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Bill Kristol with a short Palin story.
Spengler turns his attention from Russian chess masters to Obama’s losing campaign. On Obama’s speech he has this to say;
… On television, Obama’s spectacle might have looked like The Ten Commandments, but inside the stadium it felt like Night of the Living Dead. The longer the candidate spoke, and the more money he promised to spend on alternative energy, preschool education, universal health care, and other components of the Democratic pinata, the lower the party professionals slouched into their seats. The professionals I sat with were Hillary Clinton people, to be sure, and had reason to sulk, for an Obama victory might do them little good in any event.
The Democrats were watching the brightest and most articulate presidential candidate they have fielded since John F Kennedy snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And this was before John McCain, in a maneuver worthy of Admiral Chester Nimitz at the Battle of Midway, turned tables on the Democrats’ strategy with the choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. …
… Obama will spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected the obvious road to victory, that is, choosing Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. However reluctantly, Clinton would have had to accept. McCain’s choice of vice presidential candidate made obvious after the fact what the party professionals felt in their fingertips at the stadium extravaganza yesterday: rejecting Clinton in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness. McCain’s selection was a statement of strength. America’s voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.
That is why McCain will win in November, and by a landslide, barring some unforeseen event. Obama is the most talented and persuasive politician of his generation, the intellectual superior of all his competitors, but a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it. Obama’s prospective defeat is entirely of its own making. No one is more surprised than Republican strategists, who were convinced just weeks ago that a weakening economy ensured a Democratic victory.
Biden, who won 3% of the popular vote in the Democratic presidential primary in his home state of Delaware, and 1% or less in every other contest he entered, is ballot-box poison. Obama evidently chose him to assuage critics who point to his lack of foreign policy credentials. That was a deadly error, for by appearing to concede the critics’ claim that he knows little about foreign policy, Obama raised questions about whether he is qualified to be president in the first place. He had a winning alternative, which was to pick Clinton. That would have sent a double message: first, that Obama is tough enough to make the slippery Clintons into his subordinates, and second, that he is generous enough to extend a hand to his toughest adversary in the cause of unity.
Why didn’t Obama choose Hillary? The most credible explanation came from veteran columnist Robert Novak May 10, who reports that Michelle Obama vetoed Hillary’s candidacy. “The Democratic front-runner’s wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party’s nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility,” Novak wrote. …
Jennifer Rubin posts in Pajamas Media on Obama’s resumé padding.
Barack Obama has a solution to his lack of accomplishment and experience: pad his resume. If resume fraud were a crime, Obama would be looking at fifteen to life. And it is not just an isolated incident or two. He is a repeat offender.
Obama started early. Even the [1] New York Times acknowledges that in his book [2] Dreams From My Father
Obama accomplished little as a “community organizer.” (”It is clear that the benefit of those years to Mr. Obama dwarfs what he accomplished.”) But he did manage to steal credit for asbestos testing and removal in the Altgeld Gardens, a public housing project in Chicago. But he didn’t quite tell the whole story. The Times writes:
What Mr. Obama does not mention in his book is that residents of the nearby Ida B. Wells housing project, and some at Altgeld itself, had already been challenging the housing authority on asbestos. A local newspaper had also taken up the issue. …
David Warren’s Sarah Palin column.
As everyone with access to the mainstream media knows, the Alaskan 17-year-old, Bristol Palin, is pregnant by a high school hockey jock named Levi, and is going to have the baby and marry him.
The august, liberal New York Times carried three big “analyses” on this yesterday, in which their top correspondents had a go at performing journalistic “gotchas” on Sarah Palin, John McCain, and the Republican Party. They don’t need to find any example of wrongdoing or irregularity in Ms. Palin’s past. For their purpose is to reduce her candidacy to a soap opera, so that readers will not be tempted to listen to the woman, or form any judgment of their own about her qualifications to be on a presidential ticket.
One begins to understand why women other than Hillary Clinton are seldom considered for such positions. For the American liberal media grant themselves a free pass on all traditional principles of decency, and every feminist talking point besides, when they are confronted with a woman not in the feminist stereotype. Similarly, should a black man be put forward for an important office, who is not ideologically one of theirs, he will be received, journalistically, as Judge Clarence Thomas was back in 1991 — publicly lynched. …
And David Harsanyi.
… Who knows? Maybe the lynch mob will bury Palin’s candidacy. Maybe Palin will bury herself, proving to be incompetent and unworthy. But how can a candidate be portrayed as a failure by experts who haven’t heard a word from her mouth?
Not only is this dishonest, it betrays a real political anxiety over Palin’s impact.
Do vice presidential candidates have the ability to sway an election or rally a party? Almost never.
But in this presidential election, excitement has become, for the first time, a shared experience.
Jonah Goldberg says Sarah has brought new life to the GOP.
… This is my sixth Republican National Convention, and I’ve never seen anything remotely like the excitement Palin has unleashed. Some compare it to the enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan in 1976 or 1980. Even among the cynics and nervous strategists, there’s a kind of giddiness over John McCain’s tactical daring in selecting the little-known Alaskan.
Readers of National Review Online – a reliable bellwether of conservative sentiment – flooded the site with e-mails over Labor Day weekend. The messages ran roughly 20-1 in almost orgiastic excitement about the pick. On Friday, one reader expressed Christmas-morning delight over the gift of Palin, proclaiming that McCain had just “given us our Red Ryder BB gun.”
Hundreds of NRO readers announced that they were finally donating to McCain after months of holding out. Many had hard feelings toward the senator, who too often defined “maverick” as a willingness, even an eagerness, to annoy conservatives. They weren’t kidding: Between the Palin announcement Friday and Monday morning, the McCain camp raised $10 million. This enthusiasm reflects how, although the party wants Barack Obama to lose, it is just now getting excited about a McCain win. …
John Podhoretz, Jennifer Rubin, and Peter Wehner in Contentions discuss the media feeding frenzy, and Palin’s speech tonight.
I agree with you, John. The feverish quality to the press coverage of Palin, and the degree to which they want to destroy her (and in the process, her family), is astonishing, even for those of us who have watched media tendentiousness over the years. There is, I suspect, something cultural, as well as political, that is driving this. It is as if Sarah Palin–her views, her life-story, her Alaska roots, and perhaps even her decision to have a Down Syndrome child instead of an abortion–are viewed as a threat and/or an affront to many in the media. It is similar to what Clarence Thomas experienced; his life and views were a direct challenge to those who thought they knew how an African-American man ought to think and act.
The McCain campaign is right, in my judgment, to charge that the media is “on a mission to destroy” Palin and right to name names. Members of the press are acting like a “herd of independent minds.” Having never heard of her before, many within the press have deemed Governor Palin to be a failure and a joke. They are now doing everything they can to advance their views. What we are seeing, especially from CNN and the New York Times, is advocacy journalism on stilts.
Thomas Sowell on changes in politics.
One of the few political clichés that makes sense is that “In politics, overnight is a lifetime.”
Less than a year ago, the big question was whether Rudolph Giuliani could beat Hillary Clinton in this year’s presidential election. Less than two months ago, Barack Obama had a huge lead over John McCain in the polls. Less than a week ago, the smart money was saying that Mitt Romney would be McCain’s choice for vice president.
We don’t need Barack Obama to create “change.” Things change in politics, in the economy, and elsewhere in American society, without waiting for a political messiah to lead us into the promised land.
Who would have thought that Obama’s big speech at the Democratic convention would disappoint expectations, while McCain’s speech electrified his audience when he announced his choice of Governor Sarah Palin for his running mate?
Some people were surprised that his choice was a woman. What is more surprising is that she is an articulate Republican. How many of those have you seen?
Despite the incessantly repeated mantra of “change,” Barack Obama’s politics is as old as the New Deal and he is behind the curve when it comes to today’s economy.
Senator Obama’s statement that “our economy is in turmoil” is standard stuff on the left and in the mainstream media, which has been dying to use the word “recession.” …
Guess what John Stossel thinks about government drinking age mandates.
There’s a myth in this country that the drinking age is 21. But that’s only the legal age. The fact that government says you can’t drink before 21 does not mean younger people don’t drink.
More than 100 college presidents understand this, and now they want the minimum drinking age reconsidered.
“The 21-year-old drinking age is not working,” says the Amethyst Initiative, launched by former Middlebury College President John McCardell, president of Choose Responsibility Inc.
The college leaders’ statement charges that a “culture of dangerous, clandestine ‘binge-drinking’ — often conducted off-campus — has developed” and that “By choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law.”
It makes the obvious point that 18-21-year-olds are “deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer.”
States started raising the drinking age to 21 in 1984, after Congress passed a law that stopped federal highway money from going to states that kept the age at 18. Curiously, the law was backed by President Reagan, a self-proclaimed advocate of federalism. Federalism presumes that we’ll get better laws if states are free to compete in making public policy. Federal mandates kill useful experimentation by enacting one-size-fits-all policies. …