Letters to the Editor
BryanS
Published Letters: 365 Editor's Choice: 1
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Goodness me
[Read the article: Obama hits back at Clinton ad]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I didn't expect to cause such an uproar with my response to HRCin08. I was just offended - as a Salon reader and an Obama supporter - that someone would so transparently spam the site with campaign propaganda. To me, Salon is a place to engage in (sometimes heated) discussions about a wide variety of current events. A single-sentence drive-by smear runs completely contrary to that. If you read some of my other letters, you'll see that I've suspected the HRC campaign of embracing this behavior, and I think that it's no coincidence that as soon as the "anonymous" option was removed, we suddenly saw a lot fewer Clinton trolls.
I've got no problem with any legit Hillary supporters who want to engage in a discussion about the campaign. I think you're wrong, of course, and sometimes I'll be blunt about saying so, because I'm kind of a jerk. But I hate seeing a perfectly good forum ruined by posters who have no interest in participating in an actual dialogue.
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Spammers be damned
[Read the article: Obama hits back at Clinton ad]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]WTEblog posted the exact same comment twice on this article and in two other places on Salon. Rampart already caught CarolynKay signing up just so she could post Clinton propaganda. As far as I can tell, no one on the Obama side has been doing this.
Do you really think that spamming messageboards is going to turn your candidate's campaign around?
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WTEblog is a Clinton spammer
[Read the article: Obama's got ground game]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]He/she/it has posted the same comment across several articles, after signing up for a Salon account sometime within the last day, from the looks of things.
Is impersonal slander really the Clinton campaign's best attempt at an online presence?
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What a difference 8 months can make
[Read the article: Quarter of Clinton supporters would vote McCain over Obama]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Eight months ago, Hillary was enjoying double-digit leads over all of her primary opponents and was the presumptive Democratic candidate for president. Eight months ago, John McCain's campaign was flat broke, and his candidacy was dead as disco.
Nobody knows where we're going to be eight months from now. Nobody knows if the war is going to get a lot better or a lot worse. Nobody knows if the economy is going to continue limping along, or if it's going to tank. More importantly, nobody knows if these voters are responding out of frustration due to a closely-contested campaign, or if they legitimately think that John McCain has more in common with their preferred candidate than their candidate's rival in the primaries.
I'm a die-hard Red Sox fan. When the Cleveland Indians were whipping the Yankees like rented mules in the 2007 playoffs, I was tomahawk-chopping like mad. But when it came time for the Sox and the Tribe to go head-to-head, I had to invent new expletives to lob at Cleveland.
We're all fired up right now. That's what happens in a tight race. But eight months from now, Hillary or Barack won't be the enemy; John McCain will.
Eight months is forever in a presidential campaign. So let's all take a deep breath and try to keep our heads about us.
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You look tired, Alex
[Read the article: How will the spin from Tuesday's votes shake out?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Are you sure you have eight more months of this in you? Tell Joan that you're taking Friday off, and make her get an intern to weed the trolls out of the comment boards. :)
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Superman can't read minds
[Read the article: Howard Fineman, mind reader]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Other than that, I have no objections, your honor. :)
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Not to be a nag, but...
[Read the article: Obama takes Wyoming]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Since no one knows exactly what the delegate count is, you might want to provide attribution for your 1534-1433 figure. It's significantly lower (and less favorable to Obama) than the AP total (1578-1468), which is the most oft-cited one I've seen.
And maybe this wasn't mentioned because there's already another analysis piece being written, but it wouldn't have been out of place to mention that Hillary's momentum coming out of last Tuesday didn't seem to help her much. True, she was never expected to win the state, but she and her husband obviously did make a last-minute push for an upset, and she still got beat by 19 points.
Obviously, I'm an Obama partisan, and I'm hyper-sensitive to any bias against my candidate, real or imagined. But after the week he had, which was supposed to be the beginning of a momentum swing for Hillary according to the conventional wisdom, I think it would have been worth putting this victory in that context, not simply mentioning that it was an expected win in a sparsely-populated Republican state. Expected or not, it was still decisive, and delegate-wise, it most likely negated Hillary's Texas primary victory.
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Whoops
[Read the article: Obama takes Wyoming]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]My mistake: Obama won the caucus 61-38 with all districts reporting, so that's a 23-point spread, not a 19-point spread as I mentioned previously.
Anyway, that just emphasizes my original point: Shouldn't it be a bigger deal when the candidate who's supposed to be fading still gets over 60% more votes than his opponent in the first contest after the momentum was supposed to have shifted?