TPM Reader MO thinks Pawlenty’s gambit for a primary campaign personality cult may not be such a bad play after all …
Just watched the clip and wanted to make the comment that, sure, it’s bombastic. That’s the whole point, I think. Previously, what was Pawlenty known for? Boring, milquetoast candidate. I actually find it a bit refreshing for a Republican to try to get some buzz with something that is over-the-top without talking about “Second Amendment remedies”, recalling the tragedy of 9/11 (note that he smartly doesn’t put the Towers in the video when he talked about what adversity this country has faced), or pandering to the rabid back through race, ethnic, or religious-baiting. If a Republican were to be our next President, I would take Pawlenty over the likes of Romney or Guiliani, et. all any day.
I take the point. And I guess like Demon Sheep there are points for originality and thinking outside the box. And yes, points for Pawlenty for not having the disempowered masses defending themselves against Orwellian bureaucrats with their AKs and Glocks. But still, I just feel like precisely because Pawlenty seems like such a soft soap, this sort of man of destiny stuff just comes off a little farcical. Read More
Everybody who’s got the ego to run for president has to think they’re a man or woman of destiny. And I bet even Tim Pawlenty does.
But it’s still not great to make your tv ads based on man of destiny imagery and edits. I’d defer to any students of film — maybe Roger Ebert can help us — but it seems to be part of the ‘sci-fi-archival-footage-jet-fighter-heroic’ genre, with perhaps an homage to Minority Report worked in.
You simply must watch this Tim Pawlenty ad.
Lieberman says he would have won but decided to retire anyway.
We’ve gotten news that Rahm Emanuel has gotten tossed off the mayoral ballot by an appellate court in Illinois. We don’t have a sense yet of whether this is something his team has a good shot of reversing or not. But I must confess I find the whole issue sort of perplexing. I’m not particularly invested in the result one way or another. But election eligibility laws generally have very big exceptions for service in the federal government. And Rahm was first a congressman from Chicago and then the White House chief of staff. It really seems open and shut. The fact that he was leasing his Chicago home doesn’t seriously suggest he wasn’t planning on returning. If anything, the opposite.
Again, I don’t know the caselaw involved. And this is really an issue for Chicagoans. But I’m genuinely surprised this is even an issue.
Former Sen. George Allen (R-VA) announces plan to recapture the Senate seat he lost to Jim Webb in 2006, calls it “American Comeback”.
Don’t expect Google to shift on Net Neutrality when co-founder Larry Page takes over as CEO this spring.
President Obama met last month with former Bush advisor/campaign strategist Matthew Dowd.
Momentum builds for Ogden, Utah to buck the recent trend of cities buying their own aerial surveillance drones and instead purchase an unmanned surveillance blimp.
If you’re not aware of it, I want to draw your attention to an open letter to the president that went out last week calling on the President and the Secretary of State either to support or, more plausibly, not to veto an upcoming Security Council resolution condemning on-going Israeli settlement activity in the Occupied Territories. For the US to allow something like this to go forward is usually close to unthinkable. But this new resolution has the awkward dimension of lining up pretty exactly with longstanding US policy, which considers the settlements not only an impediment to peace but in violation of international law.
The signatories are some folks you’d expect and also some you would not.
Whether or not this initiative succeeds though I believe we’re going to see more of this, particularly a new willingness to rethink some of the conventions of the US-Israel relationship and a growing realization that the Israelis and Palestinians are unable to solve this impasse on their own. Some of this is rooted in changing views among American Jews. And some is rooted in the increasingly obvious toll the never-ending impasse takes on US interests in the region and indeed throughout the world. For the futures of both countries, Israelis and Palestinians are in great need of an outside force to help settle the matter. And in the nature of things probably only the US can be that force.