Convention planners, the White House and the McCain campaign are wrestling with how to choreograph a proper send-off for Mr. Bush — sure, his poll numbers are in the tank, but he is still the party leader and president of the United States — while hustling him out the door in time for Mr. McCain to look like his own man.
According to the polls, Mr Obama beats Mr McCain in nearly every group except white men. Unfortunately for Mr Obama, there are a lot of white men. In 2004 they were roughly 36% of the electorate, and they preferred George Bush to John Kerry by about 25 points. This year, Mr McCain leads Mr Obama by about 20 points among them.
Democrats have various theories about why white men do not like them. One is that the problem is only with southerners, who abandoned the Democrats in the 1960s because President Lyndon Johnson signed laws demanding equal rights for blacks. Clearly, there is some truth to this. But it is not the whole story. For one thing, the Democrats lost many non-southern white men, too. Between the presidential elections of 1960 and 2004, their share of the southern white male vote shrank by 17 points, but among non-southern whites it still shrank by 12 points. And racial attitudes have changed dramatically since the 1960s, especially among the young. There must be something besides bigotry making white men spurn the Democrats.
I came back from Colombia to find Christopher Hitchens everywhere on the Web in the same position: prone, on a raised flat surface, helpless, humiliatingly exposed, with specialists standing over his mound of a belly, doing unspeakable things to him. First he had himself photographed receiving a Brazilian wax; then he had himself videotaped being waterboarded. Up next: his sigmoidoscopy on YouTube.
Somewhere in the 1970s, the right had a stroke of genius. Cognitive theorists have long known that guilt-by-association or virtue-by-association is an effective persuasive technique. Tie a candidate to a scary image - like Willy Horton - and tie your own candidate to a beloved image - like the flag - and you stand a very good chance of winning. And if you can create a lasting negative image of your opponents by using a simple slogan (four words or less preferred, and the fewer syllables the better) that sticks, and that requires a complex argument to refute, you win. You win big.
Enter the phrase: "Tax and spend liberal." The phrase is marvelous in its brevity and semantic weight. First off, no one likes to be taxed or pay taxes. "Tax" is a strongly negative word, even when we may know, on some level, that taxes are necessary to provide such services as police, fire, military, safe food, schools, and the like. "Spend" is also a negative word buried deeply in the American public’s psyche. Notice that the right didn’t call the left "tax and invest liberals," or "collect money for necessary services liberals." The word "spend" is short, to-the-point, and implies profligate behavior. Coupled with a secondary message attacking those who are "lazy" and on welfare - a program that was always a drop in the bucket in public spending - and the phrase was and is closely associated with taking money from hard-working Americans and giving it to the shiftless.
-- J.S. O'BRIENBoth Barack Obama and John McCain have a closetful of flip flops on issues. What is interesting about the flip flops is McCain has flip flopped towards the right - on the Bush tax cuts, on torture, on immigration, on everything. There is no moving to the "middle" for McCain. There is only moving to the far right. He is really running for Bush's third term. Obama's flip flops have him moving to the right as well, aligning him closer to Bush's third term, instead of making clear he will be a break from the extremism of the Bush years.
I have long said we should change the name of the DOD back to the Department of War. If you are going to make war, then you should damn well be a man and say so.
-- DALE AMON
One fascinating thing about the death of Jesse Helms is the conservative reaction. One might expect that Helms' death would prompt from conservatives the sorts of things that I might say if, say, Al Sharpton died -- that he and I had some overlapping beliefs and I don't regard him as the world-historical villain that the right does, but that he's a problematic guy and I regard him and his methods as pretty marginal to American liberalism. But instead conservatives are taking a line that I might have regarded as an unfair smear just a week ago, and saying that Helms is a brilliant exemplar of the American conservative movement.
And if that's what the Heritage Foundation and National Review and the other key pillars of American conservatism want me to believe, then I'm happy to believe it. But it reflects just absolutely horribly on them and their movement that this is how they want to be seen -- as best exemplified by bigotry, lunatic notions about foreign policy, and tobacco subsidies.
Cartoon by Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal Constitution
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