Republicans obviously have a vested interest in the Democratic presidential primaries, and nothing warms their hearts more than the brewing identity politics battle on that side of the aisle. As David Brooks pointed out last week, the first viable female candidate for president and the first viable African-American candidate for president are reaping what their party has sown–and Democratic apparatchiks couldn’t be more terrified. On This Week, Katrina vanden Heuvel said that she thinks “the important thing is that this race not become a fractious fight about race and gender.” And why, pray tell, is it important not to race bait this time around? As former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd pointed out in response to Vanden Heuvel’s comment,
On the Republican side, the sniping between Mitt Romney and John McCain is getting almost as nasty; the former Massachusetts governor used his time on Fox News Sunday to accuse Sen. McCain of, essentially, being a corrupt pawn of special interest groups. “I just don’t think that somebody who has spent their life inside Washington, that has lobbyists on every elbow, that has been chairman of one committee or another, and has all those connections, and all the favors that are owed, and owed in return, all of the scores to settle: I just don’t think that’s going to get Washington fixed,” Romney said. Nevermind the irony of calling one of the Washington insiders committed to cutting pork barrel spending a pawn of lobbyists; consider instead the irony of Romney, whose key advisors (as Glen Johnson rudely, argumentatively, and unprofessionally pointed out on the campaign trail) are, you guessed it: lobbyists!
Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson showed up on Face the Nation to talk about his boss’s big win in Nevada, noting that, regardless of how many delegates each side picked up, the junior senator from New York had a much better weekend than the junior senator from Illinois:
Over at Meet the Press, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin lamented the fact that Obama’s historical literacy–specifically his muted praise of Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement’s injection of ideas into our political discourse–may have cost him support from movement types like Markos Moulitsas:
Indeed.
