In order to assist in some necessary cozying back up to liberal Jewish voters after his recent endorsement by Hamas, Jeffrey Goldberg did a softball interview with his Obamatude in the Atlantic.

Obama assures Goldberg that some of his best intellectual influences are Jewish and that he thinks Zionism is peachy keen, then he puts his foot in it.

JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?

BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy.

Referring to “infecting” is a nice touch, too.

Somehow I don’t think this interview is going to help him much in Palm Beach County.

August J. Pollak has a very good cartoon commenting on the noticeable partisanship of the MSM’s commentary.

via HuffPo.

Susan Estrich reads some of the handwriting on the democrat party’s wall, then tries to be optimistic anyway.

It is a thought that sends shivers down the backs of Democrats, a name that brings to mind memories of an election lost that might have been won, against a war hero once referred to in headlines as a “wimp” who won not so much by his own strengths but because of the skill of his operatives in painting his lesser-known opponent as an out of touch “liberal” who refused to salute the flag or admit his mistakes, not to mention his supposedly unpatriotic wife.

Could Obama be another Dukakis?

It isn’t just die-hard Clinton supporters who are pointing out the similarities. Even some Obama backers who believe that the nomination fight is over see the possible parallels, and are determined to avoid them, or at least try.

He tells an audience in Oregon.

0:24 video

Having used his bully pulpit on AM Radio to persuade Republicans to cross over and vote for Hillary in several of the democrat primaries, a strategic political move which he has dubbed “Operation Chaos,” Rush Limbaugh, during his radio program yesterday, paused from mocking the Mainstream media, to hint that he may continue his Operation Chaos strategy in the general election, advising Republicans to crossover again to vote for John McCain.

Darryl Fears, in a Washington Post blog, quotes Toni Morrison, in a recent Time magazine interview, distancing herself from the Clintons by asserting that people who read her New Yorker description of Bill Clinton as “the first black president” misunderstood her.

People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.

It’s true that Morrison’s “first black president” comment was occasioned by the necessity for leftists like herself to defend William Jefferson Clinton in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky sex-and-perjury scandal, and Morrison did indeed attempt to depict Mr. Clinton as being railroaded (and, in her own hypertrophied rhetoric, “lynched” and “crucified,” just like a poor black man), but the heart of her comparison, the section quoted time and time again by a nation, half chuckling in agreement, half shaking its head in embarrassed chagrin at the use of these racial stereotypes by a famous black novelist, was:

White skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.

And, though she didn’t actually write it down, every New Yorker reader read between-the-lines the additionally silently-implied comparison: “sexually promiscuous, predacious, and incapable of self-restraint, can’t keep it in his pants.”

We misunderstood her? I don’t think so.

Everybody knew that Hillary would win in Pennsylvania, and when she did, the media yawned and declared the result was long predicted. Obama winning in North Carolina, a major African American population state, with 91% of blacks voting his way, was also absolutely predictable, but Barack Obama’s success in North Carolina has been hailed by the MSM for two days now as a decisive event on the scale of Marathon or Waterloo.

The International Herald Tribune describes the avalanche of analysis declaring the race over and urging Hillary to get out of the way..

Very early Wednesday morning, after many voters had already gone to sleep, the conventional wisdom of the elite political pundit class that resides on television shifted hard, and possibly irretrievably, against Senator Hillary Clinton’s continued viability as a presidential candidate.

2:08 “It’s Over” video

Today, open bribes are on the table.

A prompt withdrawal from the contest for the Democratic nomination offers Sen. Hillary Clinton the prospect of major rewards.

One of the most inviting is the near certainty that the Obama campaign would agree to pay back the $11.4 million she has loaned her own bid, along with an estimated $10 million to $15 million in unpaid campaign expenses.

In addition, Democrats, both those who are loyal and those who are opposed to her campaign, say the odds of her winning a top leadership spot in the Senate would improve dramatically if she gracefully conceded now.

But, just look at the upcoming calendar:

MAY 2008
May 13: Nebraska, West Virginia
May 20: Kentucky, Oregon

JUNE 2008
June 3: Montana, South Dakota

Obama is likely to do well in left-coast Oregon, where moonbats nest densely in the forests of Portland and Eugene, but Hillary will trounce him in Kentucky and West Virginia, and she ought to have the edge in all the others.

The Left’s cheer-leading press wants to proclaim it’s over, but the decision is not so simple for serious adult democrat party functionaries who would like to win. Obama has the leftwing base, the media, and the Kennedys on his side, but he remains the most leftwing state legislator in Illinois transported to the US Senate by a fluke, burdened with a variety of radical personal associations, and jeopardized by a ticking time bomb of Chicago machine politics scandal. The “friend” who paid for Obama’s yard is currently on trial for fraud and extortion, and might spill something ripe to save his own skin any day.

Ed Koch says: “the (democrat) party is walking needlessly and unaware into a general election buzzsaw.”

Obama is a smooth article, but he is your typical leftwing elitist snob of Ivy League background, straight out of a one-party democrat urban stronghold, with a closet full of skeletons. He’ll be running against a genuine war hero in a time of national emergency. Obviously no one can predict what will happen in the course of months of intense campaigning, but the chances are very good that as the American people see more of Obama, week after week, all that smooth charm and glib rhetoric may begin to pall. Obama has an excellent chance of pulling off a McGovern-sized debacle for his party.

So those superdelegates will have to think long and hard about electability.

Democrats have a record of insisting upon maximum electoral inclusivity. They want felons to vote. They don’t even want anyone to be inconvenienced or discountenanced by being required to produce valid identification.

If you happen to spoil your ballot, or accidentally vote for the wrong candidate, a national election should go on and on, they argued in 2000, and you should get to do it all over again, because the correct choice of each and every single voter must be recorded.

Suddenly though, we are now listening to a very different tune.

Democrat party voters in Florida and Michigan, we are told, should be completely disenfranchised and excluded from participation in deciding their party’s choice of nominee for the presidency, through no fault or mistake of their own. They didn’t commit any crime or mess up any ballot. It’s just because their state leadership moved the date of their state’s primary forward contrary to the wishes of the DNC.

In 2000, every hanging chad was sacred, and the nation’s political processes could remain paralyzed indefinitely, as week succeeded week, because the vote of every single Floridian had to be definitively counted. In 2008, that same Florida voter can go hang (like a chad). The Left means to crown Obama, and if the voters of Florida and Michigan happen to be in the way, that’s just too bad. A 48 state primary process will be fine.

Matthew Yglesias supplies a fine example of Phariseeism.

Harold Ickes explains to the Politico that the Clinton camp knows where it can get some reinforcements.

The campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has begun urging party officials and news organizations to include the disputed Florida and Michigan delegations when figuring the number of delegates needed to win the nomination.

That unorthodox approach could put her in striking distance of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) over the next month.

Harold Ickes, Clinton’s chief delegate strategist, said in a telephone interview that the senator is likely to finish the primary and caucus season on June 3 “substantially less than 100 delegates behind” Obama’s total if those two states are included.

“We don’t believe that this party is going to go forward into a presidential race without seating both Florida and Michigan,” Ickes said.

But the Democratic National Committee had declared those delegates should not be counted as punishments to the states for moving their contests so soon in the process.

So Clinton’s argument depends on the actions of the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee when it meets May 31 to consider pro-Clinton challenges that would seat those delegations.

Clinton’s new magic number to clinch the nomination is 2,209 delegates, compared to the 2,025 that would be needed without Florida and Michigan.

“The Obama people keep talking about 2,025, which implies they don’t intend to seat Florida and Michigan,” Ickes said. “We think that’s a mistake on the part of the party – it’s foolish.”

Maureen Dowd is shocked at what a cynical politician that once sweet young Hillary has become. How dare she stand in the Left’s way?

heaven help the Democrats as they try to shake off Hillary. On top of her inane vows to obliterate Iran, OPEC and the summer gas tax, she plans “a nuclear option” during her Shermanesque march to Denver. Tom Edsall reported on The Huffington Post that the Hillaryites will try, at a May 31 meeting of the Democratic Rules and Bylaws Committee, to renege on their word and get the Michigan and Florida delegations seated. Addressing supporters here, she urged the counting of the Florida and Michigan votes, noting “it would be a little strange to have a nominee chosen by 48 states.”

“It’s full speed onto the White House,” she said. …

It’s hard to believe that this Hillary is the same Wellesley girl who said she yearned for a more “ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.” What would that young Hillary — who volunteered on Gene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign; who cried the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; who referred to some of her “smorgasbord of personalities” in a 1967 letter to a friend as an “alienated academic,” and an “involved pseudo-hippie”; who once returned a bottle of perfume after feeling guilty about the poverty around her — think of this shape-shifting, cynical Hillary?

She’s so at odds with who she used to be, even in the Senate, that if she were to get elected, who would voters be electing?

Obama is like her idealistic, somewhat naïve self before the world launched 1,000 attacks against her, turning her into the hard-bitten, driven politician who has launched 1,000 attacks against Obama.

As she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the butterfly, it’s as though she’s crushing the remnants of her own girlish innocence.

Howie Carr identifies the message of the hour you’ll soon be reading in the MSM.

These next few days are going to be a terrible time for Hillary Clinton. The title of our next episode is, “Get Out Already, Hillary!” It becomes ever clearer just how much the mainstream media is in the satchel for Barack Obama. It’s not just Chris Matthews who gets a tingle up his leg when he hears Barack. They all swoon.

And now they are going to demand that Hillary quit. The din will be incessant. They want to get down to what they consider the real Lord’s work, bashing John McCain. The trust-funded Ivy Leaguers of the press corps want to make the Rev. John Hagee the same household word that Jeremiah Wright has become.

The Clintons know this. Why do you think Paul Begala sounded so bitter on CNN last night?

“We cannot win with eggheads and African-Americans,” he said. “That’s the Dukakis coalition.”

Time will tell if the democrat party’s Rube Goldberg Superdelegate system is really capable of functioning as a safety mechanism to prevent that party’s radical activist base from selecting yet another George McGovern-style leftwing candidate to lead them to electoral disaster.

Despite Obama’s victory in North Carolina (based on a little-reported 91% of the black vote), it is too soon to count Hillary out. Yesterday’s news of the Clinton Campaign identifying the elimination of OPEC as a policy goal constitutes the single best strategic insight of the 2008 campaign so far.

Obama has the media, the Kennedys, and the activist nutroots on his side, but the Clintons still have a loyalist group representing a strong percentage of their party’s most proficient professionals.

——————————————-
BREAKING NEWS

The Clinton Campaign canceled public appearances today, and is reportedly going into private conference with superdelegates to see if there remains any possibility of victory.

Rick Moran identifies the key factor behind Obama’s advantage:

Clinton’s major problem showed in Pennsylvania and especially in Indiana; she is being outspent by Obama everywhere. Turnout in rural areas was not quite what the Clinton camp was banking on while Obama’s voters showed up in record numbers. It could be that her campaign is now suffering a bottleneck in funds which is beginning to tell at the ballot box. And with hope for victory becoming ever fainter, there is a good chance that her ability to raise money in the amounts that would enable her to compete effectively with Obama may be at an end.

She can’t keep being outspent 3 or 4 to 1 in every state and get the blow out victories she absolutely needs to close the delegate gap with Obama. Instead, that gap widened last night to where it is now, almost 150 delegates and climbing, thanks to Obama’s continued success in wooing Superdelegates.

Is this the end of the line for Hillary Clinton? The consensus among the talking heads on cable appears to be coalescing around the idea that she should wind her campaign down and get out of Obama’s way.

——————————————-
THEY Begin To Decide

Noemie Emery, in the Weekly Standard, relishes the ironies of this year’s democrat party nomination battle.

‘Strange new respect’ is the term coined by Tom Bethell, an unhappy conservative, to describe the press adulation given those who drift leftward, those who grow “mature,” “wise,” and “thoughtful” as they cause apoplexy in right-wingers, and leave their old allies behind. But no new respect has been quite so peculiar as that given by some on the right to Hillary Clinton–since 1992 their ultimate nightmare–whose possible triumph in this year’s election has been the source of their most intense fear. Lately, however, a strange thing has happened: A tactical hope to see her campaign flourish–to keep the brawl going and knock dents in Obama–has changed to, at least in some cases, a grudging respect for the lady herself. …

..she began to rouse outrage in parts of what once was her base. It is a truism that liberals think people are formed by exterior forces around them and are helpless before them, while conservatives think individuals make their own destiny. Liberals love victims and want them to stay helpless, so they can help them, with government programs; while conservatives love those who refuse to be victims, and get up off the canvas and fight. Hillary may still be a nanny-state type in some of her policies, but in her own life she seems more and more of a Social Darwinian, refusing to lose, and insisting on shaping her destiny. If the fittest survive, she intends to be one of them. This takes her part of the way towards a private conversion. She is acting like one of our own.

If this weren’t enough to make right-wing hearts flutter, Hillary has another brand-new advantage: She is hated on all the right fronts. The snots and the snark-mongers now all despise her, along with the trendies, the glitzies; the food, drama, and lifestyle critics, the beautiful people (and those who would join them), the Style sections of all the big papers; the slick magazines; the above-it-all pundits, who have looked down for years on the Republicans and on the poor fools who elect them, and now sneer even harder at her. The New York Times is having hysterics about her. At the New Republic, Jonathan Chait (who inspired the word “Chaitred” for his pioneer work on Bush hatred) has transferred his loathing of the 43rd president intact and still shining to her. “She should now go gentle into the political night,” he advised in January. “Go Already!” he repeated in March, when she had failed to act on his suggestion. “No Really, You Should Go,” he said in April after she won Pennsylvania, which made her even less likely to take his advice. “Now that loathing seems a lot less irrational,” he wrote of the right wing’s prior distaste for both the Clintons. “We just really wish they’d go away.”

And what caused this display of intense irritation? She’s running a right-wing campaign. She’s running the classic Republican race against her opponent, running on toughness and use-of-force issues, the campaign that the elder George Bush ran against Michael Dukakis, that the younger George Bush waged in 2000 and then again against John Kerry, and that Ronald Reagan–“The Bear in the Forest”–ran against Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale. And she’s doing it with much the same symbols.

“Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11,” the New York Times has been whining. “A Clinton television ad, torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook, evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war, and 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden . . . declaring in an interview with ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president,” she would wipe the aggressor off the face of the earth. “Clinton is saying almost exactly the same things about Obama that McCain is,” Chait lamented: “He’s inexperienced, lacking in substance,” unprepared to stand up to the world. She has said her opponent is ill-prepared to answer the phone, should it ring in the White House at three in the morning. Her ads are like the ones McCain would be running in her place, and they’ll doubtless show up in McCain’s ads should Obama defeat her. She has said that while she and McCain are both prepared to be president, Obama is not. They act, he makes speeches. They take heat, while he tends to wilt or to faint in the kitchen. He may even throw like a girl.

And better–or worse–she is becoming a social conservative, a feminist form of George Bush. Against an opponent who shops for arugula, hangs out with ex-Weathermen, and says rural residents cling to guns and to God in unenlightened despair at their circumstances, she has rushed to the defense of religion and firearms, while knocking back shots of Crown Royal and beer. Her harsh, football-playing Republican father (the villain of the piece, against whom she rebelled in earlier takes on her story) has become a role model, a working class hero, whose name she evokes with great reverence. Any day now, she’ll start talking Texan, and cutting the brush out in Chappaqua or at her posh mansion on Embassy Row.

In the right-wing conspiracy, this adaptation has not gone unobserved. “Hillary has shown a Nixonian resilience and she’s morphing into Scoop Jackson,” runs one post on National Review’s blog, The Corner:

She’s entering the culture war as a general. All of this has made her a far more formidable general election candidate. She’s fighting the left and she’s capturing the center. She’s denounced MoveOn.org. She’s become the Lieberman of the Democratic Party. The left hates her and treats her like Lieberman. . . . Obama is distancing himself from Wright and Hillary is getting in touch with O’Reilly. The culture war has come to the Democratic Party.

She might run to the right of McCain, if she makes it to the general election, and get the votes of rebellious conservatives. Or she, Lieberman, and McCain could form a pro-war coalition, with all of them running to pick up the phone when it rings in the small hours. The New York Times and the rest of the left would go crazy. Respect can’t get stranger than that.

And she’s right.

From a conservative perspective, it is definitely possible to argue that Hillary winning would be the best thing.

The responsibility for a new spate of liberal programs and entitlements (and their untoward consequences) would belong to the democrats, as would adult responsibility for American foreign policy. If we need to bomb Iran, the radical left and the media will be tearing away at their own Party.

Hillary additionally could very possibly be capable of assembling a more competent and responsible cabinet team than John McCain. Bill’s appointment of Richard Rubin as Treasury Secretary, and continuation of Greenspan’s tenure at the Federal Reserve, demonstrated a pragmatic commitment to a good economy.

If McCain wins, liberal Rockefeller-style Republicanism will be back in business, and any real conservative presidential candidate will face the kind of entrenched internal Party opposition that Barry Goldwater did. On the whole, the prospect of trying a come-back with a better Republican candidate four years down the road has some real advantages.

Andrew Sullivan’s brain seems to have turned still more completely into mush, as he quotes approvingly this message from a younger reader on the Left.

Your old farts really do miss the point completely, don’t they? These younger people were convinced that political involvement was useless because the system was so broken. They came of age anywhere from the second Clinton term (Lewinsky) through the disaster of the Bush years. They have no reason to believe that politics can work, or that it is possible to effect any large scale change, so they work locally or just opt out.

This is what Obama has tapped into. The reason all those thousands of young Dems registered for the first time and voted in a primary was because he made them believe honorable politics was possible. And if someone like Obama gets chewed up by the system because the forces arrayed against him are too strong — just look at the sworn enemies who are teaming up to bring him down, united by nothing more than a vested interest in the status quo — then they will conclude that the system is as broken as they thought it was.

The mistake is reading this as an Obama personality cult, in which case “grow up” would be appropriate. But the Obamaniacs I meet are nothing like that…

they don’t sing his praises, they sing their own. They are intoxicated by the idea of a politics where things they thought were not possible become possible, and people talk to each other like adults. They don’t think he’s going to fix things, they think they are.

What the old farts might want to consider is that these young people who have no particular vested interest in the current system might be seeing the rot much more clearly than the fogeys who have been entangled in it for decades. And the mature folk might want to accept that the burden of proof is on them to show why such a viscerally disgusting political game is worth playing.

Opting out of that is not immaturity, it’s intelligence.

Let’s see. These kiddies figured that if they registered to vote and campaigned for a leftist candidate, the Archangel Gabriel would show up and blow his horn, human nature would totally and completely change, the two party system and all opposition to immediate Socialism would vanish, and they would be able to do exactly as they pleased. After all, they deserve nothing less, being finer and better people and more sensitive and intelligent human beings than any other group of people or any generation which has ever lived. And if they don’t get the total and complete political gratification they are entitled to (on the basis of their youth and overall marvelousness) in this their first election, well! that will certainly prove that the American system is fatally broken and irredeemably corrupt, and they should simply opt out.

I certainly agree with the last part, as I don’t think young people so unsophisticated and self-infatuated have much of anything useful to contribute to the American political dialogue anyway.