August 30, 2008
August 29, 2008
August 28, 2008
August 25, 2008
August 24, 2008
Clinton Factor Lives On
Lisa Van Dusen | Sunday, August 24, 2008I can't speak for all women who've given birth, but when I did it, there was a definite over-under moment about six hours into the contractions. As I was pacing around my coffee table cursing the words "creative visualization" and the womb-less bugger who thought them up, I looked down at my stomach, did the quick math on the situation and thought, "Okay, how do I get out of this?"
Then, just when it seemed I couldn't go to the next level, my pain threshold magically re-set itself like a jimmied odometer and I was able to get through the last bit.
As Barack Obama ponders the last 18 months of room service club sandwiches and hog-calling contests and looks ahead to the next few days in Denver, he could probably use just that sort of superhuman second wind.
This next bit for Obama will be a convention week that might have been entirely about hope and change -- and history -- but instead will also be about The Clintons, who, in this melodrama, come with an upper-case "The," and their own spine-chilling organ flourish.
Hillary, as runner-up, will deliver a prime-time speech Tuesday night and Bill, as the former two-term Democratic president and rightful big dog of the party, will speak Wednesday.
She will be nominated and put to an ostensibly symbolic roll call vote because her supporters will have come to Denver, to hear her tell it, in search of catharsis, and political convention roll call votes are famous for their purgative properties.
Observers at the more dubious end of the Clintonology spectrum know that the range of plausible scenarios might include something more sinister and that the process, cleansing though it may be, might also serve to devalue Obama's currency as the nominee.
HILLARY'S VISION
Because the general assumption among Clintonologists of every height, weight and paranoia class is that Hillary, rather than process her belated primary concession as a character-building loss, has seamlessly shifted her gaze toward her own catharsis in 2012, everything she says and does in Denver will be magnified.
In the weeks since Hillary conceded in June, she has been, except for that somewhat unnerving catharsis crack, an absolute trouper.
Bill, on the other hand, has made it known that he is pouting over his perceived mistreatment as a race-baiter during the campaign and that he has doubts about Obama's readiness to lead that couldn't possibly have anything to do with his wife's presidential ambitions. And when Bill Clinton is pouting, we are conditioned to know, anything can happen.
Because Hillary can't afford to do anything that could be construed as disloyal to a Democratic party she'll need in about two years if her universe unfolds as it might, her speech will likely be gracious, unequivocally supportive and wistfully humble about her own destiny.
But Bill's will be parsed for how long it takes him to mention Obama, how much of it is about Hillary, how much of it is about him, whether he uses the word "ready" and whether it's delivered by his voluble, generous inner dog or his gnarly, grudging, thwarted-entitlement inner dog.
If their famously double-edged political instincts haven't been entirely doused by anger over losing the nomination (and especially if, by the time this runs, she happens to have been named the longshot/shock-and-awe VP choice), they'll both give genuinely unifying speeches.
It's fun, right?
Obama, meanwhile, has to look like he's having fun again. He has to remind Democrats of why they wanted change in the first place and what that has to do with John McCain. He has to either explain why he won't fight dirty or decide that he will. And he has to revisit the issue of race in a way that establishes the act of transcending the wrong kind of doubt as a patriotic thing to do.
If he does buy into creative visualization, I'd suggest he picture a Denver boot; that big ugly metal clamp used to thwart scofflaws and carjackers. It was invented in 1953 by Frank Marugg, a violinist with the Denver Symphony Orchestra and a man who clearly possessed a fine appreciation of both artistry and muscle.
August 22, 2008
Commentary by James Carville: Why Obama has to get mad to win
(CNN) -- With all of the vice presidential buzz in the air and the Democratic convention just days away, what's most important is what Sen. Barack Obama's campaign does following his speech to the masses at Invesco Field next Thursday. Quite simply, he needs to create a more compelling narrative on change, use history as a context for the economy, and get mad about something.
First and foremost, Obama must bring a narrative to his position as a change agent. You can't simply seek change for change's sake.
The argument must be made that this is an election with two choices: the change-seeking good guys or the status quo-clinging bad guys. The campaign needs to brand every negative attack by the Republicans as just another desperate attempt of the status quo clinging to power.
Obama's campaign should argue that all of our political friends have the courage to break from the same old game in Washington in order to provide the change we need, while all of Sen. McCain's friends in Washington refuse a new direction for America.
McCain keeps trying to claim he's a "change Republican." I don't really know what that means, but Obama and his team must continue to highlight the "McSame" that he offers: more of the same failed Iraq policy, more of the same tax breaks for oil and drug companies, more of the same Swift-boat-style tactics, more of the same on education and healthcare.
And he certainly offers more of the same failed Bush economic policy, which leads me to my next point.
Obama can connect with voters on the economy by using history as a guideline. He should start by reading "Unequal Democracy," by Princeton academic Larry Bartels. The non-partisan and non-political Bartels points out devastatingly after an exhaustive study of Democratic and Republican presidents that the Democrats built a better economy and a more just society.
The campaign needs to say that, since 1900, Democratic presidents have not only "won" but dominated on every economic front: GDP growth, employment, deficit and income equality. Need more? How about a better performing stock market and a more fiscally-responsible spending.
There's no need to listen to McCain's marginal rates, death tax, deregulation, trickle-down, supply-side shenanigans because historically Democratic presidencies have produced better economies. And with the economy still in the forefront, it seems like a no-brainer for Obama to talk about the historical supremacy of economies under Democratic presidents.
And my last piece of advice to Obama and his team is to just get mad about something. Obama's campaign seems so intent on branding him as a "cool and calm" leader.
Well, voters want to see a sense of urgency and outrage in their president: Outrage over our dependence on foreign oil; outrage over our increased cost of living, health care and education; outrage over declining incomes; outrage over an endless war and an idiotic foreign policy; and outrage over our country's loss of prestige over the last 7½ years.
To put it bluntly, Obama needs to get outraged over something other than "attacks on his patriotism."
When all the dust settles after Denver, if Obama can do these things between now and November 4, he just may become President Barack Obama. No convention or vice-presidential pick will matter as much as connecting with voters on these key issues.
James Carville, a Democratic strategist who serves as a political contributor for CNN, was the Clinton-Gore campaign manager in 1992 and political adviser to President Clinton. Active in Democratic politics and a party fundraiser, Carville has not represented any U.S. politicians recently but has consulted internationally.
Quote of the Day - by Saint Robert Downey Jr.
"I'm between two phases right now, pre-Iron Man and post-Iron Man, and the transition can be tricky," he says, shifting and smoking. "It used to be, I'd drive onto a studio lot, and the guard was like, 'Less Than Zero dude, I loved Chaplin!' Now it's, 'Iron Man!' It's not an algorithm anymore. It's a fixed number. Things have been zeroed out; it's the beginning of something. But right now, it's still a void, and we tend to think of the void as an abyss or a vacuum with nothing there. In fact, it's a new road, and what you should do on this new road is close for repairs — close right away, because that old vehicle is not going to work on that new road. I mean, if the cosmos is a loving, healing thing that also spins real fast and erupts and does violent stuff, and if there really is some kind of order to the whole thing, then everything that's led up to this moment has to be part of it, or the math doesn't work. But in this transition phase, I really am trying to live as much like a lizard as I can. Hot, rock, sun, fly, tongue."
August 21, 2008
August 19, 2008
August 10, 2008
When Paris Hilton Becomes a Voice of Reason
With her brilliant critique, Lisa Van Dusen continues to reveal the ineptitude of most U.S. political reporting and analysis. - zjm
By LISA VAN DUSENYou know a presidential campaign has veered too far into the sludge when an intervention from Paris Hilton comes off like the voice of reason.
Somehow, last week, when the Bible-toting jailbird socialite said, in a video ad announcing her energy policy, "I want America to know that I'm, like, totally ready to lead," she was the only one around who really seemed to mean it.
After early assurances from both Barack Obama and John McCain that this would be a campaign of civilized respectability and Marquess of Queensberry rules, what had promised to be an epic battle is looking more and more like a John Hughes cafeteria food fight between a smartass, cynical outcast and a cool, detached principal, only with the old white guy playing the smartass and the young black guy playing the principal.
McCain, the candidate who coasted leisurely through June and early July like he was on an Elderhostel tour, is now running as though someone spiked his Ovaltine with crystal meth -- using drive-by attack ads, snarky put-downs and party favours to make Barack Obama's strengths seem ridiculous and his own weaknesses beside the point.
The point, according to the McCain campaign, is that nobody knows Obama and too many people are enamoured of him despite that fact for all the wrong reasons.
This is a line of attack that resonates with the same white, working-class voters who are suspicious of Obama's "otherness" based on his name, his skin colour and his exotic background, and who, the McCain campaign hopes, will now count "celebutante" as one more strike against him.
If there is anyone the economically-imperiled, mortgage crisis-besieged, health care-deficient, blue-collar workers of the rust belt have a hard time identifying with, it's Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
By including Barack Obama in the same ad as two women, whose lives are as alien to the daily reality of a Wal-Mart clerk as the lives of actual aliens would be, McCain is saying: "He's not like you, either." Because they already know Obama isn't the same colour as they are, it's more a reminder than a revelation.
More than halfway through a summer of shockingly drive-able Interstates left eerily unclogged by four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, the two campaigns have spent the past week going at each other on energy policy.
Where the candidates have clashed, and therefore where the sound bites have surfaced, the sniping has been not so much about the crisis itself, as about whether inflating your tires properly, as Obama has suggested, is a silly idea or not (McCain started out saying it was silly, then said it wasn't) and whether there is a square inch of American soil, turf or broadloom, off-shore or on, safe from Drillbit McCain.
McCain is taking heat from pundits and, in some cases, from his own former staffers, for going decidedly downscale with the Paris Hilton ad, as well as one mocking Obama's messiah thing (comparing him to Charlton Heston's Moses might backfire among the McCain-queasy fundamentalists).
He also took fire for playing the reverse-race card by accusing Obama of playing a real race card when he predicted that his opponents would try to scare people by pointing out that he doesn't look like all those other presidents in their wallets, which he doesn't.
In the longer term (and there is a longer term between now and November -- there's a longer
term between now and Labour Day, in campaign weeks), some Republicans fear McCain is swapping his considerable integrity stock for a fleeting return in the polls and that it won''t be there when he suddenly needs it between now and election day.
Obama, meanwhile, is still spending too many moments looking like a guy way too surprised that running for president of the United States could possibly get this ridiculous. He should be hitting instead of just hitting back, no matter how many times in the course of a long campaign hop he longs for what must now seem like the halcyon days of the bloody Pennsylvania primary.
Luckily for Obama, the Clintons have been agitating upstage just loudly enough to remind him of all they taught him about how badly he wants to be president. That should liven up the battleground some.
August 8, 2008
August 6, 2008
The Act of Remembering
From last year ...zjm
"Even to those who managed to survive, it was hell where they envied the dead," Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba told the crowd of thousands gathered at Peace Memorial Park to remember the 62nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by the UnitedStates, which ultimately killed more than 250,00 people. Mayor Akiba went on to describe the horrific scenes etched into the bodies and memories of those who survived. After his speech, 1,000 white doves were released into the sky above Hiroshima."The Japanese government, which has the duty to work for the abolition of nuclear weapons through international law," Mr. Akiba admonished, "should protect its pacifist constitution which it should be proud of, and clearly say 'no' to antiquated and wrong U.S. policies."
The crowd of survivors and mourners bowed their heads for a moment of silence when two children rang the Peace Bell at 8:15 in the morning, the exact time the Enola Gay B-29 bomber dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.
Six days later, it was the southern city of Nagasaki that was sacrificed for the cause of freedom.
Today, it is the men, women, and children of Iraq.
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