Media Blow It Again

"It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, enumerating the years, and never got asked one time - not once - 'Well, how could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war. And you took that speech you're now running on off your Web site in 2004. And there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since' . . . Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."

I would say Obama's comments should absolutely be reported by the press. But part of a campaign's job is to put out such material. Why hasn't the Hillary camp raised this until now? Because it inevitably brings up her 2002 vote for the war?

I kind of winced when John Edwards, after Hillary's choked-up moment in a coffee shop, said we need a commander-in-chief who shows "strength" and "resolve." But my reaction was nothing compared to that of the Nation's Katha Pollitt:

"John Edwards just lost my vote. How dare he take cheap shots at Hillary Clinton for letting her eyes mist over (not 'crying' as was widely reported) at a meeting with voters in Portsmouth N.H.? This is a man who has used his most private tragedies--his wife's cancer, his son's fatal accident -- in his campaign in a way that had a woman done the same she would surely be accused of 'oprahfying' the lofty realm of politics.

"This is also the man who promoted himself early on as the real women's candidate, and who has repeatedly used his likeable wife to humanize his rather slick and one-dimensional persona. Today he deployed against Hillary the oldest, dumbest canard about women: they're too emotional to hold power . . .

"Ooh, right, we need a big strong manly finger on that nuclear button! Even if that finger has spent most it its life writing personal injury briefs in North Carolina, which, when you come to think of it, is not an obvious preparation for commander-in-chiefhood."

Before last night's results, we lurched into when-will-Hillary-drop-out mode. At RightWing Nuthouse, Rick Moran thinks she'll hang on for awhile:

"An educated guess on what is going on in Hillary's campaign would be that their polling shows a catastrophic drop in support nationwide from constituencies that she needs to win coupled with a significant de-emphasis on experience being the most important attribute voters are looking for in a candidate. Since she built her campaign on those foundations, when there is a collapse, the writing is on the wall . . .

"Her dilemma on when to get out is made more difficult by the historic nature of her campaign. There are millions of women who would love to cast a vote for her even if she wasn't going to win. That's why I think she will wait until after Super Tuesday before giving in to what is apparently the inevitable."

Obama, working with Condi Rice to calm things in Kenya?

It was inevitable: With all the positive Obama hype, someone was going to play the role of debunker. Christopher Hitchens seizes the mantle:

"To put it squarely and bluntly, is it because he is or is it because he isn't? To phrase it another way, is it because of what he says or what he doesn't say? Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois is the current beneficiary of a tsunami of drool. He sometimes claims credit on behalf of all Americans regardless of race, color, creed, blah blah blah, though his recent speeches appear also to claim a victory for blackness while his supporters--most especially the white ones--sob happily that at last we can have an African-American chief executive. Off to the side, snarling with barely concealed rage, are the Clinton machine-minders, who, having failed to ignite the same kind of identity excitement with an aging and resentful female, are perhaps wishing that they had made more of her errant husband having already been 'our first black president.'

"Or perhaps not. Isn't there something pathetic and embarrassing about this emphasis on shade? And why is a man with a white mother considered to be 'black,' anyway? Is it for this that we fought so hard to get over Plessy v. Ferguson? Would we accept, if Obama's mother had also been Jewish, that he would therefore be the first Jewish president? The more that people claim Obama's mere identity to be a 'breakthrough,' the more they demonstrate that they have failed to emancipate themselves from the original categories of identity that acted as a fetter upon clear thought."