I see that there’s a revolt against Obama because he betrayed his “left-liberal” base on the FISA bill.

Lanny Davis pours some salt on their wounds:

No doubt Senator Obama has felt political pain to be attacked publicly by his most ardent supporters. But the benefit is that he has reminded voters that as president he would be more committed to the “solutions” business than to yield to the pressure to prove his ideological purity to his party’s base. Many of the swing voters who will decide the election — soft Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans — have been waiting to see if Senator Obama can resist such pressure and follow this approach. Now they have a good example that the answer is:

Yes he can.

It sounds like Davis is just warming up to his theme. Jennifer Rubin has some excellent ideas along this line, too:

Gas prices are now a top concern of voters and Barack Obama’s Dr. No approach to increasing domestic oil supply (and almost every other idea on the production side) has even Democrats nervous. So why not switch positions and come out for “responsible energy development” and “environmentally safe drilling”?

It seems like a no-brainer. If he can change on FISA, NAFTA, Kyl-Lieberman, Iran, the surge (sort of), guns, abortion, campaign financing, corporate taxes, the payroll tax cap, his devotion to Reverend Wright and Trinity United Church, unconditional meetings with Ahmadinejad, and an “undivided” Jerusalem, why not this?

Some people just can’t get over how unfair it was to Obama to call Wesley Clark’s idiotic comments about John McCain’s service to his country an “attack.”

Someone over at the Columbia Journalism Review gets on his high horse:

It’s crucially important that we have a political debate in this country that’s at least sophisticated enough to be able to handle the following rather basic idea: Arguing that a person’s record of military service is not a qualification for the presidency does not constitute “attacking” their military credentials; nor can it be described as invoking their military service against them, or as denying their record of war heroism.

That’s not a very high bar for sophistication. But right now it’s one the press isn’t capable of clearing.

No shit, Sherlock.

But what I want to know is why it’s so “crucially important” that we have a “sophisticated” political debate in this country.

Politics is not a debating society! It ain’t bean bag, either. It’s about power struggles!

Wesley Clark is an asshole, an Obama supporter, and he is trying to torpedo John McCain’s image by belittling his wartime experience. You bet it was an attack.

How many examples do you need? Jennifer Rubin’s got ‘em for ya:

McCain communications director Steve Schmidt is weaving a theme through Jerusalem, trade, taxes, and a few other top issues.

It is not quite the flip-flop charge leveled at Kerry — that was an issue of resoluteness. This is out and out fraud, the McCain people claim. He either lied when he snatched the nomination from Hillary Clinton as he ran left and promised a new era of idealism, or he’s lying now as a born again moderate. I suspect this is a theme that will not disappear anytime soon.

Not if Obama’s fans have anything to say about it, because there is a category of political moves that are considered evil when conservatives and Republicans do them, but now they have become Obamanable^TM (i.e., admirable because the Messiah is doing them).

I referred to Obama as reptilian here, and I have long advocated for Dems to take a more reptilian approach—an honest one—here.

I don’t mind Obama’s methods, though they probably won’t sit well with idealists. What makes me uncomfortable is that I don’t know whose interests he will try to serve and who he’ll throw under the bus. His past behavior is not a reliable guide.

A leopard never loses her spots.

Once she was a loudmouth authoritarian of the right and now she’s a loudmouth authoritarian of the left: Arianna Huffington jumps on the truth-and-reconciliation bandwagon (which I described here) [e.a.]:

It’s no coincidence that a war built on lies continues to be conducted using lies (”the surge is working”). Mark Green proposes a way to end the cycle of deception: create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “This worked in a very different historical situation of South Africa and can work here as well,” wrote Green on HuffPost. “South Africans who engaged in murder and violence were given amnesty if they confessed under oath to their crimes and knowledge — but would be prosecuted if they didn’t…. The largely successful effort led to both truth and reconciliation.”

Richard Clarke echoed Green’s proposal last week, and also suggested something each of us can do: “I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let them pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 Americans dead and 25,000 Americans grievously wounded, and they’ll carry those wounds and suffer all the rest of their lives.”

If the leaders responsible for that suffering are not held accountable — both at the ballot box and by being shamed and shunned as Clarke suggests — we dishonor the sacrifices of the fallen, and make it likely that many more will endure a similar fate.

I can’t help but note that some of the most vocal Obama supporters in the blogosphere share these same revenge fantasies, and that their rhetoric runs strongly counter to what Barack Obama posited as a successful electoral strategy in an opinion posted on DailyKos in 2005. He was very clear back then that hyperpartisanship was not the way to win the White House [e.a.].

I don’t believe we get there by vilifying good allies, with a lifetime record of battling for progressive causes, over one vote or position. I am convinced that, our mutual frustrations and strongly-held beliefs notwithstanding, the strategy driving much of Democratic advocacy, and the tone of much of our rhetoric, is an impediment to creating a workable progressive majority in this country.

According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists - a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog - we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party. They have beaten us twice by energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion and discipline to their agenda. In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in “appeasing” the right wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda. The country, finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era.

I think this perspective misreads the American people. From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon. They don’t think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced, but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent. They don’t think that corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game to the detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs. They don’t think America is an imperialist brute, but are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated, are worried that we have unnecessarily alienated existing and potential allies around the world, and are ashamed by events like those at Abu Ghraib which violate our ideals as a country.

Perhaps Obama has changed his mind since then. He certainly has changed his behavior and his rhetoric an awful lot since then. (Jennifer Rubin has been bird-dogging his flips and flops on just one issue.).

What he believes today and how he will behave tomorrow: those are the things that matter, and some of us feel quite insecure with an otherwise appealing candidate, because a) he has been thoroughly compromised by the PRopaganda^TM campaign that made him into a messiah with devotees who were urged to “come to Obama” and b) because even those of us who are ultra-tolerant and can understand on some level the pull of a Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Obama just can’t figure out where he stands.

And then there are the Clintons, who don’t care at all where Obama stands: they’re too busy keeping score. Don’t worry, though. Revenge has nothing to do with it, says Terry McAuliffe [e.a.]:

Mr. Band keeps close track of the past allies and beneficiaries of the Clintons who supported Mr. Obama’s campaign, three Clinton associates and campaign officials said. Indeed, he is widely known as a member of the Clinton inner circle whose memory is particularly acute on the matter of who has been there for the couple — and who has not.

“The Clintons get hundreds of requests for favors every week,” said Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. “Clearly, the people you’re going to do stuff for in the future are the people who have been there for you.”

Mr. McAuliffe, who knows of Mr. Band’s diligent scorekeeping, emphasized that “revenge is not what the Clintons are about.” The accounting is more about being practical, he said, adding, “You have to keep track of this.”

I hate politics. But, even more than politics, I hate attack-dog authoritarians and demagogues and ideological purists—of both the right and the left.

Some people are their own worst enemies. Marc Ambinder:

A paradox: when Wright’s sermons first saw the bandwith of air on ABC News and elsewhere, Obama allies and Wright supporters begged reporters to broadcast and publish the full sermons and to provide relevant context. Well, now the cable networks are content to let Wright talk for as long as he desires; CNN seemed to jettison their entire schedule last night in order to broadcast Wright’s entire speech to the NAACP. Everyone wanted Wright’s full context: now they have him.

Obama should have cut Wright loose a long time ago, as I’ve said before. I didn’t think Wright would go so far as to try to torpedo Obama’s candidacy, but that’s what I think he’s trying to do.

Obama supporters didn’t have an easy time of it on the tube this Sunday morning. From Chris Matthews to George Stephanopoulos (no links to transcripts available yet for those two) to Howard Kurtz, every host made it plain that the former messiah is now deep in the muck.

At Contentions, Jennifer Rubin also mentions more of the displeased—the NYT’s Bob Herbert and MoDo and, most tellingly, Howard Dean.

These bear the tell-tale signs of scorned lovers’ rants. Their once beloved candidate is now reviled, mocked and tossed overboard while they prepare for the possible return of their “ex” with all the unpleasantness that entails. And who is joining them?

Well, none other than Howard Dean, who until recently seemed to pursue strategies designed to either end the race early (Obama liked that) or to encourage delegates to respect the pledged delegate count (Obama really liked that). Yet Friday, for the first time, Dean uttered this: “I think the race is going to come down to the perception in the last six or eight races of who the best opponent for McCain will be. I do not think in the long run it will come down to the popular vote or anything else.”

The bottom line in all this backing-and-forthing among pundits about whether they’re for Obama or for Clinton [e.a.]?

[I]t may be that these people have something in common: none of them really wants to be on the wrong side when the Democratic race ends.

In other words: pundits are just like the politicians they cover—first of all, they’re political animals and they operate in their own self-interest.

But you knew that … right?

Mark Steyn reads a New York Times editorial and detects a price that Hillary supporters will have to pay:

I’ve been mulling over that weirdly hysterical anti-Hillary editorial in yesterday’s New York Times in which the voice of America’s liberal establishment turned on the candidate it had endorsed only a couple of months previously for going negative, “waving the bloody shirt of 9/11″, etc.

If I were a timeserving party hack - which is to say a “superdelegate” - wondering about my support for Hillary, Pennsylvania ought to confirm the shrewdness of my judgment: Obama’s a hopelessly weak candidate with minimal appeal beyond blacks and upscale white liberals who enjoy the kinky frisson of racial guilt. But, if I were a timeserving party hack who reads the Times, I’d be struck by the ferocity of its assault on a woman it’s admired for 15 years and I’d be thinking, whoa, I don’t want that kind of publicity if that’s the price of sticking with Hill…

And the number of people who qualify for membership in polite society grows ever smaller.

“Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Filth”

Clinton-haters forget that Bill Clinton is the only Democrat in the last three decades to have gone up against the Republicans and succeeded. In part, he owed it to old-fashioned bare-knuckled butt-ugly politics, which the Democrats of 2008 are far too delicate to embrace and way eager (they say) to move beyond.

For all the rest of you (and even if you don’t admit it, I’ll bet you know there’s nothing new under the sun): Karl Rove has suggestions on how to win in the knife fight in Denver. Here’s my favorite bit:

Rule #5: Focus on Staging. Conventions are elaborate made-for-TV productions. We live in a culture of the visual. Every moment and every event should be scripted. The media will complain about it, but think through what messages you want and when you want them. This script must be visually powerful and interesting enough to keep the cameras on your candidate and not somewhere else. Make the spectacle personal. The Al and Tipper Gore kiss, for instance, did him a lot of good. And be sure to provide fresh content all the time. In the era of cable TV, talk radio, the blogosphere and YouTube, someone is watching and talking all the time. If you’re not pressing content into all available channels, someone else will.

National political conventions are equal parts carnival, prime-time soap opera, policy lecture and weeklong party. They are easy to caricature and increasingly anachronistic. But they have been an important element of the liturgy of democracy. And while in recent decades conventions have become antiseptic, predictable and largely ignored by the national press, this year, for the Democrats, could be different.

Interesting. Wait, though.

The kiss did Al Gore a lot of good?

Then how come he isn’t president?

Plus: ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Using David Brooks’s heavy-handed Hillary Hit Job in today’s NYT (which I wrote about here) as a launching pad, Ann Althouse sketches out the contours of the Uncivil War Between the Supporters:

Brooks must have thought that last line was too clever not to use, but it’s actually only a childish flipping of a phrase to its opposite, and, worse, it’s not even true. She has the audacity of hope. By calling hope hopelessness, Brooks enables himself to ask why she goes on and to pretend there isn’t the obvious answer: she has hope of winning.

Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish…?

How is what’s she’s doing any different from what every other candidate does as long as there’s a chance? To say it’s “selfish” or “narcissistic” to think you’re special is to criticize everyone who has what it takes to campaign for the presidency.

And the real issue:

Brooks challenges her to step outside her own machine and stop it, to “surprise everybody with a display of self-sacrifice.” Why? Why should she behave differently from every other politician?

Indeed—especially since she is the kind of politician from whom we expect exactly this kind of grit, which is why some of us like her (I don’t actually like her, but I do like her in a match-up against the messianic-narcissistic holier-than-thou commie-lite Obama, whose proposed policies sound to me like the road to perdition, and I do like her in a match-up against McCain, because she can match her competency to his competency).

At TNR, Michael Crowley is less passionate than Althouse, but he also sees through Brooks’s “logic” and answers the question easily:

I think it’s quite possible that Hillary simply doesn’t think Obama is electable. (See Bill and “all that other stuff.”) *** Now that may be a delusion. But if you believed it to be true, you would soldier ahead. She also does have quite a lot of passionate supporters cheering her on, and is roughly tied with Obama in national polls; that’s not easy to ignore.

Once more I issue the caveat that I’m not a politico, but I’ve long been of the opinion that the Clintons don’t believe that Obama is electable (or, rather, they believe that he is unelectable). And I agree with them: he’s waaaaaay too much to the left, and he gives no indication of even wanting to do the necessary pivot, as Kaus pointed out recently.

But “progressives” seem to want to convince themselves (not to mention the rest of us) that Obama’s the one. And former conservatives have been converted (see Andrew Sullivan’s entire blog of the last few months; here’s one of today’s encomia.

Whatever. It’s their party!

And they’re welcome to it, says Kaus today, because an Obama win sounds like four years of insufferable pedagogic condescension.

After last Tuesday, I’m not sure I want to be instructed and elevated any more by Prof. Obama. I’d kind of like to rearrange his mental furniture on welfare and affirmative action, where his vagueness suggests incoherence more than brilliance.

Yep. And the Obama critics on the Dem side haven’t even begun to address the fatuous foreign-policy gobbledy-gook of the forthcoming “Obama Doctrine,” which features something called “dignity promotion”:

This ability to see the world from different perspectives informs what the Obama team hopes will replace the Iraq War mind-set: something they call dignity promotion. “I don’t think anyone in the foreign-policy community has as much an appreciation of the value of dignity as Obama does,” says Samantha Power, a former key aide and author of the groundbreaking study of U.S. foreign policy and genocide, A Problem From Hell. “Dignity is a way to unite a lot of different strands [of foreign-policy thinking],” she says. “If you start with that, it explains why it’s not enough to spend $3 billion on refugee camps in Darfur, because the way those people are living is not the way they want to live. It’s not a human way to live. It’s graceless — an affront to your sense of dignity.”

The Doctrine is sliced and diced by Dean Barnett today in the Weekly Standard. Barnett is not a Democrat, I suppose, but at least he is a rational observer of reality, unlike the dreamers on Team Obama [e.a.]:

If the Obama Doctrine held that President Obama would send a fleet of Navy vessels to the shores of every country where dignity wasn’t being adequately promoted, that would at least be a Doctrine worthy of the name. It would be a stupid Doctrine, but at least for once Obama would be matching his rhetoric with a plan for action. As it is, the Obama Doctrine is of a piece with the rest of his campaign. It’s an attractively outlined set of worthy goals unsupported by any apparent plan of action to realize those goals.

The Obama Doctrine dovetails nicely with Obama’s promise to begin an aggressive round of–what else?–talking with all our enemies. Once again, no clearly expressed goals preceded Obama’s promise to talk. Almost needless to say, Obama has offered no elaboration on how the talking will advance specifically defined American interests. The talking is itself the point.

These are just a few of the reasons why Obama Dissenters see him as unelectable: he’s full of hot air.

Meanwhile, while I was composing this post, Hillary has decided to go nuclear on Obama, via Wright:

Clinton: Wright ‘would not have been my pastor’

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor made.
“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.”

At Contentions, Jennifer Rubin deduces why Hillary launched this attack:

This also tells us two things: that Clinton believes the media could not continue to run with this story without some added fuel from her and that she thinks this issue is a winner.

And one of her commenters describes the box Obama is in now:

Hillary is smart enough not to touch the Reverend, unless it is Obama getting burned. Obama camp is helpless. To engage in the ‘debate’ would continue to prop the story up.

Isn’t this fun?

————
*** the link is to the MSNBC site First Read:

*** “All this other stuff…”

Bill Clinton’s Friday afternoon comments about why he thinks a Clinton-McCain contest will be better for the country has been viewed by Obama supporters has an attack on the candidate’s patriotism. But be sure to focus on this phrase, “all this other stuff” intruding on the campaign and less on the “loves America” line. Wasn’t Clinton sending another message to the crowd of older, white male voters? (Remember, he was at a VFW and there was barely a member of the audience under 60, according to our reporter in the field)? The message: That if you don’t want to talk about race, then Clinton’s the candidate; if you do want race intruding into the campaign, then support Obama. There are many older, white voters, while sympathetic to Obama’s message on race, don’t want to be reminded to take their medicine and the subtle message Clinton may actually have been sending was just that, support Clinton and avoid taking your race medicine.

I saw Chuck Todd float this theory on Hardball last night, although he didn’t mention anything about “race medicine.”

Ann Althouse analyzes a Rasmussen poll:

Poll results:

“How do you rate Obama’s speech? Excellent, good, fair, or poor?”

30% Excellent
21% Good
26% Fair
21% Poor
1% Not sure

Althouse [e.a.]:

The important break in the numbers is between “excellent” and the rest, and 70% said the speech fell short of “excellent.” This is, I think, disastrous for Obama. …

Asked whether the speech was “racially divisive, unifying, or neither,” only 30% — 30% again — thought the speech was “unifying,” which is what Obama intended it and his entire campaign to be.

Obama’s popularity has been built on unifying us and transcending race. If only 30% of us heard unification in that speech, then the speech and the connection to Wright have been massively destructive to what is the chief substance of his reputation.

 No kidding.

But Althouse gets the last word, because she’s got the best metaphor:

Obama told white people to feel guilty about race just when they’d been so happy thinking that loving him, just him, was the answer to racial problems. When we saw him consorting with someone who seemed to hate us, we needed reassurance that Obama loves us, and loving Obama was enough. But he didn’t say that, and now we’re confused. Our boyfriend was telling us he needs to see other people, and we don’t understand the relationship anymore.

I think we can safely declare that Obama-mania is over.

So just a while ago I was lamenting the civil war between the “old politics” Democrats and the “new politics” Democrats.

Joe Wilson’s takedown of Obama is the kind of damaging stuff will not soon be forgotten:

Claims of superior intuitive judgment by his campaign and by him are self-evidently disingenuous, especially in light of disclosures about his long associations with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko. But his assertions of advanced judgment are also ludicrous when the question of what Obama has accomplished in his four years in the Senate is considered.

As the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee on Europe, he has not chaired a single substantive oversight hearing, even though the breakdown in our relations with Europe and NATO is harming our operations in Afghanistan. Nor did he take a single official trip to Europe as chairman. This is the sum total of his actions in the most important responsibility he has had in the Senate.

Then he lays into Obama’s advisers for good measure:

Already, one of his chief foreign policy advisers, Samantha Power, has been compelled to resign for, among other indiscretions, honestly revealing on a British television program that Obama’s public position on withdrawal from Iraq is not really his true position, nor does it reflect what he would do. Her gaffe exposed a vein of cynicism on national security. How confident can we be in his judgment?

Ouch.

Lanny Davis also whacked Obama:

I am convinced that there isn’t a shred in Senator Obama’s being that shares these hateful or bigoted feelings. … But many people, including Obama supporters, may still have two questions that Senator Obama’s speech did not sufficiently answer, at least in my opinion. …

1. If a white minister preached sermons to his congregation and had used the “N” word and used rhetoric and words similar to members of the KKK, would you support a Democratic presidential candidate who decided to continue to be a member of that congregation?

2. Would you support that candidate if, after knowing of or hearing those sermons, he or she still appointed that minister to serve on his or her “Religious Advisory Committee” of his or her presidential campaign?

And then there’s Bill Clinton:

MSNBC is reporting that on the campaign trail today in Charlotte, North Carolina, the former president said a general election matchup between his wife, Sen. Clinton, and Sen. John McCain would be between “two people who love this country” without “all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.”

In today’s New York Times, Timothy Egan writes about the Democratic Donner party:

The Dems grew raggedy, worn, desperate. Whereas the first Donner Party was bogged down in the snow of the high Sierra, these Dems could not get out of the Rockies. One faction wanted to declare it over, based on greater popular support. The other one wanted simply to stick around long enough, waiting for the rival to self-destruct. …

At their lowest ebb, they looked back and again saw the straggler, McCain. He was stronger, walking with renewed vigor despite his age. …

His party was united. What had been hatred for McCain was now hatred for the other party’s preacher. They could direct all their historic resentments, their bound-up frustrations, against this preacher, the Rev. Wright. So long as they hissed and booed at his picture every night, they stayed together, saying the nastiest of things.

There’s only one problem with this theory that the Reverend Wright has united the Republicans. It has also divided the Democrats.

Yesterday, writing in TNR, Michael Crowley cited a poll that showed a large number of blacks who objected to Wright:

Bizarrely* Surprisingly, 56 percent of blacks said the speech made them less likely to vote for Obama. Not sure what to make of that. Maybe whereas some whites felt Obama didn’t sufficiently distance himself from Wright, many blacks felt he shouldn’t have to condemn him at all?

* Too strong

Some TNR commenters made mincemeat of Crowley and demolished his remarks as patronizing and harmful:

Well, there’s a perfect example of condescending Liberal racism, if ever I saw it. You are surprised, Mr. Crowley, that black people love their country? That black people would be outraged by Rev Wright? That black people would wonder why Obama continued to sit through these sermons for 20 years?

The Right has long contended that liberals, in their patronizing, paternalistic attitude towards blacks, were the real racists. This kind of commentary underlines it.

Another one observes the confusion that we’ve witnessed on cable TV in the last few days, and suggests the reason for it [e.a.]:

By embracing Wright, Obama has resurrected and re-immersed us in the harsh, angry, and defensive racial politics of the 1960s and the 1970s. Very few blacks or non-blacks want to go back to that era. But watch the commentators on television fight and get angry at each other over Wright and Obama’s speech. …

Obama has actually become retro on race rather than post-racial. His speech was the kind of stuff that people said years ago, and it actually does not reflect where black & non-black relationships are today. Basically, Obama put himself in the same cluster that includes Al Sharpton, who is approving but hiding in the shadows of Obama’s campaign. Contrast this with Charlie Rangel, a Clinton supporter, who recently said, speaking with intentional irony: “I’m angry. I keep looking for all these white people who are insulting me and I can’t find them.” That is a truly post-racial and novel stance in our discourse about race, but it reflects where things are at teh growing edge. But Obama goes in exactly the opposite direction. I think there are a lot of African-Americans who are not any more comfortable with Obama’s way of talking about race than are many non-blacks. Rangel’s sensibility is where things are at. And Obama and Wright ain’t there at all.

Lots of people, black and non-black, supported Obama when he was post-racial, but are less interested in supporting him as a version of Sharpton. But Obama’s allegiance to Wright and his speech have placed him squarely back in 1972. Not a good year for Democrats.

But the public political theater carried by the MSM (here in the NYT) tells a different story—a story of glorious unity among Democrats, the story of the future of the Democratic party:

Alex Brandon/Associated Press

 “It is now time for a new generation of leadership to lead America forward,” Mr. Richardson said, speaking to thousands of supporters at a rally here. “Barack Obama will be a historic and a great president, who can bring us the change we so desperately need by bringing us together as a nation here at home and with our allies abroad.”

Trampling over the obvious rifts, open wounds, dissident voices, and outrage on his own side of the aisle, Mr. Richardson blames the Clinton camp and urges everyone to coalesce behind Obama:

He said his endorsement was designed to signal party leaders and voters that the acrimonious primary race must end to unify Democrats for the general election campaign.

“Look, I’m not going to advise any other candidate when to get in and out of the race,” Mr. Richardson said. He added that Mrs. Clinton “has a right to stay in the race, but I think eventually we don’t want to go into the Democratic convention bloodied and negative.”

Really? Tell that to Marc Ambinder’s thin-skinned commenters, who considered it the height of betrayal that Ambinder revealed the stagecraft behind Bumbling Bill Richardson. Here’s a selection of the responses to that revelation:

 Petty. And beneath your blog.

…

I get that your posting is light today, but seriously Marc - this is beneath your blog. Of course there’s always a lighter side to laugh about, but this is just stupid.

And one from High Dudgeon:

In this post, Ambinder, you kind of remind me of Eliot Spitzer. Like him, you had an idea to do something that wasn’t necessary but might be fun; like him, you ignored that little voice in your head that said, “nah, that’d be stupid. I should just stick to my job.”

This sort of writing is what gives blogs, and really all political journalism, and beyond that, all politics, a bad name.

James Carville has a different view of politics—namely, that it is war. Regarding Richardson’s defection to Obama:

“An act of betrayal,” said James Carville, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Clinton.

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

The Democrats’ un-civil war continues.

Is anyone surprised that the Reverend Wright has struck a blow against his favorite son Barack Obama? (I’m not, as anyone who has been reading my blog knows.)

Here’s Rasmussen:

In the week before the media frenzy over Wright, Obama and McCain were essentially tied in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll. Less than a week later, and two days after Obama’s speech, McCain had opened a seven-point lead over Obama. Significantly, by Thursday’s polling, McCain had pulled slightly ahead of Obama among unaffiliated voters. McCain also enjoys unified support from Republican voters while Obama only attracts 65% of Democratic votes at this time.

Obama’s favorable ratings have also fallen below the 50% mark since the world learned of his former Pastor. This can be seen as part of a larger trend that began shortly after Obama’s victories in the Wisconsin Primaries. At that time, just before Hillary Clinton began raising questions about her competitor, Obama was viewed favorably by 56% of voters nationwide. That had slipped to 52% just before Pastor Wright’s views became big news and to 47% just before Obama’s speech. Two days after the speech, Obama’s favorables remain at 48%.

As Rasmussen notes, all eyes—particularly the superdelegates’—will be on the electorate.

Note that all eyes will not be on the media, which is what I’m focusing on here on this blog.

Rasmussen doesn’t say it, but I will: after his much-lauded speech, the MSM gave Obama an assist in attempting to put the Rev. Wright behind himself.

I predicted that on March 16; (it wasn’t hard to do, considering the history of Obama-mania):

Well, we’re at the point now where the PR-concocted images and ugly reality keep colliding. And Obama is bound to keep “disappointing” us (or those of us who believed that Obama really is the “transcendent character” that David Axelrod created for our benefit from the exotic strands of Obama’s life).

From now on, Obama and his advocates and surrogates will have to work really hard (though they’ll have the help of a favorably disposed media) to get us to keep our minds off the things that make us doubt him.

Now, with on-the-ground results in stark contrast to the rosy optimism on offer from most MSM outlets (which claimed that with the Speech, Obama had put the Rev. Wright controversy behind him) the MSM is once again exposed as trying to lead (and mold) the electorate’s opinion*** rather than reporting on what it finds and presenting a snapshot of it.

————-*** More specifically, the cable “news” channels are leading the electorate—trying to influence public opinion—via pseudo-events created by the Obama campaign: the Philly speech; the Chicago Tribune interview in which he answered Rezko questions; the interviews he granted PBS and CNN [this from a candidate known to keep his distance from the press] after his Philly speech—to cite just the examples I know of without doing further research, although a cursory spin on Google News provides evidence that he went further into damage control mode. I see he did an interview with ABC, too. And with WITN.

And those are only a few instances of damage control that he’s preoccupied with this week. He first went into overdrive last week, as ETP’s Rachel Sklar reported.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain were all but missing from this week’s news, except as they related to Our Hero, Barack, the protagonist whose quest for the White House is presumed to be the cable “news” audience’s favorite story of the year. We shall see!

Josh Marshall explains what happens when the New Politics confronts the Old:

Late Tuesday night I wrote that the upshot of the March 4th contests was that Clinton had beaten Obama up a bit and he hadn’t responded. She’d not only bloodied up his poll numbers a bit by throwing all sorts of stuff at him. She also showed that it wasn’t at all clear that Obama was enough of a fighter to stand up to this stuff or get back in her face. More than the delegate numbers, that was the challenge March 4th had left him with.

But since then she’s just been slapping this guy around like crazy. She’s on the offense every day, dictating the terms of the discussion and getting results.

This “monster” thing is a good case in point. That’s a pretty over-the-top thing for a key campaign advisor to say. But what it tells me more than that is that the Clinton campaign has these guys rattled really bad. Some of this is no doubt due to the fact that Power is a bit out of her element. She’s more from the academic/policy world than the political/policy world. But, again, rattled. The Clinton folks have been bashing Obama like crazy. Now they follow up by explicitly demanding that Obama fire one of his key foreign policy advisors and … how, long did it take? An hour? And she’s gone.

If boxing is our metaphor she’s got him cornered on the ropes on one side of the ring and she’s just landing punch after punch. And all he can manage are the defensive moves that her constant attacks dictate.

Now just imagine Obama as commander in chief fighting real wars. That is the point that the Evil Clintons are trying to make: if he can’t take her disorienting punches coming from all directions …

This is about getting inside Obama’s (the collective Obama, let’s say) head, psyching him out, forcing mistakes and then going right back on the attack all over again. Getting the Obama folks pissed and gritting their teeth and off their game is precisely the point.

The Obama folks can either withdraw to a world where the ‘new politics’ reigns or focus on the fact that here in the real world there are two ‘old politics’ practitioners standing between him and the presidency and he needs to decide how he’s going to deal with that fact.

Once Obama is in the Oval Office, of course, there will be no “world where the ‘new politics’ reigns. Instead, there is the grim reality of Iraq and Iran and Hamas and China and Pakistan and Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, not to mention gloom on the economic front, a problem with a restive population of 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and the health care crisis.

This why no egghead idealists—my absolutely favorite kind of people in real life—have ever made it to the White House: they’re not mean enough.

p.s. Though they’ll be disappointed, I don’t think America’s hopeful youth will be crushed.

My son—a good weathervane—already senses that “Hillary has stopped his momentum.” Kindhearted mother I am, I didn’t tell him that I think Obama is dead in the water. Why add to his misery?

But I do think that, and it hurts me too. Because I like Obama a lot, and I believe that he does want to do the right things, for the right reasons. He’s just not ready for prime time—not yet.

The smearing-by-innuendo of John McCain by the New York Times drew this response from the blogosphere (via Memeorandum):

  New York Times:For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk  +Discussion: The Swamp, CNN, Washington Post, Don Surber, Buck Naked Politics, After W, The Carpetbagger Report, Outside The Beltway, Guardian, Firedoglake, Crooks and Liars, Hullabaloo, US Elections, Betsy’s Page, ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES, Bark Bark Woof Woof, Publius Pundit, The Natural Truth, Bang the Drum, Political Radar, Political Punch, The Campaign Spot, American Spectator, Los Angeles Times, TalkLeft, Washington Monthly, NewsBusters.org, Right Wing News, Politics1, You Decide 08!, South Texas Chisme, THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS, Patterico’s Pontifications, Emptywheel, Group News Blog, DownWithTyranny!, Shakespeare’s Sister, FOX Embeds, Daily Kos, Booman Tribune, Reason Magazine, Left in the West, NO QUARTER, Salon, The New Republic, PERRspectives Blog, Open Left, About US Politics, No More Mister Nice Blog, TownHall Blog, Political Machine, Riehl World View, Pensito Review, The Moderate Voice, Mercury Rising, All Spin Zone, the talking dog, Washington Wire, Wonkette, D-Day, Attytood, Prairie Weather, Jules Crittenden, Pandagon, Megan McArdle, TBogg, Politics Blog, Gateway Pundit, McCain Central, THE LIBERAL JOURNAL, MyDD, The Democratic Daily, Sister Toldjah, PrestoPundit, Commentary, Oliver Willis, michellemalkin.com, Lawyers, Guns and Money, JammieWearingFool, Truthdig, Big Head DC, BlueOregon and Brains and Eggs

 

 

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RELATED:

Josh Marshall / Talking Points Memo:

THE MCCAIN STORY  —  This afternoon, before the Times story came out, I was working on a post about national political reporters’ tendency not to give much of any scrutiny to various McCain flipflops, contradictions and bamboozlements.  Obviously, the terrain has changed a bit since …

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

Publius / Obsidian Wings:   McCain  —  Gotta say, I’m underwhelmed by the NYT’s McCain bombshell.

Mark Kleiman / The RBC:   The Iseman cometh  —  Apparently this has been an open secret for years.

Tim Dickinson / Rolling Stone:   L’affaire McCain?  —  Just landed in San Francisco to the news …

Washington Post:

McCain’s Ties To Lobbyist Worried Aides  —  Before 2000 Campaign, Advisers Tried to Bar Her  —  Aides to Sen. John McCain confronted a telecommunications lobbyist in late 1999 and asked her to distance herself from the senator during the presidential campaign he was about to launch …

 

 Pam Spaulding / Pandagon:   McCain and the lobbyist: the final straw for the GOP Base?

NY Daily News:   Tale’s tall on innuendo, short on proof

Bob Fertik / Democrats.com:   VickiGate  —  So did John McCain cheat on his wife, the taxpayers, or both?

Kevin Hayden / American Street:   Justice & Hope, day 51  —  On occasion, an exceptional moment arrives …

David Freddoso / The Corner:   The Times piece on McCain

Smintheus / Daily Kos:   McCain: Experienced in the ways of Washington lobbyists

David Kurtz / Talking Points Memo:   WAPO: MCCAIN’S TIES TO LOBBYIST RATTLED ADVISERS

Tom Maguire / JustOneMinute:   The Times’ McCain Scandal - Sex Or Ethics?

Michael Crowley / The New Republic:   Weaver’s Revenge?  —  An interesting footnote to the Times bombshell …

Lyzurgyk / PSoTD:   Vicki Iseman

Jane Hamsher / Firedoglake:   Late Nite FDL: It’s Not The Sex, It’s The Corruption

Noam Scheiber / The New Republic:

Bonus TNR Angle on the McCain Story  —  The McCain campaign is apparently blaming TNR for forcing the Times’ hand on this story.  We can’t yet confirm that.  But we can say this: TNR correspondent Gabe Sherman is working on a piece about the Times’ foot-dragging on the McCain story …

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 Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire:   McCain Will Hold Press Conference

Dan Collins / protein wisdom:   Olberdouche on McCain/Lobbyist Article in NYT

Krooney / The Page:   McCain Job #1: Discredit the New York Times to Rally the “Other” Base

Rich Lowry / The Corner:

First-Blush Reaction  —  The Times doesn’t have the goods—at least from what’s in the story—and shouldn’t have run it.  Let’s be honest: this story is all about the alleged affair, and all the Keating Five and campaign finance reform re-hash is window dressing.  A key passage:

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 James Kirchick / The New Republic:   What Story?  —  So here’s the essence of the Times’ 3,000-word “bombshell” on John McCain.

Mark Finkelstein / NewsBusters.org:   New Republic Editor: ‘Times In the Tank’ for Dem Nominee

Hindrocket / Power Line:

THE TIMES UPHOLDS ITS STANDARDS  —  The New York Times smears John McCain in tomorrow’s paper, accusing him of ethics violations and insinuating that he had an affair with a lobbyist.  What is most striking, though, if you actually read the story, is how thin it is.

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Discussion: The Huffington Post and protein wisdom

Marc Cooper / The Huffington Post:   Why John McCain Owes The New York Times a Thank You Card

Dan Collins / protein wisdom:   McCain Lobbyist Affair Rumor Reported, NYT

Mary Katharine Ham / TownHall Blog:

What’s the Quickest Way to Rally Conservatives ‘Round McCain?  —  A sandbagging from the NYT of just this skeezy a nature.  —  This doesn’t reflect badly on anyone but the Times, as far as I’m concerned.  The innuendo and full-on craptastic nature of the lede alone is enough to damn …

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 Jules Crittenden:   WaPo Writes It With A Lede

Ed Morrissey / Captain’s Quarters:

Slimes At The Times  —  The New York Times launches its long-awaited smear of John McCain today, and the most impressive aspect of the smear is just how baseless it is.  They basically emulate Page Six at the Post, but add in a rehash of a well-known scandal from twenty years ago to pad it out and make it look more impressive.

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