March 24, 2008

3/24: All Over But The Media's Shouting?

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen's Politico piece, in which they declare that "Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning," was received very positively by liberal bloggers. Most of these bloggers share VandeHei and Allen's belief that the media is portraying the Dem race as tighter than it actually is, and many are calling on uncommitted superdelegates to endorse Barack Obama in order to prevent the race from lasting until the convention. Growing numbers of liberal bloggers are expressing concern that the Obama-HRC battle is hurting Obama's chances of defeating John McCain in November. Naturally, Clinton's online supporters are pushing back against the idea that Obama's victory is assured, but they are definitely in the minority in the liberal blogosphere.

Meanwhile, conservative bloggers continue to hammer Obama over his connections to Jeremiah Wright. It seems that the trends that we first noticed two weeks ago -- in which righty bloggers direct their fire at Obama while lefty bloggers direct their fire at Clinton -- are reasserting themselves.

CLINTON: Please, For The Good Of The Party...

VandeHei and Allen's Politico piece prompted a chorus of agreement from liberal bloggers:

• TPM's Josh Marshall: "As Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen argue in this piece in The Politico, the press has been largely complicit in maintaining the fiction that the Democratic nomination race is not for all intents and purposes over. The obstacles in the way of Hillary Clinton are virtually insurmountable. And her now-sizable deficit among pledged voters is only one of them. Everyone in the press, probably including us, should be much more candid about that."
• The Carpetbagger Report's Steve Benen: "When was the last time a reporter from a major outlet pressed Clinton on when she will drop out of the race? If the shoe were on the other foot, and Obama's campaign thought it had no better than a 10% chance of getting the party's nod, would he hear the question a lot more often?"
• Atrios: "While it would be absurd to claim that Clinton is treated well be the press -- she's treated horribly in general -- it's also the case that anyone else would be subjected to a louder and increasingly derisive drumbeat for her to get out of the race."

Meanwhile, many liberal bloggers are arguing that Clinton is helping McCain by staying in the race:

• The Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias: "Hillary Clinton's already lost the nomination. Under the circumstances, I find it maddening that the party leadership isn't acting to push her out of the race. Dragging things out 'till the convention stands a much, much, much higher chance of hurting Barack Obama's chances in the general election than it does of securing Clinton the nomination. I understand the calculation from the point of view of the heart of the Clinton campaign -- McCain beating Obama in the general means the Clintons still control the party, so there's no need to worry about helping McCain and you might as well hold on and hope lightning strikes. But the broader mass of unaffiliated elites and Clinton supporters who aren't literally on her payroll are, in my view, acting in a massively irresponsible manner."
• Ezra Klein: "[This is] a game of make-believe that's keeping the likely nominee locked in a useless and damaging deathmatch with Clinton, and keeping the party from turning its attention to John McCain. My understanding is that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid don't want to labor ineffectually beneath another Republican president, but at some point, they're going to have to ask themselves if that's important enough to actually do something about. For now, the Clinton campaign is like a rushing linebacker who doesn't know the winning pass was thrown and caught. They're not going to change the game, but they could really hurt the quarterback."
• Open Left's Mike Lux: "There is no path for Hillary to the nomination at this point except an ugly, ugly path. Given the delegate math, she can only win this by a combination of fear-mongering attacks and behind the scenes deals with superdelegates. That would be terrible for our party, and for the entire progressive movement."
• Daily Kos' DHinMI: "With the delegate numbers nearly insurmountable, with the media declaring her candidacy nearing its end, with money running tight, and with more and more prominent Democratic leaders likely to join [Bill] Richardson in calling for Democrats to unify and turn attention to defeating John McCain, the question becomes more urgent: when will Hillary Clinton admit that Barack Obama will be our Presidential nominee?"
• AMERICAblog's Joe Sudbay: "It's time for the Democrats to wrap up the nomination process. Enough already. It's time for Hillary Clinton to rein in her attack dogs. Stop the incendiary conference calls. It's time for the party leaders to start showing some leadership. John McCain must be defeated in November."

CLINTON II: Who Says She Has To Go?

Obama's online critics are pushing back against the notion that Clinton should get out of the race:

• MyDD's Todd Beeton: "Contrary to the inevitability campaign Obama supporters are currently waging (what else is left after failing to win it outright on votes or to change the superdelegate rules in the middle of the game...) high level Democrats still have reservations about Barack Obama as the nominee and Obama supporters would be well-advised to accept and respect this fact. Where are all those superdelegates who were waiting in the wings to come out for Obama after March 4? If it's so impossible for Hillary Clinton to win, why aren't they ending this thing right now?"
• MyDD's Jerome Armstrong: "I'd advise the Obama supporters to be calm. Neither candidate will have enough pledged delegates to win the nomination. You should also be informed that the rules do not say that, therefore, the candidate with the greatest number of pledged delegates is the winner. Besides, if Clinton does have a good couple of next few months, there's a likelihood that she'll be able to point toward having the pledged delegate lead, when counting the states of FL & MI. The popular vote also remains very much up in the air..."
• TalkLeft's Big Tent Democrat: "It is frankly absurd to hear people, like NBC and the Left blogs, say Clinton should drop out because WE think she can not catch up. Who are we to decide what the voters will do? The voters get to decide. Not the pundits. Not NBC. Not the Left blogs. But contempt for the voters, of Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and beyond is the new watchword for Obama supporters -- from NBC on down. It is quite unseemly."

CLINTON III: Anticipating A Bloodbath

Most conservative bloggers seem to believe that the Dem fight is headed to the convention:

• RedState's Pejman Yousefzadeh: "Everything that is written in [the Politico] story is true...up to a point. It is certainly the case that it would take an electoral miracle of unprecedented proportions to vault Hillary Clinton ahead of Barack Obama in terms of pledged delegates and the popular vote. [...] But that is not the aim of the Clinton campaign. The aim of the Clinton campaign is to get this contest to the point where neither Clinton nor Obama have the 2,025 delegates needed for the nomination and then for chaos to reign. [...] The Clintons won't give up. They never do when there is a chance for power still existing."
• Power Line's John Hinderaker: "The Democrats all hope they can somehow select a candidate prior to their convention and avoid the bloodbath that could result if the superdelegates choose the nominee in a floor fight. But it's hard to see how that could happen. [...] Absent unexpected results in the remaining primaries, it's hard for me to see how the Democrats can avoid a pitched battle in Denver."
• Townhall's Hugh Hewitt: "If the organizers of Recreate 68 get their way, it won't be an argument that moves to agreement and closure, but one that explodes in protests and a rocked political establishment. Forty years later, we are back in a campaign centered on war and race, with one party led by its most established leader and the other deeply split. How deeply split."

CLINTON IV: Shooting Holes In Her Sniper Story

Liberal bloggers are mocking Clinton for falsely claiming that her plane came "under sniper fire" during a '96 trip to Bosnia:

• DHinMI: "This is a very peculiar lie. This isn't a campaign-ender, but it's certainly a significant screw-up, and it provides an opportunity for the media (and maybe the Obama campaign) to ask why the hell she made it up. [...] Why would Clinton say she was under fire when she wasn't? It's not like she could possibly have confused her imagined incident with another incident in which she was shot at. Hillary Clinton was never in combat, she was never under fire."
• Obsidian Wings' hilzoy: "The fact that [Clinton] can't tell the difference between having an eight year old read her a poem on a tarmac and fleeing through a hail of bullets doesn't give me a lot of confidence in her grasp of military affairs."
• Yglesias, dripping with sarcasm: "I don't recall that sniper incident, but I was only fifteen or so at the time, and now video has surfaced showing contemporary news coverage of the sniper attack on Clinton, and even capturing a portion of that harrowing dash -- including a moment when Clinton uses her body to shield a little girl from danger. Impressive stuff, I urge everyone to watch the video and see for themselves."
• Open Left's Matt Stoller: "I would be open to some explanation of how this episode and her recounting of it isn't dishonest. The whole 'she's experienced' because she was first lady has always been kind of ridiculous, but much less ridiculous than the notion than voting for the war and refusing to acknowledge the mistake makes you serious or demonstrates some capacity to exercise good judgment."

CLINTON V: You're Either With Us Or Against Us

Liberal bloggers are criticizing the Clinton camp after Clinton strategest Mark Penn called Richardson's endorsement of Obama "not insignificant" and Clinton advisor James Carville compared Richardson to Judas:

• AMERICAblog's John Aravosis: "I'm gonna go on a limb here and say that Jesus did not die on the cross for Hillary's superdelegates."
• Yglesias: "Maybe the Clinton camp's inner circle has just totally lost touch with reality and they really think that sort of thing is appropriate. The mindset seems a little bizarre, though. When Richardson accepted the appointment as U.N. Ambassador from Bill Clinton was he supposed to take it for granted that that constituted an implicit promise to endorse Clinton's wife's presidential campaign years in the future? That he'd signed-on for lifetime service to the House of Clinton?"
• Benen: "The message isn't subtle -- if Bill helped you, you owe Hillary. This is a mistake. Hillary Clinton is a strong candidate with tremendous skills. She'd make a fine president. But seeing her top supporters arguing publicly that she and her husband are one in the same, and that her campaign really is about restoring Clinton rule, does more harm than good."

OBAMA: This Controversy Ain't Over, Barack

Conservative bloggers continue to criticize Obama's speech about race and, more generally, Obama's connections to Wright:

• Power Line's Paul Mirengoff: "I've been listening to Barack Obama's apologists gush about how wonderful his Philadelphia speech was, and how important it is to have a serious discussion of race in America of the kind Obama now has initiated. Obama himself made the latter claim. So my question is: if this discussion is so important, why did Obama commence it only after he had been exposed as the patron of an anti-American racist?"
• NRO's Mark Levin: "I found absolutely nothing in Obama's speech that I haven't heard before -- from slavery to more spending. He was not motivated to give the speech because he wanted to bravely address issues of race in America. He could have given that speech earlier, but he was too busy trying to avoid the subject when he was riding high in the polls. No, this speech was motivated by political expediency."
• AmSpec Blog's Philip Klein: "I refuse to let Obama off the hook by forgetting why he was forced to make such a speech in the first place. Many of its boosters claim that those of us who are still focused on the Jeremiah Wright issue are missing the bigger picture and minimizing the historical importance of the speech. [...] But the racist and anti-American comments by his spiritual mentor are a legitimate issue, especially given the fact that Obama has such a thin public record. The speech may have been a great sociology lecture, but it was a grand diversion."
• Glenn Reynolds: "Obama is giving us a 'national conversation on race,' but mostly by letting a lot of white people realize just what circulates, unremarked, in the black community."
• NRO's Victor Davis Hanson: "Obama and the punditry know that we cannot have such an honest conversation [about race], given that any 'new' dialogue 43 years after civil-rights legislation would touch on inordinate crime, illegitimacy, drug use, imprisonment, and black racism in addition to white racism -- and thus logically lead to emasculation of the present privileged traffickers in grievance and reparations. Who would wish to put a soothing Obama et al. out of business?"

On the other hand, NRO's Charles Murray continues to defend Obama: "I understand how naïve it is to read a presidential candidate's speech as if it were anything except political positioning, but that leads me to my final point: It's about time that people who disagree with Obama's politics recognize that he is genuinely different. When he talks, he sounds like a real human being, not a politician. [...] I can't vote for him. He is an honest-to-God lefty. [...] But the other day he talked about race in ways that no other major politician has tried to do, with a level of honesty that no other major politician has dared, and with more insight than any other major politician possesses. Not bad."

NRO's John Derbyshire responds to Murray's post: "I don't get the sensitivity and slack-cutting towards Obama that Charles Murray's post typified. Obama's the enemy -- a far-left Democrat. We should be attacking him at every weak point. That's politics. A pro-Obama emailer whines to me that the Pastor Wright business is 'a Swift Boating of Obama.' Well, duh!"

MCCAIN: Where's The Outrage?

Meanwhile, liberal bloggers are complaining that the media is ignoring McCain's relationships with controversial preachers (specifically, John Hagee):

• Benen: "Despite condemnations from the Speaker of the House, the chairman of the DNC, Catholic groups on the left, Catholic groups on the right, and Jewish groups, none of the major dailies ran a single article about the Republican presidential nominee cozying up to a bigoted megachurch preacher or the outrage it caused in some circles. As such, Hagee wasn't 'catapulted into national controversy.' He should have been, but political reporters collectively decided to give him a pass, for reasons that are still unclear."
• Yglesias: "The Wright/Obama story and the Hagee/McCain story are imperfect parallels in several directions, but surely John McCain's successful efforts to court the endorsement of an anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish preacher who admires McCain's foreign policy as likely to bring about the apocalypse deserves more than no coverage whatsoever from the country's major newspapers."
• Salon's Glenn Greenwald: "In light of the standards governing media campaign coverage, John McCain's ties to religious extremists -- including those with a lengthy list of fringe and reprehensible views -- remains one of the most under-reported stories."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Outside The Bubble

John Derbyshire:

"Knee-deep as we have all been, for over a year now, in political chat, we forget how very little most Americans care about politics. A week or so ago a very intelligent, professional acquaintance said to me: 'Hey, this Obama guy is something new, isn't he? It would be so cool to have a black President!' It was obvious, from the remark and subsequent conversation, that Sen. Obama had just then, for the first time, impinged on my friend's consciousness, in mid-March of 2008.

I am sure it won't be at all difficult to turn up people in mid-October saying: 'Hey, this Obama guy is something new...'

Robert Conquest argues in one of his books that this widespread indifference to politics is one of the great strengths of Anglo-Saxon civilization."

LEST WE FORGET: Study: 93% Of People Talked About Once They Leave Room

From The Onion:

"LOGAN, UT -- According to an alarming new study published Monday in the American Journal Of Sociology, the vast majority of Americans are critically discussed after leaving a room occupied by two or more additional people. [...]

'Our findings will come as a great shock to the millions of Americans who have assumed people do not speak derisively about them as soon as they are out of earshot,' said Dr. Edward Phillips, a professor of sociology at Utah State University and lead author of the study. 'This phenomenon affects nearly everyone. If you have ever feared that people whom you considered to be good friends were mercilessly mocking and insulting you shortly after you left their presence, your fears are almost certainly 100 percent correct.'"

Posted by Ian Faerstein at March 24, 2008 12:57 PM