Democrats feeling their own heat

Barak Obama is getting testy about the debate Wednesday night in Pennsylvania. He feels the need to explain to people how well he did, in case that fact passed folks by.

I had a commander that used to do that; everytime he screwed up and it was obvious to the whole world, he’d sit us all down and tell us what really happened – the way he saw it.

So Obama spent the day yesterday telling us how the debate really went (from the WSJ Washington Wire);

“I think we set a new record because it took us 45 minutes before we even started talking about” the issues, Obama said at a town-hall forum in Raleigh, N.C., Thursday.

He lamented the fact that Washington encouraged manufactured debates and “gotcha games” to incite attacks. “They like stirring up controversy,” he said of the news media, before getting in a dig at his rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton. “Sen. Clinton looked in her element. She was taking every opportunity,” he said to jeers and laughter.

“That’s her right to kind of twist the knife a little bit,” he said to laughter and applause. “You know, that’s why she’s only airing attacks on the TV in Pennsylvania, like most places.”

He called her tactics “textbook Washington” as he tried to underscore his appeal as the antipolitician. “That’s how our politics has been taught to be played. That’s the lesson she learned” when the Republicans “were doing the same to her back in the 1990s.”

“When you’re running for president, then you’ve got to expect it and you’ve got to kind of let it,” and he turned to brush off his shoulders while shrugging. He said he had tried to show restraint against Clinton, a fellow Democrat, but said he wouldn’t “have as much restraint with the Republicans.”

What will he use against Republicans? The only thing he has is bluster. All I can think we can expect from him is that he restrained himself from sitting in the middle of the stage and cry his eyes out. That’ll bring in the votes.

Bill Clinton told an audience in Pennsylvania that Obama is whining (ABC link);

“When I watched that debate last night, I got kinda tickled,” the former President said at an American Legion Hall event in St. Mary’s, Pennsylvania, “After the [debate], her opponents’, oh, the people working were saying, ‘Oh this is so negative, why are they doing this.’ Well they’ve been beatin’ up on her for 15 months. I didn’t hear her whining when he said she was untruthful in Iowa or called her the senator from Punjab.”

“And, you know, they said some pretty rough things about me, too. But you know, this is a contact sport. If you don’t want to play, keep your uniform off,” Clinton told a loudly cheering crowd.

Howard Dean sees the damage that the battle against the Clintons is doing to the Obama campaign and called for the delegates to declare their intentions now (CNN link);

An increasingly firm Howard Dean told CNN again Thursday that he needs superdelegates to say who they’re for – and “I need them to say who they’re for starting now.”

“We cannot give up two or three months of active campaigning and healing time,” the Democratic National Committee Chairman told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “We’ve got to know who our nominee is.”

Peggy Noonan writes that the press corps already ignores much of what Hillary says these days;

Mrs. Clinton is transmitting, but people aren’t receiving. She has been branded, tagged. She’s been absorbed, understood and categorized. People have decided what they think, and it’s not good.

[…]

She’ll need more than four years to shake off the impression she made in 2008. And this is how you’ll know she’s making another bid for the presidency. She will wear skirts. Gone will be the pantsuits that made her look like a small blond man with breasts. It’s the new me, I wear skirts! Her first impulse is to think cosmetically. A long and weary life in politics has left her thinking this is the way to think

The Washington Times reports that Obama’s campaign fended off endorsements (Jen at Demure Thoughts wonders why);

Mr. Obama’s campaign yesterday was forced to reject an unsolicited endorsement by the Islamist terror group Hamas as the candidate worked to reassure leery Jewish voters, and his supporters derided Wednesday’s debate as unfair.

David Brooks, in the New York Times, writes that Obama has gone from being a messiah for the Democrats to a plain old politician;

He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics. He claimed falsely that his handwriting wasn’t on a questionnaire about gun control. He claimed that he had never attacked Clinton for her exaggerations about the Tuzla airport, though his campaign was all over it. Obama piously condemned the practice of lifting other candidates’ words out of context, but he has been doing exactly the same thing to John McCain, especially over his 100 years in Iraq comment.

Obama also made a pair of grand and cynical promises that are the sign of someone who is thinking more about campaigning than governing.

The election in November was the Democrats’ to lose and it’s becoming more apparent that they certainly will – unless Republicans voters, angry at their party for not being “conservative enough” hand it to them anyway.

Category: Politics