Blog de Ford

One of the justifications that Obama gives for not waiting a few years to run for president is that his candidacy makes sense now as this is a unique moment in American history during which we need a transformational leader.

I agree with his rationale, as the way we do things in Washington is simply not working. I think he can do a lot to make politics more about issues rather than the diversions to which we have grown accustomed. He’s a man of his times who seems to understand the US better than most politicians.

Given that view, I was glad to read this piece by Frank Rich in today’s Times:

This is not 1988, when a Democratic liberal from Massachusetts of modest political skills could be easily clobbered by racist ads and an incumbent vice president running for the Gipper’s third term. This is not the 1998 midterms, when the Teflon Clintons triumphed over impeachment. This is not 2004, when another Democrat from Massachusetts did for windsurfing what the previous model did for tanks.

Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It’s why some prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco to his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.

We most certainly are at a unique time in our history. Though Clinton’s election would have been historic, she just wasn’t the right person for these times. Her support of the Iraq war, her role as a leader in the 90s, and her inability to understand that 2008 is not 1992 made her a DEEPLY flawed candidate among about half of the Democratic electorate.

Obama was in a better position to read and understand this country’s mood in 2008, and I think that is why he will earn the Democratic nomination and go on to be the first American president of the 21st century.

In 1992, I was living in Washington and found myself very involved in the Democratic primary there. I ran for delegate for Jerry Brown, and found that process to be an odd one. The Brown campaign called me and asked to run for delegate simply because I had shown up at a Jerry Brown event and put my name on a piece of paper.

I knew Brown reasonably well, as I grew up in California and I thought he was a great governor. Sure, his 1992 campaign was unconventional (it pre-dated mass use of the internet, but pundits made fun of his use of an 800 number to try to get contributions that he limited at $100 per donor). He had some guy name Joe Trippi running his campaign who was quite successful working for a guy who didn’t get the nomination, but made the race more difficult for Bill Clinton than it should have been.

Eventually, I joined the Clinton fold and tried to like him even to the point of attending his inauguration.

But I always had an uneasy feeling about him. I felt that he was willing to disregard political convictions in the name of political expediency.

The Monica thing bothered me most than most Democrats, as I thought that perhaps he should have resigned over the incredible stupidity and selfishness he demonstrated at the time.

But in 2000, after a brief flirtation with Bradley, I was firmly in the Gore camp. Beyond the Florida fiasco, Gore should have won that election and would have done so easily if not for the Clinton fatigue that plagued the nation.

Think of where our country would be right now if Gore had won. 9/11 may have happened, but Gore would have committed the resources to the effort in Afghanistan to definitively defeat the Taliban and to kill or capture Bin Laden.

Instead, Bush was in power and he diverted resources from the fight in Afghanistan to attack Iraq: a country with a horrible dictator who posed absolutely no threat to the US.

In the lead-up to the Iraq war, I was in the street protesting such idiocy, but people like me were called traitors and worse simply for not being deceived by Bush and his cronies.

I worked my ass off for Dean in 2004, but alas, it was not to be. I was glad to support Kerry, who, like Clinton, voted to authorize force against Iraq, but then later admitted that was a mistake. Good people learn from mistakes.

So in 2007, Hillary Clinton announced that she was going to run for president. She refused to admit that her war vote was a mistake. Apparently, Clintons don’t make mistakes. She was defiant to anti-Iraq war Democrats in that defense.

At that moment, she became an unacceptable candidate for me for 2008.

I began to believe that Clintonian excuses for lacking a backbone on important issues was no longer acceptable.  She never deserved my vote.

But if I loathed the Clintons, I really came to disdain the O’Reillys, Hannitys, Malkins, and Coulters even more. Those people were beneath my contempt for their dishonesty.

For that reason, it was quite strange to read Coulter’s column from today:

In a Time magazine poll taken earlier this year, more than twice as many voters said Bill Clinton’s involvement in Hillary’s campaign made them less likely to vote for her as said they were more likely to vote for her. (Some even said that “having Bill Clinton around makes me less likely to vote for What’s-Her-Name.” One-third of the respondents were upset Bill didn’t call the next day, like he promised.)

So before remembering that we are now left with two dangerous choices for president — a young liberal who is friendly with terrorists or an old liberal who is friendly with Teddy Kennedy — take a moment to revel in the fact that our long national nightmare is over. It turns out getting rid of the Clintons was the change we’ve been waiting for.

Of course, Coulter’s hyperbole about Obama and McCain are silly, but getting the Clintons out of the White House IS part of the change I’ve been waiting for.

The Clintons, the DLC, Terry McAullife, and that whole triangulation mindset are some things that need to be gone from the Democratic party if we hope to build the Democratic party and elect strong leaders in our future.

Update: It looks like a hoax.

After rewatching the clip, Pennebaker told the Politico’s Ben Smith, “He does not say that. He does not say that … What he says is he’s surprised Perot’s numbers are holding. He says they must be shitting in the White House.” Pennebaker also told Smith that when the movie was released in theaters, no one thought Kantor said what he’s now alleged to have said, and that he thinks audio was dubbed onto the original video. Smith also spoke to the editor of the YouTube clip, and reports the editor “said that he enhanced, but didn’t alter, the audio in the second portion of the video.”

  Ok, so I was duped. The disputed piece was taken off YouTube - you can see the full video here:

Bill Clinton moves the goalposts again:

Bill Clinton said Friday in Charlotte that his wife’s presidential bid hinges in many ways on whether the New York senator wins North Carolina’s Democratic primary.

Speaking to about 4,000 at a rally at UNC Charlotte, the former president said Hillary Clinton would likely have to win the state’s May 6 primary to have any chance at winning the overall popular vote and ultimately overtaking Sen. Barack Obama as the party’s nominee.

Heh.

Rasmussen has Obama up in North Carolina by 23%.

I can only imagine how badly the feelings  the feelings of NC voters will be hurt when they learn that like MO, MS, GA, VA and many other states when they learn on May 7 that their state doesn’t count.

From the New Yorker:

It’s been odd during this election cycle as some Clintonistas have asserted that Obama supporters are sexist for not supporting Senator Clinton, who they view as the most experienced and best qualified candidate. While dismissing such claims (which are the same as asserting that anyone who supports Clinton over Obama is a racist), I have been searching inside myself to try to figure out if my dislike of Clinton has anything to do with some kind of latent sexism.

I admit that on a certain level, when Clinton is angry and giving voice to her anger, I have a visceral reaction. I feel like I’m 14 years old and else’s mother is scolding me for leaving a dish in the sink. Her tone makes me want to dig in my heels and leave that damn dish in the sink, since it’s not my house and she didn’t explain the rules ahead of time. It really drives me batty.

Is that sexism? Maybe, but I’m not sure.

I think more of it has to do with tone and style than it does with any kind of sexism just as in the way when I see Bush’s smirk or his stuffed-crotch flight suit or hear him saying something stupid (yet again), my blood pressure goes up a few notches. My reaction is the same when Bill Clinton is angry and shakes that index finger in a “How dare you call me a liar!” kind of way.

There are always going to be politicians who will rub some of us the wrong way for different reasons that go beyond policy disagreements, but when I think of what my real issues with Clinton are, they do go to matters of history and policy issues.

I cannot forget that she and her husband were the poster children of DLC centrism that decimated the Democratic party for a generation. Rather than saying what they think, the Clintons believed that it was best to see what was a poll-tested winner; standing up for what right has always seemed less important to those two than getting elected as witnessed by Senator Clinton’s vote on Bush’s war (I knew Bush was lying, why couldn’t she figure it out? Oh, that’s right…she knew too) and her support for silly bills like legislation to ban flag-burning.

So, no, my dislike of Clinton has little to do with sexism. It has more to do with a lack of honesty and authenticity on her part.

Clinton’s words:

“I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country and people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.”

So Obama doesn’t love this country?

Way to inject a right-wing narrative  into the DEMOCRATIC campaign.

Ugh:

Chief Strategist Mark Penn said he would put Wyoming and Mississippi, the next two states to vote, “in what I call the challenging category for us,” because Obama has “some very significant leads,” but he downplayed Mississippi in pushing the campaign’s argument that Clinton does best in the states that matter, the blue states and noting that he couldn’t remember the last time Mississippi went Democratic in a presidential race.

Amazing, but not surprising. Penn seems to think that the only states that matter are those that Democrats can easily win no matter who gets the nomination.

Maybe if Democrats in the past had tried to compete in all 50 states, they wouldn’t have been such miserable failure in electoral politics since 1994 (thanks Bill!)

Clinton makes some very good points:

Now, one of Clinton’s laws of politics is this. If one candidate is trying to scare you and the other one is try get you to think, if one candidate is appealing to your fears and the other one is appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.

With that in mind, take a look at Hillary’s new ad in Ohio and Texas (the one in which she threatens that your sleeping white children will die if you vote for Obama).

 Yep. Just like Bill said. Vote for the one who wants you to think and hope.

There.

I said it and I’ll say it again.

Bill Clinton is an asshole.

From Canada.com

The feuding escalated Wednesday. Dick Harpootlian, an Obama supporter and former chairman of the Democratic party in South Carolina, likened the Clinton campaign’s tactics to those of Lee Atwater, the former Republican strategist who was accused of race-baiting in the 1988 presidential race between George H.W. Bush and Democrat Michael Dukakis, a former Massachusetts governor.

Atwater was responsible for the infamous “Willie Horton” ads that linked Dukakis to the release of a convicted rapist who committed murder after being let out of jail.

The comparison infuriated Bill Clinton, who lashed out at reporters Wednesday following an otherwise genial town hall meeting in Charleston.

“This is crazy. This rhetoric is getting a little carried away here,” the former president said.

“She did not play the race card, but (Obama’s campaign) did. They are feeding you this, because they know this is what you want to cover. This is what you live for … Shame on you. Shame on you.”

OK, Bill, wag your finger at us for accusing your wife of playing the race card and then turn it around on Obama.

But the facts about the race card used by the Hillary campaign are these:

Billy Shaheen:

“It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?”’ said Shaheen, whose wife, Jeanne, is the state’s former governor and is running for the U.S. Senate next year.

“There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome,” Shaheen said.

Yes, the problem will be Republicans implying that Obama was a drug dealer. The Clinton campaign would never reduce itself to that level.

Bob Kerrey likes:

“the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim.”

Later, in explaining his remarks, Kerrey threw another jab by saying he wasn’t troubled by the fact that Obama “spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa.”

Ah, Mr. Kerrey likes that Obama’s middle name is Hussein. I’m sure he loves how that will help his candidate.

Oh, and Obama spent a little time in a secular madrassa? You mean a secular school? Like the secular school that you attended as a child, Mr. Kerrey? Why use the word madrassa unless you are trying to plant doubt about Obama?”

Or BET Founder and Hillary supporter Bob Johnson’s remarks:

“To me, as an African American, I am frankly insulted the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues — when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood; I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book — when they have been involved.”

Plausible denial on Johnson’s part. How could anyone ever even think that Johnson was using the Clintonian tactic of race-baiting when Johnson was just simply speaking of Obama’s past as a community organizer when he (Obama) was “doing something in the neighborhood.”

But to get back to the original point, Bill Clinton is an asshole. His wife’s campaign has used race-baiting Lee Atwater tactics to try to destroy Obama. And then Bill accuses Obama of playing the race card.

I shake my finger as I say: Shame on you, Bill Clinton. Shame on you.