Presidential Race

St Louis Caucus Night Watch Party

Obama Campaign to Hold Iowa Caucus Night Watch Parties in Missouri

 

St. Louis, MO – On Thursday, January 3rd, friends and supporters of the Obama campaign will gather for Iowa Caucus Night watch parties in St. Louis and Kansas City.

 

Event details :

 

Who:             Friends and Supporters of the Obama campaign

 

What:             Iowa Caucus Night Watch Parties

 

When:           Thursday, January 3, 2008

                        7:00 pm CST

 

ST. LOUIS

 

Where:           Obama for America St. Louis Headquarters

1204 Washington Ave. Suite 300

                        St. Louis, MO 63103

Iowa Prediction

Republicans:

Huckabee 30%
Romney 20%
McCain 15%
Thompson 15%
Paul 10%
10% uncommitted

Iowa Conservative ministers carry the day and instead of racial slippage, we have Mormon slippage. I actually anticipate a higher number of uncommitteds simply because no one seems to like their second choices, but I cannot figure out where it comes from so I leave it at 10%.
Democrats

Obama 36%
Clinton 30%
Edwards 27%
Uncommitted 7%

While everyone seems obsessed with Yepsen’s inane ranting about college students from out of state, the reality is that there was a rally for Obama in Iowa City with 10,000 people on December 28th when there aren’t really any students around other than those from the local area. I’ve seen that kind of energy once before and that was in 2004. No, not in Iowa, but in the Illinois US Senate Democratic Primary. There’s not as much of an upside in Iowa as what happened on election day in 2004, but there’s enough to give Obama a clear win. The other two I believe are topped out at about their sensitive estimator on Pollster simply because neither is new to Iowa voters.

When Did Gore and Kerry Get Sainted?

Markos and others attack Obama for daring to criticize Gore and Kerry.

I’m not picking on Markos individually, but this general idea that somehow those two twits are above criticism from our candidates is silly as hell.

They came in and trashed the party with condescension and crappy campaigns built on lame appeals fought over the margins and not the heart of the country’s values.   If you like John Edwards or Barack Obama, they are doing exactly the opposite by arguing about values and justice, not over the most recent version of school uniforms.

The person who is the natural follower of Gore and Kerry is Hillary Clinton–one of the best practitioners of the politics of condescension and someone who will argue over 10 voters in an Ohio precinct instead of millions of Americans across the country.

The question is are Democrats going to compete broadly and over values or are we going to have another candidate arguing over lockboxes and arcane votes? A Democrat will likely win the White House, but if we want to perpetuate the kind of crappy campaigns run in 2000 and 2004, pick someone who is going to argue over arcane policy points instead of arguing about the values that Americans hold dear.

The blogosphere faces significant challenges in being the best critique of the press and groupthink  in the press, but also is developing serious blindspots about the groupthink in the liberal blogosphere.

More specifically though the notion is that Obama is blaming Gore and Kerry for polarization.  That’s not what he said though, but running the kind of crappy incremental, policy wonkish and condescending campaigns aimed at winning that small sliver of swing voters perpetuates the polarization we see today.

Polarization has been heightened by a right wing noise machine over the last 25 years, but polarization is a natural effect of a closely divided nation. We would be polarized with or without the right wing noise machine. However, the way to overcome that polarization is not to build up the same infrastructure, it’s too create a large governing coalition so the elections aren’t that close.

It strikes me that both Obama and Edwards are proposing doing exactly that though using different language.  Even then, the language is more similar than anyone seems to notice with both offering critiques of the current system as a system cut from social Darwinism..
H. Clinton, Dukakis, Kerry, and Gore all held the debate on Republican terms.  Changing the terms to be on Democratic terms isn’t going to the right, it’s the kind of innovation the Party should have adopted years ago instead of going with the DLC in the early 1990s.

The progressive blogs have tended towards Edwards because of his rhetoric of fighting and I don’t find it unreasonable. I think there is a group think based on the notion that contrasting partisan fights are better overall and so it’s the only way to win.  I have never understood the argument as being an exclusive way to win though–in fact, it is one of two ways to change the debate on to Democratic terms. One can, effectively, argue that fighting for progressive values redefines the debate.  But at the same time, so does an argument that focuses upon different rhetoric, but gets you to the same end point.

The larger point is that both approaches are huge improvements over the traditional Democratic campaigns since 1980 other than 1992 and 1996. The people running those campaigns were part of the problem and it’s time to get rid of them and instead of reacting to Republicans, providing the argument to which they have to respond.

Funny Thing About Validating Right Wing Loons

It comes to bite your candidate in the ass….

Taylor Marsh tries to use the Alan Keyes claim that Obama is for infanticide and that is why he needs to be vetted. This, of course, comes from Stanek who has misrepresented the differences between the federal and the state level on many occasions.

What was one of Stanek’s most recent pieces:

Hillary vs. Obama: Who’s the biggest baby killing champion?

They are going to lie about whomever the candidate is and they’ll do all the same things to Clinton.  Trying to split Democrats by using right wing talking points only gives wingnuts some aura of respectability.

Congratulations on screwing your own candidate! Beautifully done.

Perhaps you’d like to discuss how Stanek’s defense of beating women to stop them from having an abortion is wonderful. From that column:

One of the best scenes in the Godfather movie trilogy was in “Godfather II,” when Kay Corleone (Diane Keaton) told her husband Michael (Al Pacino) she was taking their two children and leaving him. The dialogue:

Michael: Do you expect me to let you take my children from me?…. Don’t you know that’s an impossibility, that that could never happen, that I’d use all my power to keep something like that from ever happening?…. I know you blame me for losing the baby. Yes. I know what that meant to you. Kay. I swear I’ll make it up to you…. I’ll change. And you’ll forget about this miscarriage, and we’ll have another child, and we’ll go on, you and I, we’ll go on.

kay.jpgKay: Oh – oh, Michael, Michael, you are blind. It wasn’t a miscarriage. It was an abortion, an abortion, Michael! Just like our marriage is an abortion, something that’s unholy and evil. I didn’t want your son, Michael! I wouldn’t bring another one of your sons into this world! It was an abortion, Michael. It was a son, a son, and I had it killed, because this must all end. I know now that it’s over. I knew it then. There would be no way, Michael, no way you could ever forgive me, not with this Sicilian thing that’s been going on for 2,000 years….

SLAP.

Michael: You won’t take my family!

And she doesn’t.

That spontaneous slap was the reaction of a real man who a woman had just told she aborted his baby. Compare that to the modern day cowardly male response, “It’s your choice. Whatever you decide, I’ll support you.” Or worse, his threat to abandon her if she does not abort.

It was this fierce devotion to family that strangely endeared us to the Corleone men despite their otherwise heinous behavior.

Or the more recent column:

In Mr. Brooks, the teenage daughter of serial killer Earl Brooks (Costner) turns up pregnant midway through her first semester of college. When Jane tells her parents, Earl emphatically states abortion is out of the question and offers to raise the baby. Jane is equally emphatically abortion minded until that moment, when she says she will reconsider. Typical. If a mother in a crisis pregnancy is offered love and support, she will most often choose life.

I won’t give away the end of Mr. Brooks except to say the prospect of his seeing future grandchild became Earl’s motivation for a life or death decision.

All of this is way twisted, I know. But similar to Godfather II, even a schizophrenic serial killer knows abortion is wrong, and similar to Godfather II, this became a redeeming quality of one who had no others.

Mr. Brooks’ pro-life stance was an obviously planned juxtaposition.

On one hand he was a serial killer no better than Dahmer and Gacy.

On the other, he was pro-life. Of of all possible character attributes, the writer and director chose this as Mr. Brooks’ one featured nobility, something they decided demonstrated the exact opposite of the schizophrenic killer mentality.

Why is that?

Stanek, Keyes, the entire wingnut crew over at Illinois Review are going to attack whomever our nominee is. Don’t help them by giving them some sort of relevance.

Daily Dolt: Bob Kerrey

WTF:

After the event, he mused about her chief rival, Sen. Barack Obama.

“The fact that he’s African American is a big deal. I do expect and hope that Hillary is the nominee of the party. But I hope he’s used in some way. If he happens to be the nominee of the party and ends up being president, I think his capacity to influence in a positive way . . . the behavior of a lot of underperforming black youth today is very important, and he’s the only one who can reach them.”

Kerrey continued: “It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.”

He returned to Clinton: “She does inspire my confidence. She can do the job. In my view, she’s the complete package.”

Now, Kerrey says dumb things all the time, but what’s really weird out of this quote:

Kerrey continued: “It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.”

Not something that appeals to him? WTF?

Uh-Oh, The GOP is in Panic Mode

If you head over to Illinois Review you can observe a rather bizarre panic over Huckabee’s rise and all sorts of ethics problems that are just now surfacing.

The panic is hysterical because they don’t seem to like anyone, but more to the point, Huckabee is now second in Illinois, 2 points behind Guiliani.

This could be one of the most amusing GOP Nomination races. Very seldom do Republicans choose an outsider.  Usually the nomination is reserved for someone long in the party who works their way up (or is born up high).  This time, there is a serious divergence between the establishment and the grass roots and it looks to be quite the circular firing squad.  ICFST goes national!

Clinton Hits Stage Three

 Of Tucker McElroy’s 7 Stages of Barack.

3. Holy shit, in his book he talks about doing blow, this could hurt him big time.

Worse, it’s a lame ass passive aggressive attempt:

In an interview, Shaheen said, he remains perplexed about why, at this fraught point in history, voters and the media are not giving more attention to experienced Democratic candidates such as Sens. Chris Dodd and Joe Biden and are instead elevating into the first tier alongside Clinton a pair of candidates with less experience in Washington, Barack Obama and John Edwards. Shaheen also expressed his personal misgivings about whether Obama or Edwards would be electable if they became the party’s nominee.

Among his concerns about Obama as the nominee, he said in an interview here today, is that his background is so relatively unknown and that the Republicans would do their best to unearth negative aspects of it, or concoct mistruths about it. Shaheen, a lawyer and influential state power broker, mentioned as an example Obama’s use of cocaine and marijuana as a young man, which Obama has been open about in his memoir and on the trail.

“The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight … and one of the things they’re certainly going to jump on is his drug use,” said Shaheen, the husband of former N.H. governor Jeanne Shaheen, who is planning to run for the Senate next year. Billy Shaheen contrasted Obama’s openness about his past drug use — which Obama mentioned again at a recent campaign appearance in New Hampshire — with the approach taken by George W. Bush in 1999 and 2000, when he ruled out questions about his behavior when he was “young and irresponsible.”

Shaheen said Obama’s candor on the subject would “open the door” to further questions. “It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'” Shaheen said. “There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome.”

There is a solution to the problem. Answer honestly.   I know, shocking idea.