Barack Obama – Page 29

Number two with a bullet

McCainiancs nervous over the prospect that their man might pick Mike Huckabee as his running mate needn’t worry — Huckabee took himself out of the running earlier today by making a grotesque joke about Barack Obama, guns and assassination. Reuters reports:

Former Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee, interrupted on Friday by a loud crash as he spoke to the National Rifle Association, joked that the noise was Democratic candidate Barack Obama falling off a chair as he dodged a gun aimed at him.

“That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He was getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him, and he dove for the floor,” Huckabee told the NRA convention in Louisville, Kentucky, in comments that aired on CNN.

What a sense of humor, eh?

NECN appearance

I appeared on New England Cable News earlier today to talk about the presidential race.

A different kind of fight?

The quick pundit take seems to be that Hillary Clinton vowed to fight and fight and fight some more, all the way to Barack Obama’s inauguration next January and perhaps into his second term as well. But I thought I heard something else. Check this out, from her victory speech in West Virginia tonight:

And our nominee will be stronger for having campaigned long and hard, building enthusiasm and excitement, hearing your stories, and answering your questions. And I will work my heart out for the nominee of the Democratic Party to make sure we have a Democratic president.

No, she’s not giving up. Yes, she told her supporters that she still thinks she can win. But she’s obviously not stupid. She can do the math, even if Mark Penn can’t. This brief acknowledgment of reality means something.

The Clinton-Kennedy split

In my latest for the Guardian, I ponder Ted Kennedy’s decision to throw Hillary Clinton over the side of the yacht last week — a far more significant move than his endorsement of Barack Obama earlier this year.

JFK’s posthumous terrorist-coddling

Why is it that hardly anyone bothers to notice that the Hamas spokesman who “endorsed” Barack Obama did so by comparing him to John Kennedy? I mean, it’s weird, and Obama is right to label Hamas a terrorist organization. But by embracing Obama, Hamas is clearly trying to portray itself as reasonable and moderate. Which makes John McCain’s attempt to exploit this all the more deplorable. This is about Hamas trying to change its own image, nothing more.

Joe Lieberman has jumped in, too.

The end of the media road

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that Hillary Clinton has finally reached the end of the media road. The new narrative isn’t that she’s losing, but that she’s lost, and that the only thing reporters want to know now is when she’ll get out.

I made similar points this morning on New England Cable News.

Keller on Obama and Patrick

I’m ridiculously late to the party, but if you haven’t read Jon Keller’s Wall Street Journal piece comparing Barack Obama to Deval Patrick, you should. It’s more timely than ever, given Obama’s emergence today as the all-but-certain nominee.

As Keller notes (joining many others), there are numerous stylistic and rhetorical similarities between Obama and Patrick, and he wonders what that portends for an Obama administration, given Patrick’s rocky stint (it’s now officially too late to call it a rocky start) as governor of Massachusetts.

Personally, I’ve thought for some time that the similarities between the two men are exaggerated, mainly because they’re both African-American. Their life stories couldn’t be more different. Obama, who deliberately chose the life of a community organizer and state legislator, knows his way around the streets; Patrick knows his way around a corporate boardroom.

Then there’s this nugget from an unnamed Republican analyst, dug up by Mickey Kaus and brought to my attention by Jay Fitzgerald: “Deval Patrick is an idiot. Obama is not an idiot.” Oof. Pretty harsh. But the evidence thus far suggests that there may be something to it.

The nothing primary II

Well, that’s what I ended up going with when I wrote my Guardian column last night. Clinton did really well, so there’s no reason for her to get out. But she didn’t win by the huge margin she needed to change the dynamic of the race. And on (and on) we go.

The nothing primary

Good grief. I’ve got to write something up for the Guardian in a few hours, and, right now, it looks like Pennsylvania’s going to count for nothing. Clinton is probably going to win by a blah margin — say, six or eight points. That’s enough for her to keep going, but not enough for her to have a realistic chance of winning the nomination, or to refill her depleted campaign coffers.

Here’s a theory. It strikes me that, over the last month, increasing numbers of Democrats have decided that Clinton has a better chance than Obama does of beating McCain in the fall. Yet it’s almost certainly too late for Clinton, and no one knows what to do about it. Thus we go on and on and on, and no one can say how it will end.

Mostly I’ve been watching MSNBC. Now Tim Russert and Harold Ford are drawing a line in the sand in Indiana. If Obama wins Indiana, it’s over. Unless it isn’t, of course.

More about the flag-pin lady

Nash McCabe, the Latrobe, Pa., woman who’s so disturbed about Barack Obama’s decision not to make flag pins part of his everyday wardrobe, turns out to be a known Obama-hater whom ABC News tracked down with malice aforethought.

Josh Marshall: “[I]t does reinforce my sense that the disgraceful nature of the debate wasn’t just something that came together wrong, some iffy ideas taken to[o] far, but was basically engineered to be crap from the ground up.”