My little politics blog

Ickes also "likened Barack Obama to George McGovern's 1972 failed candidacy Monday, telling a breakfast group of reporters that if there had been Democratic superdelegates that year, they might well have voted for someone else for fear McGovern couldn't win against Richard Nixon."

Thanks for pointing to that one, Butrflynet. I'd say "amen" but it seems dangerous... ;-)

This is a plonk, one I've wanted to come back to before:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04obama-t.html

It's an (old) article from the NYT magazine about Obama and foreign policy; who's supporting him and why.

Obama finally leaned back to nap, and I went across the aisle. I was telling Gibbs my theory that Americans might be looking for a president whose protection they can huddle under when Obama opened an eye. And as he resumed the conversation, the frustration of months of pedaling hard and getting nowhere began to show. He wanted to know what kind of experience Clinton supposedly had that he didn't, and what kind of crisis she was supposedly better suited to than he, and why "toughness" had become a stand-in for experience, and how Clinton could get credit for it when she failed to stand up to Bush on the Iraq vote. We batted all this around. Finally he said, "Ask Nye why Hillary's paint-by-the-numbers foreign policy makes her more qualified to handle a crisis when for most of our history our crises have come from using force when we shouldn't, not by failing to use force." I promised that I would.

And I did. Nye is writing a book about leadership, and he said he had learned that at moments of crisis a leader's key attribute was the "tacit knowledge," usually acquired from prior experience, that allows him (or her) to "shape the crisis by asking the right questions." I said that Obama wanted to know how Clinton had acquired this experience. "By osmosis of going through this," Nye said, though he conceded that he wasn't sure tacit knowledge could in fact be acquired osmotically. And he added that he had great respect for Obama. "It is," he said, "a 51-49 type of distinction."

It's been a running joke on several blogs I read how the Clinton campaign spins various races that she is about to lose or has already lost as "not counting." This one's a bit of a gobsmacker:

Quote:

"I'd love to carry Texas, but it's usually not in the electoral calculation for the Democratic nominee. Florida and Michigan are," Hillary Clinton, laying the groundwork for why Texas doesn't count.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/02/quote-for-th-10.html

After weeks of finding reasons to discount every Obama victory, the Clinton campaign seems to be laying the groundwork to argue that Texas -- the state that they have been pointing to as more meaningful and representative than other states -- doesn't count, either. Why would they be discounting Texas? Oh, I don't know, this might have something to do with it.

Bill Clinton's argument is that Texas is unfair because it has a caucus in addition to a primary, and, as the Clintons have been arguing, caucuses are less democratic than primaries. It's certainly true, caucuses give disproportionate weight to well-organized party activists over ordinary voters. But you know what gives even more weight to well-organized party activists over ordinary voters than the caucus system? Superdelegates. And the Clintons obviously have no objection to that.

(h/t Mike.)

--Jonathan Chait

Well, I think what is absolutely true is, is that when Senator Clinton continually talks about her experience, she is including the eight years that she served as first lady, and you know, often says, you know, "Here's what I did."

"Here's what we did." "Here's what we accomplished" -- which is fine.

And I have not -- I have not in any way said that that experience is not relevant, and I don't begrudge her claiming that as experience. What I've said, and what I would continue to maintain, is you can't take credit for all the good things that happened but then, when it comes to issues like NAFTA, you say, well, I -- behind the scenes, I was disagreeing. That doesn't work. So you have to, I think, take both responsibility as well as credit.

Now there are several points that I think Senator Clinton made that I -- we need to discuss here. First of all, she talked about me objecting to caps on credit cards. Keep in mind, I objected to the entire bill -- a bill that Senator Clinton, in its previous version, in 2001 had voted for. And in one of the debates with you guys said, well, I voted for it, but I hoped it wouldn't pass -- which, as a general rule, doesn't work. If you don't want it to pass, you vote against it. (Laughter.)

You know, she mentioned that she is a fighter on health care. And look -- I do not in any way doubt that Senator Clinton genuinely wants to provide health care to all Americans.

What I have said is that the way she approached it back in '93, I think, was wrong in part because she had the view that what's required is simply to fight. And Senator Clinton ended up fighting not just the insurance companies and the drug companies, but also members of her own party. And as a consequence, there were a number of people, like Jim Cooper of Tennessee and Bill Bradley and Pat Moynihan, who were not included in the negotiations. And we had the potential of bringing people together to actually get something done.

I am absolutely clear that hope is not enough. And it is not going to be easy to pass health care. If it was, it would have already gotten done. It's not going to be easy to have a sensible energy policy in this country. ExxonMobil made $11 billion last quarter. They are not going to give up those profits easily.

But what I also believe is that the only way we are going to actually get this stuff done is, number one, we're going to have to mobilize and inspire the American people so that they're paying attention to what their government is doing. And that's what I've been doing in this campaign, and that's what I will do as president.

And there's nothing romantic or silly about that. If the American people are activated, that's how change is going to happen.

The second thing we've going to have to do is we're actually going to have to go after the special interests.

Senator Clinton in one of these speeches -- it may have been the same speech where you showed the clip -- said you can't just wave a magic wand and expect special interests to go away. That is absolutely true, but it doesn't help if you're taking millions of dollars in contributions from those special interests. They are less likely to go away.

Just got back from the rally!

(Wanted to get to a fresh, un-stretched page...)

OK so Obama was late. Quite late. Sozlet was extremely good -- I'd brought a magazine and she read happily and chatted with people. She'd made an Obama t-shirt and a lot of people commented on it and then chatted with her about why she supports Obama. (Yesterday E.G. asked her what she knew about him and she rattled off all this stuff and he said "how do you know that?" and she replied, "I read the paper...!") (She does, she's been reading the NYT lately, especially election stuff.)

Anyway, it dragged on, and on, and I pitied the poor interpreter who had gotten there really early. Flight delays or something, I didn't really catch what happened. I know he came here from Cleveland.

Then finally Eddie George (OSU Heisman Trophy winner) took the stage, then Mayor Coleman, then Obama!

Good speech. I know so much of it already. The interpreter was really struck by a lot of it as she was interpreting (yes, I think I convinced her to vote Obama when we were chatting before he showed up -- she had been leaning Hillary but was put off by how things have been going lately and was pretty easy to nudge off the fence). She'd give me little "whoa!" expressions in the applause pauses. There was some new stuff about McCain that was very good! "Pay attention, Senator McCain" is one thing I remember. I'll have to see if I can find it back.

We had prime seats (after some hassle -- there wasn't really a section per se as there had been at the previous Obama rally and at the Michelle Obama event), and we both got to say hi and shake hands with him when he made the rounds. He chatted with sozlet for a while -- loved her shirt. :-D I said that I'd seen him in October and things were a bit different these days! Big grin from him.

Sozlet wasn't really suitably impressed that he probably spent more time with her than any other single person in the several-thousand-strong audience. She seemed to think that was just to be expected. She was certainly happy about it though!

"I've got some news for John McCain, that is there was no such thing Al Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade.

"I've got some news for John McCain. I've got some news for John McCain. He took us into a war, along with George Bush that should have never been authorized, never been waged. They took their eye off the people who were responsible for 9/11 and that would be Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, that is stronger now than at any time since 2001. I've been paying attention John McCain!

"John McCain may like to say that he wants to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell. But so far all he's done is follow George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq that's cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars and that I intend to bring to an end so that we can actually start going after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and in the hills of Pakistan, like we should have been doing in the first place. That's the news John McCain!

"I respect John McCain, but he's tied to the politics of the past; we're about the policies of the future. He's the party of yesterday. We want to be the party of tomorrow. That's why I'm running for President of the United States of America."

we both got to say hi and shake hands with him when he made the rounds. He chatted with sozlet for a while -- loved her shirt. :-D I said that I'd seen him in October and things were a bit different these days! Big grin from him.

Sozlet wasn't really suitably impressed that he probably spent more time with her than any other single person in the several-thousand-strong audience. She seemed to think that was just to be expected. She was certainly happy about it though!