Lazy-Ass "I Told You So" Post

No one knows what’s going to happen in November, but I wrote the following on another blog back in February:

Thus far, Barack Obama has been subjected to virtually no media scrutiny and--much more importantly--has been the target of no Republican attacks. It is therefore ludicrous to make any claims about his ability to defeat John McCain. It's like saying the Dolphins will beat the Patriots provided the Patriots don't take the field.

John McCain and Hillary Clinton have been around for a long time. They have rich, compelling and complicated biographies full of many successes and not a few failures. The public knows who they are. Democrats who think they can turn McCain into a flip-flopper or Hillary into Miss Congeniality are living in a fantasy land. A few things can be done at the margins, but these candidates cannot redefine each other. They will try, of course, but the public will soon tire of it. A McCain-Clinton race will end up being more about issues than personas. The Democrat will win that race.

Barack Obama's campaign was going nowhere until Obamamania spread throughout the land. There's a very good reason for this--when the spotlight was on him alone, he couldn't deliver. His paper-thin resume and lack of a coherent agenda made people wonder what all the fuss was about. Only when he became bathed in the reflected light of his supporters' adoration did he become viable. His campaign has now reached the stratosphere, but it's the political equivalent of a Ponzi scheme. It's fundamentally about nothing--by design.

Obamamania will weaken. The media and the Republicans are going to put the spotlight back on the candidate. He has defined his movement, but he has not defined himself. I don't know what he's going to come up with, but it had better be good.

Just for the record.

Taylor Marsh Chimes In

Riding shotgun on the caboose of the Obama Train hasn’t jarred loose all of her smarts. She knows it’s time for the menfolk to help with the dishes:

Some say Hillary should step in. Not going to happen. It's why I've been writing the posts I have about Palin. There is no way Clinton is going to mix it up with a woman who has a fraction of the experience, gravitas, and years of political time put in. HRC will focus solely on McCain - Bush.

Palin is Biden's job. It comes with the added burden of schooling the press between now and the vice presidential debates on what a man can say to a woman when he's in a political dogfight with her. Right now, given what I've seen and read, it's doubtful Dems have a clue. Because Palin doesn't just represent some vice presidential nominee. McCain's team has hooked her to the future of the Republican Party itself and the base has bought in all the way.

Taylor’s right to be concerned. Joe Biden’s partisan gearbox has two positions: Overdrive (when he’s on the campaign trail) and Park (when he’s questioning Sam Alito).


Smash-up on Palin Street?

Sarah Palin's Sure-Fire "Gaffe Repellent" (Extra-Strength “DUBYA” Formula!)

George W. Bush is the Michael Phelps of cluelessness, but have any of his idiotic statements ever landed him in hot water? No! And it’s all because he takes "staying on message" a lot more seriously than he takes the PDB.


Here's how it works:


Prior to any interrogatory situation, our President stocks his addled brainpan with about a dozen "answers," plus a few random quips and smart-sounding sentences. Subsequently, upon hearing a question, he quickly scans this Liliputian database and emits whatever pre-approved response seems appropriate. And though his dyslexia often scrambles his syntax (making him sound stupid), and his ignorance often causes him to choose an inappropriate response (making him sound incomprehensible), Bush’s strict adherence to a rigid system of message management makes it virtually impossible for him to "gaffe-out."


Extremely knowledgeable politicians like Joe Biden get cocky and get into trouble. Bill Clinton at the top of his game could wing it. Everybody else needs to buckle down. (Barack Obama has learned the value of staying on message. Early in the primaries he thought he could bullshit his way through anything. That got old quick. You haven’t you heard him declare war on Pakistan lately, have you?)


Nobody can compete with Bush when it comes to regurgitating his talking points. He is, after all the Decider, and, like Stephen Colbert, he’s proud of "thinking with his gut." (Words are a nuisance and of no importance.) But if Sarah Palin employs some variation of the Bush formula during her debate with Biden–and she really doesn’t have time to do much else--only Democrats will need to hold their breath.

Woman's Work

Sarah Palin makes Axelrod nervous. TPM to the rescue!

Where's Hillary?

Well, she's--

Not on the ticket. Not asked to be on the ticket. Not vetted.

Not doing enough!

Meltdown

Matt Stoller this morning:

This party is aroused by a raw primal screeching bitterness. I don't know if independents see Rudy's prime time speech like I see it, but what I see is a vicious white mob who laugh and sneer at people losing their homes in the name of small town American values and who hate community organizers standing up for those people.

If Stoller's candidate is going to make his experience as a community organizer the centerpiece of his resume, when the candidate himself is emphasizing the importance of overhauling our foreign policy, he'd better expect to get hammered.

The primaries are over. Deal with it.

As for "raw primal screeching bitterness," I guess Stoller doesn't read the comments on the Obama blogs.

Organizing and Governing

For his most fervent acolytes, Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer in Chicago is at the core of what makes him so special. But Republicans are likely to cast it as a waste of time:

"When I started organizing, I understood the idea of social change in a very abstract way," Obama told me last year. "It was to some extent informed by my years in Indonesia, seeing extreme poverty and disparities of wealth and understanding sort of in a dim way that life wasn’t fair and government had something to do with it. I understood the role that issues like race played and took inspiration from the civil-rights movement and what the student sit-ins had accomplished and the freedom rides.

"But I didn’t come out of a political family, didn’t have a history of activism in my family. So I understood these things in the abstract. When I went to Chicago, it was the first time that I had the opportunity to test out my ideas. And for the most part I would say I wasn’t wildly successful. The victories that we achieved were extraordinarily modest: you know, getting a job-training site set up or getting an after-school program for young people put in place."

So Obama went to law school and then began a political career during which he has never stopped anywhere long enough to accomplish very much. (It seems he’ll wait until he becomes all-powerful.) Much of the sound and fury emanating from Denver last week was designed to obscure a skimpy resume. He doesn’t need to bring attention to it now by dissing Sarah Palin for being mayor of a small town and governor of a big state. (Size matters. Just look at the map--very impressive on TV.)


And this is just stupid.



Dan Quayle was never taken seriously, but his boss, George H. W. Bush, had no trouble beating Michael Dukakis senseless. Sarah Palin may turn out to have problems, but if the Democrats aren’t careful, they’re going to get blamed for all the increasingly gratuitous piling-on by the media.


Alaskan folk heroes are made, not born.

Notes From Outside The Loop

Massachusetts is no left-wing "People’s Republic." (It’s been a long time since Nixon/McGovern.) In the Commonwealth's radio landscape, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting Rush Limbaugh or some homegrown, faux-populist, Republican tool. Right-wing broadcasters are still a force to be reckoned with, particularly with Sarah Palin now on the scene to push their manly buttons. Expect the wingnuts to turn up the volume on the Attack Machine to "11" as the campaign gets hotter.


Barack Obama had a good convention (from the little I saw of it), but he remains very beatable. He needs to make this election entirely about John McCain’s unacceptability. When the afterglow of "Thursday Night in Denver" has faded, the transcendent awesomeness of Obama-as-Savior will only be observed from within the friendly confines of Keith Olbermann’s skull. It's going to be trench warfare in the real world.


Is Hillary Clinton off the media’s shit list? Though many who watched her amazing speech ended up feeling depressed that the best woman had lost–and lost unfairly!–the pundits were beside themselves with joy as they witnessed the spectacle of their favorite female punching bag shoveling dirt (at least temporarily) on her own uppity aspirations. If Obama goes down to McCain, it’s hard to imagine Chris Mathews and Company having the stomach to blame Hillary for it. (Bill, on the other hand . . . He’s still white trash, and he makes no secret of his contempt for his beltway betters.)


By traditional standards of what constitutes "experience," we now have two tiers of candidates: Biden/McCain and Obama/Palin. Democrats would be well advised to just leave Sarah alone. Let her make her own mistakes. And does Obama really want to see Joe Biden, of all people, have to help deconstruct her resume? Is there any chance that the venerable Gaffe Master can avoid wading hip-deep into the rancid stream of sexism that runs through the Democratic Establishment? (Obama's Blogger Boys are already there.)


John McCain was actually quite effective with Chris Wallace on Sunday. He’s using Sarah Palin to take the tarnish off his old maverick image--they'll run as the dynamic duo of change--and he might get away with it. On Friday, I was sure he'd trot out Romney so he could tap into the Mittster’s proven ability to sell Republican economic snake oil, but now I suspect that McCain might, at long last, have become disgusted by his own craven flip-flopping on Bush’s disastrous tax cuts. With Wallace, he kept mumbling his way through his "keep taxes low" pledge as if he knew he'd have to raise them. McCain is going to serve only one term. Perhaps, as part of his legacy, he wouldn’t mind restoring some fiscal sanity to the Republican Party. In any case, Democrats need to keep pounding him on economic fairness. He doesn’t want to talk about it.


Finally–is this guy a piece of work? He was ubiquitous during the Obama selection process touting the wisdom of the party elders. Now he just needs to get lost.