September 10, 2008

• yup

  Jonah Goldberg is one of my favorite conservative columnists. He reminds me of the classic cheerful conservative. (As Dinesh D'Souza wrote in Letters to a Young Conservative, we conservatives should always be cheerful because we know our ideas are right and they will win out in the end.). Love this most recent piece by him.

  Bold Prediction: We'll look back at September as the month Obama & Co. lost the election. He's self-destructing before our very eyes ("lipstick on a pig"? really?). The guy has never had to run a tough campaign in his life. Sorry, the Democratic primary doesn't count. All he had to was pander to the ultra-liberal base and he faced an opponent with high and already established unfavorable ratings, and even then, he probably would've lost to Hillary if the primary season was a month longer. Obama is like cheap jewelry; he looks great at first glance, but the more you leave him on, you end up with these ugly red marks on your ears.

  McPalin Rattles Team Obama
  The double-team strategy is a winning one.
  By Jonah Goldberg
  
  Barack
  Obama, a famous fan of pickup basketball, must recognize his plight:
  It’s two on one now. John McCain drafted Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the
  star point guard from the Wasilla Warriors, to double-team Obama.

  (McCain’s
  team doesn’t care if no one guards Joe Biden, who seems to spend most
  of his time yelling to the media, “I’m open! I’m open!” But when he
  gets the ball, all he does is talk about what a great player he is and
  dribble in place.)

  So
  after the halftime show of the political conventions, to strain the
  sports metaphor a bit further, it looks as if the change-up in strategy
  has Team Obama rattled and in danger of choking. Polls — the closest
  thing we have to a scoreboard — show that McCain, at least temporarily,
  has taken the lead. On Tuesday, the Real Clear Politics average of
  national polls showed McCain ahead by a razor-thin (and statistically
  meaningless) 2.9 percentage points. The USA Today-Gallup poll had
  McCain leading by a whopping 10 points among likely voters (and four
  points among registered voters), though that’s almost surely an
  overstatement.

  The McCain-Palin convention bounce also all but
  closed the ticket’s gender gap. According to Rasmussen Reports, Obama
  had a 14-point lead among women; now it’s three. According to the
  latest ABC/Washington Post poll, McCain now has a 12-point lead among
  white women.

  Still, there’s a lot of pressure on Sarah
  Barracuda. Called up from the political minors, she could yet wilt
  under the hot lights. But that’s looking less and less likely.

  The
  outrageous attacks on Palin out of the block (She banned books! She
  opposed family planning education! She’s a creationist!) are untrue.
  And the eagerness of the mainstream media to go after her family life
  has backfired as well. For instance, Hanna Rosin wrote sneeringly in
  Slate magazine of Palin’s “wreck of a home life.” Would Slate say that
  Obama, conceived out of wedlock to a teen mom, comes from a “wreck” of
  a family? I somehow doubt it.

  Palin’s more sober critics, mostly on the right, worried that picking
  her would undermine McCain’s claim to “experience.” Almost the exact
  opposite has happened. Thanks to the double-team strategy, Obama has
  found himself in the awkward position of sounding as if he’s running
  against the GOP’s vice presidential nominee. When Obama compared his
  own experience to Palin’s tenure as mayor of Wasilla (leaving out her
  current job as governor), he ran right into the pick the McCain
  campaign had set, leaving McCain a clearer path to victory.

  The
  more Obama has to explain why being a community organizer — or a state
  legislator, or a one-term senator with few accomplishments under his
  belt — is better preparation for the presidency than being a mayor or
  governor, the more he volunteers his own shortcomings when compared
  with McCain.

  Besides, on paper, Obama doesn’t stand up very well against Palin. All
  of the mythic themes of Obama’s political narrative — the ethics
  reformer, the bipartisan, the new kind of politician — look like
  press-release material next to Palin’s accomplishments. Obama voted the
  Democratic Party line more often (97 percent) than McCain voted in
  accord with President Bush (90 percent). In Washington, Obama’s
  supposedly “sweeping” ethics reform — which forces congressmen to eat
  lobbyist-provided meals standing up instead of sitting down — and his
  feckless reforms in Illinois make him look the Bambi to Palin’s
  Godzilla.

  Obama’s idea of ethics reform is to mandate clean sheets in the brothel. Palin’s is to tear it down.
  
  The
  most unsportsmanlike conduct in the days to come will be the search for
  Palin gaffes, of which there undoubtedly will be many. The media will
  call fouls on her that they never call on the other candidates. Over
  the last week, Obama misspoke and referred to his “Muslim faith” on
  ABC’s This Week and told a rally how excited he was to be in
  “New Pennsylvania.” Perhaps that’s one of the 57 states he once claimed
  to campaign in?

  And let’s not forget Biden, whose gaffes are the unavoidable byproduct of his limitless gasbaggery. Biden could shout on Meet the Press,
  “Get these squirrels off of me!” and the collective response would be,
  “There goes Joe again.” But if Palin flubs the name of the deputy
  agriculture minister of Kyrgyzstan, the media will blow their whistles
  saying she’s unprepared for the job.

  Fair or not, that’s how it works in the pros. But so far, it still looks as if the MVP title is hers to lose.

  — Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

  • 1:36 pm
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