2008 Primaries Thread 3: The Rejecting and Denouncening

gabbneb isn't the question more does hillary blow him out in penn and indiana and does he barely squeak by in carolina? ie does he limp severely into the convention? cuz otherwise moot fucking point right, this race is over. now if somehow this does happen and that's when edwards finally endorses hill, then it could maybe get interesting but odds are none of these things are gonna happen nevermind all of them right?

Obama on North Carolina early voting:

"you can call my hotline on 1-888-NCEARLY, that's E-A-R-E, UH, E-A-R-L-Y... almost pulled a Dan Quayle there for a second"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cv2DOlE8xc

the governer's name is e-a-r-l-e-y

bowling 37s ite

i'll bet ron paul can bowl better than a 37, rite?

obama threw the match

"gabbneb isn't the question more does hillary blow him out in penn and indiana and does he barely squeak by in carolina? ie does he limp severely into the convention?"

yeah this is what i was gonna ask, if he should pull an 0-fer the rest of the way, this gets really really interesting right? im worried this aint as automatic as youve been presenting it

you're concerned all right

i have no idea what thats supposed to mean but ill chalk it up to you being a cock

kind of a britishes post but morb's hacking skills in evidence in the weirdly abrupt closing line here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/18/wuspols218.xml

o its most definitely kind of britishes

yeah, i think i adequately flagged that up.

lol torygraph

Hillary is behind a tag that says break glass in event of emergency. We've already had a fire drill or two.

She's behind that glass, alright, but she's also pounding it as hard as she can with a tiny hammer.

it's good that we've got this stuff now rather than late in the week before election day.

I told myself that for a while too, but now I'm starting to think it would be better to leave McCain (or his allies) to raise the issues themselves, even if they came out later in the campaign. As it is now, McCain gets to rise above the fray, while the two Democrats throw mud at each other. It's not a pretty picture.

Newsweek: 19 Point National Lead For Obama

It'll pass. But yeah, swift boating a candidate is especially effective when it comes at the hands of supposedly respectable journalists. At least the GOP had to pay to air commercials against Kerry. Josh Marshall is spot-on as usual.

OTM. It's largely a matter of tone and context. By asking the questions they way that they did, as matters of self-evident relevance, in such a prominent setting and in their approved role as ostensibly objective and nonpartisan moderators, they imparted a significance to the accusations that no amount of GOP repetition would have been able to accomplish.

I think that this more traditional debate format perhaps privileges the role of the moderator too much. I question the logic that TV journalists should be granted the role of referee, with all the authority that entails, over an event of this potential significance for the country. I think the format of the "Compassion Forum" actually put the questioners on a more even playing field with the candidates - since it becomes basically a two-way dialog between candidate and questioner, rather than a refereed contest between two candidates, with the journalist in the role of referee.

the governer's name is e-a-r-l-e-y

Easley, Mike Easley.

oh rite

ha ha

Robert Reich endorses Obama

Which makes him the second Clinton cabinet member to do so, right?

Yes. Judas No. 2, apparently.

(I mean, so James Carville would presumably say).

I am waiting for Donna Shalala's endorsement next.

they're both verys hort

bill ayers has a blog

http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/episodic-notoriety-fact-and-fantasy/

that dude is a douche

let's not go there

Not that I'm sympathetic to him necessarily, but I wouldn't be surprised if a handful of ILXors were and that's a can of worms for a whole other thread.

not terribly sympathetic to him either, just glad I read his response

otoh sanctimonious shit like this is why i hate dennis perrin:

The late radical journo Andrew Kopkind admitted to thinking briefly about committing homicide. While skiing in Aspen during the mass-murderous Rolling Thunder bombing campaign in Vietnam, Kopkind spotted then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara near the edge of a cliff, one of the war criminals behind the destruction in Southeast Asia. "I could have reached out with my ski pole and pushed him over," Kopkind said to friends. The temptation must have great, but unlike McNamara, Kopkind was not a killer.

Don't shit where you eat, Hillary.

gross

Though the past few weeks have been painful (I haven't been around these parts much because I made a conscious decision not to follow the primaries so closely anymore), I think at the end of the day everybody looked at the turnout they were getting for these other primaries, looked ahead to the GE, and decided it would be better to let voters in these states feel like they had their say, even though Hillary can't win. If it's a done deal, why not let Pennsylvania vote? Of course I'm in the "McCain has no chance in hell" camp.

Despite the best efforts of the national news media, this protracted nomination process is good for the Democrats - the news that's being made, the speeches being given, are all about Democratic issues - that's where the conversation is, where the "center" os the debate is - health care, getting out of Iraq, etc - and McCain's going to have to address those issues or swiftly be deemed irrelevant

http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2008-04/37983329.jpg

Red Johnson (Laurence Fishburne) is one week away from retiring from the Secret Service when...

WAHT

http://media.gallup.com/poll/graphs/041908DailyUpdateGraph1_trew634.gif

That's unfortunate.

Wait a second...hold the phone!

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/gallupjk.jpg

the gallup lol

its a shop lol xp

the news that's being made, the speeches being given, are all about Democratic issues - that's where the conversation is, where the "center" os the debate is - health care, getting out of Iraq, etc - and McCain's going to have to address those issues or swiftly be deemed irrelevant

i don't know, it looks like the issues are more like, which democrat is more Out Of Touch With America -- the radical muslim black nationalist who wants to raise your capital gains taxes, or the shrewish millionaire conniver who everyone hates? and how badly will either get beat by a Real American like john mccain (who was being tortured for his country while the clintons and obama's black panther/weather underground buddies were destroying america)? i'm not saying that reflects what anyone really cares aobut or what is going to actually happen in november, but that's what the campaign coverage has sounded like recently. the democrats are not setting the agenda; the whole agenda seems to be, who is most vulnerable to the Republican Attack Machine? (the Republican Attack Machine seems to have migrated from being something the republicans sort of try to downplay to being a gleefully acknowledged and shame-free fixture of the political landscape. nobody ever talks about which republican will be most vulnerable to the Democratic Attack Machine.)

so no, i don't really think this thing is helping the democrats much at this point.

is vulnerability (or not) of democrats to the republican attack machine the foremost thing on voters' minds though? it's not for me. i think that's a kind of obscure inside-baseball angle. i'm as interested in how the national political media in the us covers these things as anybody, and the stories they tell certainly have a lot to do with how people conceptualize the candidates - and it's unquestionably true that these stewards of our national discourse would rather get given a cuban necktie than report on substantive differences in policy proposals, but the fact is that mccain has no ideas - none - and while he does get to "swan around looking like a statesman" (-- jeremy paxman) while obama and clinton land blows on each other, the steady drumbeat of news and polls ever since mccain clinched the nomination has been on democrats, their issues, in nevada, mississippi, texas, vermont, all over the local papers and in peoples' conversations. when the focus snaps to the general election, how can the republicans help but look bad? a $600 bribe check every year isn't going to cut it.

i agree with all of that. but as that debate showed, there's a disconnect between the things on voters' minds and the day-to-day obsessions of the campaign coverage (and therefore of the campaigns). on the issues the democrats obviously have the opportunity to set the agenda this year, and maybe that will be true if/when the campaign ever becomes about the "issues." but getting to that point is going to take a lot of fighting by the democratic ticket to keep the whole thing from being about imagined or real "republican attacks."

i mean, i saw larry sabato on cnn yesterday outlining in detail a weather-underground attack ad that he imagines the republicans would run against obama. this ad doesn't even exist, and sabato more or less acknowledged it would be distorted and unfair, but he enthusiastically described what a 30-second spot would look and sound like, right down to the wording. it pretty much illustrates that josh marshall post that was linked up above: the media has so much absorbed the gop viewpoint as part of the landscape that the "attack machine" practically doesn't even have to attack anymore; everybody just imagines what it will say and do. (and of course hillary's campaign has been doing this for months now too. the republicans will say this, they republicans will say that, booga booga booga!)

meanwhile their chosen candidate remains a blubbering old sack of nonsense who has absolutely nothing relevant and very little that's even comprendible to say on any of the issues whatsoever

see also ...

xpost: right right, but look, this is what's in the news in april. ok, april is still early. but it's not that early. there seems to be an assumption that at some point all this silliness will stop and we'll get to the real campaign where the democrats will have a massive edge. but this is the real campaign. just like al gore inventing the internet was the real campaign. we're in this weird meta-narrative where the actual campaign might never happen, or might be so marginalized by the campaign about the campaign (who's "shaping the storyline," who's elitist, who's doing the best job of courting the media) that the "issues" never really come into focus. obviously settling on a democratic candidate would help, but it's not like all this other stuff is going to suddenly disappear. in the most likely scenario at the moment, the mccain campaign just takes the baton from the clinton campaign and obama's still answering questions about his pastor in october.

ok maybe not "most likely," but at least a possible scenario. and then the analysis in november seamlessly becomes how the democrats never managed to "break through" all the "distractions," without anyone having to take responsibility for how those "distractions" became something that couldn't be "broken through." the media will say they were just reflecting the campaigns, the campaigns will say they were just reflecting the media, and pious columnists will write columns about how democrats just don't get the values of real americans.

yeah but I'm talking about voters, not the msm and definitely not bloggers