Letters to the Editor
Asher Steinberg
Published Letters: 224 Editor's Choice: 12
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"the quality of WR stories... has indeed gone up" - Or Not.
[Read the article: Cheney's bogus oil argument]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Not that Mr. Benen writes bad stories, he often has valid points, but the idea of War Room isn't some partisan McCain-bash. It's supposed to be a bulletin on the campaign news of the day, along with insightful but nonpartisan analysis. Who's winning superdelegates, what the polls in PA show, the astonishing fact that Obama's polling behind McCain in New York state - that kind of thing. Sort of like the Caucus blog on the Times or the Ben Smith/Jonathan Martin blogs on Politico. Instead, Benen spends half of his time bashing Bush, who as far as I know isn't running for re-election, and the other half taking shots at McCain, when what the blog is supposed to be about is the election, and the only one going on at the moment is the Democratic primary.
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Whole Foods Is Just Doing This To Cut Costs
[Read the article: Environmental advocacy at its finest]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]With rising oil prices, plastic bags cost more than paper ones. That's the only reason they're doing this.
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Unsurprisingly, I Think You're Wrong
[Read the article: Is it "contradictory" to decry the right's tactics while insisting on their equal application?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]this is just an exercise in reflexively filling in the gaps in the insipid personality-based script -- authored by the Right and amplified by their media partners -- that dominates every one of our elections, regardless of who the candidates are or what they do.
John Kerry's defining trait was that he windsurfed in effete tights. Al Gore's was that he invented the Internet, claimed credit for Love Story, and wore earth colors because Naomi Wolf told him to. Michael Dukakis' was that he looked like a geeky loser in a helmet and didn't seem to show enough manly rage when asked in a debate about a hypothetical case where his wife was raped and killed.
If what you said above were true, particularly the bolded part, why did the media never turn Clinton into an effete snob, or Jimmy Carter, or for that matter, Hillary? Conversely, if the media always paints Republicans as "Regular Folk," how come Bush's father got portrayed in much the same way that Kerry was four years ago, i.e. as an out-of-touch patrician jerk? I'm not going to dispute that there is this stereotype about Democrats, but some Democrats play into it and others don't. Bill Clinton would have never gone to Iowa and said, of rising food prices, "do you see what they're charging for arugula at Whole Foods these days?"
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So I Disagree
[Read the article: The harmony between the Right and the media]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The fact is, Obama and Clinton agree on practically every issue; therefore the only thing that you can use to make a decision between the two is the personal stuff that you say shouldn't have been raised. When they finally got to policy, we learned that Obama would raise the cap on payroll taxes (while, bizarrely, providing an exemption on people in the impoverished 97,000-200,000 tax bracket) whereas Hillary wouldn't, that Hillary would raise cap-gains to no higher than 20% and he would possibly go as high as 28% (but probably less), and that Hillary would be superoverzealous in protecting Israel from an imaginary nuclear attack while Obama would just be overzealous. Obama's promising to leave Iraq in 16 months and Hillary's making an even foolhardier 60-day-pledge. They agreed on everything else. Given their agreement on virtually everything, how are voters supposed to choose between the two without making recourse to what we know about their personalities, character, electability, and so on? Moreover, Obama never talks about any of this stuff to the press. He has a press conference about once a month, leaves after they ask him eight questions, and if you ask him about Wright or whatever, he'll say, "wait till I give you a speech, I think that would be more fulsome." Well of course his speeches are more fulsome than the incoherent nonsense he spouts when he's on the spot, but they also protect him from having to answer any hard questions and allow him to make up b.s. like how he meant 'cling to religion' in a good way. So the moderators really had a duty to ask him about this stuff, since his campaign keeps him at such a distance from reporters, and more importantly, since the two candidates are so close on policy that the only way to make a choice is on personality issues.
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Wrong Question
[Read the article: The fallout from the Democratic debate]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Where do you suppose trustworthiness, honesty, and personality in general rank on the list of criteria voters use to pick their candidates? These guys have the same positions on everything; the only way to distinguish between the two is to look at personality.
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Maybe Golf/Squash Players Just Tend To Be Dorks
[Read the article: Do women prefer men who play team sports?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Also, what about singles tennis players? I can't imagine that women would prefer men who play no sport to tennis stars.
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Krugman is Right
[Read the article: Krugman asks "what's gone wrong" with Obama campaign]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you look at every exit poll, Hillary always beats Obama among voters who say the economy's their number one issue. Why? Because, while Obama does, of course, have economic policies, he rarely talks about them in any depth. I went to a Hillary event (not a supporter, just out of curiosity), and her whole stump speech is a laundry list of economic policies. Tax cuts, healthcare, subsidizing college tuition, witch-hunt investigations into oil companies and their ill-gotten profits... I'm not for any of it, but at least it's concrete stuff. Obama's people have clearly made a strategic decision that wonkery doesn't get you votes, and early in the campaign I think that approach paid dividends, but now it seems to be backfiring.
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The Limbaugh Stuff is a Myth
[Read the article: Krugman asks "what's gone wrong" with Obama campaign]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As we all know, the majority of Pennsylvanian party-switchers voted for Obama. If it weren't for mass party switching, Obama would've lost by something more like 12 points. It was Obama's campaign, in fact, that mobilized thousands of Pennsylvanians to switch parties. When I was back home in PA in March, he was running radio ads telling you where to go to switch your party registration. Why? Because he knows that party-switchers prefer him. My whole family, in fact, switched parties so they could vote for him (although one actually ended up voting for Hillary after Obama's swan dive of a debate).