It was a nice morning for a run. The humidity seemed better than yesterday, though it was still quite warm. I managed four miles and then did weight work on the legs.
iPod: Moyers from a week ago on the foreclosure crisis and the Alejandro Escovedo’s Real Animal while I lifted.
There remains a split among Democrats, with some Clinton supporters still smarting over criticism leveled against their candidate during the primaries.
Consider this post today from Talk Left, which was one of the more vociferous Clinton supporters among liberal blogs. Big Tent Democrat makes the questionable point that the Obama campaign “is in a difficult position to combat” the GOP’s use of the race card
BECAUSE of the outrageous and disgraceful accusations that were hurled at Bill and Hillary Clinton during the primaries by many of his supporters.
Criticism of the Clintons, according to Clinton supporters, was never legitimate criticism, but always unfair attacks. Big Tent goes so far as to take what I think was a fairly even-handed critique from Eugene Robinson
From the beginning, Hillary Clinton has campaigned as if the Democratic nomination were hers by divine right. That’s why she is falling short — and that’s why she should be persuaded to quit now, rather than later, before her majestic sense of entitlement splits the party along racial lines.
is portrayed as Robinson “disgracefully smearing Hillary Clinton.” Significantly, it ignores the context of the quote — Clinton’s comment that she could better connect with “working, hardworking Americans, white Americans” — making a mockery of the notion of smear.
That’s not to say that Clinton supporters, especially female Clinton supporters, shouldn’t be angry, as well. Mysogyny was an ugly subtext of too much of not only Obama’s campaign, but of the campaigns of Edwards and the other Democrats.
An honest assessment of the primary campaign would admit that plenty of abhorent nonsense was pushed by both camps.
Liberals — in particular, those who were Clinton supporters — need to take a step back, assess the reality of the November race and realize what is at stake. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have far more in common, in terms of values and vision, than either have with John McCain. And with several Supreme Court slots likely to open — slots now held by the court’s liberals — do former Clinton supporters want to be responsible for allowing McCain to fill the vacancies?
Back on the road with a three-miler today, listening to Moyers on torture.
Josh Marshall describes the basic problem with viewing the presidency only through the commander-in-chief lens, call its use as a substitute for president “novel and in many ways pernicious”:
(T)he growing use of the term in this sense is an effective barometer of the progressive militarization of our concept of the presidency and our government itself.
We see it here in its semantic form but we can observe its concrete effect in the Bush administration’s claims of almost absolute presidential power well outside of war-fighting — almost as if the president is a kind of warlord simultaneously directing the military and the civilian governments with similar fiat powers.
Marshall then reminds us just how wrongheaded this is, and how it contradicts the founders’ intent.
(T)he point of the constitution’s explicitly giving the president the title of commander-in-chief was not to make him into a quasi-military figure. It was precisely the opposite — to create no doubt that the armed forces answered not to a chief of staff or senior general or even a Secretary of Defense (originally, Secretaries of War and Navy) but to a civilian elected officeholder who operates with the constrained and limited power of that world rather than the unbound authority of military command.
That’s something the next president needs to remember.
This week’s Dispatches, on the mortgage industry bailout, is up.
