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Thomas Sowell says our duty as voters is clear.
Now that the two parties have finally selected their presidential candidates, it is time for a sober– if not grim– assessment of where we are.
Not since 1972 have we been presented with two such painfully inadequate candidates. When election day came that year, I could not bring myself to vote for either George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I stayed home.
This year, none of us has that luxury. While all sorts of gushing is going on in the media, and posturing is going on in politics, the biggest national sponsor of terrorism in the world– Iran– is moving step by step toward building a nuclear bomb. …
Karl Rove has tips for the candidates.
Politics has become hi-tech with sophisticated databases, the Internet, TV ads, focus groups and polls.
But a lanky Sangamon County, Ill., lawyer described the essential task of politics in 1840 in a letter to his Whig campaign committee. Make a list of the voters, he wrote, ascertain for whom they will vote, have undecided voters talked to by someone they hold in confidence, and, on Election Day, get all Whig voters to the polls.
Abraham Lincoln was a great president, but he was also a very practical politician. And Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama would be wise to take his advice. In a close election, organization matters a lot. …
VDH with words for revisionist historians who have set their sights on WWII.
… In the luxury of some 60 years of postwar peace and affluence — and perhaps in anger over the current Iraq war — Buchanan and Baker and other revisionists engage in a common sort of Western second-guessing. The result is that they always demand liberal democracies be not just better and smarter than their adversaries, but almost superhuman in their perfection.
Buchanan and others, for example, fault the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I as too harsh on a defeated Germany and thus an understandable pretext for the rise of the Nazis, who played on German anger and fear.
Those accords may have been flawed, but they were far better than what Germany itself had offered France in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, or Russia after its collapse in 1917 — or what it had planned for Britain and France had it won the First World War. What ultimately led to World War II was neither Allied meanness to Germany between the two wars nor an unwillingness to understand the Nazis’ pain and anguish.
The mistake instead was not occupying all of imperial Germany after the first war in 1918-19. That way, the Allies would have demonstrated to the German people that their army was never “stabbed in the back” at home, as the Nazis later alleged, but instead defeated by an Allied army that was willing to stay on to foster German constitutional government and its reintegration within Europe. The Allies later did occupy Germany after World War II — and 60 years without war have followed. …
Boston Globe offers thoughts on Hillary’s failure.
At a social event last spring at the home of Mark Penn, then Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist and one of the most prominent and well-compensated Democratic consultants in the business, a fellow Democrat wondered aloud if freshman Senator Barack Obama might wrest the nomination from the well-connected New York senator.
Penn, the dinner guest said, waved his hand dismissively. “Flash in the pan,” Penn said, adding that the Clinton campaign saw former North Carolina senator John Edwards as her biggest challenge.
Indeed, few at that time expected that Obama would overcome the political and financial head start the wife of the former president appeared to have at that phase of the campaign, even though Obama had already drawn exuberant crowds in early primary states. But Penn’s offhand remark reveals the mistakes made by a Clinton campaign that failed to take Obama’s candidacy – or his supporters – seriously enough at the outset, and did not prepare for the long-haul fight Obama was ready to wage for the nomination, according to political specialists. …
Bob Novak writes on Hillary’s VP provocation.
Just when it seemed on the last Tuesday of the presidential primary season that Hillary Clinton would bow to the inevitable, she enraged Democrats who expected her to start strengthening Barack Obama as their party’s nominee. During a conference call between Clinton and other New York members of Congress, Rep. Nydia Velazquez suggested that only an Obama-Clinton ticket could secure the Hispanic vote. “I am open to it,” Clinton replied, according to several sources.
That message, promptly made public, infuriated Democratic activists outside the Clinton camp. Clinton was horning in on the climax to Obama’s amazing political feat. Worse yet, she was going public on a vice presidential bid she knows Obama does not want to offer. Talking about an unlikely dream ticket further slows the party unification process that Clinton’s critics say already comes two months too late because of her.
She showed that her exchange with Velazquez was no aberration by not delivering a concession speech Tuesday night. Clinton’s extraordinary bid for the vice presidency is a new provocation, in keeping with her repeated insistence that she is electable — implying that Obama is not. …
According to James Taranto, Jimmy Carter tells Obama to stay away from Hillary as VP.
Daniel Henninger says Obama’s identity politics were better than Hillary’s identity politics.
… Some in the Clinton tong profess not to understand what happened to her. “We are filled with disappointment and amazement,” said Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who helped deliver unto her the Keystone State. “Why haven’t these results caused the superdelegates to come around?”
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com.dowjones.video.articlePlayer.draw(“1588489612″,”320″,”290″,”left”,”452319854″, “Wonder Land columnist Dan Henninger speaks to Kelsey Hubbard about the role "identity" politics played in the Democratic nomination. (June 5)”)
//–>Did Ed Rendell ever believe that the 794 superdelegates, weeded from the party’s topsoil, would decide that of the two candidates’ constituencies – Hillary’s “women” and “white” voters and Barack’s black voters – they would stiff Sen. Obama’s nearly 90% black base? So long as he led her by one delegate, this was never going to happen.
Writing last week in the Boston Globe, Geraldine Ferraro now says that “sexism” contributed to Hillary’s defeat. She wants a study to determine “whether either the Clinton or Obama campaign engaged in sexism and racism.” Isms abound.
The irony too bitter to swallow is that Barack Obama’s identity politics trumped Hillary Clinton’s identity politics. Put differently, what goes around comes around.
“Identity politics,” something new, emerged from the dank vapors of the late 1960s and 1970s. The theory came hard-boiled and soft-boiled. …
Marty Peretz posts on the Clintons.
Bill Clinton is a bully, a coy bully. But a bully nonetheless. Given the ups and downs of Hillary’s campaign, however, — and they have mostly been downs — he has lost much of his coyness and even his trickiness. He is now just a resentful bully, as most bullies are and as his rant two days ago demonstrated.