Kevin Drum is experiencing a bit of schadenfreude at Hillary Clinton’s expense this morning.

….It turns out that Barack Obama’s hiring of Patti Solis Doyle is even more interesting than I thought at first. Perhaps because I deliberately pulled back from campaign coverage during the final couple of months after Texas and Ohio, I didn’t realize that Solis Doyle had become so estranged from Hillary Clinton after she was fired as Hillary’s campaign manager. Far from her hiring being a conciliatory gesture, the developing conventional wisdom is that Team Obama is sending the same kind of message to Team Clinton that the Tattaglia family sent to the Corleones in The Godfather:

“It’s a slap in the face,” Susie Tompkins Buell, a prominent Clinton backer, said in an interview. “Why would they put somebody that was so clearly ineffective in such a position? It’s a message. We get it.” She said it was a “calculated decision” by the Obama team to “send a message that she [Clinton] is not being considered for the ticket.”

Other Clinton insiders also seethed. “Who can blame Obama for rewarding Patti? He would never be the nominee without her,” one person who has worked for both Clintons and remains close to them said. The sentiment reflected what another person in the immediate Clinton orbit described as “shock” that Obama would send such a strong signal that he is not considering Clinton as his running mate so soon.

Another Hillary supporter puts it even more bluntly: Hiring Solis is the “biggest f*** you I have ever seen in politics.”

And he’s not alone. The whole left side of the blogosphere is buzzing like a beehive over this one.

Larry Johnson today has a new spin on the Obama Birth Certificate rumor: Obama is disqualified by an uncited, unlinked alleged 1952-1986 era Hawaiian state statute requiring both parents to be US citizens for their child to be a US citizen.

An internet friend (Katherine) has pursued this relentlessly. She sent me the following:

According to the state laws in Hawaii that were in effect at the time of Obama’s birth, a child must be born to “TWO” U.S. Citizen parents (this law was in effect from “December 24, 1952 to November 13, 1986,“ which means it applies to Barack’s birth.

But only Barack’s mom was a U.S. Citizen. Papa Obama was a citizen of Kenya. Well, the Hawaiian law stiplulates that:

…If only one parent was a U.S. Citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least FIVE of which had to be after the age of 16.”

It appears that Obama’s mother was only 18 when Obama was born, which means she was shy of the 21 years of age required by the law. In other words, she was not old enough to qualify her son for automatic U.S. Citizenship.

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Don’t blame Rush Limbaugh, and don’t blame rightwing bloggers like me, Obama Fight-the-Smears site and Bob Beckel. Larry Johnson is the source. I’m just reporting interesting or amusing campaign events, and Larry’s new rumor qualifies.

Robert Samuelson does a nice job of identifying the reality behind the campaign facade.

His campaign is itself a contradiction.

On the one hand, he projects himself as the great conciliator. He uses the metaphor of his race to argue that he is uniquely suited to bridge differences between liberals and conservatives, young and old, rich and poor — to craft a new centrist politics. On the other hand, his actual agenda is highly partisan and undermines many of his stated goals. He wants to stimulate economic growth, but his hostility toward trade agreements threatens export-led growth (which is now beginning). He advocates greater energy independence but pretends this can occur without more domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.

All this reflects Obama’s legislative record. From 2005 to 2007, he voted with his party 97 percent of the time, reports the Politico. But Obama’s clever campaign strategy would put him in a bind as president. Championing centrism would disappoint many ardent Democrats. Pleasing them would betray his conciliating image. The fact that he has so far straddled the contradiction may confirm his political skills and the quiet aid received from the media, which helped him by virtually ignoring the blatant contradictions.

And what does the straddle tell us of him? Aside from ambition — hardly unique among presidential candidates — I cannot detect powerful convictions in Obama. He seems merely expedient in peddling his convenient conflicts. He strikes me as a super-successful graduate student: the brightest, quickest, most articulate guy in the seminar. In his career, he has advanced mainly by talking and writing — not doing — and may harbor a delusion common to the well-educated: that he can argue and explain his way around any problem.

The Clinton-Obama nomination battle viewed from a Star Wars perspective.

4:59 video

Barack Obama must be giving very serious consideration to Virginia Senator James Webb for his Vice Presidential running mate.

Talk about balancing the ticket.

Webb is a Southern redneck, and a former Marine Corps officer and genuine (not like John Kerry) war hero who received the Navy Cross, the nation’s second highest award for valor. Webb is also a former Republican who served as Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan.

With Webb, Obama has a chance to match McCain’s war record and stronger defense policy background. He also becomes able to make a strong play for precisely the white, working class, and rural constituencies where he himself is weakest.

Selecting Webb, of course, would be fraught with ironies. It seems highly doubtful that the two men could stand each other, and the combination of their personal images would be just a tad incongruous, kind of like the late Bayard Rustin running for president with John Wayne as his running mate.

Webb has moved startlingly to the left since suddenly launching his electoral political career by running over the broken body of Republican George Allen into a Senate seat for Virginia. There is reason to wonder if Webb’s apparent ideological conversion is the result of a third marriage to a youthful wife of Asian background whose political philosophy is now in ascendance in the Webb household or whether Webb has been being cynical and insincere in pursuit of still higher office.

Webb’s Born Fighting, a history of the Scots Irish published in 2005 just as he was commencing his political career, contained enough political asides to read like a version of Mein Kampf written by Pat Buchanan.

Though he ran for the Senate as anti-war liberal, the Webb who speaks in Born Fighting is populist, nativist, and protectionist. In essence, that Webb is every bit as much an ethnically aggrieved and partisan member of some hypothetical Trinity Evangelical Church of Hillbilly Snake-Handling as the loudest and noisiest whitey-denouncing, racist-US-Government-accusing member of Barack Obama’s Trinity Evangelical Church of Black Nationalist Liberation Theology in Chicago.

If Obama goes with Webb, it will be amusing to watch, at the very least.

I mention all this, because I was noticing this morning that efforts are afoot on the political left to scuttle such a mesalliance.

David Mark, at the Politico, is waving the bloody shirt with a vigor not seen in American national politics since the time of James G. Blaine.

He is joined by Stale’s Timothy Noah, who finds Webb “awful” and clearly much too butch. (The man carries a gun. Shocking!)

McCain supporters better hope these limp-wristed lefties succeed at exposing Webb’s awfulness and arousing the ire of the democrat base. He would make Obama’s ticket a lot stronger.

National Review is calling for him to do so, to “debunk” some rumors I’ve never heard before myself.

Rumor one: Obama was born in Kenya. Rather unlikely, as it would require everyone in his family to lie about this in every interview and discussion with those outside the family since young Obama appeared on the scene. However, if it were true, it would probably raise a major question of “does he qualify as a natural-born citizen”? If Obama were born outside the United States, one could argue that he would not meet the legal definition of natural-born citizen under because U.S. law at the time of his birth required his natural-born parent (his mother) to have resided in the United States for “ten years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16.”

Ann Dunham was 18 when Obama was born – so she wouldn’t have met the requirement of five years after the age of 16.

(Interestingly, apparently there isn’t much paperwork on Obama’s parents’ marriage. Obama: From Promise to Power, page. 27: “Obama later confessed that he never searched for the government documents on the marriage, although Madelyn (Obama’s maternal grandmother) insisted they were legally married.” Also note that Obama’s father apparently was not legally divorced from his first wife back in Kenya at the time, a point of contention that ultimately led to their separation.)

Rumor Two: Obama’s middle name is not “Hussein” but “Muhammad.” …

Rumor Three: His mother did not want to name him after his father, and his birth certificate says “Barry.” Perhaps the most plausible of the rumors, as Obama was known by that name through much of his childhood and young adulthood. If true, this would spur a new round of “When Barry Became Barack” stories – a minor headache for the campaign, but hardly a major scandal.

Three could be true, I suppose, but I doubt it would be all that damaging if proven.

Two does not seem very likely.

And, as for One, my own understanding is that the US law is currently based on both jus sanguinis and jus soli. At the present time, if you’re born in the United States, you are automatically a citizen, and any child of a US citizen is a citizen. But the NR author may be correct: back in 1961, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 would have been the ruling law and it might have contained some residency provision. I’m still looking for a functioning on-line copy of the text. Maybe I’m having problems getting one site to load because so many democrats are also trying to read it.

Peter Schweizer thinks Barack Obama running for president as a victim is the ultimate and supreme expression of the left’s culture of complaint.

We now are down to two presidential candidates. One went to the Ivy League and Harvard Law School as a young man. The other spent years of his youth in a Vietnam Prisoner of War camp and suffered lifelong injuries. Guess which one whines more about his hardships?

Jimmy Carter’s Sweater: All Ready For New User

NBC:

Williams: Is it going to be tough to run with an incumbent party for the White House, given this economic backdrop?

McCain: I– I think it’s– it’s tough. But I think the American didn’t, people didn’t get to know me yesterday. They know me. They know that I have fought for restraining spending, which Senator Obama has been a big part of, with earmarking (UNINTEL) projects. They know that I have been a strong fiscal conservative, and they know I understand the challenges that they face.

They need a little break from– from their gasoline taxes, and they — and they know that — we’ve got to get spending under control. And we’ve got to become independent of foreign oil. Sen. Obama says that I’m running for a Bush’s third terms. It seems to me he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s second. (LAUGHTER)

Obama defeated Hillary by out-spending her, which he was able to do by raising staggering and stupendous mountains of money. How did he do that?

Kyle-Anne Shiver explains that Obama raised his cash using the organizing techniques of leftist Saul Alinsky with a little help from FaceBook.

During this campaign season, Barack Obama has raised such unprecedented mountains of cash that he has broken every record in the annals of political fundraising. It’s enough to make him appear a veritable money wizard. If his own “high-flying words” are being “deployed in the service of cynical aims,” his contributors don’t seem aware of it, and the cash keeps rolling in. …

But what exactly is in it for them? What is Obama selling to his contributors that causes them to open their wallets and whip out those Visa cards over and over again?

Obama has appropriated one of the most successful ad campaigns in the history of American advertising and revived it for a voting bloc that has probably never heard of it. The old Prudential tagline from the 1950s and 60s, “Own a piece of the rock,” has become “Own a piece of the Movement,” or sometimes “Own a piece of this campaign.”

This sort of clever manipulation was at the heart of Alinsky-style “community organizing” in the interest of revolutionary change. He taught, through his books and seminars for radical acolytes, how to convince the common folks that the organizer was merely their tool, willingly offering his own time and service so that they could succeed in throwing off the yoke of their masters. This, Alinsky taught, would ingratiate the organizer with the ones he needed to organize.

Alinsky showed how Marxism would take over America, not through violence, but by organizing the power of the vote. Power came from two sources in American society, Alinsky believed: Money and people. If one lacks money, one uses people. Different means, same end. In fact, it was Alinsky himself who advised ‘60s radicals to eschew violence for law degrees and politics. Writing Rules for Radicals a year after the intense riots that accompanied the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Alinsky advised patience, persistence, and working within the system:

Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. — Rules for Radicals, p. xix

The last 40 years have been merely the prelude, it would seem, to Obama’s candidacy. He’s the man of whom Alinsky and his Marxist acolytes dreamed.

The leftist network within the mainstream media and the various blogs of the 527s has blared a constant message for the past eight years, bashing Bush, Bush’s war, Bush’s economy, Bush’s failures to the people, all to set the stage for the political savior, who has now emerged. The people indeed seem ready for the revolutionary “change” that Alinsky foretold.

If anyone wonders why college campuses are agog with Barack Obama, why the youth are falling all over themselves in their rush to join the movement, one need look no further than to the guru of Facebook, Chris Hughes. Hughes became a full-time member of the campaign early on, and his intimate knowledge of the social network he co-invented has helped Obama accumulate not only all that cash, but more than a million “friends” as well.

Want to get tens of thousands of people to show up at an Obama rally? Go to MyBarackObama.com and tell all your “friends” about it. What may look like magic is just an updated version of: “I’m going. Are you? Everyone who’s anyone will be there.”

Alinsky himself pioneered a non-tech form of this type of manipulation, urging his organizers to use social self-interest as a way to bolster attendance at meetings. But while the Alinsky method involved corralling the most popular community members as leverage, Facebook allows “friends” to connect with “new friends” with the touch of a button, without even having to get out of bed.

For those under 30, Facebook is the high-tech version of the burger joint and the cruising strip of earlier decades, with seemingly limitless possibilities for connecting with other like-minded folks. Using this social network for political power is an Obama first. While Howard Dean used the power of the blogs to temporarily boost his candidacy in 2004, Hughes has created a firestorm of campus support for Obama with a social network that elevates the trivial and encourages the many small contributions that add up to record-breaking numbers.

It’s all in the network; no wizardry here. Just lever-pulling.

Facebook is designed around the shallow and social. Networkers are not “commentators,” as they would be on a blog; they are “friends.” Friends do not need to agree on ideas; they just need to like the same kind of music. Friends do no need to agree on ways to improve society; they just need to like a candidate’s cadence, his body, or his clothes.

As each day of this campaign passes, it becomes more and more like 1968, with the generation gap between young and old emerging as the factor of difference between our candidates. Obama is the Facebook candidate, and he has an awful lot of folks merrily following his yellow brick road. It may lead to the White House, I fear, and Obama may become our very first Wizard in Chief.

Elizabeth Scalia explains, at PJM, how the democrats’ choice of new Obama over old Hillary tends to strike women as a painfully familiar story.

A trophy wife, of course, is the younger, less shopworn, unlined, doe-eyed, and sometimes opportunistic woman some middle-aged men marry upon achieving the measure of worldly success that puts them in more “elite” company. Mixing with a “higher caliber” of people, such men know what they wish to present to the world: energy, a tuned-in trendiness, a certain sleekness of manner, and above all, youth! If they can’t quite project all of that with their comb-overs, their sagging jowls, and their reading glasses, why, a pretty young wife and pretty young children are just the accessories to help the illusion along.

To the curb goes the first wife, who worked his way through college, raised the children, kept the house tidy, blended the families, and played hostess to the bosses and hangers-on; she made him look good. The first wife laughed at the stale jokes, refilled the glasses, endured the late nights alone, and gazed in dewy-eyed worship as he took his bows. She learned to turn a blind eye to his follies — and perhaps his fillies — in the belief that one day it would all pay off. She believed in him and all he stood for; she espoused his cause and made his arguments, only to discover that if she Botoxed herself into mummification and submitted to looking as perpetually surprised as Nancy Pelosi, she was still a middle-aged woman — a little too wise and weary to impress his new, superficial friends, or to be impressed by them, and not terribly interested in a helpmeet/sidekick do-over.

Upon taking control of Congress in 2007, the Democrats found themselves running simpatico with those terminally elite nations who sniffed with disdain at American individualism while being strangled by the tentacles of their own statism. Emboldened by these openly chummy alliances, and sensing a GOP in the mood to slit its own wrists and die, the Democrats looked across the breakfast table at Hillary Clinton in her sensible clothes and felt a little disappointed. There she sat — a hard worker, smart, always willing to do what it took to win. By and large, she’d been a good helper, delivering the pretty little votes, raising the pretty big dollars, entertaining, organizing, laughing, gazing, and lying when she had to, for the good of the family.

But in the dazzling company of the left-elites, she looked … old, and worn. She could be a little shrill, and a terror with a lamp or an ashtray. She was shrewish and nagging — forever reminding everyone that she had sacrificed. If some smiled to see her arrive at a party, the smile was perfunctory; they only listened to her tiresome policy talk until they could murmur an excuse and find a prettier, livelier corner with prettier, livelier companions.

Then they spotted — Obama! He was young, pretty, and had a pleasing voice. He looked good in jeans and had just a touch of edginess about him when he smoked. He seemed born to be looked at. Not much real experience in the hard political world — a few turns around the dance floor with glamorous-seeming men — but he appeared eager to learn, eager to get ahead, and because he stood for almost nothing, he would be easy to lead. He hadn’t accomplished much of note, but trophy wives don’t need thick resumes.

As a trophy wife, Obama would be content to let the Democrats pull out of Iraq; Hillary might actually suggest they stay. Obama would be able to sell the socialized health care Hillary couldn’t pull off. Most importantly, Obama would schmooze and photo-op with the elites for whose approval the Democrats so desperately yearned; Hillary was untrustworthy, there. She might snub Ahmadinejad and, like Bill Clinton before her, pledge to jump into a trench with a rifle to defend Israel. Obama would smile and look good while doing neither.

Putting both to the scales, light Obama rose in the balance; Hillary was judged too heavy. The Democrats threw over the tried and true to go with the trophy wife. The one they could train and show off to the world as “theirs,” who was the very image of everything they hope to project about themselves, regardless of the realities.

When Obama first came on the scene, former CBS news editor Dick Meyer called him a Rorschach test, on whom the electorate could project whatever they wished to see. Some saw — and see — those nebulous words that can mean anything. Hope! Change! Peace! My best self!

Willem-Adolphe Bouguereau, Democrat Who Stabbed Hillary Pursued By the Furies, 1862, Chrysler Museum of Art

Well, here you are. You’ve got a really obscure guy with an exotic and ultra-left background that you’re running for president… because he talks so good. My, oh my. I’m just a Republican myself, and what do I know? But it sure looks like a risky move to me. I mean, what are you democrats going to do if some bad stuff on this virtually unknown guy with no meaningful record of any kind should happen to come out during the course of the months and months and months yet to go until November? Did you really think no one will be looking ?

I find all this kind of surprising. George W. Bush hands you guys an “Elect One President Free” card, and you all go nuts, and do your level best to find some way to blow it. Does your party really have a death wish?

And, btw, tell me democrats, whatever happened to all that “every vote must count” jazz we heard so much about in 2000? Hillary did win the popular vote, you know, by more than 300,000. And your own Rules Committee gave Barack Hussein a bunch of votes from Michigan, a primary in which he never even ran, by pure fiat, voiding the expressed will of the voters of that state. They also halved the votes of Florida (where every dimpled chad, as we all know, is sacred) along with Michigan’s to improve B. Hussein’s margin and to lower Hillary’s count. Was that democratic? So where are David Boies and the rest of the democrat party’s valiant fighters for everybody’s franchise? Is there possibly some inconsistency here?

I don’t mean to pry into your party’s internal operations, but it sure looks to me as if your bosses and backroom operators screwed Hillary over and strong armed her (the wimp!) right out of the race, greasing the skids to benefit Obama.

Watching all this, I feel like the chorus in one of the Greek plays. I feel this overwhelming urge to chant: “You guys are going to so get it in November.And you are so going to deserve it.”

Larry Johnson puts his hand on a stack of bibles, swears he is telling the truth about the “Whitey tape,” and then issues a warning to democrats.

I now appreciate somewhat how Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center, must have felt as he tried to warn Condaleeza Rice and the Bush White House about a brewing terrorist attack in the days leading up to September 11th.

John Cole responds with a link to a mocking YouTube spoof video, which is unfortunately lame. Lots of left-side blogs are linking it and pretending that it is terribly amusing.