2008 Primaries Thread

Sullivan, off his meds.

and otm

I hope Sully is around for Rodham's eulogy.

What kind of feminist is he? Good lord.

i like this new angry hillary

hillangry

What I'm not getting is how Sullivan could have been a Republican for years and years and now start complaining about politics not being all high minded and polite?

Still, I can't help but read Sully's piece and think, this person he despises so much sounds kind of awesome. I wonder what he'd have had to say about Sen Mikulski's first campaign, why, how can we ever elect her? She's a fighter? How shameless, how tacky!

He nicely glosses over the urge to out-and-out call her a bitch with the artful "rottweiler with issues," I'll admit.

Mikulski>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Hillary

he just likes the bitch in her, i guess

He's been a conservative but not a Republican. Idea guy.

i don't know why i'm bothering, but while mikulski might be way more of a nerd than even relatively-bookwormish hillary, she's at least authentic and uncalculating and not pretending to be confident. at least when she isn't hitting on random men.

What does that mean, really, to be authentic? I don't understand. Not being facetious here. I really don't, and can't figure how anyone got to be elected Senator without actually calculating political moves. I mean, what is she pretending to be that she is not, thereby making her inauthentic?

lol yeah hillary, inauthentic? surely you jest

MUSIC CRITCS ARE THE ART OF PRETEND FORGETFULLNESS

Oh, fuck it. Burn the witch.

lololololol

you could argue that being less accomplished at projecting authenticity than all the other senators who do exactly the same thing as her actually makes her more authentic

from wikipedia

Speech patterns

Hillary Clinton campaign logoWhile speaking from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama on March 4, 2007, as part of ceremonies honoring the anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965, Clinton adopted a broad Southern Drawl during parts of her talk and used speech patterns common to the Southern United States.[70] The native Chicagoan's normal speech is devoid of this accent. Clinton's defenders pointed out that she may have adopted a southern accent because she lived in the Southern United States for 17 years.[71] Defenders of Clinton also pointed out that the most commonly circulated audio and video clips of her "Southern" speech focused a segment in which she was reciting the lyrics of a James Cleveland hymn and trying to reproduce its original cadences.[72] However, on April 20, 2007, while speaking her own words to the annual convention of the National Action Network, she once again temporarily adopted this accent.[73] On April 27, 2007, while speaking at a Greenville, South Carolina campaign event, Clinton said that she had split her life among three parts of the country and that her sometimes-Southern accent was a virtue.[74] She joked, "I think America is ready for a multilingual president."[74]

The native Chicagoan's normal speech is devoid of this accent.

lol

Authentic is subjective, but this is where I'm saying that Obama is (I think very deliberately) not distorting any facts or taking quotes out of context -- this is the "high road" that could pay off if there's a way of getting this tactic across, because it's a much higher form of integrity than Bush and now Clinton have practiced.

Former President Clinton said Tuesday he enjoyed the bickering.

"I know you think it's crazy, but I kind of like to see Barack and Hillary fight," Bill Clinton told a mostly white crowd of about 300 at a black church in Greenville, S.C. "They're flesh and blood people and they have their differences — let them have it."

I gotta say, Bubba's role in this whole campaign so far has been really gross - from the lawsuit outburst to the "fairytale" comment to stuff like this. Blech.

my father last week on the phone re: obama: "you really think people are gonna vote for a muslim?" obv there's a lot of work still to be done.

Fwiw, Obama has adopted a Southern accent while in the South as well.

is it just the name?? some kind of generational memory of 'muhammad ali'? or are those emails getting around to everyone?

i've even talked to liberals from up here who said "yeah, he seems interesting. it might be good to have a muslim president"!!

Obama has taken a high-road of a sort, and I do respect him for it. I think it shows a form of personal integrity. However, I think that Clinton also has shown integrity. I don't think that her campaign has engaged in quite the all-out slime war that has been portrayed in this thread. What else can she criticize him on if not his public statements and record? His stated positions on the issues are almost identical to hers. I think that her criticisms have been within the bounds of fair play. How well does any of us know what Obama really thinks about Reagan and his ideas or why he chose that moment to bring them up? Those who like him assume he meant the best. But on the other hand if Obama's vague talk about transcending political differences makes you a bit suspicious, then remarks like that might set off a red flag.

xposts

i've even talked to liberals from up here who said "yeah, he seems interesting. it might be good to have a muslim president"!!

Yeah, I think my dad's girlfriend said something to this effect.

I thought he did a good job of giving the context to his Reagan statement after Hillary distorted it.

Hillary saying over and over in the debate "I didn't say Reagan! I didn't say Reagan!" seemed like a lawyerly parsing of words that people associate with the Clinton brand (and I loved this guys until recently).

it's the email! that was what my dad referenced. "a guy at work showed me this email..." (my dad is a furniture salesman, so not fortune 500 but...)

obama's vagueties def worry me. not that i think he's secretly conservative but that i'm still not entirely sure what his convictions are. but i do trust his intellect and whatever else i've been able to gather about him. but the crossover thing is totally true: going back to my family, all of them are SERIOUSLY hardcore conservatives, and when i was home for xmas none of them had anything bad to say about him at all, and i got more than an earful about edwards/clinton.

and i don't think he's done. he wins sc and suddenly momentum is his again. i don't put *any* stock in 2/5 polls yet. remember how giuliani was gonna run away with this thing?

Fwiw, Obama has adopted a Southern accent while in the South as well.

Obama has at times adopted the cadence of the black church, his belonging to one and being a black man and all

but I guess Hils can be our 2nd black president rite? lol.

I fuckin applauded the dude on CNN last night calling out Toni Morrison on that moronic 'first black president' shit

true, but i'm sort of deferring to josh marshall's judgement:

in iowa, O had time time time to get personal and work the magic to come out from under HRC. in NH, he didn't. in SC, he has, but for the rest of the 2/5 states she is probably just too far ahead in too many places. it's a matter of d = r x t at this point.

xp to YGS

From my reading of the transcript of Obama's remarks - and this is just my interpretation, I'm not trying to slime him - it sounds like he was saying that the pendulum had swung too far in the liberal direction by 1980, and that Reagan was actually kind of right to take the anti-government tack that he took, but that now the pendulum has swung too far in that direction, and it's time to maybe turn towards a more proactive government again. It actually makes a lot of sense to me, though naturally it's not what you'd expect to hear from a die-hard liberal.

Here's the part I'm referring to, btw:

I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different.

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.

I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

I think Kennedy, twenty years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times.

I think we’re in one of those times right now. Where people feel like things as they are going aren’t working. We’re bogged down in the same arguments that we’ve been having, and they’re not useful.

And, you know, the Republican approach, I think, has played itself out.

I think it’s fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten, fifteen years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom.

One analysis of what Clinton said last night re Obama and Reagan.

That commentary about Reagan sort of points toward a long-game approach of wooing conservatives for the GE.

RE Reagan comment: Once again, Obama underestimated the ability of the base to be deliberately obtuse.

RE 1st black pres: "Toni Morrison owes black America an apology." Yeah, I felt the same way.

RE Muslim email: How smart was it to start sending out these emails and making these allegations years before the GE. People have been talking about Obama the Muslim for years. The longer one believes something, the truer it feels.

yeah, my take on Obama's basic political character is that it's defined in part by what he inherited from his secular humanist liberal Mom and in part by his academic questioning of what wisdom he received from her

which is basically me, too, I'll admit

McCain's knowledge of economics (or lack thereof)

Just saw an Obama interview on CNN. He interviews really well. He is a fantastic orator. He is not as strong a debater as I'd like him to be.

Kerry writes like he speaks:

As a veteran, it disgusts me that the Swift Boats we loved while we were in uniform on the Mekong Delta have been rendered, in Karl Rove's twisted politics, an ugly verb meaning to lie about someone's character just to win an election. But as someone who cares about winning this election and changing the country I love, I know it's not enough to complain about a past we can't change when our challenge is to win the future -- which is why we must stop the Swiftboating, stop the push-polling, stop the front groups, and stop the email chain smears.

incomprehensibly?

Obama has taken a high-road of a sort, and I do respect him for it. I think it shows a form of personal integrity. However, I think that Clinton also has shown integrity. I don't think that her campaign has engaged in quite the all-out slime war that has been portrayed in this thread. What else can she criticize him on if not his public statements and record?

-- o. nate, Tuesday, January 22, 2008 5:09 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

thats.not.what.shes. doing

Kerry writes like he speaks

Yep. Like my in-laws (diehard Republicans) said during the 04 GE debates: Kerry "speaks to the Senators," while Bush "speaks to the PEOPLE!"

(They're awesome in-laws, despite being Republican and all).

I mean seriously: "As a veteran, it disgusts me that the Swift Boats we loved while we were in uniform on the Mekong Delta have been rendered, in Karl Rove's twisted politics, an ugly verb meaning to lie about someone's character just to win an election."

What, he has no one to look this shit over?

i like this new angry hillary

'new'

so for general election

kerry taking high road=looks like frenchified wussbag
but
obama taking high road would = looks like a principled guy?

hes got a better shot at success w/ it than kerry but...