Here on Easter Sunday it’s important to note that not much has changed in the Idiotsphere, despite a near meltdown this week in the markets and St. McWar having Alzheimer’s moments all over national teevee about Iraq.
Nope. The only story out of the Village this entire week has been how one man has put McSame into the White House guaranteed, and that man is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Despite their frantic efforts to one-up each other on issues large and small, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could soon find themselves sharing the same unhappy burden: the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Unless one of them can find the courage and the sense to forcefully denounce the black pastor, Clinton and Obama both could end up watching John McCain get elected President.
Midway through the second week of the Wright fiasco, and five days after Obama tried to cool the boiling issue with an important speech on race, it is increasingly clear we are witnessing a Democratic train wreck. For months, the collision has been unfolding in slow motion as the closely fought campaign worked its way across the country and the chances for a clear winner slipped away one state at a time.
Suddenly, the wreck is happening at full speed. The dream team is looking like a nightmare.
Race was always a touchy subject, but not the dominant one, at least on the surface. Now there is no other issue.
Economy in the shitter? Bush about to attack Iran? 4,000 dead troops and rising in Iraq? Doesn’t matter…because a black man said bad things about America and he must be punished. There is no other issue and the Village has said so. So sayeth the Village, so shall it forever be.
Race is now the only issue in the race and the Village will now do everything it can to assure that. It’s the Clenis, it’s Swift Boat, it’s Willie Horton all over again. Obama is an insane, whitey-hating angry racist who threw his grandmother under a bus.
“I’m sure,” said Barack Obama in that sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac, fries and strawberry shake sound profound, “many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”
Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree, flown-the-coop nuts. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose legions of “spiritual advisers” at the height of his Monica troubles outnumbered the U.S. diplomatic corps, Sen. Obama has had just one spiritual adviser his entire adult life: the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, two-decade pastor to the president presumptive. The Rev. Wright believes that AIDS was created by the government of the United States – and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Rev. Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”
Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years.
Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDS is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.
Before the speech, Slate’s Mickey Kaus advised Sen. Obama to give us a Sister Souljah moment: “There are plenty of potential Souljahs still around: Race preferences. Out-of-wedlock births,” he wrote. “But most of all the victim mentality that tells African Americans (in the fashion of the Rev. Wright’s most infamous sermons) that the important forces shaping their lives are the evil actions of others, of other races.” Indeed. It makes no difference to white folks when a black pastor inflicts kook genocide theories on his congregation: The victims are those in his audience who make the mistake of believing him.
“If only there were still a candidate other than Obama!” the Village tells us, eager for the spectacle of a Democratic Convention where the long knives are out and there’s blood in the streets. “If only Hillary could save us!”
It is a tribute to Hillary Clinton that even though, rationally, political soothsayers think she can no longer win, irrationally, they wonder how she will pull it off.
It’s impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she’ll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama’s wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams.
“It’s like one of those movies where you think you know the end, but then you watch with your fingers over your eyes,” said one leading Democrat.
Hillary got a boost from the wackadoodle Jeremiah Wright. As a top pol noted, the Reverend turned Obama — in the minds of some working-class and crossover white voters — from “a Harvard law graduate into a South Side Black Panther.”
The Scary Black Man argument still holds a lot of weight in 2008, but if you’re looking for a more technical argument on how Hillary can take the nomination and the Dems dump Obama’s darkie self, there’s always the logic of Dan Balz.
Clinton needs at least four things to happen. First, she must significantly narrow Obama’s lead in the pledged delegate count. Under almost no scenario is there a way for her to overtake Obama in that column, given the rules of proportionality. But by winning the overwhelming share of the last 10 contests, she can begin to cut down the margin and also claim momentum at the end of the race.
Second, she must also finish the primaries ahead of or nearly tied with Obama in the popular vote. Because she cannot take a lead in pledged delegates and because Obama will have won more states by the end of the primaries and caucuses, she will need the popular-vote edge to give uncommitted superdelegates a rationale to deny Obama the nomination.
At this point she is more than 700,000 votes behind — more than 400,000 if the Florida results (but not those from Michigan) are included. She will need big victories in Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Kentucky and West Virginia to come close. But without new voting in Michigan and Florida, her chances of winning the popular vote are greatly diminished.
Third, Clinton must emerge in national polls as a stronger candidate against John McCain. Clinton has gained ground in recent polls, but the superdelegates will look at the polls in June, not March, before making their decisions.
Finally, Clinton must persuade uncommitted superdelegates to deny the nomination to the candidate who has more pledged delegates. But to side with her would almost certainly offend African Americans, the party’s most loyal constituency. How many superdelegates will be prepared for that?
What’s not clear is whether Clinton can accomplish all this without a much more negative campaign — and that could prompt rebukes from party leaders and calls for Democrats to coalesce around Obama.
Of course this whole Village myopia on the Wright thing makes this seem much less like a long shot and more like the last chance the Dems have before a McSame blowout in November as the Bradley effect gets renamed the Obama effect in his honor.
Eleanor Clift asks “Is He American Enough?“, the hallmark of Serious Journalism.
By most accounts, Obama did a masterful job aligning the promise of his candidacy with the grievances expressed by both blacks and whites, noting in particular how the anger of working-class whites over affirmative action and welfare formed the Reagan coalition. But the cable-news noise machine doesn’t easily let go of something so juicy as the anti-American rhetoric served up by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The now-retired pastor did what the Clinton campaign had been unable to do–put Obama in a box he doesn’t need to be in, one that brands him as a candidate primarily of black aspirations. The cable commentators kept pounding away, but in another universe, the one inhabited by Obama’s base–the millennial generation–his Philadelphia speech became the most-viewed video on YouTube this week with almost 2.5 million hits so far. Maybe, just maybe, the cable critics and conservative pundits are talking to themselves.
At an election-watch panel Thursday morning organized by the American Enterprise Institute, a questioner using journalistic shorthand asked if the uproar over Reverend Wright “has legs.” The consensus among the panelists was that Obama might have stanched the bleeding among Democratic primary voters but that the issue will continue to dog him in a more virulent form with questions about where his true loyalties lie. Is he American enough? He’s new on the national stage, and people are prone to believe the negative campaign already underway on the Internet alleging various falsehoods. This belated scrutiny of Obama bolsters Clinton’s argument that she’s been vetted and there are no shoes to drop. You can almost hear her aides, sotto voce, saying “we told you so.” Hillary’s comment that it’s “un-American” for Obama not to endorse a do-over vote in Michigan builds on the narrative that he’s not one of us. She’s got a point. The Republicans made John Kerry French; imagine what they can do with Obama.
All while Clift is prodding at the noise machine, she’s blissfully unaware of her role in it. Let’s keep in mind what the Village wants here: McSame versus Hillary. Obama has to go because he is Not a Serious Foreign Policy Person on the war. The Village can’t have that, because the Village says the Surge is Surging.
“The war in Iraq has come at significant cost to the American economy. It has led to a spike in oil prices, resulted in massive deficit spending,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued at a recent press conference.
The surge of U.S. troops in Iraq has brought positive changes to that war-ravaged country. What are Democrats, eager to win the 2008 election, to do? Simple calculus: The price of oil is up; we’re still at war. It’s obvious, then: Blame the war for high gas prices.
It’s economic fear-mongering — with an added appeal for the anti-war crowd. In West Virginia, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama told supporters, “When you’re spending over $50 to fill up your car because the price of oil is four times what it was before Iraq, you’re paying a price for this war.”
Noted Stanford economist John Taylor said, “A lot of people could listen to that and think it sounds reasonable.” But the high price of gasoline is largely a function of increased demand for oil in the global economy. And a more secure Iraq could mean more oil.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton also hit that note last week when she argued in her big Iraq speech, “Our economic security is at stake.”
Unemployment is at 4.8 percent and inflation is under control. No matter: With mortgage foreclosures eating into the housing market and Wall Street investment houses holding too much bad debt, many Americans are afraid of losing what they have. (I get that. I work in a shrinking industry. But the larger picture isn’t as dim as Democrats and the media paint it.)
Make no mistake, the Village has now officially decided Obama has to be annihilated off the political landscape. What they did to Kerry and Gore will look like a walk in the park compared to the coming months of racial animosity the Village will assure us is on the minds of everyone in America.
And the Village will give us a way out of this horrible racially-tinged nightmare: first Hillary, then Saint Barbecue.
