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Karl Rove asks if Obama is ready for primetime.
After being pummeled 55% to 45% in the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama was at a loss for explanations. The best he could do was to compliment his supporters in an email saying, “you helped close the gap to a slimmer margin than most thought possible.” Then he asked for money.
With $42 million in the bank, money is the least of Sen. Obama’s problems. He needs a credible message that convinces Democrats he should be president. In recent days, he’s spent too much time proclaiming his inevitable nomination. But they already know he’s won more states, votes and delegates.
His words wear especially thin when he was dealt a defeat like Tuesday’s. Mr. Obama was routed despite outspending Hillary Clinton on television by almost 3-1. While polls in the final days showed a possible 4% or 5% Clinton win, she apparently took late-deciders by a big margin to clinch the landslide.
Where she cobbled together her victory should cause concern in the Obama HQ. She did better – and he worse – than expected in Philadelphia’s suburbs. Mrs. Clinton won two of these four affluent suburban counties, home of the white-wine crowd Mr. Obama has depended on for victories before. …
Hugh Hewitt interviews Mark Steyn. They cover Hill’s win and we learn more about Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.
HH: We begin as we do on any broadcast when we’re lucky with Columnist to the World, Mark Steyn, www.steynonline.com. Mark, what do you make of Hillary’s win?
MS: Well, I would have been surprised if she hadn’t won. I gather Chris Matthews came on the air at 8:00 and predicted an Obama win, which would have ended the race. It would have showed that he was resilient to the worst kind of scandals, which is to say when you yourself put your foot in it, which he did with his guns and God remarks. And it would also have showed that mainstream Democrats in a critical state were prepared to discount those kind of stories. So what would have changed the race would have been an Obama victory. Once it’s as predicted a Hillary Clinton victory, then I think the only question is how big the final figure is. If it isn’t double digits, then it’s a poor night for Hillary and it’s a good night for Obama, because it shows that his numbers can hold up under quite a sustained assault. But I think that both candidates are really getting weaker as this thing goes on.
HH: Terry McAuliffe, campaign director for Hillary Clinton, was out today saying I don’t need to raise twenty, though I could raise $20 million. These media markets ahead in Oregon and Kentucky and West Virginia and Indiana and North Carolina aren’t that expensive, sounding every bit like a campaign guy who’s going all the distance. I just can’t see Hillary Clinton quitting if she won.
MS: No. Hillary Clinton isn’t going to quit, because I think she realizes that Obama is a weak candidate. He’s weak in the sense that he’s unknown. And an unknown candidate always has vulnerabilities. Some of those have been raised on your show, not just long distant past associations, but a lot of current associations. So she’s got to figure that at some point, if he doesn’t get stronger, then her argument to the superdelegates is look, this guy can’t win. He’s not the glamour puss the media make him out to be. The big glamorous Obama guy that they love, and when they do these messianic cover stories on him, it’s simply not reflected in the numbers.
HH: Now Salem producer Guy Benson discovered some audio from a reunion of SDS’ers in 2007. I want to play you four clips, two from Bernardine Dohrn, and two from William Ayers. …
Dorothy Rabinowitz explores the media’s Obama adoration.
… The uproar is the latest confirmation of the special place Mr. Obama holds in the hearts of a good part of the media, a status ensured by their shared political sympathies and his star power. That status has in turn given rise to a tendency to provide generous explanations, and put the best possible gloss on missteps and utterances seriously embarrassing to Mr. Obama.
The effort and intensity various CNN panelists, for instance, expended on explaining what Mr. Obama really meant by that awkward San Francisco speech about bitter small towners clinging to their guns and religion – it seems he’d been making an important point if one not evident to anyone listening – exceeded that of the Obama campaign itself.
Still, no effort in helpful explanations was more distinguished than that of David Gergen, senior CNN commentator, who weighed in just after the first explosion of reports on Mr. Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright. About this spiritual leader – whose sermons declared the September 11 attacks to be America’s just deserts, who instructed his flock that the United States had set forth on a genocidal program to kill black Americans with the AIDS virus, who held forth as gospel every paranoid fantasy espoused by the lunatic fringe about America’s crimes – Mr. Gergen said, “Actually, Rev. Wright may love this country more than many of us . . . but we’ve fallen short.”
It was an attempt at exculpation, as regards Rev. Wright, that no one has equaled, though many have come close. Not least Mr. Obama, who spends considerable time arguing that the press has focused on a few “snippets” taken from years of sermons. …
George Will examines our education establishment.
… After 1962, when New York City signed the nation’s first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students’ scores on standardized tests declined.
In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so “seismic” — Moynihan’s description — that the government almost refused to publish it.
Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools’ effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class — fractured families — would have to be faced.
But it wasn’t. Instead, shopworn panaceas — larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes — were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.
In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA’s behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us “open” classrooms, teachers as “facilitators of learning” rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of “multiculturalism,” and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century. …
Hitchens on Hill’s PA win
Walter Williams follows up a Sowell column.
Dr. Thomas Sowell’s recent column, “Republicans and Blacks,” (April 10, 2008) pointed out the foolhardiness of Republican strategy to secure more black votes. He pointed out that it is a losing strategy to reach blacks through the civil rights organizations and black politicians. It’s like a quarterback trying to throw a pass to a receiver surrounded by a bunch of defenders. The second losing strategy is to appeal to blacks by offering the same kinds of things that Democrats offer — token honors, politically correct rhetoric and welfare state handouts.
Sowell suggests that Republican strategy should be to highlight the liberal Democratic agenda that has done great harm to the poorest of the black community. Among those he mentions is the environmental agenda where “tens of thousands of blacks who have been forced out of a number of liberal Democratic California counties by skyrocketing housing prices, brought on by Democratic environmentalists’ severe restrictions on the building of homes or apartments.” Since 1970, San Francisco’s black population has been cut in half.
Then there are the liberal judges and parole boards who have turned criminals loose to prey on black communities. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, between 1976 and 2005, while 13 percent of the population, blacks committed over 52 percent of the nation’s homicides and were 46 percent of the homicide victims. Ninety-four percent of black homicide victims had a black person as their murderer. …
John Stossel thinks there are a lot of Chicken Littles around.
“Mortgage Crisis,” shouts the New York Times. The Times has used the term “subprime crisis” at least 11 times. Not in opinion columns — in news stories.
The columns are worse. Paul Krugman writes: “A lot of the financial system looks like it’s going to shrivel up and have to be rebuilt.”
The “financial crisis,” says Fortune’s senior editor, “is threatening to bring down the entire system, with dire consequences.”
When the current troubles aren’t a “crisis,” they’re a “disaster”. That’s what John McCain called them, while Hillary Clinton prefers “crisis,” saying, “This market is clearly broken, and, if we don’t fix it, it could threaten our entire housing market.”
Wait a second.
Where is this “credit crisis”? Did the supermarket reject your Visa card? I still see Ditech commercials offering fixed-rate mortgages at around 5.5 percent.
Sure, some lenders are skittish while things play out. Some investment banks and brokerage houses are sitting on shaky mortgage-backed securities. But why call that a “crisis”?
Do we have 25 percent unemployment, as we did during the Depression? Do we even have 7.5 percent unemployment, 12 percent inflation and 20 percent interest rates, as we did during Jimmy Carter’s presidency?
There’s a been a loss of jobs in the past two months, but that comes after years of strong job creation — 25 million net jobs in the last 15 years . At 5.1 percent, unemployment is low by historical standards. …