Month: July 2008

Such A Mean Old Man

by digby

In true Nixonian fashion, McCain ramps up the politics of resentment:

In his weekly radio address, McCain said, “this week the presidential contest was a long-distance affair, with my opponent touring various continents and arriving yesterday in Paris. With all the breathless coverage from abroad, and with Senator Obama now addressing his speeches to ‘the people of the world,’ I’m starting to feel a little left out. Maybe you are too.”

This is classic Orthogonian rhetoric (those of you who’ve read Nixonland will know what that means.) And it works on many levels. First, he’s tweaking the “breathless” press, who are responding predictably, judging from the headlines I’m seeing this morning: Obama Disputes He’s on a ‘Premature Victory Lap’.

Second he’s saying that Obama is more interested in “others” than he is Real Americans. Typical elite. Uppity at that. It’s hard to know if this approach will work, but it makesa certain amount of sense for Republicans. People are in a sour mood. They want to blame somebody. Why not a young, black guy? Not much a stretch for a lot of these folks.

The good news is that Obama has probably done all he can to show that he looks presidential — an extremely important thing to the Village media — and can now come back and enlarge the agenda. Iraq and Afghanistan are important, but I don’t think this election will be fought on foreign policy turf — at least I hope not. I suspect that is where Obama’s heart really lies, and I’m not arguing that it shouldn’t. But my sense is that people are really concerned about domestic issues (some of which do relate to foreign policy, like energy.) Democrats have a lot more to offer — and speak the right language of economic angst — and should be able to control the agenda at a time like this. Foreign policy and national security must be dealt with, but this is one time when the domestic agenda should be front and center and Obama should be able to capitalize on that.

I’m glad the trip produced some good stories and memorable images. But I’m also glad it’s over. Obama needs to shift this election on to domestic ground. The Republicans have got nothing to offer but tax cuts for rich people and I don’t think that’s going to cut it this time. There’s no reason to be playing on John McCain’s field.

Even if he is muddled and confused and highly overrated, people still seem to think he knows something about national security. But I don’t think anyone thinks he has a clue about domestic issues. He can only rely on the old fashioned conservative politics of resentment and that doesn’t play to his strength as a maverick “man of honor.” It just makes him look like a mean old man and that’s not a winning image, even for Republicans, who are all mean old men at heart.

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Talk About Presumptuous

by digby

From Dave Niewert at FDL

Style Sheet

by digby

Via Nathanrudy at DKos, I see that the NY Times has done another story on female bloggers — and published it in the appropriate place — the Style section. Because if there’s one thing bloggers are all about it’s style.

(May I describe my “style” as I type this? I’m wearing a black t-shirt, black pants with very chic black rubber thongs. I’m drinking a tall non-fat latte out of a short paper cup. My Ikea desk gleams cheaply in the sunlight as my long haired cat abruptly jumps into my lap, rubs his fluffy white fur all over my chic black outfit, knocks my coffee onto the keyboard and then bounds away, startled and hissing, for no good reason. Are you fascinated? I thought not.)

Here are the opening paragraphs:

FOR two days last week, many of the men’s bathrooms at the Westin St. Francis Hotel here were turned into women’s bathrooms. The stalls on the second floor were lined with note cards featuring nurturing messages like “You are perfect.” Nearby, women were being dusted with blush and eye shadow, or having the kinks in their necks massaged.There was a lactation room, child care, and onesies for sale emblazoned with the words “my mom is blogging this.” No doubt they were. Last weekend, about a thousand bloggers, almost all without the Y chromosome, attended the annual BlogHer conference, which began in 2005 to help female bloggers gain exposure. It has since evolved into a corporate-sponsored Oprah-inflected version of a ’60s consciousness-raising group. Blogging has come a long way from its modest beginnings. These days, there is money to be made, fame to be earned and influence to be gained. And though women and men are creating blogs in roughly equal numbers, many women at the conference were becoming very Katie Couric about their belief that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts at, say, Daily Kos, a political blog site. Nor, they said, were they making much money, even though corporations seem to be making money from them.

“Becoming very Katie Couric.” That’s cute.

I don’t know what to say except that there are obviously a bunch of successful women online (aside from Arianna) who aren’t acknowledged — but not enough of them. Hardly anybody’s making money, male or female. But what else is new? This story doesn’t delve deeply into any stories about those women who attended the convention who are successful, what kinds of blogs make money, how they do it, why some work and some don’t. Instead it took a snide tone about female bloggers as if they are some bizarre, trivial subculture of lactating zombies who bitch and moan all the time. It’s a tiresome old tale that’s been told several times a year for the past five years. I’m not sure this writer even attended the thing it’s so filled with cliches.

In any case, unless it’s about fashion or interior design or maybe food, a story about a female gathering of bloggers should not be in the Style Section any more than a story about Netroots Nation should be. There are many different communities online, some overlap and some don’t, but women are in all of them and “style” is only one topic they write about. It’s a piece that should have been written as a straight news story or not at all. Stories about “women” — half the population — don’t automatically belong in the Style section any more than stories about “men” automatically belong in the Sports section.

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Virtual Gothic

by digby

I’ve been wondering when this would turn up. Here’s the “Obama Death List” (Not to be confused with the Clinton Body Count.)

It’s easy to dismiss this stuff, but considering that a rather large number of Americans believe that Obama is a muslim because some bozo sent out an email, it’s a mistake to think it doesn’t matter.

These are themes that fuel the sick, dark underbelly of the American right wing. They don’t mean all that much in and of themselves, but they do add to the overall themes of “otherness” that are used against Democrats. As Dave Niewert has amply documented, this is how they mainstream their gothic toxins into the body politic. It’s par for the course, but disturbing, as always.

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“I Thought You Were Gonna Ask About The Pig”

by digby

As we watch the Presumptuous Uppity One cavort around Europe like he’s something special, maybe we should take a moment and remind ourselves what a real president looks like:

H/T to Dover Bitch

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Nice Trick

by dday

I guess conservative bloggers are pitching a fit because Obama didn’t pay his respects to the troops at Landstuhl AFB in Germany. That might be because the Pentagon nixed it.

I’ve just gotten clarification from the Pentagon on what really happened with regard to Barack Obama’s canceled visit to an Army base in Germany, something the McCain campaign has been using to hit Obama since yesterday.

A Pentagon spokesperson confirms to me that because of longstanding Department of Defense regulations, Pentagon officials told Obama aides that he couldn’t visit the base with campaign staff. This left Obama with little choice but to cancel the trip, since the plan to visit with campaign aides had been in the works for weeks […]

It’s unclear how Obama could have made the visit at all, given the Pentagon’s directives. No Senate staff was on the trip, and the Obama camp says they received the Pentagon’s directives on Wednesday, after they were already abroad.

Bottom line: We’re not seeing any issue here at all.

This of course, won’t stop anyone, including McCain, from making it an issue.

It is a nice trick by the supposedly apolitical Pentagon, however. Allow Obama to plan a trip to the Air Force base, then lay down the rules at a time when Obama has no choice but to cancel it, and then watch the political fur fly.

Good work.

This Daily Kos diarist has a lot more (apparently McCain visiting troops at US Naval bases with campaign staff wasn’t a problem). And then there’s this:

Utah Army National Guard Intelligence Officer (i.e.,. spy) reportedly authors chain email defaming Obama

The new chain email claims, incorrectly, that Obama blew off the troops waiting to shake his hand at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan so he could shoot hoops instead (was the alleged Intell Officer trying to imply a racist smear against Obama as well? You know those black guys and their basketballs…). In any case, the Army came out and denied the veracity of the email – Obama didn’t shoot hoops, and he did greet the troops – but screw that, where is the denial from the Intell guy? I want to see him declaring that he didn’t write the email and that it’s factually untrue. If our spy didn’t offer the anti-Obama smear, then wouldn’t you think the military would have mentioned that right at the beginning of their denial?

Just as importantly, if the author of this phony smear is an Army intelligence officer – read: a US spy – then there is some serious potential illegality with him using his professional disinformation spycraft in an attempt to influence an American election. Remember, it was just yesterday that State Department employees in Berlin were told not to dare show up at Obama’s speech, lest they appear to be weighing in on our elections. So how do you think a US spy using his spy talents to influence our elections falls under the rules?

You take each one of these by itself, maybe it’s nothing. But they’re starting to add up. Funny how all of these “nonpartisan” military brass seem to be weighing in on the election on precisely the same side, isn’t it?

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Christmas Warmonger

by digby

Oh Lordy:

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) tells People magazine in the issue out Friday that he and his wife, Michelle, do not give Christmas or birthday presents to their two young daughters.

Obama tells the magazine’s Sandra Sobieraj Westfall in a seven-page cover story that he and his wife follow the unusual practice because they “want to teach some limits.”

In the interview earlier this summer, Obama noted that they do spend “hundreds” of dollars on birthday slumber parties. Michelle Obama told People: “Malia says, ‘I know there is a Santa because there’s no way you’d buy me all that stuff.’ ”

I’m not sure I get this. Judging from what Malia says there, they get presents from “Santa” but not from Mom and Dad. Or maybe not. But who cares? Those girls are obviously completely normal little American kids and the only “unusual” thing about their lives is the fact that their father is a very important guy. (And good for them if Barack and Michelle don’t promote the rampant materialism that infects American culture.)

But you know the right’s collective head is going to swirl around like Linda Blair’s after guzzling a 16 oz can of Andersen’s Split pea soup. John Gibson will be speaking in tongues. Bill O’Reilly will be flagellating himself with a cat ‘o nine tails. This proves they are not only Muslims, you see, but they have a particular hate-on for Christmas. OMG.

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Hide The Rabbit

by digby

Following up on DDay’s post below about the press corps’ pique that they aren’t getting enough access, I can’t help but be reminded that we all know exactly what the press wants from a candidate. They’ve told us. Here’s Somerby on Margaret Carlson’s book about the 2000 campaign:

CARLSON (page 101): The campaign, or specifically the campaign plane, is the last time the press gets to see the man who would be president more closely than an attentive viewer of C-SPAN. Bush didn’t like campaigning, so he treated the time on the press like recess, a chance to kick back between math and chemistry classes. He was seductive, playful, and most of all, himself. It’s a failure of some in the press—well, a failure for me—that we are susceptible to a politician directing the high beams of his charm at us. That Al Gore couldn’t catch a break had something to do with how he was when his hair was down. Only it never was.

Needless to say, that was because Gore was (next paragraph) “intent on proving he was the smartest kid on the planet.” But your press corps never seems to tire of making these odd confessions. Routinely, they report that they judge your pols, and tilt their coverage, based on trivial matters of personality and personal preference. Carlson goes on, at considerable length, about how Bush “bond[ed] with the goof-off in all of us” on that plane. Persistently, she portrays the press corps—and herself—as if they were feckless teen-agers. On the plane, “[Bush’s] inner child hovers near the surface,” she writes. And not only that; “Bush knows how to push the buttons of your high school insecurity.” But then, “a campaign is as close as an adult can get to duplicating college life.” Bush “wasn’t just any old breezy frat brother with mediocre grades…He was proud of it,” Carlson writes, approvingly. This seems to explain the press corps’ preference. “Gore elicited in us the childish urge to poke a stick in the eye of the smarty-pants,” she writes. “Bush elicited self-recognition.” Yes, those sentences actually appear in this book, and yes, they seem to be Carlson’s explanation of Gore’s lousy coverage. “It’s not hard to dislike Bush’s policies, which favor the strong over the weak,” she writes. “But it is hard to dislike Bush.” Carlson spends little time on those Bush policies, “which favor the strong over the weak.” By contrast—as noted in Thursday’s HOWLER—she spends lots of time complaining that the Clintons would subject her to tedious policy chatter. It is perfectly clear that “the goof-off in Carlson” has little interest in such major tedium. In India, she falls asleep when Mrs. Clinton limns health care, and she can’t understand why Candidate Bill Clinton, in 1992, would talk to her about welfare reform. Talking to Bush is much more fun. “As he propped his rolled-up sleeves on the seat back in front of me, his body leaning into the conversation, he waggled his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx, mugging across the aisle,” she relates. You’ll probably think that we’re being unfair. Read this book and you’ll see that we aren’t. No, Carlson spends little time on Bush’s policies, though it’s clear who she thinks they favor. For example, she briefly mentions Bush’s legislative approach after the 2002 elections. “After his big win in the midterm elections in 2002,” she writes, “Bush lurched further in the direction of protecting those who have against those who don’t.” But she spends much more time discussing the way Bush provided better food on his plane. Mmmm! “There were Dove bars and designer water on demand,” she recalls, “and a bathroom stocked like Martha Stewart’s guest suite. Dinner at seven featured lobster ravioli.” Apparently, Bush’s policies reflect the tastes of “those that have” even when dinner bells chime.

Get with the program Obama campaign. Feed them Dove bars and treat them like six year olds. Or you could do this:

FOER (2/14/00): This is the stuff journalists are not supposed to see—a strategy session on abortion, the mocking of opposing campaign staffs, the candidate stuffing Krispy Kremes into his mouth. But it’s happening in plain sight, on John McCain’s bus—the Straight Talk Express—as it barrels across the bogs of South Carolina. With reporters sitting cross-legged at his feet, the candidate returns a call from [RNC chairman] Jim Nicholson.

Oooh, baby.

Whatever you do, don’t treat the press like professional journalists. They want to be bought off with lobster and the illusion of being “on the inside” with both insulting nicknames and tales of hot broads in Rio. They can’t stand being ignored. (I’d keep the pet rabbit safely indoors if I were the Obamas. These people have issues.)

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Codpiece Delusion

by digby

Like so many of you, I have long thought that electing McCain is a third Bush term. His differences in policy really are minimal and his temperament is equally arrogant and angry. What I didn’t realize until recently is that he’s equally delusional. That’s the Bush trifecta.

Remember this mantra?

1998:

“I know how to lead. I have been telling my fellow-Texans that I have a vision for a better tomorrow for our state. You can’t lead unless you know where you want to lead. I’m a uniter, not a divider,

2004:

“I’ve shown the American people I know how to lead,” said Bush.

Here’s McCain in 2008:

“What makes you more qualified than Mitt Romney, a successful CEO and businessman, to manage our economy?” Senator McCain offered a simple answer: “Because I know how to lead.”

Then: remember this from Bush?

“I’ve been to war. I’ve raised twins. If I had a choice, I’d rather go to war.'”

Check this out, from McCain, 2008:

I know how to win wars. I know how to win them.

Todd Gitlin asks:

How does he know? Which war did he win? Vietnam? Personal courage didn’t win it. Nothing did.

So McCain has gone from a heroic prisoner of war who survived to tell the tale to someone who “knows how to win wars.” But then, why not? Bush was hailed as the second coming of Winston Churchill because he made a speech that included the word “axis” in it, so why not?

McCain is getting crispy. He attacked Obama in a really ugly way by saying that he’s willing to “lose a war to win an election” and now he’s telling everyone he knows how to win them. This is delusional. Codpiece delusional. McCain has never “won” a war.

This is what Wes Clark was talking about and why they staged a full-on fainting party. McCain is running as a military leader — but he isn’t one. He’s a politician who was in a war as a young man and was captured by the enemy. It was heroic service, but it wasn’t leadership. And yet the myth of military leadership is the foundation of his claim to the presidency.

Bush sold himself as a sort of McCain type — a cocky, individualistic, maverick flyboy ( just like in Top Gun only without all the oiled abs —or maybe there were….) Bush, of course, was a total phony, down to his Chuck Yeager accent, while McCain was closer to the real thing 40 years ago. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or fake. This type of personality can be brave but they aren’t leaders. In fact, they are temperamentally completely unsuited to be leaders. The fact that both of these men feel the need to baldly that they “know how to lead” should be a tip-off. That’s something people can sense and see and it doesn’t need to be articulated.

McCain is just like George W. Bush, only old.

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The Frowning Sourpusses On The Bus

by dday

Digby writes about the press turning back on Obama out of sensitivity to the “liberal media” label. And that’s true. So is the fact that they are small-c conservative, lazy, and easily led. But there’s another factor. They’re whiny little babies who aren’t getting the access they demand by divine right, and sometimes the Obama campaign dares to question them.

But, the next morning, Nagourney awoke to an e-mail from Talking Points Memo writer Greg Sargent asking him to comment on an eight-point rebuttal trashing his piece that the Obama campaign had released to reporters and bloggers like The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder and Politico’s Ben Smith. Nagourney had not heard the complaints from the Obama camp and had no idea they were so steamed. “I’m looking at this thing, and I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’ ” Nagourney recently recalled. “I really flipped out.”

Later that afternoon, Nagourney got permission from Times editors to e-mail Sargent a response to the Obama memo. But the episode still grates. “I’ve never had an experience like this, with this campaign or others,” Nagourney tells me. “I thought they crossed the line. If you have a problem with a story I write, call me first. I’m a big boy. I can handle it. But they never called. They attacked me like I’m a political opponent.”

You know, the remedy to that is to not build an entire article out of completely misreading poll data.

But there’s more. Seems that the Obama camapign, in addition to mildly standing up for its candidate, doesn’t dole out the barbecue with the same vigor as the presumptive Republican nominee.

Last year, when Hillary Clinton campaigned as a front-runner, Obama provided access to the press corps and won over the media […] But, as Obama ascended from underdog to front-runner to presumptive nominee, the flame seems to have dwindled. Reporters who cover Obama these days grouse that Obama’s flacks shroud the campaign in secrecy and provide little to no access. “They’re more disciplined than the Bush people,” a reporter on the Obama trail gripes. “There was this idea of being transparent, but they’re not. They’re total tightwads with information.”

In June, there was something of a revolt after Obama ditched the press corps on his campaign plane for a secret meeting with Clinton at Senator Dianne Feinstein’s house in Washington, leaving the reporters trapped on the flight to Chicago. The D.C. bureau chiefs of half a dozen news organizations, including the late Tim Russert, sent an angry letter to Obama aides Robert Gibbs and David Plouffe and threatened not to reimburse the campaign for the cost of the flight. “The decision to mislead reporters is a troubling one,” they wrote. “We hope this does not presage a relationship with the Obama campaign that is not based on a mutual respect for the truth.” After the incident, the press corps decided that one pool reporter would keep Obama in sight at all times. “It’s a body watch,” one reporter jokes.

It just goes on like that. The sense of entitlement is really incredible. Obama isn’t a certified Village member in good standing as it is, so these indignities like keeping a private meeting private and holding a 10-minute interview to 10 minutes (yes, that’s really a compliant) are magnified. The idea that the press considers the Obama campaign operation “young and arrogant” both really betrays their bias and displays a stunning lack of self-awareness.

After all, the press has lived through eight years of a notoriously tight-lipped and secretive White House, whose President would regularly demean them in public and call them major league assholes behind their back, and they lapped it all up, believing Bush to be a popular and mythic hero long after the public had turned away.

But of course, he was a Republican, and all that humiliation was just locker-room joshing. The Democrat is supposed to be afraid of the press, because they can take him or her down over an afternoon tea, and the fact that this guy isn’t totally letting the media run roughshod over him must be deeply frustrating. It does not compute. And he’s limiting access and maximizing his campaign time! How dare he!

Aside from all the laziness and hewing to narrative and all the rest, the press corps are, in general, exceedingly vain. When the Village makes the decision that they are offended (and somehow they didn’t through eight years of a President who held them in the utmost contempt), they will lash out. And so expect this over the next several weeks.

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