Joe Biden initially admits that perhaps it was in bad taste to make fun of McCain for not using a computer, being as his inability to type is a result of injuries suffered in Vietnam.
However, we must remember that the only possible lesson Democrats think they can learn from 2004 is that one must, everywhere and always, be on the offensive. So Biden has retracted his statement. I will paraphrase his statement: “Having reviewed our ad making fun of John McCain because he’s a cripple and can’t type, I am now more convinced than ever that John McCain’s advertisements are a pack of lies.” Seriously, read it. It’s not just that the words coming out of Joe Biden’s mouth are embarrassing: even his press release statements don’t make sense.
Apollo posted this at 12:47 AM HKT on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
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About a month ago, I laid out my theory that Obama didn’t really want to be president:
In the realm of pure speculation, let’s try to figure out his mindset if Obama, understanding that he wasn’t really ready for the presidency but wanting some practice, ran in 2008 thinking that he wouldn’t win the nomination. So his plan would be that 2008 was supposed to be a dress rehearsal for the real event in 2012. Winning the nomination would put him in the position of a dog who suddenly caught the Honda Civic. He hadn’t planned for this, and on some psychological level didn’t want to abandon his original plan of coming up short in 2008.
But an intelligent person, which Obama surely is, would try his best to adapt. He’s brought in a small army of consultants. For all his intelligence, Obama didn’t anticipate winning, and that’s scared him somewhat, made him trust his judgment less. It was one thing for him to luck into his Senate seat, where his primary and general election opponents self-destructed; it is quite another for him to luck into the White House. Expecting, quite reasonably, to lose, and then winning, would make anyone question his judgment and look for someone with a sounder grasp of affairs. Unfortunately for Obama, he’s surrounded by true believers, whose judgment is (almost by definition) lacking. My hunch is that Obama doesn’t have anybody in his inner circle who tells him the bad news, not because they’re afraid of his reaction, but because they’ve all drunk the Kool-aid.
So we have an intelligent but unsure man, isolated from dissenting opinions, who perhaps doesn’t want to do what everyone around him wants him to do. His advisers, convinced of his inevitability, probably wanted someone who could plausibly take charge of the presidency if, God forbid, something should happen to Obama. Meanwhile, Obama himself probably wanted someone intelligent and experienced, who has Washington insider knowledge and foreign policy background that he himself lacks, and who is independent of the true believers. Picking Biden—chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a senator for 36 of his 66 years on earth, a former sharp critic and rival for the presidency—fits the bill. It also satisfies Obama’s subconscious desire to lose.
Now I see (H/T) that Christopher Hitchens thinks like I do (but writes much better, curse him):
By the end of that grueling campaign season, a lot of us had got the idea that Dukakis actually wanted to lose—or was at the very least scared of winning. Why do I sometimes get the same idea about Obama? To put it a touch more precisely, what I suspect in his case is that he had no idea of winning this time around. He was running in Iowa and New Hampshire to seed the ground for 2012, not 2008, and then the enthusiasm of his supporters (and the weird coincidence of a strong John Edwards showing in Iowa) put him at the front of the pack. Yet, having suddenly got the leadership position, he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with it or what to do about it.
Look at the record, and at Obama’s replies to essential and pressing questions. The surge in Iraq? I’ll answer that only if you insist. The credit crunch? Please may I be photographed with Bill Clinton’s economic team? Georgia? After you, please, Sen. McCain. A vice-presidential nominee? What about a guy who, despite his various qualities, is picked because he has almost no enemies among Democratic interest groups?
Ah well. We’ve still got about 6 weeks to go. If Obama really wants to blow it, he’ll do something screwy in the debates.
Hubbard posted this at 4:35 PM HKT on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 as Audacity of Hype, Hitch-slapped!
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The Politico is, strangely, not being facetious when it says that Obama doesn’t want race to be an issue in this race. That’s really difficult to square with his shameful Philadelphia speech. He was confronted with proof that his preacher was an anti-American hate-monger, and his response wasn’t to accept blame for his association with such a noxious man, but rather to say that Wright’s problem was actually the nation’s problem and what we needed to do was have a national conversation about race. Obama wants to avoid race about as much as McCain wants to avoid discussing his war record.
The more Obama discusses race, of course, the larger the Bradley effect in November. Which will then be heralded as a sign of America’s deep racism. This is going to be awful.
Apollo posted this at 5:01 PM HKT on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 as Audacity of Hype, Race
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From the usually sensible Volokh Conspiracy, regarding the last weeks’ financial weirdness:
And I don’t know about you all, but really, I sure wish that we had someone like Sarah Palin calling the shots here — nothing like someone who knows absolutely nothing about the issues to steer us through a potentially planet-wide financial meltdown, eh?
As opposed to Barrack Obama, John McCain, or, really, any number of political whiz kids who understand this issue completely? I agree that I’m not confident in Palin’s knowledge of this issue, but I can’t name a single politician whose knowledge I would be confident in. Perhaps Phil Gramm, but I wouldn’t trust his political abilities to get his fixes through.
The Palin attacks that drive me nuts are the ones that are applicable to everyone but only get pointed out for her. After her speech the Democrat talking point was that she *gasp* had a speechwriter. Now she doesn’t know anything about the financial “crisis.” But, of course, the last president who had a broad understanding of economics before being elected was Herbert Hoover, and look where that got us.
What’s more distressing than Palin’s presumed ignorance on this subject is Obama and McCain pretending like they’re not ignorant of the subject. If one of the candidates knew what he didn’t know, that would be a lot more comforting.
Apollo posted this at 4:18 PM HKT on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 as Audacity of Hype, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!
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It’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day, mateys!
Dorothy posted this at 2:59 PM HKT on Friday, September 19th, 2008 as Uncategorized
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I think this post does a good job of summarizing Obama’s terrible record on race. The presidency is largely about getting surrogates to do your will; if a cabinet member does something and the president doesn’t reverse it, it’s appropriate to hold the president accountable for that decision. Obama is letting his staff and his surrogates call opponents racist. This is despicable, but, I’ll hasten to point out, it’s exactly what I predicted would happen.
Miscreants on the Left are already laying the framework to label an Obama defeat as the product of racism; woe are we if Obama goes into the election leading in the polls but then loses because of the Bradley effect (which is decidedly not a product of racism–quite the opposite-though it will be spun as such). An Obama loss is going to be a disaster for race relations in America. But not nearly such a disaster as spending four years with Leftists labeling any opponent of an Obama administration as racist.
Apollo posted this at 12:42 PM HKT on Friday, September 19th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype, Race
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If Sarah Palin were a Democrat, she definitely would have called Joe Biden a “master debater.” “Great debater” doesn’t make the 6th graders snicker.
Apollo posted this at 7:29 PM HKT on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
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- Robbie is upset at the bailouts, and is worried that he’s turning liberal because he’s opposing the Bush Treasury. Actually, Robbie, you’re a healthy libertarian, and Bush is going unhealthily socialist on us. Support for the free market means letting companies that screw up go belly up. Being pro-business can lead to government bailouts, which is why there are so few pro-free marketers.
- Charles Rangel is busy being corrupt—how, exactly, does anybody forget about $75,000 on taxes? I suspect he’ll get away with it and continue as Ways & Means chairman. Unless, perhaps, the McCain campaign starts running ads about the Demcoratic Congress and makes Rangel the posterboy.
- Susan Estrich has good advice for Obama: lay off Palin, quit whining about negativity, and hammer McCain on the economy. Estrich managed the Dukakis campaign, and it looks as though she learned the right lessons from it. Whether Obama can do this is an open question.
- Sarah Palin’s e-mail account has been hacked. Obama needs to denounce this quickly, or he’ll be rightly tarred as the identity theft candidate. Update: Glenn Greenwald asks, “What does Sarah Palin have to hide?” This line of argument is probably productive only with the true believers.
- James Carville and Stan Greenberg have a new memo (warning: link in PDF) analyzing the race. They think Obama can win, but is underperforming generic Democrats right now. They echo the kind of analysis Ben Wattenberg and Richard Scammon proposed in The Real Majority, and focus on what TRM called the unyoung, unpoor, unblack (but not anti-young, anti-poor, or anti-black) voters.
Hubbard posted this at 9:54 AM HKT on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype, It's Economics - Stupid!, Politics
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This is what “hope” looks like after 19 months of campaigning. A foreign language ad in which you take a third party’s words completely out of context and then tie those words to a candidate that third party barely supports. Add in the nifty racial overtones and this ad should be an early favorite for the Sid Blumenthal Award for Accuracy and Decency in Political Advertising. The ad uses Rush Limbaugh’s [accurate] description of Mexican immigration law to imply that John McCain is racist, and does this all in Spanish. That’s got to win an award for something.
Leftist bloggers have been shouting to the heavens for the last few weeks that everything John McCain says is a lie (one thing, at least, wasn’t, despite the amazing fact that it somehow became the leftist blogosphere’s crowning example of how dishonest John McCain was). Whatever. McCain didn’t campaign as super-post-partisan-bring-the-whole-country-together-nice-guy. Obama did, and he’s running a campaign filled with deciet and out and out lies. Which is fine, so far as it goes. I just wish some of the Obamaniacs would take the chill pill of their preference and understand that John McCain isn’t the sole owner of dishonesty. He probably doesn’t even own a controlling interest. The other day I saw a blogger riffing about the Obama campaign trying to shut down David Freddoso’s WGN radio appearance. That blogger complained slightly that Obama was doing it, because, he said, that’s the sort of thing McCain does. But actually, it’s not; it’s the sort of thing Obama did. So Obama tried to silence a critic through thuggish tactics, and this reminded the Obamaniac of all the times McCain has silenced…like…well, specifics weren’t important. What was important is that the post got across just how awful McCain is by showing something that Obama was doing.
I distinctly remember back in 2004 being able to read blogs from Kerry supporters without feeling an urge to throttle the writer. I’m not sure whether Obama supporters are more insufferable than Kerry supporters were (after all, most Kerry supporters were lukewarm about the man), or whether I’ve just lost some tolerance (possible, though an anecdotal survey of my friends suggests otherwise). The tizzy so many have gone into since the Palin pick has finally made me wish for the end of this campaign. And a McCain win, because it will be wretched to spend four entire years listening to Obamaniacs gush about how great Obama is.
Apollo posted this at 11:33 PM HKT on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
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There’s now a Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator (H/T) that I tried:
Sarah Palin has picked out an All-American set of names for her children. There’s Track, Trig, Bristol, Willow, and Piper.
Ever wonder, What would your name would be if Sarah Palin was your mother? Well now you can find out!
Hubbard, if you were born to Sarah Palin, your name would be:
Bullpen Cola Palin
Who knows, Bullpen Cola Palin you just might be president one day!
Best. Name. Evah.
Hubbard posted this at 9:00 AM HKT on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 as Random Bloggish Things
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It says something of my reading habits that when I read that David Foster Wallace killed himself, I didn’t read the details of who he was and instead reached for Albion’s Seed. Wrong three-named David. Though I haven’t read any of his books, I knew I’d heard of Wallace elsewhere. Turns out he was a professor at Pomona; I remember when they hired him in 2002 they considered it something of a coup. Evidently he was A Big Deal. I may or may not have met him, but I met lots of people who were ecstatic about taking his classes.
While leaving yourself hanging so that your wife finds your body is a pretty classless way to go, it’s a step above the last Pomona professor to kill himself, who took one of his friends out with him.
And here’s a snippet from the Pomona homepage, which has an unfortunate Pomona People excerpt to pair with a memorial.
And to tie this into politics, here’s a lengthy piece Wallace wrote back when journalists liked John McCain.
Apollo posted this at 6:58 PM HKT on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 as Uncategorized
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Both the Obama and McCain campaigns have taken to quoting op-eds as their sources in their ads, doing so in a way that implies the source is from a hard news item. Considering the (criminally) low standards of fact-checking employed in most opinion pages, this should stop immediately.
Tom posted this at 12:11 PM HKT on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
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Once, long after the passions of the election had cooled, I had drinks with someone who had been my opposite number; that is, someone who had volunteered for the candidate opposing my candidate. Our side had won, but my opposite’s bitterness had (mostly) subsided. Both of us had been pretty disillusioned with the up close view of sausage being made, and as were comparing notes about that whole clusterbungle, a third party came up to us and complained about the pettiness of politics and the nastiness of negative ads. In a flash, my opposite and I both said the exact same thing: “We wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work.”
With that in mind, Ezra Klein (H/T) has effectively summarized why the campaigns are busy mudwrestling:
The McCain campaign’s decision to lie about, well, everything, really needs to be understood as more than the outcome of John McCain’s consuming ambition. It is a rational and obvious response to the rules laid down by the media. Indeed, McCain’s spokesperson Brian Rogers says this directly to The Politico’s Jonathan Martin. “We ran a different kind of campaign and nobody cared about us. They didn’t cover John McCain. So now you’ve got to be forward-leaning in everything.”
And it’s true. Earlier this year McCain made poverty tours and offered policy speeches. No one cared, Obama retained his lead. It was only when he began offering vicious attacks and daily controversies that he began setting the pace of the coverage. The McCain campaign learned something important about the media: It’s an institution that covers conflict. If you want to direct its coverage, give it more conflict than your opponent. And so they have.
Klein’s analysis could be carried further, but first a tangent.
Let us stipulate that between her introductory speech in Dayton and her address to the Republican Convention, the mainstream media’s coverage of Sarah Palin and her family was ridiculously overblown. Millions of people saw these unhinged accusations, and then they say Palin perform, and they stopped believing what the talking heads were saying about Governor Palin. The unintended consequence of the media’s venom was to inoculate Palin, so to speak, from any future criticisms—even legitimate ones. Meanwhile, nobody on the right expected three front page New York Times articles about poor Bristol Palin on the same day. After catching his breath, McCain decided that since the media coverage was going to spin him walking on water as being unable to swim, he might as well attack hard. In for a penny, in for a pound, so McCain went for a ton.
Further, almost by accident, the McCain campaign realized that the best way to unnerve Obama was to hit his ego. Nobody runs for federal office without seeing a future president in the mirror, but even by this bar, Obama’s stuck on himself. The ads comparing Obama to Britney and Paris were tacky and graceless, but they rattled Obama. In a sense, they were the first punches he had to take, and he didn’t handle them well. If we understand Obama’s charmed political life, we can understand why he reacted so badly.
First, remember that he won his state senate seat unopposed; he’d maneuvered all his opponents off the ballot. Second, remember that Obama lucked into his Senate seat when his major primary opponent (Blair Hull) and his original general election opponent (Jack Ryan) collapsed in sex scandals. Third, remember that Obama lucked into the presidential nomination because Hillary Clinton didn’t realize she had to attack him until it was too late. Once she figured that out, she won 9 of the last 14 primaries, while McCain was watching and studying.
The situation as it now stands: Obama faces McCain, who wants to win the presidency and is willing to go negative; worse, Obama faces Palin, who’s immune to most criticism and is a hero to swing voters for flourishing in a media firestorm; worst, Obama has no significant support from his running mate, whose best showing in the presidential primaries was 3% in his native Delaware and who happens to be a walking gaffe machine.
If things don’t change, either through Obama’s gutsiness or a Republican gaffe, then expect a mudslide for the next 50 days that will bury Obama and give us President McCain. Yes, McCain could campaign nicely and let Obama win, but he won’t do that. He’s going to go ugly because it works.
Hubbard posted this at 9:11 PM HKT on Monday, September 15th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype, Journalism
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Bill Burton is a jerk. I’d never seen him on TV before, but he comes across as a significantly less likable version of Ari Fleischer. He was probably the PR flack for his College Democrats chapter.
Is the Obama campaign really proud of this? Is this what 19 months of campaigning for “hope” has culminated in?
Apollo posted this at 7:10 PM HKT on Monday, September 15th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype, Journalism
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Randall Kennedy’s awkward wording makes a point that he probably wasn’t thinking of [emphasis added]:
I anticipate that most black Americans will believe that an Obama defeat will have stemmed in substantial part from a prejudice that robbed 40 million Americans of the chance to become president on the day they were born black. They will of course understand that race wasn’t the only significant variable — that party affiliation, ideological proclivities, strategic choices and dumb luck also mattered. But deep in their bones, they will believe — and probably rightly — that race was a key element, that had the racial shoe been on the other foot — had John McCain been black and Obama white — the result would have been different.
Mr. Kennedy’s intended point seems to be that a black McCain would lose to a white Obama, but this seems doubtful. If a black Republican had John McCain’s personal history and mostly conservative voting record, does anyone think that a white first term Democratic senator would stand a chance against him in the presidential race?
Side note: how has Mr. Kennedy survived as a professor at Harvard Law School when he writes so badly? Besides the awkward and confusing phrasing of that last sentence, how did he work in four dashes into it?
Hubbard posted this at 12:46 PM HKT on Monday, September 15th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype, Buffoon Watch, Race
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