Wednesday-Night

See also U.S. campaign 2008

Buckley Bows out at National Review After Endorsing Obama (Daily Beast)
Christopher Buckley: Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded. National Review: It’s an intense election season and emotions are running high. We continue to have the highest regard for Chris’s talent and wit, and extend to him warmest regards and understanding. WSJ: “I think they wanted to put as much daylight between Christopher Buckley and themselves as the y could,” Buckley said Tuesday of National Review editor Rich Lowry and publisher Jack Fowler. “It’s an odd situation, when the founder’s son has suddenly become the turd in the punch bowl.” WaPo: Buckley can’t be completely disappeared; the Washington author owns one-seventh of National Review and serves on the magazine’s board.
10 October
Esquire endorses Obama
Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama
by Christopher Buckley
6 October
David Brooks: Sarah Palin “Represents A Fatal Cancer To The Republican Party“
He [William F. Buckley] thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.
Brooks predicted an Obama victory by nine points, and said that although he found Obama to be “a very mediocre senator,” he was is surrounded by what Brooks called “by far the most impressive people in the Democratic party.”
“He’s phenomenally good at surrounding himself with a team,” Brooks said. “I disagree with them on most issues, but I am given a lot of comfort by the fact that the people he’s chosen are exactly the people I think most of us would want to choose if we were in his shoes. So again, I have doubts about him just because he was such a mediocre senator, but his capacity to pick staff is impressive.”
August 21
Between rallies and parties next week, Democrats would do well to come up to the Rocky Mountain promontory where William F. Cody, the Elvis of the Old West, is buried. They should come to this perch and look out at the future. It’s theirs to lose.
(NYT) DENVER -– From Buffalo Bill’s grave atop Lookout Mountain you can see nearly every vote Barack Obama needs to win the presidency -– that is, if all goes as planned starting next week, when Democrats settle into the Geography of Hope.
Below are the Front Range suburbs, one of the fastest growing areas in the country, where women and the young are more likely to favor Obama, and men are proudly independent -– waiting to be impressed, reluctant to embrace any one party, concerned about the rookie with the funny name.
You see a metro area rated one of the most educated, but also a troubled exurban frontier, mile-high neighborhoods named for lost ranches where the leading crop this season is the foreclosure sign.
This is the America that Obama has to win, and if he simply holds on to every state that Al Gore took in 2000 and claims Colorado’s nine electoral votes he will be the next president. More
Obama’s Steady Lead Bests Kerry in ‘04: U.S. Campaign Notebook
Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) — Democrat Barack Obama, belying the talk of a tightening presidential race, maintains a steady lead of 3.5 percentage points over Republican John McCain, according to averages of six national polls this month compiled by the Web site RealClearPolitics.com.
More sobering for Obama is that at the same stage four years ago — a week out from the Democratic National Convention — Massachusetts Senator John Kerry was ahead of President George W. Bush in the polls. Kerry’s average lead in six polls taken in weeks before the 2004 convention was narrower, however, at a single point.
Still, recent surveys in a dozen states that voted Republican last election show Obama running slightly ahead of McCain or only a few points behind.
Is Obama good for Canada?
How the US choice for president really affects us up here.
By Michael Fellman
(The Tyee) … the trade issue is far from the most important consideration for Canadians when they consider the American election in November.
Most significant for us is how the Americans manage their economy. A deep depression down south will spill over to us. A fiscal crisis down there would tear at our financial structures as well. An invasion of Iran or another new military adventure, or conversely, an early exit from Iraq would have major implications for the world balance of power, not just the health of the American armed forces.
More important than strategic or even economic considerations, however, is a seemingly more intangible factor — the moral quality of American international hegemony.
July 31
Treating the Pill as Abortion, Draft Regulation Stirs Debate
by Stephanie Simon
The Wall Street Journal
Set aside the fraught question of when human life begins. The new debate: When does pregnancy begin?
The Bush Administration has ignited a furor with a proposed definition of pregnancy that has the effect of classifying some of the most widely used methods of contraception as abortion.
McCain Tries to Define Obama as Out of Touch
Mr. McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal ….
Central to the latest McCain drive is an attempt to use against Mr. Obama the huge crowds and excitement he has drawn, including on his foreign trip last week, by promoting a view of him as more interested in attention and adulation than in solving the problems facing American families.
July 27
How Obama Became Acting President
Frank Rich, New York Times
The election remains Mr. Obama’s to lose, and he could lose it, whether through unexpected events, his own vanity or a vice-presidential misfire. But what we’ve learned this month is that America, our allies and most likely the next Congress are moving toward Mr. Obama’s post-Iraq vision of the future, whether he reaches the White House or not. That’s some small comfort as we contemplate the strange alternative offered by the Republicans: a candidate so oblivious to our nation’s big challenges ahead that he is doubling down in his campaign against both Mr. Maliki and Mr. Obama to be elected commander in chief of the surge.
July 15
(Huffington Post) Phil Gramm’s recent disparaging of “a nation of whiners” complaining about a “mental recession” did more than offend the sensibilities of economically struggling Americans. His gaffe also served as a reminder that McCain had appointed one of the most reactionary, venal, and destructive political figures in recent times as his top econ man. By Sunday, the damage to the McCain campaign had grown so severe it announced that Gramm’s role had been significantly reduced.
July 10
Media Coverage of Religion in the ‘08 Campaign
The study finds that when coverage of the “horse-race” aspects of the campaign is excluded, religion emerges as a relatively prominent topic, accounting for 10% of the non-political-process coverage during the 16 months studied. In fact, religion garnered nearly as much coverage as race and gender combined (11%), even though the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination were a black man and a woman.
July 5
Candidate Obama: A Marginally Less Risky Alternative”
Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay

June 20
Obama, in Shift, Says He’ll Reject Public Financing
In making its decision to bypass public financing, the campaign declined an infusion of $84.1 million in money from federal taxpayers. The decision means that Mr. Obama will have to spend considerably more time raising money — he will head to California next week to open the effort — at the expense of spending time meeting voters.
The public financing system limits the amount of money that campaigns can spend in return for the public money. It was set up to reduce the influence of private donations in the political process.
The Two Obamas
By DAVID BROOKS
(NYT Op-Ed) 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.
June 7
Ending Her Bid, Clinton Backs Obama
Mrs. Clinton offered nothing less than a full-throated endorsement for and embrace of Mr. Obama and his candidacy. She has said many times that she would work her heart out for the nominee, and aides said she knew that now was the time to begin to show it.
June 6
Barack and Bobby: Compare and Contrast; and, Obama-Clinton as Lennon-McCartney circa 1970
June 5
The Conversation: Primary Days of Yore
Gail Collins and David Brooks
Do you miss the primaries yet? Personally, I was happiest when the field was crowded and, if all else failed, you could always whip up something about Dennis Kucinich or Mitt Romney’s dog. But now we’re embarking on five months of campaigning between two guys who are running as reformers who won’t do politics in the brain-dead way of yore. Which is what we’ve always dreamed of. Who do you think is going to break his true-believers’ hearts first?
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