Perhaps this is obvious. But it seems to me that the real reason the Democratic primary race has gone from heated to vicious (at least among the candidates’ supporters, if not the candidates themselves) is precisely because we’re in this awkward seven week hiatus in which there are no actual elections being held. Actual voting, rightly, has served as the closest thing to a referee this on-going contest has. So each side would have it at for a week or so. And then we’d have some voting. And despite all the efforts to spin the results on both sides they’d still have an undeniable effect. After South Carolina, Hillary seriously rejiggered her approach. After Ohio and Texas, Obama’s camp decided that certain attacks against them had stuck. All the acrimony and spin notwithstanding, the regular input of voters had the effect of keeping the campaigns on something like a common narrative. Without them, we are stuck with the same, unchanging stubborn set of facts: Obama has a relatively narrow lead which, under the DNC’s rules, is nevertheless extremely difficult to overcome. And each side is left cycling over into more and more heated iterations of the same arguments, like a cascade into mounting levels of mania, at least among supporters if not always the campaigns themselves.
That doesn’t mean that both side’s arguments have equal merit. For my part, I think the Obama campaign has far the better part of it. But I think it does explain why we’re now in this self-escalating spiral.
Does McCain have al Qaeda on the brain? And which Democratic campaign is definitively evil? We run down the key questions raised on this weekends Sunday shows …
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
In today’s White House press briefing, pay particular attention to Dana Perino’s not-so-subtle use of the sentiments of fallen soldiers’ families (at least as they are relayed by the President himself) to reinforce support for his Iraq policy:
As the Clinton campaign now concedes, Sen. Clinton’s claims about running from their military aircraft to evade sniper fire are not borne out by the video of the events in question. Now still others have come forward to dispute her account. And there’s even more. Sen. Clinton has said on a number of occasions that she was “the first, you know, high- profile American to go into Bosnia after the peace accords were signed because we wanted to show that the United States was 100 percent behind the agreement.”
But this also seems to incorrect.
According to some quick research we did, it turns out that Madeleine Albright, then UN Ambassador, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs John Shalikashvili, then-Sec Def Bill Perry, various members of Congress and President Clinton himself had all visited Tuzla a few months earlier.
I think the real story here though is the big picture. People have faulty memories. Things get dramatized in people’s recollections. And despite what happened on the ground, they did do one of those evasive ‘cork-screw’ descents [see update below] meant to guard against taking incoming fire, a relatively routine measure in conflict and post-conflict settings but one that I’m sure made everyone on board feel palpably that this wasn’t some flight to Paris or Madrid. But this is an anecdote that’s become something close to a staple of her foreign policy experience resume. And it’s pretty clearly false. And it comes in the context of a whole slew of exaggerations — some minor, some major — that she’s used to puff up her Commander-in-Chief resume.
As I noted a few weeks back, I don’t think you need to be a veteran or someone who’s done foreign policy work in the executive branch. Bill Clinton didn’t have any. I think both Clinton and Obama are perfectly capable of being good presidents and able commanders-in-chief — certainly they’d pursue wiser polices than John McCain. But in trying to push this argument that she and John McCain stand on one side of the foreign policy divide (aka, Commander-in-Chief threshold) and Obama on the other she’s had to make a series of arguments that are just plain silly.
Late Update: Apparently the military aircraft did not make a ‘corkscrew’ landing but rather what the Post refers to as a ‘very fast descent’ (not sure if they mean a steep descent). In any case, as per what I said above, not sure this greatly changes things. Memories aren’t perfect; maybe she doesn’t know the difference, etc. But wanted to set the record straight.
McClatchy reports:
A cease-fire critical to the improved security situation in Iraq appeared to unravel Monday when a militia loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr began shutting down neighborhoods in west Baghdad and issuing demands of the central government.
Simultaneously, in the strategic southern port city of Basra, where Sadr’s Mahdi militia is in control, the Iraqi government launched a crackdown in the face of warnings by Sadr’s followers that they’ll fight government forces if any Sadrists are detained. By 1 a.m. Arab satellite news channels reported clashes between the Mahdi Army and police in Basra.
Will Bunch was at the Daily News editor board session with Hillary Clinton today. And in the process of asking her a delegate number crunching question she told him, “And also remember that pledged delegates in most states are not pledged. You know, there is no requirement that anybody vote for anybody. Theyâre just like superdelegates.”
Technically this is true. In fact, I believe that all of the delegates at the Democratic Convention can do whatever they want. They may have been elected to be a Clinton or Obama delegate. And they’re ‘pledged’ to vote for that candidate. But once they’re on the floor of the hall they actually free to do whatever they want.
But it’s basically a non-point because campaigns don’t choose just anyone to serve as a delegate. They pick the absolute hardest core supporters of their candidate. So the odds of any delegate getting flipped are basically nil.
It’s also another example of the fog of nonsense that has increasingly enveloped the Clinton campaign. Spin is one thing. And it’s not a bad thing. But to have utility it must be tethered to some relevant facts, some kind of reality. Otherwise it just descends into ridiculousness. There’s always some new clever but inane argument to twist ‘up’ into something at least somewhat resembling ‘down’. Or if not that, enough to keep your head spinning long enough not to notice for a while that 2 and 2 still equals 4. It’s like getting snowed by a precocious adolescent or maybe Jon Lovitz’s Tommy Flanagan.
Usually this malarkey comes out of the mouth of Mark Penn. But it seems to be infectious.
You probably noticed that the JPMorgan buy out deal of Bear Stearns has now been renegotiated with JPMorgan now agreeing to pay $10 a share as opposed to the $2 preliminarily agreed last week. The fact that the dollar price could expand fivefold so easily gives some graphic sense of how arbitrary some of these dollar amounts are or perhaps how little real sense people have of the degree of risk and value tied to these enterprises. But when I saw this change the first thing that occurred to me was whether we were able to pull any our of our (i.e., the public) money off the table when the deal for the Bear Stearns shareholders got dramatically sweetened. It seems that the answer is yes, to some degree at least. But the terms still seem a little unclear to me.
From today’s article in the Post comes this expanded detail …
As part of the new Bear Stearns deal, the Fed’s role was also renegotiated. The central bank originally had agreed to put public dollars on the line to guarantee $30 billion of risky mortgages owned by Bear Stearns. In the reworked deal, J.P. Morgan agreed to cover the first $1 billion in losses if the value of those securities falls, with the Fed responsible for any losses beyond that.
Presumably the idea here is that the substantial risk of loss is in that first $1 billion while the remaining liability is real but much less risky. So it becomes less a bail-out than a wisely deployed insurance policy on liabilities the Fed has some ability to gauge. But are they sure that’s true? I don’t have the financial knowledge to even begin to game out and answer. And even if I did I think I’d need some access to the company’s records to have any sense of what’s going on.
But let’s remember, as far as Bear’s shareholders are concerned, the company should have been allowed to fail and all those shareholders to be cleaned out. The logic of any level of bail out is that the collateral effects of the company’s collapse would be too damaging to the country’s financial sector. So any lifeline to the company’s shareholders is a secondary effect of the achieving the public good of financial sector stability. So before the Bear shareholders start recouping any of their losses I would think that the risk the public is on the line for from this deal should be reduced to little or nothing.
White House strategy on Iraq troop levels: Let’s just play it vague and maybe no one will notice we’re kicking this on to the next President.