Month: May 2008

Why shouldn’t we just go ahead and let Hillary be President?  What have we got to lose?  She has been the heir presumptive since 2006.  She is entitled to be president and has proven what a great leader she will be for the next 4 years.

Cross posted at Daily Kos, Texas Kaos, Doing My Part For The Left
With Hillary, we will have a type of president we have become so use to in the past 8 years.  Hillary’s strong belief in her way or the highway is so reminiscent of Shrub we might find it hard to realize that a Democrat is actually in the White House.

Just think, we can look forward to 4 glorious years of a President who can never be allowed in public with out people to keep a tight reign on what she says.  Who knows she might be tired and just say any old thing that is lurking in her mind.  Sort of like Shrub giving the finger or telling people to go to hell when they don’t agree with him. At least we know Hillary can pronounce nuclear and read cue cards.

Hillary will be just one of the boys tossing back shots and bluffing her way through 4 years just like George has done.  She voted for the Iraq War and by god she ain’t apologizing.  While we’re at it we might as well start a 3rd war with Iran just so Hillary can get some good photo ops.

And we know Hillary can spin a good yarn to keep us all entertained.  Just look at that whopper she told about her trip to Bosnia.  If the TV stations hadn’t had actual video of her hugging that little girl, we would have sworn she had Chelsea under one arm and a sub-machine gun in the other.  Why it’s as good a whopper as Shrub’s about weapons of mass destruction.

Hillary will also do a bang up job on getting us better health coverage just like she did when she was First Lady.  She proved as First Lady how well she could reach out and build a coalition to get things changed.  She has all that experience working with Democrats and Republicans to make things easier for All Americans.  Well, not the people who lost their jobs because of NAFTA or the GLBT Community that she threw under the bus when she was advising Bill about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or said nothing against DOMA, but that’s fine.  George has been throwing people under the bus for 8 years so it won’t be an adjustment for anyone.

On the other hand you might not better bring up mistakes she made when she was First Lady.  She has that thing like Shrub where if it wasn’t good, it didn’t happen.  She cannot be held responsible for things in her past cause that’s  the past.

Now don’t cross her cause we never know what she might have in mind for you.  Hillary has a long memory and can think up some of the worst things that have ever happened to wish on people who ain’t with her.

Here’s to a Hillary Presidency.  4 more years of the same stuff we have been getting for the last 8.  It’ll be like Shrub never left.

It’s official, Bob Barr is now the Libertarian Party nominee. From what I understand, that means Barr will be on the ballot in at least 48 states. I don’t know how well he will do but he is going to be running on repealing the Patriot Act and the Defense of Marriage Act (which he co-sponsored), ending the war in Iraq, and ending the war on drugs. As these are things that appeal to Democrats more than to Republicans, it’s not absolutely clear that Barr will pull more votes from McCain than from Obama. I think we’ll actually have to look at things on a region by region basis. The libertarian strain of Republicanism is strongest in New England and the Western half of the country. I expect that Barr will hurt McCain among disaffected Republicans in those regions. However, his brand of non-militaristic leave-me-alone Repulicanism is unlikely to sell well in the South. He might actually provide an alternative to Obama for some white anti-war Southerners.

The big question is whether he will be able to inherit Ron Paul’s coalition and whether they will be able to raise enough money to run ads and get Barr’s name recognition up to a point where he might rise in the polls. Can Barr get into the debates? Right now that seems very unlikely. But it’s not completely out of the question. Time will tell.

Liz Trotta is the former New York bureau chief of The Washington Times and is a contributor for FOX News Channel.

The author of Fighting for Air: In the Trenches with Television News, Trotta was the first woman to cover a war for broadcast news.

She began her career in journalism in 1965 working for the NBC affiliate in New York and won network recognition by taking on tough assignments including covering the Vietnam War and 1984 presidential candidate, George McGovern.

Trotta has worked for Hillman Periodicals; Inter-Catholic Press Agency; Long Island Press; Chicago Tribune; Newsday; NBC and CBS. She has taught Journalism at Stern College of Yeshiva University.

The winner of three Emmy awards and two Overseas Press Club awards, Trotta is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Here’s Liz Trotta on FOX News this morning.

For those of you that can’t play YouTubes, here is what she said:

“and now we have what … uh…some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama …uh..um..Obama [after being prompted by the FNC anchor]….well both if we could [laughing]”

I consider this to actually be a crime. Seriously. Going on television and advocating that ‘we’ kill Barack Obama if we can is a crime. Isn’t it? Any lawyers want to weigh in on this one?

This was my comment answer to Steven D’s post.  The quotes are from HRC’s speech.

I am running because I still believe I can win…. I believe I can provide that leadership.

Almost all of the people have spoken, and the majority of them do not agree with you.  To be fair, it’s only a slight majority.  To be fairer, you started off as the presumptive nominee and then after Iowa, people started rallying around Obama.  Of course you believe you can provide presidential leadership, or you wouldn’t be running.  But to believe you can win?  Now?  How?  You are clearly out of touch with reality.

If Sen. Obama wins the nomination, I will support him and work my heart out for him against John McCain.

 What a refreshing change from the months of free campaigning you did FOR McCain against Obama.

I am running because I believe staying in this race will help unite the Democratic Party.

I might believe you if you hadn’t so successfully turned your strategy into a matter of Black & White, Man & Woman.  If you cared about uniting, you would have done as Edwards did and spoke out preemptively against racism (and sexism!), saying that if someone is only voting for you because you are white or you are a woman, you don’t want their vote.

I believe that if Sen. Obama and I both make our case – and all Democrats have the chance to make their voices heard – in the end, everyone will be more likely to rally around the nominee.

I’ll cede this one to you – but you know damn well the only reason it would be controversial if the party shouted you off the stage now is because you’ve made it a goddamned civil rights issue, when in fact it is your self-absorbed political motivations keeping you in so long.

I am running because my parents did not raise me to be a quitter…. As the first female candidate in this position, I believe I have a responsibility to finish this race.

God forbid one accept a loss gracefully.  You are setting a horrible example for young women – the kind of macho toughness that some women think they have to adopt in order to beat men at their own game.  I’d give you my copy of the Tao te ching if I thought you’d read it: “the softest thing overcomes the hardest thing”.  Obama had been gentle, and you’ve mocked him as weak.

I am running for all the men and women I meet who wake up every day and work hard to make a difference for their families.

Yes… because Obama is only helping the wealthy and welfare moms?  Huh?

I believe I won a 40-point victory two weeks ago in West Virginia and a 35-point victory in Kentucky this past week because I’m standing up for them.

With NAFTA?  With pandering?  With smear campaigns?

Finally, I am running because I believe I’m the strongest candidate to stand toe-to-toe with Sen. McCain.

Sadly, the popular vote and the delegate vote do not support your belief. You also fail to take into account the large percentages of Obama supporters who are independents and first-time voters and Obamacans and who will not turn out for you.

Good lord.  All this is doing is casting further doubt on Obama.  A few months ago, I was excited by HRCs campaign – even though I’ve been anti-DLC & Clintons for years, I was just thrilled that in my lifetime a woman might be president.  But now any comraderie I felt with Hillary Clinton is replaced with embarrassment.  I want a leader who can say “I’m sorry” or “I messed up”.  The blustering bullshit of “I did not have sex with…” was never as bad as WMD, of course… but I’m ready for a politician who is also able to be human, speak frankly, and admit mistakes.  It takes real strength to be vulnerable, and as an independent-minded woman, I know I’ve often confused strength with toughness….  It takes the most strength to be soft.

In her own words without comment from me:

And today, I would like to more fully answer the question I was asked: Why do I continue to run, even in the face of calls from pundits and politicians for me to leave this race?

I am running because I still believe I can win on the merits. Because, with our economy in crisis, our nation at war, the stakes have never been higher – and the need for real leadership has never been greater – and I believe I can provide that leadership.

I am not unaware of the challenges or the odds of my securing the nomination – but this race remains extraordinarily close, and hundreds of thousands of people in upcoming primaries are still waiting to vote. As I have said so many times over the course of this primary, if Sen. Obama wins the nomination, I will support him and work my heart out for him against John McCain. But that has not happened yet.

I am running because I believe staying in this race will help unite the Democratic Party. I believe that if Sen. Obama and I both make our case – and all Democrats have the chance to make their voices heard – in the end, everyone will be more likely to rally around the nominee.

I am running because my parents did not raise me to be a quitter – and too many people still come up to me at my events, grip my arm and urge me not to walk away before this contest is over. More than 17 million Americans have voted for me in this race – the most in presidential primary history.

I am running for all those women in their 90s who’ve told me they were born before women could vote, and they want to live to see a woman in the White House. For all the women who are energized for the first time, and voting for the first time. For the little girls – and little boys – whose parents lift them onto their shoulders at our rallies, and whisper in their ears, “See, you can be anything you want to be.” As the first female candidate in this position, I believe I have a responsibility to finish this race.

I am running for all the men and women I meet who wake up every day and work hard to make a difference for their families. People who deserve a shot at the American Dream – the chance to save for college, a home and retirement; to afford quality health care for their families; to fill the gas tank and buy the groceries with a little left over each month.

I believe I won a 40-point victory two weeks ago in West Virginia and a 35-point victory in Kentucky this past week – despite voters being repeatedly told this race is over – because I’m standing up for them. I’m standing up for the deepest principles of our party and for an America that values the middle class and rewards hard work.

Finally, I am running because I believe I’m the strongest candidate to stand toe-to-toe with Sen. McCain. Delegate math might be complicated – but electoral math is not. Our campaign is winning the popular vote – and we’ve been winning the swing states we need to get 270 electoral votes and take back the White House: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arkansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Michigan, Florida and West Virginia.

What say you?

As Scooby-Doo would say, “Ruh-roh.”

All the best stuff at Booman Tribune is not found on the front page (as we call it). Indeed, quite a lot (some might even say most) of the best writing posted here can be discovered among the many fabulous diaries written and posted by our members. For those who might have missed them here are a few I think you ought to read and drop a comment on, if you would:

Ilona meet Ilana, Ilana meet Ilona – Combat PTSD Research by Jim Staro

The Other Kind Of Congressional Oversight by dansp

Obama wants Bill Clinton to help heal Hillary’s wounds? by idredit

Stepping Through the Door by Boston Joe

And those are just a few of the thoughtful, well written and informative diaries posted here. For new readers and those who come here primarily to check out the latest from BooMan, I urge you to broaden your use of the site to include all of our writers. Just go to the right hand margin of this web page and look for the sections titled Recommended Diaries and Recent Diaries.

Thank you, and good reading.

As soon as I saw the name of Maureen Dowd’s column today, I howled in agreement. Oh, YES. It’s titled “All About Eve.” I didn’t even need to read further to understand what she was saying.

The story is essentially this: an ambitious actress cozies up to a fading star with the ultimate goal of replacing her. She makes friends quickly but stabs them all in the back, using their wounded bodies as rungs on the ladder to her personal success.

Wow. Is that an apt description of how I view Hillary Clinton. I read the column, and it did not disappoint.
Maureen gets it:

on the Democratic side, it is, as The Times’s Obama reporter Jeff Zeleny has written, a “hushed worry.” Barack Obama has fused two of the most powerful narratives in American history — those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Camelot — and that makes him both magical and vulnerable.

He was only 6 years old in the spring of 1968, when Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. But the unspoken fear that he is in some danger as their spiritual heir hovers over his race. He got a Secret Service cordon last May, the earliest a candidate has ever been given it.

Remember the uproar in Texas when we found the police were not screening the crowd? Normally we wouldn’t even concern ourselves with such things. But he is vulnerable, and we know this. I believe it’s not because he’s black, or liberal. I believe it’s because he truly wants to end the Iraq war. I believe strongly that’s one of the key reasons Martin Luther King and both Kennedys were killed. They opposed the empire builders, as does Obama.

On many levels, I feel Obama is a much more tepid version of those great heroes. But some part of him aspires to walk in his shoes, and for that, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. He at least knows enough TO aspire to that tradition.

Maureen also sums up what I feel is the best thing to come from Hillary’s awful comment:

Obama now has the perfect excuse not to pick Hillary as his running mate. She has been too unseemly in her desire to be on the scene if he trips, or gets hit with a devastating story.

In the movie All About Eve, Eve eventually gets her comeuppance. Hillary is finally getting hers, given the media coverage of her comment all over the channels today.

It’s embarrassing to me that Sean Wilentz teaches at Princeton University. It puts a stain on the entire town. Wilentz has spent this entire primary defending the Clintons against accusations that they have deliberately racialized the campaign. Now he comes out and argues that Obama does not appeal to white working class voters. Dishonest throughout, Wilentz makes no connection between the Clintons’ tactics and rhetoric and results like this:

Pike County, Kentucky

Hillary Clinton 12,915 91%
Barack Obama 936 7%
Undecided 196 1%

Rather than look at the results out of Appalachia for what they are, Wilentz launches an unmerciful attack at the new New Left:

Having attempted, with the aid of a complicit news media, to brand Hillary Clinton as a racist — by flinging charges that, as the historian Michael Lind has shown, belong “in black helicopter/grassy knoll territory,” Obama’s supporters now fiercely claim that Clinton’s white working class following is also essentially racist. Favoring the buzzword language of the academic left, tinged by persistent, discredited New Left and black nationalist theories about working-class “white skin privilege,” a vote against Obama has become, according to his fervent followers, “a vote for whiteness.”

Sen. Jim Webb, who is somewhat of a historian/anthropologist/member of the Appalachian culture, doesn’t like to hear people attribute the primary results to racism. His explanation is more nuanced:

“This isn’t Selma, 1965. This is a result of how affirmative action, which was basically a justifiable concept when it applied to African Americans, expanded to every single ethnic group in America that was not white, and these were the people who had not received benefits and were not getting anything out of it. And they’re basically saying let’s pay attention to what has happened to this cultural group in terms of opportunities.”

I like how Sen. Webb is responding to this issue from a political point of view, but he’s parsing beyond what the facts will allow. Pike County, Kentucky voted against Obama because he is black. It’s that simple. If you want to know why they don’t trust black people, that’s an interesting question and Webb’s answer is as good as any I’ve seen. But racism is what explains the results. Others can dissect the causes of racism. And Clinton fed right into this racism by telling the voters of Pike County that she was their candidate and the other guy was a big-city elitist with weird religious ideas.

Despite the fact that exit polls showed the 18% of white voters thought race was important and that 88% of them (state-wide) voted for Clinton, Wilentz says there is no evidence of racism.

In fact, all of the evidence demonstrates that white racism has not been a principal or even secondary motivation in any of this year’s Democratic primaries. Every poll shows that economics, health care, and national security are the leading issues for white working class voters – and for Latino working class voters as well. These constituencies have cast positive ballots for Hillary Clinton not because she is white, but because they regard her as better on these issues.

Really? Ninety-one to seven percent better?

Selectively ignoring exit polls and county results is no way to further an academic career. But Wilentz’s worst error is his analysis of what it takes to win the Electoral College. He goes into great detail to explain to us how important it has been historically to win certain states. None of that matters. All that matters is who gets more Electoral College votes. No one cares which states are in which column, we only care about who has 270 or more votes.

If Obama wins all Kerry states (and he currently leads in the polls in all Kerry states except New Hampshire) then simply winning Iowa, New Mexico, and Nevada gives us a 269-269 tie, which Nancy Pelosi’s House of Representatives will decide in Obama’s favor. Never mind that Obama is currently polling ahead in Indiana and Virginia, and that Clinton is losing to McCain in Wisconsin and Michigan. Wilentz isn’t concerned with facts. For him, winning an election that doesn’t include Kentucky and West Virginia is a betrayal of the Democratic Party’s heritage.

Out with the Democratic Party of Jefferson, Jackson, F.D.R., Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, and in with the bright, shiny party of Obama – or what the formally “undeclared” Donna Brazile, a member of the Democratic National Committee and of the party’s rules committee, has hailed as a “new Democratic coalition” swelled by affluent white leftists and liberals, college students, and African-Americans.

The Democratic Party, as a modern political party, dates back to 1828, when Andrew Jackson crushed John Quincy Adams to win the presidency. Yet without the votes of workers and small farmers in Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as a strong Democratic turnout in New York City, Jackson would have lost the Electoral College in a landslide. Over the 180 years since then, only one Democrat has gained the presidency without winning either Ohio or Pennsylvania, with their large white working-class vote.

According to Pollster.com’s polling average, Obama is currently ahead in Pennsylvania by 5 points and SurveyUSA has him with a 48%-39% lead in Ohio. It’s odd for Wilentz to make the argument that Obama won’t win in states where he is currently polling ahead. But what’s really dishonest, at least in the case of Ohio, is that Obama needs to win these states. He’d like to win them, but he doesn’t need to win them. He has consistently polled well ahead in Colorado and he has leads in Iowa, Indiana and Virginia. Winning those states while holding Kerry’s states would provide a 292-246 Electoral College victory. Do you think the white working class people of Iowa and Indiana would wring their hands that the Democratic Party won without Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia? I don’t.

Given that Obama’s vote in the primaries, apart from African-Americans, has generally come from affluent white suburbs and university towns, the Gallup figures presage a Democratic disaster among working-class white voters in November should Obama be the nominee.

I didn’t know that Maine, Iowa, Oregon, and Colorado had that many college towns and African-Americans. Once again, Wilentz ignores the regional factor in racial resistance to Barack Obama. It’s as if the only white working class people in the country come from Appalachia. Given that Obama currently has a lead in Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Indiana it’s kind of hard for me to see this looming disaster in November. I’m more concerned with why Clinton is doing so badly in Iowa, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Gore won Iowa and Bill Clinton won all of these states. Why is Clinton trailing there?

Culturally as well as politically, Obama’s dismissal of white working people represents a sea-change in the Democrats’ basic identity as the workingman’s party – one that has been coming since the late 1960s, when large portions of the Left began regarding white workers as hopeless and hateful reactionaries. Faced with the revolt of the “Reagan Democrats” – whose politics they interpreted in the narrowest of racial terms – “new politics” Democrats dreamed of a coalition built around an alliance of right-thinking affluent liberals and downtrodden minorities, especially African-Americans. It all came to nothing.

Obama isn’t dismissing white working people at all. But what do you expect him to do? Go to Pike County, Kentucky to fish for votes? Even in a closed Democratic primary he only won 936 votes there. Those people aren’t reacting to his message or lack of message. Their not looking one inch beyond the surface of his skin. And don’t be surprised if he shows up there anyway to explain that he will work hard for their economic opportunity while McCain will only pander to their guns and God and feelings about abortion. It’s not as if Obama is scared of those people. But this is an election and elections involve strategy. You don’t spend your efforts in places that aren’t going to give you more than 10% of the vote even after you’ve secured the most delegates in the race.

Sean Wilentz is a dishonest wanking hack.