This story about Obama taking the stage in Iowa to the sounds of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems”? Yeah. Not so much. If it were true, it seems it would have been a bigger story on caucus night, what with all the cameras rolling and the reporters crawling around the scene and all.
Being able to publish from my handheld (Palm 700p) has been kind of fun. So we’ll see if maybe I can’t start publishing during lunch. No links, unfortunately.
-Did you get a chance to hear Hillary on NPR this morning? She didn’t say anything new or noteworthy. What I thought was interesting though was the interviewer’s persistence in asking Mrs. Clinton take a swipe at Obama. She asked her three times and three times Clinton changed the subject back to herself. Listening to her, I got the sense she wasn’t going to take the bait and while her campaign may feel it’s alright to go after Obama, the strategy for the candidate herself appears to be one of emphasising her record. Interesting.
-TPM reports this morning that Hillary may be running out of money. Makes sense. She’s maxed out her existing contributors and after Iowa, I’m guessing she doesn’t have too much coming in. We saw the same thing in 2004 with Dean. After losing Iowa, donations dried up and he went broke within a few weeks. This after lapping EVERYONE in fundraising. There’s a lesson there for 2012.
-A friend of mine says I sound a little Dittoheady when I bash Hillary. Do I? It’s something I’m going to pay attention to.
-There’s chatter on the O-Live board that Winter Hawk coach Rich Kromm has only been in Portland part-time this season. Fascinating. If true, this could certainly explain the team’s inconsistent play this season. I’m going to talk more about this tonight.
-I’m with Colin. LSU 24 Ohio State 20.
-My mp3 player has about run dry. Is there any good rock and roll out there? None of that electronic crap. I need some gee-tars. Given the news of the weekend, The Shins are disqualified.
The current conservative meme suggests Obama has no record. Just two years in the Senate. Hillary tried that one out in Iowa and we know how that worked. So in New Hampshire, she’s trying a different tack. He has too much of a record.
Hillary’s aides point to Obama’s extremely progressive record as a community organizer, state senator and candidate for Congress, his alliances with “left-wing” intellectuals in Chicago’s Hyde Park community, and his liberal voting record on criminal defendants’ rights as subjects for examination.
Along the same lines, ABC reported that Clinton aides gave the network various examples, of Obama’s controversial stands. The aides cited Obama’s past assertion that he would support ending mandatory minimum sentences for federal crimes, pointing to a 2004 statement at an NAACP-sponsored debate: “Mandatory minimums take too much discretion away from judges.”
Jack and Jill take it from there.
Criminal Defendants rights?
Ending mandatory minimums?
We KNOW whose community those positions fall disproportionately to, don’t we?
I told you. I told you that she was going to use sending Black Men to the Prison Industrial Complex to get elected.
Here’s what makes Obama different than almost any politician in my lifetime. Clinton, Bush, and their machines would either run and hide or spin their way out of controversial positions or uncomfortable incidents from the past. Obama? The guy can’t wait to talk to you about them. The Hillary machine doesn’t know how to deal with that kind of openness. Neither do the Republicans. They’re both too used to trench warfare. Obama doesn’t play that.
So many thoughts tonight as I let the Obama victory sink in.
- Edwards, the great white male Boomer Democratic hope, is done. He spent the last four years pounding every corner of Iowa, shaking every hand, kissing every baby, hoping to use a victory as a springboard to greater things. It didn’t happen. He would have had my vote in the 2004 primaries, but I was still a registered Republican at the time. I never got past his declaring this time around in post-Katrina New Orleans. It seemed opportunistic to me. It just looked dumb. He’s also decided to take matching funds which is suicide in this era. There’s no way he’d make it from March through the conventions without money. I think he can play an important role in helping to shape Obama’s healthcare initiative. I hope he gets that chance.
- Driving home tonight as the caucuses began, I left a message for a friend of mine begging him not to make me vote for Hillary in November. It’s difficult to describe my reasoning other than to say I just don’t want four years of Republican nonsense that would surely accompany a Clinton presidency. We wouldn’t be able to last a week without hearing the words Vince Foster. Watching MSNBC’s coverage tonight, Chris Matthews practically wet himself at the thought of Hillary’s counter-punch, going on and on about how the campaign was strategizing and would find just the right words to air live on the 10pm news. It never happened. While I believe she’s in major trouble, I completely believe what a commenter said here a few weeks ago. They’ve still got some tricks up their sleeves. The question is if she does try to Swiftboat him, or something similar, will it backfire? I believe it will. I also believe the race will be all but decided two weeks from Saturday in Nevada. If she can’t win there, she won’t be able to win anywhere.
- Still until there’s a stake through her heart, I don’t discount Hillary. And neither does Obama.
- The conventional wisdom is finally catching up to something I was saying way back in September. There is no way Hillary and Obama will share a ticket in 2008. My ticket right now is Obama-Webb. I’m not alone.
- Huckabee. Limbaugh Conservatives have been in denial about the role and prominence of Evangelical Christians in their party. They were alright with them as long as they voted the way they wanted. I’m not sure what the Limbaugh wing of the party was thinking the Evangelicals would do this time around. Were they just going to sit on their hands and do nothing? Did the Limbaugh/Rove coalition secretly hope Christians would stay home and let Rudy or Romney skate away with the nomination? I think we found out tonight that’s not going to happen.
- Six weeks ago I figured Huckabee would be the #2 on any Republican ticket. This morning I figured Romney would win and Huckabee would be the Republican Howard Dean. Tonight I think Huckabee could well be the nominee.
- Rudy is sliding into irrelevance. Watching him on MSNBC was painful. The words 9/11 never left his lips, but he spoke about it in a ton of code. He kept referring to his experience handling crises. Well hes got one now. His strategy was to be the white knight candidate, lying in wait as Romney and McCain beat each other to a pulp up north. It’s falling apart in front of him. Hillary actually tried to run a similar strategy in 2006, figuring there would be no front runner by the Fall and she would just slide into the race around Thanksgiving. She was forced into the race way earlier than she wanted. Right now, every time you see Huckabee on the front page, consider it another opportunity lost for Mayor 9/11.
- I had much bigger hopes for Ron Paul.
You know, I was going to vote for Obama and even announced that a week or so ago. But this is a great example of why it’s best to wait and see how things shake out. Not being blinded by candidate worship, it’s easier to sniff out the bullshit. And you have to have your head stuck deep in the sand to deny that Obama is trying to close the deal by running to the Right of his opponents. And call me crazy, but that’s not a trait I generally appreciate in Democrats, no matter how much it might set the punditocracy’s hearts a flutter.
Keith “If you take away the Independent vote, Obama only wins 32-31″ Olbermann can too. Obama has an opportunity to unite like no candidate in my lifetime. And that means heading toward the middle to pick up independents and even *gasp* Republicans. He’s right in step with a ton of Americans who are fed up with our political inertia. I know I’m gushing like a schoolgirl, but I honestly don’t care.
So that’s that. At this point, I’m focusing on Nevada two weeks from Saturday. If Obama wins there, it’s Katie, bar the door.
I remember as a child getting up to watch the Space Shuttle return from orbit. During re-entry there was always a 45-second period where Mission Control couldn’t communicate with the Shuttle. No one knew what was happening. Watching Iowa this week is a lot like figuring out what’s happening with the Shuttle. No one knows. And anyone who says they do is lying. The press is at a fever pitch right now, slamming Hillary and Chelsea for clamming up and Huckabee for going all…weird. Now they’re predicting a big win for Edwards.
The thing about the 24-hour news cycle we now live in is everyone wants to know what’s happening right now. The truth is, we don’t know and we won’t for a few days. By then Iowa will be old news and we’ll all be screaming about New Hampshire. And so it will go.
I truly hope Obama wins everywhere. Barring him, I’ll vote for Edwards. Anyone else…I’m moving to Australia.
Karl Rove has some advice for Obama.
Iowa is your great chance for a breakthrough. Win it convincingly and you can build on it in the contests that follow. Lose it and victory becomes much more difficult.
Oh gee, you think?
I wonder what Newsweek is paying for this type of scintillating analysis.
Things are going sideways in Iowa, so it’s time to lower expectations.
Our definition of success doesn’t necessarily mean coming in first.
Howard Dean said the same thing the night he let out the scream that ended his candidacy.
Hard to believe, but there’s only six weeks to go until the Iowa caucus. I think Hillary’s in for a shock. And she knows it.
Hillary launched a bizarre attack on Obama yesterday that’s just left me scratching my head.
“Voters will have to judge if living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face,” Clinton said. “I think we need a president with more experience than that, someone the rest of the world knows, looks up to and has confidence in.”
What on God’s green Earth is she talking about? Has she been preparing to be president since the third grade? Since when does being class president in elementary school count as experience on a presidential resume? Where Obama was raised has zilch to do with his potential ability to be commander in chief. Hillary should be ashamed.
She’s not, of course. Her campaign supporters, like Wesley Clark and Geraldine Ferraro have been accusing anyone who dares criticize Hillary of parroting right-wing talking points. Yet she runs one up the flagpole herself. This little whack she took yesterday is straight out of the Ann Coulter playbook. Is she going to start calling him B. Hussein Obama next?
And while she keeps attacking the VWRC, shes very quietly cozied up to it. Back during the Spring, her campaign leaked her fund raising numbers to Drudge, king of the right-wing blogosphere. She followed it up last week by leaking a false Obama smear to Robert Novak. The result has been to get the right wing machine into gear, digging up old stories and wondering aloud if those are what Hillary is discussing. There’s the one about a real estate deal that looks shady, but no one can figure out if there’s anything there.
Then, of course, there’s the drug use. In Manchester, NH on Monday, Obama opened up a little about his youthful indiscretions.
“You know, I made some bad decisions that I’ve actually written about. You know, got into drinking. I experimented with drugs,” he said. “There was a whole stretch of time that I didn’t really apply myself a lot. It wasn’t until I got out of high school and went to college that I started realizing, ‘Man, I wasted a lot of time.’”
Obama has written about his drug use in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father.”
“Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final fatal role of the young would be black man,” Obama wrote. Mostly he smoked marijuana and drank alcohol, Obama wrote, but occasionally he would snort cocaine when he could afford it.
Drugs, Obama wrote, were a way he “could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.”
Rush Limbaugh, of all people, pounced on that yesterday, wondering aloud whether Hillary would go after Obama’s past drug use. I can’t wait to hear the 2008 version of “I didn’t inhale” when she’s asked about her own youth.
Following his Jefferson-Jackson performance, Obama has taken the lead in Iowa. What I suspect is happening is the undecideds are starting to come down off the fence, and they’re breaking for my guy. Hillary has to punch her way out of this, but the more she does, the more she reminds everyone of how glad we were to see the Bill and Hill show leave in in the first place. As poisoned as the political atmosphere is today, it will be even worse with Hillary in the Oval Office.
