Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Last month, near the end of the Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire, moderator Tim Russert — known as "Washington’s toughest interviewer" and perhaps the most influential journalist in America — had one last chance to pin the candidates down with his legendary common sense, persistence, and no-bull style. This is what he asked, first to Barack Obama:

"There’s been a lot of discussion about the Democrats and the issue of faith and values. I want to ask you a simple question. Senator Obama, what is your favorite Bible verse?"

When Obama finished his answer, Russert said to the other candidates, "I want to give everyone a chance in this. You just take 10 seconds." Predictable banality ensued. A foreign visitor unfamiliar with our presidential campaigns might have scratched her head and said, "This is how you decide who will lead your country?"

Indeed it is, because the process is controlled by Tim Russert and people like him. Russert’s Bible question encapsulates everything wrong with him, and with our political coverage more generally. It seeks to make candidates look bad rather than finding out something important about them (if you want to explore a candidate’s religious beliefs, you don’t do it in pop-quiz form and give them just ten seconds to answer). It substitutes the personal anecdote for the policy position, the sound-bite for the substantive answer. It distills the debate into a series of allegedly symbolic, supposedly meaningful moments that can be replayed.

This type of debate question is not about what the candidate believes and would actually do in office, but about how clever the moderator is for cornering the candidate. And above all, it takes a genuinely relevant matter (a candidate’s view of the universe) and crams it through a channel by which the thoughtful candidate will be pilloried and the shallow, pandering, overly rehearsed candidate will garner praise.

-- PAUL WALDMAN

You cannot be a president of the United States who’s wanton in his expression of violence. There’s a lot of people who need care. He might be one of them. If there isn’t something wrong with him, then there’s something wrong with us. This, to me, is a very serious question.

-- DENNIS KUCINICH

(Washington Post columnist Ruth) Marcus and Hillary (Clinton) want it both ways. Marcus endorses the idea that a female President will change attitudes towards women, but one would think that backwards. Women get elected to office because attitudes have already changed. They have proven themselves as capable as men, and as able to handle the tough decisions as men, and until now, the sharp debate and criticism as well.

Hillary set that last cause back a few steps, and Marcus fails to realize it. By playing the damsel in distress, she wants to eat her cake and have it, too. Hillary wants to project strength but pull a fainting spell when other candidates treat her as an equal -- and as a frontrunner -- by challenging her on her policies. A fainting spell might serve as a distraction from the two disastrous answers she gave in the debate, but America won't elect Scarlett O'Hara as President. The voters want strength in the Oval Office, not passive-aggressive hypocrisy.

-- ED MORRISSEY

What is it about the candidacy of Ron Paul that has attracted the paranoid fringe of American politics?

Clearly, there are Ron Paul supporters who are rational and grounded, not given to spouting conspiracies or blaming “neocons” for everything bad that happens in the world (neocons being a blind for anti-Semitism). For all we know, they may be the majority of his voters.

But just as clearly, there is a dark underbelly to the Paul campaign – a ruthless, mob of internet ruffians who seek to intimidate those who would dare criticize them, the Paul candidacy, or most especially, one of their pet conspiracy theories about 9/11, the “New World Order” (an amorphous term that generally means the imposition of a one world government), or something as mundane and silly as planting a computer chip in every new born in America.

-- RICK MORAN

Given that the Republicans are now definitively the war party (not that the Democrats have yet become the peace party, but that’s another story), it’s hard to see how libertarian Republicans can survive, any more than Dixiecrats survived Nixon’s Southern strategy. The recent decision by RedState to ban Ron Paul supporters is a pretty clear indication of how real Republicans think about this. This has big implications for a thinktank like Cato, which has opposed the war (but very sotto voce – a visitor to their website would be hard pressed to tell that there even was a war) while remaining within the Republican tent. They had a good discussion of the issues a while back, but it doesn’t seem to have had any effect.

This process cuts both ways. It’s hard to witness the catastrophic government failure that has characterized every aspect of this war without becoming more sympathetic to certain kinds of libertarian (and also classically conservative) arguments, particularly those focusing on the fallibility of planning.

-- JOHN QUIGGAN

Cartoon by Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate