26 posts tagged “2008 primaries”

It’s been interesting watching the MSM dissect the Clinton campaign with a whole range of experts saying why she will not be the Democratic Party nominee for the presidency. I would venture to say these are the same experts predicting a Hillary Clinton win a year ago.
   It’s that which I have found remarkable today as Sen. Barack Obama becomes the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, rather than the very strong likelihood that Sen. Obama has won.
   For months, the mainstream media have been promoting Sen. Obama heavily. One reason is that he is newsworthy to the left. More often than not, his race is used as the reason behind that promotion. In essence, most New Zealanders, and I would say most non-Americans who watched the news from the US, were left in little doubt that he would take the Democratic Party contest.
   Image sells in American politics, and probably politics in many western countries. George W. Bush got people used to thinking about a Republican president in 2000 by forming his cabinet while lawyers battled Florida. When he did win, only diehard Democrats tried to tell the American people they had been hoodwinked. Everyone else awaited the January 20, 2001 swearing-in. Go back a few years and Tony Blair, too, gave an inevitable image of a Labour victory in 1997.
   This time, Sen. Obama has done the same, and it has been a well thought-out campaign: his book, writing from a humanist perspective and admitting any faults that his rivals were likely to dig up; a consistent branding scheme (the use of the Gotham typeface, for example); and vagueness (to give his opponents less of a target).
   On some of these aspects, Sen. Obama has fielded a very different campaign. Only vagueness seems to be the common thread with other winners. A pre-campaign book was clever as well as admitting to things no other potential presidential nominee would, such as his having tried cocaine.
   In fact, when he began getting specific after a challenge by Sen. Clinton, he actually lost traction.
   I do not pretend to like all of Sen. Obama’s policies if I were to look at his voting record in the Senate, any more than I find myself in accord with Sens. Clinton and McCain.
   As a minority, I am glad that a racial barrier has been broken in American politics. Even though Sen. Obama is biracial, he has been branded an African–American through his father’s homeland, showing just how people are habitual pigeonholers. If by the quirk of genetics he had his mother’s skin colour, would his race have become such an issue?
   That one matter shows how far his campaign has come, in a country that would not have fathomed a “black” president other than in fiction, in the form of Morgan Freeman or Dennis Haysbert.
   We can accept God being played by Morgan Freeman, but a black president?
   While having huge African–American support, I totally understand the campaign Sen. Obama ran in terms of race: he plain didn’t mention it.
   I wouldn’t.
   Any member of any minority in the world, whether that minority is black, yellow, brown or white, who has been brought up on the idea of hard work and dignity, would not make race an issue—with perhaps the exception of others making race an issue for him or her.
   I think that earned Sen. Obama brownie points among many of the United States’ immigrants and people descended relatively recently from immigrants.
   It finally proves so many of those lessons from our parents right: that if you work hard, you can become a leader.
   Once upon a time, parents said that but knew that it would take a miracle for a minority to get there, whether we are talking about the US or New Zealand.
   Barack Obama is proof not only of his own abilities, but he represents the hope that the presidency is no longer governed by skin colour, but by sheer hard work. That speaks to a large part of the electorate, including Caucasian–Americans.
   In some ways this has allowed his policies to be overlooked, which is actually unhealthy for democracy. Americans need to be voting on who can bring them true honour and meaning. But just as Sen. Obama began attacking Sen. John McCain’s policies as he presumed himself the Democratic nominee, it will be up to Sen. McCain to reveal his opponent’s policy shortcomings.
   However, it was not always in the bag.
   Those same MSM experts seem to forget that Sen. Clinton, using a campaign that broke the rules on branding (a confused message and confused visual communications) got so close to Sen. Obama that it actually was a miracle she survived and gained as many votes as she did. Writing in a country that has had two successive female prime ministers and, at one point, women in the Governor-General’s and Chief Justice’s role as well, the gender difference means far less to me. What I saw was a clumsy campaign that had more traction than logic would allow me to admit.
   Sen. Clinton’s progress was nothing short of amazing considering she did not play from the rulebook, and we brand consultants will have to at least acknowledge her case and say: anomalies exist in marketing strategy.
   The question is now whether there is a Clinton vice-presidency, but Obama aides are dead set against it. Equally, Clinton aides would not want their senator cosying up with Sen. Obama.
   If the Clinton image of “will say and do anything for the top job” is accurate, and as Sen. Clinton herself mentioned the possibility of assassination, I would not consider the senator from New York to be a vice-presidential nominee if I were Barack Obama. I might get “Arkancided” in the hope of her succession.
   But right now, Sen. Obama has a Democratic Party to reunite and invigorate, something that Sen. McCain may have difficulty doing for an uninspired GOP. Sen. Obama has media visibility on his side, reaching internal as well as external audiences.

This is National Headache Awareness Week. Show us what gives you a headache.

Warning: this may also give you a headache.

I guess rules and signing pledges mean nothing to Sen. Hillary Clinton. And if she takes such a callous approach to her own party’s rules, will she have much respect for the US, its Constitution and its laws?
   This is not a new news item, but it does echo the flip-flop nature of Sen. Clinton and her deafening insistence now that Florida and Michigan be seated at the Democratic convention. You know, those states that she said earlier didn’t need to be seated?
   She’s only louder now because we know Sen. Obama is gaining among white voters.

   Rules are rules, Sen. Clinton.
   If you didn’t agree with them, last September would have been the time to say no, rather than leading the people of Michigan and Florida down this path.
   Most Democratic candidates understood the rules and decided not to campaign, so how can you really keep a straight face and say that you fairly won those two states when they were largely uncontested?
   Sen. Obama’s name wasn’t even on the Michigan ballot. Because he remembered what the party rules were.
   Last year, Sen. Clinton, you agreed states not following the rules would not be counted; during the campaign in these two states, you led the people to believe that they would; then, in other contests, you said they wouldn’t; and now, you say they should.   
   That’s just in the space of eight months.
   I’d support the seating of delegates from these two states if they were given a fair vote, not an automatic admission of what was essentially a one-horse race.
   I would say an ex post facto attempt to rewrite party rules is un-American.
   With all this going on, Sen. McCain looks way more consistent than whomever will get the Democratic nomination.

Whether you support the war in Iraq or you don’t—and here in New Zealand we have the luxury to criticize the United States—David Horowitz’s recollection (video found originally on Humbled Infidel’s blog) of why the US went in certainly correlates with my own. It’s why I have always held back attacking President George W. Bush, because faced with what he had in front of him, I cannot honestly say I would not have done the same thing. As Horowitz reveals, neither would Al Gore, who supported Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech in 2002.
   The end of this video (cut short) goes into the rationale for war surrounding UN Security Council resolution 1441, which PM Tony Blair managed to sell to Parliament—but which, I always felt, the US was less successful at doing. There are legal arguments there based on the UN Charter but it was always about 1441. 
   This is one of the problems I tend to have with the US Democratic Party, for all my own left-leaning tendencies. Right now, for example, constituents are begging the super-delegates that they should not select who will best beat Sen. John McCain and the Republicans, but who represents their position. The fact this question has even arisen is disturbing: as representatives of the people of course one should represent the citizens. The minute you do not, you do not have a democracy: it is a quest for power among élites ignoring the citizenry, the sort of thing people were getting away from when the US was founded. 
   I am not saying that the GOP wouldn’t look after its own, but given that they have fielded men like Sen. Bob Dole—who from a marketing perspective was a tough sell against President Clinton—it seems that it might be more willing to represent its base than look at seizing power. The 42nd president gifted them the Monica Lewinsky situation, which hurt the Democrats. I would say that they never forgave the GOP or Kenneth Starr who were steadfast in their condemnation and investigation. That power-hungriness from the Democrats is very apparent in the way the Bush administration has been undermined in the last eight years.

   I say if one opposes the war, then there are ways to do it without resorting to revisionism. I might not agree with our PM, Helen Clark, on her courses of action, but at least she took a position based on the facts before her and said ‘No’ to going in to Iraq. She has never gone and revised history, and simply held firm on her principles. She has good support for it because most New Zealanders opposed the war and carried out her job (on that occasion) as a servant and representative of the people.
   The consequences of Resolution 1441 were always clear but the means of acting upon them were less so because of the way the UN Charter is written, and that ambiguity effectively gave some countries a chance of opting out. Our PM took it, as did the leaders of many other nations. It is respectful, even if she later made a gaffe about how she did not think a Gore presidency would have gone to war. (As Horowitz reminds us, that is probably an incorrect position.) They believed that an extra resolution was needed before war; the US, UK, Australia and others did not.
   The Democratic Party and the anti-war movement probably think that this is all too tough to sell to the public, so they engage in other tactics, shaming US troops or the administration and pressuring those who have short memories to join their cause. I am not saying that what they have uncovered is all untrue—of course I accept there are dodgy dealings surrounding the war and I even accept some misconduct—but they’d earn my respect if they didn’t flip-flop or cover up the truth. Sen. Clinton, who voted for the war, who voted for the increase in expenditure alongside Sen. John Kerry, is one of those very high-profile politicians who has changed depending on the trade winds of public opinion.
   Of course a senator or a future president must be representative but she must also stand on truth. ‘I was wrong to have supported the war because …’ would have been a good start. ‘Now the American people are telling me that it is time to withdraw our troops.
   ‘My support was founded on the belief that resolution 1441 was inviolable. It was not, and we have carried out the due punishment needed on Saddam Hussein’s régime.’
   There are millions of ways to spin it, especially ways to do it without demoralizing the young men and women serving in Iraq—and I am not even a politician.
   This would also mean she’d have to go against her husband’s attacks on Kosovo, which also did not have that additional Security Council resolution but was a preemptive strike by the US. George W. Bush is not alone, just that the media give him more grief over it.
   But a mea culpa is not flip-flopping and it is not pandering. It is being honest, something the Beltway sees very rarely.
   What concerns me, however, is that the road to war is a serious matter. It should not be so easily bent because the decision should be founded on principle—and if those principles existed after resolution 1441 was broken then they exist today. Congress voted for the war, with bipartisan support. There needs to be a far bigger shift for any US representative to say no to the war now—so what is it?
   A poor entry strategy, a poor exit strategy, the belief that the US’s only task was to oust Saddam Hussein, the belief that the parameters of the original declaration of war have been fulfilled—what? Certainly Sen. Clinton needs to tell us.
   She has said that she would not have voted for the war if she knew there were no WMDs. But as Horowitz points out, the existence of WMDs was not the basis for war. Did Sen. Clinton “misspeak” again?
   There is a popular notion that that was what resolution 1441 was all about and we all remember Sec. Powell’s Powerpoint presentations to the UN.
   But unless Sen. Clinton has misremembered this incident as well, resolution 1441 on November 8, 2002 was about Iraq’s non-compliance with conditions laid down by the international community over disarmament, which included WMDs, but they were not the core issue.
   When Iraq lied about what it did with its WMDs, which the international community confirmed it had as late as 1998, the US took a hard line.
   Iraq itself never offered an explanation on the discrepancy between its claims and tests by the inspectors.
   That was one legal justification for the US and the UK, and, skipping over a few issues, the war began.
   I sure wish the US politicians would just tell the truth about the vote at that time because they should have a better understanding of it, having been there—rather than let people like me catch them out.
   This is another reason to not dislike Bush: he said he would stay the course, so he did. The majority of Americans voted for him in 2004 (regardless of whether one is counting the electoral college or the popular vote) and knew this full well. And while I think some of his spending has sent that US deficit soaring, he has stayed firm on his belief in his tax cuts. He seems content because he thinks he is protecting the Constitution and that he needs to continue his strategy. Maybe that is the Bush world-view. (He saw how his Dad got burned on the ‘No new taxes’ and learned from it. He saw how his Dad lost the support of the right wing of the GOP and learned from it. And he saw how he was criticized for being too smart when he ran for Congress—which is where the folksy public image comes from. Welcome to Bushland.)
   Had the war successfully concluded people would praise him on his steadfastness.
   For if a leader bends based on the trade winds, then will she bend based on pressure from other sovereign nations? If Saudi Arabia put pressure to bear on the US, would Sen. Clinton cave in? If a communist nation put pressure on Sen. Obama, would he? Or, for that matter, how far will Sen. McCain bend to foreign pressure? 
   We cannot turn back the clock now and see how the message could have been better communicated to the US. We should know, from the Horowitz video, why the US went in and understand who is now lying to the American public: that is important. For all his failings in everything from the Patriot Act (which I am no fan of, and it has restricted the movement of people who could benefit the US) to the Alberto González judicial appointments, I do not think it was President Bush. I have never called him a bare-faced liar.
   The next presidential election is a chance to address those failings. The economy can be fixed but what is in dire need of repair are the values to which not only Americans want moral leadership, but most of us in the western world. Get the values right, get the truth right, and the rest will follow.
   At the end of the day I care not if the president is a Democrat or a Republican, and I have no say in it anyway, as long as our common values are restored and preserved, and the leader is truthful. And that the decision for staying the course or withdrawing is also founded on truth.

A lot of people call George W. Bush a dumbass, because they say he is ignorant about foreign policy and the names of leaders.
   Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she is smart and experienced, even if she has memory and “misspeaking” problems caused by sleep deprivation.
   Here’s the latest one that made the front page here in Wellington, New Zealand, in the Australian-owned Dominion Post newspaper. Sen. Clinton called Helen Clark the ‘former prime minister of New Zealand’ even though she’s still in office.
   If she gets in, Americans are still going to get comments about a dumbass, ignorant president from us. So much for restoring America’s international prestige—when she makes mistakes like this.
   No doubt it was caused by sleep deprivation again.
   If you can read the article, the latest Clinton “misstatement” managed to remind the New Zealand press about her gaffe that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, something later revealed to be complete fiction. The Bosnian sniper-fire incident is also in there.
   She’ll say anything, it seems—and in my book, that’s not presidential. The anti-Bush types say that if the world could have voted a US president, he would not have got in. It seems that if New Zealanders could vote in anyone into the White House from here, Hillary Clinton doesn’t look like our pick.

I always enjoyed seeing Johnny Carson on late night TV. I didn’t know he was still alive.
   Oh, wait! It’s John McCain!

   White folks all kinda look the same.

Forwarded to me by a friend, an article that shows Sen. Clinton’s lying goes way back, before she was a politician. Excerpts:

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the [House Judiciary Committee]. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation—one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.
   Why?
   “Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

Read the remainder of the article at http://www.northstarwriters.com/dc163.htm.

From the Associated Press:

Former President Clinton says Democrats concerned about what the deadlocked presidential contest between his wife and Barack Obama may be doing to the party should just “chill out” and let the race run its course.

   Not great advice: ‘Chill out about my wife’s lying.’ This is effectively the idea.
   Sorry, Bill, been there before.
   In 1992 and 1996 we were told by then-Governor and President Clinton to ignore his past and focus on the future. Well, we all know what ignoring the past gave us: a controversial president distracted by the Lewinsky scandal, making him an easy target for the Republican Party.
   The trouble is, they all seem pretty controversial.
   But Americans should not forget a candidate’s background and choose not from one who can play the people or promise the earth. That past will impact on how (s)he does the job.
   Of course Mr Clinton has to ask us to forget in order for his wife to be in with a chance. I just would not be surprised if this becomes Sen. Obama’s catchcry if any controversies stick to him.
   My advice, nevertheless, will remain the same. Never forget, America. Not about your values, your freedoms, and certainly not about 9-11.

American Infidel posted an excellent piece from Cross Action News on how the US political system has been compromised, by Carl Parnell. Some excerpts:

   However, as seen in these different opinions, politicians have been blamed for the failure of America’s political system. But, one respondent to the survey voiced a strong opinion that put the blame on average Americans. Her opinion was:

Our Constitution frames the best form of government on the planet. The balance of powers and the system of checks and balances provided a framework that allowed our young country to grow and develop and remain despot free for the last 220 years. The government itself is not what I have lost faith in. “We the People” is what I have lost faith in.

   And advice for the electorate follows (my emphasis), and I have to agree with it as I have never, in the elections I have participated in, voted for personal gain. Even for those who do not believe in God or in prayer, the remaining advice is still useful:

   “Of the people, by the people, for the people” means the people should educate themselves and elect leaders at all levels that work for them. The people should watch what those elected officials do and boot them out of office when they no longer work for the people. The caliber of citizens and politicians has declined in the last 220 years.
   Therefore, America’s political system is at a crossroads in 2008. When the American electorate votes for the President of the United States and for any members of Congress in November 2008, they must absolutely know the true facts about each candidate. Citizens of the United States must not permit the race, gender, or political party of the candidate be a determining factor in who wins the election. Citizens of the United States must not let personal economic gain become the deciding factor in which candidate they vote for in any election. Citizens of the United States must vote for candidates who have the true qualities of great leaders, such as those possessed by America’s forefathers. Some of these qualities would be honesty, integrity, morality, faith in the nation they serve, faith in the people they serve, having the character of a statesman instead of the character of many modern-day politicians. Of course, true representative leaders of the United States should always pray to God before voting on any legislation that affects the greatest nation in the world.
   However, if America continues to elect people to office that assume the role of a politician instead of a statesman, America may lose more than just the faith of its citizens toward its political system. America may possibly lose its status as the greatest nation in the world.

   There is still support for the US around the world—but they need a beacon to look up to rather than to criticize. In November, vote to make America great again—not just in economic terms, but in terms of the true leadership and morality that it can stand for.

Now that Hillary Clinton has admitted to a problem with sleep deprivation, causing her to lie pathologically about Bosnia, then may I suggest this to the American public?
   I am often answering emails at 2 a.m. So a 3 a.m. phone call is not a biggie. (A 5 a.m. call would suck though.) Vote for me!
   Of course, we have that little problem of Art. II, s. 1 of the US Constitution.