Maddow targets Buchanan’s homophobia

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLHzW7MlEQw&hl=en&fs=1]
If you didn’t catch this on MSNBC last night, you should watch. Rachel Maddow goes off on that old homophobe Pat Buchanan for his 1992 “culture war” speech — the one that the late, great Molly Ivins said “sounded better in the original German.”

Scroll ahead to 3:30 if you’re in a hurry. Here’s Maddow:

I hadn’t planned on talking about this, but I was thinking about 1992, when I was 19 years old. And Pat, that was the year of your famous culture-war speech at the Houston convention.

And when Bill Clinton got elected that year, I remember, as not a very political person, feeling a visceral sense that, you know, I like the idea of the Clinton family being around for the next four years. I like the idea of them being on TV all the time, in the news all the time, them just being around. Because they seem likable, and, more importantly, I think that they don’t hate me.

I think if they knew me, they wouldn’t hate me, and they don’t want an America that doesn’t want me in it. I believe that they would respect me. And after the 1992 convention that year, I didn’t feel that way about the incumbent president or his party.

Buchanan chose to ignore the genuine hurt and emotion behind Maddow’s words, and Maddow wisely didn’t push it any farther. But good for Maddow for calling Buchanan out on his hateful words aimed at gay men and lesbians — words he’s never disavowed, and that he no doubt believes to this day.

A presidential makeover

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that two contrasting speeches by Michelle Obama show she understands what works in Chicago doesn’t work on the national stage. Unfortunately for Democrats, the Obamas’ efforts to reinvent themselves risk making them seem inauthentic and leave them vulnerable to Republican attack.

Glenn Marshall resurfaces

We interrupt this week’s orgy of national political news to tell you that Glenn Marshall — the convicted rapist and phony war hero who helped target Middleborough as the home for the world’s largest gambling casino — continues to pull strings behind the scenes.

George Brennan of the Cape Cod Times reports that Marshall is neither forgotten nor gone from the circles of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, which he served as president before his past was brought to light by Cape Cod Today and the Cape Cod Times.

And just to bring this full circle: As I recently wrote here, here and here, it’s ludicrous to pretend that the Spectrum Gaming report commissioned by Gov. Deval Patrick for $189,000 is an independent assessment. But there was one interesting wrinkle. Whereas Patrick has seemed less than enthusiastic about supporting a tribal casino, Spectrum warned that such a casino is inevitable.

As the great Gladys Kravitz recently observed, one of Spectrum’s clients is the financier Sol Kerzner, who’s the source of much of the money behind the Middleborough proposal — and thus an important guy in making Glenn Marshall an important guy.

You absolutely cannot make this stuff up.

Tell us something we don’t know

I just spent, oh, the last hour and a half reading Roger Simon’s dauntingly well-reported piece for the Politico on how Barack Obama managed to beat the Clinton juggernaut. (Chuck Todd was praising it on Tom Ashbrook’s show this morning. Do we really believe he had time to read it?)

Like Joshua Green’s Atlantic article on what went wrong with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, it is full of insight and nuance. And, like Green’s piece, I ultimately found it unsatisfying. Here’s the problem: No one other than a political junkie is going to read such a story. And we political junkies have been living all this in real time for many, many months.

Both Simon and Green remind us of details we might have forgotten, skillfully weave a mass of information into coherent narratives and come up with some previously unreported nuggets. (Green: Mark Penn is smarter and more awful than we thought. Simon: Obama’s brain-trusters actually believed they could knock Clinton out in the opening weeks of the primary season.) In the end, though, they don’t do much more than tell us what we already know.

If there’s one thing of value I learned from the two accounts, it’s that no one should believe the Democrats would be in better shape today if Clinton had won the nomination — especially if she had won it easily, and had not had to put her dysfunctional campaign staff to the test.

OK, two. I think it’s a pretty good bet that Simon and Green are going to write books about this historic campaign. At nearly 16,000 words, Simon’s article is already about a quarter of the way there.