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Rich Lowry writes on the Columbia, Venezuela, and Ecuador excitement.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez reached for what he considered the ultimate insult when he called Colombia “the new Israel.” If by that he means a country better governed than its immediate neighbors, that dares to protect itself against terrorists across its border despite getting bludgeoned for it by the international left — he had a point. …
The Economist has a good analysis of the battle for the Dem nomination.
JOHN EDWARDS has been saying since 2004 that there are two Americas—the America of the rich and privileged and the America of the poor and put-upon. The results of March 4th proved that there are also two Democratic Parties.
A famous political distinction exists between “wine-track†and “beer-track†Democrats. Wine-track Democrats have traditionally supported reform-minded liberals such as Gary Hart and Paul Tsongas. Beer-track Democrats have preferred more practical-minded pols. Walter Mondale famously hammered the nail into Gary Hart’s coffin when he stole a line from a hamburger advertisement and asked “Where’s the beef?â€
Part of Bill Clinton’s genius was to bring the wine-drinkers and beer-drinkers together. This was, after all, a man who went to Yale and Oxford but who grew up the child of a widow in the backwoods of Arkansas. Yet this year’s Democratic primaries have burst the party asunder once again.
Obamaworld is a universe of liberal professionals and young people—plus blacks from all economic segments. Hillaryland, by contrast, is a place of working-class voters, particularly working-class women, and the old. These are people who occupy not just different economies but also different cultures. How many white Obama voters eat in Cracker Barrel or Bob Evans? And how many Clinton voters have a taste for sushi? …
… The great challenge for the Democratic Party in November will be to put this coalition back together. But the bitter fight in the months to come will widen the already gaping divide. John McCain could not be better positioned to pick up the pieces.
Then Peggy Noonan. Who is awesome.
From the first voting in Iowa on Jan. 3 she had to prove that Clintons Are Magic. She wound up losing 11 in a row. Meaning Clintons aren’t magic. He had to take her out in New Hampshire, on Super Tuesday or Junior Tuesday. He didn’t. Meaning Obama isn’t magic.
Two nonmagical beings are left.
What the Democrats lost this week was the chance to paint the ’08 campaign as a brilliant Napoleonic twinning of strategy and tactics that left history awed. What they have instead is a ticket to Verdun. Trench warfare, and the daily, wearying life of the soldier under siege. The mud, the cold, the dank water rotting the boots, all of it punctuated by mad cries of “Over the top,” bayonets fixed.
Do I understate? Not according to the bitter officers debating doomed strategy back in HQ. More on that in a minute.
This is slightly good for John McCain. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hemorrhage money, exhaust themselves, bloody each other. He holds barbecues for the press and gets rid of a White House appearance in which the incumbent offers his dread embrace. …
… I end with a deadly, deadpan prediction from Christopher Hitchens. Hillary is the next president, he told radio’s Hugh Hewitt, because, “there’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power . . . people who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end.”
It was like Claude Rains summing up the meaning of everything in the film “Lawrence of Arabia”: “One of them’s mad and the other is wholly unscrupulous.” It’s the moment when you realize you just heard the truth, the meaning underlying all the drama. “They win in the end.” Gave me a shudder.
Good VDH Corner post on the same subject.
And then, Mark Steyn.
Well, we will have Hillary Clinton to kick around some more, at least for another few weeks. The Mummy (as my radio pal Hugh Hewitt calls her) kicked open the sarcophagus door and, despite the rotting bandages dating back to Iowa, began staggering around, terrorizing folks all over again.
“She is a monster,” Barack Obama adviser Samantha Power told a reporter from The Scotsman – and not a monster in a cute Loch Ness blurry, long-distance kind of way. “You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh,’” continued Ms. Power, who subsequently resigned from the campaign.
The New York Times took a different line. The monster is you – yes, you, the American people. Surveying the Hillary-Barack death match, Maureen Dowd wrote: “People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?”
Do even Democrats really talk like this? Apparently so. As Ali Gallagher, a white female (sorry, this identity-politics labeling is contagious) from Texas, told the Washington Post: “A friend of mine, a black man, said to me, ‘My ancestors came to this country in chains; I’m voting for Barack.’ I told him, ‘Well, my sisters came here in chains and on their periods; I’m voting for Hillary.’”
When everybody’s a victim, nobody’s a victim. …
David Brooks thinks Obama has taken a wrong turn with his campaign.
… Clinton can’t compete on personality, but a knife fight is her only real hope of victory. She has nothing to lose because she never promised to purify America. Her campaign doesn’t depend on the enthusiasm of upper-middle-class goo-goos. On Thursday, a Clinton aide likened Obama to Ken Starr just to badger them on.
As the trench warfare stretches on through the spring, the excitement of Obama-mania will seem like a distant, childish mirage. People will wonder if Obama ever believed any of that stuff himself. And even if he goes on to win the nomination, he won’t represent anything new. He’ll just be a one-term senator running for president.
In short, a candidate should never betray the core theory of his campaign, or head down a road that leads to that betrayal. Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him.
Besides, the real softness of the campaign is not that Obama is a wimp. It’s that he has never explained how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona.
If he can’t explain that, he’s going to lose at some point anyway.
After a March weekend when it snowed for 24 hours straight in Mississippi, it is fitting we have an WSJ Interview with Vaclav Klaus one of the world’s prominent global warming skeptics.
… Mr. Klaus has become a globally prominent voice of skepticism about what he calls global-warming “alarmism.” This week, while in New York to address a gathering of fellow “non-alarmists” at a conference in Times Square, he took some time to sit down with members of the Journal’s editorial board to offer his dissenting views on Russia, Kosovo, America and of course, climate change.
“I am not a climatologist,” Mr. Klaus cheerfully admits. “I am not disputing the measurement of the temperature.” Even so, Mr. Klaus believes that his many years of experience in the fields of economics and econometrics give him some insight into the nature of the problems faced by climatologists and policy makers. In climatology as in economics, he says, “there are no controlled experiments. . . . You can’t repeat the time series.” So, just as you can’t run a controlled experiment to determine the effect of, say, deficits on interest rates, we can’t directly determine the effect of CO2 on climate. All we have are observations and inferences.
Mr. Klaus is also interested in the politics of global warming. He has written a book, tentatively titled “Blue, Not Green Planet,” published in Czech last year and due out in English translation in the U.S. this May. The main question of the book is in its subtitle: “What is in danger: climate or freedom?”
He likens global-warming alarmism to communism, which he experienced first-hand in Cold War Czechoslovakia, then a Soviet satellite. While the communists argued that we must all sacrifice some freedom in pursuit of “equality,” the “warmists,” as Mr. Klaus calls them, want us to sacrifice liberty — especially economic liberty — to prevent a change in climate. In both cases, in Mr. Klaus’s view, the costs of achieving the goal, and the impossibility of truly doing so, argue strongly against paying a price of freedom. …