Letters to the Editor
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padcrasher
Also the title of this thread is Bill Clinton: The Chris Matthews of South Carolina. Bob Somersby has this bad habit of making these huge stretches of reasoning in attempts to equate liberals with right wingers when it comes to demagoguery. Is that what is going on here?
I spelled out explicitly the rationale behind the comparision: just as Chris Matthews' unfair and harsh comments about Hillary Clinton seemed to swing a sizable poration of the electorate towards Hillary in the days before the election (thus rendering the polls wildly inaccurate), so, too, did the reaction to Bill Clinton's behavior seem to swing many voters in the last couple days towards Obama (thus rendering the polls wildly inaccurate).
It's possible to compare A and B in a specific, discrete sense without positing that A = B.
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Clinton can also be challenged with this
Bipartisan lobbying firms serve rosters of blue-chip corporate clients. To push the Bush administration's Medicare drug benefit bill on Capitol Hill, the pharmaceutical manufacturers hired Democratic lobbyists Vic Fazio, a former Democratic congressman; David Beier, who had been a chief domestic policy adviser to Al Gore; and Joel Johnson, a former top aide to President Clinton and Senator Daschle [who also became a lobbyist after failing to get re-elected]. To push their side, the generic drug manufacturers hired Chris Jennings, who had helped devise Clinton's unlamented health plan, and former Republican Mark Isakowitz, who had helped defeat the Clinton plan. Similarly, in 1998, when tobacco companies wanted to sell Congress the settlement they had reached with state attorneys general over tobacco health claims, they turned for help to both Republican and Democratic lobbyists, including former Gore aide Peter Knight, the former Demcratic governer Ann Richards, and George Mitchell, former Democratic Senate majority leader.
While nonbusiness interests have better access to power under Democratically controlled government than under Republican, businesses have excellent access under both. Upon leaving office, more than half of the senior officials of the Clinton administration became corporate lobbyists. Clinton's first legislative director left his post after less than a year to become chairman of Hill & Knowlton Worldwide. Clinton's deputy chief of staff departed in less than a year to run the U.S Telephone Asociation. According to the Center for Public Integrity, between 1998 and 2004 more than 2,200 former high-ranking federal officials, from both Republican Democratic administrations, registered as federal lobbyists, as did over 200 former members of Congress. By 2003, more than half the total number of former members of Congress who were registered lobbyists had served as Democrats. Almost all were lobbying for large corpoarations.
--Robert Reich, Supercapitalism
This isn't exceptional, given that the revolving door is now the norm of politics, but if a candidate wants to affect change this is one of the biggest problems that has to be confronted.
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The First Gay President
Glenn, I don't understand why you are so afraid of the idea of black voters in South Carolina being responsible for Barack's win in South Carolina. Why is that taboo to talk about? As if we'd just insulted him?
I'm gay and if there was a gay candidate running for president, all things being equal, there is a huge possibility that I would vote for him or her. Why? Because it's human nature to want to support one of your own, and because one feels that a member of their own group understands their problems and concerns in a way that no one else quite can.
Black voters gave Obama the victory in South Carolina. Why are you so afraid of acknowledging that? That in itself seems like a weird form of racism.
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Certainly it couldn't have been historical
Can you guess who the last presidential candidate was that won the South Carolina primary and didn't end up on the national ticket? I'll give you one try.
Is it possible that that was the comparison Bill Clinton was making? That not all South Carolina primary victors are on the ballot in November? No, of course not. It must be race-baiting, because the Clintons are well established race-baiters. I know because I keep hearing from the MSM that it is so. Funny thing though, every time I hear them say it, there is no substance given to the claim. The people use words like 'aggressively campaign' and 'tearing Obama down.' What they don't do is provide even a single example of a comment remotely associated with race-baiting.
Now, Glenn and Josh say the thing speaks for itself, when Bill Clinton mentions Jesse Jackson. Except that it doesn't. When Obama supporter Jesse Jackson Jr. claimed that Hillary Clinton didn't care as much about Katrina victims as she did about her own appearance (http://youtube.com/watch?v=eNrlSn7ndAA), I didn't see a flurry of articles about how wrong it was to race-bait. Maybe when it comes to talking about race-baiting some people are selectively deaf.
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Was Bill sugar-coating a bitter Pill for Hillary?
Explaining her loss in the only terms he could come up with?
They are both SO invested in the process that they cannot pull their punches. The Obama-Jackson comparison is just that - a punch.
A low blow? Maybe...or rather a kidney punch?
Thanks, Glenn, for starting a lively discussion this snowy Sunday morning!
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Good update, Glenn
I was beginning to think that my earlier comment had been ignored:
http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/01/27/clinton/permalink/cc2bca5cc11e816a52a9c6f47d8e375f.html
;)
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@ Glenn
Again, people who aren't engaged are more easily manipulated. Isolation breeds paranoia, and paranoia breeds a willingness to play the victim, and to buy into the whispering campaigns of professional propagandists.
We see this every day in the UT threads; intelligent, articulate people, who've somehow managed to convince themselves that only they can see through the web of conspiracies which have entrapped us, that the powerful will always be able to fool everyone but them, that no matter what anyone does, the public life is a dirty game -- a mug's game, in fact -- and that the only way to maintain one's own purity is to remain aloof, and to call down scorn on the entire false process.
Well, all I have to say is that the doomed sheeple are not so dumb, and not so doomed, once they get up off the couch and go take a look for themselves. I don't know how this election will turn out, but I take comfort in knowing that the model the Republicans have relied on -- the passivity of the majority of the people, and their willingness to believe the worst about everyone that the Karl Roves of the world draw a bead on -- is about to be tested.
I commend you for your part in helping to re-invigorate a broader participation in political affairs, but I do wish you'd see that swift-boating, like any form of lying, has a definite half-life. Those who've engaged in it, Republicans or Democrats, have been playing with fire all along.