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Couple of Slate columnists explain last night. Mickey Kaus first.
I’m as flummoxed as everyone else, having gone along with the near-universal consensus that Obama would win. Mystery Pollster has his work cut out for him. But I’m confident that soon enough there will be so many powerful explanations for what feels like an out-of-the-blue event that it will seem overdetermined. It’s important to memorialize this moment of utter stupefaction.
That said, here are four possible factors: …
Then John Dickerson.
Democrats like a fighter. Maybe that’s the simplest reason Hillary Clinton pulled out a surprise victory in New Hampshire. Before her campaign even arrived here, her aides were promising they’d take the fight to Obama. In the five days between the two contests, the Clinton campaign worked hard to bring Obama down to earth. Direct mail and phone calls attacked Obama on issues from abortion to taxes. Hillary Clinton upped her criticisms considerably at Saturday’s Democratic debate, in her stump speeches, and in heavy rounds of press appearances. Her central charge was that Obama was all talk. Voters who elected him would make the same know-nothing mistake they made in 2000 when they picked George Bush because they thought they’d rather have a beer with him than the other guy.
No one thought the strategy was working, including the Clinton staff. …
Maureen Dowd wonders if Hillary can cry her way back to the White House.
When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes.
A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the “humanized†Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. “We are at war,†he said. “Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-il?â€
Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.†He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships.â€
Bill Clinton was known for biting his lip, but here was Hillary doing the Muskie. Certainly it was impressive that she could choke up and stay on message. …
For WSJ, Fouad Ajami writes on George W. and his effect on the Mid-East.
It was fated, or “written,” as the Arabs would say, that George W. Bush, reared in Midland, Texas, so far away from the complications of the foreign world, would be the leader to take America so deep into Arab and Islamic affairs.
This is not a victory lap that President Bush is embarking upon this week, a journey set to take him to Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian territories, the Saudi Kingdom, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Bush by now knows the heartbreak and guile of that region. After seven years and two big wars in that “Greater Middle East,” after a campaign against the terror and the malignancies of the Arab world, there will be no American swagger or stridency.
But Mr. Bush is traveling into the landscape and setting of his own legacy. He is arguably the most consequential leader in the long history of America’s encounter with those lands.
Baghdad isn’t on Mr. Bush’s itinerary, but it hangs over, and propels, his passage. A year ago, this kind of journey would have been unthinkable. The American project in Iraq was reeling, and there was talk of America casting the Iraqis adrift. It was then that Mr. Bush doubled down–and, by all appearances, his brave wager has been vindicated. …
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As is their habit, the holders of Arab power will speak behind closed doors to their American guest about the menace of the Persian power next door. But the Arabs have the demography, and the wealth, to balance the power of the Persians. If their world is now a battleground between Pax Americana and Iran, that is a stark statement on their weakness, and on the defects of the social contract between the Sunnis and the Shiites of the Arab world. America can provide the order that underpins the security of the Arabs, but there are questions of political and cultural reform which are tasks for the Arabs themselves.
Suffice it for them that George W. Bush was at the helm of the dominant imperial power when the world of Islam and of the Arabs was in the wind, played upon by ruinous temptations, and when the regimes in the saddle were ducking for cover, and the broad middle classes in the Arab world were in the grip of historical denial of what their radical children had wrought. His was the gift of moral and political clarity.
In America and elsewhere, those given reprieve by that clarity, and single-mindedness, have been taking this protection while complaining all the same of his zeal and solitude. In his stoic acceptance of the burdens after 9/11, we were offered a reminder of how nations shelter behind leaders willing to take on great challenges.
We scoffed, in polite, jaded company when George W. Bush spoke of the “axis of evil” several years back. The people he now journeys amidst didn’t: It is precisely through those categories of good and evil that they describe their world, and their condition. Mr. Bush could not redeem the modern culture of the Arabs, and of Islam, but he held the line when it truly mattered. He gave them a chance to reclaim their world from zealots and enemies of order who would have otherwise run away with it.
John Fund alerts us to today’s important Supreme Court argument on voter ID.
Supporters and critics of Indiana’s law requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls square off in oral arguments before the Supreme Court today. The heated rhetoric surrounding the case lays bare the ideological conflict of visions raging over efforts to improve election integrity.
Supporters say photo ID laws simply extend rules that require everyone to show such ID to travel, enter federal office buildings or pick up a government check. An honor system for voting, in their view, invites potential fraud. That’s because many voting rolls are stuffed with the names of dead people and duplicate registrations–as recent scandals in Washington state and Missouri involving the activist group ACORN attest.
Opponents say photo ID laws block poor, minority and elderly voters who lack ID from voting, and all in the name of combating a largely mythical problem of voter fraud.
Some key facts will determine the outcome, as the court weighs the potential the law has to combat fraud versus the barriers it erects to voting. The liberal Brennan Center at NYU Law School reports that a nationwide telephone survey it conducted found that 11% of the voting-age public lacks government-issued photo ID, including an implausible 25% of African-Americans. …
Rob Bluey too.
All eyes will be on New Hampshire Wednesday morning for the first true primary in the 2008 elections. But even as hardy New Englanders trudge to the polls, something at least as consequential will happening in Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a major case on election law.
In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board and Indiana Democratic Party v. Rokita, the court will tackle the issue of vote fraud. The arguments will revive the debate over voter disenfranchisement that raged after the contested presidential election of 2000.
This time the controversy surrounds Indiana’s requirement that voters show photo identification when they cast their ballot. At a time when Americans are asked to show photo ID for routine things such as buying alcohol or getting on an airplane, it hardly seems unreasonable to do the same before voting. There’s also overwhelming public support for voter ID requirements; Rasmussen puts the number at 77 percent approval nationally.
In Indiana, however, a coalition of left-leaning groups — led by the state Democratic Party and ACLU — has brought suit against the state, claiming that requiring photo ID at polling places disenfranchises low-income citizens, minorities and seniors — constituencies considered key to Democratic electoral success. …
Thomas Sowell on the myths of 1968.
This 40th anniversary of the turbulent year 1968 is already starting to spawn nostalgic accounts of that year. We can look for more during this year in articles, books, and TV specials, featuring aging 1960s radicals seeking to relive their youth.
The events of 1968 have continuing implications for our times but not the implications drawn by those with romantic myths about 1968 and about themselves.
The first of the shocks of 1968 was the sudden eruption of violent attacks by Communist guerillas in the cities of South Vietnam, known as the “Tet offensive,” after a local holiday.
That this sort of widespread urban guerilla warfare was still possible after the rosy claims made by American officials in Washington and Vietnam sent shock waves through the United States.
The conclusion that might have been drawn was that politicians and military commanders should not make rosy predictions. The conclusion that was in fact drawn was that the Vietnam war was unwinnable.
In reality, the Tet offensive was one in which the Communist guerilla movement was not only defeated in battle but was virtually annihilated as a major military force. From there on, the job of attacking South Vietnam was a job for the North Vietnam army.
Politically, however, the Tet offensive was an enormous victory for the Communists — not in Vietnam, but in the United States.
The American media, led by Walter Cronkite, pictured the Tet offensive as a defeat for the United States and a sign that the Vietnam war was unwinnable. …
Detroit Free Press says crime drops when more folks carry guns.
Six years after new rules made it much easier to get a license to carry concealed weapons, the number of Michiganders legally packing heat has increased more than six-fold. But dire predictions about increased violence and bloodshed have largely gone unfulfilled, according to law enforcement officials and, to the extent they can be measured, crime statistics. The incidence of violent crime in Michigan in the six years since the law went into effect has been, on average, below the rate of the previous six years. The overall incidence of death from firearms, including suicide and accidents, also has declined. …