WHAT WENT WRONG? (Michelle Cottle, New Republic) We asked (begged, really) a range of Hillarylanders for their up-close and personal lists of “What Went Wrong?” Not everyone wanted to play. Many stubbornly pointed out that their candidate is not yet dead. But, on the condition of total anonymity, a fairly broad enough cross-section of her staff responded–more than a dozen members all told, from high-level advisors to grunt-level assistants, from money men to on-the-ground organizers… “There was not any plan in place from beginning to end on how to win the nomination. It was, ‘Win Iowa.’ There was not the experience level, and, frankly, the management ability, to create a whole plan to get to the magical delegate number. That to me is the number one thing. It’s starting from that point that every subsequent decision resulted. The decision to spend x amount in Iowa versus be prepared for February 5 and beyond. Or how much money to spend in South Carolina–where it was highly unlikely we were going to win–versus the decision not to fund certain other states. … It was not as simple as, ‘Oh, that’s a caucus state, we’re not going to play there.’ That suggests a more serious thought process. It suggests a meeting where we went through all that.”
BARACK OBAMA: THE NEW GREAT REDEEMER (Gerard Baker, London Times) It’s fairly clear now that, with the near-certain nomination by the Democrats of Barack Obama everything is in place for the media to indulge in one of the greatest, orgiastic media fiestas of hero-worship since Elvis Presley… This media narrative is not only an outgrowth of the journalists’ natural enthusiasm for a Democrat such as Mr Obama. It is also a clever ploy to pre-emptively de-legitimise any Republican critique of the Democratic nominee. It is designed to prevent Mr McCain from asking reasonable questions about Mr Obama’s strikingly vacuous political background, or raising doubts about his credentials for the presidency. The idolatry of Mr Obama is a shame, really. The Illinois senator is indeed, an unusually talented, inspiring and charismatic figure. His very ethnicity offers an exciting departure. But he is not a saint. He is a smart and eloquent man with a personal history that is startlingly shallow set against the scale of the office he seeks to hold. It is not only legitimate, but necessary, to scrutinise his past and infer what it might tell us about his beliefs, in the absence of the normal record of achievement expected in a presidential nominee. If the past 40 years have taught us anything they have surely taught that premature canonisation is an almost certain guarantee of subsequent deep disappointment.
MCCAIN CAMPAIGN TO RE-VET ENTIRE STAFF (Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic) After a series of disclosures forced the resignation of two McCain campaign aides with ties to unsavory regimes, the campaign has decided to scrutinize the background of the entire staff to ferret out connections to lobbyists. This morning, according to two Republicans with direct knowledge, Rick Davis, the campaign manager, e-mailed to McCain’s entire staff a memo entitled “McCain Campaign Conflicts Policy” – Effective Today" that includes a questionnaire asking about previous professional activities… The new conflicts policy prohibits campaign staffers from being “registered lobbyist or foreign agent, or receive compensation for any such activity.”… Sympathetic critics – including some within the campaign – worry that the damage to McCain’s brand has already set in, and have, for months, urged senior campaign officials to screen their staff. That the campaign waited until now to ask these questions of staff suggests that no one at a senior enough level saw the presence of many former lobbyists as a problem. Davis and senior strategist Charlie Black are both former lobbyists.
THE MCCAIN DOCTRINES (Matt Bai, New York Times Magazine) If it is true that McCain’s Vietnam experience left him with a different attitude about foreign wars from the one held by those who were on the ground, then it certainly wasn’t apparent earlier in his political career. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, after he arrived in the Senate, McCain was, in fact, an outspoken opponent of American intervention in faraway lands — at least in cases where the country wasn’t willing to lose thousands of lives to achieve its aims. But during the post-cold-war 1990s, as America’s foreign-policy establishment struggled to define the nation’s obligations to the rest of the world, McCain went through his own kind of inner journey, seeking some balance between the legacy of Vietnam and the pull of new crises around the globe — crises born of savagery and rife with human consequence. That journey led him inexorably toward Iraq, where McCain’s resolve hardened to the point that now, as he prepares to run the climactic campaign of his life, he finds himself carrying the weight of another war, one that has divided the country and devastated his party. One way or the other, Iraq will determine this last phase of McCain’s political life, as surely as the war in Vietnam defined its beginning.
MCCAIN AND OBAMA TILT TOWARD THE CENTER ON IRAQ PLANS (Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times) After launching their candidacies with opposite positions on the Iraq war, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama seem to be edging toward a middle ground between them. McCain has long denounced timetables for withdrawal, but said for the first time Thursday that he would like to see most U.S. troops out of Iraq by a specific date: 2013. Obama has emphasized his plan to withdraw all combat brigades within 16 months of taking office, but also has carefully hedged, leaving the option of taking more time – and leaving more troops – if events require. The positioning is noteworthy because McCain and Obama have made Iraq war policy a core element of their campaigns. But McCain has bowed to the political reality that American impatience with the war is growing, and Obama to the fact that a poorly executed exit would risk damage to other vital U.S. interests.
HOW OBAMA AND MCCAIN DEFINE EACH OTHER (John Dickerson, Slate) The quickest way to understand the emerging foreign-policy debate between John McCain and Barack Obama is to look at the unpopular world leader each is trying to turn into the other’s running mate. McCain has picked Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for Obama, and Obama has selected George W. Bush for McCain. The benefit of the boogeyman strategy for both Obama and McCain is that it allows each to tie his opponent to a highly unpopular man who can be counted on to regularly say unpopular things. When Ahmadinejad produces one of his outbursts, McCain will raise the alarm about Obama’s odd, accommodating, touchy-feely diplomacy. How could he even think about meeting with such an evil character? When Bush paints his ideological opponents as appeasers, or otherwise colors in black and white only, Obama gets a chance to argue that McCain shares the rigidity that led Bush and his team to rush into war on faulty evidence. The similarities in the guilt-by-association strategies only go so far, obviously. Obama is nowhere near Ahmadinejad and on many issues McCain is quite close to Bush. That should make it easy for Obama to wriggle free, whereas the pictures of McCain hugging Bush will be omnipresent and harder to escape. Whether that’s true depends on how well the candidate being drummed by this attack is able to speak for himself.
WHAT OBAMA OWES THE CLINTONS (Peter Beinart, Time) If Clinton had been more principled, if he had been less of a panderer, if he had tried to be purer than his political opponents–if, in other words, he had been more like Obama–he might have opposed the death penalty, vetoed welfare reform and unambiguously defended affirmative action. He might also have gone with his liberal base, not Wall Street, and chosen economic stimulus over deficit reduction in 1993. And had he done those things, Barack Obama would probably not be in a commanding position to become the next President of the U.S. So as they bid Clintonism goodbye, Obama fans should show a little gratitude. If Bill weren’t the person they revile, Barack couldn’t be the person they love.
OBAMA ADMIRES BUSH (David Brooks, New York Times) “The debate we’re going to be having with John McCain is how do we understand the blend of military action to diplomatic action that we are going to undertake,” he said. “I constantly reject this notion that any hint of strategies involving diplomacy are somehow soft or indicate surrender or means that you are not going to crack down on terrorism. Those are the terms of debate that have led to blunder after blunder.”… Obama doesn’t broadcast moral disgust when talking about terror groups, but he said that in some ways he’d be tougher than the Bush administration. He said he would do more to arm the Lebanese military and would be tougher on North Korea. “This is not an argument between Democrats and Republicans,” he concluded. “It’s an argument between ideology and foreign policy realism. I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush. I don’t have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm. I don’t have a lot of complaints with their handling of the fall of the Berlin Wall.” In the early 1990s, the Democrats and the first Bush administration had a series of arguments — about humanitarian interventions, whether to get involved in the former Yugoslavia, and so on. In his heart, Obama talks like the Democrats of that era, viewing foreign policy from the ground up. But in his head, he aligns himself with the realist dealmaking of the first Bush. Apparently, he’s part Harry Hopkins and part James Baker.
RULING COULD REVIVE GAY MARRIAGE ISSUE IN THE CAMPAIGN (Adam Nagourney, New York Times) This year, the decision in California could at the very least have resonance with socially conservative voters in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Even if Mr. McCain does not wield it as part of his fall campaign — and his political associates said he almost certainly would not — history suggests that independent conservative advocacy groups would seize on the ruling to try to define Mr. Obama and his party as culturally out-of-step. Presumably, it is just a matter of time until voters across the country see advertisements including same-sex couples taking their vows on the steps of San Francisco City Hall. There is considerable debate whether the marriage issue helped Republican candidates in 2004. And it seems questionable if voters are going to find it compelling this year, at a time when the country is facing a prolonged war, an ailing economy and skyrocketing gasoline prices, the issues that Mr. McCain and the two Democratic candidates are confronting on the campaign trail every day.
IN THE SOUTH, A FORCE TO CHALLENGE THE G.O.P. (Adam Nossiter and Janny Scott, New York Times) Should Mr. Obama become the Democratic nominee, he would still have to struggle for white swing voters in the South and in border states like West Virginia, where he lost decisively to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Tuesday’s presidential primary… But in Southern states with large black populations, like Alabama, Mississippi and Virginia, an energized black electorate could create a countervailing force, particularly if conservative white voters choose not to flock to Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, predicts “the largest black turnout in the history of the United States” this fall if Mr. Obama is the nominee. To hold these states, Republicans may have to work harder than ever. Already, turnout in Democratic primaries this year has substantially exceeded Republican turnout in states like Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Some analysts suggest that North Carolina and Virginia may even be within reach for the Democratic nominee, and they point to the surprising result in a Congressional special election in Mississippi this week as an indicator of things to come.
MORE: Obama Warns Republicans About Critical Ads (Charles Babington, Associated Press) Perhaps no one took greater comfort in the Republican Party’s third straight loss of a long-held House seat this week than Barack Obama, who says the results point to clear limits in the effectiveness of attack ads he expects this fall. The Democratic presidential candidate played a prominent role in all three special elections to fill vacant GOP seats, and he landed on the winning side each time… “The same kinds of tactics that the Republican Party has been employing over the last several election cycles just aren’t going to work this time,” he told reporters on his charter plane after receiving former rival John Edwards’ endorsement Wednesday. “I mean, they did everything they could, right? They ran Wright. They ran Obama. In Louisiana, they ran Pelosi. The same way that in previous election cycles they had run Hillary or other folks they thought would scare off voters. It didn’t work.”
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