Granted that Barack Obama’s campaign be much ado, but the mania didn’t appear out of nowhere.
The first time I heard Obama speak, on a radio quiz show in 2005, my first reaction was that the guy could be a contender. One thing that jumped out at me was his weird knack for being a dick, genial and funny at the same time. Obama happy fun time isn’t quite the same as a Barney hour, it’s more like the comic who rips you a new one but you can’t help enjoying the experience. He has an oddly anti-political habit of telling special interest audiences what they don’t want to hear. Give a listen and see if you agree.
The kind of Republican who regards ideology uber alles may not enjoy an Obama presidency any more than Clinton or Edwards.
srv
Yeah, right, sure he does.
He seems to have forgotten about the oh, that INVASION, that made Hezbollah what it is.
Playing the Cosby act doesn’t lose him any votes. But it sure does win over them white folk.
myiq2xu
Like a frat-boy that would be fun to have a beer with?
He’s already a uniter, so if he starts talking about not leaving any kids behind or being compassionate, I’m outta here!
John Cole
Hey now- while I am enjoying tweaking all the Obama supporters for their laughable and over-the-top odes to Obama, I think it is beyond unfair to compare him to Bush.
I am not disputing in any way, shape or form that Obama might be a good President, nor am I disputing that he might be a great President. I certainly will dispute that any of the Democratic candidates could be as bad as Bush.
Their are legitimate criticisms to be leveled of his supporters (and much fun to be had), but comparing Obama to Bush is BS.
Jeff S
That sounds like what pick-up artists refer to as Negging.
srv
You’re right. Bush has way more substance.
Keith
All depends on the substance in question. Would you rather have a handful of shit or a handful of a fart?
srv
If you think people have been putting up with shit for too long, how long do you think they’ll put up with gas? If living with the Democratic Party is going to be like living with a dog with bad gas, I for one am ready to take it out in the back forty and put it down.
I guess I’m voting Republican this year for the first time in my life. Obviously it has to get worse before people will demand something really better.
bago
srv: So what’s it like posting from the year 2000?
grumpy realist
Considering who Obama managed to get to sign off on some of his legislation, anyone who can’t see a difference between Bush’s “bilateralism” and Obama’s ability to get people to work together–well, I really would like to see what exactly you’re smokin’.
myiq2xu
I’ll ride the magic unity pony if Obama Girl comes over my place and asks me real nice.
PS – “Real Nice” = Butt nekkid!
Badtux
Bush… substance… is vacuum a substance? Hmm… well, anybody who would get the U.S. involved in a land war in Europe has a vacuum inside his head, so yeah, I guess if vacuum is a substance, Bush has lots of substance. Alrighty, then!
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Badtux
Bush… substance… is vacuum a substance? Hmm… well, anybody who would get the U.S. involved in a land war in Asia has a vacuum inside his head, so yeah, I guess if vacuum is a substance, Bush has lots of substance. Alrighty, then!
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
TenguPhule
Shorter SRV: I can haz the One True Pure Knight on Shining Armor now?
Any Democrat is better then Bush by virtue of not being completely batshit insane.
DVDA
I don’t know. The more I see them operate, the more the Clintons look like imperial elitists. They are not so different than the neo-cons, just much, much smarter.
They understand things like nuance, and they think through the likely consequences of their actions. And no, they’re not crazy.
But they’re naked attempt to use racism to knee-cap Obama is disgusting, and it speaks to a very dark worldview… and an insatiable lust for power.
Many people predict the next energy crisis will unleash unseen horrors on this world, and it was Bill Clinton who regime change in Iraq US Policy. They weren’t so stupid as to go barging in as clusily as the neo-cons, but they sure as shit wanted to.
If you believe in trading US blood for middle eastern oil, then yeah… Clinton will be better than Bush. But if you wish to move in different direction, Clinton may be the biggest obstacle to doing so.
If McCain gets elected, he’ll be much easier to take out in 2012 with someone who may yet end the oil wars, or at least end US involvement in them. But if Clinton is the incumbent in 2012… it’s hard to see anything but endless war.
Pb
srv,
Heh; I remember that was when Obama was being attacked for saying this:
…it reminds me of when Howard Dean got attacked for saying this:
…not that you’ll find a primary source for that, mind you–apparently it’s something he said to The Washington Post that they forgot to actually publish until later, when he was already being attacked for saying it to them.
However, I can show you a later Washington Post editorial that says this:
…so go figure…
Wilfred
You might want to read this, too:
That last alliance will sink Obama like a stone. Article here
Randolph Fritz
“He has an oddly anti-political habit of telling special interest audiences what they don’t want to hear.”
That is a hopeful thing, possibly one of the best things I’ve heard about the man.
Pb
Re: that WaPo Dean quote, Billmon had it:
TheFountainHead
I hear srv has a sign on his front yard that says, “Dick For President”.
Scotty
So is he supporting Giuliani or Mitt?
cleek
is that an endorsement or an offer ?
Zifnab
Mystery Method ftw!
Worse. Cheney.
4tehlulz
‘sup traitor?
ThymeZone
Sorry, not seeing that. One has to suspend all disbelief and argue that any putdown is racist.
The “fairy tale” remark wasn’t racist, wasn’t even dogwhistle racist. I thought it was over the top, but I can’t call it racist.
The “lazy” remark isn’t racist. That’s standard politics. People who seek national office from a Senate perch are always going to be vulnerable to those kinds of attacks, because the Senate is such a weird place with such weird protocols and processes.
What looks really troubling to me is the zeal of Obama supporters to go after all criticisms as if they were “racist.” That’s a huge mistake. Americans don’t want walking-on-eggs, politically correct touchiness. They don’t want Obama attacked because he is black, and they don’t want him defended just because he is black.
If two people at the level of Obama and Clinton can’t carry on a campaign like this, in these times, without falling back on race and gender as “issues,” I don’t think it speaks well of either of them.
I also wasn’t impressed with Hillary’s “some of my best friends are black” routine on MTP yesterday. I’d have been more impressed if she said you know, I called Barack and we talked about race and gender and I guaranteed him, and he guaranteed me, and we both guarantee you that we won’t let this campaign descend to that level. Next question, Tim.
Bombadil
Nominated for PotD
John Pedo
Well me and my mate steven hawkins think that the maths of this equation are rather interesting, im going to eat some bacon on my wet flaps. Good day to you sir!!
Neal
I actually like that aspect of Obama. He once told a group of teachers that there should be some consideration of merit based pay, not just tenure. Of course they didn’t like that…but God damn it, it’s true.
I also remember hearing about him telling a black audience that the black community has a problem with homophobia.
I’m not completely in the saddle in regards to the unity pony but I think it beats Bush/Cheney’s habit of speaking to only friendly audiences and caressing their ears with what they want to hear.
cleek
“is that an endorsement or an offer ?”
(no offense to srv, of course)
D-Chance.
Is “electability” becoming another Clintonite code word for Obama’s campaign (nice guy, but…)?
No worse than “vertical” (the word Josh Marshall freaked over when the Huckster used it), I guess…
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Am I the only one here that thought “cocaine” as the first word?
“illicit substance”? Anyone? anyone?
/me sits back in corner.
myiq2xu
It’s too early on Monday morning for any goldberging.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
You know, the one thing that’s starting to drive me up the wall is that Obama is a guy risking his young political career to become President, and by doing so is standing in the way of the speeding train of martyrdom that is Hillary. He has people that support him, an actual personality, and position papers that aren’t written in crayon and aren’t schemes on the next political gambit.
Like him, distrust him, or reject him… you have to admit: This dude certainly has substance.
And anything has more substance than an ex-President’s straight-C, frat-boy,
alcoholicfundamentalist son.Zifnab
Perhaps, if we lived in a non-bullshit society, this might fly. But when you read Karl Rove’s latest Op-Ed, you can’t help but hear him whistling past dixie.
~ via CrooksAndLiars
The hat-tip towards “black people are lazy basketball players” meme is abundantly clear. Obama is going to be a racial punching bag in this election, with shills like Rove taking underhanded verbal swipes one minute while screaming about the poor disenfranchised white man the next.
Hillary needs to get as far away from that rhetoric as possible. Reinforce the level of politically correct discourse. She’s already been the target of mysoginistic gender-baiting, with all sorts of “Crazy old post-menopasal woman with a finger on the nuclear button who can’t stand up to terrorists” whinefests. Playing this game – even to the lightest degree – just encourages Chris Matthews to cry “Hillary did it too!” while he talks about how Monica’s blowjobs got the former First Lady a Senate seat.
Now more than ever, the Democrats need to keep their noses sparkling clean.
Scotty
There’s no way to make a fair system for it. And no way to make it equal in a cross-subject manner. It’ll never happen on a large scale.
Jen
I liked this from the article:
Does this mean GWB acts black…?
Seriously, though, tough love. I like it. I don’t think there’s any Democrat short of the previously “Democratic” incarnation of Lieberman that the R’s would be happy with. Don’t care. “Increasingly irrelevant vestige of a less enlightened time”, that’s the R motto as far as I’m concerned.
Steven Hawkins
Ah John Pedo had a very good answer to this interesting topic, hmmm im going to eat some bacon on my wet flaps to with a bit of pickle off my tackle. Nice to see you, to see you nice!
Jill
Tim F… you didn’t see Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention?
ThymeZone
Well, we’re changing the subject. The subject I responded to was that the evil Clintons were dogwhistling racism on Obama.
I don’t buy that. Politics is a mean and cruel business, and Obama strikes me as a guy who can take a punch without crying “foul — racism!”
Rove, of course, is Rove. He would gladly use race or any other factor against Obama. He’ll use it both ways, suggesting that Obama is an uppity colored boy out of one side of his mouth, and then suggesting that Obama is injecting race into the thing by complaining about it. That’s Rovian politics, and we fully expect to see it this summer no matter who the Dems nominate. If it’s HRC, then Rove will use his knives against her. So be it.
Like I said the other day, Rove will have his work cut out for him trying to elect the corpse-like McPain, whose slogan is “I can run a better war that George Bush can. And just to prove it, I’ll make it a 100-year war.”
Pb
So does the white community. In fact, pretty much everyone but the liberals do, and a few of them do too. But in retrospect, that anecdote is almost amusing, considering Obama’s earlier McClurkin debacle.
Zifnab
I disagree. We measure job performance in a thousand other fields. I get a performance review every six months at my office. I know friends at Schlumberger who receive bonuses and other incentives depending on how well the company performs on a given year.
Are you honestly telling me that rating a teacher is more difficult than rating an engineer or a lawyer or a doctor or a sales rep? The problem I hear is that merit based pay won’t be perfectly “fair”. Well, shit. Life’s not fair kids. But the idea is to create incentives for improved performance. After 12 years of public education, I can tell you that you really do have to want to be a teacher to be a good teacher. The administration at my high school was perhaps the most detrimental school-based factor in my education. They knee-capped, underfunded, and harassed all the good teachers. But the bad teachers who could fly below the radar existed at that school for decades without a problem. And this was at – arguably – one of the best public high schools in the state, perhaps even the country.
Tim F.
I don’t weigh prepared speeches all that much, even barn burners like that one. Michael Gerson wrote all kinds of pretty talk for a president’ who didn’t deserve it. The audio I linked to was the first time that I noticed Obama being witty and quick on his feet.
Scotty
But that can’t take into account all improvements or performances. Would it be an improvement if a teacher gets a student who does 1 out of every 5 homeworks to do 2 out of 5 homeworks? Or how about helping a student who averages 50% get a 55%. Or does merit pay come into play only when students achieve high marks in a particular class?
Jen
Rove accusing someone else of trash talking “transcends” pot, meet kettle. Kind of like, “pot, meet the vast infinite blackness that is the universe”. And pickup basketball? Sheesh. What a dick. (okay, that’s always an appropriate reaction to MC Rove.)
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
I disagree on your disagree. (Take that! You wanna go! Huh?!)
Companies have fairly straight forward ways of making sure that no employees get out of line. For example, I’m working in a hedge fund’s IT dept. and I have a boss sitting behind me, passwords that keep me from taking the easy route, co-workers I have to interact with, etc.
Teachers work in a fairly independent environment, and it’s not like the kids that already hate school are going to call the teacher out when she starts bending the rules to start looking good.
This, however, is true.
The answer is likely to be a mix, but I think the weakness is in the teacher independence. This concept of having one teacher dominate the subject matter does not provide fertile ground for checks and balances.
The problem to that is that the schools are underfunded as a whole, and nobody wants to become a teacher for the pay we’re giving.
One: Pay more across-the-board. Make it hip to be a teacher again. Then,
Two: Institute checks so that evaluation actually works. Then,
Three: Institute evaluation-based salaries.
We’re way behind.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Oops, addendum.
I meant to say, Zifnab, that you were right that nothing is going to be perfect.
Neal
Pb, I agree. I’m not singling out the black community on that one, I just was using it as an example of Obama being willing to make unpopular statements. That is all.
Zifnab
I think we’re in total agreement there. Merit based pay is the final cap on the teacher-pay problem. But when you’re already paying teachers starvation wages, the first step is an across-the-board hike.
Unfortunately, that can’t really take place at the federal level. For starters, a $40k / year salary in Montgomery, Alabama is not the same as a $40k / year salary in New York or LA, so some federal salary floor for teachers would be silly on its face. People need to want to fund education at the local level, because that’s where education takes place. Federal programs should encourage researching and promoting systems that work. I just don’t know what the federal government can do across the board effectively, though. Your community either wants good schools or it doesn’t. No President can change that.
Scotty
It wants good schools, but doesn’t want to pay for them.
Pb
Neal,
Sure, but if / to the extent that Obama was, I think he would have been wrong to do so.
ChristieS
Also, it may want them, but can’t afford to pay for them.
MBL
Yes. A whole hell of a lot.
I’m pretty good at my job, but if Johnny’s mother is on crack and his daddy isn’t around? He’s not going to do well at school regardless of what I do. The guy down the hallway who hands A’s out to his honor students like they’re candy? His kids are going to do well even if he’s lousy at his job. He’ll look better than me, by just about any metric you can imagine, even if I’m better at my job than he is.
In fact, even if I’m the one teaching the honor students, I can be the best teacher in the world, and moving them from a 95% average to a 98% average ain’t gonna look like much to an outside observer.
It is very, very difficult to come up with a way to measure teachers that is not heavily confounded by the SES of the students and the skills of their parents. Particularly in comparison with sales reps, for God’s sake.
Birdzilla
Obama is too liberal we dont need BILL CLINTON II in the whitehouse