Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

Let McCain Be McCain

5 Comments

Jen Rubin applies Occam’s Razor:

I think those postulating a “McCain panic” theory to explain his campaign suspension don’t understand, or they pretend not to understand, John McCain. This is what he does. He elevates matters he considers higher national priorities above politics, which he finds at some level disasteful. Lots of people differ with his priorities, but that’s not at issue. If you look back over McCain’s career, he does this again and again: campaign finance reform, immigration reform, the surge and now this. He junks his party and the immediate short term political consequences when he thinks there’s something else at play. That in large part is what drive his GOP base nuts. And they likely won’t be thrilled here.

One can attribute nefarious motive ( “Ah! He’s just feigning love of country and putting his political career at risk!”) or you can take the more mundane explanation : this is how he operates and what he honestly believes. This performance with Katie Couric is plainly him at his best.

As for Barack Obama, I agree with this take that his initial effort to avoid involvement with brokering a deal didn’t come off all that well. (“It’s shocking that someone who believes himself ready to lead the free world would so brazenly try to dodge any participation in what could be a defining moment in our history.’) What was striking about Obama’s comment was his remark that if “the Congressional leadership” needed him, he’d be available. It’s an odd way to put it — he is the leader of his party now and he seemed utterly disinterested in doing anything that involved active problem-solving/deal-making. He does after all have a current job — in the Senate.

And this time, he’s not even voting “present.”

It’s a sterling example of his general career path–accomplishing little in his current job because he always views it as little more than a rung on the ladder to the next one.

Political Commentary

Well, I’ll Bet That Caught Them By Surprise

56 Comments

The McCain campaign just announced that it’s suspending the campaign to go back to DC and work on the bailout, and calling for a postponement of Friday night’s debate.

That puts the Obama campaign in a tough position. He can’t show up on Friday and debate an empty chair, and McCain has just once again demonstrated that there are things more important to him than winning elections. It also demonstrates his record of working on bi-partisan efforts.

It’s hard for Obama to do anything but a “me too,” which will burnish McCain’s leadership credentials as well. This could end up being a very good move, politically, for the McCain camp, which has been off its game ever since the Wall Street panic started. In terms of the polls, though, while it’s true that Obama has opened up a gap, interestingly, he didn’t seem to take any away from McCain. The gap seems to be a result of recent new McCain supporters going undecided again (probably because of the response of the campaign to the panic). Obama still can’t close the deal and get a majority of support.

[Update a while later]

Apparently Senator Obama is willing to go to Oxford and debate an empty chair. If I were the McCain campaign, I’d send Sarah as a replacement.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

We Knew This Was Coming

27 Comments

There are more and more stories appearing in the media with the template that we’re a racist nation. This is preparing the groundwork to blame Obama’s upcoming loss on the evil right-wing bigots, of both parties. And of course, poor Michelle won’t be able to feel proud of America any more.

No, it won’t have anything to do with the fact that he’s Michael Dukakis with more melanin. It will have nothing to do with the fact that he has the most liberal voting record in the Senate and his running mate comes in third, that one needs a scanning tunneling microscope to measure the thickness of his resume, that he sat in the pew of an America-hating bigot for twenty years and had his children baptized by him, that he partnered with an unrepentent domestic terrorist to radicalize Chicago schoolchildren. No, it will be our fault, because we are racist, and don’t deserve the blessings of having The One preside over our unworthy nation.

Anyway, here’s the latest example, from US News.

[Wednesday morning update]

Jonah Goldberg has related thoughts today:

This spectacle is grotesque. It reveals how little the supposedly objective press corps thinks of the American people — and how highly they think of themselves … and Obama. Obama’s lack of experience, his doctrinaire liberalism, his record, his known associations with Weatherman radical William Ayers and the hate-mongering Rev. Jeremiah Wright: These cannot possibly be legitimate motivations to vote against Obama, in this view.

Similarly, McCain’s experience, his record of bipartisanship, his heroism: These too count for nothing.

Nope. It’s got to be the racism.

Political Commentary

Tell Them What You Really Think

3 Comments

Christopher Hitchens wonders why Barack Obama is so vapid, hesitant, and gutless:

By the end of that grueling campaign season, a lot of us had got the idea that Dukakis actually wanted to lose–or was at the very least scared of winning. Why do I sometimes get the same idea about Obama? To put it a touch more precisely, what I suspect in his case is that he had no idea of winning this time around. He was running in Iowa and New Hampshire to seed the ground for 2012, not 2008, and then the enthusiasm of his supporters (and the weird coincidence of a strong John Edwards showing in Iowa) put him at the front of the pack. Yet, having suddenly got the leadership position, he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with it or what to do about it.

I’ve noted this in the past. Obama wasn’t prepared, either mentally or in terms of experience, to be a candidate this time around, and had no expectations of it happening–it was just for practice and name recognition. To repeat, he’s like the dog that chases cars, but doesn’t know what to do with when when he catches it.

And calling him a “dusky Dukakis” has to sting. Particularly because it’s true.

Political Commentary

Send In The Clowns

8 Comments

Have to agree with this:

…reader Stan Brown emails: “I’m watching the Senate hearing and listening to the senators question Paulson, Cox and Bernanke. The markets continue to fall as investors also listen. Clearly, if experience in the Senate leads to the performance we are watching today, experience is seriously overrated. These senators are frightening.” I feel that way every time I watch a Senate hearing. Where do we get these people?

The last time a Senator was elected president was almost fifty years ago. There’s a reason for that. The only time it will happen this year is that both parties were foolish enough to make one the nominee. It’s almost like the process of becoming a senator selects for mediocrity.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Real History Of America

11 Comments

A very interesting essay by Roderick Long:

There’s a popular historical legend that goes like this: Once upon a time (for this is how stories of this kind should begin), back in the 19th century, the United States economy was almost completely unregulated and laissez-faire. But then there arose a movement to subject business to regulatory restraint in the interests of workers and consumers, a movement that culminated in the presidencies of Wilson and the two Roosevelts.

This story comes in both left-wing and right-wing versions, depending on whether the government is seen as heroically rescuing the poor and weak from the rapacious clutches of unrestrained corporate power, or as unfairly imposing burdensome socialistic fetters on peaceful and productive enterprise. But both versions agree on the central narrative: a century of laissez-faire, followed by a flurry of anti-business legislation.

Every part of this story is false.

Observant libertarians have long noted that in general, captains of industry are not capitalists (or to use Jonah Goldberg’s (via whom I found his link) more accurate phrase, “free-market economists”–“capitalism” is a Marxist term), and never have been.

Political Commentary

This Made Me Laff

4 Comments

Geraghty:

We have been hearing, and will hear, a great deal about Palin’s approval/disapproval rating, questions about whether voters think she has the right experience, etc. I wonder if the right question about the Democratic vice presidential candidate — “Do you think Joe Biden knows what he is saying when he speaks, or does his mouth operate completely independently of any central nervous system?” — would generate some interesting results.

Joe Biden is the gift that’s going to keep giving right up until election day. Thank you, Senator Obama, thank you.

[Update early afternoon]

As I said, the gift that keeps on giving. Senator Biden was for coal, before he was against it. He likes (on odd days of the week, anyway) coal gasification. But with gasbags like him around, we won’t have to mine any coal at all.

[Another update]

Man, the hits just keep on coming:

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, “look, here’s what happened.”

It was probably one of those steam-powered televisions. And as Jesse Walker notes, “…if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, “Who is that guy? What happened to President Hoover?”

Maybe he was helping Barack’s uncle liberate Auschwitz.

[Mid-afternoon update]

I did not know that. Felix the Cat was the very first television star. As Ed Driscoll notes, they wouldn’t have been asking what happened to President Hoover; they would have been asking what happened to Felix.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Obama-Ayers Connection

2 Comments

It’s finally starting to get some play in the MSM, but only at the Wall Street Journal:

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s “recruitment” to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.

In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and the Political,” Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Gray Lady to cover it. And unfortunately, it doesn’t lend itself to a ten-second explanation or sound bite, other than “Barack Obama worked to radicalize Chicago school children.” But someone should ask him just what there was to show for the hundred million, since it’s the only thing that he’s ever actually run (other than, as the Reverend Jesse Jackson amusingly noted, his mouth).

More thoughts over at Hot Air.

[Update a while later]

Dr. Kurtz has more over at NRO:

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most important executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a largely a failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons for that failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama. Above all, by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist history aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly legitimate issue in this campaign.

“Most important”? More like “only,” unless one counts running his campaign (which is really done by Axelrod).