2008 USP(G)ET pt. II: counting the days to 2012 primary thread 1

she went to second grade at four different schools

lol

http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/0908/In_reintroduction_Palin_to_do_more_interviews_and_tell_her_story.html?showall

Sitting with McCain for their first joint interview a week after the widely panned sit-down with Couric, Palin interjected when the CBS anchor brought up a report about the Wasilla Assembly of God, the governor's childhood church and one she still attends at times, seeking to pray gays away from homosexuality.

"Sarah Barracuda showed up today," the aide said, reprising the feisty former point guard's high school basketball nickname and one that has been largely forgotten since her post-convention cosseting.

"We're encouraging CBS to run entire thing," the aide said of today's session. "Run it end to end online."

Of concern to McCain's campaign, however, is a remaining and still-undisclosed clip from Palin's interview with Couric last week that has the political world buzzing.

The Palin aide, after first noting how "infuriating" it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions.

After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases.

There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence.

How many more segments of the interview are there, and when will they be aired?

Decent opinion article from The Economist as reprinted in the Seattle Times

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/381050_nixononline30.html

In election season Republicans rely on Nixon playbook
THE ECONOMIST

Modern Republicans admire no one more than Ronald Reagan, the man who, in their view, destroyed communism, rolled back welfare-state liberalism and reintroduced God into American politics.

But when it comes to practicing politics, particularly at election time, the Republicans have a rather different hero, a man of frowns rather than smiles: Richard Nixon.

Nixon's great contribution to Republican politics was to master the politics of cultural resentment. Before him, populism belonged as much to the left as the right. William Jennings Bryan railed against the eastern elites who wanted to crucify common folk on a "cross of gold." Franklin Roosevelt dismissed Republicans as "economic royalists."

Nixon's genius was to discover that the politics of culture could trump the politics of economics -- and that populism could become a tool of the right.

Nixon understood in his marrow how middle-class Americans felt about the country's self-satisfied elites. The "silent majority" had been disoriented, throughout the 1960s, by the collapse of traditional moral values. And they had boiled with righteous anger at the liberal elites who extended infinite indulgence to bomb-throwing radicals while dismissing conservative views as evidence of racism and sexism.

Nixon recognized that the Republicans stood to gain from "positive polarization": dividing the electorate over values.

He also recognized that the media, which had always made a great pretence of objectivity while embracing a liberal social agenda, could be turned into a Republican weapon. He encouraged Spiro Agnew, his vice president, to declare war on the "effete corps of impudent snobs" in the media, with their Ivy League educations and Georgetown social values.

Many people predicted that 2008 would finally mark the end of the Nixon era. The issues were too grave to be swamped by a squabble about culture, the argument went. And the candidates, in the form of John McCain and Barack Obama, were too noble to be distracted by the siren voices of the culture war.

George Packer dismissed the remains of the culture wars as "the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that's brain-dead."

Andrew Sullivan hoped that Obama might finally take America "past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the baby-boom generation that has long engulfed all of us." This paper saw the two candidates as "America at its best."

Not quite. Two weeks after the Republican convention, America seems to be hellbent on repeating the 1972 election. Forget about the "sunny uplands" of post-partisan politics.

The American electorate is still trapped in Nixonland: a land where Democrats and Republicans exchange endless gibes about who despises whom, where simmering class and regional resentments trump all other political considerations and where the airwaves crackle with accusations about lies and counter-lies.

The Republicans now have all the material that they need to do what they do best. Obama is an Ivy-League-educated intellectual whose associates include unrepentant terrorists and swivel-eyed preachers. McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, is a Nixonian fantasy come true, perfectly designed to create a cycle of accusation and counteraccusation.

The "liberal media" cannot do its job without questioning Palin's qualifications, which are astonishingly thin; but they cannot question her qualifications without confirming the Republican suspicion that they are looking down on ordinary Americans.

"Here's a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators," Palin told the Republican convention, doing her best to channel Agnew. "I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion; I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country."

Nixon's original insight remains as true now as it was in the late 1960s: Lots of liberals do, indeed, look down on flyover Americans as stump-toothed imbeciles and, for some strange reason, lots of flyover Americans resent them for it.

What is more, the culture wars have intensified since Nixon's last election, supersized by the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion in 1973.

Yet the Republican Party's decision to rely so heavily on Nixon's 1972 template is nevertheless depressing. Aren't Republicans supposed to deplore the politics of victimhood?

Conservatives make a good case that treating minority groups as victims diminishes America and institutionalizes dependency. But when it comes to election time they not only play the politics of victimhood, but play it with extraordinary relish, presenting ordinary Americans as the victims of diabolical conspiracies.

Haven't Republicans done quite well when it comes to power? They have controlled the White House for 28 of the past 40 years, and have a solid majority on the Supreme Court. And aren't Republicans rather good at getting their message across?

Nixon was justified in feeling that the press liked to kick him around. But the past 30 years have seen the emergence of a conservative media establishment that excels at kicking liberals around, not least Fox News and talk radio.

Nixon at least had the excuse that he spent his life as an outsider, despite his intellectual gifts and relentless hard work. McCain is the ultimate insider: the offspring of a naval dynasty, a bad boy turned war hero, the media's favorite Republican.

The bigger question is whether the politics of resentment will be enough on its own to win an election. Rick Perlstein, the author of "Nixonland," points out that, from Nixon's time onwards, "culture" has always been just one part of the Republican trifecta, which also includes economic management and foreign policy.

Richard Nixon and George Bush Sr. offered mastery of foreign policy. Ronald Reagan offered a revolutionary mixture of free-markets at home and assertiveness abroad. But this year the Republicans are left with nothing but a culture war to sell to the voters -- Richard Nixon with the redeeming features left out.

From The Economist magazine. Copyright 2008 Economist Newspaper Ltd.

way to steal your thesis from nixonland

hahahaha keep it up you fucking loser

― Shakey Mo Collier, Monday, September 29, 2008 4:25 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hahaha 1st graf gave me biggest IRL lolz of the campaign

That's a decent piece, but I'm pretty close to canceling my subscription to the Economist at this point. I read it because it has great international coverage and is sort of the embodiment of what I think of as "reasonable conservatism," even though I totally disagree with it. However, during election season the stench of the Tory bullshit comes out so strongly that it because nausea-inducing just to read the headlines of the articles. Their tack this year is how they just can't believe that Walnuts isn't living up to his maverick principles and that he's lying, incompetent, senile and running a Rove-ian campaign. Wow. Shocker.

If they endorse him, they will lose all credibility.

Er, that it because/that it becomes.

has Economist not noticed that Palin's numbers have tanked?

Making a similar point earlier on MSNBC, Holtz-Eakin said McCain deliberately "kept a low profile."

they did endorse kerry, you know

xp

EAT SHIT

1,000,000,000 FLIES CAN'T BE WRONG

-- THE ECONOMIST

I will say it one more time: since appointing their american bureau lead to the Editor In Chief spot, that magazine has gone right downhill in a damn hurry. I remember as soon as he got in charge all the picture captions went from occasionally-lol to po-faced-literal, and then after that everything else also got notably dumbed down. Fuck 'em.

K. J. Lopez discovers what her core constituency is like. Apparently this has surprised her a bit.

lol 'we knew you were a democrat you dirty person named lopez'

guys i am just so upset at jimmy carter for crashing wall street. SO UPSET.

and those house democrats! they hold the majority so obviously they are at fault for all those republicans who didn't vote for it.

(ugh. THESE are the straws they are grasping for. such a farce.)

gotcha journaism = some guy at the cheesesteak place asking you what yr gonna do if u get elected

there is some question about the economist's veracity in covering the globe at large, though i can't find the links in my current state. though at least they do cover it, which is more than most other 'newspapers' do. it's useful to keep in mind their guiding principles:

1. the utterly free market will save us all
2. america (or other capitalist hegemon) as global cop, however misguided, is better than an isolationist america (or other capitalist hegemon)
3. robert mugabe is totally on the way out, no shit
4. silvio berlusconi sux

When did a new EIC take over the Economist? I thought I had a harder time stomaching it over the past year or so, but figured I was just tiring of their shtick. Glad to hear it's not just me.

Lexington is always dreadful, btw.

heh, one of my good friends from HS writes for the Economist. I just resubscribed b/c I had frequent flier miles from Delta that I had to use or lose, and so magazines it was.

K. J. Lopez discovers what her core constituency is like. Apparently this has surprised her a bit.

To be fair, people who argued in favor of HRC instead of Obama for Dem candidate usually got a far worse inbox.

Still, KLo's "and now we're the president of Iran?" about-face was lolz

Mookie, <3

what can one say about a person quoting an explicitly racist email to oneself and having no comment on its racism?

URL says it all

http://www.ibnlive.com/videos/74587/fatwa-against-zardari-for-flirting-with-palin.html

i just saw the daily show from friday so i dont know if this has gotten any play yet: the menacing "i can certainly handle more than one grill" gesture he made towards the women on the View (i think). anyways it was the moment of zen and it was super creepy and needs to be circulated http://www.thedailyshow.com/ it's still on the front page. there's still room for more character assasination let it fall in heaps hahaha die

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=186060&title=Moment-of-Zen---More-Than-one-Grill

I find McCain kind of endearing when he gets irritable, even if the stuff coming out of his mouth is completely shitheaded. I think his annoyed tone of voice is similar to mine.

curtis you could find a reason to kind of like hilter

haha I had kind of expected you to agree with me tom! cranky ppl gotta stick together!

btw I still don't like McCain, I just like grumpy old men

(and I wouldn't think it was so endearing if I thought he had any significant chance of getting elected)

So, like is the shotgun wedding this weekend or what? Is that how she's going to get out of this?

(1) Voter preferences are much more strongly correlated with age than they have been in recent elections. In 2000, Al Gore won young (age 18-29) voters by just 2 points, barely different than his overall margin against George Bush. In 2004, John Kerry won young voters by 9 points. But this year, young voters are going for Barack Obama by anywhere from 15 to perhaps as many as 35 points, depending on which poll you look at.

I was not aware of that.

This is going to be incredible because since the 'youth vote' began snowballing for Obama all his opponents can do to counter it is mumble something about young people being too ADHD to turn up on polling day.

Okay, here's what should happen: prior to his next stop on the campaign trail, Obama needs 1) to sit down with some respected economists and 2) to have his campaign announce to the media that his next speech will be something a little different. He then uses the platform to talk to average Americans like adults, even in a relatively broad way, how they should behave in the face of this economic crisis. Fill the absolute void of leadership and say something helpful and, hopefully, a little comforting. Don't even mention McCain (which should never happen unless absolutely necessary, anyway). Act like a President. Maybe even kick it off with "My fellow Americans...". It's a gamble, but I think most Americans would like to see a little leadership at this point by someone who seems even vaguely trustworthy. Plus, if it pays off, McCain loses. If he does something similar, he looks like an also-ran. If he counters, any resultant economic meltdown is going to look like it's at least partly his fault. If he keeps mum, it's as good as a concession. This is the time for one of them to strike and make himself look like the presumptive President. And if it works out, it functions both as a calculated political move and the kind of speech that 5th graders read about in history class.

Mind you, I came up with this in the shower this morning, but there's a nugget of something worthwhile in there.

Mind you, I came up with this in the shower this morning, but there's a nugget of something worthwhile in there.

dang perry to thread

lol

omg why does he talk about pizza

It reminds him of his face?

Of course not. But, look, I understand this day and age of ‘gotcha’ journalism. Is that a pizza place? In a conversation with someone who you didn’t hear… the question very well, you don’t know the context of the conversation, grab a phrase.

^^^ this is crazy talk

and gdamn it was in a world famous CHEESESTEAK spot

"gotcha pizza journalism, is this for pick-up or delivery?"

"hi i'd like one pizza with extra moose, please"

when the delivery guy rears his head do you tip him y/n?

"You're not the regular moose pizza cheesesteak delivery boy."

Mooserella with that?

"this pizza is off the record and will continue to be off the record until you and your gotcha pizza delivery style learn some respect"

when you open the pizza box, those fake spring-snake things fly everywhere and scare the shit out of you. then the delivery boy takes the secret video of the event and it shows up on the evening news.