Hillery, Obama, Edwards and the Democrates

In the second place, what he said was

Quote:

"I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There's a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal."

And what he's speaking to is merely another facet of how positive will be the perception of America to the rest of the world where an American president is black (or female, of course) and has a familial connection to the non-christian, particularly the muslim world. That's something we've all thought about and talked about.

I guess we'll never know exactly what Bob Kerrey was thinking when, over the weekend, he referred to Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama" and mentioned his Muslim father and grandmother, or when he referred to Obama's childhood school in Indonesia as a "secular madrassa" on CNN yesterday. But maybe that's exactly the point. You have to admit there's a certain tactical brilliance at work here either way: Using people like Kerrey as surrogates--which is to say, people with a reputation for slightly offbeat pronouncements--means never having to say you're sorry. If they stay perfectly on message, then great. And if they go a bit over the line, well, that's fine, too. That's just Bob Kerrey being Bob Kerrey... It's genius.

Well here we go. Say nothing bad about Obama. Don't point out how he was educated and where because it might put him in a bad light. This is how our present idiot president became the president. Don't point out that Obama has a different education than most U.S.citizens or his relatives are Muslim oriented. Keep the people in a feel good cocoon. How about presenting the facts and letting people make up their own minds.

But please procede. Maybe even this time the liberals can can manage to prove themselves idiotic beyond measure.

Kos' post is tempered. So is the post you've added above.

You said elsewhere, in the last few days, that were it to come to Hillary vs McCain, you would (if you could) toss your vote to McCain. Correct? You might as well push for Nadar's re-entry into Presidential politics in the US. How could it possibly be that you might imagine the US (and the world) better off under another Republican with the foreign and domestic policies that McCain advocates? How loathsome do you consider Hillary to be such that you'd end up with this position?

What you and the others suggest re Kerrey's motives match nothing I know of the man.

Hillary Clinton v the media
US elections 2008: It's not just her personality. The reason why the press doesn't like her goes much deeper than that
Michael Tomasky

Interesting piece by Howard Kurtz in today's Washington Post about the media coverage on the Democratic side of the presidential race. The working thesis: Hillary Clinton is on the receiving end of coverage that's much tougher and more sceptical than coverage received by Barack Obama.

True? Basically, yes. Kurtz cites many examples, most of which have merit. He quotes some big-foot pundits, some of the biggest creators of the conventional wisdom going, like Time's Mark Halperin and Newsweek's Howard Fineman, as agreeing that it's true.

I don't really have a horse in this race. If anything I find Obama perhaps the more compelling of the two. But my basic interest in this election, as both opinion writer and engaged citizen, is to get the modern conservative movement out of power. Whoever can do that is OK by me, whether it's Clinton or Obama or Dennis Kucinich's wife.

But the hyperventilating coverage that Clinton receives ought to be obvious to anyone who watches this stuff with an open mind. It was evident during her first Senate run in 2000, which I covered closely. On the day of her formal announcement, a big sign behind her on the stage read simply, "Hillary". There was a lot snickering in the press accounts over the next few days about the fact that she'd left off the "Clinton", which was taken as "proof" that she was trying to distance herself from her philandering husband and was once again dragging the rest of us into the family soap opera. I thought to myself: and if she'd put the "Clinton" on there, these exact same people would have been complaining about how she was trying to trade on her famous husband's name when she really should have been striking out on her own, and was thus dragging the rest of us into the family soap opera.

There is no question that much or most of the press just doesn't like her. It's partly a personality clash. Reporters like pols who are loosey-goosey, self-deprecating and good at faking sincerity; a candidate who in private leans forward during an interview and winks and seems to be taking the reporter into confidence, and who in public is quick with a one-liner. Clinton isn't any of these things. She wants a controlled environment with few variables - not because she's some kind of first amendment hater, but just instinctively, undoubtedly for reasons having to do with how she was raised (go read about that control-freak father of hers). She can't fake sincerity.

And there's something deeper going on too. The obvious animus on the part of her fellow baby boomers has to have something to do with their anxiety about their generation. Many powerful liberal boomers doubt their generation's greatness but are at the same time quite vain about their generation's brilliance. They are at war within themselves, and Clinton somehow personifies the internal moral turmoil. Whenever I read or see a big-time boomer pundit carrying on about the "Clinton psychodrama" or some such, I know that the real psychodrama is going on in that person's head.

It may turn out that she's just not a great candidate under pressure (and she's never been under pressure like this). If so, fine, that's life. She wanted inevitability but has learned that things don't work like that in presidential politics. And she is certainly guilty of trying to cut moral corners on the biggest issue of our time (the war in Iraq). If voters punish her for that, that's life, too.

It's been interesting to observe that some Hillary-haters in the press see every single thing she does as part of the larger tableau of her inherent treachery, while her out-and-out media defenders seem to have difficulty distinguishing between unreasonable bias against her and criticisms that are totally fair. But what remains true is that the latter are far, far outnumbered, and if she does prevail in 2008, she will have defeated not just a political foe but a hefty media antagonism as well.

Why conservatives love Barack Obama
Clinton haters who think the Illinois senator can beat Hillary support him now, but their affection will fade if he gets the nomination.

By Joe Conason
Dec. 21, 2007 | In the weeks since Karl Rove offered his unsolicited advice on how to defeat Hillary Clinton in the pages of the Financial Times, right-wing expressions of support for Barack Obama have become increasingly conspicuous and voluble. Although often couched in high-flown moral terms that accept the Illinois senator's definition of himself as a fresh and unsullied figure, his Republican endorsers cannot quite conceal their underlying animus.

They hate Hillary Clinton and they think he just might be able to beat her.

Exactly why the American right hates the Clintons so fervidly remains a subject of debate among both political scientists and psychiatrists, but the persistence of those emotions is beyond dispute, especially among commentators and activists with little actual exposure to Hillary Clinton herself. (Evidently her conservative colleagues in the Senate have developed warmer feelings for the first lady they once demonized, but that's another topic.) So powerful is their fury that they will not hesitate to promote the career of a liberal black politician whose background and religious affiliation they regard with suspicion. Of course, they're also quite confident that they can bring him down later, too.

For the moment, at least, he is their shining hero. That is why the Weekly Standard ran a cover story in early December that provided a swooning rehash of Obama's life story and a series of masterful scenes from the campaign trail. ("He sounds like a man who knows what he's talking about and knows what he wants to do. There are no questions that catch him off guard, no issues he hasn't considered.") Written by Stephen Hayes, the admiring biographer of Dick Cheney and perhaps the last journalist on earth who still believes that Saddam Hussein was allied with al-Qaida, the flattering Obama profile raises none of the expected concerns over his eagerness to negotiate with the Iranians and other enemies of democracy. Why spoil the moment?

The wind behind that Hayes puff blew up into a bilious gust last week when William Kristol endorsed Obama in an editorial titled "Time to Move On ... From Hillary," urging Democrats to prevent the return of the Clintons to the center stage of American politics. He worked himself up into a lather of fake indignation over the clumsy attacks on Obama in recent days by Bill Shaheen, Bob Kerrey and Mark Penn. So did George Will, whose column excoriating Hillary Clinton invoked a very tired comparison with Nixon.

Evidently Will and Kristol assume that everyone has forgotten their own movement's penchant for filth during the Clinton White House years. Back then there was no limit to the jeering, lying assaults on the Clintons and everyone around them, including their young daughter. It was a poisonous atmosphere to which the likes of Kristol and Will contributed much pollution. For them, Obama's clean image is merely another weapon to be deployed.

Naturally, the impulse to promote Hillary's nemesis has often conflicted with an irrepressible urge to bludgeon him. How could excitable right-wingers restrain themselves from mugging an African-American politician with that surname, let alone his middle name? The answer is that they couldn't restrain themselves at all, as radio hooligan Rush Limbaugh has proved several times over the past year, beginning with his musical mockery of Obama as "the magic Negro," proceeding weeks later to a chanted repetition of "Obama Osama, Osama Obama." At one point, Limbaugh even claimed credit for making Obama "blacker," which the radio host openly said he hoped would help him attract African-American votes away from Clinton.


Obviously none of this is Obama's fault, nor does it reflect poorly on him in any way. So far his campaign has judiciously refrained from exploiting the right's flirtation with him, even though he occasionally echoes conservative themes in his criticism of Clinton. It is true, moreover, that some Republicans and conservatives who will forever despise her find him attractive on his own merits.

But nobody should imagine that the right-wing media whose voices now praise Obama will continue to do so if he wins the Democratic nomination, or that the mainstream media, which still takes so many cues from the right, will do likewise. The conservative movement's affection for any Democrat is always fickle and flimsy. Its assessment of any black Democrat, let alone a presidential nominee, is more likely to reflect the bigoted crudeness of Limbaugh than the manufactured erudition of Will. (And we can expect to see many more cartoons like this one.)

Should Obama hope to continue to enjoy his free ride, he should consult his old mentor Joe Lieberman, the senator from Connecticut who used to be a Democrat. Conservative commentators and right-wing media outlets always loved Lieberman for his willingness to echo their talking points on subjects such as school vouchers and Social Security privatization. When he agreed to join the Democratic ticket as Al Gore's running mate in 2000, the Weekly Standard and the National Review, among others, suddenly discovered how despicable Lieberman actually was. Having abandoned the Democrats altogether, he is now fully rehabilitated.

But Obama and his supporters must cherish no illusions about what will happen to him if he vanquishes Clinton. He will need the same kind of armor that she has worn proudly for years. What the right likes best about him is that he doesn't seem to own any.