Letters to the Editor
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spinerret
Completely agree with you. Both Tripster and Madden's articles are anecdotal and really do not present the reality on the ground.
But I am heartened by the ABC / Washington Post poll.
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Bitter to the bone
People like me who are bitter and cling to stuff are also damn proud of it.
Don't tell me I'm not bitter, Lou Dobbs. I'll wipe that grin off your fat face.
Why do some of us hate Hillary? Its because we're bitter. I personally don't like Hispanics. There are plenty of individual hispanics that I like, but I don't like them, as a group.
Why? because someone stole stuff from my yard once, and I blame them.
The Bitters are a swing vote. Some of them voted for Bush originally because they were sick of hearing about Clinton's junk. Some like me mostly never vote.
Hey, we're not the smartest tools in the shed. But candidates, ignore us at your peril.
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Bill Clinton: Older voters too savvy to fall for Obama
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2008/04/bill_clinton_ol.html
Last week, however, Clinton seemed to suggest that older voters might be more absent-minded than wise. Defending Hillary Clinton's faulty recollection of landing under sniper fire during a 1996 humanitarian visit to Bosnia, the former president said of her critics, "When they're 60, they'll forget something when they're tired at 11 o'clock at night, too."
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Clinton losing traction over Obama in Pennsylvania, Indiana
Los Angeles Time Poll
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-poll16apr16,0,794499.story
Her formerly double-digit lead is now just a five-point margin in Pennsylvania, survey finds. The reduced margin makes a win for her there less significant. She trails Obama among Hoosiers.
By Janet Hook, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
2:00 PM PDT, April 15, 2008
WASHINGTON -- With three crucial Democratic primaries looming, Hillary Rodham Clinton may not be headed toward the blockbuster victories she needs to jump-start her presidential bid -- even in Pennsylvania, the state that was supposed to be her ace in the hole, a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.
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AJ Holmes and Sherry
Yes, Holmes injected 7% solution of cocaine until Dr.Watson weened him off it.
As part of my elite noblesse obilge, I would highly suggest the GONZALEZ BYASS - Rare Old Soleras Matusalem. And I'd have to plug the Tokaji as well, if you like the sweet ones. Not quite Crown Royal.
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@Madam The Oratory of Senator John Kerry
I agree that Kerry always made sense, eventually. He would come up with these wonderful baroque constructs full of curli cues and interjections, and qualifiers, and, and, and. He's very thoughtful.
Sometimes he needed to just say "Yes". And stop. So I think his speaking style hurt him among the non Henry James crowd (approximately everybody in America except for a handful).
Obama is just on another level. He can build complex passages, but it's not like being on Mr. Toads Wild Ride while you are listening to him.
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Cry Uncle for me
I agree with you on Kerry. Most of the time he reminded me of that now dead patricianlike Bill Buckley, but of course, Kerry is a much better person that Buckley could ever be. Oh. Did Gore Vidal gore him in one obituary.
But I was comparing Kerry to Bush, because who else did we have to compare and contrast in our pick of who should be President. Bush would have failed if her was running for high school president. But alas! Like Jon Stewar would say "he talked to us as if we were adults." I mean Kerry
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Fester, Yes, Watson Always Was a Buzzkill
But the recommendations are truly, deeply appreciated. I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to wine. I do have a hard-earned respect for Crown Royal, however, as I left a bit of my liver in Utah (worth it, too) a decade ago. That's an evening I'll never forget for not being able to remember much of it.
Battery's running down and the cord won't reach out here, so I'll say goodnight and catch you when the sun's up again.
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The cure for wine illiteracy
I know this guy who is a GM at a restaurant and has wine tasting classes at a local adult ed shop. He has a simple approach to wine education: Drink More. I've gotten good results by chatting up the guys in wine shops that are out looking for good wine cheap. Any idiot with money can buy an expensive bottle, but it takes skill to find a good one cheap. The pros will take pride in their ability to sniff out the gems.
Tokaji is a Hungarian sweet wine made by combining dry and sweet wine in differing amounts, using a system called puttonyos that numbers from 1 to 6, the higher number the sweeter the wine. My grandfather was a big fan, and I think I inherited some of his bad habits.
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@madam Comparing Kerry to Bush
While taking out the trash, I was pondering your words and literary comprehension. No causation or correlation, just free association. I think too many people weren't used to concentrating in the way necessary to listen to Kerry. So they tuned him out. All we have left is "I was for it before I was against it", which is quite short for Kerry.
I find it interesting that the two suprise candidates, Obama and Huckabee have such strong oral skills. I wonder if their success is partially an unconscious reaction to the Bush years. I find it painful to listen to him.
Where are those linguistic anthropologists when you need them?
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About Obama's chances
Quoth ShawnWM:
And I'm betting that the same people who think a Dem who lost by a full 17 percentage points in California and New Jersey, who demonstratably can't win New York, Florida or Ohio (and Pennsylvania without a lot of help from rightwingers who deliberately voted in the Democratic primary) are the same people who think the anecdotal evidence from some alleged Obama loving "trailer park" dude scientifically points to a sure-fire win across Red America -besides the fact that near every kid in the Ohio Valley now is talking about Obama's "terrorist ties" they "heard about".
Oh, boy. How many ways can a person be wrong in one paragraph? Other folks have already demolished the false "17%" statistic, so let's start with the absurd idea that Obama wouldn't win California, New Jersey or New York. The current polling for McCain vs. Obama and McCain vs. Clinton shows either Democrat winning California easily. Obama is actually polling better than Clinton in New Jersey, even though she won the primary there. It's true that at the moment, Clinton does slightly better than Obama in New York, but that's to be expected. If Obama wins the nomination, do you really believe that New York will vote for McCain?
I firmly believe that a lot of the Clinton and Obama supporters who are currently saying that they'll vote for McCain if their candidate doesn't get the Democratic nomination will change their minds by November. I'm sure that they really believe what they're saying now, but once the primary season is over and they start thinking about McCain's policies and agenda more carefully, they'll come around. Some of them may hold their noses while voting for a candidate they don't care for personally, but I can't believe that self-described feminists would vote for a candidate who's consistently anti-choice, or that voters who praise Obama for his position on the war would vote for a candidate whose support for the war has been unwavering.
As for Ohio and Pennsylvania, current polling shows McCain beating both candidates in Ohio and either Democrat beating McCain in Pennsylvania, both by substantial margins. (See electoral-vote.com for the details.)
Next, let's look at the claim of "rightwingers" voting Democratic in Pennsylvania. I don't think there's any solid evidence about Republicans voting tactically for either Democratic candidate, but let's remember that Rush Limbaugh is still telling his supporters to vote for Clinton, not Obama.
Finally, the article doesn't claim that Obama will necessarily win the votes of these "bitter" voters. It just says that they don't seem to disagree with Obama's characterization. And that seems to be borne out by the polls (see Tuesday's War Room for details). There's also a good piece about the whole "bitter" kerfuffle by a columnist from the Philadelphia Daily News, which you can read by clicking on my name.
Will Obama reach these voters? I don't know. But I do know that working-class Americans respect honesty and integrity, and rightly or wrongly those are not qualities associated with Hillary Clinton.