Weekend Punditry On the Race for White House

By: E&P Staff The pollsters may be down but the pundits, after a few mea culpas, are still up and delivering strong opinions on the race for the White House, with no votes being counted this weekend as Obama battles Clinton and five Republicans fight each other. Here is a selection of excerpts from across the Web.

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Frank Rich, in his Sunday column for The New York Times:

Every politician employs pollsters, but Mrs. Clinton, tellingly, has one, Mark Penn, as her top campaign strategist. As Sally Bedell Smith reminds us in her book about the Clintons, ?For Love of Politics,? it was Mr. Penn who helped shape the 1996 Bill Clinton campaign in which ?soccer moms? were identified and wooed with such Cracker Jack prizes as school uniforms and V-chips to monitor TV violence. For Mrs. Clinton?s Senate campaign four years later, it was also Mr. Penn?s market testing that, in Ms. Smith?s telling, ?crafted anodyne, bite-sized messages for Hillary.? The overall message uniting the small-bore promises, such as it was, remains unchanged today: competence, experience, wonky proficiency....

In Mrs. Clinton?s down-to-earth micropolitics, polls often seem to play the leadership role. That leaves her indecisive when one potential market is pitched against another. Witness her equivocation over Iraq, driver?s licenses for illegal immigrants and even Cubs vs. Yankees. Add to this habitual triangulation the ugly campaigning of the men around her ? Mr. Penn?s sleazy invocation of ?cocaine? on MSNBC, Bill Clinton?s ?fairy tale? rant falsifying Mr. Obama?s record on Iraq ? and you don?t have change. You have the acrimonious 1990s that the Republicans are dying to refight, because that?s the only real tactic they have.

It would be good for both her campaign and the presidential race in general if Mrs. Clinton does find her own voice. We?ll know she has done so when it doesn?t sound so uncannily like Bill Clinton and Mark Penn.
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David Greenberg, in an op-ed at www.washingtonpost.com that declares in its heading that Obama is "The Great White Hope":

Obama doesn't threaten or discomfort whites. He doesn't strike them as wronged or impatient, or as the spokesman of a long-subjugated minority group or even as someone particularly culturally different from themselves. As much Kansan as Kenyan, Obama does not descend from families who suffered American slavery or Jim Crow. His family tree has fewer slaves than slaveholders, fewer chains than Cheneys.

This background may be what some people (mainly blacks) have meant when they asked the regrettable question of whether Obama is "black enough" to earn their votes. But Obama has always been black enough for his elite white enthusiasts, who would never presume to judge an African American's racial authenticity -- indeed, are all too happy to have such a question be kept, by prevailing norms, off limits to them.

Some pundits scratched their heads when Obama was trailing Clinton among black voters. (He's now pulled even or ahead.) But it made perfect sense. Clinton had a track record of working for African Americans' interests. Obama was not just skirting controversies such as the "Jena Six" -- the black Louisiana teenagers punished disproportionately last year for their role in a racial fracas -- but was aiming his appeals squarely at the white Iowans who he knew could make him the front-runner.
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Megdan Daum, in her column at www.latimes.com:

What we want from Clinton is the impossible. We want her to pursue the nomination without looking like a pursuer.

We want, on some level, for her to win the White House according to the dating guide "The Rules" -- acting aloof to the point of indifference. We might even want her to borrow a page from "Bridget Jones' Diary," in which the heroine resolves not to "sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend."

As counterintuitive as it sounds, we want Clinton to assure us that she has plenty of other fish to fry if things don't go her way.

The problem is, political campaigns aren't won by following "The Rules." That's why we may be further from electing a female president than we'd care to admit.
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Michael Kinsley, in a column at www.washingtonpost.com:

Libertarians get patronized a lot. Chipmunky and earnest, always pursuing logical consistency down wacky paths, they pose no real threat to the established order. But the modest success of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas in the presidential campaign entitles them to some answers to the questions they raise. They say: People should be free to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn't hurt other people. If you agree, how do you justify (let's pick just two): 1) laws that forbid private behavior, such as recreational drugs; 2) government programs that redistribute one person's money to someone else?

The libertarian perspective is useful, and undervalued. Why does the government pay farmers not to grow food? Why are medications for fatal diseases sometimes held off the market in case they aren't safe? (Compared to death?) Legislators and regulators should ask themselves far more often than they do whether some government activity or other expands freedom or contracts it.
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Gail Collins' column at www.nytimes.com:

It?s quite an assortment of Republican options. What bothers voters about Romney, as it turns out, is not his Mormonism but his inherent Mitt-ness. Fred Thompson is the Republican establishment dream candidate. (Social conservative, instinctive rich guy and he?s been a lobbyist, so he gets it.) Unfortunately, he reminds most other people of Mr. Potter, the banker in ?It?s a Wonderful Life.?

Rudy?s actual problem is not that he failed to campaign enough in Iowa and New Hampshire, but that he showed up just often enough for the voters to get a sense of what he?s really like when he isn?t heroically covered in dust from a terrorist attack.

Huckabee seems to be a nice guy, but conservatives are afraid he?d break up the old evangelical-plutocrat Republican alliance and most liberals are restrained by their irrational attachment to the theory of evolution.

?I feel like Will Smith in ?I Am Legend? ? I?m the last guy standing that?s not a zombie,? said McCain.
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Lawrence O'Donnell, blogging at www.huffingtonpost.com:

John Edwards is a loser. He has won exactly two elections in his life and lost 31. Only one of his wins and all of his losses were in presidential primaries and caucuses. He remains perfectly positioned to continue to lose with a Kucinich-like consistency. Nothing but egomania keeps Edwards in the race now. All presidential candidates are egomaniacs but some of them have party status worth preserving that forces them to drop out when they hit the wall. A loser like Edwards has no status or dignity to lose. Campaigning and losing is his life. So, he will continue his simple-minded, losing campaign and deny Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton the one-on-one contest they deserve.

If John Edwards stays in the race, he might, in the end, become nothing other than the Southern white man who stood in the way of the black man. And for that, he would deserve a lifetime of liberal condemnation.

Maybe Edwards is already not a factor in the campaign because Edwards voters would split evenly between Senators Obama and Clinton if Edwards dropped out. But we'll never know unless Edwards does the right thing and gets out of the way of the only two candidates who have a chance to get the nomination.

The white male monopoly on the Democratic nomination has finally come to an end. Someone has to tell John Edwards.
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