How McCain Can "Get Right"
Plus--Mickey's faster stimulus package.
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Thursday, December 20, 2007
McCain's Secret Friends? Pithy, knowledgeable Weekly Standard blogger Richelieu busts Edwards aides for forced spinning of their man's comeback. But Richelieu himself keeps spinning McCain comeback scenarios--the latest suggests that Giuliani could become a "Superman" by dropping out and endorsing McCain. If, as everyone including me suspects, Richelieu is in fact former McCain strategist Mike Murphy, someone should bust him. The Standard is depriving its readers of a key fact they need to judge his posts. ... P.S.: This is not to say that Edwards or McCain might not, in fact, come back. ...Update: And isn't Jake Tapper a famously huge McCain fan? Today ABC's evening news led with Tapper's report hyping McCain rival Giuliani's apparently brief illness as if it were the equivalent of Paul Tsongas' cancer. ... 3:53 P.M. link
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"Nice Hagel!' Malcolm Gladwell has elaborated a Theory of Disqualifying Statements, in the context of courtship:
For every romantic possibility, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word ... capable of extinguishing it.
Gladwell gives two examples of such disqualifying phrases. ("Brown," and "nice Tits!").
There are similar Disqualifying Statements in politics, words that will extinguish your enthusiasm for a candidate at the very moment when you are ready to swoon for him (or her). Here's one of those words: "Hagel." As in:
Barack Obama has often said he'd consider putting Repbulicans in his cabinet and even bandied about names like Sens. Dick Lugar and Chuck Hagel.
Forget that this is a cliche appeal to hack Washington bipartisanism, that Sen. Hagel's reputation seems to have been built on the substitution of good looks and agonizing passion for coherent, articulated thought, that the press mainly loves him because he's always ready to go on television and stab his party in the back. Why would you promote Hagel at the very moment when his prediction that the Surge was "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam" appears to have been humiliatingly wrong? Disastrously wrong, potentially, if it had been heeded. Disqualifyingly wrong, you'd think. Obama is saying, in effect, that his need for respectable approval trumps reality. ...
P.S.: And just when many people (e.g. me) were trying to conivnce themselves that Obama's inexperience wouldn't be a problem because he'd surround himself with terrific advisors. ...
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Enterprise vs. Millennium Falcon: Which is the Fastest?
Eleanor Roosevelt's License to Pack Heat
Photograph of Ann Coulter on Slate's home page by Brad Barket/Getty. Photograph of a wedding cake with two grooms on Slate's home page by Hector Mata/AFP Photo. Photograph of Princess Diana on Slate's home page by Georges De Keerle/Getty Images.