Dean Baker, feeling a little left out, says Obama’s new economics team is more Wall Street than Main Street.
I’m a little disappointed we weren’t given at least a somewhat more scurrilous rating. I mean, how many sex scandals do we have to give wall-to-wall coverage to be even a little scurrilous?
With an era of good feelings breaking out among Democrats nationwide, I hesitate to delve back into the acrimony and angst of the Obama-Clinton duel and all the anger it sowed between Democrats across the country. But I do it with a suggestion that may surprise some of you and one that questions my own earlier take.
I was never someone who thought Hillary was under any obligation to get out of the race until the end or even necessarily that she should have done so. What got me was her campaign’s harsh and strident attacks on Obama — one that often mimicked Republican attacks and which escalated in intensity as her hopes of beating him approached the vanishing point.
Hillary supporters claimed that there was nothing that Hillary was throwing at Obama that McCain and Co. wouldn’t be thrown at him later. So at a minimum she was helping him get the stuff behind him and perhaps even making him a stronger candidate.
This always struck me as what I can only very generously term a deeply disingenuous argument. And I still find it deeply disingenuous. But I’m coming around to the belief that it may have been an accurate one — much more than I realized or was willing to credit.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think Hillary was trying to do Barack any favors. (see Matthew 18:7) But looking forward, it seems far better to me that all the Reverend Wright, Rezko, Bitter and and all the rest are out there and run through and basically old news. Better they were run through in the spring than the summer or the fall.
What’s more, in these first few days of the general election, in addition to McCain’s and Obama’s fundamental qualities as candidates, I think it is increasingly evident that both campaigns are hitting the ground at very, very different speeds. Clinton gave Obama one hell of a run for his money. He’s been campaigning and fighting at a fever pitch — as has his whole campaign — for months. And it shows.
On the contrary, McCain’s operation is simply a wreck. Flabby. Disorganized. Sometimes comical. And one big reason for that is that McCain hardly won the nomination. It defaulted to him. Looked at with some distance and perspective the Republican race fell out as follows: Rudy imploded because of the combustible force of his own militant ridiculousness. Then Huckabee gutted Romney. And since Huckabee was too out there (ironically, simultaneously too sane and too looney to pass Republican muster) that left McCain. With the rest of the field flopping around like fish on dry land, McCain was able to sew the nomination quickly with pluralities in the GOP’s winner-take-all contests.
No discussion of this race would be complete without reference to the many damaging factors that are beyond McCain’s control — the collapse of public support for the Republican party, the Iraq War, the deep unpopularity of President Bush, etc. But when you see trainwrecks like the McCain camp’s lame effort to upstage Obama on his victory night with that lime green speech clunker, it becomes evident that this campaign just hasn’t had a chance to go head to head with a real competitor. And it shows.
VIPs — including a couple of U.S. senators — got special loan deals not available to the general public at subprime giant Countrywide.
For those of you who remember President Bush’s 2005 crusade to phase out Social Security by privatizing the program and converting it into a system of private investment accounts, you know that one of the biggest lines of bamboozlement was the White House’s attempt to take the word for Social Security privatization — i.e., ‘privatization’ — and pretend that it was a word Democrats had come up with and one that was unfair for any members of the press to use.
Needless to say, not only is ‘privatization’ an accurate description of the policy but it’s also the one Republicans came up with and the one they used until polls showed definitively that the American people want to preserve Social Security and weren’t for privatizing it. So ‘privatization’ was consigned to the memory hole and Republican spinmeisters tried to find as many ignorant or gullible journalists as they could to allow them to keep changing the name of their policy in order to trick the public into accepting a policy they didn’t like.
After they dropped ‘privatization’ they called it ‘private accounts’. And when ‘private accounts’ tanked too, they said that ‘private accounts’ wasn’t fair either. They were really ‘personal accounts.’ The whole thing just got silly and sad.
It didn’t work in 2005. But now McCain — he of the straight talk — is trotting it out again.
This video is from a townhall meeting in New Jersey just this morning …
M.J. Rosenberg hopes against hope that McCain makes Iraq the centerpiece of his campaign, as Krauthammer recommends.
In the post below I noted how John McCain is now going in for the same Social Security ‘privatization’ bamboozlement that President Bush did, claiming that calling his policy ‘privatization’ is some sort of lie or spin.
Here’s video of McCain using the word himself in 2004 and then claiming it’s all a bum rap just this morning. For more ins and outs of the policy and terminology issues, see the post below. To take the McCain flimflam straight up, no chaser, watch the vid …
The House government oversight committee will vote June 20 on whether to hold EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson and a White House OMB official in contempt for their failure to comply with congressional subpoenas.
Very sad news. Tim Russert has died of a heart attack, at 58. News started spreading within the last half hour through media and political circles. It’s now been confirmed by The New York Times.
Our deepest condolences to his family, friends and colleagues.
Late Update: Video of Tom Brokaw announcing Russert’s death on MSNBC this afternoon. Brian Williams was on location in Afghanistan and joined the newscast later.
Later Update: Russert’s final online chat at MSNBC.com, from earlier today.
Later Still: NBC’s Chuck Todd reminisces about Russert: