With the biggest primary contests in 2008 coming up in 48 hours or so, with the potential to decide who we’ll have to put up with for the next ten months so that we can put up with them for four years, the Village is still trying to push the McCain (rising from the ranks of the vigorous and vibrant electoral process of the GOP) beats Clinton (the inevitable choice of a hopelessly fractured “identity politics” laden broken Democratic party) meme.
This week’s squawking magpies take to the Village can-and-string technology to make that point, starting with the Grand Dame herself, MoDo the Red who compares the Democratic race to that of Hollywood facade.
A more accurate snapshot of the frosty Clinton-Obama relationship came on a frosty December day in a scorching encounter that is now known simply as “the tarmac moment.” On Dec. 13, the two senators were preparing to board their private planes, parked next to each other at Reagan National Airport, to go back to Iowa for a debate. Hillary sent word to Obama that she wanted to talk to him. Obama’s aides figured that she wanted to make a pro forma apology for the comments of Billy Shaheen, the Clinton co-chairman in New Hampshire, who had told The Washington Post that Republicans would pounce on Obama’s confessions of cocaine and marijuana use in his late teens. Shaheen would step down the next day, but Camp Obama did not think the slam was a mere slip of the tongue.
In front of her plane, Hillary apologized to her rival about Shaheen. Obama replied that he was concerned at the pattern of insinuations and attacks from her supporters and that a message needed to be sent from the top that sharp attacks were not, as Hillary had put it, “the fun part.” He brought up another recent example: the Clinton volunteer in Iowa who had been asked to leave after forwarding sleazy e-mail falsely claiming that Obama was a Muslim.
Then, according to witnesses from the Obama camp, Hillary got very agitated and was “flapping her arms.” All her simmering grievances spilled out during the 10-minute talk. She was still furious about David Geffen’s searing interview with me the previous February, charging that she and Bill lie with such ease “it’s troubling.” While Geffen’s fund-raiser for Obama spurred the column, Obama knew nothing about the interview until it appeared. Hillary was also angry that Obama had called her “disingenuous,” telling Newsweek that it was a contradiction for her to claim that her tenure as first lady gave her more experience but then refuse to release her first lady papers from Bill’s library, saying she had no control over them.
At some point, an Obama intimate recalled, he “gently put his hand on her arm to chill her out.” The tall senator often leans down to put a friendly hand on the shoulder of his fellow senators — male and female — on the Senate floor, and they seem charmed by the gesture.
But Senator Clinton and her circle were not. They had been surprised and troubled by what they saw as his attempt to grab her arm and hold her in place while they talked, an unpleasant flashback to Rick Lazio getting in her space. As Queen Bee of the Clinton hive, Hillary has created a regal force field that can be breached only with permission, so something that wasn’t even a jostle was perceived as a joust.
The encounter seemed to have steeled them both. Hillary, to knock back the upstart who had unexpectedly gotten in her way, and Obama, who came away feeling that, for all of Hillary’s outer strength, she was afraid of him in some ways, and for all of her supposed poise, she had a more spiky temperament than he had realized.
But on Thursday, when he leaned down to whisper and put his hand on her shoulder, she looked up at him with a glowing smile. They really should have taken home gold statuettes.
You can practically hear her licking her lips and slurring “Sweetie darling” like the girls from AbFab. “Oh yes darling, those two absolutely despise each other but they need each other, it’s fascinating.”
It’s nothing but fluff to MoDo, a high school student council President popularity contest, a catfight on the fashion runways of Paris or Milan.
The Washington Post’s Peter Wehner meanwhile goes for the double backhanded compliment combo against Obama.
Barack Obama is not only popular among Democrats, he’s also an appealing figure to many Republicans. Former GOP House member Joe Scarborough, now a host on MSNBC, reports that after every important Obama speech, he is inundated with e-mails praising the speech — with most of them coming from Republicans. William Bennett, an influential conservative intellectual, has said favorable things about Obama. So have Rich Lowry of National Review and Peggy Noonan. And so have I.
A number of prominent Republicans I know, who would wage a pitched battle against Hillary Clinton, like Obama and would find it hard to generate much enthusiasm in opposing him.
What is at the core of Obama’s appeal?
Part of it is the eloquence and uplift of his speeches, combined with his personal grace and dignity. By all accounts, Obama is a well-grounded, decent, thoughtful man. He comes across, in his person and manner, as nonpartisan. He has an unsurpassed ability to (seemingly) transcend politics. Even when he disagrees with people, he doesn’t seem disagreeable. “You know what charm is,” Albert Camus wrote in “The Fall,” “a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.” Obama has such charm, and its appeal is not restricted to Democrats.
He’s clean and articulate you know. And the GOP prefers him to Clinton because…well…Clinton Derangement Syndrome.
A second reason Republicans appreciate Obama is that he is pitted against a couple, the Clintons, whom many Republicans hold in contempt. Among the effects of the Obama-Clinton race is that it is forcing Democrats to come to grips with the mendacity and ruthlessness of the Clinton machine. Conservatives have long believed that the Clintons are an unprincipled pair who will destroy those who stand between them and power — whether they are political opponents, women from Bill Clinton’s past or independent counsels.
Every time I see CDS out there, I can’t help but think of Madeline Kahn from “Clue”.
Yes, I did it, I killed Yvette. I hated her, so much… That… it… it… flam – flames. Flames, on the side of my face, heaving… breathle – , heaving breaths. Heaving breath…
Oh, and in the end, Petey there thinks Obama can’t win a general election because of course he’s too liberal.
If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee and fails to take steps such as this, his liberal views will be his greatest vulnerability. Obama will try to reject the liberal label — but based on his stands on the issues, at least so far, the label will fit, and it will stick.
Barack Obama is among the most impressive political talents of our lifetime. If he defeats Hillary Clinton, the question for the general election is not whether he can transcend his race but whether he can reach beyond his ideology.
Which is complete bullshit of course, they figure if they can pull Obama to the right, he’ll lose the primary and then they can get the matchup they really want: Kickass Old Maverick Guy versus the Bitch. The hate Clinton. But they fear Obama.
On the other side of the aisle, the Politico is doing its dead level best to paint Mitt as “Dead Mormon Walking”.
But with no message up on the airwaves driving the two-man-race narrative and reminding conservatives about what they dislike about McCain, the factors beyond Team Mitt’s control are exacerbated.
The most threatening, at the moment, is the clock. Just as Romney hurriedly pivoted to an anti-Washington message in the four days between Iowa and New Hampshire, he has just a few days now to slow the McCain momentum and paint his rival as unacceptable.
But he’s apparently declined to do so via television ads, and there is not enough time to do it through direct mail. Romney is sending a barrage of robo-calls into key Super Tuesday states, but that likely won’t be enough.
McCain, meanwhile, is picking up a slew of train-leaving-the-station endorsements each day and is increasingly seen as the inevitable nominee by many party regulars.
Winning a closed primary by nearly 100,000 votes, as he did in Florida, has that effect.
And as Florida — where Romney had a sophisticated and well-planned operation in place — demonstrated, the strength of organization matters less than the wave McCain is riding — and that wave got significantly bigger after the Sunshine State primary.
So while McCain may not have any infrastructure in place in a state like Illinois, for example, he nevertheless has the air of a winner, and voters tend to reward success.
Then there is the Mike Huckabee factor. With little chance at winning his party’s nomination and having demonstrated next to no success outside his evangelical base, the happy warrior is nonetheless riding on into Super Tuesday.
Predictably, he’s keying on conservative, Baptist-heavy Southern and border states that would seem most amenable to his message.
And he’s airing the same popular, faith-based ads in those places as he did in Iowa, though at a much smaller clip.
So far, he has focused the entirety of his criticism on Romney and not said a single cross word about McCain.
Romney’s camp recognizes, with no small degree of frustration, that there is little they can do about Huckabee, a candidate who is likely to keep the conservative vote splintered.
“He seems to be either running for a talk show host slot or the VP slot,” observed Madden.
Romney the victim, yet his obituary is all but written. McCain rhymes with “ordain” after all. They want to see this happen badly enough to taste it with every breath.
They want to prove that Only The Village can decide our next President, not the unwashed bourgeoisie voters. You will have McCain-Clinton because we want it. And you will like it. It gives us the greatest chance to impart our wisdom over that dirty, filthy blogosphere.
The challenge is to sell McCain to the GOP as a conservative stalwart as much as it is to turn the Democrats against Obama for being a Reagan centrist.
Conservatives bristle at the thought of a Republican president who might raise income and payroll taxes. Or enlarge the federal government instead of shrinking it. Or appoint Supreme Court justices who are anything but strict constructionists. Or grant a blanket amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.
Now, I don’t believe that a President McCain would do any of those things. But President Reagan did all of them. Reagan also provided arms to the Khomeini theocracy in Iran, presided over skyrocketing budget deficits, and ordered US troops to cut and run in the face of Islamist terror in the Middle East. McCain would be unlikely to commit any of those sins, either.
Does this mean that Reagan was not, in fact, a great conservative? Of course not. Nor does it mean that McCain has not given his critics on the right legitimate reasons to be disconcerted. My point is simply that the immaculate conservative leader for whom so many on the right yearn to vote is a fantasy. Conservatives who say that McCain is no Ronald Reagan are right, but Mitt Romney is no Ronald Reagan either. Neither is Mike Huckabee. And neither was the real – as opposed to the mythic – Ronald Reagan.
The conservative case against McCain is clear enough; I made it myself in some of these columns when he first ran for president eight years ago. The issues that have earned McCain the label of “maverick” – campaign-finance restrictions, global warming, the Bush tax cuts, immigration, judicial filibusters – are precisely what stick in the craw of the GOP conservative base.
We hate him. But he’s your next President, just like we put Bush on the docket. So f’in deal with it.
But this year, the conservative case for McCain is vastly more compelling.
On the surpassing national-security issues of the day – confronting the threat from radical Islam and winning the war in Iraq – no one is more stalwart. Even McCain’s fiercest critics, such as conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, will say so. “The world’s bad guys,” Hewitt writes, “would never for a moment think he would blink in any showdown, or hesitate to strike back at any enemy with the audacity to try again to cripple the US through terror.”
McCain was never an agenda-driven movement conservative, but he “entered public life as a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution,” as he puts it, and on the whole his record has been that of a robust and committed conservative. He is a spending hawk and an enemy of pork and earmarks. He has never voted to increase taxes, and wants the Bush tax cuts made permanent for the best of reasons: “They worked.” He is a staunch free-trader and a champion of school choice. He is unabashedly prolife and pro-Second Amendment. He opposes same-sex marriage. He wants entitlements reined in and personal retirement accounts expanded.
McCain’s conservatism has usually been more a matter of gut instinct than of a rigorous intellectual worldview, and he has certainly deviated from Republican orthodoxy on some serious issues. For all that, his ratings from conservative watchdog groups have always been high. “Even with all the blemishes,” notes National Review, a leading journal on the right (and a backer of Romney), “McCain has a more consistent conservative record than Giuliani or Romney. . . . This is an abiding strength of his candidacy.”
The message is clear. The Village wants McCain versus Clinton for the next ten months so they have a clear good guy and a clear bad girl to blather on about. They want to shape this election by shaping your opinion. They want to remind you that you do not need to think…you just need to listen. To them.
Everyone’s on board the McCain Lovefest/Clinton Hatefest circle jerk. And they’ll do everything they can to see that we comply.
