What I like about Obama's pick is that it appears he truly thought about which candidate would be best for the job. He didn't pick Biden because of his rock star persona, or based on some calculation that he could deliver this or that state, but simply because he thought he was best qualified. Good for him.
After the Heller decision was handed down, I wondered whether and to what extent it would affect the ACLU's nonsensical position on the Second Amendment.
Well, there's some news on that score. First, the good. The Nevada branch of the ACLU has openly embraced the second amendment as a constitutional right for private citizens. Here's hoping other local branches will follow suit.
Because at the national level? The organization's official stance has gone from the merely embarrassing to the howlingly idiotic and jaw-droppingly hypocritical.
The ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right. Therefore, we disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller.
Then they go on about how Heller didn't specify precisely how much regulation was permissible, so they're just staying out of it. Amazing, isn't it? We're still arguing over the precise limits of freedom of speech and search and seizure (and likely always will) so by the same logic, the ACLU should remain neutral on 1st and 4th amendment cases until all that ugliness gets sorted out, right?
I've been an ACLU member for some time now, and I've always had to accept that the organization had a political bias that I didn't always agree with. I sucked it up, however, because I felt the work they did was important. But this? This is just a goddam shame and disgrace.
My membership is up for renewal, so I think I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to send my membership dues (and maybe a little extra) to the Nevada chapter. I'll also send a letter to the national chapter explaining precisely why I won't be renewing this year.
It may be a while before they get around to reading my letter, though. I was gratified to see that plenty of others were already giving the ACLU hell for this in the comments section of their own blog. The commentary was fierce and damned near unanimous. Here's a sampling.
So pretty much, your policy went from “we agree with the decision in US v Miller that gun ownership is not a constitutional right” to “we disagree with DC V Heller and still believe that gun ownership is not a constitutional right”, meaning that despite whatever ruling is laid down, the ACLU will be against the individual right of private gun ownership....Well, now it’s confirmed, you are nothing more that a bunch of left wing hacks who could give a flying fuck about the Bill of Rights.
Q: How does an ACLU lawyer count to 10?
A: 1, 3, 4, 5 . . .
The ACLU’s position was wrong before Heller; to maintain it now is absurd. Not one of the justices in Heller endorsed the “collective rights” viewpoint. If the ACLU believes that it is the best public policy that individuals should not own guns, it should campaign for the removal of the 2nd Amendment from the Constitution. By instead arguing for a ridiculously narrow judicial interpretation of that amendment, it is undermining its argument for a broad reading of the rest of the Bill of Rights it so treasures.
I don’t know why this the only consitutional right the ACLU doesn’t defend. The Bill of Rights protects the rights of INDIVIDUALS, so the idea that the Bill of Rights protects a “collective right” is absolutely preposterous. The ACLU needs to change its position on the Second Amendment from the politically correct orthodox liberal position to the truly civil libertarian position. We cannot pick and choose which rights are worthy of more protection than others.
If the ACLU wants to maintain its credibility as the defender of the bill of rights then it must endorse the 2nd amendment as an individual right, and not maintain its pathetic stance claiming it disagrees with the SCOTUS. The fat lady has sung. Get with the program.
I just took the money I had slated to re-up my lapsed ACLU membership and used it to re-up my NRA membership.Sorry ACLU you lost me.
ACLU,You’ve lost another American here. I will never donate a cent to your organization of crazy, intolerant lefties.... Your arguments are incredibly lame.
The ACLU is full of fail, this shows it.What the real name of this organization is, American Civil Liberties that we support Union.
What a joke.
My post was not vulgar, did not violate any of the rules of this site, and was still deleted.I guess you worthless people have given up on the first amendment as well.
I’ll briefly re-state what I said in my first post: I am a Liberal as well as a gun owner, and I will no longer support you.
And there's much, much more. As of right now, there are just under a thousand such comments, all more or less the same. The fact that the ACLU (LOL!) is apparently deleting many of them just makes them look even more foolish than their brain-dead, inconsistent and indefensible reaction to Heller.
If this tidal wave of blowback is any indication, I wonder whether they'll eventually be forced to reconsider? I hope so. In the meantime, my money's going to Nevada... and the NRA.
During a recent phone call with my mom, she was talking about something or other that Oprah Winfrey had said on TV or radio that had got her somewhat agitated. She started going on about it, perhaps trying to agitate me as well. I interrupted and patiently explained that I don't give a damn what Oprah thinks or says about anything.
That's kinda how I feel about this story too. Seriously, why is this big news? It certainly won't damage the Obama campaign (if anything it'll help.) I suppose it could be theoretically damaging to Jackson himself, but really, c'mon. As I've said previously, the man is an ignoramus -- a complete and utter ass whose fifteen minutes mercifully expired decades ago. So while I did get a chuckle at the mental image of Jesse "ripping Obama's nuts out," is it really news what Jesse Jackson says or thinks about anybody?
First let me be clear about something. I have every intention of voting for John McCain in November, barring some earth-shaking change in the interim. I've always liked McCain, and I think his nomination by the GOP was a positive development for the party that should be rewarded.
But that being said, I'm really becoming much fonder of Obama than I was back during the primary season. Maybe I'm just a sucker, but I think he's earned it. I mean, we all knew he'd run back to the center once he clinched the nomination, but his definition of "center" seems to be far more encouraging than I would have ever thought.
I always expected some Sister Souljah moment in which he'd toss said Sister under the proverbial bus. I didn't expect that he'd populate and entire city block full of Sister Souljahs, climb behind the wheel of the bus himself, and then proceed to mow them all down like tenpins, systematically backing the bus up to make sure he'd been thorough enough.
And yet that's what we have. Just during the past couple of weeks we've seen him triangulate on NAFTA, FISA, public campaign financing, the Second Amendment, the death penalty, MoveOn.org, faith-based programs, and I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff. It's no wonder that the Wall Street Journal suggests that it's he, rather than McCain, who's running for "Bush's Third Term."
Needless to say, this all makes me very happy. It's not that I really want a third Bush term (God forbid) but I do welcome the flurry of unmistakable signals that Obama will not be beholden to the nutroots left. I actually disagree with Obama on several of these reversals, but nonetheless view them as welcome developments to the extent they shatter the image of Obama as rigid ideologue.
Don't get me wrong. I don't doubt for a minute that's he's far more liberal than I am by instinct and by nature, but he's also proven to be politically savvy enough to understand why Bill Clinton has been the only Democratic president since FDR to be elected twice. When progressive ideology and cynical political calculus cross paths in an Obama administration, can there be any serious doubt as to which will win?
Obama knows that the left may whine and bitch when he disappoints him, but that they will continue to stand by him regardless, just as they stood by Bill Clinton when he was dismantling welfare, signing NAFTA, and cutting the capital gains tax. For this reason, he knows he has more to fear from the right and center than from the left. Hell, maybe only Nixon could go to China. And maybe an Obama presidency could work out okay after all.
The truth is, the big thing that really bothered me about an Obama presidency was his economic policy. If we take him at his word, he wants to increase (drastically in some cases) pretty much every federal tax that exists. But at this point, one has to wonder how committed he is to any of his campaign pledges. Perhaps those tax plans were only tossed in there to make his (equally unlikely) proposed spending programs sound somewhat less budgetarily farfetched. How long before he jettisons all of them? His economics team, after all, seems remarkably pragmatic and centrist.
I don't pretend to know the real answers here. But I did have a dream last night, in which my subconscious told me its own predictions. I dreamed I met Obama at some big public function or another. I grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him aside and asked him which of his myriad tax hike proposals he actually planned on implementing. He was more forthcoming than I expected, and whispered to me that he would only raise the capital gains tax (including dividends), and only on those earning a very high income.
I asked him if he could at least consider cutting the corporate tax rate in return, as even Charles Rangel wants to do, but I woke up before I could get an answer.
Conservatives and liberals both found plenty of stuff to bitch about, but I actually thought this Supreme Court term was a pretty good one. I found myself agreeing with their decisions more often than not. (Hey, does that mean I think like Anthony Kennedy? It certainly doesn't seem so. Oh well.)
The biggie for me of course was Thursday's decision in the Heller case striking down D.C.'s gun ban. Believe it or not, this case represented the first time in the republic's history that the Supreme Court has unambiguously weighed in on the question of whether the right protected by the Second Amendment is an individual right. I suspect one of the reasons this has only been addressed in the 21st century is that earlier in our history, folks would have thought the question ludicrous. An individual right to bear arms was taken for granted by our founders, as well as by generations to follow.
I've always found this "collective" right theory to run afoul not only of the framers' intent, but also of plain common sense, and it seems that in recent years, the consensus of legal thought has turned against it as well. Needless to say, I'm glad to see this bogosity finally put to rest. The Heller decision didn't go as far as I might like in my wildest fantasies, but it's certainly more than I realistically expected.
One thing I have to wonder is whether this ruling will have any impact on the ACLU's ridiculous and senseless official position (if indeed such it can be called) on the Second Amendment. I like the ACLU on balance, and am a dues-paying member. But I'm also a member of the NRA, because I think the ACLU dropped the ball on this very important right, and their statement on the matter to be asinine and downright embarrassing.
Their whole raison d’être (a little Mexican lingo there for diversity's sake) is to zealously safeguard the Bill of Rights -- the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Oddly, however, one of the ten gets handled a whole lot less expansively than the others, to say the least.
We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain militias to assure their own freedom and security against the central government.
I truly don't understand how an intellectually honest reading of the Second Amendment, taken together with the writings of the founding fathers, including the Federalist Papers and the other contemporary influential works on democratic theory, can support such a view. Anyway, I guess it's a moot point from now on. The supreme judicial body in the land has ruled that an individual right to bear arms does exist, so will the ACLU amend its position? Is it really in their nature to take a narrower and more constricted view of civil liberties than the Supreme Court? And if so, who needs 'em?
Even more ludicrous is the following argument:
Most opponents of gun control concede that the Second Amendment certainly does not guarantee an individual's right to own bazookas, missiles or nuclear warheads. Yet these, like rifles, pistols and even submachine guns, are arms.The question therefore is not whether to restrict arms ownership, but how much to restrict it. If that is a question left open by the Constitution, then it is a question for Congress to decide.
Christ, aren't they embarrassed to write this kind of crap? I know full well they have some pretty heavyweight legal minds within their ranks. Is this the best they can come up with? Or is their position so inherently weak and hard to justify that anyone attempting to do so would sound foolish?
The problem with the above argument should be obvious. Allow me to illustrate:
Most proponents of free speech concede that libel, slander and perjury should not be allowed, so the question becomes not whether to regulate speech, but rather how much. Therefore, the ACLU is staying out of it, and will allow Congress to decide the proper amount of regulation, even if it means that residents of D.C. live under an effective total ban against criticizing the government.
Different amendment, same argument. Pathetic. One can hope that today's ruling might prompt the ACLU to genuinely rethink their stand on gun control, and hopefully come up with a position that's less, well... retarded. Probably too much to ask for, though. My prediction? Their already dismally weak argument will simply become weaker still, now that the thin, fictitious fig leaf of "collective rights" has been taken from them.
As for other implications, hopefully we'll start to see some lawsuits challenging prohibitive gun regulations in the handful of states (including my own) that still lack liberalized firearm laws.
And what about the upcoming election? Well, a Republican friend of mine had a surprising opinion. He was hoping for the D.C. ban to be upheld today. Why? His reasoning was that a repudiation of an individual interpretation to Amendment II would energize a powerful yet complacent gun lobby to turn out in force and sweep the GOP back into power.
I have to say, I'm glad he was disappointed. I wouldn't give 20 bucks to see the Republicans back in Congress, much less a constitutional right. But he does have a point, though. I think the gun lobby played a huge role in the GOP tsunami of 1994, but that they've been fairly complacent ever since. I wonder whether the fact that this ruling was so close (5-4) will help motivate the NRA crowd to turn out for McCain? We'll see, I guess.
Meanwhile? Drinks are one me.
UPDATE: Looks like the dissent comprised some awfully shoddy legal work. Really, it's astonishing this case was as close as it was, if this is the best they can do.
MORE UPDATE: I love this post. Maybe the 5-4 split will resonate after all.
How could four of our top justices feel obligated to gut not the Third or the Twentieth but the Second Amendment of our Constitution? How could they believe it wise to insert the State into every home, every dark alley, every dangerous situation by removing the basic human right of protection from us? We’re Americans; we don’t lose rights we gain them and extend them to others. Heck. the same SCOTUS in its wisdom decided to give our rights to al-Qaeda this term. The least it could have done is allowed Americans to have the rights embedded in their own Constitution.At least 6-3 could have been written off by saying that 3 of the old coots had forgotten what it’s like not to be protected day and night by Secret Service details - luxuries that most of us don’t have. But there is no excuse for 4.
EVEN MORE UPDATE: Good point from Patterico:
If the Democrats had appointed just one more Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, there would be no individual right to possess firearms in the United States of America.
It's funny. I was thinking about yesterday's post in which I made a thinly-veiled insinuation of anti-Semitism, and wondered whether I had gone a bit too far. Well, I guess not:
"The Jews at Goldman are responsible for high oil prices," one user on a Yahoo message board for Goldman Sachs wrote recently. "Yeah, not one word from the media about how the greedy Jews have brought this whole financial mess on the world. Wonder why that is?" said another poster on a message board for Lehman Brothers Holdings.These comments and others like them have drawn the attention of the Anti-Defamation League and public relations officers from firms named on the message boards, who are approaching Yahoo about cleaning up the sites.
I guess I called it. Not that it was any great feat of prognostication. In fact, it's sadly predictable. When times get tough, trot out the usual scapegoats. And although it should go without saying, I want to make clear that I'm not implying that all critics of rampant oil speculation is anti-Semitic in nature, by any means. Still, I've thought I detected an ugly undercurrent to some of it for a while now, and it looks like I was right.
But enough about that. I'm going to go celebrate today's Supreme Court ruling! I'm sure I'll write more about it soon, but for now? It's time to have a few drinks to the Second Amenment! Cheers.
(HT: Glenn)
There's a lot of talk these days about how "speculators" are to blame for driving oil prices up to unwarranted levels. It's almost accepted as a given, although I find it odd that no one seems able to explain the mechanism by which these speculators are manipulating the price of crude oil. As someone who dabbles in the derivative markets myself, I confess to being mystified regarding what people believe is actually going on.
Is there anyone out there who can explain it to me? Because honestly, the whole thing is starting to sound reminiscent of the Protocols of Zion -- of generations of malcontents scapegoating their misfortunes on "gold traders from Eastern Europe."
I never thought I would say this, but John McCain has now irretrievably lost any chance whatsoever of getting my vote. He's disappointed me in the past, but with policy statements such as this one, there's no coming back.
Here's a photo I took of the flag that flies over the wreckage of the Arizona in Pearl Harbor.
I was thinking again about this story on McCain's Memorial Day Veepstakes cookout, and something struck me. Look at the guest list. At the risk of sounding like James Watt, we're talking about two gays, an Indian, a Jew and a Mormon. I have a feeling this isn't going to be your typical GOP ticket. That could be a very good thing in today's climate (I'm still pulling against the Mormon, though.)
Hopefully it's just a barbecue, but lots of folks are looking at the guest list for John McCain's Memorial Day shindig and speculating that it might have something to do with his veep choice.
I kinda hope not. I'd rather believe it's a gathering of friends and supporters who were instrumental in helping McCain clinch the nomination with no overarching agenda. The most widely rumored veep candidates in attendance range from the merely uninspiring (Crist) to the crushingly disappointing (Romney) all the way to the disastrous (Huckabee.)
Fortunately, if you read past the first few grafs you learn that the guest list also includes Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman. Granted, they're probably only there because they're joined at the hip to McCain these days, but it still makes me feel better. As unlikely as I think they are to be veep candidates, I'd love to see either one of them on the ticket -- I like Graham (my former congresscritter) for all the same reasons I like John McCain, and I'd really like the star power that Lieberman would bring to the ticket. Then there's also Bobby Jindal, who'd make an interesting choice, and is certainly someone I could live with.
I just really hope McCain doesn't screw this up. Despite all the media attention it gets, I really don't think the VP nominee usually does much to boost a ticket. A bad pick, however, can certainly drag a ticket down -- especially for a candidate who's 71 years old.
UPDATE: Hmm. After re-reading my link, I realized I don't see Mike Huckabee's name anywhere in there. Hopefully I just imagined it.
Obama's enlisting some help in persuading Jewish voters in Florida to vote for him.
...Mr. Obama has lined up surrogates like State Representative Dan Gelber, the House minority leader, and Mr. Wexler, both of whom are Jewish. Mr. Wexler said he would try to convert voters one mah-jongg table at a time, with town-hall meetings in the card rooms of high-rise condominiums and articles in community newspapers.“Many of the political leaders in Palm Beach and Broward County were at my son’s bris,” he said.
That's great, but here's the thing. When you have to work to try to convince Jewish people to vote for a Democrat, that's a pretty good sign that you've got a problem on your hands. Time will tell how successful these efforts will bet, but so far?
Still, Mr. Wexler admits, he has not yet been able to persuade his in-laws to vote for Mr. Obama.
Not looking so good.
For the second time in a week, nominee-apparent Barack Obama got a lopsided ass whippin' in a swing state by a dead woman. That can't be good news for the Dems, no matter how you slice it. Kentucky is a pretty reliable bellwether for presidential elections, successfully predicting the outcome of the past 11 presidential elections.
West Virginia and Kentucky are exactly the kinds of states the next president will need to win, but Obama's weakness in such states is crippling. Not only was he trounced by more than two to one, but a mere one-third of Hillary voters in Kentucky said they would support Obama in the general election. Those are pretty grim statistics for the Obama campaign. Whatever the polls say now, one is hard-pressed to look at the electoral map and explain how Obama can come up with 270 votes in November.
So how did the Dems end up in this situation? I think the answer is that the Democrats' nomination process is fatally flawed. Its problems extend beyond the superdelegate nonsense, and even beyond the proportional representation scheme, which not only guarantees a long, hard internecine slog, but is also a poor proving ground for the winner-take-all race in the general election.
More importantly, votes from districts that went Republican in 2004 were given less weight than blue districts. That's why we have the bizarre spectacle of Obama racking up huge wins in places he doesn't stand a prayer of winning in November, while Hillary has largely been kicking his ass in the swing states that will actually decide the next election. Once again, they've managed to nominate a candidate with no real strength outside the liberal archipelago.
I think what we are witnessing is an ugly, bitter divorce between the Democratic Party and the Clintons. It's a pity, because the Clintons are the only Democrats in my lifetime who know how to win a national election.
Why? Because we all know that using Barack Obama's actual middle name is the worst thing anyone could possibly do, ever.
"Barack HUSSEIN Obama," [Wright] said, emphasizing the Illinois senator's middle name dramatically, "Barack HUSSEIN Obama, Barack HUSSEIN Obama. There are Arabic-speaking Christians, there Arabic-speaking Jews, Arabic-speaking Muslims and Arabic-speaking atheists. Arabic is a language, it is not a religion. Stop trying to scare folks by giving them this Arabic name like it's some disease."
When I read this headline in today's New York Times
McCain Frequently Used Wife’s Jet for Little Cost
my eyes glazed over before I even got to the first paragraph. Nonetheless, I forced myself to wade through the article, because as a dedicated political blogger I post here once a month, whether I need to or not. At the end of it all, I found it a rather sad, pathetic effort on the part of the Grey Lady.
Look, I realize that the Times is going to pull out all the stops to see that the Obamessiah is elected president this year. McCain may be their favorite Republican, but at the end of the day, he's still, well, a Republican. But if this is the horse shit is the best they can up with, I can't help but feel pretty damn good about the McCain campaign.
Deep into the story, the Times grudgingly admits that McCain broke no laws, yet somehow they think it unseemly that his campaign paid so little for leasing the plane in question. But it doesn't take much imagination to envision what the NYT headline would have been if he'd done exactly what they wanted:
Candidate Pays More than Required for Wive's Plane! Inappropriate Transfer of Funds from Campaign to Wife?
Oh well. The good news is that the New York Times is even worse financial shape than McCain's campaign. Gee, I wonder why?
This is beginning to be a pattern. Obama has never appealed to me as a candidate, but I was at least hopeful that he'd represent a break from the sleazy, dirty soundbite politics we've seen too much of lately, in which one side seizes on a phrase or sentence, lifts it completely out of context and deliberately mischaracterizes it.
I guess I was naive. Perhaps Obama fears he can't win an honest campaign against John McCain. He may be right.
(via Glenn)
Lol. Atrios says that Charlie Gibson and George Snuffleupagus were "gang raping democracy" last night because they asked Obamessiah confrontational questions rather than simply genuflecting and prostrating themselves. Yes, that's right. If your preferred candidate is forced to suffer the indignity of facing and uncomfortable question, it's the very same thing as Democracy Herself suffering one of the most brutal, violent crimes imaginable. Whatever.
Anyways, I actually watched the debate last night. I hadn't planned to, but I happened to be visiting some pro-Obama friends' house, and they had it on, and, well, I got sucked in. I thought Obama did better than most of the Monday morning quarterbacks seem to be giving him credit for. I was a bit surprised this morning to find the punditocracy nearly unanimous in viewing Obama's performance as dreadful, but oh well. I often disagree with those folks.
And even though I thought he performed as well as could be expected, he also finally and definitively destroyed any chance that I could be sanguine about an Obama presidency. Hillary I can live with. Obama I can't. He lost me in this exchange with gang-rapist Charlie Gibson. In it, Gibson points out that cuts in the capital gains rate often results in more revenue, while increasing rates results in less. In response, Obama seems to be saying that raising revenue is less important than taking money away from rich people. That's a bit too socialist for my tastes.
Look, I'm not totally unsympathetic to the whole "tax fairness" thing, but why does tax fairness always seem to mean raising taxes? Why couldn't fairness be achieved by cutting rates on earned income to bring them in line with long term capital gains? Or be revenue neutral about it and split the difference. Set them both at (say) 25%.
But no, that doesn't seem to be the direction Obama wants to move in. He seems more inclined to raise every tax he can find -- income to 39.5%, capital gains to 28%, dividends to 39.5%, and the estate tax all the way back up to 55%. To top it all off, his elimination of the FICA cap would add an additional 12.4% at the margin for self-employed entrepreneurs. (For salaried folk, you'd have a 6.2% increase, along with a de facto increase in our corporate tax, already among the very highest in this tax-competitive, global economy, a fact which even Charlie Rangel seems to appreciate.)
Oh well. I'm sure none of this stuff will prevent him from winning the Democratic nomination. Come November, however, I think it'll be a different story.
Glenn and Tom have some pretty good roundups on Obama's recent campaign cock-up. I'd have expected this kind of insulting, bone-headed condescension from Michelle, but am a bit surprised that it came from Barack himself.
The Democratic success in 2006 was due in large part to making the party more salable to heartland America. Well, so much for that. This kind of elitist paternalism, so carefully avoided in the mid-term campaign, won't help him make inroads into red America.
I guess I can go ahead and start planning the menu for my John McCain inauguration party. I'm thinking maybe something with a Southwestern motif.
The political junkie's favorite map is back up and running, although the map on the main landing page is a bit schizophrenic. The red and blue states, as you'd expect, show where McCain is winning or losing to the Democrats, but the brown and pink colors represent which of the Democratic candidates lead the other, and doesn't necessarily suggest that they lead McCain. (Am I the only one who thinks it's funny that the dude used brown and pink to represent Obama and Hillary? I lol'd.)
Anyway, the map will probably make more sense after the Dems are done duking it out. There are previews here and here.
Meanwhile, here's a bizarre poll that has to be regarded as an outlier, but is interesting nonetheless.
A Republican presidential ticket of John McCain and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would beat a Democratic ticket of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama - in either combination - in heavily "blue" New York, a surprising poll showed yesterday.The Marist College-WNBC survey found a McCain-Rice team ahead of a Clinton-Obama ticket, 49 percent to 46 percent, and an Obama-Clinton ticket, 49 percent to 44 percent.
I happen to think (hope) such a pairing is extremely unlikely. It's hard for me to see what benefit Rice would bring to the ticket, unless it's just naked identity politics ("we'll see your black person and raise you a woman!") I guess I'm a bit skeptical, but still, if you're a Democrat, you can't be too happy about this. If the Dems even have to compete in New York, that's a very bad sign.
It's time for me to go on record with this one: If the Democrats nominate Barack Obama this year, they will lose. It's possible they could lose with Hillary as well, but I believe that a HRC-McCain race would at least be competitive. By contrast, I think John McCain will beat Obama like a drum.
I've always questioned the conventional wisdom, common in both parties, that Hillary would be easier to beat than Obama. Folks who subscribe to this logic seem to be taking a snapshot of a moment in political history and fallaciously assuming the same political dynamics will obtain in November.
If the election were held today, they may have a point, since early head-to-head polls have thus far seemed to indicate that Obama would fare better against McCain than Hillary (although now that I check the latest numbers, it seems that Obama's advantage, never more than a couple of points, may have already evaporated.) The problem as I see it is that Hillary's numbers are fairly stable, whereas Obama's have nowhere to go but down. I think one would have to be incredibly naive to believe that his current stratospheric popularity can survive intact for 8 more months.
A Democratic friend of mine with no especial fondness for Obama recently confessed that he'd voted for him in the primaries, primarily because he thought Obama stood a better chance at defeating McCain. When I asked, skeptically, why he believed that, he said of Hillary "they're going to swiftboat the shit out of her."
Well yes, they will. But so what? She's been through it all before. What are they going to say about her that hasn't already been said? She's a known quantity, and I doubt that rehashing cattle futures or the White House travel office yet again is going to change her ranking in the polls significantly (unless it's in the upward direction, there being a historical pattern that such attacks often backfire by engendering sympathy for Mrs. Clinton.) Obama, by contrast, has never even faced serious political opposition, much less the no-holds-barred smashmouth brawl that modern presidential campaigns have become. Who knows how well he'll hold up? Judging from the week he's just had, it doesn't look promising.
When you look at the electoral map, the picture looks even more grim. Obama's been kicking ass in states like South Carolina, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Mississippi -- in other words, in states that he doesn't have a prayer of winning in November. In the swing states that could actually decide this election (e.g., Ohio and Pennsylvania) Hillary usually polls much stronger. I can look at the 2004 electoral map and find several blue states that represent possible opportunities for McCain. Can anyone show me a single red state that Obama can win?
I suppose that as a McCain guy, I could just sit back happily and enjoy the train wreck, but I can't. I can't bring myself to hope for an Obama nomination. You never know what might happen. What if McCain's cancer comes back? What if he turns out to be Client Number Eight? I confess that I'd much rather have Hillary there to pick up the ball than Obama.
And I'm sensing that more and more Democrats are beginning to think the same way. We all knew the honeymoon couldn't last. It's winding down now, and I think buyer's remorse is starting to kick in. But will it be too late? Has the contract already been signed, or is there still time to get out of it?
