To keep it alive is not to demonstrate that Obama is a sexist - although millions have seen him being rather ungallant to Hillary Clinton. It is to demonstrate to all - persuaded and unpersuaded - that the Obama/Biden ticket is amateurish and unready for office. The future President of the United States has been thinking about nothing but his opponent’s vice president for over a week.  A man without experience has descended to argue about who has less experience - with someone at the bottom of the ticket. A man who has voted twice, steadfastly, every time he could, for the Bridge to Nowhere, is attacking somone at the bottom of the ticket for having been in favor of it before changing her mind and killing it. Obama has many talents, but the ability to negotiate a crisis is not one of them.
To remind voters about Obama’s failure of nerve, of good manners and of common sense is a great strategy. Because if he obsesses about Sarah Palin today rather than run his campaign, it reminds us that, if elected, he will be just as likely to obsess about Parviz Davoodi rather than focus on his country’s interests in a dangerous world.
If, in the course of a full week since Sarah’s speech, and ten days since her nomination, Obama is still so visibly rattled, so unable to pick a strategy and stick to it, so frightened - how can he possibly be ready for the Presidency?
On the day McCain “blew it” by choosing Sarah, I wrote re McCain’s choice of Sarah that it showed why military service is really important to Presidents: not because it improves their morals or proves their patriotism, but because it teaches them the importance of strategy.
Today the amazing Jennifer Rubin posted in Contentions a long list of the amazing strokes of luck that McCain has enjoyed in the last few weeks.
Which proves my point. As Napoleon is often quoted as having said, good generals are lucky, not just brave.
I should not have been as surprised as I was. Since then, I have realized that, perhaps as easy cover for their anti-Zionism, the mainline Protestant churches make a great noise about their occasional condemnation of “Jews for Jesus” and similar group. But this fastidiousness has simply not trickled down to the parish level.
Where are the GOP “re-branders” now? Palin brews “GOP Classic” In the spring and summer of 2008, it was popular to talk about the GOP “brand” as damaged goods. Boehner, Schwarzenegger, Tom Davis, even Andrew Sullivan all lamented (or celebrated) the shopworn nature of the Republican brand - and all suggested that the path to re-branding led away from Bush’s White House, to a new formulation - in essence, a kinder, gentler Republicanism of the Bush I or even Rockefeller era. They ignored, of course, Bush the younger’s attempt to provide a compassionate conservatism. Needless to say, none of them had any idea of what branding is all about. As marketers, the GOP rebranders would have had successful careers at the Coca Cola Company in the early 1980s, when New Coke was created. But New Coke was a failure, except by its contrast with Coca Cola Classic. What Sarah Palin delivered last night was GOP Classic - a slap in the face not only to the hapless Obama and Biden pairing, but to those who sought to walk away from the strengths and basic identity of GOPitude and create a New GOP brand. Coca Cola Classic saved Coke. We just saw a master marketer - Sarah Palin - hired by a master CEO - John McCain - do what great marketers have always done.
1. Bristol Palin’s pregnancy was broadcast to the world as soon - or sooner than - it was discovered. John Edwards’s mistress Rielle Hunter’s pregnancy was covered up by major media sources even though it was well documented.
Over at Commentary’s Contentions blog, James Kirchik wrote a noble post demanding a reassesment of Joe Lieberman, now that he has been passed over for McCain’s running mate. Kirchik argues that since Lieberman did not modify his positions on key issues to him, such as abortion and the selection of judges, he should be admired for consistency, not damned as a hack:
Heather MacDonald, who, like Noam Chomsky, is what Walter Laqueur calls a perfectionist in politics (which is an odd thing to be if you are, like Heather, an atheist conservative rather than a millenarian Marxist), grumbles noisily:
Governor Palin did not win her way to power because of her husband’s political office, or because of her husband’s financial support. She is the first woman candidate to emerge on the national stage whose career was propelled by her own talents. In fact, her career, if anything, has impaired the middle-management career of her husband, who resigned his field supervisor’s position with BP because his company would be negotiating with the State of Alaska.
“For example, you’re a voter, and you have Candidate X and Candidate Y, Candidate X agrees with you on everything. But you don’t think that person can deliver on anything. Candidate Y disagrees with you on half the issues, but you believe that, on the other half, the candidate will be able to deliver. For whom will you vote?”
Not because it is an indicator of the willingness to sacrifice for one’s country. Not because it provides a background of solemnity and comradeship in the event of a decision to put the lives of servicemen and severicewomen on the line. What McCain gained from his military service - upon which, according to Jimmy Carter, he shamelessly capitalizes - is not moral standing but the ability to think strategically.
McCain just exhibited great generalship in the last few days - not only in whom he picked as VP, but how tightly controlled the whole process was. It took daring, imagination, and the ability to think five or six moves ahead. These are qualities that the men on the Democratic ticket often impute to themselves and have seldom shown in action.
To be fair, given the limitations of their native abilities, had Obama or Biden ever been professional soldiers, they would not have learned these things on the job. But at least they would have learned that even mediocrities must be prepared to be confronted by brilliance. Watch the left this weekend and enjoy their gnashing of teeth.
Tom Friedman’s column in today’s Times hails China’s progress at the expense of ours: “When you see how much modern infrastructure has been built in China since 2001, under the banner of the Olympics, and you see how much infrastructure has been postponed in America since 2001, under the banner of the war on terrorism, it’s clear that the next seven years need to be devoted to nation-building in America.”
It’s not a particularly brave position to take. If Obama wins, she doesn’t lose much. Her insistence on circa-1969 feminist grievances (which she does not out of conviction, I think, but out of its opposite - it’s easy for her to keep that particular background music going while she performs other tasks) will keep her immune from any interest-group recriminations. She will rise above the fray and become a Teddy-Kennedy-sort of figure - looked up to as a kind of secular saint without any of her worshippers knowing quite why. If Obama loses, then she has been just loyal enough to avoid the dolchstosse imputation, and she resumes the role of inevitability with which she is most comfortable.
If they weren’t among the chief Jewish voices among Obama’s Zionist supporters, Marty Peretz and Leon Wieseltier would provide a beautiful anthology of anti-Obama arguments for those Jews selfish enough to wish that their race not be exterminated.
Earlier this week, John Edwards promised us that he only conducted his affair with Rielle Hunter during the period when his wife’s deadly cancer was in remission - and I see no reason why we should not take him at his word. And most of us admire him for his gallantry in this regard. But after a couple of sleepless nights, I’m no longer sure that his behavior is as admirable as I first thought.
Senator Obama, finally, coyly, has suggested that anyone who opposes him - and whoever runs against him - is a racist. In doing so, he has opened a Pandora’s box of evils for his campaign. As we’ve already seen in the past few days, Obama has released the pygmy energies of his cultured defenders, who have amplified, trivialized, and thus unintentionally satirized Obama’s ploy.
I have to admit that I disagree with the estimable Mike Long about the governor of the commonwealth of Virginia in which we both live.  Tim Kaine has a record of accomplishment in his brief term as Governor that Senator Obama cannot equal. Consider just a few of them:
Washington, DC - May 15, 2010. Of course I made up that headline - it hasn’t happened yet. But George Packer is very wrong in The New Yorker, when, speaking of the West’s obligation to invade Burma in order to save the Burmese, he claims modestly that he knows “all the arguments why we shouldn’t.” There is one paramount argument he hasn’t thought of - and that is to contemplate, a year or two hence, the onrush of a million words from Andrew Sullivan apologizing for our “botched” effort, if it is imperfect, and condemning those who were once heartened and persuaded by his former eloquence, his now-discarded wisdom and realism.
In an insufficiently thought through column today, Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal compares Obama to Bobby Kennedy in 1968, another “young charismatic politician who served as a magnet for the young and idealistic, [who] was in the process of conquering doubts about his background and personality in 1968.” Seib, old enough to know better, manages to be wrong about RFK and wrong about Obama in the same sentence. RFK in 1968 was a hardened, cynical politician, perhaps the least popular member of the Kennedy family and the Kennedy administration, who, halfway through the primary season, took on, co-opted and all but defeated the charismatic, idealistic politician who had pioneered the anti-war position of those days: Eugene McCarthy. Sound familiar?
Many of Senator Obama’s supporters are wondering why what Jeremiah Wright said once or says now really matters to Senator Obama’s campaign. It’s a disingenuous question, but it deserves an honest answer.
On March 20th, I predicted here that Obama’s essential indolence would earn him the vice presidential nomination, and that he would be glad, and relieved, to take it. His performance in the week before the Pennsylvania primary proved that, on occasion, I can be right. I argued that Obama’s career demonstrated a particular kind of ambition - an ambition that always drove him, despite his immense talents, to do the minimum, to act if absolutely necessary - but to act languidly.
In my view, the Speech, for all its brilliance, has accomplished only one thing: it has made it likely that Senator Obama’s amazing career will be capped by the vice presidency. Instead of having overcome the criticism of his enemy Gerry Ferraro, he will have merged with her: he will be Ferraro to Hillary’s Mondale.
I am glad to say that the following story, which I have made up out of whole cloth, could never take place, because of Senator Obama’s probity, integrity and character.
The more intelligent and shamefaced Obama enthusiasts often make a kind of apology for their Obamamania. Yes, he is inexperienced, they admit, but he can certainly be trusted to pick the very best people to advise him and run his foreign and domestic policy. Is there actually any reason to think this?
Try this. Listen to Senator Obama drone on. And then listen to President Bush - a man I admire, but to whose voice, halting, mis-speaking, mis-pronouncing words, I have never been able to listen without cringing.
It’s a breathtaking tactic: “Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), the Democratic Party’s 2004 presidential nominee, will endorse Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for president in South Carolina today, Democratic sources told Politico.
Many are outraged by the action of the King School’s health center of Portland, Maine. There, educators are supplying prescription-only contraceptive medication - “the pill or the patch or any other reproductive health care,” according to the Portland Press Herald - to middle school children. Parents do not give permission - indeed, they never find out. Outrageous it is, because this is something the private sector should be doing, not the school board. Consider these facts.
The judge played the holocaust card. In his testimony yesterday, Bush’s nominee for AG compared the interrogation of terrorists in Iraq, with vital information about threats to U.S. servicemen and Iraqi civilians, to the death camps of Nazi’s Germany. On the one hand, our treatment of people who have chosen to forego the protections afforded by the Geneva Convention, as such criminals were treated by the British in Northern Ireland (with the approval of the European Court of Justice) - on the other, extermination of people for the crime of being circumcised.
O day of joy! The Swedish Academy has brought another load of royal jelly to feed Al Gore’s vanity. And just as Mrs. Clinton was cementing her lead - so much so that she felt safe in cutting herself off from death-grip of the netroots and reaching out to moderates and right-of-centers.
That’s a headline you won’t see. But if there ever was an instance of a “lobby” effect in the manner in which Professors Mearsheimer and Walt accuse what they call the Israel Lobby - to act against the interests of the United States because of a blood tie - it displays itself in the House resolution regarding the Muslim slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915. Those who promoted this resolution are correct about the Armenian genocide, but the resolution itself is, in my view, utterly pointless. There are many reasons why the resolution has no effect. Everyone knows that genocide was committed against the Christian citizens of the Muslim Ottoman state. There are virtually no Armenians left in modern-day Turkey, and yet Christians and Jews live in and visit Turkey today in more safety and to a warmer welcome than they do in any other Muslim-majority state. The resolution has no bearing on Turkey - the murder of Armenians during 1914-1918 was conducted by an entity with which modern Turkey has no continuity, in territory or law.
