Category Archives: Barack Obama

Carol Fowler: An uptick explained

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Before I left the office last night, I glanced at my stats page in Typepad and noticed something odd: I was getting a lot of hits from Google on a year-old post headlined "Carol Fowler and the Dark Side" (which, now that I look back at it, was an odd headline for the subject).

Later that night, I realized why — the quote from Ms. Fowler on Politico. Sheesh. What a bunch of nothing — my post last year was more interesting.

Folks, compared to the usual overheated rhetoric from Democrats of a certain persuasion about those ofFowlercarol
us who oppose abortion, this was nothing. When I heard the quote on TV (my wife watches TV news, even local "if it bleeds it leads" TV news, usually when I’m not in the room; but there I was trapped in my recliner holding a grandbaby and begging somebody to pop in a DVD — I ended up staying up way too late to rewatch "The Graduate"), I thought sure it would be something provocative. When I heard, "Choosing someone whose primary qualification seems to be that she has…," I thought the next thing would be a reference to some distinguishing feature of female anatomy. But when I then heard, "…n’t had an abortion," I could not freaking believe that someone was making an issue of it.

Come on, folks — at least what Don said was offensive, and I was fairly dismissive of that meaning anything, either. As any rational person who knows the way human beings talk with friends would be.

Anyway, that explains the uptick in interest over Carol Fowler. Again, sheesh.

And again, I will urge the partisans: Get over it. Democrats, quit your whining about "Swiftboating," which, I’m sorry to tell you, is not a real word, much less something for you to keep wetting your pants about, expecting the GOP to do it to you at any minute. That "quit picking on me" pose doesn’t work on anybody but your whiniest base. (And Barack, dismissing the GOPpers for acting hurt about "lipstick," then whining yourself about "Swiftboating" is about as petty as I’ve heard you get.)

And Repubicans, get over your crying about the lipstick and the Fowler remark and the mean media and the pregnant daughter and the rest.

And then let’s try to have a grownup election, OK?

And for you Democrats…

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Confetti

Yes, I know that before Sarahmania there was Obamania, and for those of you who still fondly remember those days before the Alaskan Invasion (the way some clung bitterly to Elvis after the Beatles came along — which I guess would make McCainiacs like Sinatra devotees), here’s a picture to warm your hearts.

It’s not as visually interesting or evocative as some of the other pics I’ve shared, such as the T-shirt guy, but it’s a nice photo, with a nice composition — or at least, well cropped. You’ll notice it also has a little of that halo thing going on. I had saved it when I saw it after the acceptance speech for use later, and since I sensed Dems getting antsy over the last couple of posts, I share it now.

Enjoy.

DeMint sticks up for Sarah Palin

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If you’re a Republican looking for cred on Iraq, then you want Lindsey Graham to stand up and tell everybody you were for the "surge" when nobody else was — as Lindsey did for best buddy John McCain last week.

But if you’re looking to bolster your rep as a fiscal hawk, then you want South Carolina’s junior senator.

Jim DeMint has made a name for himself nationally as the scourge of earmarks. So it is that Sarah Palin’s got to be grateful for his op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal this morning, headlined "Yes, Palin Did Stop That Bridge." An excerpt:

In politics, words are cheap. What really counts are actions. Democrats and Republicans have talked about fiscal responsibility for years. In reality, both parties have a shameful record of wasting hundreds of billions of tax dollars on pork-barrel projects.

My Senate colleague Barack Obama is now attacking Gov. Sarah Palin over earmarks. Having worked with both John McCain and Mr. Obama on earmarks, and as a recovering earmarker myself, I can tell you that Mrs. Palin’s leadership and record of reform stands well above that of Mr. Obama.

Hyde Park is a small town, too (according to Chicago)

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A reader gave me a heads-up to a piece in the Chicago Tribune in which a supporter of Barack Obama rebuts Sarah Palin by insisting that the Democrat is from a small town, too. A sample:

We know about the power of faith. In Hyde Park we brave the bitter winds to gather in Rockefeller Chapel on Thanksgiving morning. We are welcomed by African drums; we are blessed by rabbis, priests and preachers; then we are sent home to our holiday feasts by the smell of burning sage offered by Indian tribal leaders.

You know, I can really dig this, because when I was growing up, Bennettsville was just like that!…

No, no, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t make fun… not even when people seem to be going out of their way to tempt me… And earnestness, particularly of the "politically correct" variety, can be so wickedly tempting. (And I HATE that trite phrase, "politically correct." But how else do you describe something that so painstakingly, self-righteously invokes the concept, like, "look at me; I’m doing my best to be a cliche…")

Oh, and please, please, you who are earnest and self-righteous — PLEASE don’t try to explain this to me. I get it; what is offensive to me is when somebody thinks I DON’T get it, and goes to such lengths as this to overexplain to me the virtues of "multiculturalism." I got it when I was in the first grade, I promise — probably earlier. We’re all God’s children, regardless of race, color or creed — even the irony-deprived among us. But no one with a sense of humor can see it ladled on that thick and not crack up.

And don’t worry, this writer doesn’t expect you to get the point from that excerpt above; for those of you just too clueless to get it, she drops it on you like an anvil in the last graf:

The people of rural America do not have a monopoly on these principles. And they are not the only Americans who count….

Ow! Got … to… have… release…. "So a preacher, a priest and a rabbi walk into an herbal tea bar in Hyde Park…"

SORRY, dang; I can’t help it! Get thee behind me…

The Kulturkampf is wearing me out.

DOH! We forgot the ‘national will’ part!

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Following up on my call earlier to Dave looking for resources about DIME, he e-mailed me something he got from a friend who teaches at West Point:

DIME is a list of the instruments of national power:

The ability of the United States to achieve its national
strategic objectives is dependent on the effectiveness of the US Government
(USG) in employing the instruments of national power. These instruments of
national power (diplomatic, informational, military, and economic), are normally
coordinated by the appropriate governmental officials, often with National
Security Council (NSC) direction. They are the tools the United States uses to
apply its sources of power, including its culture, human potential, industry,
science and technology, academic institutions, geography, and national
will.

To which I responded,

National will! We forgot about national will! DOH! That’s the problem!…

And kidding aside, that IS the problem. As long as our conversations about strategy is grounded in the kind of political vocabulary we’ve heard for the last few years — mostly based either in trying to appeal to bases or win elections — we’re not going to be able to assemble the national will to focus all of our resources toward international goals that are beneficial not only to this country, but to the world at large.

Where George W. Bush has failed, more than in any other way, is in assembling that national will and leading us to act upon it.

Unfortunately, so far I haven’t seen either McCain or Obama state a whole strategy that the nation can get behind — that is, something that goes beyond the either-or oversimplification of "soft power vs. hard power." If they did it and I missed it, I’d appreciate a heads-up.

Obama and McCain: The Halo Effect

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Obama_halo

After the Democratic Convention, I grabbed the above picture of Barack Obama, thinking I had not yet seen a more perfect photographic invocation of the notion that Sen. Obama was The One.

I didn’t think Republican lighting engineers could top that, and they didn’t, but they certainly tried. Note the photo below from Sen. McCain’s Thursday night address. Now you see why he has made some long-delayed inroads among his evangelical base.

Mccainhalo

Gallup shows McCain leading

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This morning I see that, while Nielsen sees Obama and McCain tied in "buzz" (whatever that means), Gallup sees McCain leading by 5 points. A week ago, after the Democratic Convention and before the Republican, Obama had led by 7 points in the same poll.

From the USAToday story:

WASHINGTON — The Republican National Convention has given John McCain and his party a significant boost, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken over the weekend shows, as running mate Sarah Palin helps close an "enthusiasm gap" that has dogged the GOP all year.

McCain leads Democrat Barack Obama by 50%-46% among registered voters, the Republican’s biggest advantage since January and a turnaround from the USA TODAY poll taken just before the convention opened in St. Paul. Then, he lagged by 7 percentage points.

More on that "enthusiasm gap:"

Before the convention, Republicans by 47%-39% were less enthusiastic than usual about voting. Now, they are more enthusiastic by 60%-24%, a sweeping change that narrows a key Democratic advantage. Democrats report being more enthusiastic by 67%-19%

Discuss amongst yourselves.

The NYT’s very, very cool video/text software

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Have you had occasion to check out the way The New York Times has been posting the major speeches from the conventions? It’s about the coolest — and to me, most useful — software I’ve ever seen. Certainly the coolest since Google Maps came up with the "street level" view, and without the Big Brother overtones.

Here’s what it does: First, there’s a high-quality video window. Then, there’s a transcript of the speech posted next to the video, but that’s not the cool part. The cool part is that if you click on the paragraph you want, the video jumps to the beginning of that paragraph. Then, on top of that, there’s a topical outline to the right of the transcript. Click on the subject you want, and it jumps to that part of the transcript and video. It’s amazing.

Not only that, but the paper’s site search engine — which unfortunately often frustrates me; it doesn’t read my mind as well as, say, Google does — will take you straight to these miraculous pages with the simplest, most intuitive input, such as "Barack Obama’s speech."

Since I subscribe to the NYT, I don’t know whether these are accessible just to subscribers, or to everyone. But in the hope that you can go check them out and groove on them, here are a few of the top speeches from the two conventions:

Did it work for you? I hope so. This is too cool not to be able to share.

Art for art’s sake

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Invesco

Looks like I won’t get around to telling my Dan Quayle story today, because it will take me some time. It’s about how several of us here at The State spent a week back in 1988.

But in the meantime, here’s a picture I just liked because I liked it. The composition, or the visual irony of stylized artwork superimposed on reality, or some such. Anyway, somebody at the WSJ liked it, too, because they put it on their front page, even though they knew it would be outdated (Obama’s acceptance speech was that night) by the time readers saw it. I’m guessing they subbed it out in the local edition.

Anyway, I was going to post it on Friday, but an abortive attempt to find it on AP failed. Today I found it. So enjoy.

Maybe an art major out there can explain to me why I like the picture.

To bounce or not to bounce

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My Dad does something I don’t do — he watches the 24/7 cable TV "news" channels — so he’s usually much more up on the latest spin than I am. Yesterday, while I was pulling nails from a large pile of lumber in my driveway so I could reuse it, he mentioned having seen that Obama didn’t get a "bounce" in the polls from the convention.

My reaction: Well, of course not — that was not a convention designed to appeal to independents. It was aimed at the hearts and minds of the already committed. Even Obama’s speech, which I had expected to go well beyond that, was (for him) pretty much party boilerplate. If you want a bump up in the polls, you have to appeal to people who aren’t already for you, and the Obama campaign didn’t do that last week. Hence my Sunday column.

Of course, there are different schools of thought as to whether Obama got a bounce or not. CNN says not. Gallup says he did. The WSJ today handled it about right, saying merely that "Early polls gave mixed readings on how much of a bounce Sen. Barack Obama got from the Democratic convention."

Then of course there’s the usual silly back-and-forth over expectations.

The bottom line is, this is what it was before the Democratic convention — a close race. And the only poll that counts is the one in November.

What’s with the tieless look?

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Obamabiden_2

As I noted earlier, the masculine equivalent of Sarah Palin’s specs and tied-up hair is to wear a coat and tie. The effect in both cases is to project seriousness of purpose.

So what are we to make of the fact that, all of a sudden, the male candidates for president and vice president are, quite deliberately, showing themselves in public without neckties?I don’t mean as a sort of occasional thing for a barbecue, but all the time. And don’t try to tell me this is just happening without somebody thinking about it; campaigns think about everything these days, as Peggy Noonan noted the other day (writing about Obama’s acceptance speech, the last time he was seen wearing a tie).

This has been coming for some time. As far back as 2006, Joe Biden was regularly appearing here in S.C. with a jacket, but no tie… sort of the Paul-McCartney-on-the-cover-of-Abbey-Road look. Here’s proof of that.

Then, I started noticing Obama doing the same. And McCain, too. And Huckabee and even Romney.

Here’s what worries me about this… those of you who are old enough to remember will recall how JFK killed men’s hats. There are some authorities that dispute it, but then there are many who believe Oswald didn’t act alone. Suffice it to say that before JFK, men wore hats. Afterwards, they didn’t.

Obama could do the same with the necktie. Biden and McCain aren’t so much of a threat, because when they go tieless, they just look like they’re been playing with their grandchildren and didn’t want them chewing on their ties. They don’t look natural that way.

But there’s been altogether too much loose talk about Obama’s charisma. No less an authority than Ted Sorensen has sat in my board room and pronounced Obama the rightful heir to Camelot. He’s already known as The One. How long can it be before he’s dubbed The Tieless One? (Note the picture above — while Biden just looks like he’s on his way to play golf, Obama is making that "early-60s, Best-and-Brightest" statement again with the white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up).

So, if the necktie industry, moribund as it is, wants to save itself, it had better do what it can to elect McCain. Because if Obama’s elected, every day will be casual Friday.

Or at least, he would get the "credit." The fact is that, as I have noted twice in recent columns, Gallup has found that only 6 percent of American men wear a tie to work every day. I, of course, am of the 6 percent, and am determined to wear the thing every day until I retire. I mean, I have to now — it’s a statement. Before, it was conformity. Now, it’s a statement of adherence to traditional values and seriousness of purpose. I’ll have you know that I bought on of the last bow ties at Lourie’s — in fact, it may have been the last bow tie they actually sold.

I also still have a Wilson Jack Kramer Autograph wooden tennis racket, although I don’t use it any more. I do use my old persimmon 4 wood, though. When I’m hitting it right, it’s the best club in my bag; the ball flies like a rifle shot. Which reminds me, I’m not working today…
Mccainhuck

What the other candidates look like

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Well, I certainly got some reactions on that last one, some quite condemnatory. It makes me wonder — would these folks have reacted so vehemently if they had heard me share that cultural association with regard to Gov. Palin, face-to-face? Probably not. Even as she was speaking — I had flipped on the little TV outside my office to listen while going back and forth getting work done — I had given her a glance and shared that observation with Cindi. Cindi paused in what she was doing only long enough to glance at the tube, and correct my facts — I had described her hair as looking as though she had quickly pinned it up atop her head to get it out of her way while getting work done, and Cindi informed me that she had paid good money to get her hair done that way.

Which of course changes nothing. The point in the end is that Sarah Palin apparently puts her hair up in a way that looks pragmatic and businesslike to ME, and wears Serious Eyeglasses rather than contacts, as a deliberate statement meant to balance her beauty. It’s a way of being taken seriously. And for those of you so deeply offended on gender grounds, men do the same thing — they wear suits.

Would it make y’all feel better if I describe some of the other figures in terms of snap judgments based on their appearances? OK, I will. It won’t be quite the same, of course, because a beautiful woman evokes a response that’s unlike any you get with a man or a less-attractive woman — something that I believe Sarah Palin understands well enough to hide some of that light under a bushel. OK, here we go:

  • Let’s start with Joe Biden. Joe’s a nice-looking guy, don’t you think? He’s got a smile that couldBiden_grin_2
    light up a stadium (what does he use on those teeth?). Joe sort of radiates "politician" — more specifically, Irish politician. Loads of Blarney, but I mean that in a good way — I enjoy hearing Joe talk, up to a point (the point is when — and I’ve had this happen a couple of times — I speak to him more than once in a week, and he starts telling me the same anecdote that he told me the other time). Beyond that, he projects something else that apparently is inconsistent with his working-class background: He looks Patrician. If he’s Irish, you think, he’s certainly not shanty Irish. Lace-curtain all the way. Shows how looks can deceive.
  • John McCain looks like what he is — the aging fighter jock. He’s got the build, the bantam-rooster feistiness, however wracked by old wounds. He has a pretty bright grinMccain_grin
    of his own, but it’s of a different quality from Biden’s. Biden’s grin is of the master salesman about to close a deal. McCain’s is about cockiness, the cockiness of the Naval Aviator. That cockiness seems to have gone into his pick of his Veep candidate. He’s saying, I don’t particularly need a vice president; I plan on sticking around, so experience and qualifications didn’t matter. Might as well pick somebody who pleases all those whiners in my base and maybe peels off some of the more emotional HIllary supporters, the ones for whom it was all about her being a woman. This is a quality that strikes his supporters as reassuring confidence, and his detractors as obnoxiousness.
  • Barack Obama… well, my first reaction is that he does not fit a type at all. He’s unique. He, too, has a winning grin, but he doesn’t use it all that much; his stock persona isObama_serious
    deeply serious. But then I remember that there is ONE sort of character that he does sometimes remind me of, and it’s completely in tune with that seriousness. I mentioned it to my wife the other night: He looks like something out of the early 60s, particularly one of the young Best and Brightest of the Kennedy Administration. I had trouble saying WHY he looked that way — was it the cut of his suits? Were his ties that narrow? Was it the way he rolls up the sleeves of his white dress shirts? My wife said it was his thinness — people are bulkier than that these days. His thinness makes him look like he’s from another era. Maybe. Of course, if you wanted to play on the race thing, you could say he’s like Sidney Poitier (60s again) in either "To Sir With Love" or "In the Heat of the Night." The "black" guy who comes across as whiter, as more Establishment, more conservatively attired and carefully spoken, than any white guy you ever saw.
  • If you want to go farther afield, you could say Hillary Clinton is the "Smartest Kid in the Class (Just Ask Her; She’ll Tell You)," the one who absolutely has to get the best grades — also the one who takes names of those who misbehave if the teacher leaves the room, and gives a full report when the teacher returns. BILL Clinton is the clever wastrel who is probably at the top of the list of defaulters she gives the teacher — the kid who’s just as smart, but wastes it on trying to be the class clown, or the most popular kid in the school. Funny thing about Bill — I had seen him around for years. I first saw him in person back in 1978, and he had this manner about him that caused me to read him all wrong. I would have pegged him as the child of privilege, the fair-haired one who could do no wrong and loved life because everything went his way. It really shocked me to learn that he didn’t come up that way, because he projects that kind of guy. That’s one thing he and Joe sort of have in common.

So there you go — shallow, quick-impression assessments of all the major characters. None of them are exactly sitcom characters, but I worked with what I had.

Yelling at the television

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THE DEMOCRATIC convention forced me to an unpleasant realization: I’ve become one of those crotchety old guys who yell at the television in helpless frustration: “Lies! How can they say such things? How can anyone sit still for this stuff?”
    And this week, I’m in for more of the same with the Republicans.
    What sets me off? Oh, take your pick — the hyperbole, the self-importance, the us-against-them talk, the stuff that Huck Finn called “tears and flapdoodle.”
    Take, for instance, this typical bit from Hillary Clinton’s speech:

    My friends, it is time to take back the country we love. And whether you voted for me or you voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose. We are on the same team. And none of us can afford to sit on the sidelines. This is a fight for the future. And it’s a fight we must win together. I haven’t spent the past 35 years in the trenches… to see another Republican in the White House squander our promise…

    Let’s deconstruct that a bit.
    Take back the country? From whom? Did I miss something? Did the Russians roll right on through Gori and into Washington? No? You say Americans are still in charge, just the “wrong” Americans, of the wrong party? But your party controls Congress! Take it back from whom?
    … a single party with a single purpose. Now there you’ve hit on the biggest lie propagated by each of the major parties, the conceit that there is something coherent and consistent about such loose confederations of often-incompatible interest groups. Did you not just spend the last few months playing with all the force you could muster upon those very differences, those very tensions — between feminists and black voters, between the working class and the wine and cheese set? What single purpose, aside from winning an election?
    This is a fight… No, it isn’t, however much you love to say that. Again, I refer you to what the Russians are doing in Georgia — that’s a fight, albeit a one-sided one.
    … that we must win together. Actually, that raises a particularly pertinent point, which is that the only “fights” that “must” be won are the ones in which “together” is defined as all Americans, or all freedom-loving peoples, whereas such divisive factions as your party and that other one that will meet in St. Paul militate against our being able to win such fights together.
    I haven’t spent the past 35 years in the trenches… You’re absolutely right; you haven’t. So spare us the war metaphors.
    … to see another Republican in the White House squander our promise… Like that’s what matters, the stupid party label. Like there isn’t more difference between you and Barack Obama in terms of philosophy and goals and experience and what you would bring to office than there is between John McCain and Joe Biden. Come on! Please!…
    Sigh. Fume. Mutter.
    This stuff wouldn’t upset me quite so much if not for the fact that this was to be the year that we rose above this stuff. That’s why I so happily supported both John McCain and Barack Obama in their parallel bids for the White House. Both men offered themselves as alternatives from the incessant, bitter, destructive partisan warfare of the Clinton-Bush years.
    John McCain is the man the GOP’s partisans love to hate, the guy they call a “Republican In Name Only,” the man they stooped to new lows to destroy in 2000, the senator who’d just as soon work with Democrats as Republicans, the candidate who, coincidentally, has been giving Sen. Clinton a lot of love in his latest campaign ads.
    Barack Obama was the Democrat who made it abundantly, eloquently clear that he was not running in order to “fight” against his fellow Americans. So all week, I looked forward to his acceptance speech, and when it came I was… disappointed.
    Maybe I had built it up too much in my mind, depended too much on it to wash away the bad taste of all those boilerplate party speeches I had heard. He said many of the right things. He said “Democrats as well as Republicans will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past,” but as for most of it — well, read David Broder’s column on the facing page.
    When he said “part of what has been lost these past eight years… is our sense of common purpose,” I thought, yes, but it’s been happening a lot more than eight years, and you know that. But he said it that way because of his audience. That’s what made the speech flat, by Obama standards. He had to avoid offending the kind of people who love the bitter politics that he had been running against.
    What I had wanted to hear was the kind of thing that caused me, while blogging on live TV the night of his South Carolina primary victory, to write “What a TREMENDOUS victory speech!” A sample of what impressed me so that night:

    “We are looking for more than just a change of party in the White House…. We are up against decades of bitter partisanship that cause politicians to demonize their opponents… That kind of politics is bad for our party, it’s bad for our country, and this is our chance to end it once and for all.”

    That sort of anti-partisan vehemence would not have played well in Mile-High Stadium. Maybe, as he escapes the gravitational pull of Denver, the Obama of January will come out to inspire us again. I hope so. In the meantime, on to the Republicans….
    Just moments ago as I write this, as he announced he’d chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate, Sen. McCain promised the GOP crowd that he’d “fight for you.”
    Lord help us.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

TIME magazine features Anton Gunn

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Just got a heads-up that Anton Gunn — Democratic nominee for Bill Cotty’s House seat, S.C. political director for Barack Obama — has been featured in TIME magazine. A sample:

Anton Gunn is a first-time delegate to the Democratic National Convention from South Carolina, and he has never so much as watched a political convention on television before. Even Barack Obama’s famous keynote address in 2004 didn’t grab his attention (he sheepishly admits he still hasn’t listened to it). In fact, until two years ago, when Gunn ran for a state house seat in Columbia and lost by 298 votes, he’d never been involved in electoral politics.

Obama’s candidacy has brought a wave of new voters and volunteers into the Democratic Party, but even among them, Gunn, 35, stands out. In addition to being a Democratic delegate and a candidate once again for the state legislature, he now has a line on his political résumé few can match: political director for the Obama campaign in South Carolina, the state that more than any other launched the Illinois Senator’s successful candidacy.

You know, I don’t think I would have singled out Anton as one of those people brought into politics like Obama. I saw a number of such folks back in the state primaries, and some of them were real novices. Anton was relatively NEW to politics, but he was already in it before he met Obama. That doesn’t take away from his achievement helping Obama win the primary, a job for which he was quite inexperienced.

I guess this sort of exposure is kind of hard to match if you’re David Herndon, Mr. Gunn’s opponent in November. Of course, it remains to be seen to what extent TIME magazine readers are a factor.

How about that Obama speech?

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Obamaspeech

On the Sarah Palin post, Wally said he wanted to know what I thought about Barack Obama’s speech last night. Well, here’s PART of what I have to say about it in my column coming up Sunday:

    Barack Obama was the Democrat who made it abundantly, eloquently clear that he was not running in order to “fight” against his fellow Americans. So all week, I looked forward to his acceptance speech, and when it came I was… disappointed.
    Maybe I had built it up too much in my mind, depended too much on it to wash away the bad taste of all those boilerplate party speeches I had heard. He said many of the right things. He said “Democrats as well as Republicans will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past,” but as for most of it — well, read David Broder’s speech on the facing page.
    When he said “part of what has been lost these past eight years… is our sense of common purpose,” I thought, yes, but it’s been happening a lot more than eight years, and you know that. But he said it that because of his audience. That’s what made the speech flat, by Obama standards. He had to avoid offending the kind of people who love the bitter politics that he had been running against.

Don’t just go by me; be sure to read the Broder column I mention above (it’s embargoed until Sunday). Frankly, I was a little worried that I was the only one (other than David Brooks) left flat by the speech, until I saw what Broder had written.

But don’t just go by him, either. What did y’all think?

Robert’s ‘sexist’ cartoon

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Hillarys_delegates

Robert’s in trouble now! He mentioned to me a few minutes ago the negative attention his cartoon from yesterday about Hillary and Barack has garnered, particularly on a blog called "Feminist Law Professors."

That blog took time out from considering "Which Wine Should I Bring To A Party At My Dean’s House?," a post that demonstrates at least a sense of humor of a sort, to bristle over "Political ‘Humor’ in the South Carolina MSM," which features Robert’s cartoon. It was filed under the category, "Sexism in the Media."

Key commentary from that blog:

That’s the same cartoonist that produced this and this and this and this.

Now I invite your commentary…

Did Obama’s position on Iraq just change?

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Michelle Obama just said* something that made me say, "huh?" She was listing all the wonderful things that would happen if her husband were elected — the arrival of the millennium, dogs and cats living together in peace, the usual hyperbole you hear from people on such occasions, nothing remarkable — when she said:

"… See, that’s why Barack’s running: to end the war in Iraq responsibly…"

Say what? The Obama position, I thought, was an end, without modifiers, to our involvement in Iraq. Not and end to the war, of course. Democrats to whom Obama’s Iraq position (my one beef with him) appeals just want the U.S. to leave, never mind what happens in Iraq (at least Obama wants to leave "carefully" and "responsibly"), even though they use the phrase, "end the war." (Some of them, if you can fathom it, actually imagine that there will only be violence while Americans are there — I suppose they would also answer "no" to the Zen question about the tree in the forest.)

Well, we have been ending the war, quite responsibly and honorably, under the leadership of Gen. Petraeus over the past year. But I thought Obama was against that. I thought he just wanted us to leave.

When did that change? Or did it not change, and his wife is laboring under a misconception?

* Continuity note: I wrote this last night a minute or two after she said it, but didn’t post until now because I couldn’t find a transcript to confirm that I’d heard the quote right. It was one of those things where you hear something, and don’t right it down, but over the next few minutes you think, "Wait a minute… what did she just say?"

The ‘Clean’ Team

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Of course, the very best reason for Obama to have made the veep selection he did is that in Joe Biden, he has someone "who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

No, wait — that’s what Biden said about Obama.

It speaks well of Obama that he didn’t let that remark, which cast a shadow on Biden’s candidacy from the day he announced, get in his way. Evidently, Obama understood perfectly well what Joe meant — rather than more nefarious, paranoid interpretations that some may have chosen to apply — and agreed with me that Joe was absolutely right. From my column of July 29, 2007:

    Poor Joe Biden, who’s even older than I am, got into all sorts of trouble for calling Obama “clean,” but that’s just what he is. And for those who are focusing on details of the latest 24/7 news cycle’s scandal or whatever, it’s easy to forget how appealing “clean” can be to the fresh-faced.

Up-close and personal Biden videos

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Maybe now that Obama has pulled Joe Biden back into the spotlight, some of you may want to look at some of the video clips of our editorial board interview with him back in October, when he was still trying against all odds to be at the top of the ticket.

If so, here they are:

Over the next few days, I’ll try to find time to mine the rest of my video to see if there was anything that didn’t seem interesting then that is more interesting now that he’s the running mate.

Oh, and I also have some older video of Joe. Here he is at the Galivants Ferry Stump Meeting (being introduced by Fritz Hollings), and here is some poor-quality phone video of him really getting worked up talking to the Columbia Rotary about immigration.

Oh, and in case you want to see video of the other guy on the Democratic ticket, here’s a post I did with a bunch of clips from our January interview with Obama.

Welcome back, Joe

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Biden1

    All right, let’s try one more time — I wrote this post twice this afternoon and had it crash both times right when I stored it for the last time, and the whole thing disappeared, despite the fact that I had saved drafts along the way. You’d think with the subject being an Irishman, a bit of luck would rub off on me. Here goes…

So Obama picked the one guy he needed to pick, the one running mate with all the strengths that perfectly match his weaknesses. And so we welcome Joe Biden back to the limelight.

Well, not "back" exactly, since my man Joe didn’t get any of the light that was his due the first time around. Despite all that time spent paying dues here in South Carolina — starring at the Galivants Ferry Stump Meeting in 2006, and doing the rubber-chicken circuit with great regularity, he couldn’t get any attention, and no love from S.C. Democrats. Why? Because the Beltway media had decided it would be about Obama and Hillary, and apparently S.C. Democrats were spending all their time staring at 24/7 TV "news" instead of looking around them, and they mistook what they saw on the Tube for reality, until it became reality.

Never mind that Joe Biden was easily the best-qualified candidate in the field. By the time January rolled around, he was down, out and forgotten.

That made things at tad easier for us on The State‘s editorial board in the end. By the time Obama came in and dazzled us in his endorsement interview — and Hillary had refused to come in and try to give us a reason not to endorse Obama — the choice was easy. But if Joe had still been in it, I suspect I would still have been pulling for him, and who knows where we would have ended up? It might have been like 2004 all over again, when I persuaded a very divided board to go along with me (talked them into exhaustion is what I did, in a three-hour marathon after which I lost my voice for about a week) and endorse my other man Joe.

As it was, though, we reached a very quick consensus, much as we had done earlier in the month with John McCain.

Joe Biden, of course, had been in to see us months before, just as McCain had done. And those were not the first visits we’d had from either of those veterans.

So now Joe’s back in it. Good. This will be interesting.

Biden2