Call It A Comeback
I would normally say that it was that he got several facts wrong, but instead of asking questions that illuminate a position, he tried to ask gotcha question after gotcha question after gotcha question.
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It wasn’t good questioning because it didn’t allow for clarification or nuance instead insisting on yes or no answers that had little to do with substance.
Mister Answer Man, Greg Sargent seems awfully flip about this. He seems to think that Obama is now completely off the hook, and that the question itself was “inane.” I’m not so sure. Aren’t the American people entitled to know whether Barack Obama, as a Muslim, approves of another Muslim who thinks Judaism is a “gutter religion,” and shouldn’t Obama reject him even more strongly by rejecting and denouncing him and then repudiating and disdaining him as well? – D. Schlussel, Michigan
Read the whole thing….
Or why understanding transitive relationships should be taught in Journalism 101.
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What the fuck was that? What do you do to assure…blah, blah, blah.
Timmeh took his cue from Richard Cohen in the Washington Post column:
Barack Obama is a member of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Its minister, and Obama’s spiritual adviser, is the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In 1982, the church launched Trumpet Newsmagazine; Wright’s daughters serve as publisher and executive editor. Every year, the magazine makes awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to a man it said “truly epitomized greatness.” That man is Louis Farrakhan.
Except, Timmeh, got the facts wrong on top of it. Wright didn’t say Farrakhan epitomized greatness, that was a part of the Trumpet Magazine award to Farrakhan. Wright is the CEO of the magazine, but his daughter Jeri is the publisher. While those ties might be relevant, it’s very different from Jeremiah Wright saying that. And, in fact, the magazine split off from the congregation in September of 2005.
The thing is, everyone is missing the point about how fucking stupid this line of questioning was. When was the last time Timmeh took on some right wing fundamentalists for being anti-semitic? So why isn’t George Bush asked about every anti-semitic rant by LaHaye or Wildmon since by the transitive property Timmeh is invoking, Bush has close spiritual adivisors who work closely with them?
The Council on National Policy alone contains a whole host of anti-semitic right wing Christians who hobnob with the Tony Perkins and the Richard Lands and the Dobsons of the world, but that transitive connection would never be brought up would it? This isn’t just a connection of someone who goes on a trip with or says something nice, it’s a working group of conservative fundamentalists who welcome anti-semitism into their efforts to bring about a Christian government. Of course, the Bush administration has routinely played footsy with Wildmon, not just had a friend of his be nice to him on occasion.
This would never be an issue for a white candidate and shame on Timmeh for trying to do it to Obama. If Timmeh wants to be concerned about anti-semitism he should start asking the Mike Huckabee’s of the world about their supporters who they actually work with to get elected.
I think that breaking down Russert’s Wright/Farrakhan questioning helps illuminate how truly bizarre it is:
1. The title of Obama’s book, “The Audacity of Hope,” came from a sermon delivered by Jeremiah Wright. Wright is Obama’s pastor.
2. Wright is the “head” of United Trinity Church.
3. Wright said that Louis Farrakhan “epitomizes greatness.”
4. Wright went with Farrakhan in 1984 to visit Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
5. Farrakhan has said that Judaism is a “gutter religion.”
6. Wright said that when Obama’s political opponents found out about the Libya visit, Obama’s Jewish support would dry up “faster than a snowball in Hell.”
Russert’s question is then “What do you do to assure Jewish Americans… you are consistent with issues regarding Israel and not in any way suggesting that Farrakhan epitomizes greatness.”
The first question about Farrakhan—and Russert’s insistence on mentioning Farrakhan’s views regarding Judaism after Obama had already denounced Farrakhan’s bigotry—was all foreplay leading up to this masterstroke in which Russert synthesizes the six discrete facts into a knockout punch of innuendo and guilt by association: perhaps Obama thinks that Louis Farrakhan, the man Obama explicitly denounced not one minute before, is the very epitome of greatness.
All of the stuff about going to Libya, Farrakhan’s “gutter religion” comment, and Jewish supporting drying up like a snowball in hell—that was all totally unnecessary to reach the ultimate question, but wasn’t it fun?
Can’t make it up–shortly after Iowa:
Last night Big Media was finally able to publish the story they wrote a year ago. The victor last night was Big Media. The victors last night were Chris Matthews and Tim Russert.
But let’s not excuse what happened last night by blaming others. Let’s not make excuses by cheering about the delegate count or the delegate distribution in Iowa (Obama gets 16 delegates, Hillary 15, Edwards 14). Let’s not cheer about Hank Aaron nor the continuing endorsements coming in for Hillary. Let’s not cheer about Hillary strength in nationwide polls.
We need to take responsibility for what happened in Iowa. Let’s survey the damage and the opportunity.
* * *
Dodd, Biden and the rest are now out of the race. Richardson gets to participate in Saturday’s debate but goes nowhere. Edwards gets to participate in Saturday’s debate but goes nowhere (conventional wisdom before Iowa was that for Edwards Iowa was a “must” win – Edwards lost. Conventional wisdom was right and Edwards will have a tough time raising money, organization, and support.)
Iowa was a problem for Hillary for several reasons. Obama was from a neighboring state and spent a lot of money there and Edwards practically lived there for years. A bigger problem was the unified field of opposition against Hillary (Big Media, Republicans, and the Democratic candidates). This unified field of opposition meant that “going negative” against an individual in Iowa could easily backfire and there were too many opponents (include Big Media, Big Blogs, and Republicans) to take everybody on in a fight. Another complication was the ability of independents to vote in Iowa; a complication which exists in New Hampshire as well.
The race is between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Big Media. Barack Obama is the Chris Matthews candidate and we need to treat him as such.
* * *
Our biggest failure in Iowa and beyond: we let down young people. Young people wanted change and excitement and truth and we gave them words and policy, and logic.
We effectively abandoned young people to a flim flam artist. We did not provide the truth to young voters. We were afraid they would get angry and disillusioned. We abandoned them. Young people thought the change and therefore the excitement was with the other side. We were excited by Hillary because we know she represents change worth having but we did not engage young voters by arming them with all the facts.
Flim flam artists target the young with excitement and hoopla, and hope. That is the way it always is. Hillary campaign strategists viewed Obama as a political adversary to be counteracted within normal political discourse involving policy. But Obama is a flim flam artist. You defeat flim flammery and flim flam artists by exposing them for what they are.
Again, you do not defeat a circus parade. You cannot persuade a bystander, using logic, not to be excited about the circus parade. You cannot cite statistics about how the parade is financed, how ugly the clowns are beneath the makeup, the amount of cheap glitter and paint employed to create the excitement.
Reading and viewing assignments for the Hillary media team this week: Elmer Gantry (book and movie), The Music Man (movie). Understand the opposition.
How do you defeat the Chicago circus of the ridiculous? Tell the truth fearlessly.
Young people and gay people did not know about Obama’s cynical gay bashing tour in South Carolina. Why not? Why did the gay newspaper The Washington Blade endorse Hillary but not mention the gay bashing tour of South Carolina? The campaign did not get the message out. Advertise in gay periodicals – tell the truth – fearlessly. We did, but as our commenting student in Iowa informed us, the campaign did not get the message out in Iowa. This is what we wrote:
What’s great about this is after all of the claims about the Obama cult, I have to say this and a few select bloggers out there have an uncanny ability to channel Wolfson and the whining that everyone is out to get them
The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.
Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s) and members (for example, the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar-or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity).
The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.
? The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members’ participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before joining the group (for example, lying to family or friends, or collecting money for bogus charities).
Most Hillary supporters are good people and many are friends. The people running Hillaryis44 might get some deprogramming…
I’m waiting for the site to explode in a blast of spontaneous
They have been entertaining me for a while now and I thought I’d share some of the better bits:
For nonbelievers the Winter solstice brings the scientific fact of spaceship earth returning to the Sun’s ascent and the promise of longer hours of lifegiving light. The alignment of bright stars in Orion’s belt with the massive dogstar Sirius in northern skies brings the promise of rebirth with the eventual Spring embrace.
For believers, various celebrations are observed and encapsulated in the circular wreaths of evergreen.
Let me suggest that a site putting this out there, ought to be careful about calling people incense burners and birkenstock wearers….
Obama:
Obama, like any flim-flam confidence man, is running against the clock. Flim-flam artists have to keep moving and changing stories and charming and spinning and talking that sweet talk – all the while keeping an eye out for the law. The trick is to pocket the money you got from the rubes who believe that snake-oil you sell but get out just in time to avoid the pokey.Obama’s problem: The clock is ticking faster than Obama is dancing.
After getting away with complete acceptance of his totally manufactured story Obama began to face scrutiny from the more discerning members of the Democratic left. The more intelligent members of the Democratic left began to dismantle Obama’s bull and take notice of why Republicans were acting as Obama cheerleaders. Their judgment was “No there there – an empty Republican suit.Hillary:
Hillary’s numbers began to soften when the Big Media Party, especially Tim Russert, decided to throw everything they had at her. Immediately the Republican candidates started to run ads against Hillary in places like New Hampshire. The Democratic candidates too continued the attack on Hillary. It was Hillary against them all. Her poll numbers softened. Now the opposite dynamic is in effect.With the death of Benazir Bhutto candidates like John McCain, respected and loved by Big Media, began echoing the Hillary message. Experience matters. McCain and Big Media started to talk about the value of experience at the same time Obama started to get some little examination. John Edwards too finally realized his problem was Obama the concilliator, not Hillary the fighter. Edwards also realized that he needs to replace Obama as the non-Hillary. As we noted above Edwards adopted a hypocritical but intelligent stance regarding the financing of his campaign. Obama, whose numbers had earlier risen with the collapse of Edwards’ soft supporters is now losing those soft supporters to Edwards.
The Hillary campaign had already adjusted to the all out assault on Hillary initiated by Tim Russert. The endorsement of Hillary by the Des Moines Register and the rollout of that endorsement and the Hillary surrogates and the Hill-o-copter, the return of reality to the campaign trail because of the killing of Bhutto, and the last minute realizations of John Edwards all have contributed to the Hillary rise. But the big factor helping Hillary is that Iowans know they are being tested. Iowans are the ones who have to help select the next president – not a drinking buddy, not a popular college professor, – the president.
As Iowans get closer to decision day this Thursday, Iowans get serious. Pick a president Iowa – and Hillary will do just fine in the caucuses
That was three days before teh Iowa Caucus.
Mark Penn’s and Howard Wolfson’s stupidity is catching
One quote: “Let’s stay positive and not get away from the long-term game plan.”
Two quotes later: “of course we’ll fight… Make no mistake it’s now a fight between a true competent woman leader and a puppet propped up by Karl Rove.”
Night is day, white is black, that state matters, that same state doesn’t matter….
A truly hysterical parody site or just hysterical self-delusion.
Among other sharp remarks, Buffenbarger said this, which upset the incense burners:
“Give me a break! I’ve got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won’t last a round against the Republican attack machine. He’s a poet, not a fighter.”
Obama incense burners were upset at a labor leader denouncing the Obama demographic who have nothing to lose in this election. Bottom line is that the “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearning, trust fund babies” are economically secure enough to survive whatever happens in November.
The “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearning, trust fund babies” are the ones who got us all into the mess we are in when they supported Ralph Nader in 2000.
The “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearning, trust fund babies” gambled with other people’s lives and other people’s money in 2000. In 2008 they are singing the same ol’ kumbaya song.
Strangely, my father who retired after many years in the IAM and a guy who thought it was fun to beat up hippies in the 1960s, voted for Obama on Super Tuesday and would do it again.
Yglesias on the Clinton Campaign
Tons of interesting stuff in Patrick Healy’s article on Hillary Clinton supporters reconciling themselves to probable defeat. This bit lurking near the end is, if true, pretty telling:
In interviews with 15 aides and advisers to Mrs. Clinton, not a single one expressed any regrets that they were not working for Mr. Obama. Indeed, some aides said they were baffled that a candidate who had been in the United States Senate for only three years and was a state lawmaker in Illinois before that was now outpacing a seasoned figure like Mrs. Clinton.
Whether or not you think the more “seasoned” candidate ought to win presidential elections, it seems to me that any campaign staffer who could be genuinely “baffled” by experience not proving to be a winning issue is demonstrating a scary ignorance of how things work. Is her staff baffled that Joe Biden didn’t win the nomination?
Worse than that, as I’ve previously pointed out, Frank Rich demonstrates why the experience argument falls apart given the performance of her campaign:
That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.
Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.
But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.
The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.
In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall – the March 4 contests – she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.
==========
What’s next? Despite Mrs. Clinton’s valedictory tone at Thursday’s debate, there remains the fear in some quarters that whether through sleights of hand involving superdelegates or bogus delegates from Michigan or Florida, the Clintons might yet game or even steal the nomination. I’m starting to wonder. An operation that has waged political war as incompetently as the Bush administration waged war in Iraq is unlikely to suddenly become smart enough to pull off that duplicitous a “victory.” Besides, after spending $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts in January alone, this campaign simply may not have the cash on hand to mount a surge.
For all the vaunted message discipline of the Clinton campaign, there has been no message. It’s Michael Dukakis updated for 2008. It only gets worse when she claims her experience makes her better suited to be Commander-in-Chief.
After denouncing Mr. Obama over the weekend for an anti-Clinton flier about the Nafta trade treaty, and then sarcastically portraying his message of hope Sunday as naïve, Mrs. Clinton delivered a blistering speech on Monday that compared Mr. Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience to that of the candidate George W. Bush.
“We’ve seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech on foreign policy at George Washington University. “We can’t let that happen again.”
With a crucial debate on Tuesday night in Ohio, both Mrs. Clinton’s advisers and independent political analysts said that, by going negative against Mr. Obama at a time when polls in Texas and Ohio show a tightening race, Mrs. Clinton risked alienating voters. Mrs. Clinton has always been more popular with voters when she appeared sympathetic and a fighter; her hard-edged instinct for negative politics has usually turned off the public.
“There’s a general rule in politics: A legitimate distinction which could be effective when drawn early in the campaign often backfires and could seem desperate when it happens in the final hours of a campaign,” said Steve McMahon, a Democratic strategist working for neither candidate.
In Mrs. Clinton’s speech Monday, she also portrayed herself as “tested and ready” to be commander in chief, while accusing Mr. Obama of believing “that mediation and meetings without preconditions will solve some of the world’s most intractable problems.” Mr. Obama has said he would go further than Mrs. Clinton to meet with leaders of hostile nations, but he has also said he would prepare for those meetings carefully and would not be blind to the leaders’ motives.
In contrast, she appears to think that talking to the United States is a perk to be earned by good behavior. This is the very essence of the problem with Bush’s foreign policy and why she is not competent to be President. It isn’t just experience, but ideology that matters and in this case, the experience has led to her support of failed policies.
Clinton is not competent. She suffers the same deadly combination of arrogance and incompetence that the Bush administration has demonstrated. Except she cannot even run a campaign.
Obama at the Debate last week:
OBAMA: I think, as I said before, preparation is actually absolutely critical in any meeting. And I think it is absolutely true that either of us would step back from some of the Bush unilateralism that’s caused so much damage.
But I do think it is important precisely because the Bush administration has done so much damage to American foreign relations that the president take a more active role in diplomacy than might have been true 20 or 30 years ago.
Because the problem is, if we think that meeting with the president is a privilege that has to be earned, I think that reinforces the sense that we stand above the rest of the world at this point in time. And I think that it’s important for us in undoing the damage that has been done over the last seven years, for the president to be willing to take that extra step.
OBAMA: That is the kind of step that I would like to take as president of the United States.
This is one of the most important differences between Obama and the essentially any other candidate who has been running this cycle. US policy is destructive in many ways, the most destructive being the notion that the rest of the world must meet our conditions to even talk.
If your argument is experience, than it should lead you to better judgment. To the contrary, Hillary Clinton has absorbed every bit of wrong thought in DC.
Yglesias pointed out the most simple example of this in the Cuban policy Obama advocates:
Obama’s policy isn’t as far-reaching as I’d like to see, but this is still night and day between him and Clinton. I have no idea what she’s even trying to say about Cuba. Obama is talking sense, directly labeling our policy a failure, and then drawing at least a few of the correct implications from them with regard to remittances and travel.
Clinton cannot even make the point that our Cuban policy has been an absolute failure. Right there she loses any claim to being progressive–or even being a member of the reality based community.
“Emphasize Barack Hussein Obama’s unusual name and exotic background through a Manchurian Candidate prism.”
Is there too much lead in the DC water supply?
ArchPundit
