Andrew Sullivan’s worst nightmare:

Clinton aide: She and Obama could be running mates

Terry McAuliffe told a business group in Madison on Tuesday it ‘‘sure is’’ possible the former first lady and the Illinois senator could become running mates.

You can’t make this stuff up.

This innuendo about Samantha Power’s hostility to Israel should stop. It’s ugly, nasty, and unproductive.

A much more reasonable line of inquiry would be to ask both Ms. Power, who is devoted to internationalism and believes that much can be accomplished through international institutions, what she thinks of reports like this one, sponsored by the UN, which claims that anti-Israeli violence by the Palestinians is okay and perfectly understandable, because they are freedom fighters:

UN expert: Palestinian terror ‘inevitable’ result of occupation

The report by John Dugard, independent investigator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the UN Human Rights Council, will be presented next month, but it has been posted on the body’s Web site.

In it, Dugard, a South African lawyer who campaigned against apartheid in the 1980s, says “common sense … dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by Al-Qaida, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation.”

“While Palestinian terrorist acts are to be deplored, they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or occupation,” writes Dugard, whose 25-page report accuses the Israel of acts and policies consistent with all three.

If Power defends this report—or the mind-set that produced it—then there will be plenty of room to attack her, and her precious UN, for their grotesque moral equivalence.

Stephen Hayes, writing in the WSJ, suggests that Republicans ignore the power of Obama’s rhetoric at their own peril. And he nails Obama’s special gift:

Mr. Obama has the unique ability to offer doctrinaire liberal positions in a way that avoids the stridency of many recent Democratic candidates.

Now, if you’re Mickey Kaus, you believe that Obama using his quiet way of speaking to cover up and hiding his way-too-left tendencies.

I agree with Kaus—the heuristic cues about Obama’s way-leftiness are obvious to those people who are tuned in to political code, which is a tiny fraction of the electorate. Millions and millions of entranced and besotted fans, however, get deceived, plain and simple.

And that makes me deeply unhappy about Barack Obama’s expected candidacy: unlike Reagan, to whom he is being favorably compared, he is being fundamentally dishonest with the vast majority of potential voters.

The job of his opponent will be to dismantle Obama’s pleasingly vague idealism with a relentless barrage of detailed, specific questions on policy—and particularly on the “dumb” Iraq war (his signature issue) and what he, as president, would do about Iraq on Day One, Day Two, Day Three, etc.

But I like Prince whole, and according to Gawker:

Prince: Sex Machine Broken

It’s his hip. He needs surgery. He’s 49!

Ideologically Correct comedians don’t refer to Barack Hussein Obama’s middle name, or to the fact that his last name rhymes with Osama, says K.O.

Nor do they proclaim that BITCH IS THE NEW BLACK and tear down the MSM for being so obviously in the tank for Barack Hussein Obama.

On the other hand, Keith dear, he’s Jon Stewart—with an audience of 1 billion—and you’re not. Being his ideological policeman is such an important job, though. Isn’t it?

It buys goodwill from the press—especially if you’re John McCain.

The “straight-talk express” also carries the connotation of getting the talk directly from McCain’s mouth rather than from the mouth of a spokesman. He is gracious, personable, and likeable (or so I’ve heard from those who know him), and he talks willingly to the press.

We know all about the Clintons’ horrendous relationship with the press.

What I find most curious is that Obama reportedly does not make himself readily accessible to the press. Despite this, he’s got amazing press. Of course it’s also because of this that he’s getting amazing press. He is also being managed and handled. And he is being presented as an old school-style celebrity. His stardom operates on the scarcity model—namely: look, but don’t touch.

The Politico picks up on this theme today.

I expect that Obama’s rapid-response team will in fact come up with an appropriate response.

I should also note that there is one constituency to which Barack Obama has paid attention lately: the Jooooooos. And the Joooooooos’ reps at the New York Sun are watching him like a hawk (you’ll excuse the expression) on Israel.

In the context of discussing the media’s failure to cover foreign policy issues (a subject I’ve addressed repeatedly and elaborated on most recently here), whippersnappers Matt Stoller and Matthew Yglesias urge their fellow progressives to bring national-security issues into their politics.

Yglesias:

A presidential campaign knows it needs to check the national security box, so they organize one or more Major Foreign Policy Addresses and then kind of play duck-and-cover hoping that Republicans won’t attack them and when Republicans do attack them whining that you shouldn’t play politics with national security. But if we all take for granted that politics will be played with basic questions of economic growth and fairness, then why not play it with national security, too?

Stoller:

Look, if you want foreign policy to become a political issue, you have to make it a political issue. That’s an organizing problem. I didn’t see any attacks from any Democratic candidates against each other on North Korea or Russia, any attempts to draw distinctions, though I saw a lot of high-minded ‘major serious policy addresses’. …

And you can blame the press if you want, but if 97% of a campaign budget is going towards something other than communicating foreign policy ideas to the public, then what exactly is being done to fix this problem?

Readers may be surprised to note that while I often disagree politically with both Stoller and Yglesias, I agree completely with their positions on this matter.

Of course politics doesn’t stop at the water’s edge.

Of course national security is a domestic issue.

Of course Democrats need to give voters an idea of what they’re for in foreign-policy matters.

Unfortunately, though, bringing foreign policy to the fore (as it stands now among progressive thinkers) would expose Democrats’ huge vulnerability on this issue if they continue to say that they are for pulling out of Iraq and damn the consequences, which is what their position appears to be. (I’m not sure, because they won’t say.)

The impression that a lot of people have of the Democrats—even, and perhaps especially, during wartime—is that the party is profoundly unserious, in the ways that matter, about the outside world, about foreign policy, and about national security.

To be serious in the ways that matter requires, first of all, that you validate the notion that we are at war, with hundreds of thousands of troops sitting in hostile territory; that a wartime president is, most importantly, the commander in chief, mandated to keep America and Americans safe; that you validate people’s (i.e., the electorate’s) legitimate fears and anxieties about the dangerous world we’re living in (not entirely of our own making) and the many dangerous bad actors we face (some of whom are evil); that you acknowledge political Islam as a movement (even if it has various, and conflicting, manifestations—i.e., some Sunni-inspired, some Shia-inspired) that directly and deliberately challenges Western Enlightenment ideals and, even more important, Western notions about human rights for all.

To be serious in the ways that matter requires that Dems address terrorism as a tactic that we will face here at home. That was—or should have been—one of the lessons of 9/11, which, as readers will recall, preceded the Second Iraq War and was a clear signal about the wider world’s longtime unhappiness with and hatred of the U. S. of A.

The Democrats have utterly failed to address these legitimate fears. Many anti-war Dems have chosen to charge Republicans with fear-mongering rather than address people’s real fears. For example, in their politicking about the Iraq war—and about Bush’s supposedly looming attack on Iran—many Democratic partisans loudly and aggressively downplayed the threat from Iran as “Republican talking points.”

These are not serious arguments, and I believe they will fall way short with those voters who are concerned—at the reptilian-brain level—about “national security.”

From what I can tell, the Dems’ foreign policy narrative is that we have to clean up America’s image abroad, whereas the GOP’s narrative is (as always) about keeping Americans safe.

But, by all means, Democrats should foreground these issues. They just need a better pitch if they expect to win skeptical reptilian voters.

—————-

p.s. Most of the Obama fans that I know support him because they hate the war in Iraq. They don’t want to think about the war. They want to believe that Obama can get us out of there, put it behind us, and move on. He is encouraging them to believe that this can, and will, happen. It’s a cynical political maneuver.

If you personally don’t want to think about foreign policy, that’s all the more reason for you to vote for a person who does think about it, and has honest, smart, well-rounded advisers who come up with detailed plans, backups, fail-safes, etc..

It had to be said that Obama’s anti-Clinton strategy is a vigorous insider hit job, following almost exactly David Geffen’s talking points. And now her communications director, Howard Wolfson, has said it … in so many words:

Senator Obama’s entire campaign against Senator Clinton is negative. I think he has run against her as the status quo. He has essentially called her divisive. He has called her untruthful. He has questioned her credibility. He has said she will do or say anything to get elected. If that’s not negative, I don’t know what is.

Obama’s claim to be post-partisan is his most skillful sleight-of-hand in his bag of tricks. In fact, he mounted an insurgency against Clinton. In what way is that not “old-style politics”?

But the people want to believe—mundus vult decipi—and so they don’t ask questions.

Barack Obama is deliberately opaque in an era that demands transparency. Surprisingly, a lot of folks don’t seem to mind, because they like the guy. Susan Sarandon, an Obama supporter, “can’t wait to see what he stands for.”

Others, however, are made very uncomfortable by Obama’s lack of specifics.  Spengler, for one, is deeply troubled by the things he purports to know about Obama’s parents—all of which was news to me. And as Wretchard notes, Spengler is “uncharacteristically vituperative.” Like Wretchard, I also wonder why.

It does rather seem, for the moment, as if America might just be crazy enough to elect a crafty and talented radical-lefty law professor who figured out how to hide those views (as Mickey Kaus described Obama in early February in a talk with Robert Wright on bloggingheads.tv).