[reposted, with a new title, cause WordPress is acting up]

Obama rebukes Wesley Clark for saying that McCain’s service to his country was no biggie when it comes to deciding who should run the country.

Josh Marshall thinks it’s a cop-out and that Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to take on McCain’s war record.

John Aravosis wants to know: “Honestly, besides being tortured, what did McCain do to excel in the military?”

For his part, Barack Obama is now not only the proud bearer of a flag pin on his lapel but also a true-blue American patriot, who is offended by MoveOn.org’s accusing General David Petraeus of betrayal.

Now, that is a pivot. And Obama is very smart to execute it, and to run like hell away from attacks on John McCain’s record and character.

p.s. For the record, here’s something John McCain wrote in his 1974 thesis. I’d lay odds that Obama has read it, and everything else McCain has written, and knows a lot better than to attack McCain on his strengths [e.a.]:

[McCain's] fellow prisoners say his [forced] capitulation only redoubled his determination to provoke his captors. “Acts of defiance felt so good that I felt they more than compensated for their repercussions,” he wrote, “and they helped me keep at bay the unsettled feelings of guilt and self doubt my [false] confession had aroused.”

He’s completely unlike the old Obama.

WaPo:

BARACK OBAMA isn’t abandoning his pledge to take public financing for the general election campaign because it’s in his political interest. Certainly not. He isn’t about to become the first candidate since Watergate to run an election fueled entirely with private money because he will be able to raise far more that way than the mere $85 million he’d get if he stuck to his promise — and with which his Republican opponent, John McCain, will have to make do. No, Mr. Obama, or so he would have you believe, is forgoing the money because he is so committed to public financing. Really, it hurts him more than it hurts Fred Wertheimer.

Pardon the sarcasm. But given Mr. Obama’s earlier pledge to “aggressively pursue” an agreement with the Republican nominee to accept public financing, his effort to cloak his broken promise in the smug mantle of selfless dedication to the public good is a little hard to take. “It’s not an easy decision, and especially because I support a robust system of public financing of elections,” Mr. Obama said in a video message to supporters

 Jake Tapper:

On Wednesday morning, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, told the pro-Israel lobby the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that he would be a strong ally of the Jewish state. As such, he repeated one of the talking points AIPAC likes to hear, that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” …

In an interview [later] with CNN’s Candy Crowley, Obama said of Jerusalem, “obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations.” …

Of his feelings about dividing Jerusalem, Obama said: “As a practical matter, it would be very difficult to execute. And I think that it is smart for us to — to work through a system in which everybody has access to the extraordinary religious sites in Old Jerusalem but that Israel has a legitimate claim on that city.”

Some in the media portrayed this as something of a flip-flop. “Facing Criticism, Obama Modifies Jerusalem Stance,” said Reuters. “Obama amended his support for Israel’s stance on Jerusalem on Thursday…”

David Brooks:

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.

But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

Speak for yourself, Brooks. I have not failed to appreciate his ambition. Indeed I have noted it repeatedly (but I’m too lazy to provide the links right now).

If I were in the Obama camp, I would quit trying to sell the idea that the “change” he’s offering is generational, because, as I recently noted, the Clinton generation (of which I’m nominally a part) is not exactly ready to hand over the reins (and Obama’s tendency to talk like a punk doesn’t help matters).

But generational change is how some Dems are painting the “differences” between the Clinton and Obama camps—differences that are being elided as Obama “Moves to the Center,” claims Thomas Edsall in the HuffPo [e.a.]:

In the international relations policy arena, sources in and out of the Obama camp described a more subtle process taking place, as Obama is forced to decide which Clinton experts to add to the team, and at what level in the hierarchy.

“While there are exceptions on both sides, one of the key differences between the Clinton and Obama foreign policy gurus is generational. And this generational split has significant consequences,” one knowledgeable expert said, speaking on background. “In the main, the senior folks in the Clinton administration (1993-2001) went with Hillary, while many of the less senior people went with Obama.”

Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy advisers came of political age during the Cold War, in many cases during in the Carter administration, and tend to see the world in terms of states and state conflicts, this source said. In addition, many of Hillary Clinton’s top advisers “spent eight years dealing with Saddam [Hussein's] intransigence in the 90s,” making them more receptive to the arguments for invading Iraq.

Conversely, this expert argued, many of the Obama advisers are post-Cold War theorists who tend to see the world in terms of failed states, the influence of technology, food crises, non-state actors like Osama bin Laden, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the uneven distribution of the benefits of globalization.

Another way of seeing this “generational difference,” of course, is this: having experience (aka coming of political age is a form of experience, which the Clintonistas have) versus having smart-(ass) ideas (aka being post-Cold War “theorists”—which the Obamabots think they have).

Meanwhile, one prominent California family lives out a different kind of drama at home, where it’s not a left-sectarian fight but rather a GOP-vs-Dems debating (sorta) society:

Of all the supporters behind the two presumptive nominees for president this year, none are quite as intriguing as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who has thrown his support behind Senator John McCain, and the governor’s wife, Maria Shriver, a Democrat and vocal backer of Senator Barack Obama.

The lawn of their Brentwood home has dueling campaign signs. The breakfast table has become a casual debating society. Ms. Shriver is even threatening to bring a life-size cutout of her preferred candidate into the house, something the governor has seen her do in other elections. “When one of the candidates screws up,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said of the cutouts, “the kids carry them outside.”

And to my great relief, the Dem side in this battle is represented by a fair-minded person—a “little-d democrat” [e.a.]:

“I think there are great benefits to having kids grow up understanding that we do not live in a one-party system,” Ms. Shriver said. “That there are two ways at looking at an issue. To be patient, and to compromise, those are good lessons not just in politics but for life. I grew up believing there was only one way to think. There isn’t.”

All hail the friendly enmity between people with different politics!

The loonies at MSNBC are fantasizing about how to wreak vengeance on the warmongers:

Noting that “prominent Democrats” had ruled out impeachment, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann asked former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke on his show last night, what “remedy” there could be for the lies and misinformation highlighted in the new Senate Intelligence Committee reports on the Bush administration’s misuse of pre-war Iraq intelligence.

CLARKE: Well, there may be some other kind of remedy. There may be some sort of truth and reconciliation commission process that’s been tried in other countries, South Africa, Salvador and what not, where if you come forward and admit that you were in error or admit that you lied, admit that you did something, then you’re forgiven. Otherwise, you are censured in some way.

Now, I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society …

Somehow I think we will avoid truth and reconciliation commissions here in the U.S. and A.—or at least so I hope! They’re getting pretty popular up in Canada!

But these revenge fantasies of Richard Clarke’s remind me of something Jared Diamond wrote in the New Yorker recently, in an essay about tribalism [e.a.]:

We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend. …

But, while acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful.

So, yes: Feelings of vengeance, like all other feelings, need to be addressed and processed so that people can move beyond them. But truth-and-reconciliaion councils are a vehicle for wallowing in those feelings, not for moving beyond them (just as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “liberation theology” nurtures the grievances of his congregation and ensures that their racial resentment will live on in future generations).

Well, let’s hope we don’t enter a new era of witch-hunting, which some Dems (the ones who want to “look into” the instances of “racism” and “sexism” in the primary campaign between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) seem bent on.

On that score, there’s one small encouraging sign buried deep in the biography of a future President Obama. When Barack Obama was practicing what he learned from Saul Alinsky, he reputedly felt uncomfortable with some necessary parts of the process of community organizing.

But, although he was a first-class student of Alinsky’s method, Obama also saw its limits. It appealed to his head but not his heart. For instance, Alinsky relished baiting politicians or low-level bureaucrats into public meetings where they would be humiliated. Obama found these “accountability sessions” unsettling, even cruel. “Oftentimes, these elected officials didn’t have that much more power than the people they represented,” he told me.

At one meeting, where residents of an asbestos-laden housing project confronted their property manager about whether their homes had been tested, Obama suddenly had the urge to warn his target. “I wanted to somehow let Mr. Anderson know that I understood his dilemma,” Obama wrote in Dreams, with the kind of empathy that is the hallmark of his autobiography. He was sometimes more interested in connecting with folks on the South Side than organizing them. He studied the characters he encountered so closely that Kruglik says Obama turned his field reports into short stories about the hopes and struggles of the local pastors and congregants with whom he was trying to commune.

Let’s hope that a President Obama will prove to be a late-stage dissenter from the School of Alinsky.

update: Instalanche!  Thank you, Glenn Reynolds!

Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around. Mostly, I write about media culture (”They call it news. I call it infotainment.”) But even though I’m not a politico, like everyone else during this election season, I find myself writing a lot —way more than I’d like—about politics.

John McCain captures his Reagan moment, sticks it to Obama, and uses him as a footstool from which to launch his campaign for real:

“In my other profession and the war I served in, the country relied overwhelmingly on Americans from these same communities to defend us. As Tocqueville discovered when he traveled America two hundred years ago, they are the heart and soul of this country, the foundation of our strength and the primary authors of its essential goodness. They are our inspiration, and I look to them for guidance and strength. No matter their personal circumstances, they believed in this country. They revered its past, but most importantly they believed in its future greatness, a greatness they themselves would create. They never forgot who they were, where they came from, and what is possible in America, a country founded on an idea and not on class, ethnic or sectarian identity. And America must not and will not forget them.

The McCain campaign will now start his “Forgotten Parts of America” tour.

Is it impossibly corny? You betcha.
Will it work? Maybe, if the media gives him some airtime … which is doubtful.

Do the echoes of agitprop help or hurt Barack Obama?

Meghan Daum examines the issues:

Fairey told me he thinks it’s solely his use of red that makes some people uneasy. I’m not so sure. He’s an artist; his adoption of propaganda tools — the graphic style, the underground distribution, and, OK, the color red — is at least in part ironic, a comment on political-machine communiques, a subversion of them. Although, let’s be honest, most people don’t look at the world through the meta-tinted glasses that this genre of art requires. They may get a whiff of critique, but what if they get a stronger whiff of something they can’t quite identify? And what if that confusion leads to some form of heebie-jeebies when it comes to Obama?

Still, the most radical aspect of this whole phenomenon is not the artwork itself but how it conveys Obama’s sharp divergence from the generic, easily digestible cultural coding that’s always been associated with getting elected. As Fairey says, Obama has “radical cachet.”

But if you like Obama and you’d like to see him elected president, it’s worth asking yourself exactly why none of the other candidates has dipped an ironic toe into agitprop, and whether their freedom from images that conjure mass idol worship, however archly, might not help them in the end. [e.a.]

One of those images was mounted on a fence around the corner from my polling place. It creeped me out—because I know agitprop, and I didn’t like it associated with Obama: it was a huge turnoff.

Daum claims there’s Hillary merchandise too, so:

It’s all commodity. As a result, no one’s commenting.

Maybe. For now. But things change.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m wondering when TV “journalists” will face the truth about their profession—namely, that what you see below is not just the future of “the news” but also the present.

(via FishbowlDC)

Fishbowl quotes some of the “juicy bits” from the upcoming NYT Mag article:

 

“By the way, have you figured me out yet?” Matthews said at the end of another phone conversation the following day. “You gotta under-stand, it’s all complicated. It’s not like Tim.” Tim — as in Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of “Meet the Press” — is a particular obsession of Matthews’s. Matthews craves Russert’s approval like that of an older brother. He is often solicitous.

In an interview with Playboy a few years ago, he volunteered that he had made the list of the Top 50 journalists in D.C. in The Washingtonian magazine. “I’m like 36th, and Tim Russert is No. 1,” Matthews told Playboy. “I would argue for a higher position for myself.”

Friends say Matthews is wary of another up-and-comer, David Gregory, who last month was given a show at 6 o’clock, between airings of “Hardball.” It is a common view around NBC that Gregory is trying out as a possible replacement for Matthews.

According to people at NBC, Matthews has not been shy in voicing his resentment of Olbermann. Nor, according to network sources, has Olbermann bothered to hide his low regard for Matthews, although when I spoke to him, Olbermann denied any personal animosity toward Matthews and told me that he appreciates his “John Madden-like enthusiasm for politics.”

Hmmm. Recognize anyone?

Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, in The Entertainer
London, 1957, photo by Snowden

p.s. The last time I used that image was here, in May 2007.

The last time I wrote about Matthews was here.

————————–

*** When I claimed my blog on Technorati two years ago, this is how I described it:

They call it news. I call it infotainment.

No one can say that we weren’t warned well in advance. See, for example, Neal Postman and Michael Schudson and Joshua Gamson.

Joe Klein nails Obama’s weakness as a general-election candidate:

But there was still something missing. I noticed it during Obama’s response to a young man who remembered how the country had come together after Sept. 11 and lamented “the dangerously low levels of patriotism and pride in our country, the loss of faith in our elected officials.” Obama used this, understandably, to go after George W. Bush. “Cynicism has become the hot stock,” he said, “the growth industry during the Bush Administration.” He talked about the Administration’s mendacity, its incompetence during Hurricane Katrina, its lack of transparency. But he never returned to the question of patriotism. He never said, “But hey, look, we’re Americans. This is the greatest country on earth. We’ll rise to the occasion.”

This is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right.

Sorry, Joe. In fact, between the two Democratic candidates it is only Barack Obama who is infected with this disease. And he’s got it bad, as he made plain on The View [e.a.]:

“Had the reverend not retired and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable staying there at the church,” Obama said.

See, he’s got to be even-handed about America. He’s got to indicate that he knows it’s deeply flawed.

He wouldn’t want anyone to think that he thinks this a great country or anything. And yet he wants to be its president.

How does this guy stack up in the general election against someone who reveres his country?  That’s hard to say. But let’s not put the cart before the horse.

A New York Times/CBS poll finds that:

Obama’s Support Softens

This is his support among Democrats. He is bleeding:

Mr. Obama’s big lead among men over Mrs. Clinton has disappeared during that period; in February 67 percent of men wanted the party to nominate him compared with 28 percent for Mrs. Clinton, while now 47 percent of men back him compared with 42 percent for Mrs. Clinton, a difference that is within the poll’s margin of error. Similarly, his lead among whites, voters making more than $50,000 annually and voters under age 45 has shrunk.

And still the NYT spins like a top:

The poll, taken March 28 through April 2, includes some encouraging news for Mr. Obama as he and Mrs. Clinton slog through what has become an extended fight for the nomination. Over half of those sampled continue to view him as having a better chance of defeating Mr. McCain. Most expect him to win the nomination. And Mr. Obama’s supporters are more enthusiastic about his candidacy than are Democrats backing Mrs. Clinton.

In other words, his devoted fans really love him. Everybody else has questions.

At the Corner,Liberal Fascism author Jonah Goldberg, whose book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than ten weeks, gives a lively account of the ups and downs [e.a.]:

The most plausible explanation [for the books slide from the top 10] is the same one that explained why I leaped onto the Times list my first week out of the box. After all I opened at #10 even though I had a small first printing and it was hard to find the book in many stores. No one — except the Times itself — really understands how their formula works. But it definitely measures demand, perhaps not as much as sales, but enough to launch a book to the list if the demand is intense. In other words, the rate of sales — and presales — at all levels of the market (stores, clubs, wholesale etc.) are part of the formula. This week a whole slew of new books with big promotion budgets came online and the cross platform demand apparently shoved LF downward.

That’s an interesting perspective on the factors involved in achieving bestsellerdom on the New York Times lists, a mysterious process that was also mined last October by the NYT’s public editor, Clark Hoyt.

Goldberg also talks about how it feels to have written this book:

Obviously, I’d like to stay on the list as long as possible. …And it annoys all the right people the longer I’m on it, of course. … Three months on the NYT list — and hitting #1 — plus a dozen printings is far better than I dared hope. And yet I still hope the book does even better and has a wider following.

Son, you hit the lottery. STFU.

There’s another scourge even worse than racism afflicting America, ABC News reports:

Study: ‘Weight-ism’ More Widespread Than Racism

It’s illegal to discriminate against someone because of race or gender, but our culture condones a bias against people who are overweight.

There are no federal laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of weight, and only Michigan has such a law, according to a new study from Yale University.

As a result, the researchers contend, weight discrimination is spiraling upward, and that’s a dangerous trend that could add fuel to the obesity epidemic.

Since Barack Obama has appointed himself Understander-and-Sermonizer-in-Chief***, I expect from him a groundbreaking Lincolnesque speech about “fat-ism” any day now.

There may be a glitch, though. One of the “understanders” about fat-ism explains the tragic conditions that prevail to make the overweight feel persecuted [e.a.]:

“We send a message to citizens in our culture that this is something that is tolerated,” she said. “We live in a culture where we obviously place a premium on fitness, and fitness has come to symbolize very important values in our culture, like hard work and discipline and ambition. Unfortunately, if a person is not thin, or is overweight or obese, then they must lack self-discipline, have poor willpower, etc., and as a result they get blamed and stigmatized.”

Senator Obama may not be able to weigh in effectively on this topic. He considers certain foods too “decadent“:

At the chocolate factory, he went into the kitchen, where five white-haired women in plastic hairnets spun chocolate into a variety of shapes. He picked out a few candies for his daughters, handing them for safekeeping to aide Reggie Love.

Watching the process, he said: “Can I ask you the truth, though? Do you actually eat the chocolate or do you get sick of it?”

The workers giggled. “We make it; of course we eat it,” said Jean Hockbenerocht.

Later, at the diner, Obama was plied with a chocolate cake. “Oh man, that’s too decadent for me,” he demurred. A woman then offered him a Styrofoam container, which he opened, finding a burger, cheese fries and onion rings. Obama shrugged, took a ring, and tossed the container back.

Is Barack Obama a secret stigmatizer of fat people?

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*** Here’s what he told the ladies of The View:

The candidate explained, “Part of what my role in my politics is to get people who don’t normally listen to each other to talk to each other, who [say] crazy things, who are offended by each other, for me to understand them and to maybe help them understand each other.”