Tom McMahon

If The Democrats Had Nominated Hillary, She Would be Ahead By 30 Points By Now

From Pat Buchanan:

Since mid-September, the stock market has cratered, losing half of the $8 trillion that has vanished since October 2007. All five of America's great investment banks -- Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill-Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley -- have either ceased to be independent or ceased to be.

The nation's largest savings and loan, Washington Mutual, and largest insurance company, AIG, have gone belly up, with the federal bailout of the latter costing $100 billion and counting. Perhaps $3 trillion of the $8 trillion in stock value that is gone disappeared after passage of the $700 billion federal bailout of Wall Street.

No bottom is in sight to the worst market crash since 1929. Recession is now certain. George W. Bush has fallen to 26 percent approval, a level unseen since Richard Nixon was driven from office in the Watergate summer of '74. Four in five think the nation is on the wrong course.

Yet, Obama has only a six-point lead in an averaging of national polls. While he has moved ahead in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, one senses America is not so much rallying to him as running away from a Republican brand that is now on the same shelf with Chinese baby formula.

Obama still has not closed the sale. He has overtaken McCain not because of any brilliant campaign he has conducted but because of the dreadful news pouring out of Wall Street. McCain and Palin are being dragged down by Dow Jones, not Barack Obama.

The Progression Of Left-Wing Talking Points For A Democratic Party Sex-Scandal

From Kaus:

1. Too horrible and shocking; it can't possibly be true;
2. It's not true;
3. You can't prove it's true;
4. Why are you trying to prove it's true?
5. It's disgusting that you've proved it's true;
6. What's the big deal anyway?

We're all pretty familiar with this by now, eh?

His Problem, Not Hers

From Susan Estrich:

Usually, of course, it’s when you’re losing that people demand you drop out. In Hillary’s case, it’s her winning that can be seen as the problem that demands a solution. I don’t buy that.

So long as Hillary keeps her focus on McCain, as she has done in recent speeches, and avoids giving McCain ammunition to use against Obama, she’s not affirmatively hurting Obama. All she’s doing is making clear the vulnerability that is his challenge, his problem, not hers.

Obama has a problem with one of the core groups in the Democratic base. If he has won this nomination, he has won it without them, despite them. The problem is he can’t win the White House that way.

You can talk until you’re blue in the face about the new voters Obama has brought to the process, about the enthusiasm among students and his appeal to independents, but at the end of the day, if you’re a Democrat, you don’t win the White House without winning the votes of white, working-class voters in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio and New Jersey and, yes, West Virginia.

And you can call these people every name in the book, starting with racist, as some Obama supporters are prone to do, but questioning people’s motives generally is not a very effective approach to addressing their doubts or bringing them into the fold. Insults do not turn skeptics into supporters.

No Point In Pretending Anymore

An excerpt from Christopher Hitchens:

However, it was not really the class vote at which people were looking. In North Carolina, Senator Obama reaped almost one hundred per cent of a constituency which the commentators quite frankly called by its primary color.

In Indiana, that constituency is not such a large share of the electorate.

Nobody especially likes to bang on about this, but this is as good an explanation as any for the discrepancy between the two candidates and the two states.

And, since West Virginia and Kentucky are next up – and reporters are almost unconsciously describing these two states as for some reason more “natural” for the former First Lady – in a short while we will be seeing the pendulum of politics swing back again.

There is less and less point in pretending that this campaign is not “about” race.

A Bigger Upside, A Bigger Downside

An excerpt from Powerline:

As to which candidate would make a better president, the analysis is not that dissimilar. It’s hard to see Clinton being a good president, at least from my perspective. However, there probably are limits as to how bad she would be. Hillary seems to understand that the world is a dangerous place; that our enemies make it so; and that therefore, at a minimum, we should not be in a rush to accommodate them.

Obama may or may not grasp these basic realities. If he does not, then he will be another Jimmy Carter.

Yet, in contrast to Clinton, one can imagine Obama turning out to be a good president. That’s because there’s some evidence that he’s intellectually open to deviations from orthodox liberalism in ways that Clinton isn’t. In addition, there may be something to his (admittedly self-serving) claim that he’s temperamentally better suited than Clinton to working with his political adversaries. It’s difficult to see how he could be more poorly suited.

In sum, Obama seems to have both a larger upside and a larger downside than Clinton. Being risk averse when it comes to politicians, I’d probably rather see Clinton in the oval office. But fortunately, I don’t have to cast that vote.

2016

From Burt Prelutsky:

Chelsea Clinton, while giving one of her recent speeches for Mother Clinton, was asked whether, like Hillary, she recalled running from gunfire at the Kosovo airfield in 1996. The audience, no doubt filled with true believers, first groaned at the impertinence of anyone daring to question the First Daughter, then rewarded Chelsea with an ovation for saying nothing more than “I was there.”

Now that Chelsea is all of 28, I suppose, like her parents, she is mastering the technique of avoiding direct questions as the all-important first step in carving out a political career. The fact is, by 2016, when Hillary expects to be winding up her second term, her daughter would be 36 and of an age to make a run for the White House herself. Heck, if things pan out, none of the Clintons might ever have to pay rent again.

Obama vs Hillary: The Tribal Divide

From Michael Barone:

But looking at these electoral data suggests to me that there's another tribal divide going on here, one that separates voters more profoundly than even race (well, maybe not more profoundly than race in Mississippi but in other states). That's the divide between academics and Jacksonians. In state after state, we have seen Obama do extraordinarily well in academic and state capital enclaves. In state after state, we have seen Clinton do extraordinarily well in enclaves dominated by Jacksonians.

Academics and public employees (and of course many, perhaps most, academics in the United States are public employees) love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war. Economically, defense spending competes for the public-sector dollars that academics and public employees think are rightfully their own. More important, I think, warriors are competitors for the honor that academics and public employees think rightfully belongs to them. Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees. They have, in historian David Hackett Fischer's phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, "If you attack my family or my country, I'll kill you." And he (or she) means it. If you want to hear an eloquent version, listen to Sen. Zell Miller's speech endorsing George W. Bush at the 2004 Republican National Convention. The academic who hears the Rev. Jeremiah Wright declaiming, "God damn America," is not unnerved. He hears this sort of thing on campus all the time. The Jacksonian who watches the tape sees an enemy of everything he holds dear.

Sad

Sad

Bill Clinton Plays Another Race Card

Bill Clinton Plays Another Race Card

DID SHILL BILL'S SHRILL GRILL SWILL SPILL ILL WILL? NIL KILL STILL. CHILL PILLS TIL LIL' HILL THRILLS?

Sometimes all you need is a good headline.