http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/48bda4baaf82f1d1/490fc9fbda4f57f4/48bda4baaf82f1d1/64b4f29a/-cpid/d53dc332f7bcae0eBoston Legal, which always has worn its liberal politics on its sleeves, made an overt endorsement of Barack Obama during tonight’s episode, going beyond its usual political pontificating during trial scenes to present the conservative wack-job, Denny Crain (William Shatner), changing his mind and voting for Barack Obama. His reason: He was usnure of what the right choice was, he said, but “after these last eight years, I knew the wrong choice.”
I’m hoping that there are a lot of people out there that ultimately follow his lead.
It is difficult to believe that, after nearly two seemingly endless years, this electoral free-for-all is finally coming to a close. The polls have Barack Obama up, cracking 50 percent almost across the board, with the sputtering McCain campaign likely to lose in recent Republican strongholds as Virginia and Ohio.
And yet, there is much consternation among Obama supporters, like my friend Bill, who has been riding the Obama bandwagon since it left the garage back in the day. Here is what he wrote me today:
Why do I feel that Obama’s situation is like that old plate spinning from the old 50’s TV shows, if he can keep them spinning until election day (5-8 points up) then he gets an electoral landslide, but if he doesn’t …..
Or this mixture of hope and despair from Pierre Tristam, of the Daytona News-Journal:
But there’s still Tuesday. Whatever the polls say, I’ve spent the last three months lurching between hope and despair, usually a few dozen times a day. I can’t help it. I’ve always taken presidential elections personally, because whoever is president disproportionately defines the nation’s identity, and therefore mine as an American. It’s an identity I cherish more protectively than whatever is left of my ancestry or the family and creed I was born into, which were never a choice.
Being an American is, and proudly so, though for too many of the last 30 years the blare of conceit and belligerence, the offensive divide between “worthy” and “unworthy,” “loyal” and “disloyal,” even “legal” and “illegal,” made pride in this country more difficult, and certainly less just, than it should be. It’s different this time. The belligerence is receding. The noise is dying. The pride isn’t — pride in a country that could produce a candidate as radically at variance with the nation’s tainted history yet as perfectly representative, as perfectly American, as Barack Obama. An America so divided couldn’t have pulled it off.
An America on the mend very much could, because it’s what the country at its best has managed to do. This is the America of my dreams. On Tuesday, I hope that it’ll be no fantasy. I despair that somehow, it may yet be.
It’s been a long time in the desert for progressives. An Obama victory doesn’t guarantee our coming home, but at last it gives us a chance to — maybe — sit at the table.
David Sirota comments on something that I think is going to become an issue come January — something that ties into the concerns I raised yesterday about Barack Obama and progressivism.
Basically, Sirota raised concerns about Bill Clinton’s potential impact on an Obama presidency, given some comments that Clinton made yesterday that had Fox and some conservatives talking about Obama as offering a third Clinton term. (I’m not sure that Clinton was implying that, but impressions are everything in politics.)
Sirota, who spoke on Fox about the Clinton speech, rightly concludes that “Clinton’s entire narrative is the starting gun of what will be a very intense effort by the larger pool of Clintonites to infiltrate an Obama administration.” That, were it to happen, it would undercut Obama’s argument of change and populist economics.
If we can step back and look honestly at the economic situation, then we have to admit (as I admitted on Fox) that Clinton officials had a hand in the key deregulatory policies that led to the financial meltdown, and the key free-market fundamentalist policies (rigged trade deals, corporate tax loopholes, etc.) that are hollowing out the economy. These same people are now going to try to use an Obama presidency to reassume the posts they had in a Clinton administration. And the fact that, according to Bill Clinton, Obama is already potentially letting them – well, that’s really disturbing (if unsurprising).
The hope is with a big enough election mandate, Obama will feel more empowered to sweep out the Clintonites and start fresh – both in terms of personnel, and in terms of ideology. Because if he doesn’t, not only could it stunt his policy agenda, it could also create political problems for him. The media – and especially outlets like Fox News – are going to be looking for weak points that allow them to tar and feather an Obama presidency as just “more of the same.”
Obama, in winning the primaries and potentially the general electon, will have taken control of the Democratic Party — and, by extension, will have relegated Bill Clinton to the history books.
But , as I wrote yesterday, there is a tension apparent in Obama’s political makeup that has him shifting between the progressive/liberal and Clinton wings of the party. Which is why, as I wrote yesterday and as Sirota writes today
it’s important for progressives to start laying down markers about what we should and should not cheer on – what we should and should not expect from an Obama adminstration. In my opinion, it doesn’t help Obama win the election, nor will it help his administration, to be painted as a mere second act for the last Democratic administration.
Making the Obama presidency the third term of Bill Clinton’s presidency is both substantively inappropriate to the times, and politically dangerous/tone deaf. I hope that’s not the path a President Obama takes, should he win the White House.
Juan Cole explains the hypocrisy at work in the latest Republican campaign meme — that we have to elected Republicans to the White House or the Senate to prevent one-party rule.
Moreover. the Republicans did have one-party rule in 2000-2006 and really did have all three branches of government under their control. Can anyone think of any major Republican leader in that period who argued that it was a bad thing and who urged voters to cast ballots for Democrats in order to restore some checks and balances?
On the contrary, the Republicans seriously considered abolishing the Senatorial tradition of requiring 60 for the passage of especially important measures such as confirming justices. They wanted to be more, not less, powerful, to exercise the prerogatives of one-party rule without let or hindrance.
The conservative wing of the blogosphere has been buzzing about the decision on the part of the Obama campaign to cut off a Florida television station from access to the candidates and their wives. It is a foolish move on the campaign’s part, of course, but the conservative response certainly goes beyond the rational.
A typical comment comes from Greg Pollowitz at National Review Online, who called the campaign’s decision
A preview of things to come in Obamerica — play ball or you’re out.
This echoes a letter I received over the weekend (it’ll run in Thursday’s paper):
An now Joe Biden receives some questions he is uncomfortable with, and the Obama campaign pulls all further interview from the station — WFTV in Florida? Is this an example of things to come and what we should expect from an Obama presidency — that we shall not dare question anything our president or vice president do? Is this a democracy or a dictatorship?
Again, the Obama folks were wrong to cancel Jill Biden’s appearance, but for conservatives and Republicans who have been chattering about liberal bias — and who applauded decisions by the McCain campaign to shield Sarah Palin from the press and who canceled an interview on Larry King’s show because of touch questioning of a McCain advisor by CNN’s Campbell Brown:
This afternoon, anchorman Wolf Blitzer announced on air that McCain’s planned interview with Larry King tonight had been canceled by the campaign. Blitzer said McCain aides complained that Brown had gone “over the line” in her grilling of Bounds.
McCain campaign spokeswoman Maria Comella later explained the cancellation with this sharply worded statement:
“After a relentless refusal by certain on-air reporters to come to terms with John McCain’s selection of Alaska’s sitting governor as our party’s nominee for vice president, we decided John McCain’s time would be better served elsewhere.”
The thing I find so striking about this is that the rhetoric being used by the McCain campaign — the faux outrage, etc. — is no different than that offered by my liberal colleagues. That the GOP has ginned it up this time is no surprise, nor is it a shock that they were silent when McCain shut CNN down. the same can be said about Obama and the left.
In any case, there is another angle on this that goes beyond the Biden interview and raises questions about WFTV anchor Barbara West. Watch the video of the WFTV-Biden exchange, an interview framed around McCain talking points.
Now, watch her interview with McCain from about a week earlier, which was done by the same WFTV anchor and followed the same basic script.
I wouldn’t characterise it so much as a softball interview as I would pitching him batting practice — or free television ad time on a news show.
The lesson in all of this, I think, is that we need to see these little campaign outrages for what they are — nonsense that will be forgotten once the campaign is over.
I just don’t see either of these candidates as being the reincarnation of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush when it comes to the press. Both have a history of being open and available and both are likely to revert to past history once the election passes.
Hank Kalet 