Letters to the Editor
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Why indeed
@ doloresflower
And why would Drudge want Obama to win when Obama is beating McCain in the polls with more ease than Clinton?
For the same reason Republicans are being urged to cross over in the open primaries (I've heard them on the radio myself) to vote for Obama. 1) They hate the Clintons with a vengeance (almost as much as some Obama supporters) because Bill Clinton actually had the nerve to beat them ... twice. Don't those damned democrats know that the Presidency belongs to republicans?... and 2) They want Hillary out because they know Obama will be much easier to beat in the general. Yeah, I know what the polls say. But anyone who has followed elections for some amount of time know that these polls are totally meaningless 8 months out. The polls couldn't even predict NH 2 days out, do you really think they accurately forecast what's gonna happen in November?
Drudge and his right wing buddies know something that Obama supporters are oblivious to. He is gonna get creamed in the general election, if not before. They know that a large part of the democratic party prefer to go with feelings and idealism instead of substance and pragmatism. But the democratic party is not the country. That's why we have lost 6 of the last 9 presidential elections. Idealism is a wonderful thing, and if Obama is nominated, we will be able to take comfort in it during the next 4 years of the McCain presidency.
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More problems with Sean Wilentz's article (1)
Point-by-point problems with 'The Race Man' by Sean Wilentz in The New Republic
Sean Wilentz: In the first three paragraphs, Wilentz attempts to defend Clinton against the mailers Obama's campaign sent out making allegations against Clinton's health-care plan and her support for NAFTA. May I just point out that Wilentz is immediately off-topic in his own article? What do Obama's mailers have to do with playing the race card? Wilentz immediately betrays his own bias by not holding Clinton to the same standard that he holds Obama to. Is Wilentz seriously suggesting that Clinton's campaign has not sent out materials and made campaign moves that were designed to make Clinton look good and her opponent look bad? Certainly Obama does have a message of change and hope, but does that mean his campaign can't be aggressive in some ways? (To be fair, I think some of those campaign mailers do sound like they stepped over the line an inch or two, but coming on the heels of Clinton's ridiculous plagiarism charge and other attacks, how can anybody accept her overplayed outrage as anything but another tactic?)
Here is Sean Wilentz's thesis: "A review of what actually happened shows that the charges that the Clintons played the "race card" were not simply false; they were deliberately manufactured by the Obama camp and trumpeted by a credulous and/or compliant press corps in order to strip away her once formidable majority among black voters and to outrage affluent, college-educated white liberals as well as college students. "
First, who is actually charging the Clintons with playing the "race card"? I mean, hasn't the issue died? Obama himself is conciliatory and apparently holds no grudges against Clinton for anything she might have done, so it doesn't seem to me Obama thinks the Clintons played the race card. In fact, the whole "race card" issue is quite low in the news cycle, and nobody really discusses it or talks about it much. This whole thing amounts to a handful of small flaps that Clinton bounced back from and that nobody really holds against her now anyway. I certainly didn't think most of what went down was any big deal, and I didn't see the Obama camp playing it up much either. The only thing I *DID* see was the media playing it up -- because it sells papers (or mouse-clicks).
Notice that part of Wilentz's premise is that the race charges were "deliberately manufactured" by the Obama camp. Keep that in mind as we go through his examples, which rarely if ever demonstrate that anything is "deliberately manufactured" by Obama's people. Also, notice that Wilentz discusses a "compliant press corps." The problem with this reference is that Wilentz is assuming what he sets out to prove -- that the causal chain of the race charges goes from the Obama people to the press. But Wilentz does not demonstrate this causal link at all. (The press gets its stories from many other sources than from campaign leaks and press releases.) Read on...
Sean Wilentz: "This development is the latest sad commentary on the malign power of the press, hyping its own favorites and tearing down those it dislikes, to create pseudo-scandals of the sort that hounded Al Gore during the 2000 campaign. It is also a commentary on how race can make American politics go haywire. Above all, it is a commentary on the cutthroat, fraudulent politics that lie at the foundation of Obama's supposedly uplifting campaign."
Notice here that Wilentz is contradicting himself. First he says that the race charges are the product of a press that is geared toward "creat[ing] pseudo-scandals." Then he says they are the product of Obama's campaign. Well which is it, Wilentz? Is the press responsible, or is Obama's campaign? Is it everybody? Is everybody out to destroy Hillary Clinton? Paranoid much?
Sean Wilentz: [discussing the flap over Mark Penn's use of the word "cocaine" on the Chris Matthews program: "Since then, Obama's strategists and supporters in the press have whipped the story into a full racialist subtext, as if Shaheen and Penn were the executors of a well-plotted Clinton master plan to turn Obama into a stereotypical black street hoodlum."
Where is Wilentz's evidence of this racialist subtext? Where is Wilentz's evidence that the racialist subtext traces back to the Obama campaign? I saw the exchange and nobody was angry about anything related to race -- they were angry because Mark Penn was being a snarky ass who, while discussing negative campaigning, kept creeping negative little jabs into his discussion of the use of negative campaign tactics. It wasn't just the Obama campaigner who was angry, it was also a John Edwards person. Wilentz writes a dozen sentences describing this scenario, but then he fails in his conclusion to draw any direct link between the Obama campaign and the "racialist subtext." He conflates NYT columnist Frank Rich with the Obama campaign as if there were no distinction to be made.
Sean Wilentz: "That evening, the Democratic campaign became truly tangled up in racial politics--directly and forcefully introduced by the pro-Obama forces. In order to explain away the shocking loss, Obama backers vigorously spread the claim that the so-called Bradley Effect had kicked in."
Where is Wilentz's evidence for this? Also, who are "Obama backers"? What does "Obama backers" even mean, as it could be anybody who favors Obama but who is not connected to the actual campaign. (Earlier in Wilentz's article, he is quick to dismiss the negative smearing of a Clinton campaign co-chair Bill Shaheen, saying that Shaheen "remarked entirely on his own" to make a careful distinction. So why doesn't Wilentz apply the same standard to the Obama campaign? Wilentz is all too willing to lump Obama "backers" together as if they are all following the Obama campaign's will, but he is quite forgiving of anything done by Clinton backers as long as there is no direct link to the top.