A Second Hand Conjecture

Boy, this was an awfully interesting exchange. Democratic strategist Mark Penn, absurdly invited by Brian Goldsmith to argue the press has been soft on Sarah Palin, instead slams the media for counterproductively biased and vindictive coverage:

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Toby Harnden weighs in with his thoughts on the Palin effect. All interesting, all very astute IMO.

Of particular interest is Toby’s argument that McCain commands enough public respect for his experience and expertise, that he has no concerns about being eclipsed by Sarah. Because of that, he’s perfectly comfortable to ride in her publicity tailwind, legitimately without a fear that voters could fall into doubt about who is in command.

This is of course correct and it’s enormously important as a contrast between the candidates. That’s because this intrinsic stature gap is precisely what Barack Obama didn’t have (or suspected he didn’t have), when he declined consideration of Hillary Clinton for his own vice presidential slot. Something that’s regarded today even by Joe Biden as a considerable mistake.

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Joe Biden says Hillary Clinton would have been a better pick than himself. A little amusing naturally, but I’m impressed by the candor and humility of it. Fine characteristics for a serving vice president who is expected to exert substantial influence on foreign policy.

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(photo: Rahim Alizadeh)

In Verdi’s opera Nabucco –the namesake of the western gas pipeline to Europe that holds the promise of partial independence from Russian energy reliance– the Jewish patriots take the daughter of the Babylonian king hostage, in order to compel his charity for Jerusalem. Today, after the Georgian invasion, Azerbaijan is a victim of a not dissimilar hostage-taking by example, and it’s just as perilous.

So much a captive to the gambit is Azerbaijan, that it had to be seen embarrassingly consulting with the Russian president, while the American vice president was left to rant to reporters in their captial. Cheney wanted a Nabucco pipeline endorsement from Azerbaijan, although he didn’t get the rejection portrayed in the press, he didn’t get approval either. He got the thing Dick hates most: strategic ambiguity.

Sympathy for the Azeri position here is mandatory. Their heart is with the United States, but their survival instinct forces them to withdraw into balance. An overt endorsement of a pipeline under American pressure would have potentially been against every instinct for a country that has been playing the game of pacifying powerful neighbors for far longer than the Americans have even been aware of the region. Any pipeline threaded through Turkey to Central Europe –which Iran has been refused access to, and is designed specifically in order to bypass Russia– has long promised the Azeris hostility from her two invidious and lethally powerful neighbors. (more…)

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Chronicle of the Conspiracy
Follow the link

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Approval ratings for recent presidents at the end of their final terms. Bush will presumably end somewhere in Carter’s 1980 territory.

(About.com)

Lest that depress McCain supporters, such measures can of course be highly misleading in predicting general election outcomes for their successors. Nixon’s 1968 victory was a damned near run thing, and despite the lingering unpopularity of Nixon in 1976, and a generally toxic atmosphere for the GOP in general, it should be remembered that Ford nearly beat Carter (popular vote: 50.1 to 48%, electoral college 297 to 240). Of all these presidents’ personal histories, political philosophies, personalities and general images, McCain and Ford’s are probably most similar. Right down to being Naval war heroes.

Speaking of which, if you’ve never read the story of how a young Lt. j.g. Gerald Ford saved the ship one night in the Pacific, it’s worth a moment to do so.

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Hmmm, oil states controlling production to just barely meet 35.6% of supply so they can keep prices high. That’s bad.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0508/Clinton_OPEC_can_no_longer_be_a_cartel.html

“We’re going to go right at OPEC,” she said. “They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at,” she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.

“That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly,” she said, saying she’d use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.

But, wait till you see her plan for health care.

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I agree with one of the commenters over on HotAir…

How DARE they call us Indianans. We are called Hoosiers for some gawd damn reason, so call us that when you’re insulting us.

I dare him to come here and say that. It would be a tossup if he were beaten or laughed at. Mostly we’d probably laugh at him, and maybe tar-n-feather him. That’s what he deserves.

UPDATE:

Alright, seems to have been either a hoax, or a dirty campaign trick.

But I will stand by my tar-n-feathering for anyone who got Bill Clinton elected… or nearly any career politician.

One has to ask though, who ultimately benefits from an anti-Clinton attack based on doctored footage?

Maybe this is actually a reverse attack. Now that the ad has been shown to be faked (and quickly,) Hillary will gain some sympathy, because obviously Obama and his crew are using dirty tricks to attack Hillary. So, maybe Clinton operatives put out such an attack, simply because it could be easily defused.

Or, most likely, an army of one decided that this was a good ploy. Occams razor and all…

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The sin of omission that Hillary is committing with the re-telling of the Indiana plant moving to China (while not mentioning that it was sold to China during her husbands tenure,) is starting to gather some light. The following story was linked by the DrudgeReport today.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/election2008/story/35337.html

It’s a story Hillary Clinton loves to tell, about how the Chinese government bought a good American company in Indiana, laid off all its workers and moved its critical defense technology work to China.

And it’s a story with a dramatic, political ending. Republican President George W. Bush could have stopped it, but didn’t.

If she were president, she says, she’d fight to protect those jobs. It’s just the kind of talk that’s helping her win support form working-class Democrats worried about jobs and paychecks, not to mention their country’s security.

What Clinton never tells in the oft-repeated tale is the role prominent Democrats played in selling the company and its technology to the Chinese. She never mentions that big-time Democratic contributor George Soros helped put together the deal to sell the company, or that the sale was approved by the administration of her husband.

I’ve been following this since the 24th when I finally got around doing some investigation of the claims she made in her ad. And even noted that Senator Bayh of Indiana is complicit in her sin of omission.

And what is their excuse for not being concerned with the purchase in 1995…

Because “there were assurances made that production would stay in the United States,”

In other words, they promised not to move production out of the US.

Update:

Instapundit linked to the same story also.

And the story made the Special Report w/ Brit Hume last night on Fox News.

The Rollin’ Rollin’ Rollin, keep this wagon rollin’ Update:

More coverage,

http://nwitimes.com/articles/2008/05/01//news/top_news/doc7832950a3328e7fb8625743c0004a528.txt

Kevin Griffis, Indiana spokesman for U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, said Hillary Clinton’s comments about Magnequench were part of “Washington game-playing” in which “people are willing to say anything to win an election.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24315615/ < -- includes some push back from the Clinton campaign...

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=4757257&page=1

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/abc-digs-into-clinton-tra_b_99473.html

“In 1995, when this group bought Magnequench, there were assurances made that production would stay in the United States.” But as ABC recounts, the Congressional Research Service reports that the state-owned Chinese company that Clinton allowed to purchase Magnequench “promised to keep those Anderson, Ind., jobs in the U.S. only until 2005.”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/trailhead/archive/2008/04/29/hoosier-daddy.aspx

Hillary’s chutzpah in flagging this issue is compounded by her criticism of the sale on national-security grounds (“They’re building up their military. They want to compete with us every step of the way. And we’re basically helping them.”) In the late 1990s, Republicans in Congress decided that U.S.-approved technology transfers to China under Clinton were creating a disastrous national-security breach, and conservatives tried to stir anxieties about imminent U.S. surrender to the Middle Kingdom to defeat presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000. Now, to win Indiana, Hillary Clinton seems to be saying that the wingers were right all along about that no-good husband of hers.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2008/05/01/abc-corrects-clintons-indiana-tale-blaming-bush-closed-factory

Interestingly, the hometown paper did carry this on the 17th of last month. But it hasn’t received national attention until now. Hmmm, wonder if the email to the Obama campaign had anything to do with it???

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In searching today about the post I put up last week, about Clinton’s ad about defense jobs lost to China, I found these juicy bits…

Bayh blasted federal policies that allowed the sale of the plant to the Chinese, saying that now the United States has to buy the magnets used in its smart bombs from China. The Pentagon bureaucrat who approved the sale ought to have lost his job, Bayh said, not the 225 people who worked at Magnaquench. “We ought to put a stop to it, and President Clinton will,” he said.

Trout said Indiana used to be the magnet capital of the United States, but that all magnet manufacturing plants have since been sold to foreign interests.

“If we had someone in the White House who was paying attention, maybe this wouldn’t have happened,” he said.

Clinton said America is losing its military advantage. To allow the sale of a company that makes magnets for use in smart bombs to the Chinese is “anything but smart,” she said.

Eee gads, the irony is just to good to be true.

Coverage of the issue…

Glad to see I wasn’t the only one to figure it out.

UPDATE:

OH, and it really does keep on rolling:

We might just want to ask ourselves, who was governor of Indiana at the time of the sale to China?

I know, I know, but they promised not to move the company out of the country, so that makes it OK to sell them the technology.

More coverage:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/clinton-criticizing-closu_b_98972.html

http://thetmexperience.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/clinton-misremembers-again/

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/24/193716/354/588/502845

And I got a letter in the local paper…

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As at least one person has said, there’s the type of slip of the tongue where one accidentally says what one really thinks.Has everyone seen by now Obama’s take on why small town Midwestern sorts cling to religion, guns, racism, and anti-illegal immigrant notions? They’re bitter.

“It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

So now he’s conceded that his remarks were ill chosen and that of course religion and the second amendment are good things. He attempts to say the same thing but with better chosen words. He also seems to have left out the “antipathy to people who aren’t like them” part. (Which, frankly, I hadn’t seen anyone make much of a deal about but there is a lot I don’t see so…)

You decide if he’s done better.

“Lately there has been a little typical sort of political flare up because I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois who are bitter,”

My “home town” is between 200 and 300 people. I had to go to the next town for school and my graduating class numbered Forty-one. Anywhere that I have gone in my 20+ years of adult life no one has had the first clue of what “depressed local economy” actually means. They just don’t know.

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photo: Alan Chan

The Clinton campaign’s effort to brand Barack Obama as a plagiarist, for borrowing some lines from his friend Deval Patrick, is truly sigh inducing. Even worse is Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson’s tacit acknowledgment (in the midst of the attack), that Hillary has been borrowing language from Obama himself. Wolfson alleges that this doesn’t matter, because “Sen. Clinton is not running on the strength of her rhetoric.” Carpetbagger Report agrees with him: “Senator Clinton is running on the strength of whatever bogus attack she can come up with to attack Obama with every day.” Yup.

Supplemental: Is That Legal? amusingly notes that many of Deval’s own lines were “stolen.”

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source image: heartcores

I’m posting the news rather late because…well, because I’m writing from New Mexico. It should come as no surprise to the election observer, that the Land of Enchantment is once again rather late in declaring a winner in an election. This time it was the Democratic caucuses, and the winner was Hillary Clinton. New Mexico is always late because almost every election seems to break even in this politically divided swing state (and partly because alacrity just isn’t the state’s highest virtue).

In 2004 it took the state canvassing board three weeks to finally declare a winner in the presidential election. That year, California managed to get ten million ballots counted in a couple of hours, while New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, was busy complaining to the press about being overwhelmed with merely 7% as many. Incidentally, if you pronouce her name vee-hill-her-own, you could be a native.

But we should hope the occasion of the recount is just ordinary local narrowness, and not an unwelcome portent that the country hasn’t yet overcome her predilection for narrow national election results. On a raw and bitter level, I’d have trouble enduring another post-election experience full of recounts, recriminations, farcical conspiracy theories and obstinate resistance to obvious concessions. Remember this sort of thing?

Kerry won. Here’s the facts. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted….
(TomPaine)

The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry and the Republican incumbent, President Bush Jr., amounted to another stolen election.
(CommonDreams)

Ominously enough, some people are already starting to say similarly strange and obdurate things:

To imply that the New Mexico gives Clinton a win amid a string of losses, is to imply a falsehood.
(Dakota Voice)

This time around I could be pleased with whomever won, if they could give me a Reagan ‘84, Nixon ‘72, or Johnson ‘64 style annihilation of their opponent. A year without another hand recount in New Mexico would be a good thing for this country.

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photo: Tim Kelley

After getting obliterated in the Potomac primaries, new polling shows that Barack is beating Hillary Clinton in next week’s Wisconsin vote too. In light of becoming the frontrunner, Obama now appears to be further orienting himself toward the general election, and away from a contest with Hillary that is rapidly taking on the appearance of a petty squabble.

State of the Union grabs the relevant portion of Obama’s speech:

John McCain is an American hero. We honor his service to our nation. But his priorities don’t address the real problems of the American people, because they are bound to the failed policies of the past. George Bush won’t be on the ballot this November, but his war and his tax cuts for the wealthy will.

[snip]

And I admired Senator McCain when he stood up and said that it offended his “conscience” to support the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in a time of war; that he couldn’t support a tax cut where “so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate.” But somewhere along the road to the Republican nomination, the Straight Talk Express lost its wheels, because now he’s all for them.
(State of the Union)

It looks like Obama will attempt to employ the successful Clinton/Morris strategy for dealing with Dole’s impressive record. By intentionally praising the historical McCain, he can make him look anachronistic. When coupled with the inevitable political contradictions that arise from any lengthy residence in the Senate, it can be a potent attack (as Bob Dole found out).

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photo: Chris Dunn

Spiegel has a typically aggressive (and aggressively European) interview with John McCain today. In many ways it’s an interesting yet disappointing exercise, due to its focus on the perceived past sins of the Bush administration. While much ground is covered, a little too often Spiegel essentially asks “Bush did XYZ, which is bad. How will you differ?” That comes at the expense of examining many questions about the future Atlantic partnership.

However, the responses are interesting…particularly in tone. McCain gives Europe answers that in many ways will not conform to their desires in practical terms. But in a way, may be answers which seem more palatable to them. After all, the European adoration of international negotiation, consultative diplomacy and multilateral consent for its own sake, is on a certain popular level a superficial partiality for words and handshakes. One that by nature is always highly susceptible to the rephrasing of any given position to achieve acquiescence.

A few key responses from McCain:

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At some point along the way Obama became the pragmatist’s choice. Hillary used to own that territory when concerns turned to electability, but that’s all over with now. Perception is as PoliticalBuzz puts it, “Obama is someone who can rally a broad base.” Combining the leftist base with the moderate infrastructure is always difficult. But this time both may be able to consolidate behind Obama. See Judith Gayle for a representative example of the shift that’s going on among progressives. However, the bearded, bereted, wannabe Cuban guerrilla, perhaps isn’t the best image to preach the message of electability.
(HT: Ben Weyl)

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Out of total Super Tuesday primary votes:
Democratic votes for Clinton and Obama: 14,622,822 (63.6%)
Republican votes for McCain, Romney and Huckabee: 8,370,022 (36.4%)
(Time via Dinocrat)

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Steven Taylor takes a look at Paul Kane’s conclusion that it is now mathematically impossible for either Obama or Clinton to win the nomination with pledged delegates, and notes that a super-delegate decided nominee represents an enormous political problem for the Democrats:

The party that has a legitimate gripe about the 2000 election and the fact that Al Gore won the popular vote cannot find themselves in a situation in which the nominee with less popularly-selected delegates is given the nomination by delegates who were not elected via the primary/caucus process.
(PoliBlog)

Not only is this a problem of political perception and party unity, it could conceivably jeopardize the unification of the two candidates on a single ticket. The candidate perceptions themselves of whether or not they’ve been swindled out of the top slot on the ticket could be significant. Given the nature of this race, it has become almost imperative that the loser is named the vice presidential nominee. But when we are dealing with two candidates who no longer seem particularly fond of each other to begin with, trouble may lie ahead by adding the dimension of a potential backroom convention deal.

Supplementally, Dr. Taylor also adds:

Also, at the end of the day, the DNC may very much come to regret taking the Michigan and Florida delegates out of the pool.
(PoliBlog)

Further evidence that the politics of exclusion always ends up punishing you in democracy.

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Sadly, Mike Huckabee remains in the race in order to distort it. One has to wonder if the increasingly paranoid crypto-theocrat’s gambit to become McCain’s Vice Presidential nominee succeeds, how substantially will it depress mainstream conservative turnout? I’d say pretty significantly, as this is a concord between the liberal + soc-con wings of the party (although there’s now several points of commonality). Even were 66% of the GOP to be very happy about the ticket (that’s stretching their numbers substantially), that would still equal a devastating defeat to an almost certain Clinton/Obama ticket which will naturally command well over 90% approval from invigorated Democrats. You need maximum GOP turnout to have any chance of beating that Democratic ticket and McCain/Huckabee will not get it for you.

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I guess she’s only pro-union when it benefits her.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4218509&page=1

In six years as a member of the Wal-Mart board of directors, between 1986 and 1992, Hillary Clinton remained silent as the world’s largest retailer waged a major campaign against labor unions seeking to represent store workers.

Clinton has been endorsed for president by more than a dozen unions, according to her campaign Web site, which omits any reference to her role at Wal-Mart in its detailed biography of her.

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It’s not to often that a headline comes along that makes me bust out laughing. But the following one did.

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