At Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog, David Weigel provides a handy timeline of “Crazy” Larry Johnson’s rumor-mongering regarding the vaporous Michelle Obama video, showing that Johnson’s story has been “evolving” faster than Barack Obama’s position on Iran. It ends, as all good Johnson tales must, with Larry dropping an F-bomb — which seems as close to a bombshell as he is likely to drop on this subject.
June 5, 2008
June 5, 2008
Three big pieces of Obama-DNC hype [Karl]
The first big piece of hype is at the HuffPo, where Sam Stein recycles some prior hype from Team Obama and the DNC: Sixteen months after he launched his campaign for the White House, Sen. Barack Obama may, just now, be entering his campaign’s most perilous stage. Facing a rift of sorts within the Democratic Party and concerns over the scope of his political base, the Illinois Democrat is pursuing
June 5, 2008
A Tale of Two (Multiculturalist) Cities, distilled
Daniel Henninger examines the Democratic nomination battle and comes away with the idea that identity politics is something of a tar baby. Or maybe it’s a whore with a heart of gold. Pick ’em, as they say: […] the candidacy of the first liberal white woman to run for president is about to lose, defeated by, yes, a black man. Some in the Clinton tong profess not to understand what
June 5, 2008
John Bolton lays out some inconvenient truths [Karl]
Although the Washington Post would like to portray the entire world as having a thrill up its leg over Barack Obama’s historic achievement in becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, a close reading of the story also shows anxiety among countries from Israel to Iraq and China (largely due to trade concerns likely echoed in South America), indifference in Russia and happiness among the mullocracy in Iran. Today’s L.A. Times
June 5, 2008
A tale of two polls: Talking to Ahmadinejad [Karl]
Two new polls related to the argument between Barack Obama and John McCain over whether the US president should meet directly with the leaders of US enemies like Iran remind us that the interpretation of public opinion polling is as much art as science. On Monday, Gallup released a poll summarized as follows: Large majorities of Democrats and independents, and even about half of Republicans, believe the president of the United States should meet
June 5, 2008
Lincoln’s (and Rove’s) Rule: Organization Matters [Karl]
Dark Lord Karl Rove, writing for the Wall Street Journal, notes a historical precedent for a theme I have hammered here at pw all year long: Politics has become hi-tech with sophisticated databases, the Internet, TV ads, focus groups and polls. But a lanky Sangamon County, Ill., lawyer described the essential task of politics in 1840 in a letter to his Whig campaign committee. Make a list of the voters,