Historians: McCain is Doomed

Since Obama wrapped up the nomination, I’ve been feeling better about his chances, despite the protests of the Clinton dead-enders.

I’m glad to see that my optimism is well-founded, according to some historians:

One week into the general election, the polls show a dead heat. But many presidential scholars doubt that John McCain stands much of a chance, if any.

Historians belonging to both parties offered a litany of historical comparisons that give little hope to the Republican. Several saw Barack Obama’s prospects as the most promising for a Democrat since Roosevelt trounced Hoover in 1932.

More:

“It is one of the worst political environments for the party in power since World War II,” added Alan Abramowitz, a professor of public opinion and the presidency at Emory University. His forecasting model — which factors in gross domestic product, whether a party has completed two terms in the White House and net presidential approval rating — gives McCain about the same odds as Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and Carter in 1980 — both of whom were handily defeated in elections that returned the presidency to the previously out-of-power party. “It would be a pretty stunning upset if McCain won,” Abramowitz said.

What’s more, Republicans have held the presidency for all but 12 years since the South became solidly Republican in the realignment of 1968 — which is among the longest runs with one party dominating in American history. “These things go in cycles,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. “The public gets tired of one approach to politics. There is always a measure of optimism in this country, so they turn to the other party.”

I’m not breaking out the champagne just, yet, but things are looking damn good, especially since Obama is showing that he’s not afraid to fight back against GOP smears.

We are going to do this.

Lanny Davis: Clinton Supporters’ Feelings Are Easily Hurt

Life must have been hard for Lanny Davis as a Lieberman supporter, especially given all the flack the poor Joe was given by Democrats. He must have really gotten upset when that Ned Lamont decided to run against and then beat Holy Joe in the Democratic primary. Lanny must have felt vindicated when Lieberman beat Lamont in November of 2006, and so now he must feel even better that Lieberman will share the stage with John Hagee (the man whose endorsement Lieberman’s BFF rejected) at Hagee’s Armageddon Conference.

But, today, Lanny’s not worried about Joe. He’s worried that that big meanie Barack Obama has intentionally enraged Clinton supporters. From his list of Four Things the Obama Campaign Couldn’t Resist Doing to Anger Clinton Supporters:

1. Couldn’t resist waiting one day after Sen. Clinton won West Virginia by 41 points to announce John Edwards endorsement.

So in other words, he’s mad because Obama had the nerve to practice smart politics by trying to change the media narrative through an announcement of a major endorsement the day after being thumped in WV? Damn that Obama!

2. Couldn’t resist waiting to win majority of ALL delegates (not just pledged delegates) to do victory lap speech in Iowa the night Hillary won Kentucky by 36 points.

Well, I would hardly call Obama’s speech that night a victory lap. But Clinton wouldn’t celebrate a little if she won the majority of pledged delegates that night? Or would she have waited a day or two out of sensitivity to Obama’s big win in Oregon?

3. Couldn’t resist waiting to win majority of all delegates to announce Jim Johnson as VP search committee head…

Snip

Obama wouldn’t confirm or deny the that Mr. Johnson has been appointed to head the VP search effort. That makes many Clinton supporters feel uneasy about Senator Obama.

At this point, Obama’s choice of a soft drink would make Clinton supporters feel uneasy about him (“He drinks DIET Coke? Who does that pansy elitist think he is??”). It’s apparent that Obama is the likely nominee. Why let John McCain get a huge head start on the VP selection process? Or would Clinton supporters prefer that Obama not think about a VP until the convention in August?

4. Couldn’t resist listing Bill Richardson as under consideration for Veep – the one Red Flag name that infuriates even moderate Clinton supporters the most — not because he chose to endorse Sen. Obama, but the way he did it, i.e., his inability to avoid making negative comments about Sen. Clinton while doing so — another person who sometimes can’t resist the temptation of not being gracious when he should be, a great disappointment to many of his former close friends from the Clinton camp and which will not be forgotten.

Hmm. I know that Richardson is Judas, and that makes Clinton Jesus, but I’m having a hard time finding much Clinton bashing in Richardson’s endorsement. The worst I could find was this:

I believe the campaign has gotten too negative. I want it to be positive.

So I’m wondering what Obama has really done that has upset the delicate sensibilities of Clinton supporters. My list looks something like this:

1. Obama chose to run.

2. Obama ran.

3. Obama is on the verge of winning.

Did I miss anything?

It’s Obama!!! Or Maybe Not!!!

From CNN:

Despite Hillary Clinton’s landslide victory in Kentucky, Barack Obama has won a majority of pledged delegates in the race for the Democratic nomination.

Clinton won Kentucky by more than 30 points, but Obama’s share of the state’s 51 delegates was enough put him over the threshold, according to CNN estimates.

So Obama will be our nominee unless he’s not. He has the majority of pledged delegates which should determine that he will be the nominee, but maybe that won’t matter.

But seriously, part of me is starting to think this is finally over.

Unless it’s not.

Responding to a Clinton Supporter

From Roseanne’s Blog:

After she (Arriana Huffington) dutifully helped the misogynists in the dem party to completely destroy the woman day after day with comments about her body, her husband, her mental capacities, attacking her for having no morals, equating her feminism with “beltway politics of the past” and ultimately laying the blame for all of Iraq at her feet, it makes me sick to even visit huffington post.

I’ve been looking around some of the pro-Clinton blogs in the past few days to try to understand the bitterness coming from that camp. Roseanne sums up the way they are feeling and what many are thinking right now, and I don’t get it.

I don’t remember hearing anyone making remarks about Clinton’s body, and the only person that I can remember who questioned Clinton’s mental capacities was her husband when he tried to explain “sniper-gate” by saying that she was tired and over sixty.

Bill Clinton most certainly is a legitimate issue for her opponents to bring up, since she pins much of her experience credibility on her time as first lady, but she seems to only accept responsibility only for the good things that happened during their tenure in the White House. And when President Clinton says controversial things on the campaign trail, he is acting as a representative of her campaign, so certainly, his words certainly are a legitimate issue.

Clinton may have been attacked for having no morals, but aren’t all politicians open to attack in that area? Don’t many people believe that politicians are, by definition, amoral?

Feminism certainly is not the “beltway politics of the past,” Roseanne. I don’t think that anyone has suggested that it is. When we talk about “the beltway politics of the past,” we’re not talking about feminism. In fact, it’s the last thing on our minds. We’re talking about the petty bickering in Washington that has consumed our politics for way too long and in which the Clintons certainly played a role. How you could equate that with an attack on feminism is baffling.

The Iraq war and Clinton’s vote are legitimate issues, too. I don’t know anyone who thinks the war was entirely Clinton’s fault, but she does bear some responsibility, as do other Democratic politicians who supported it. For many of them, that vote seemed to be one of pure political calculation – at the time it was thought that voting against the war would be political suicide. I put John Kerry in the camp as well, but Kerry now admits that the vote was wrong. Clinton remains unrepentant about that vote. Sorry, Roseanne, but you can’t expect people who were against the war at the time to think she has a lot of credibility on the issue. In fact, I think that vote is a major reason that she will not likely be the Democratic nominee.

And if you don’t like to read the Huffington Post, don’t.

I respect Senator Clinton and her supporters. It’s been a really long and tough campaign, but these cries of victimization and threats to vote for McCain (whose Supreme Court appointments will set feminism back a generation or two) don’t serve your cause well.

Keep fighting for your candidate, but please don’t feel like it’s a personal attack if Obama wins the nomination based on the established rules that we had going into the primary. A lot of those rules stink, and they need to be reformed, but Obama will likely win by playing within that framework.

Joe Biden – My New Best Friend

Er, not really. But it’s nice to see a Washington Democrat as if he’s mad about something.

In case you missed it:

Speaking before the Knesset, Bush said that “some people” believe the United States “should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.”

“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Bush said. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Biden’s response?

“This is bullshit, this is malarkey. This is outrageous, for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, to sit in the Knesset … and make this kind of ridiculous statement.”

Why can’t more Democrats just say what’s on their minds?

Anti-Rationalism

There was a piece in the Washington Post in February by Susan Jacoby that brought up a concept I have discussed before as “agressive ignorance” among some American voters, but had never seen described as “anti-rationalism:“

The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism — a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. (“Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture,” Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a “change election,” the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

The entire article is worth a read, given the state of our political discourse.

Remember when the rap against Kerry was the he spoke French? Or when people voted for Bush because they would like to have a beer with him?

Obama and Foreign Policy

In the last day or two, it seems that Obama has been getting a lot of flack for this statement:

Foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton and Senator McCain.

It was taken a little bit out of context by the Clinton and McCain camps to demonstrate what a naive neophyte Obama must be. After all, McCain has visited 69 countries as a senator and Clinton traveled all over as first lady. While certainly those experiences have value, it’s hard to imagine how such official visits would give those senators a perspective on the world’s people and how they live that’s much deeper than a tourist visiting Europe on a package tour.

Obama, on the other hand may not have the extensive foreign policy credentials (in the official Washington sense) that McCain has, but the time he spent as a child in Indonesia and in Kenya with his family had a profound effect on him in understanding how people live and what they believe. They are experiences that go way beyond official tourism, as anyone who has lived abroad for any extended period of time knows.

In Obama’s words:

“This I know. When Senator Clinton brags, ‘I’ve met leaders from 80 countries,’ I know what those trips are like. I’ve been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There’s a group of children who do a native dance. You meet with the C.I.A. station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of plant that” with “the assistance of Usaid has started something. And then, you go.”

I knew what Sunni and Shia was before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

To be fair, yes, McCain did live in Vietnam for many years as a POW, and while his service was heroic, it doesn’t seem that kind of experience would be particularly helpful in forming a balanced view of the Vietnamese people.

In 2000, McCain said:

I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.

While he may have been referring to the prison guards, that kind of statement doesn’t demonstrate a strong understanding or sensitivity to people outside of this country that someone with Obama’s experience living and learning abroad might possess.