22 January 2008 a Tuesday

I watched a lot of the Democrat debate last night, much better reduced to only three people. Two, actually, as it became quite plain that Edwards was a distant third, an afterthought. I'm prejudiced, of course, because I thought that Obama did a great job, appeared confident and humorous and even honest at times (something about none of us in politics have entirely clean hands, which drew surprisingly little reaction), while Hillary came out as a stone-faced shrew with an evil glare occasionally, with Edwards the comedy-relief token white male, as Obama skillfully painted him.

Obama's sub-text message was that yes, this race was all about race and gender, no matter what we say, and you aren't either of the two that matter, white boy. Edwards almost didn't quite know how to handle the role...elect me, I'm the traditional white male you've always preferred? His 'poor boy' schtick doesn't go over well with people who look at his mansion and figure he'd be the biggest slave-owner in the state if slavery were still allowed, and I'm getting sick and tired of a trial lawyer telling me that he doesn't take any money from special interests...at least Hillary jabbed him a bit on that subject.

Anyhow, I thought Obama won big, so I'm interested now to see the pundit take.

All of the people who keep worrying about America's trade deficit can't quite seem to realize that if it weren't for the U.S. buying so much stuff from abroad that their economies would be in even worse shape than they are. Of course they aren't immune, just from that one aspect alone.

And the breaking news just this second on the NYT was that the Fed really slashed interest rates this morning, following the Asian market tumble. Meanwhile, here's another headline on the same page:

So why is it I get the impression this is merely a case of the big boys reorganizing their portfolios?

And here's a good reason I chose to retire rather than stay in the California real estate business forever, as some old brokers do:

Too bad Iraq can't have a democracy like some of the stable European countries, huh?

As she has never done before, Mrs. Clinton linked Mr. Obama to a longtime fund-raiser, whom she characterized as a slumlord in “inner-city Chicago.”

Mrs. Clinton was referring to Mr. Obama’s ties to Antoin Rezko, a Chicago businessman who was indicted last fall on federal charges of business fraud and influence peddling connected to the administration of Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois. Mr. Obama did work for a law firm in Chicago and performed legal work involving Mr. Rezko’s housing developments. On Saturday, Mr. Obama returned more than $40,000 in political contributions that were linked to Mr. Rezko.

And Mr. Obama, who appeared on the verge of losing his temper at times, noted that she was on the board of Wal-Mart while he was working on “the streets” as a Chicago community organizer. Mrs. Clinton was a director of Wal-Mart from 1986 to 1992.

I think Hillary picked a dog that won't hunt, because he's sure not going to convince black voters that Obama is a pal of slumlords, whereas the remark about the director of Wal-Mart is undeniably true and the relationship lasted for a long time.

Mr. Obama, who would be the nation’s first black president, was asked about how the author Toni Morrison had bestowed that title on Mr. Clinton more than a decade ago.

“I think Bill Clinton did have an enormous affinity with the African-American community,” Mr. Obama said, praising Mr. Clinton for his longtime commitment to racial equality as a man who grew up in the South.

Lightening the moment, he added: “I would have to investigate more Bill’s dancing abilities and some of this other stuff before I accurately judged whether in fact he was a brother.”

Mrs. Clinton replied, “I am sure that can be arranged.”

Obama was funny and clearly won this exchange, but he should have emphasized an earlier point: that he isn't running to be a black president, first or otherwise. In the meantime, I hope he takes Hillary up on her offer, which was rather stupid of her to make. Maybe Obama can suggest Bill play his sax again?

“There are three people in this debate, not two,” Mr. Edwards reminded Wolf Blitzer, the moderator of the debate, which was sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus and shown on CNN. “I also want to know on behalf of voters in South Carolina, how many children are going to get health care because of this? We have got to understand that this is not about us personally.”

Mr. Edwards made a labored effort to highlight what he called his electability in the general election, referring to himself as “the white male” candidate, a phrase that became a point of playful banter between him and Mr. Obama, who often referred to the fact that a woman and a black man are running.

Yeah, but Edwards wasn't trying to run on that point, he was more defending himself by then. Anyhow, why should there even BE a Congressional Black Caucus, does anyone know? What state or district do they represent? But if they aren't representing their state or district, who do they represent? I think they are a divisive factor, myself, and ultimately Obama's chances will be doomed if enough people get the idea that he is going to be the leader of the Congressional Black Caucus instead of the electorate as a whole. It won't be because of his race, either, but because he represents a special-interest group, blacks, which the CBC brazenly and openly does.

Six months ago, Bill Clinton seemed to be settling comfortably into roles befitting a silver-maned former president: statesman, philanthropist, philosopher-king. Now he has put all that high-mindedness on hold -- maybe it was never such a great fit, after all -- to co-star in his wife Hillary's campaign as a coldblooded political hit man.

No, scratch the "coldblooded" part. At times, in his attempt to cut Barack Obama down to size, Bill Clinton has been red-faced with anger; his rhetoric about voter suppression and a great big "fairy tale" has been way over the top. This doesn't look and sound like mere politics. It seems awfully personal.

Has Robinson forgotten that this is a man who can cry out of only one eye? Has he forgotten how Clinton can look you straight in the eye, while lying? Has he forgotten that Clinton was, before they look his license away, a lawyer? I'm not sure either one of the Clintons are capable of uncalculated emotional displays, except perhaps Hillary's anger.

Obama's candidacy not only threatens to obliterate the dream of a Clinton Restoration. It also fundamentally calls into question Bill Clinton's legacy by making it seem . . . not really such a big deal.

That, I believe, is the unforgivable insult. The Clintons picked up on this slight well before Obama made it explicit with his observation that Ronald Reagan had "changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not." ...

Both Clintons have trouble hiding their annoyance at Obama's impertinence.

Admittedly I am not a Clinton fan and I have to try to self-evaluate some of my own remarks, but the fact is that I have never really bought this idea that Clinton is so all-fired tolerant of black people as he is supposed to be. I think Robinson's use of the word "impertinence" is very revealing, especially since Robinson is himself a black man.

You have to remember that Bill Clinton is a native southern boy. One of my favorite racial stories is something Willie Mays is alleged to have said about the difference he discovered (when the Giants moved west to San Francisco) about being black in the south and being black in the west. In the west, Willie is supposed to have said, whites don't care how big you get, they just don't want you living next door. In the south, whites will let you live next door but they don't want you getting too big. Uppity, he didn't say, but that's the term.

And impertinence is a perfect description of how white southerners feel perhaps involuntarily, an osmosis thing. I don't think any of us can ever fully eradicate or overcome the affects of our early environment, even when we know better and try as hard as we can.

But it's not entirely racial for Bill Clinton, it's more a case of lese-majesté...he's personally insulted at the thought that someone could seemingly compare him unfavorably with anyone else. Anyone at all, although citing Reagan may have made it worse.

The Clintons don't much like losing.

So forget about the Bill Clinton we've known for the past eight years...

There's a battle to be fought against an upstart challenger who has the audacity to suggest that maybe the Clinton presidency, successful as it was in many ways, didn't change the world -- and that he, given the office, could do better.

That's it, in a nutshell. If Obama had been appropriately fawning at Clinton's feet, saying he only hoped he could be half as good a president as Bill was, you'd see a different Bill Clinton here...maybe even the one we've, ah, known for the past eight years.

I discover that Obama has to be my inner-man's choice on the Democrat side, of the three candidates still running, just from the way I feel about the thought of the other two winning. I thought his performance in last night's debate was pretty powerful compared with theirs. I know it's a terribly sexist thing to say, but Hillary reminds me of exactly the kind of wife that you don't want ever to have.

I feel a little queasy at the thought of finding E. J. Dionne right, but since I think I already elaborated on this point earlier I guess it's okay:

John McCain is feared by Democrats and liked by independents. That, paradoxically, is why he may yet be rejected by Republicans, even though he has bent over backward to satisfy conservative demands.

...McCain did not actually carry self-identified Republicans who voted in South Carolina. Independents saved his candidacy.

It is precisely this profile that worries Democrats. The persistence of McCain's maverick image suggests he may be the one Republican who can rescue his party from the undertow of the Bush years. ...

McCain thus confronts the most difficult challenge he has faced so far. He made his name as a straight-talker who does not shade his positions to satisfy potential critics. But to win the rest of the way, McCain may have to offer himself as a split personality.

He will argue to those on the party's right who mistrust him that they should support him as the one candidate who can appeal beyond the Republican base. But he will also try to ease conservative worries by presenting the most conformist version of himself, thereby giving independents food for second thoughts.

Dionne, a liberal, thinks that McCain will be two-faced about it. This is acceptable for Democrats such as Hillary, but not for straight-talking Republicans.

What is it they say...the 'perfect' is the enemy of the 'good'? I think that the conservative Republican base needs to take a realistic look at 2008 and decide that the Democrats are right about fearing McCain as the only Republican who is capable of being elected on their side, after which they should decide that even an imperfect McCain will still be more conservative than ANY of the Democrat candidates. Rumsfeld was criticized for one of his true statements, like he often was, but you do fight the war with the army that you have, not the one you wish you had, and the same is true of elections. You fight the war and try to win it with the best candidate for victory that you have, not the best one you could wish for, and Republicans will have to become pragmatic enough to treat the election the same way if they want to win. Losing nobly on your principles is still losing, and not helping get your own side elected is the same thing as helping the other side. Sitting out a race is not the same thing as not having an effect upon the results.

But will they nominate the most-electable candidate? Will McCain get past the Republican primaries and Romney get the nod based upon ideology? (If you are really a Conservative Republican then Rudy is no better than McCain, after all.)

Which side would get hurt the worst if McCain and Lieberman teamed up and ran as independents? Could they cut a 25% swath out of each side of the middle, leaving 25% each on the far right and far left? Wouldn't that be fun to watch?

Richard Cohen isn't as much fun when he strays away from politics, but I still found this interesting:

The most useful magazine journalism of the (still) new year comes to us not from the usual sources -- Newsweek, Time, etc. -- but from Portfolio, a business publication. It has enumerated the vast amounts of money Britney Spears is worth not just to herself, but to others as well -- about $110 million to $120 million annually to the struggling U.S. economy. This is what Portfolio calls the Britney Industrial Complex.

Spears' ubiquity goes without question. She gets the sort of coverage only dictators, potentates or absolute monarchs can command or even dream of. "Between January 2006 and July 2007, Britney was a cover subject of People, Us Weekly, In Touch, Life & Style, OK!, or Star a total of 175 times in just 78 weeks," Portfolio tells us. And on Yahoo, just to throw another statistic your way, she was the No. 1 search subject in six of the last seven years. Her single slip to No. 2 came in 2004, when she was bested by Paris Hilton -- a dark, dark year for us all.

... Spears herself gets a reported $250,000 to $400,000 just to appear at an event, giving new meaning to Woody Allen's observation that "90 percent of success in life is just showing up." ...

Portfolio's point, and mine as well, is that Spears is big business -- and ought to be viewed that way. She herself still makes oodles of money -- about $9 million a year, the magazine says -- and maybe has a personal fortune of about $125 million.

George Will's take on politics is more interesting, but he sure does lose his emotional balance when it comes to McCain:

Nevada's caucuses turned a simmering subtext of the Democratic presidential nomination contest into a dominant narrative. South Carolina winnowed out a Republican candidate, whether Mike Huckabee knows it or not, and the candidate who counted on being winnowed in there, Fred Thompson, wasn't.

Good line about Huckabee. He's the John Edwards of the Republicans...not in competition but in denial.

Speaking in the sunshine after her Nevada victory, Hillary Clinton said there were many people to thank but mentioned only one: Antonio Villaraigosa, Los Angeles's Hispanic mayor. Her 64 percent of Nevada's Hispanic vote produced her victory. Although the culinary workers union had endorsed Barack Obama, many of its workers are Hispanic and went their own way.

The 22 Democratic primaries and caucuses of Feb. 5 occur in many states with huge Hispanic populations (e.g., California, New York, New Jersey, Obama's Illinois), so for Obama's campaign, the suddenly pressing question is: Will America's largest minority group, Hispanics, support a candidate from the second-largest minority, African Americans?

Meaning the election may really be about 'race' after all, just not the one Obama thought. Oddly enough, minorities don't really worry about the rights of minorities in general, only their own particular group. Hispanics undoubtedly also see Obama as the leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, willing to do more for them than he is for anyone else, Hispanics included.

Also, Obama seems flummoxed by the Clintons' Clintonness. When he committed the gaffe (defined as the utterance of a truth in conditions inhospitable to that fugitive virtue) of saying that for many years the Republicans were "the party of ideas," he was merely repeating something said decades ago by an exemplary Democrat, the senator whose seat Clinton fills -- well, occupies: Pat Moynihan.

Clinton promptly resorted to the sort of bilge that the adjective "Clintonian" was created to denote.

I'm still chuckling...three great lines out of four! I particularly liked the definition of 'gaffe', finding it to be very profound. I liked this appropriate quote, too, plus the following comment:

As a fellow so usefully said in Charles Dickens's "The Pickwick Papers," "That 'ere song's political; and, wot's much the same, that it ain't true." ...

One of the Obama campaign's senior leaders, who must have dozed through the 1990s, has expressed astonishment at the Clintons' intellectual sociopathy, as when they audaciously charge that Obama is a tepid defender of abortion rights. Their evidence is that on an abortion-related vote in the Illinois Legislature, he voted "present." The Clintons certainly know, and just as certainly do not care, that Obama's vote was tactical, cast for procedural reasons at the behest of abortion-rights leaders in Illinois.

A populist to whom the people are indifferent is a melancholy spectacle, and John Edwards won just 4 percent in Nevada, where his courtship of unions was supposed to elevate him to the top of the class struggle's barricades. He has competed in three states (Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada) and lost them by increasing margins. Someone should tell him the joke that another populist, William Jennings Bryan, told on himself after losing three presidential elections (1896, 1900 and 1908) as the Democrats' nominee:

A man tried three times to enter a saloon and three times was tossed out. After the third time he dusted himself off and said, "I'm beginning to think those fellows don't want me in there."

I can't imagine a funnier or more appropriate description of how I feel about Edwards' candidacy. "A populist to whom the people are indifferent is a melancholy spectacle." Outstanding!

George Will is known to be a master of wordsmithery, but I think he outdid himself with this column.

In a sharp political jab at the former president about Mr. Obama's chances of becoming the first black American to win the presidency, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin said the country is on "the cusp of turning the impossible into reality. Yes, this is reality, not fantasy or fairy tales."

At the end of her remarks, the crowd of more than 2,000 gave her a standing ovation, except Mr. Clinton who remained seated in the front pew for VIPs, clapping politely.

I wish I could have seen his carefully constructed and maintained expression.