Let’s Send Hillary Some Love!

C’mon PUMAs, Hillocrats and Clintonistas, let’s send Hillary some love!  The woman ran an historic campaign in the face of tremendous odds and against the turning tide of her two-faced, deck-stacking colleagues in her party.  Almost a full half of her supporters still refuse to vote for anyone else, and a large numbers of the ones who say they will, do so reluctantly.  She’s met and overcome every obstacle placed in her path, and after an inhumanly grueling contest, still stands tall.  So, let’s hear it for her!

Sure, she’s “taking one for the team” right now.  And yeah, what she’s “taking” for her smugly duplicitous “team” is a steaming pile of horse, bullshi, doggy doo-doo, but we shouldn’t hold that against her.  I know you’re probably just as tired as I am of the “help me help Barry look like he won” emails and stuff, but let’s give the woman a break, okay.  It must be tough being her right now.

The way I see it, if Senator Clinton can take the time to send us e-mails telling us what she wants, the least we could do is e-mail her back, telling her what we want.  Of course we want to thank her, as I said, she deserves that, and of course we want her to know that we wish her all the best in anything she decides to do from now on.  So why not tell her again how much we wish she and her VP pick were taking the nomination instead of Obuhbuh and his running mate, Uncle Joe Biden.   And if she did decide to buck the big boys and their still unproven fifty state/bump up the black vote strategy,  a whole rainbow coalition of us would back her up.

So c’mon, what do you say?  You in?  If so, dash off an e-mail to a real “she-ro.”  I’m sure she’d love to hear from you.

PUMA

Just Say No Deal

Obama – Biden Off On The Stupid Foot

Barack Obama and his newly selected running mate have already gotten off on the stupid foot.  Likening John McCain to George Bush at their kickoff event in Springfield, Illinois today, Biden had this to say:

He repeatedly linked McCain to President George W. Bush and said the Arizona senator would be more of the same in the White House. “The times require more than a good soldier, they require a wise leader,” Biden said.

CNN illuminates further:

“John McCain … served our country with extreme courage, and I know he wants to do right by America,” he said of his Senate colleague and the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. “But the harsh truth is loud and clear: You can’t change America when you supported George Bush’s policies 95 percent of the time.”

Do they really want to go there?  Back in February, NBC’s Andy Merten wrote:

But just how far from the status quo is Obama’s position toward the nuclear-armed state, which is a known sanctuary for al-Qaeda terror cells? It turns out that Obama, whose platform of change has become the cornerstone of his campaign, may actually be more in line with the Bush administration than either McCain or Hillary Clinton.

John McCain himself has characterized Obama similarly as recently as June 18, regarding Obama’s position on offshore drilling:

“When I announced this policy the other day, Sen. Obama wasted no time in mischaracterizing it. He described my position as — you guessed it — another example of Bush’s third term,” McCain said in Springfield, Mo. “I guess the senator has changed his position since voting for the 2005 Bush energy bill — a grab-bag of corporate handouts that I opposed. Come to think of it, that energy bill was the only time we’ve ever seen Sen. Obama vote in favor of any tax break — and it was a tax break for the oil companies.”

Victor Davis Hanson, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor emeritus at California University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services says that the comparisons don’t stop there:

But less noticed is that Obama is not just deflating John McCain’s efforts to hold him to his long liberal record, but also embracing much of the present agenda of an unpopular President Bush on a wide variety of fronts.

Take social issues. Obama is now a gun-rights advocate. Like Bush, he applauded the Supreme Court’s overturning of a Washington, D.C., ordinance banning the possession of handguns.

The senator, also like Bush, supports the death penalty. He recently objected to the court’s rejection of a state law that allowed for the execution of child rapists.

And although Obama is still pro-choice, he now, like the president, thinks “mental distress” should not justify late-term abortion.

In addition, the new Obama would like to continue — and even expand — Bush’s controversial faith-based initiative program of involving churches in government anti-poverty programs.

Today, the Obama/Biden vs. Bush/Cheney comparisons are being made in the New York Times:

The choice by Mr. Obama in some ways mirrors the choice by Mr. Bush of Dick Cheney as his running mate in 2000; at his age, it appears unlikely that Mr. Biden would be in a position to run for president should Mr. Obama win and serve two terms.

Michael Goodwin, in the New york Daily News sees it, too:

Meet the new Dick Cheney. By picking Joe Biden as his running mate, Barack Obama has taken a page out of George Bush’s 2000 campaign and picked a grownup who knows a thing or two about the adult world.

Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic.com seems more hopefull about it all:

Biden has aspects of the Cheney pick – he’s older, more seasoned and more adept at foreign policy than Obama. But no one imagines that Obama would delegate – and all but abdicate – critical decisions to Biden the way Bush has to Cheney.

However, there are the Cheney-like big business associations of Biden’s to consider, says Politico via Yahoo News:

Also expect to hear more about Biden’s close ties with credit card companies. His largest contributor, based on total contributions by employees, over the past five years has been MBNA, the Delaware-based bank aquired in 2005 by Bank of America that, until then, was the world’s largest independent credit card issuer and a major supporter of the 2005 bankruptcy bill that Biden crossed the aisle to support.

Now for me, the question at this point, isn’t whether the comparisons are valid, it’s about the wisdom of kicking things off by encouraging them to be made.   But then, when things are so obvious, what else are you gonna do?

PUMA

Just Say No Deal

Biden: Last Comic Standing

Though the selection of Joe Biden as Barack Obama’s running mate is being touted by the schmoos as a good thing, obviously, the truth is that Biden is the only guy who would take the job and could be passed off with a straight face.  After Bill Bradley,  Jim Webb, Ted Strickland, and  Mark Warner, turned Obama down flat, and Hillary Clinton and John Edwards half-heartedly kinda agreed to consider an offer that certainly was not forthcoming, who else was left?  Claire McCaskill?  Yeah, right.

So, with Obama’s options clearly limited, his selection of Biden is not really surprising.  I mean, he’s got grey hair

At 65, Mr. Biden adds a few years and gray hair to a ticket that otherwise might seem a bit young (Mr. Obama is 47).

and he’s from Philly, too.

And if Obama’s multinational formative years seem unusual to many voters, Biden is almost a caricature of the American story. Now a white-haired, full-throated senator from Washington central casting, he was born “Joey” Biden to a blue-collar family in Scranton, Pa., and has never seemed to lose touch with his Irish Catholic roots.

That Philly connection is a really big deal according to USA Today:

In choosing the Delaware Democrat, Obama gave the Democratic ticket a blunt-speaking, Irish Catholic who can appeal to the blue-collar voters important to the party’s base. Many of those voters flocked to New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the primaries, especially in battleground states such as Indiana and Pennsylvania — where Biden was born and raised in Scranton.

But Biden has declared himself to be even more proud of the state he represents in the Senate, Delaware:

“Better than anybody else,” Biden said, when asked on “Fox News Sunday” to rate his chances of winning Southern states.

“You don’t know my state,” he said. “My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country. My state is anything from a Northeast liberal state.”

But then, Biden has always been racially aware.

BIDEN: “I think that the only reason Clarence Thomas is on the Court is because he is black. I don’t believe he could have won had he been white. And the reason is, I think it was a cynical ploy by President Bush.”

And he never lets anybody forget it.

While campaigning in New Hampshire, Mr. Biden said that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”

Not even Barack Obama.

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

So Biden is not always so eloquent, himself.  Even if, on occasion, he’s even been known to put his foot in his mouth, that’s not always a bad thing.  Not according to a guy named John Harwood, appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:

JOHN HARWOOD: He is not somebody who is infused with political correctness, the verbal equivalent of putting his pinky up when he opens his mouth. So this is what, the way ordinary voters are as well. They’re not always worried about sort of calibrating every single word by “ooh, is this racially insensitive?”  That’s something that Joe Biden brings as an asset to the ticket.  The gaffes actually show one of his strengths.

Harwood’s not the only guy to make that point.

Biden’s embarassing remark about Obama may actually make him a more appealing running mate, however. Obama publicly absolved Biden of any taint of racism at a debate in Iowa last year, and that narrative of racial reconciliation is central to his appeal.

Hey, I don’t have to understand the logic of statements like that for them to work, right?  In fact, even if I thought that Obama’s glossing over of a racially insensitive insult made him look wimpy, Biden’s toughness counters his weakness.

Richard Ben Cramer, in his masterful look at the 1988 race, “What It Takes,” wrote that even from boyhood, Biden was not to be underestimated.

“He was little too, but you didn’t want to fight him - or dare him,” he wrote of Biden. “There was nothing he wouldn’t do. Joe moved away from Scranton, Pa. in ‘53, when he was ten years old. But there were still a lot of guys in Scranton today who talk about the feats of Joey Biden. … Joey would never back down.”‘

Maybe that’s why Biden got the nod.  He threatened to beat Obama up if he didn’t.  Or maybe, when the offer call came in, he was home.

PUMA

Just Say No Deal

At Least He’s Clean

It’s Biden!!  Yaaay?  Who cares?  At least Biden thinks Obie’s articulate, bright and clean.  Woo hoo!

Most noteworthy is what he says about Barack Obama: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Awwww

As I said in a comment on Sugar’s blog, I’m sure Obuhbuh agrees with Biden’s assessment.  In fact, I’m sure Joe’s discerning taste in Negroes is why he got the job.

God bless happy endings.  ‘Cause it’s over.

PUMA

Just Say No Deal

Hillary Can’t Fix This, Barack

People are so clueless.  There’s a theory floating around that Hillary Clinton not only owes it to her party to deliver her supporters to Barack Obama, there’s a belief that such a thing can be done.  ‘Fraid not.  When will people get it through their heads that people chose to vote for Clinton, they did not pledge allegiance to her?  Voters looked at the candidates running and made a decision, as they always do.  However, none of those voters agreed at any point to follow HRC blindly.

A large number of those who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries also flat out rejected her opponent, some did not.  Some people, like me, believe Clinton is the far superior candidate, while Obama is woefully unqualified.  For others, it was about one candidate being good, the other being better.  Still others, while not being fully committed to HRC, came to the decision to support her as a result of deciding that Obama was unacceptable under any circumstances, no matter who opposed him.  Whatever their reasons, a sizable number of people who voted for Hillary will never vote for Barack Obama, no matter what Hillary Clinton says.

It is extremely simplistic, and frankly, stupid, to assume that if Clinton is unavailable, Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents will gravitate to Obama by default.  It is much more logical to assume that removing her from the equation gives the victor the opportunity to make his case to the half of his party that didn’t vote for him in the primaries.  Yet, everyone wants to obscure the fact that he is fundamentally incapable of doing any such thing by trying to put the burden of convincing these voters to embrace the “presumptive nominee” on the shoulders of the candidate those voters still prefer.  This defies common sense.

In a Newsweek article by Eleanor Clift, polster Celinda Lake pushes this delusion, despite the obvious realities:

The startling news in the bipartisan Battleground poll unveiled midweek by Lake and her Republican counterpart, Brian Nienaber, is McCain’s 10 point lead among independents. The election outcome in November will likely hinge on that group, and they were supposed to be Obama’s strong suit. “McCain is a known quantity; Obama is a new quantity,” Lake explained, adding that independents right now are deciding on the basis of strength of leadership, rather than change.

No, Ms. Lake, Independents are deciding on the basis Obama being who he is, and coming up short.  Clift speculates that John McCain is leading in part because of his clever ads depicting Obama as…well, Obama.

McCain is a far more plausible candidate at summer’s end in part because he has sanctioned a sharply negative campaign against Obama.