Probably the biggest surprise of this campaign is how much the McCain camp seems to enjoy attacking Obama. I was expecting an entire campaign of sanctimonious my-opponent’s-behavior-saddens-me tut-tutting, but instead we’re getting instructions on what toga to wear when at “The Temple of Obama (’The Barackopolis’).” This is great stuff, and it’s more tolerable to watch when it seems like at least one side is enjoying themselves.
In a similar vein, I watched Bill Clinton speak at the DNC tonight. The man obviously enjoys speaking to a large room of cheering people, and he doesn’t get to do it that much anymore. He looked existentially happy, like a pig who only gets to wallow in mud for ten minutes every four years. This is what he was born to do, and it was a delight to watch him be that happy.
Apollo posted this at 8:43 PM EDT on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
Out of these 10 reasons not to pick Romney for VP, at least 8 are good. The best is 9, which is similar to something I’ve said time and time again:
9. Rommey supporters typically say that he would be good on the economy. But why, exactly? Paul O’Neill and John Snow were both highly successful businessmen, and yet were weak as Treasury Secretary. Why would Romney be any different – and would McCain want to be seen to hand over control of the economy to his vice president? Business and government require different leadership styles. Few people can handle both well, and Romney’s thin record as governor provides little evidence he can. The conservative Tax Foundation stated that the total state and local tax burden in Massachusetts rose 5.1 percent on Romney’s watch, and the state ranked 46th in job growth from 2003-2005 (in the middle of a boom). In any event, skill in business is very different from skill in finance – or governing.
I really don’t see why so many found this guy to be an attractive candidate. It still makes me a sad panda to look back at how so many movement conservatives latched onto this guy as their standard bearer.
Update:Here is a flaming example of the vacuous “he knows a lot about the economy” pap. There are so many better picks.
I also agree with David Brooks’ excellent advice today, which is that Obama needs to simply be who he is. He just isn’t a Krugman-style attack dog; he isn’t terribly partisan; he isn’t really that radical. Clinton era tax hikes for the successful and tax cuts for the struggling, a healthcare proposal less statist than Romney’s, diplomatic caution, religious temperance, global awareness: these are his themes, bound together with the hope of the next generation. He is the 21st Century, while McCain is eager for the 19th. You have to trust the American people to see this - not panic, trust.
I have made this argument before, but the foolishness of the GOP Veepstakes, and the fact that this is probably my last opportunity to say my peace on this matter, compels me to write one last time about why Sen. McCain should chose Fred Thompson as his running mate.
As its famous first occupant once wrote, the Vice Presidency is “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” According to the constitution — and contrary to Dick Cheney’s tenure — the veep’s only two official jobs are to preside over Senate, casting the deciding vote in a tie, and to assume office is the president dies or leaves office before the end of his term. This is a terrible place to purposely put someone with executive experience, ambition, and a history of being a go-getter. That is why it would be such a waste of Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, or — in a similar way to — Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal, both of whom need to grow in office before being put out to the political pasture.
Thompson, however, has the perfect temperament for the job: indeed, the very laid-back, laconic approach that undid him in the primaries could be a tremendous benefit to him in office. There’s no question of his ability to preside over the Senate, and he’s certainly just as qualified to succeed the president as Sen. Biden.
But Thompson also provides at least two positive reasons to be picked. To begin with, his conservative bona fides and close personal friendship with McCain offer the best chance conservatives have to curb McCain’s many inanities. Thompson has an excellent chance not simply to put conservative ideas forward to McCain, but to actually slap him around and be listened to. Thompson could have a steadying effect on McCain, something badly needed.
Related but different, however, would be Thompson’s ability to act as a spokesman of the McCain administration and for limited government/federalist-style conservatism. Simply by virtue of his title, Thompson can be on every news show — domestic and foreign — every night as the public face of American Conservatism and President McCain.
One final suggestion: though McCain is only required to choose a running mate at the convention, there’s nothing to prevent him from announcing his cabinet appointments there as well. Wouldn’t it be startling if, after introducing his Vice President, he went to announce that he has already chosen his Secretaries of State, Defense,and Treasury, and Attorney General nominees, right as John Bolton, Joe Lieberman, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani took the stage?
Apollo has written before about Sen. Obama’s willingness to use his race both to attack others and to defend himself against attacks. The practice, of course, is not limited to Obama. Here is Prof. Lani Guinier — a failed Clinton nominee for Assistant AG and a current professor at Harvard Law — on NPR yesterday.
(NPR Host) Neal Conan: What do you think it would say about America – given the disparity of the popularity of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party as we look ahead – what do you think it will say about America if he loses?
Guinier: I think it would say that we are still caught up in the original sin that has haunted our country since the Founding, and that is the sin of slavery and of the subsequent commitment in many ways to Jim Crow and to white supremacy. One of the things we have to understand: we can admire George Washington, we can admire Thomas Jefferson, but these Founding Fathers all owned slaves, they owned human beings as property, and a set of justifications had to arise in order to explain that to themselves and to our country. I think we’re ready to move past those justifications, but that’s really the question.
George Will made an excellent point a few months back that’s relevant to this:
When, in 1975, Frank Robinson became major league baseball’s first African American manager, with the Cleveland Indians, that was an important milestone. But an even more important one came two years later, when the Indians fired him. That was real equality: Losing one’s job is part of the job description of major league managers, because sacking the manager is one of the few changes a floundering team can make immediately. So, in a sense, Robinson had not really arrived until he was told to leave. Then he was just like hundreds of managers before him.
Obama, his campaign, and his supporters have done great damage his post-racial identity — and the hint of improved race-relations it gave — Guinier being a only a particularly stark and grim example. Most people will rightly tell you that an Obama victory not based on his race will bode great things for America, just as an Obama loss due to racism will be a great tragedy. What so many forget is that his winning because of race would also be be tragic, just as his losing without regard to it should be seen as a sign that the sins of the past are dead and buried.
There’s no indication that Huckabee is being considered, so consider this idle speculation like the Hillary chatter prior to Obama’s pick. But wouldn’t Huckabee make a lot of sense given the things we’ve learned the last two weeks?
1) McCain might have a “wealth problem,” and certainly Democrats are going to try to hit his wealth for all its worth in their play for working-class voters; Huckabee doesn’t have a problem on this front, and has lots of working-class cred.
2) The pro-choice trial balloon hasn’t been well received, and it’s clear that a pro-choice nominee would create a major disruption; Huckabee is pro-life.
3) Obama picked Biden who is going to a vivid presence (for better or worse) on the stump and could be formidable in debate; Huckabee is a great campaigner and might be just the guy to puncture Biden in a debate.
4) (This is a less important point.) The McCain folks have made a huge deal about differences between Obama and Biden during the primaries; McCain and Huckabee didn’t have much in the way of differences and went out of their way to praise each other. The other upsides are the press likes Huckabee (for now), he’s a different kind of Republican, and his selection would be such a shock, it might even be considered bold. The downsides are—as I’ve noted many times before—he doesn’t have much in the way of national security credentials and has a big seriousness gap, obviously not trifling matters. But if McCain can’t do Lieberman, and isn’t thrilled by Pawlenty or Romney, Huckabee might be worth a last-minute second look.
Huckabee is essentially a socially conservative socialist, fond of tax increases and hostile to free markets. When the Massacusetts Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, he argued that Romney should ignore the court. It seems to me that the head of the executive branch is supposed to abide by the rules of the judicial branch, and Huckabee clearly disagrees. Bad idea. Memo to McCain: Don’t Huck around.
At one time, it was said “The truth will make you free.” Today, there seem to be those who think that rhetoric and hype will make you free. It might even be called the audacity of hype.
Yeah, I realize that anyone with half an ear can coin the phrase which has become our most used category behind “uncategorized.” But let me dream that one of the biggest brains in the business reads us.
In polling for the presidency, a generic Democrat beats a generic Republican the way Michael Phelps outswims a quadriplegic. Yet Obama is shockingly underperforming. As the prophet noted:
The winds at the Democrats’ backs are hurricane-force gales, and yet there’s Obama holding steady, like a young Dan Rather in his schoolgirl rain slicker, immobile and unmovable.
Quite a few of the explanations have focused on the voters, or the voters’ reactions to the candidates. Perhaps the problem is that Obama, on some level, doesn’t really want to be president, and is therefore self-sabotaging his candidacy.
This thought came to mind when browsing the reaction to Obama’s selection of Joe Biden as a running mate. Patrick Ruffini pulled up some of Biden’s greatest goofs, and McCain already has a puckish ad running about Obama-Biden (H/T)
Jay Nordlinger observed that Obama had a wealth of good options, the political equivalent of lobster or lamb chops, and instead went with a tofurkey. Much as we like to snark at him, Obama is intelligent. He has to know that Biden is a walking gaffe machine, the Democratic Dan Quayle. The first rule of a vice presidential pick is to do no harm to the ticket; like Quayle before him, Biden flunks. The argument that Biden is a choice that shows Obama is serious about governing doesn’t supersede this first rule, since one must win the election before selecting furniture in the oval office.
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.
I have no inside knowledge of the Obama campaign or Obama himself. I’m just speculating here. But I think I’m reasonably close to explaining what’s going on. Other Democratic politicians are Washington insiders and foreign affairs buffs and are executive branch material: former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, Virginia Senator James Webb, Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd. But only Biden brings a counterproductive gaffe machine. The next 70 odd days are going to be interesting—if your idea of interesting is a root canal.
Work your way through this plainly biased reporting. What’s striking is how the reporter tries to overwhelm you with bill numbers, quotes about different amended versions of bills, and obtuse analysis about what is or isn’t extreme, to obscure this basic fact: when faced with a law that gave legal rights to babies accidentally born alive, and that specifically said it had no other impact on abortion laws, Barack Obama used his power to kill the bill.
The thought of babies being exposed in America - not in a Communist dictatorship, but in America - should be absolutely revolting to any civilized person. Yet there was Obama, approaching this issue skeptically because he was afraid that it might impinge on abortion rights.
if that fetus, or child—however way you want to describe it—is now outside the mothers’ womb and the doctor continues to think that it’s non viable but there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, (the fetus is) not just coming out limp and dead, that, in fact, they would then have to call a second physician to monitor and check off and make sure that this is not a live child that could be saved.
So in Obama’s world view, the rights of newborns - and if it is “outside the mothers’ womb,” it is not a fetus - are so negligible that the possibility that the law might require a second opinion on whether some babies are in fact alive was too high a burden to place on a woman seeking an abortion.
…essentially adding an additional doctor who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physicians to induce labor and perform an abortions. Now if that’s the case… I think it’s important to understand that this issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births.
The bill was specifically about babies who came out alive. Obama couldn’t take his eyes off of his abortion dogma long enough to see that there were babies being exposed, left to die in closets. Faced with evidence that this monstrous practice was occurring in his state, Obama couldn’t bring himself to get worked up about it. Instead, he took the opportunity to rise in defense of abortion rights, and to criticize and kill the bill that tried to save the lives of living, breathing babies.
This sort of abortion uber alles philosophy is monstrous. We ought not expose babies. Those who see a bill written to ensure that living, breathing babies are not intentionally killed, and are primarily concerned with the burden on abortion rights of requiring a second opinion in a few marginal cases have priorities that leave me utterly aghast.
Anyone expecting the mainstream media to attempt being unbiased in this election would be floored–absolutely floored–to see Obama say, on live national television, that a mainstream political group is “lying,” then to see his campaign later admit that he was completely incorrect and that the opposition group was completely correct and that he himself had been lying for years, and then not have the media investigate when he again called that group liars just a few days later.
I, of course, am not surprised. I said then that he had slapped every political journalist in the face and challenged them to investigate his record, and that not a one of them would take up his challenge. I go to sleep tonight confident that they never will. This is another embarrassing example of the American press’s credulity when faced with leftist lies. If only there were some sort of recent example of the press accepting a liberal politician’s word and then being exposed as complete fools for doing so. Then, maybe, they might learn their lesson.
Want further proof that Obama has no ability to speak except from a teleprompter? Read this answer; it seems to be in response to a question about same-sex marriage:
The reason that people believe there needs to be a constitutional amendment, some people believe, is because, uh, of the concern that, uh, uh, about same-sex marriage. I’m not somebody who’s [sic] promotes same-sec [sic] marriage, but I do believe in civil unions. I do believe that we should not, um, that that for a gay partners [sic] to want to visit each other in the hospital, for the state to say, you know what, that’s all right, I don’t think in any way inhibits my core beliefs about what marriage are [sic].
Prof. Althouse draws the conclusion that his “uh”s and lack of grammar tell us that he’s hiding something. I think it’s just further proof that the man is not that smart. McCain is going to mop the floor with this guy during the debates.
Apollo posted this at 9:58 AM EDT on Monday, August 18th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype