AlchemyToday

From a ham-handed Op-Ed in the American Spectator today (another rehashed look at Obama’s problem with Jews):

Well, it is likely that Obama will soon be having to retract Merrill McPeak. McPeak, who was arrested last year for driving under the influence, apparently has a problem controlling more than his thirst for fermented beverages. He also has a penchant for bashing Israel or, more particularly, Jews who oppose negotiating with terrorists.

Can we just strike advisers’ DUIs from the record as relevant right now? Can a Blumenthal just cancel out a McPeak? Ditto for Clinton’s extramarital indiscretions canceling out Dodd/Kennedy’s on Obama’s side. And while we’re at it, let’s ignore both campaign’s missteps in the Irish & Scottish press. Groovy.

Wherein, someone who writes a post copied whole cloth from a campaign memo should make note of its source? Moreover, does this rule apply more or less when someone previously took somebody else to the mat over purported plagiarism?

Admittedly, standards vary for those running for President and those bloviating on cable news, but presumably they exist.

Over at the Corner, Marc Hemingway discovers Google and feigns intrigue:

In fact, there’s only 563 mentions of the phrase “make history” on barackobama.com and another 1,750 mentions of “making history” on the candidate’s website alone. How on earth could anyone have gotten the idea that Barack Obama was suggesting that a spectrographic analysis of his skin color proves that his mere election as president would be a positive historical event? In fact, one might say that “making history” was a successful campaign theme for Obama precisely because it used race to his advantage, making the subtle suggestion that electing a black man would make Americans feel better about the state of race relations. And isn’t this exactly what Geraldine Ferraro was eviscerated for pointing out?

Since Marc’s asking questions, here’s some answers for him.

1. If you click through the Google links that Hemingway provides, 99% of them are posts on blogs for BarackObama.com users.  Not necessarily the most eloquent, post-racial, on-message people in the world.  Another 0.9% are fundraising pitches; again user-generated pages (you can make your own fundraising page with whatever message you want to share with your family).  Another 0.09% are official pages & posts from the campaign, which highlight the history-making aspect of any number of events in Obama’s run: the amount of money he’s raised each quarter, the number of donors he’s had, the record turnout levels in every primary and caucus held so far, the low average dollar amount for his donors, etc etc etc.  And, yeah, there’s the debate transcripts that Hemingway points to.  Clearly though, every reference to “making history” is coded language to appeal to the AA-loving instincts in Democrats that make us all want to elect unqualified Black men to be President.
2. Ferraro was eviscerated for saying something that was not only unartful but manifestly retarded.  She made the argument that Obama, who’s gone to lengths to distance himself from race as long as I’ve seen him in politics, would’ve inevitably taken longer to get where he is if he weren’t Black, and even longer if he’d been a woman.  Anyone who says that it utterly unfamiliar with the dynamics of the Senate primary contest in Illinois that was a critical springboard in Obama’s trajectory to where he’s at today.  Obama was up against a well-funded opponent as well as a Democratic establishment opponent, and he was neither.  You’d think, given his Blackness and his opponents’ pastiness,  he’d turn out Chicago hard, maybe try to appeal to other Illinois minorities, etc… nope.  Instead, he barnstormed downstate Illinois (I was in school at the time, annoyed by Blair Hull commercials on TV, and initially confused as to why this also-ran guy with the silly name had signs up all over town) and pushed hard to get his opponents to take a firm position on Iraq (this is 2004, when nearly everyone with a (D) after their name was hedging madly on the issue–especially those facing strong Republican challengers in the general election).  Down in Champaign, we didn’t have many people protesting against Afghanistan or Iraq, but when they’d show up every Sunday they’d be greeted by a pro-war counterprotest that featured the biggest flags I’ve ever seen lofted up with cherry pickers over someone’s car dealership.  Downstate Illinois remains, regrettably, one of the more racist parts of the country along with similar midwestern areas (rural MO, OH, IN).  There’s a legacy of hate there that’s more contemporary, less ingrained/normalized like you see in the South, and, I think, a lot more poisonous.  Want to exploit your race to gin up White-guilt votes?  This is not the place for a Black Harvard man from Chicago with an angry Black pastor to try it.  He didn’t get the downstate vote by pointing out the embarrassingly low number of Black, post-reconstruction Senators, he got it by meeting with people, addressing their concerns, and possibly getting them to recognize to look beyond race.

I’d bet that if you’d ask Obama how his election would “make history” he’d tell you that it’s not because we’d have a Black man in the White House, but because after his Presidency, no one would care about the color of the next person elected.

Just got this in the e-mail from the Yellow Dog Dems:

Richie: Existing TDP Credentials Process Already Provides for “Verification”

Below is a statement by Texas Democratic Chairman Boyd Richie regarding the Delegate Selection Process:

The Texas Democratic Party and local Democratic Party organizations around our state are working to turn the enormous opportunity created by the record Democratic turnout experienced on March 4th into a positive outcome for Texas Democrats this fall and in 2010. We are proud of both our Presidential candidates who helped create that turnout. We ask now that the campaigns work with us rather than become an impediment to this extraordinary opportunity to build our party.

On March 4th, our Democratic precinct conventions experienced record turnout of roughly one million precinct convention attendees, a ten-fold increase from the previous high attendance mark. As expected in any record turnout involving hundreds of thousands of people, there were reports of problems caused by long lines and crowded facilities. These problems are not unique to Texas. Similar problems, in proportionately similar numbers, occurred in pure caucus states like Iowa and Nevada.

The overwhelming majority of problems reported in Texas do not affect the legitimacy of delegate allocation. It is important to remember that the precinct conventions are just the first of three steps where delegates and alternates are selected. “Final results” will not be determined until June 6-7 at the Texas Democratic State convention. And at each convention step, Texas Democratic Party rules provide a credentials process to address problems and provide an avenue to register complaints and make formal challenges

For that reason, the Texas Democratic Party will not do as suggested by one campaign and circumvent Party rules to set up an unnecessary, ad hoc “verification” process that could effectively disqualify delegates selected at their precinct conventions after the fact. The Party has never stated any intention to set up a verification process of this nature because Party rules already provide for “verification” through our credentials process. Candidates who wish to disqualify delegates must pursue formal challenges based on evidence filed appropriately in accordance with our party’s rules.

The Texas Democratic Party plans to conduct our district and county conventions on March 29 and our June State Convention in accordance with procedures set forth in Texas law and party rules. Both campaigns have the opportunity and responsibility to do their jobs by documenting evidence, filing challenges if warranted, and turning out their delegates in a system that rewards such an effort when final delegate results are determined at the State Convention in June.

These are two consistent messages out of the Clinton campaign as to why superdelegates and intelligent voters should pick her over Obama:

1. Obama has lost most big states (CA/MA/NY/TX/OH/FL/MI). Lots of electors are at stake here in November. The general is winner-take-all, so Hillary’s wins here should be worth more than the oft-marginal numbers of delegates she’s been awarded. Criticisms of this point of view: a primary win does not imply a win or even an advantage in the general election (Clinton has repeatedly made this argument about Obama’s red-state wins and it’s a good one). Relevant evidence: excepting Florida, every “big state” I’ve analyzed so far shows Obama doing as well or better than Hillary against McCain. In all states, Obama’s performance relative to Hillary’s is trending upwards.

2. Obama’s negatives will inevitably rise once the right-wing smear machine has gotten into gear. My criticisms: while you can genuinely argue whether or not Clinton’s campaign has been negative, it has undoubtedly been critical of Obama and has hit on all the notes that previous Democratic and Republican opponents of his have touched on–voters in polled states have come to know Obama through both the efforts of his campaign, his presentation in the media, and Clinton’s effort to highlight his vulnerabilities (Rezko/Chicago Seven/Poor white voters/Wright/All-talk-no-walk/etc). Obama’s performance vis-a-vis McCain has consistently improved through months of polling in every state I’ve looked at.

Here are the states I’ve compiled this morning; I’ll add California and Washington and other non-big battleground states later as well as provide the compiled polling data. First, Clinton and Obama’s match-ups vs. McCain, plotting the percentage difference between the candidates:

Next, plotting the difference between the blue and red lines in these graphs with a linear regression — a positive slope in the regression indicates that Obama’s strength against McCain, relative to Clinton, is improving.

Don’t know why I put myself through this, but I just counted several instances where Taylor Marsh accuses Barack Obama of playing the “hoodwink” card in South Carolina and Mississippi–presumably some sort of political crime because he’s been caught speaking in coded language to his black supporters. Now, I saw Obama throw this line out, which has been a standard part of his stump speech for months, in Baltimore in front of an audience that was probably half-or-so white, but Baltimore’s a majority black city and Obama was trying to get out the vote for his largely black supporters in Downtown and West Baltimore, so I decided to see if there’s any veracity to T. Marsh’s claims (from what I gather, there generally isn’t, but let’s give her a fair shake).

Turns out, Obama’s used that exact language in practically every state he’s campaigned in since South Carolina.

Alabama

However, he rebutted efforts to besmirch his character in Birmingham, a cradle of the civil rights movement, where he addressed a cheering, racially mixed crowd of 10,000.

“That’s just the same dirty tricks. That’s old-style politics, trying to bamboozle you, trying to hoodwink you, running the okie-doke on you.”

“This election … it’s not a black or white issue, it’s not a young or old issue it’s a past issue versus a future issue,” Obama said in an impassioned speech at the University of Alabama. “… This is our moment. This is our time.

California

On stage in front of a “change” banner at a fund-raiser at the Avalon club in Hollywood, Barack Obama reprised his his ‘bamboozled” line last night for an audience that included celebrities. (Quentin Tarantino!). “It’s the typical response against a movement for change,” he said. “[It] happens, by the way, every time. It’s fascinating, you know, Bill Clinton was confronted with the same stuff back in the 90s. And now, you know, things go full circle.”

Missouri

Browsing the language news online recently, I found a lively debate under way at the MSNBC politics blog. The item sparking the discussion was a note on Barack Obama’s colloquial language; he was already telling voters not to be bamboozled or hoodwinked by his opponents, not to fall for the okey-doke. And in St. Louis, the MSNBC reporter said (mistakenly, it now appears), he added hornswoggled to the list.

Different context; don’t know where

Obama wants multi-year prison sentences for bankers and others who “hoodwink” poor people into homes beyond their means, and as with some in Congress, he wants bankruptcy judges to be able to change the terms of mortgage contracts.

Osh Kosh, WI

“They will try to bamboozle you, hoodwink you, run the okey-doke on you,” Obama likes to warn of his foes.

Boston, MA

I am not going to cower and quake because the big, bad Republican machine is coming. Because they practiced that old politics. Yes, we have had it with ???. We know the games, the tricks, the bamboozle.

 

Not only that, but look at this:

Camp Clinton shot back Tuesday that Obama was trying to hoodwink people into thinking Sen. Clinton, D-N.Y., doesn’t want to start pulling out. “Sen. Obama is mistaken,” said Clinton adviser Howard Wolfson, who fired off an e-mail listing Clinton’s repeated calls for a “phased redeployment.”

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