Tag Archives: Democrats

Alec Baldwin on the Caroline Kennedy candidacy

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Caroline Kennedy

“…[T]there is a right way and a wrong way to go about this in the current political climate. I think it is ill-advised for New York Democrats to play the Good Dynasty/Bad Dynasty card. Especially now. The Bad Dynasty is not even out the door. The Illinois Governor is reminding Americans that abuse of power is a non-partisan disease. And New York Governor David Paterson will also face consequences for this decision.

This is more about protecting a Democratic Senate seat than romanticizing it.

Appoint an individual (fine…man or woman) who has been elected to something. Something! Then there is a race in 2010, if I understand New York’s electoral mechanics properly. That is not that long from now. Then certain New Yorkers could run. And probably win. I would probably vote for her (er…them).

But this must be done with great care. Patience and care. You know, the way that we beat John McCain.”

via HuffPo.

The Other Winner

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Howard Dean speaking at DNC event
“[If] election night stamped Obama indelibly into the pages of American history, then [Howard] Dean’s place in that history, too, should probably be revisited. Very nearly discarded by his contemporaries as a spectacularly flawed presidential candidate and a bumbling chairman, Dean may well be remembered instead as the flinty figure who bridged the distance between one generation of Democrats and the next, the man who first gave voice to liberal fury and tapped transformative technologies at the dawn of the century — and then channeled all of it into rebuilding the party’s grass-roots apparatus. Just as Ronald Reagan and the conservatives learned from Barry Goldwater, just as Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers took inspiration from reformers like Robert La Follette, so, too, did Obama and the new progressives in America evolve from Howard Dean.” (New York Times Magazine)

The Obama Myth

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Factual Discrepancies to the Selma Claim: “Sunday’s march in Selma, Ala., may have been a sacred commemoration of the ‘Bloody Sunday’ civil rights march of 1965, but beneath it all lurked raw politics, with Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., competing fiercely for black voters.

While local churches were packed with parishioners, just a few hundred yards apart on Martin Luther King Jr. Street, the rival Democratic presidential candidates made their pitches, both praising civil rights leaders for paving their way.

‘Don’t tell me I’m not coming home when I come to Selma, Ala. I’m here because somebody marched for our freedom. I’m here because y’all sacrificed for me,’ Obama told a crowd.” (KTRE)

Did anyone hear the soundbites from Obama’s Selma speech? He certainly has developed a down-home accent recently. I hope this won’t be a harbinger of a wholesale attempt to reinvent himself similar to blue-blood New England preppie Dubya’s vote-trolling transformation into a drawlin’ Texas shucks-jes’-folks common man.

Hell hath no fury like Hillary

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Toby Harnden: “A delicious spat between the Obama and Hillary camps today after coruscating anti-Clinton comments from Hollywood mogul David Geffen that vividly encapsulated every concern about Hillary and Bill that nestles in the hearts of Democrats wary of the couple.

What did it reveal? That this will be a bloody campaign. That Team Obama is prepared to do battle. That Team Clinton wants to bury Obama early. And that Hillary will respond to every slight with ferocious indignation while protesting with a straight face that she only wants to run a positive campaign.

Geffen’s comments to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times were incredibly damaging to Hillary. Dowd is one of the most influential political journalists in the US. Two decades ago, she sunk the presidential campaign of Joe Biden. Hillary wants to make sure Maureen doesn’t do the same thing to her.” (Telegraph.UK)

Geffen’s major misgivings speak to the unelectability of Clinton and the vulnerability to giving the election easily to the Republicans if she is the nominee.