Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - Posts
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The Clinton Machine has morphed into the Clinton Hydra. With five days left until South Carolina’s primary, Hillary Clinton spent Tuesday in Washington, D.C.; California; and Arizona while Bill campaigned for her in South Carolina. Meanwhile, Chelsea Clinton is leading an “Our Voice, Our Future” tour that looks to turn young adults into Hillary supporters.
Today, at a press conference in Washington, Clinton said, “I think on both sides, our surrogates are obviously out there advocating for each of us. But this is between us. This is who's on the ballot. This is who's presenting our case to the public.” Except it’s not. Bill is presenting her case to South Carolina’s public, and Chelsea is presenting it to the youngsters. That’s OK—surrogates are a necessary and reasonable facet of the campaign—but Clinton is only one of two or three principals. Mind you, she’s not necessarily the principal thanks to Bill’s eight-year tenure in the White House.
Obama is catching on to the Clintons’ strategy and has no recourse other than to complain about it. Obama’s wife isn’t a former president, and his daughters are still getting visits from the tooth fairy. At last night’s debate, Barack Obama let out a sliver of frustration when he sighed, “Well, I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes,” in response to Hillary and Bill Clinton’s two-headed critique of his record.
Today, he continued to talk about it, telling CBN’s David Brody, “She said last night that Bill Clinton wasn’t the one running for president, but this is the next primary and he’s the one who’s staying behind.” He knows he’s powerless to stop it, so he has to hope voters will think it’s unfair that the Clintons are ganging up on him or that she’s neglecting South Carolina. It seems that Obama’s star power—which has created thousand-person rallies—does have its limitations: It doesn’t carry over to his family members.
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In The State’s endorsement of Barack Obama—a coup he most likely didn’t need, but a coup nonetheless—the editorial board’s most compelling argument isn’t for Obama but against Hillary. In it, they imagine another Clinton presidency almost as a futuristic dystopia:
The restoration of the Clintons to the White House would trigger a new wave of all-out political warfare. That is not all Bill and Hillary’s fault—but it exists, whomever you blame, and cannot be ignored. Hillary Clinton doesn’t pretend that it won’t happen; she simply vows to persevere, in the hope that her side can win. Indeed, the Clintons’ joint career in public life seems oriented toward securing victory and personal vindication.
It’s become a refrain of the Obama campaign that they don’t want to relive the battles of the 90s. But this acute sense of dread—a preemptive Clinton fatigue—resonates for Dems who want a clean break from the past two decades. (For young people who don't fully remember the Clinton years, the feeling is slightly different. They back Obama, I'm convinced, because of an identity politics rooted in age. They see Obama as their candidate—they can point to him and say, He's mine—whereas Hillary belongs to earlier generations.) Meanwhile, however much Hillary wants to turn over a new leaf, her GOP opponents are more than happy to mull over the old ones. And with November a ways off, that will make for a long and painful general election.
That’s not to say Obama wouldn’t emerge from a general election bruised and battered. But the prospect of nine months of recriminations—let alone four or eight years of it—is enough to drive at least one editorial board over to the O team.
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Trailhead reader Mark Lyons has taken the lead in the Primary
Pool contest, notching nine of the 12 possible points over the weekend to bring his total to
25 points out of a possible 33. Mark was one of eight contestants to guess the
first-, second-, and third-place winners in the South Carolina Republican
primary.
This week’s honorable mention goes to Quintus Jett, the only
contestant to correctly guess the results of the Nevada
Republican caucuses, in which Ron Paul finished second to Mitt Romney,
ahead of John McCain in third place.
Also, Trailhead owes an apology to Jeremy Naylor, whose
original submission was not included in our pool due to a formatting error. After
the Michigan
primaries, Naylor had earned 18 points, which put him in the lead over two contestants
who each had 17. Naylor now has 22 points.
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So Fred’s dead. Cut to frantic speculation about what’s next for him.
One idea, floated by a campaign adviser to the Examiner: Fred for vice president!
"Having somebody like Thompson on the ticket, it seems to me, could go a long way toward unifying and energizing the base," Galen told The Examiner.
Unifying, perhaps. “Energizing”—that’s probably taking it too far. Galen continues:
"I don't even know if he'd take it, although I'm not sure I've ever heard of anybody turning it down," he added. "He has said flat out he's not interested in becoming vice president, but that's what they all say."
Frankly, we’re going to take Thompson at his word on this one. If the man doesn’t want to be president, why would he want to be VP?
Another theory, floated by the Dickensianly named Chadwick Matlin: Fred dropped out because young Thompson doppelganger Javier Bardem snagged the nomination—for best supporting actor! Thompson knew he'd been eclipsed.
P.S. As usual, the Onion had the story first.
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Sometimes it feels unfair to take a person's small moment and blow it up to Cloverfield proportions. But when that person is Mitt Romney and the small moment is him trying to endear himself to black people, it’s impossible not to.
In the first moment, Romney poses with a group of young African-Americans and says, “Who let the dogs out? Who, who.” (A spokesperson says he was responding to someone saying, “Who let you out?”) Later, he approaches a baby wearing a necklace: “Hey buddy! How’s it going? What’s happening? You got some bling bling here!” Fox News has the video here.
On the one hand, it’s a cringe-worthy display. George Romney may have marched with Martin Luther King Jr., but judging from this video you'd guess that was the last time a Romney interacted with an African-American. But on the other hand, it’s sort of adorable. He’s like your out-of-touch grandparent who tries to win you over by proving he knows the “Bad Boys” theme song. In the current issue of the New Republic, Jonathan Chait describes how Romney’s cluelessness can be touching:
Romney has acquired the aura of an overbearing, upper-class phony. But I see him as more of an earnest dweeb, desperately, and unsuccessfully, trying to fit in with his new crowd. I can almost picture him coming home from the Republican debates, crying his eyes out that he wants to move back to Massachusetts because all the other candidates keep laughing at him. If this image leaves you unmoved, you're made of sterner stuff than me.
Same goes for the “bling” moment. As much as I want to call Romney out for tone-deaf pandering—can you imagine him saying that to a white baby in Utah?—that would be stating the obvious. If any other candidate had said it, like Giuliani, the remarks might have sounded downright offensive. But with Romney, it’s clear he just doesn’t know any better.
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