GOP trainwrecks

Back-to-back GOP trainwrecks!

Surprising that there are few comparisons of Reagan's experience with Obama's experience.

Carter-Reagan?

McCain-Obama..

Al Smith speeches

McCain, and

Obama

h/t one of my Clown Buds

Epic Fail

Yes, we know we're awful and you hate us, but the Dems will be worse (and did you know that Obama is black?)

This is one step beyond "running on the fumes in the tank".

When you get to this point, it's time to fold your tent and silently steal away. This is beyond embarrassing.

If I were a Republican loyalist reading this, I'd crawl in my hole and pull it in after me.

creative ways of responding to RNC mailings

E-mailer #1 writes:
___________________________

On the outside of the envelope in red:

EMERGENCY NOTICE

The Obama Democrats and their left-wing special interst allies have come together in a united front ...
My friends, the last thing we Republicans can afford is to have our hands tied behind our backs because their candidate broke his promise to the american people ...

... fundraising goal of $30 million in the next 15 days ...

... the weeks ahead will be the most important in our battle to defeat the democrats and their deeply flawed policies that embrace higher taxes, more government spending, socialized medicine, and surrender in Iraq.

John McCain

The envelope is postage paid. If I send it back - no money, of course - who will pay? The NRC or the US?
__________________________

E-mailer #2 responds:
__________________________

Go to the physics dept and ask the particle physics experimental types for a sheet of depleted uranium
__________________________

FtC responded:
__________________________

lead would probably do almost as well. :-)
__________________________

E-mailer #2 replied:
__________________________

about 1.7x Pb - but nothing says it quite like depleted uranium.

Obama and working class voters

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/opinion/29mellman.html

First, there is no relationship between how candidates perform among any particular group of voters in primaries and how they do with that segment in the general election. In 1992, Bill Clinton lost college-educated voters to Paul Tsongas in the early competitive primaries, but he went on to win that group in November by the largest margin any Democrat ever had. Similarly, John Kerry lost young voters in the competitive primaries in 2004 before going on to win them by a record margin in the general election.

Second, Democrats running for president have been losing white, non-college-educated voters since before Mr. Obama was elected to the Illinois legislature. Al Gore and Mr. Kerry each failed to win a majority of this bloc in the general election. With these voters, the size of the losing margin is what matters.

Mr. Gore lost them by 17 percentage points while winning the national popular vote. Mr. Kerry lost them by 23 points and the country by fewer than two and a half points. The last Democrat to win white, non-college voters was Bill Clinton, who carried them by a single point in the three-way races in 1992 and 1996.

By comparison, Mr. Obama is only two percentage points behind John McCain among these voters in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. Another recent survey shows him down seven points.

In other words, Mr. Obama is faring better today with the white working class than did either Mr. Gore or Mr. Kerry.

social networking writ large

Roger Cohen on social networking, politics, and the Dem primary

Obama's use of the internet for fund-raising and to support grassroots organizing has been generally acknowledged as game-changing.

I don't know much about HRC's campaign organization, but from what I've read, it's largely based on the big-donor and city-machine model that has until recently been considered "best standard practice." I think this is part of Cohen's point.

I think Cohen is right about "blindness", and it's an important point. Social networking in any era scales only to a certain size. Hierarchy is an organizing mechanism that allows scaling beyond physical proximity without the use of technology. Telephone and radio allow scaling to larger and dispersed organizations. The internet allows scaling further.

Barring some surprising reversal, Obama has defeated HRC in the race for the Dem nomination because (among other reasons) he has a better toolkit.

But Cohen doesn't clearly distinguish the tool - in this case social networking - from the uses to which the tool can be put. He recognizes the distinction:

connection is no panacea, or guarantee against violent threats: Al Qaeda uses the Web effectively. But without understanding connectivity, you can no more beat terrorism than win an election.

It's been said that "you need a sharp knife in the kitchen, but you can cut yourself with a sharp knife."

The interesting question is, what will Obama do with the tool when he's president?

specificity v. temperament and vision

http://firedoglake.com/2008/05/21/finally-barack-obama-gets-specific-about-what-change-is/

One of the criticisms of Obama has been his insufficient specificity (I think McJoan made this statement), although Hilzoy and Kathleen and others have argued that Obama has been quite specific.

I gather that Obama is surmounting Swopa's specificity threshold barrier.

I've tended to look at matters rather differently.

I'm just not much worried about specifics, within reasonable limits.

(Update: Of course the Flying Spaghetti Monster is in the details of, er, what the meaning of "reasonable" is.)

I'm more concerned about temperament and vision. Specifics are worth something, but specifics tend to be ephemeral, because policy specifics will inevitably be bent to conform to political realities.

For me, the fact that Obama decided on community organizing rather than set his sights for (what I read was) a near-certain SCOTUS clerkship says loads more about temperament and progressive instincts than policy specifics.

Put slightly differently [beats dead equine vigorously], temperament and vision give an indication of how a person will act in novel situations, or when his'r'her preferred way forward is blocked. Specifics are static and of limited predictive value.

Once I saw that HRC, Edwards, and Obama seemed to be peas-in-a-pod (w minor differences), I let specifics go and looked for other reasons to vote for or against particular candidates.

My recommendations are free and worth every penny.

Hunter channels FDR

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/5/22/9551/86182/147/518517

No, I mean Rove.

Or something.

Hunter writes:

There can be no doubt, now. The election results in MS-01 and other places are clear: the Republicans are in a world of trouble -- even in their own strongholds.

This can only mean that the usual avenues of Republican victory -- finding some imagined threat to the flag and apple pie, and goading all sufficiently gullible GOP believers into a state of panic over it -- are becoming stale. This is remarkable, as the list of threats to America grows with every election cycle: if current trends continue, by the year 2080 the GOP will have launched advertisements blaming the problems of America on every individual American citizen, by name.

(elide description of candidate threats to America)

Actual Goats: Have you ever met an actual, real-life goat? There is a reason the term "scapegoat" still remains relevant today: whenever something on a farm is not as is should be, the odds are nine in ten that the blasted goat was responsible. A rope chewed in half? The goat. A tree stripped of bark? The goat. Canvas chewed, leather straps eaten down to the buckles, hoofprint-shaped dents all over the hood of the car? The goat. Did someone sneak onto your computer one evening and purchase a full-sized ocean kayak, which was then delivered to your door a week later, every member of your family denying that they were the one who placed the order? Blame the goat. Goats can stand a towering one hundred centimeters high at the shoulder. Their hooves and tongues are not just prehensile, but posthensile and extrahensile: for any moment in time when you are not looking directly at them, they have opposable thumbs. At least twelve of them. Stop blaming scapegoats for America's problems, and take a cue from rural Americans nationwide: blame the actual goats.

Flag-Burning Polar Bears: The old scapegoats not working, and no new ones are doing the trick? Well, get creative. Combine old, well-loved scapegoats to make new, updated ones. Perhaps polar bears are burning our flags. Perhaps illegal immigrants are sneaking across the border in order to turn our children gay. Perhaps Muslims want to raise your taxes to pay for polar bear abortions -- how would America feel then?

There is nothing more Republican than the ability to take any problem, botch the solution spectacularly, and blame the resulting mess on some group that has little to nothing to do with it. Recognizing that all Republican failures are not actual failures, but cruel sabotage by normal everyday Americans, or by sneaky ethnic people, or clever but evil animals, or devious environmental or biological processes: now that is one of the highest forms of patriotism.