
UPDATE: As Phil, Ponnuru, and Clark Stooksbury point out, Barr voted for a prescription drug bill but the Bush plan actually passed after Barr left Congress. But Barr voted for an entitlement expansion nonetheless.
Pay close attention to the Mississippi congressional runoffer between Republican Greg Davis and Democrat Travis Childers for the seat vacated by Sen. Roger Wicker. It will be the latest indicator of how safe those safe Republican seats are going to be this fall.
Jeffrey Goldberg's
interview with Barack Obama on Israel has drawn a lot of attention,
with Republicans making an issue out of his statement, "I think is that
this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our
foreign policy." I actually wouldn't make too much of that, because
it's clear from the context that he meant the Arab-Israeli conflict
infects all our foreign policy, not the nation of Israel, but Michael Goldfarb is right that Obama's statement, even giving him the benefit of the doubt.
But
what I found particularly troubling were that his answers were
bizarrely abstract to the point of being evasive. When asked, "Do you
think that justice is still on Israel’s side?" It would have been easy
for Obama to just say, "absolutely," but instead, he said, "I think
that the idea of a secure Jewish state is a fundamentally just idea..."
The question was whether it was still
just, and Obama couldn't bring himself to say that justice is still on
Israel's side, instead he had to talk about the nation conceptually.
Lest he offend liberals by even acknowledging in an abstract sense that
the "idea" of Israel was just, Obama is sure to follow up with, "That
does not mean that I would agree with every action of the state of
Israel..." This suggests that he likes Israel in theory, but not in
practice.
Later in the interview, Obama offers another bouquet
to liberals when he says, "some of the tensions that might arise
between me and some of the more hawkish elements in the Jewish
community in the United States might stem from the fact that I’m not
going to blindly adhere to whatever the most hawkish position is just
because that’s the safest ground politically."
The problem is
that without explaining what actions of Israel he doesn't agree with,
and what positions he considers too hawkish, his statements are pretty
meaningless.
I also found the interview quite patronizing,
when he starts mentioning the author Philip Roth, and utters the
classic, "I’ve got all these Jewish friends." His reaction to the Hamas
endorsement was also quite bizarre, he understood why the endorsed him,
and doesn't seem particularly outraged by the idea that a terrorist
group would get behind him. He also says, "I welcome the Muslim world’s
accurate perception that I am interested in opening up dialogue and
interested in moving away from the unilateral policies of George Bush
but nobody should mistake that for a softer stance when it comes to
terrorism or when it comes to protecting Israel’s security or making
sure that the alliance is strong and firm." So why should there be any
surprise that Hamas thinks he is willing to deal with them once the
dust clears?
With all of that said, my sense is that Obama
will continue to have problems with the pro-Israel community, but will
still win Jewish voters in general. The truth is that the issue of
Israel is pretty low on the list of priorities for most Jews,
especially younger Jews. Unfortunately, Jews are still overwhelmingly
ideologically liberal, so to the extent that they do care about Israel,
they can be bought off pretty easily with vague statements such as,"You
will not see, under my presidency, any slackening in commitment to
Israel’s security." The only question for me is how much McCain can eat
into the typical Democratic margin among Jews in Florida, who tend to
be older, especially given his links to Jeremiah Wright, who is tight
with Louis Farrakhan.
The name might not mean much to many people and the press is stressing his ties to Ross Perot, perhaps as a way of of stressing Bob Barr's seriousness as a third-party candidate. But I find Verney's involvement in Barr's campaign interesting. Conservatives of a certain bent may recall that Verney, who had been chairman of Perot's Reform Party until he was replaced by a chairman loyal to Jesse Ventura, led the Perotista dead-enders in trying to deny the party's nomination to Pat Buchanan in 2000. Barr's candidacy could mark the first time paleos and Verney have been on the same side in a political fight since Buchanan first joined the Reform Party in the fall of 1999.
Rich Lowry hits on all cylinders with this column blasting the tacit arrangement between Obama and the establishment media to declare off-limits ANY subject that makes Obama look bad. As I have said all along, John McCain has a seriously uphill battle, because while he has achieved his current strength only with the support of a fawning media, he now will be Media Enemy Number One while Obama gets more help, by far, than Kerry did in 2004 or even than Clinton did in 1992. So McCain will be running without his TWO bases -- the GOP base, which is unenthusiastic, and his own personal base in the media, which will suddenly be hostile. It might really throw him off his stride.
In a recent World magazine piece promising young journalist Jonathon Seidl asks whether "treating religion as a deposed king and advocating for its return
to the throne within public schools might have far greater consequences
than many realize."
"I've never been called a compassionate conservative," the ex-Republican told reporters at the National Press Club, responding to a question about immigration .
"If a person is illegally in this country, the taxpayers of this country and the government of this country owe them nothing," Barr said.
This notion that government owes something to people, simply because they're here, does not resonate with me as somebody who believes in responsible government. If one were running a charity called the United States of America, that would be one thing. This is not a charity, this is the people's business. . . . I disagree with the [1982 Plyer v. Doe] court decision . . . that decided that children of illegal aliens, people who are in this country unlawfully, have a right to a public education paid for by the taxpayers of this country. That is an improper, irresponsible decision."
In a Newsweekcover story evidently written to preempt any legitimate criticism of a presidential candidate with the thinest records of any presidential candidate in the modern era, Richard Wolffe and Evan Thomas swallow whole the Obama campaign's contention that John McCain is unfaily smering Obama by correctly noting that a Hamas spokesman has endorsed the naive senator. The article never mentions the fact that a Hamas spokesman did actually endorse Obama, nor did it mention (perhaps becuase of the deadline) that an adviser to Obama actually was meeting with the terrorist group.
In my piece for today, I go much further than McCain ever would, sifting through Obama's past, his questionable associations, and his current double talk on Hamas and Israel.
Here was my conclusion:
Obama is running for the most powerful job in the world without much of a public record of which to speak. Yet those who demand to know a little bit more about the candidate by scrutinizing his statements and relationships are arrogantly dismissed as engaging in "smears" and being divisive for refusing to simply take him at his word.
Welcome to the new kind of politics.
McCain adviser Mark Salter has already issued a response to the Newsweek story.
There's an old saying that everything becomes funnier if you add "on ice!" to the end of it. Walt Disney… on ice! Nuclear winter… on ice!John Kerry… on ice! Pauly Shore… on ice! Okay, the last one is never funny, but you get the idea.
Anyway, John McCain seems to be taking a similar approach to climate change legislation. Come up with whatever expensive regulatory scheme you want, and then just add the words "market-based."Suddenly, it's all good! So here he is telling the New York Times today that he'll “propose a domestic cap-and-trade system that will mobilize market forces to develop and commercialize alternatives to carbon-based fuels.” It's as if he believes a massive regulatory intervention will somehow become more palatable if you repeat the word "market" as many times as possible.
