although I'm not sure right now. But both have to be considered long shots to win the presidency. Americans don't have a great history of electing either women or African-Americans with Islamic-sounding surnames to be president. Clinton has long had stratsopheric negatives. A poll back in the summer found over 50% of people saying they would never vote for her, and Republicans have long said they'd prefer to have her to run against. As to Obama, he's African-American with next to no experience.

You'd think after 8 years of Bush/Cheney that the Dems would have a cakewalk, but it doesn't look like it.

You wrote a pretty long post addressed to me. Too bad it had almost nothing to do with the point I raised. Yes, I'm sure women can be misogynistic too. And so maybe, if Obama were being misogynistic in his statement, he would not alienate half the voters. Fine. My point still stands and it seems to be one that even you can figure out. Why would a politician who's out there trying to get every vote he can alienate a huge share of the voters my being misogynistic? It just doesn't make any sense. See? That's why politicians get tagged for "pandering" so often. Because they're afraid of offending some significant portion of the electorate.

Well, judging the current candidates by how they stack up compared to Bush is setting the bar a might low don't you think? Any of the current candidates, except possibly Huckabee, would clear it with ease, but I expect a lot better of them or anyone else.

But as to your notion that the sexism some people on this thread perceive was unconscious, it frankly seems a bit odd. In the first place, this whole discussion (at least about the sexism issue) has been about a careful parsing of words, i.e. he used certain words like "periodically" and "feeling down" to commuunicate the message without seeming to. How can he be both unconscious of the import of his words and at the same time choose them so carefully? As I've said before, when your attempt to make sense of a person's words or actions gets that complicated, I suggest you find a simpler explanation - like this was not a sexist statement at all.

And what, assuming you're right which I very much doubt, is the practical effect of Obama's being an unconscious sexist? What does that even mean?

Oh, one more thing. Doesn't it seem a trifle desperate to conclude that someone as demonstrably intelligent as Obama is so ignorant of his own motivations that he can't see about himself what you can see about him? Frankly that seems to me a real stretch. It looks a lot more like seeing what you want to see than seeing what's there.

No, you've missed it again. I agree that you speculated. My posts to you were to the effect that your speculation doesn't make sense, at least to me. Care to address that?

but this is an appropriate inquiry and one Obama and people speaking for him need to learn to answer. It's his weakest point and we'll hear this nonstop until November.

Truly, the extreme awfulness of the Bush Administration with its attendant wars, economic debacles, lies and scandals has thrown politics as usual off track. That's why an African-American with an Islamic-sounding name and no experience and a woman could even be considered as presidential material. So it's just barely possible that all the slander of the right-wing machine will come to naught. People may just be sick of it this year. They're sick of everything else.

I hadn't heard that but I'll definitely repeat it as true.

I'm off!

there were news stories saying we had plans for 16 permanent bases in Iraq and that that was what the invasion was all about. Of course they weren't taken seriously at the time, but lo and behold!

So let's everyone ask Obama and Clinton what their plans for military bases in Iraq are, should they be elected.

the Dems should use the name "McCain" and the word "lobbyists" in close proximity about a billion times between now and November.

but let's remember what we're talking about.

Yes, real incomes have been dropping since about 1973, but what we must remember is that they should never have been there in the first place. World War II totally destroyed the industrial infrastructure of the world, except ours which it improved markedly. Massive government spending on war industries upgraded capital plants across the country, and the military training of millions of young men made them ideal for factory work. Beginning in 1945, U.S. industry had no international competition, so the world became our market. The Marshal Plan made sure the world had the money to buy our goods. No wonder the world was flooded with everything from U.S.-made cars to Hollywood movies. No competition meant that unions in this country were free to flourish and provide good wages to men with only a high school education. Those were prosperous times, but Europe and Japan had caught up by 1973 when Nixon abrogated the Bretton Woods agreement.

The lack of competition plus war spending drove wages and prices to unnaturlly high levels. That could not be sustained, and the fact that real wages and our nation's life style have been descending slowly ever since is due not to perfidy on the part of Dems or Reps but to the nature of capitalism. It's a race to the bottom because competition between firms forces them to seek ever-lower wages, hence capital flight to China, India, etc.

For those of us who were born and grew up after WWII, this comes as somewhat of a surprise, but it shouldn't. The decades from 1945 to about 1975 were completely aberrant in the history of capitalism. Look at what we were like in, say, 1900, or England 50 years before that, and you'll see what capitalism is really like, and it ain't pretty.