Hillary is slinging now!

[FOTD]

Easier read but you will not see it in any Tulsa pubs....

Begrudging His Bedazzling
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 27, 2008

CLEVELAND

"A huge Ellen suddenly materialized behind Hillary on a giant screen, interrupting her speech Monday night at a fund-raiser at George Washington University in Washington.
What better way for a desperate Hillary to try and stop her rival from running off with all her women supporters than to have a cozy satellite chat with a famous daytime talk-show host who isn't supporting Obama?
"Will you put a ban on glitter?" Ellen demanded.
Diplomatically, Hillary said that schoolchildren needed it for special projects, but maybe she could ban it for anyone over 12.
Certainly, Hillary understands the perils of glitter. The coda of her campaign has been a primal scream against the golden child of Chicago, a clanging and sometimes churlish warning that "all that glitters is not gold."
David Brody, the Christian Broadcasting Network correspondent whose interview with Hillary aired Tuesday, said the senator seemed "dumbfounded" by the Obama sensation.
She has been so discombobulated that she has ignored some truisms of politics that her husband understands well: Sunny beats gloomy. Consistency beats flipping. Bedazzling beats begrudging. Confidence beats whining.
Experience does not beat excitement, though, or Nixon would have been president the first time around, Poppy Bush would have had a second term and President Gore would have stopped the earth from melting by now.
Voters gravitate toward the presidential candidates who seem more comfortable in their skin. J.F.K. and Reagan seemed exceptionally comfortable. So did Bill Clinton and W., who both showed that comfort can be an illusion of sorts, masking deep insecurities.
The fact that Obama is exceptionally easy in his skin has made Hillary almost jump out of hers. She can't turn on her own charm and wit because she can't get beyond what she sees as the deep injustice of Obama not waiting his turn. Her sunshine-colored jackets on the trail hardly disguise the fact that she's pea-green with envy.
After saying she found her "voice" in New Hampshire, she has turned into Sybil. We've had Experienced Hillary, Soft Hillary, Hard Hillary, Misty Hillary, Sarcastic Hillary, Joined-at-the-Hip-to-Bill Hillary, Her-Own-Person-Who-Just-Happens-to-Be-Married-to-a-Former-President Hillary, It's-My-Turn Hillary, Cuddly Hillary, Let's-Get-Down-in-the-Dirt-and-Fight-Like-Dogs Hillary.
Just as in the White House, when her cascading images and hairstyles became dizzying and unsettling, suggesting that the first lady woke up every day struggling to create a persona, now she seems to think there is a political solution to her problem. If she can only change this or that about her persona, or tear down this or that about Obama's. But the whirlwind of changes and charges gets wearing.
By threatening to throw the kitchen sink at Obama, the Clinton campaign simply confirmed the fact that they might be going down the drain.
Hillary and her aides urged reporters to learn from the "Saturday Night Live" skit about journalists having crushes on Obama.
"Maybe we should ask Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow," she said tartly in the debate here Tuesday night. She peevishly and pointlessly complained about getting the first question too often, implying that the moderators of MSNBC — a channel her campaign has complained has been sexist — are giving Obama an easy ride.
Beating on the press is the lamest thing you can do. It is only because of the utter open-mindedness of the press that Hillary can lose 11 contests in a row and still be treated as a contender.
Hillary and her top aides could not say categorically that her campaign had not been the source on the Drudge Report, as Matt Drudge claimed, for a picture of Obama in African native garb that the mean-spirited hope will conjure up a Muslim Manchurian candidate vibe.
At a rally on Sunday, she tried sarcasm about Obama, talking about how "celestial choirs" singing and magic wands waving won't get everybody together to "do the right thing."
With David Brody, Hillary evoked the specter of a scary Kool-Aid cult. "I think that there is a certain phenomenon associated with his candidacy, and I am really struck by that because it is very much about him and his personality and his presentation," she said, adding that "it dangerously oversimplifies the complexity of the problems we face, the challenge of navigating our country through some difficult uncharted waters. We are a nation at war. That seems to be forgotten."
Actually it's not forgotten. It's a hard sell for Hillary to say that she is the only one capable of leading this country in a war when she helped in leading the country into that war. Or to paraphrase Obama from the debate here, the one who drives the bus into the ditch can't drive it out."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/opinion/27dowd.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

[USRufnex]

Look out Barack... here comes the kitchen sink!

??Race Man
How Barack Obama played the race card and blamed Hillary Clinton
By Sean Wilentz, The New Republic
Published: Wednesday, February 27, 2008??

SEAN WILENTZ = PARTISAN HILLARY CLINTON HACK

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=129d0545-4db1-4dfd-988c-2c6e1c807934

The New Republic

A Mere Smear
by Cass R. Sunstein
Sean Wilentz's unfair attack on Barack Obama and his supporters.
Post Date Thursday, December 27, 2007

The Compact Oxford Dictionary of Current English offers several definitions of the word "smear." One is "coat or mark with a greasy or sticky substance." Another is "damage the reputation of [someone] by false accusations." Neither of these definitions perfectly fits Sean Wilentz' discussion of Barack Obama and his supporters, published on The New Republic's website last week. But Wilentz has certainly produced a smear.

Wilentz does deserve considerable credit--this is one impressive smear. Saying nothing about Obama's career or positions, Wilentz announces that there is a "delusional style" in American political punditry, typified by support for inexperienced, unqualified candidates on the basis of the delusional belief that those candidates have good "instincts." In Wilentz' view, the presidential candidacy of George W. Bush was merely the latest beneficiary of the delusional style.

Is Wilentz actually trying to make a claim about American history? Or about American journalism? Sure, American political commentary has had its fair share of delusions, but the idea of a general "delusional style" is much too vague and abstract to be illuminating. There is no such "style" in American politics. (Wilentz is playing here on Richard Hofstader's illuminating, substantive, and influential 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics.") Wilentz is right to say that some members of the press were excessively generous to Bush's candidacy, perhaps because they preferred him to the not-terribly-fun Al Gore. Many of Bush's supporters, in the press and elsewhere, have been disappointed, but they were hardly deluded.

But Wilentz's real goal is not to act as some kind of press ombudsman, or to identify a previously unrecognized "style" in campaign reportage. It is to condemn the (hardly unanimous) press support for Barack Obama, who turns out, astonishingly, to be the new George W. Bush. An enthusiastic supporter of Hillary Clinton, Wilentz thinks that The Boston Globe editorial board, David Brooks, and Fareed Zakaria (among others) support Obama not on the basis of reason, but because of "nothing more than enthusiasm, based on feelings and projections that are unattached to verifiable rational explanation or the public record." In Wilentz' account, the delusional "Obama-awed commentators" have failed to learn the true lesson of the Bush Administration, which is that the last time America opted for intuition-based governance, it produced a "catastrophic presidency."

Wilentz contends that Obama's supporters like him because of his "good vibes" (ouch!) and their belief in the power and virtue of his "intuition." Notwithstanding some snippets of writing that Wilentz removes from context, that's a ludicrous contention. The editors of the Globe, among Wilentz's special targets, invoke not "good vibes" in their endorsement of Obama, but the public record, including his support for merit pay for teachers; his work with Republican Richard Lugar to add conventional weapons to the nation's threat reduction initiative; his work in Illinois on campaign ethics; his support for a cap on carbon emissions; and his inclusive approach to health care negotiations.

More generally, and whether this point was given due emphasis by the columnists who so offended Wilentz or not, the fact is that those who support Obama do so for diverse reasons. He opposed the Iraq War before hostilities began--not on the basis of intuition, but after a careful (and entirely prescient) analysis of the likely consequences. Obama is the opposite of a polarizing figure (and maybe we could use that in the White House). He has a keen and sympathetic understanding of competing positions. He is a Democrat who actually understands economics and the needs of business. He has a stunning intelligence (and maybe we could use that in the White House). He promises to go beyond the decreasingly relevant conflicts of the 1960s and the 1990s. He is a specialist in constitutional law (and maybe we could use that in the White House). On issues ranging from health care to climate change, his policy proposals are careful and pragmatic.

Wilentz is not content to accuse Obama's supporters of having lost their grip on reality. It turns out that their candidate is not merely a neophyte but also dishonest. The reason? His autobiography, Dreams from My Father, "contains composite characters and other fictionalized elements--not exactly a portrait of sterling honesty or authenticity." This sentence gives Wilentz's game away. Obama's moving and unusually self-revelatory book is hardly rendered dishonest or inauthentic by his decision not to use real names and to offer some composite characters when describing friends and situations from his youth.

Of course reasonable questions have been raised about Obama's candidacy. Many responsible people believe that some other candidate would be a better president. But having failed to show that the pundits who support Obama are deluded, Wilentz offers no reason to reject the arguments that they actually offer. And it is not so reasonable to manufacture, evidently for the occasion, something called a "delusional style" in American political history, and to accuse supporters of Barack Obama of having taken leave of their senses. Wilentz is a distinguished historian. I can't imagine what got into him.

Cass R. Sunstein is a contributing editor at The New Republic and teaches at the University of Chicago. Over the years, he has offered informal advice to both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama; a long-term law school colleague of the latter, he has acted as an occasional, informal adviser to his campaign.

[USRufnex]

http://civilwarmemory.typepad.com/civil_war_memory/2008/01/is-sean-wilentz.html

[FOTD]

"Wilentz does deserve considerable credit--this is one impressive smear. Saying nothing about Obama's career or positions, Wilentz announces that there is a "delusional style" in American political punditry, typified by support for inexperienced, unqualified candidates on the basis of the delusional belief that those candidates have good "instincts." In Wilentz' view, the presidential candidacy of George W. Bush was merely the latest beneficiary of the delusional style."

Not for one minute did I ever think Shrub had good instincts. Bushco set the delusional threshold. Barack has good instincts. You don't come from nowhere to here by being lucky.