Obama '08?

Interesting, I'd just come to post this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/17/reagan-advisers-see-a-bit_n_82057.html

Did you read the Andrew Sullivan piece on that? Obama as the liberal Reagan?

Interesting, I'd just come to post this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/17/reagan-advisers-see-a-bit_n_82057.html

Did you read the Andrew Sullivan piece on that? Obama as the liberal Reagan?

ND ReSource: Obama forms exploratory committee; surprising similarities between senator and Reagan

[...]

"In terms of political philosophy, professional background and racial heritage, Obama and Reagan are distinctly different, one a figure of the new century and the other a representative of the previous one," Schmuhl wrote in an essay published Jan. 14 in the Chicago Tribune. "Look more closely, however, and you see a number of striking parallels between the young senator contemplating a White House campaign and the late, Illinois-born two-term president."

Among the similarities is the dominance of their mothers in their formative years, early careers outside of politics, humbling election losses, and, perhaps most notably, "the mysterious yet magical quality of charisma that attracts and inspires others."

Schmuhl adds: "Their ready smiles, rhetorical eloquence and rock-star magnetism transcend day-to-day politics, and citizens respond emotionally as well as intellectually. At a time when so much political oratory sounds processed by an anonymous speech writer, Reagan and Obama's words have the ring of authenticity."

[...]

Just coming back, and here nimh and you are posting on almost the exactly same thing.

Here's the transcript, via Matt Stoller

(I didn't, and don't, think "spadework" was anything when Hillary used it.)

The court ruled to allow voting in casinos:

Quote:

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - A federal judge on Thursday allowed Nevada Democrats to hold presidential voting in casino hotels on the Las Vegas Strip, potentially helping Sen. Barack Obama in the next round of the campaign on Saturday.

For the first time, Nevada Democrats planned to set up nine locations for Saturday's vote so casino shift workers, who are largely represented by a union that endorsed Obama, could attend caucuses and vote for a presidential candidate.

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1553481720080117

Bill Clinton: "You asked the question in an accusatory manner so I will ask you back -- do you believe that if the Democrats had understood that they had agreed to give everybody who worked in a casino a vote worth five times as much as people who voted in their own precinct? Did you know that? Their votes will be counted five times more powerfully in terms of delegates to the State Convention and delegates to the National Convention. What happened is nobody understood until they uncovered it. And now they are saying 'ohh they don't want us to vote.'"

Interesting butterfn

What's Hillary been doing these last 35 yrs? I thought she was only an elected official fairly recently.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

okie wrote:

Last night, she was repeating over and over her 35 years of experience again. Question, has anyone yet figured out what those 35 years of experience amounted to?

Not me!

From Wikipedia.org:

1970-1979

Quote:

She began her career as a lawyer after graduating from Yale Law School in 1973, moving to Arkansas and marrying Bill Clinton in 1975, following her career as a Congressional legal counsel; she was named the first female partner at Rose Law Firm in 1979 and was listed as one of the one hundred most influential lawyers in America in 1988 and 1991.

Quote:

[In] Yale Law School, [..] she served on the Board of Editors of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action. During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center, learning about new research on early childhood brain development and working as a research assistant on the seminal work, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973).

She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free advice for the poor.

In the summer of 1970, she was awarded a grant to work at Marian Wright Edelman's Washington Research Project, where she was assigned to Senator Walter Mondale's Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, researching migrant workers' problems in housing, sanitation, health and education [..].

In [the] summer [of 1971], she interned on child custody cases at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which was well-known for its support of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and radical causes [..].

The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. [After graduation from Yale], she began a year of post-graduate study on children and medicine at the Yale Child Study Center. Her first scholarly paper, "Children Under the Law", was published in the Harvard Educational Review in late 1973 and became frequently cited in the field. [..]

During her post-graduate study, Rodham served as staff attorney for Edelman's newly founded Children's Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as a consultant to the Carnegie Council on Children. During 1974 she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal. Under the guidance of Chief Counsel John Doar and senior member Bernard Nussbaum, Rodham helped research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds and standards for impeachment. The committee's work culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974. [..]

[After moving to Arkansas and marrying Bill Clinton,] Rodham joined the venerable Rose Law Firm, a bastion of Arkansan political and economic influence, in February 1977, specializing in patent infringement and intellectual property law, while also working pro bono in child advocacy [..].

Rodham co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a state-level alliance with the Children's Defense Fund, in 1977. In late 1977, President Jimmy Carter (for whom Rodham had done 1976 campaign coordination work in Indiana) appointed her to the board of directors of the Legal Services Corporation, and she served in that capacity from 1978 through the end of 1981. For much of that time she served as the chair of that board, the first woman to do so. During her time as chair, funding for the Corporation was expanded from $90 million to $300 million, and she successfully battled against President Ronald Reagan's initial attempts to reduce the funding and change the nature of the organization.

1979-1992

Quote:

She was the First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992, was active in a number of organizations concerned with the welfare of children, and was on the board of Wal-Mart and several other corporate boards.

Quote:

[She] took a leave of absence from Rose Law in order to campaign for [Bill] full-time. As First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton chaired the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee from 1982 to 1992, where she sought to bring about reform in the state's court-sanctioned public education system. [In] one of the most important initiatives of the entire Clinton governorship, she fought a prolonged but ultimately successful battle against the Arkansas Education Association to put mandatory teacher testing as well as state standards for curriculum and classroom size in place. She introduced Arkansas' Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youth in 1985, a program that helps parents work with their children in preschool preparedness and literacy. She was named Arkansas Woman of the Year in 1983 [..].

From 1987 to 1991 she chaired the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, which addressed gender bias in the law profession and induced the association to adopt measures to combat it. She was twice named by the National Law Journal as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America, in 1988 and in 1991. [..]

Clinton served on the boards of the Arkansas Children's Hospital Legal Services (1988-1992) and the Children's Defense Fund (as chair, 1986-1992). In addition to her positions with non-profit organizations, she also held positions on the corporate board of directors of TCBY (1985-1992), Wal-Mart Stores (1986-1992) and Lafarge (1990-1992) [..]. Clinton was the first female member on Wal-Mart's board, added when chairman Sam Walton was pressured to name one; once there, she pushed successfully for the chain to adopt more environmentally-friendly practices, pushed largely unsuccessfully for more women to be added to the company's management, [but] was silent about the company's famously anti-labor union practices.

Hillary's "experience" lie, by Timothy Noah:

http://www.slate.com/id/2182073
Takes on the whole "35 years of experience" meme, with some interesting commentary on how she lost his nascent support.

Excerpt:

Quote:

But I'd never felt the large emotions she seemed to stir in others. New York's junior senator wants to be president? Fine, I thought. Let's hear her pitch. Because she was still a relative newcomer to government service, I assumed that, more than most presidential candidates, Clinton would recognize the need to give voters a reason to vote for her. I waited expectantly to discover what that reason might be.

I never dreamed the reason would be "experience." More astonishing still, the public seems to be buying it. According to a new New York Times/CBS News poll, 79 percent of all Democratic primary voters believe that Hillary Clinton has "prepared herself well enough for the job of President," compared with only 40 percent for Obama. "Experience Counts" declared the headline of a Jan. 9 editorial in the Boston Globe about the New Hampshire victories of Hillary Clinton and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. "The results suggest that, at the least, New Hampshire voters put more stock in the length of a candidate's track record than Iowa voters did," the Globe said. But the paper never got around to explaining what, in Hillary's case, that experience consisted of.

Let's be clear. If you're a Democrat, experience isn't on this year's menu.

He then goes on to explore the differences (and similarities), between the top three candidates, experience-wise, in some detail. Last paragraph:

Quote:

Clinton's claim to superior experience isn't merely dishonest. It's also potentially dangerous should she become the nominee. If Clinton continues to build her campaign on the dubious foundation of government experience, it shouldn't be very difficult for her GOP opponent to pull that edifice down. That's especially true if a certain white-haired senator now serving his 25th year in Congress (four in the House and 21 in the Senate) wins the nomination. McCain could easily make Hillary look like an absolute fraud who is no more truthful about her depth of government experience than she is about why her mother named her "Hillary." Dennis Kucinich has more government experience than Clinton. (He also has a better health-care plan, but we'll save that for another day.) If Clinton doesn't find a new theme soon, she won't just be cutting Obama's throat. She'll also be cutting her own.

There's this, too:

Quote:

Clinton's claim to superior experience isn't merely dishonest. It's also potentially dangerous should she become the nominee. If Clinton continues to build her campaign on the dubious foundation of government experience, it shouldn't be very difficult for her GOP opponent to pull that edifice down. That's especially true if a certain white-haired senator now serving his 25th year in Congress (four in the House and 21 in the Senate) wins the nomination. McCain could easily make Hillary look like an absolute fraud who is no more truthful about her depth of government experience than she is about why her mother named her "Hillary." Dennis Kucinich has more government experience than Clinton. (He also has a better health-care plan, but we'll save that for another day.) If Clinton doesn't find a new theme soon, she won't just be cutting Obama's throat. She'll also be cutting her own.

Thanks

She was "The First Lady of Arkansas"

sounds like a terrifying book title

nimh wrote:

Here's the transcript, via Matt Stoller

There's a very... lively discussion in the comments section to that post. Sharp differences of opinion, but mucho interessante. A healthy debate between progressives I think (tho some posts are lamer than others of course).

Reading thru it I kept going from, "WTF he think he's doing?", to, "well I guess.. yeah, that makes sense", and back again...

I really dont like Obama contrasting "the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s [when] government had grown and grown" with the "sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship" of Reagan, though. It seems like another instance where he appears to repeat & validate conservative criticisms of the left.

IMO, Reagan's "sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship" meant vilifying any social-democratic sense that still remained from the New Deal/Great Society era and replacing it with libertarian, anti-progressive, anti-regulation, anti-union, anti-welfare bigotism, and I dont like liberal politicians praising that ****, I mean, not substantively. But yeah, maybe those other commenters are right and I shouldnt worry...

Or wait - actually, what you first have to do to check whether Noah is right would be to fact check the way he includes the word "government" in Hillary's claim. I know that Hillary often speaks of her "35 years of experience" - "fighting for people", for example, or "working for change", or some such pablum. Noah is saying Hillary can easily be shown to be lying when she claims she has "35 years of government experience" - but does she claim that?

I think he's mostly saying that all of the top candidates are roughly equivalent, experience-wise. That it's silly for her to say she's that much MORE experienced than either of them -- not that's she's inexperienced per se, but that experience is not nearly the divide between her and her competitors as she has made it out to be. And that it leaves her wide open if she's running against someone who actually does have experience in the general election.