1) From the New York Times, “My Plan for Iraq” by Barack Obama. Barack Obama and his minions are responding fiercely albeit ineffectively to the notion that the presumptive Democratic nominee is a flip-flopper. They figure they have to respond in this fashion, since flip-flopping doomed John Kerry’s campaign. Well, flip-flopping and swiftboating. But John Kerry wasn’t a flip-flopper. Seriously. I’m from Massachusetts, so I know. Kerry was something much worse – a straddler. Actually, he was something much, much worse – a clumsy and maladroit straddler. Throughout his political career, Kerry has had a pathological need to get on both sides of hot button issues. During the presidential campaign, this tendency raised its hideous head several times. Everyone remembers the infamous I-voted-for-it-before-I-voted-against-it line, but more telling was Kerry’s little pirouette on abortion. One day, Kerry asserted his total commitment to a woman’s right to choose. With his next breath, he reminded the press corps that as a matter of his Catholic faith he did however consider abortion murder. People from Massachusetts had long grown accustomed to this Kerry habit long before he won the Democratic nomination, and it’s why we couldn’t believe the Democratic party had been so foolish to tab Kerry. Gephardt wouldn’t have been that bad! Straddles like the abortion one had the precise opposite effect of what Kerry intended – they annoyed each and every voter, regardless of where he stood on the substantive issue. In my earliest blogging days, I referred to Kerry’s uncanny ability to bug both sides while employing craven efforts to please both sides as “The Kerry Magic.” Incredibly, Barack Obama is showing the same habit. The members of the left who are still fuming over his FISA betrayal will recognize the disingenuous and downright Kerry-esque penchant for seizing both sides of an issue. Remember that thing he posted on his website about how much he hated the bill that he had just supported? The fact is, flip-flopping won’t lead to Obama’s doom. The public expects its politicians to flip-flop or to evolve or to lie – choose whichever term of art is most to your liking. The Kennedys had a brilliant line that they used to explain their evolutions: It’s not where you come from, but where you stand. But the public does demand some reasonable level of clarity on where a politician stands. On Iraq, Team Obama has become stuck in a quagmire of confusion. On Meet the Press yesterday, leading Obama surrogate Claire McCaskill said that Obama’s 16 month surrender plan in Iraq is a “goal” and added it would be “irresponsible for a commander-in-chief to set a date in stone.” And yet today, the titular head of Team Obama took to the pages of New York Times and declared:
That sounds sort of “set in stone” to me. Meanwhile Obama is trotting off to Iraq this week with “Republican” Chuck Hagel in tow to lend the voyage some military bona fides. Hagel’s the guy who long ago called the surge, “The most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” Then again, I guess Hagel still makes a far more credible traveling companion than Harry Reid would. And what’s the purpose of this trip? Ostensibly to talk to the commanders so Obama can further refine his plan which isn’t set in stone. Unless you like it as is, in which case you may consider it set in stone. Until further notice. 2) From the New Yorker, “Cover Illustration of the Obamas” (seen below) by some guy who really pissed off a lot of people.
On “The Simpsons,” there’s a character named Montgomery Burns. The richest man in town, Mr. Burns delights in despoiling the environment and “releasing the hounds” on unwelcome visitors, especially children. In one episode, he almost fulfilled mankind’s long-held ambition of blocking out the sun. Some conservative Simpsons critics long believed that the Montgomery Burns character was meant to mock rich people. But because the character was so over the top, it more served to mock the simplistic and Manichean views some liberals have of rich people. The same is obviously true of the New Yorker’s controversial cover. It doesn’t mock the Obamas – it mocks idiots who see the Obamas as the type of people who burn the American flag in their study while engaging in a terrorist fist-bump. Not everyone has gotten the joke. My favorite reaction to date has come from Pandagon.net, the blogging home of Amanda Marcotte, the Edwards campaign’s controversial blogger that you may remember from last year. Pandagon is home to perhaps the shrillest version of feminism on the web, and yet the site’s Jesse Taylor responded to the cartoon with a lecture on humor. “The hallmark of good satire,” Taylor scolds, “is that it’s good enough to perhaps be taken credulously by those who aren’t too swift, but also ridiculous enough to show that whoever does take it seriously is a bit slow in the head. This is not good satire.” Strident and perennially outraged feminists posing as the arbiters of good humor? Take it from one who knows – if those comments were themselves intended as satire, they would be the equivalent of satire gold. The interesting thing about this episode is Obama’s reaction. One thing about Obama that hasn’t been discussed much is his seemingly congenital lack of a sense of humor. I’ve spoken with Mopeds who had better senses of humor. Anyone who has labored through Obama’s books knows what I’m talking about – this is a guy who seldom jokes, and who never jokes about things he takes seriously. Like himself. Yesterday afternoon, Obama reacted to the cover tersely:
By last night, Obama and his campaign had predictably pivoted into full high dudgeon mode. In doing so, he blew an opportunity to show some regular guy bona fides. This was a cartoon that came from friends. The New Yorker ain’t exactly the Weekly Standard, you know. And when you sign up for a presidential campaign, you have to know that you’ll be mocked in every imaginable way. Obama could have and should have laughed this off. He could have demonstrated an ability to laugh at himself and not take himself so seriously. Instead, we are left to marvel at what a dour and humorless chap this Obama fellow has turned out to be. 3) From the New Yorker, “Making It” by Ryan Lizza This piece is so long, I’m seriously considering changing my preferred adjective for an overly lengthy and flabby piece of reportage from Greenwaldian to Lizza-esque. Still, the piece is important. So if you don’t have a few spare hours this afternoon, I recommend you check out Scott Johnson’s excellent (and necessary) Reader’s Digest-style condensation at his Powerline site. I do want to take a moment to call your attention to one particularly revealing part of the story. Lizza excerpts Obama’s newspaper column of 9/19/01 that reacted to the horrific events of a week earlier:
Okay, you’re probably so distracted and annoyed by the stifling political correctness and overarching wimpiness that you’re missing the other trademark Obama trait on display here. In the above passage, he regurgitated virtually every left wing cliché that was in vogue at the time. He did (and does) that all the time. He’s also completely wrong on everything. That happens a lot, too. One hopes that Obama has since learned that it wasn’t Osama bin Laden’s or Mohammed Atta’s abject poverty that brought the towers down. One has less hope that he’ll abandon his habit of substituting a recitation of clichés for actual intellectual inquiry any time soon. 4) From the New York Post, “Net-Roots Ninnies” by Kirsten Powers. Love the title, so had to put it in the Required Reading. Unfortunately, Powers isn’t really right. As a Democrat lashing out at the Netroots for engaging in childish self-indulgence for bashing Obama over things like his FISA betrayal, Powers takes special aim at Markos Moulitsas:
Far be it from me to serve as Kos’ Boswell, but Powers doesn’t quite communicate the potency and effectiveness of Kos’ political tactics. Seeing the decline of the Republican party a few years ago, Kos figured it would be a good idea for the Democrats to distinguish themselves in every way possible from the GOP brand. It’s tough to argue with that tack. While much of this has been accomplished with stylistics including overheated and oft-juvenile rhetoric, the creation of a GOP vs. Not GOP paradigm obviously benefited the Democrats in 2006 and figures to do the so again in ’08. Subscribing to this political weltanschauung, Moulitsas thus feels it’s an enormous strategic blunder for Obama to systematically engage in blurring the lines between himself and McCain. Given that the McCain campaign had a wretched go of it last week and Obama still managed to lose ground thanks to his serial straddles, it’s a distinct possibility that the Netroots have a point when they shriek that Obama’s tactics are misguided. Powers is, however, completely right that the Netroots can be a bunch of ninnies. If you want to see them in they’re full ninny-dom and have a strong stomach, check out some of the Daily Kos threads from the weekend where dozens of commenters virtually danced on Tony Snow’s grave. But at their higher level, the Netroots have some pretty savvy political minds. It ill-behooves both moderate Democrats and conservative Republicans to deny that inconvenient truth. 5) From the New York Times, “The Character of Optimism” by Bill Kristol The authors of the many moving tributes to Tony Snow have fallen into three categories – those who were Snow’s longtime friends and admirers, those who brushed up against Tony and came away impressed by his decency and those who only knew him from afar. Bill Kristol knew him well for decades – the sense of loss that everyone who knew Tony feels from his too-soon passing is profound. There’s also a sense of unfairness. Tony was still a young man with a limitless future and much to do down here. It’s unfair not only to him but the rest of us that we won’t have him around. I knew Tony Snow the way the vast majority of you did – only through my TV, radio and newspaper. I never spoke with him; neither did we exchange a single email. Also like most of you, I found Tony Snow a profoundly good man. I felt strongly about this, even though I never met him. His final passage seems to have been marked by an unusual amount of warmth, goodness and contentedness. Such was the case with his entire life.
