The News of the Last Few Days

Various and sundry things have happened since my last blog, so I’ll go over each one in order of most recent news.

1. Obama declines public financing.  I think we all saw this coming.  Yes, the talking heads on cable news will have a field day for the next news cycle, but the average American could care less.  And, honestly, if we look at the questionnaire Obama filled out, he said he would make every effort to use public financing for his campaign.  His counsel has already come out and said they tried to come to some accord with the McCain camp, but were unable to.

The reality fo the situation is that I can’t imagine the Obama campaign using public financing even if McCain had said “sure, we’ll do what ever you want.”  Because Obama’s ability to raise a boatload of money in small amount from millions of people is revolutionary, and it is perhaps his biggest advantage.  He can challenge McCain in any state in America now, regardless of whether he actually has a chance of winning or not.  Basically, he can spend and spend and spend and force McCain to try to keep up.  It would be much like Pennsylvania was in the primary; Clinton won, but it cost her most of her money.

While this might be a PR bump for Obama, it’s not going to be a real problem or, more to the point, it will be more of an positive than a negative in the long run.

2. Michelle Obama begins her goodwill tour.  If anyone in Washington is still scoring above 50% in opinion polls, it’s probably Laura Bush.  So it’s pretty fantastic that the current First Lady came out in defense of the possible future First Lady, saying that she knew what Michelle Obama meant when she said this was the first time she’s every been proud of her country and that sometimes you misspeak in public.

Michelle Obama has taken full advantage of Laura Bush’s comments, bringing them up on The View the other day.  She also took the chance to address the fist bump issue (and the fact that it’s an issue is unreal).  She also hammered home the point that she is not some Ivy League snob, but a woman from a lower middle class home who struggled to get by, made something of herself, and is now focused on raising her children.  There are clips from the show all over the internet and I recommend checking them out.  She really did a great job.

One note on that, however.  I read an article somewhere online pointing out something  had mentioned to my wife to be after Michelle’s appearance on the Colbert Report: Michelle seems to be far funnier than she’s allowed to be.  You can almost get a sense that she’s holding back a bit out of a sense of decorum, but that in an informal setting she probably has a razor sharp wit.  It will be interesting to see what kind of a First Lady she would be, particularly if we ever get to see that wit come out.

3. Black people are everywhere!  A couple of recent polls have suggested that sample polling is off because it doesn’t accurately reflect the number of African-Americans living in any given state, particularly in the South.  The main issue is that, up until now, it was an irrelevant point because a large majority of those African-Americans didn’t vote.  Guess what?  They’re voting now.

Which, as I’ve trumpeted over and over again, is the real genius behind Barack Obama.  Be they black, white, rich, poor, old, or young, Obama is getting people who have never voted to come out in droves.  There is nothing more revolutionary than that.  Imagine, an election where the results are actually determined by a majority of Americans!  It’s mindboggling.

A side note: I was shocked when I heard Tim Russert had died.  Nicole (my fiance) and I watch a lot of MSNBC (because we’re Obama backers and they are, without a doubt, biased towards Obama, just as Fox is biased towards any Republican and CNN was fairly clearly biased towards Clinton).  So for the past few months we’ve seen a lot of Russert, particularly in his role as elder statesman during primary coverage.

Russert was great.  He wasn’t rabidly liberal like Olbermann.  He wasn’t unconsciously mysoginistic like Matthews.  He wasn’t determinedly vanilla like Williams, nor was he desperately nostalgic like Brokaw.  He was just the perfect political reporter, never overshadowing the facts with his own opinion, yet always willing to step up and make the big prediction.

He was the first commentator to truly announce that Obama had won the nomination, and this was weeks before the final contests.

While I might have my own opinions on the never ending coverage that MSNBC has done (to the point where it’s become almost insincere), I’m truly saddened that I won’t get to see him during the general election coverage.  It’s heart breaking that he won’t get to see that.

Crossing that line.

I have a friend named Matt.  Matt is a big Red Sox fan.  One of the jokes that I like to make with Matt is that I’m unsure why I should know anything about Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester.

See, Jon Lester is a cancer survivor who not only returned to baseball, but won a World Series and, later, threw a no hitter.

But any time you watch a game in which Jon Lester is pitching, the announcers spend a good ten to fifteen minutes talking about the fact that Jon Lester had cancer.

For all of his career, Lester will be defined, first and foremost, by the fact that he survived that disease.  He has won a World Series and he has thrown a no hitter, but it’s all secondary to that illness.

Which, in the end, is actually pretty irrelevant to his baseball abilities.  Sure, it’s amazing that he was able to recover the way he has, but let’s not pretend that a starting pitcher (and once prized prospect) for the Boston Red Sox was receiving the same medical care as Joe Average on the street.

Still, it’s an amazing story and I don’t mean to belittle it.  It’s just that, in the scheme of what he’s trying to do as a baseball player now, it really should be secondary, not forefront.

Kind of like being a POW.

The other day on Politico they had the latest TV ad that the McCain campaign was airing in some battleground state.  And it opened with him talking about the fact that he had been a POW for five and half years.  The ad was about McCain’s plans for the economy.

…

Again, I am in awe of what the man went through as a POW.  I can’t even comprehend that, much like I can’t comprehend having cancer (and hopefully never will).  But the fact that McCain was a POW for over five years has very freaking little to do with his ability to run our country.

I have this conversation in my head:

Reporter: Senator McCain, you said that you’re preparing to unveil a comprehensive economic plan.

McCain: My friend, when I was a POW for five and a half years, I had a lot of time to think about America’s economy and how it would need to grow and change over the coming decades.

Second Reporter: Senator McCain, many believe that, if given the opportunity, you would appoint a judge to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe vs. Wade.

McCain: My friend, when I was a POW for five and a half years, I had a lot of time to think about a woman’s right to choose and how that related to the Bible.

Reporter: Um, I’m sorry Senator, but I thought you spent your time thinking about the economy.

McCain: My friend, clearly you’ve never been a POW.

Waiter: What would you like to drink, Senator McCain?

McCain: My friend, when I was a POW for five and a half years, we rarely got anything to drink.

Waiter: So iced tea, then?

And this will go on and on until he’s elected president.

It should be interesting, in the coming months, to see how many times the GOP uses the words “POW” and “un-America,” the former with regards to their candidate, the latter with regards to Obama.

The transition

I have a blog in me that will more than likely be at least a little bit offensive (and does not involve HIllary Clinton or her supporters), but I’ve decided to put it on hold for today.  I just want to make sure I know exactly what I’m saying before I start ranting, which is not exactly an easy task for me.

Instead, I’d like to talk about Barack Obama taking over the Democratic party.

It’s strange at how little coverage Obama’s first act as official/unofficial top Democrat got.  Just the day after proclaiming his victory in the primaries, he went on record that his campaign does not and will not take money from lobbyists…and that neither will anyone else in the Democratic party.

I have to wonder how that went over on Capitol Hill.

I also have to wonder how that’s progressing and who’s in charge of it.  Maybe that’s why it’s not getting much media coverage, because it was lip service.  It’s not as if we’ve heard about any changes that have occurred because of this new stance.  And I’d be willing to bet there are a lot of grey areas with respect to what money comes from lobbyists and what doesn’t.  But still.

I also thought it was interesting that Obama basically went out of his way to say “yes, Howard Dean is still in charge” of the DNC.  There had been some question as to whether or not this would be the case, and in many ways that has to be seen as Obama’s desire to maintain the “new kind of politics” image that he’s running on.  It’s actually a shame that Dean doesn’t get more coverage, aside from the “will he intervene if Clinton takes the contest to the convention” question.  Howard Dean laid the groundwork for Obama’s winning strategies, yes, but he also changed the framework of the party itself.  And while I’d love to see the Democrats show a bit more spine, maybe they’ve just been waiting to get their ducks in a row before making drastic moves.  I’d like to think that.

Even crazier, there’s word that many of the DNC operations have been moved to Chicago to integrate with the Obama campaign.  Given all the similarities between 2008 and 1968, it’s probably not surprising that the DNC would have to move to Chicago.  I suppose there’s a certain appropriateness to that, although I hope the similarities end there, because the Democrats lost that election (and, really, the winner was Richard Nixon, who is obviously more Bush than McCain, at least as far as we know).  Funny enough, though, the VP candidate that year was Edmund Muskie, a man who would later see his own run at being the nominee fall apart because he…wait for it…cried just before the New Hampshire primary.  Creepy, isn’t it?

All in all, it’s going to be interesting to see how the DNC moves forward from here.  It seems like Obama has the potential to be the kind of Democratic president that Clinton failed to be — one that actually uses his influence to insure that the rest of the party does well, too.

What went wrong?

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about what went wrong with the Clinton campaign.  Jon Stewart was even kind of enough to put together a montage of pre-primary newscasts where everyone — EVERYONE — proclaimed Hillary the nominee.  At one point, polls had her up by as much as 30 points.  So now everyone is asking: what went wrong?

I’m going to preface any further discussion with this: my opinion of Hillary Clinton plummeted during the course of the primaries.  I actually liked her quite a bit when the primaries started, even though I had been on the Obama train for some time before that.  I would have been more than happy had she won the nomination, even though I preferred Obama (and, for the record, I still would have voted for her, because I’m not insane).

But over the five months that made up primary season, my opinion of her dropped.  The sense of entitlement, the aggressive language, the comments that served to attack Obama while simultaneously praising John McCain (and almost unforgivable sin in the world of partisan politics) — it seemed that every day Hillary became less and less…well, likable.  The post-Super Tuesday “kitchen sink” strategy just made things worse.

There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance and at some point it seemed like Hillary crossed that line.  But how?  And why?

For that, I turn to a comment Richard Wolffe mentioned on “Race to the White House” on MSNBC a few days ago.  Say what you want about Richard Wolffe, he pointed out something I had never considered before, yet fully agree with, something everyone seems to be pointing to now that Hillary is out of the race.  I mean, how many times in the last week have you heard someone say “now she can be herself” or “now she can be a woman” or “now she can address the issue she really wants to address?”  But what’s the implication behind those statements?

Wolffe’s comment was that Hillary’s people were so concerned about sexism that they had her be overly aggressive in her campaigning, and they had her do that from the very start.  They expected issues of “strength” and “assertiveness” to be the problems Hillary would face in winning people over.  They figured that overcoming the “woman” issue would be the greatest hurdle they would face.

And I think they were wrong.  I think they actually OVER estimated the influence that would have.  I’m not saying it wasn’t there, but I am suggesting that had Hillary simply been herself, had she not exaggerated her strength as a leader to the point of making her seem cold and calculating, then I think she would have done better, particularly against an opponent like Obama, who was constantly self-deprecating and unflappable.  Instead, we saw a Hillary Clinton who was quick to attack and at times downright hawkish.

What’s interesting about this idea, to me, is that the Obama campaign’s strategy seemed to focus on the fact that Americans were more progressive than most thought, the polar opposite view to the Clinton campaign.  The greatest example of this, perhaps, was his speech in Philadelphia.  Instead of simply letting the issue of race gestate, Obama faced it head on and, in doing so, raised the level of discourse in this country.  But at no point did we see Hillary attempt any similar discussion on gender, because her campaign’s game plan was to ignore the issue by hiding its existence.

Which makes the cries of gender bias against Hillary all the more unfortunate.  Because while those cries are unfortunate (and so have some basis), they were also an opportunity for Hillary to show what kind of a leader she truly was by addressing them.  But her campaign seemed to think so little of the American public as to believe that any such conversation would reflect badly on their candidate.

In the end, I can’t help but think that played a large part in how things turned out.  Obama’s campaign was willing to give the American people the benefit of the doubt, was willing to believe that we were ready for some frank, intelligent discussion on some difficult issues.  The Clinton campaign, however, did not have the same faith in us, and as a result that lack of faith was returned to them.

The bigger question, however, is whether or not the rest of the country is ready, or able, to have those same conversations.

Unity

A week ago I was thinking about posting a blog stating that Obama should pick Hillary as his VP.

Even though adding Hillary (or someone like her) would play contrary to Obama’s anti-establishment theme, I felt that bringing her supporters on board was more important.  It also felt like yet another case of Democrats wussing out; you wouldn’t see Republicans struggling with such an issue.  They would look at the numbers, look at the electoral map, and then make the choice that would win them the White House.

It was time for the Democrats to pull the trigger for once.

But since then I’ve begun to have second thoughts.

Initially, it was a conversation with a friend, an Obama supporter who could be labeled an “Obamacan.”  She was glad Obama won the nomination, of course, and planned on voting for him…but not if Hilary was on the ticket.  She said she’d vote McCain if Hillary was on the ticket.

And what about that?  What about all the “Obamacan” and independents that Obama would lose with Hillary on the ticket?  She ran such a divisive campaign and has such a tumultuous past with certain demographics, Obama would be sure to lose votes.  But what he lose more than he would gain?  Probably not.

The kicker for me came a few days later, after reading and watching a few interviews with the more extreme Hillary supporters out there, those that seem so irrational as to switch parties if their candidate isn’t the Democratic nominee (and it’s completely irrational, given the similarities between Obama and Hillary’s platforms and the polar opposite world that McCain lives in).  The rational Hillary supporters will come on board no matter what (particularly with her endorsement).  So evidently it’s the irrational ones that Obama would be trying to win over by naming her to VP.

But I truly don’t think that would be enough for them.  They don’t want second place.  Naming her VP wouldn’t convince them to vote for a ticket with her on the under card.  And if that’s the case, then what’s the value in bringing her on board?

Let’s ignore her supporters then.  There’s a theory that she plays to certain demographics better than Obama does.  But she’s not alone in this.  There are plenty of qualified candidates out there that would appeal to working class whites.  While I have my own concerns over Jim Webb, he would not only just appeal to that group, but also shore up any military questions about the Obama ticket.  And that’s just the first guy I thought of.  Hillary, as far as demographic appeal is concerned, is not special.

Not only that, but any other alternative choice isn’t going to bring the baggage that Hillary does.  If Hillary were to be named the VP, how many times do you think we’ll see the clip of her claiming that John McCain passed the Commander In Chief threshold, but Obama hasn’t?  It will be on 24/7 on Fox.  The way she ran her campaign could be a liability to the ticket.

So there it is.  I don’t think a VP spot will convince her hold outs to come over.  Her demographic appeal isn’t unique.  And she could be more of a burden than anything else.

Honestly, I think she’d be more valuable stumping for Obama, but not on the ticket.  She needs to get out there and start talking about the issues, particularly those regarding women.  She needs to make them realize that McCain is going to continue a Republican regime that treats women as second class citizens by cutting social programs specifically meant for women.  Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that at least one Supreme Court judge will retire in the next four years…

I don’t know where Hillary goes from here, but I’m not sure it can be anywhere near the Oval Office.

History

It’s just after 3 PM here in Los Angeles.  MSNBC’s coverage of the final two Democratic Primaries has just started.  According to their numbers, Obama is just 14 delegates shy of hitting the magic number of 2118.  Huffington Post actually has him only 12 short.

There are still more superdelegates rolling in.  In fact, some people think he might even reach 2118 before the polls close in Montana.

There’s a decent chance I might cry.