The Sacramento Bee reveals the fundamental strategy of the Obama campaign: warm, fuzzy emotionalism and no specifics about policy.

It’s obvious that Obama can charm, but is that any reason to promote a State Senator who got into the US Senate by a fluke to the White House? The more I see of him the more convinced I am that he should be selling cars.

On the verge of a hectic few weeks leading to Super Tuesday, the crucial Feb. 5 multistate primary including California’s, Mack wanted to drill home one of the campaign’s key strategies: telling potential voters personal stories of political conversion.

She urged volunteers to hone their own stories of how they came to Obama – something they could compress into 30 seconds on the phone.

“Work on that, refine that, say it in the mirror,” she said. “Get it down.”

She told the volunteers that potential voters would no doubt confront them with policy questions. Mack’s direction: Don’t go there. Refer them to Obama’s Web site, which includes enough material to sate any wonk.

The idea behind the personal narratives is to reclaim “values” politics from the Republican Party, said Marshall Ganz, a one-time labor organizer for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers who developed “Camp Obama” training sessions for volunteers.

When people tell their stories of how they made choices and what motivates them, they communicate their values, Ganz said in an interview.

“Values are not just concepts, they’re feelings,” Ganz said. “That’s what dropped out of Democratic politics sometime in the ’70s or ’80s.”

To convey these values, the Obama campaign claims to be taking grass-roots organizing to a new level, harnessing what they describe as a groundswell of enthusiasm.

Randall Hoven examines John McCain’s 82.3% ACU rating. His conclusion is “not very.”

Senator John McCain’s lifetime rating of 82.3% from the American Conservative Union is often cited as proof that he is conservative. Here is a closer look at that 82.3 rating.

First, a rating of 82.3 is not really that high. It puts Senator McCain in 39th place among senators serving in 2006, the latest year for which the ACU has its ratings posted online. For that most recent year in particular, McCain scored only 65, putting him in 47th place for that year. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE), for example, scored 64 and 75, respectively, in 2006.

Generally, McCain has voted less conservatively in more recent years. His average for 1990-97 was 88, but was only 74 for 1998-2006. …

So where did McCain differ from the ACU? The big areas were taxes, campaign finance reform, the environment and, most recently, immigration. There was also a smattering of support for trial lawyers; federal intervention in health, education, safety or voting issues; internationalism; and some social issues. He was more consistently conservative on spending and defense issues. …

Many of the votes were close. In one third of these votes, a swing of only two senators would have changed the outcome. In over two thirds, a swing of ten senators would have changed the outcome. As someone remarked, McCain is like a baseball player who gets all his hits after two outs and no one on base, and all his outs with men in scoring position. …

McCain’s ACU ratings since 1998 put him on the liberal side among Republicans. The few Republicans consistently more liberal than McCain would be Chafee (formerly R-RI), Collins (R-ME), Snowe (R-ME) and Specter (R-PA). One could expect senators from northeastern states to be more liberal since their constituencies demand it, but McCain represents the fairly conservative state of Arizona. (Arizona’s other senator, Kyl, has a lifetime rating of 96.9, and half the representatives from there have ratings of 94.7 or higher.)

How much more liberal would McCain vote if his constituency put even the slightest pressure on him in that direction?

Seattle Times:

On Tuesday, millions of Florida voters will head for the polls. Being Floridians, many of them will become confused and drive into buildings, canals, cemeteries, other Floridians, etc. But some will actually make it to the polls, where they will cast ballots that will play a crucial role in the presidential election. Or, in the case of Democrats, not.

It turns out that the 2008 Florida Democratic primary doesn’t count. Florida will be sending the same number of delegates to the 2008 Democratic convention as Uzbekistan.

This may seem unfair, but there’s a simple, logical explanation: The whole primary system is insane. Consider the process so far …

First Iowa held “caucuses,” in which Iowans gathered in small groups at night and engaged in some mysterious Iowan ritual that for all we know involves having intimate relations with corn. Right after that, Wyoming had a primary, but it was only for Republicans, because Wyoming Democrats (apparently there are at least two) will hold their primary on March 8.

Most of the candidates ignored Wyoming and focused on the New Hampshire primary, except Rudy Giuliani, who’s following a shrewd strategy, originally developed by the Miami Dolphins, of not entering the race until he has been mathematically eliminated. After New Hampshire came Michigan, where the ballot listed all the Republicans, but only certain Democrats, including Chris Dodd, who had already dropped out of the race, but NOT including Barack Obama or John Edwards.

After Michigan came the Nevada caucuses, in which Hillary Clinton got more votes, but Barack Obama got more delegates. (If you don’t understand how that could happen, then you have never been to a casino.)

Then came the South Carolina Republican primary, which of course was not held on the same day as the South Carolina Democratic primary, which will be Monday. Then comes Florida, in which Republican voters will elect some delegates, although the total will only be half the number Florida was originally supposed to get.

Meanwhile Florida Democrats, as I mentioned, will have the same impact on their party’s nomination as if they fed their ballots to ducks. …

How did we end up with this ridiculous system? We got it through endless petty squabbling, in both parties, over the issue of which states get to go first. That’s right:

When confronted with what should be a minor procedural problem, the leaders of our major political parties can’t even work intelligently with their own allies, let alone their opponents. This is why, no matter who wins in November, I am optimistic about the future of the nation. …

So that’s the situation, Floridians. On Tuesday, it’s your turn to stand up and be counted, unless of course you’re a Democrat. But whatever you are, you should get out there and vote, even if you have no earthly idea what or whom you’re voting for, or why, because that’s what democracy is all about.

Chuck Shiflett, editorializing in the Cartersville (Georgia) Daily Tribune, supplies a perspective on voter turnout you won’t read in the Times.

It was a normal day in America’s newsrooms; then the story broke that Heath Ledger had died. I racked my brain … who the heck was Heath Ledger? I shouldn’t have worried about finding the answer, because for the rest of the afternoon and evening all the important news was swept from the airwaves of CNN, Fox, and MSNBC as we were flooded with wall to wall coverage of yet another celebrity tragedy.

Dave Ramsey and two other prominent financial gurus were scheduled to appear on Larry King for a full 40 minutes to discuss the rapidly worsening financial situation. Sorry, guys … some Hollywood type was diddling around with drugs and took a dirt nap. CNN will have to reschedule you so that we can bring viewers mind numbing ramblings on the life and times of Heath Ledger.

I hate it for the guy. Ledger was in the prime of his life and his movie career was headed higher. However, what should have been a 30-second news piece turned into a media feeding frenzy with every network trying to create a new angle in order to drag the story out. Is this what we’ve come too?

Are Republicans really ready to nominate a 72-year-old U.S. senator who has more in common with Democrat John Edwards than Ronald Reagan? Or have we swallowed his marketing mantra of “straight talk”?

Who cares what Barack Hussein Obama believes in? Oprah endorsed him and that’s enough for millions of Democrats. Shouldn’t we want to understand Hillary Rodham Clinton’s socialist dream for America? Nah, the only thing that matters is that she’s a woman.

I can’t even count how many times a talk show host on our radio station has taken a call from a supporter of Obama or Hillary and then asked the caller to name one policy their candidate espouses. Usually there’s dead silence … and then a rambling answer about how he or she believes their candidate cares about people. …

Every election we hear the media types pontificate about how pitiful voter turnout is. I’ve been guilty of it myself. However I’ve about come to the conclusion we would better off as a nation if we discouraged voting. Do away with motor voter. No more voter registration drives.

It’s easy to see why only property owners were allowed to vote in some colonies in the early days of this land. The powers that be understood that those with a vested interest would pay attention and cast their votes accordingly to protect our capitalist way of life.

As evidenced by the new Donkephant economic stimulus plan, here’s what we have. Today the majority of Americans are like spoiled children with parents who can’t say no. If you’ll stop crying then mommy will let you have one more cookie … OK two more cookies … all right three cookies, but that’s it … maybe. How else do you explain a stimulus plan that gives tax rebates to people who paid no taxes? …

So to all the folks who don’t have a clue … set your Tivo to record plenty of stuff this week to keep you entertained and then stay home on election day so you can catch up on the latest episodes of “American Awful” or “Dancing With The Has Beens.” To those who truly understand the issues we’re facing … I’ll see you at the polls.

The Times’ Gail Collins writes Rudy’s epitaph.

Tuesday’s Florida primary is supposed to be the Giuliani firewall, his explanation for why he kept coming in third or fourth or fifth everywhere else. . . . Many commentators have pointed out — really very unkindly — that the longer Giuliani stayed in Florida, the lower his standing in the state polls. Perhaps it would have been wiser for him to make his stand in a place where people had barely heard of him.

They say Guam is quite lovely this time of year.

“The reality is we are getting support,” said the candidate in answer to the inevitable question. He says “the reality is …” very, very often. Almost as often as he says “very, very.”

Those of us who live in New York found it rather peculiar that Giuliani was a front-runner at all, given his deeply mixed record running the city. Now, the idea that Florida might take him out of the race is somewhat disappointing. There’s still so much about him we haven’t yet had a chance to share with the national electorate. Did we ever mention the time he tried to stop the city elections because he didn’t think that New York could get along without him?

Rudy was thrown off his game by the public’s shift from worrying about terrorism to worrying about the economy, and a dwindling interest in hearing him talk about where he was when the terrorists attacked New York. He’s tried to rebound by vigorously promoting a national catastrophe fund to reduce the cost of home insurance in hurricane-prone Florida. This is not, in general, an idea that fiscal conservatives cotton to. It’s so dicey, in fact, that even Mitt Romney has been hesitant about adopting it as a pander-point.

Giuliani has turned hurricanes into nature’s way of saying Al Qaeda. (“All of us are subject to the impact of natural disasters … and of course acts of terrorism, which I remember living through.”)

Perhaps he can pull it off. Florida is one of those places that makes participating in elections as easy as ordering a drive-thru hamburger. People have been casting their votes for almost two weeks now. Maybe a lot of them voted for Rudy and then were embarrassed to admit it to the pollsters, once they discovered he wasn’t really very popular after all.

Still, his campaign has a definite pall over it, and his many hangers-on have to be wondering whether another pathetic showing here would damage the Rudy brand. Are corporations still going to pay him $100,000 for lecturing about leadership and 9/11 now that they know he’s done it for free on the pool deck at the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando and Paisano’s Gourmet Pizza in Port St. Lucie? (More critically from the minions’ perspective, are they still going to provide, as the speaking contract requires, “first-class travel expenses for up to five people?”)

Are they still going to hire his firm, Giuliani Partners, to do whatever it is Giuliani Partners is supposed to do, now that the glow of hanging out with America’s Mayor has faded? Before the terrorist attack, after all, Rudy Giuliani was just a lame-duck mayor with abysmal approval ratings, a tabloidy personal life and uncertain job prospects. What 9/11 has given, 1/29 could taketh away.

Perhaps that’s why he’s refrained from saying anything unpleasant about any of his competitors in Florida. Mitt Romney and John McCain are torn between trying to go in for the kill and their desire to avoid looking like Barack and Hillary. The best Rudy can do, on the other hand, might be to avoid looking like a future contender on “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

Hat tip to Stephen Frankel.

Andrew Sullivan caught Faye Wattleton in an appearance on Hardball, defending Hillary’s claim to the White House on the basis of foreign precedents:

I think that its entirely consistent with the ascension of other women to the top offices in their country; they come come about it as the result of the president being their spouse or being members of prominent families. So I don’t think that we should be so upset and agitated about Mr. Clinton’s participation – we should continue to focus on the issues that the people want to hear about…these other matters are really side issues.

which prompted a momentary return of something very much like the old Conservative Andrew Sullivan:

Wow. A proud defense of nepotism over feminism. Or rather, as is the Clintons’ wont, a total conflation of feminism with nepotism. I remember similar Clintonian feminists in the 1990s trashing, smearing and sliming women who dared to complain about the sexual harassment and abuse of women that Bill Clinton – with his wife’s full knowledge – engaged in for years. This couple really do corrupt everything they touch.

Last month (12/20), Chris Matthews reacted to the same foreign precedent mentioned by Fay Wattleton:

I always thought the problem with Hillary was, her notion of government was, “I am Evita, I am the one who gives gifts to the little people and then they come and bring me flowers and they worship at me because I am the great Evita.”

1:24 video

Don’t you loathe politicians… all politicians?

This amusing 1:44 video mocks the whole gang of them as one after another invokes the phony baloney mantra of the 2008 primary campaign.

Mother Jones likes John McCain and thinks it’s just awful that conservatives are saying such mean things about him.

Die-hard conservatives despise McCain for multiple reasons. Primarily, they fear the impact his candidacy could have on the Republican Party and the conservative movement. For conservatives, derailing McCain’s candidacy is not about electability, but ideological protection. As conservative writer and activist Robert Tracinski put it this week in an article titled “Why McCain Needs to Be Stopped,” “McCain is a suicidal choice for Republicans, because on every issue other than the war, he stands for capitulation to the left.” And conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt recently said a “GOP vote for McCain is a vote for a shattered base.”

Conservatives also feel that McCain has routinely frustrated their ambitions by taking heretical policy stances. “Almost at every turn on domestic policy,” Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, said in a recent radio interview, “John McCain was not only against us, but leading the charge on the other side.” Just a day earlier Santorum had gone on a different radio show as part of his anti-McCain jihad and attacked the senator on a variety of issues. “He’s not with us on almost all of the core issues,” he said. “He was against the President’s tax cuts. He was bad on immigration. On the environment, he’s absolutely terrible. He buys into the complete left-wing environmentalist movement in this country. He is for bigger government on a whole laundry list of issues.”

“We’d of had a much bigger tax cut if John McCain had voted with us,” said DeLay on Fox. “We’d be drilling in ANWR [Artic National Wildlife Refuge] today” if not for McCain.

And the traitors at the New York Times have endorsed him, too:

Still, there is a choice to be made, and it is an easy one. Senator John McCain of Arizona is the only Republican who promises to end the George Bush style of governing from and on behalf of a small, angry fringe. With a record of working across the aisle to develop sound bipartisan legislation, he would offer a choice to a broader range of Americans than the rest of the Republican field.

When Mother Jones and the Times like him, it ought to be pretty obvious that he does not belong at the top of the Republican ticket.

The St. Petersburg Times reports that, as the GOP contest moves on from open primary states like New Hampshire and South Carolina to more significant states like Florida where Republicans actually decide the winner of the Republican primary, the form of the decisive battle is taking shape.

It’s Mitt Romney vs. John McCain in the final stretch of Florida’s crucial Republican primary.

A new St. Petersburg Times poll shows the former Massachusetts governor and Arizona senator neck and neck among Florida Republicans, while Rudy Giuliani’s Florida-or-bust strategy has been a bust.

Neocon Michael Medved pulled out all the casuistical stops yesterday in a shameless attempt to defend Senator John McCain. Evidently moving over to the conservative side has not cured Michael of the liberal habit of employing highly selective evidence to make a preposterous case.

Meanwhile, Ann Coulter summed up McCain’s candidacy far more accurately and succinctly: “John McCain is Bob Dole minus the charm, conservatism and youth.”

The Wall Street Journal observes today that Barack Obama and his leftwing democrat party supporters are finding out the hard way what those of us on the right already knew about the Clintons.

Obama should be sure to keep an eye on his cat.

One of our favorite Bill Clinton anecdotes involves a confrontation he had with Bob Dole in the Oval Office after the 1996 election. Mr. Dole protested Mr. Clinton’s attack ads claiming the Republican wanted to harm Medicare, but the President merely smiled that Bubba grin and said, “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

We’re reminded of that story listening to Barack Obama protest his treatment by the now ex-President Clinton on behalf of his wanna-be-President wife. “You know the former President, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling,” Mr. Obama told a TV interviewer. “He continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts — whether it’s about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq or our approach to organizing in Las Vegas.”

Now he knows how the rest of us feel.

The Illinois Senator is still a young man, but not so young as to have missed the 1990s. He nonetheless seems to be awakening slowly to what everyone else already knows about the Clintons, which is that they will say and do whatever they “gotta” say or do to win. Listen closely to Mr. Obama, and you can almost hear the echoes of Bob Dole at the end of the 1996 campaign asking, “Where’s the outrage?”

This has been the core of the conservative critique of the Clintons for years. So it is illuminating to hear the same critique coming from Mr. Obama and his supporters now that his candidacy poses a threat to the return of the Clinton dynasty. Even Democrats are now admitting the Clintons don’t tell the truth — at least until Mrs. Clinton wins the nomination.

The Onion has news on the latest campaign development:

After spending two months accompanying his wife, Hillary, on the campaign trail, former president Bill Clinton announced Monday that he is joining the 2008 presidential race, saying he “could no longer resist the urge.”

“My fellow Americans, I am sick and tired of not being president,” said Clinton, introducing his wife at a “Hillary ’08” rally. “For seven agonizing years, I have sat idly by as others experienced the joys of campaigning, debating, and interacting with the people of this great nation, and I simply cannot take it anymore. I have to be president again. I have to.”

He continued, “It is with a great sense of relief that I say to all of you today, ‘Screw it. I’m in.'”

In a show of respect, Clinton then completed his introduction of Hillary Clinton, calling her a “wonderful wife and worthy political adversary,” and warmly shook her hand as she approached the podium. A clearly shocked Mrs. Clinton got halfway through her speech about the nation’s obligation to its children before walking briskly offstage.

Read the whole thing.

I must confess that I had interpreted all the MSM reports that Fred Thompson had no fire in his belly for presidential campaigning, and that he was considering withdrawing last week, and this week, and next week as liberal wishful thinking at its worst.

But it appears that, for once, they were telling the truth.

Fred Thompson clearly was some kind of half-committed, thoroughly disorganized faux candidate, since he washed himself out on the basis of low attendance results from a couple of thoroughly non-determinative open primaries. Fred was like one of those Civil War political-appointee generals who marched up to the front, heard a little gunfire, and then rapidly beat a panicky retreat. His departure from the field can hardly be regarded as a major loss to Conservative cause, judged with respect to either his demonstrated competence or resolution.

It seemed like bad news at the time, but we’ll get over it.