2008 Primaries Thread 2: THE QUICKENING

John Kerry's not even a likeable person in the first place.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/02/23/clinton-draws-bush-obama-comparisons/?mod=sphere_ts&mod=sphere_wd

Hillary Clinton adopted a new tactic today: Comparing the candidacy of rival Barack Obama to that of George W. Bush in his 2000 presidential run.

Criticism of the Bush Administration quickly shifted to her opponent. Without evoking Obama’s name specifically, she alluded to an argument her campaign has made for weeks that the Illinois senator relies on florid speech and is not specific enough about his plan for the presidency.

“Do you think people voting in 2000 knew what they were getting? People thought they were getting a ‘compassionate conservative,’ and it turns out he was neither. And we have lived with the consequences,” she told a crowd gathered in a Cincinnati State Technical Community College gymnasium.

“Bush promised change as a compassionate conservative and the American people got shafted and we’re going to have to make up for it now. So, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

She reminded Ohioans, who played a major part in electing Bush, that he also ran a campaign based on change. “People have talked a lot about change in this election. Well, we have lived through some of the worst change anyone could imagine over the last seven years,” she said.

a message to hillary:

hillary dude... sometimes you just get beat. sometimes your opponent is better. happens to everyone. even obama. srsly. sorry abt that. life is mad real. :(

ahahah did she actually say "the American people got shafted"?

haha this speech is mad nasty

now if she had said "the American people got shafted and we’re going to have to make up for it now. Fool me once, shame, shame on you. Fool me you cant get foold again!"

i would srsly reconsider my vote.

why is huckabee on my tv screen?

times responds http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/business/media/21askthenewsroom.html

wothwhile

Well, we have lived through some of the worst change anyone could imagine over the last seven years,” she said.

Most of it approved by you with your voting stick?

tina fey's hilary thing was brilliant, alas.

i heard tina was some sort of nasty republican - people said that on the 30 rock thread

http://i31.tinypic.com/wtao8p.jpg

http://i27.tinypic.com/x6cvvt.jpg

just for a rundown of tina's comments:
http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/2/24/1161/99305

i heard tina was some sort of nasty republican - people said that on the 30 rock thread

-- jhøshea, Sunday, February 24, 2008 8:32 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Link

-said people would all vote for mccain anyway in the end
-said people vote for obama out of white guilt (but in a good way)

Get One Nader

she said she was a republican in some parade magazine profile from several years ago, but I don't know if it was true or not

oh yay nader is running, wow I hope hilary gets the nomination so we can have a president mccain and all want to kill ourselves again

loool over/under, nader gets 1%?

Nader is perfectly positioned to pick up...Ron Paul supporters.

Tim Russert looks like he want to insert a potted fern into Nader's ear.

gad, Russert is a douche.

that doesn't sound like a douchey thing to want to do

anyway, as disappointing as it is to see clinton go super negative like this, it does give me hope that if she does win the nomination, she will be relentless on mccain's ass; so much for that much-heralded "friendship" we'd heard about

No, but Russert's investment in the efficacy of our political parties is douchey; he's genuinely appalled that someone would not accept party politics.

word up homos: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/24/nader.politics/index.html

yah russert is the biggest sycophant in the whole fucking world

Damn, someone already posted that Nader's running. Well, he's getting mine and my 5 semi-legal non-paid house maintenance interns to vote NADER 08.

loool over/under, nader gets 1%?

i got a hundo on the under

over/under, nader gets 0.1%?

I was thinking about Clinton's new "Obama = Bush" argument and I've concluded that it's a really gracious strategy for her endgame, actually. The reason is that it doesn't tarnish Obama in a way that will have repercussions should he be the candidate in the general election. I doubt the GOP will pull out the "Obama = Bush" argument. But if she went with the "Obama isn't qualified to be the commander-in-chief" argument, it could legitimize a damaging attack in the general election. I suspect this attack (which doesn't seem very convincing to me, anyway) was motivated by these considerations.

i suspect it was motivated more by abject, panicked desperation

i was talkin to someone last night who said he thought obama was the new tony blair

weak

that's kind of mindboggling.

just saw the fey/hillary clip... does it look odd to anyone else? she looks really uncomfortable going through it. maybe she knows her audience is probably anti-hillary, i dunno.

I was thinking about Clinton's new "Obama = Bush" argument and I've concluded that it's a really gracious strategy for her endgame, actually.

I was thinking about Clinton's new "aggressive" arguments and I've concluded that, if things aren't going well for her in the Ohio debate, she will reach across the desk and try to strangle Obama to death.

i was talkin to someone last night who said he thought obama was the new tony blair

Well he is running a lot of the Blair playbook

political systems are so different there's not much point in making the connect other than, if you don't like obama, you can say "he's the new tony blair".

people in 1996 were (iirc) saying that blair was the new clinton -- and what with blair's xeroxing clinton's triangulation steez, they had a point.

The big question on Obama isn't whether he will govern as a centrist. He will. That's how the office works. The real question is whether he can, through the power of his position and the so-called bully pulpit, move the center leftward. I think he has a better chance of doing this than Hillary Clinton.

As for his running the Tony Blair playbook, that would come down to what substantive policies he lays out in his first six months, not how he chooses to fish for votes.

just to bite, a little, blair became party leader, ie "presidential candidate" (but not), almost years before the next election, in 1994. he rapidly made symbolic gestures toward not being the loony left labour party of the 1980s, though nostalgists tend to forget how little chance of a revival there was for the labour left under any leader. (being specific, he ended labour's commitment to nationalization -- this was never going to come back on the table... until last week, in fact!)

but at that point 'old labour' had no rival to blair. his rival was also his ally, gordon brown. the party establishment was fucked by then, and his guy peter mandelson had assiduously put him and brown in good positions since the late 1980s.

i don't see strong obama parallels there.

on the other hand blair did usher in a new era of post-racial politics, his public-school-and-oxford education a radical break with british politics past, so yeah i concede that one.

http://images.teamsugar.com/files/users/1/13839/15_2007/rok_119_05.jpg

NADERRRRRRRR!

Nadir.

Poll has Obama in front in both Ohio and Texas:

http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/articles/decision-analyst-obama-texas-ohio-mccain-022308005.html

jimmy the mod otm

oh man, this is not good:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/24/hillary-clinton-mocks-bar_n_88194.html

plus she's wearing that awful yellow blazer again.

thaaaat video holy shit ^^^^^

uh yah hillary we have your voting record to prove that people dont always do the right thing

i am shocked and appalled that this photo isnt up on drudge yet - u slippin matt

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/gen/12717/thumbs/r-CLINTON-MOCKS-OBAMA-large.jpg

pathetic.

whoa girl u mad!! i dunno what else she could do at this point other than get really negative, i guess we'll see how that goes. if your opponent has a lock on hope and sunshine i guess that's all you have left? still, it should be yet another lesson: you have to have managerial competence and a willingness to fight as part of your candidacy's values. but that's a baseline, innit -- running on those things as the central plank of your appeal is just not enough for people.

this thread, and my life-world at the moment, is Baraquiste central, so my sense of how turns like the yellow-blazer speech above will play out there in the world are a bit skewed. i can't see it doing her any good at this point.