Sarah Palin, “Small Town Mayor”
Those who've read my previous commentary on Sarah Palin, notably yesterday's post on the announcement of Palin as McCain's VP pick, know that I think she's a poor choice. While she has many fans and may be possessed of some remarkable political gifts, she's a tough sell as "Ready On Day One" and thus undercuts McCain's best argument against Barack ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on August 30, 2008 08:58
Obama as Jackie Robinson
Adam Serwer laments the fact that Barack and, particularly, Michelle Obama have to humanize themselves to the electorate and fight back against an elitist caricature. [T]he Obamas are still fighting Jackie Robinson Syndrome, the reflexive double standards and often small, sometimes large, but always public humiliations that come from being the first black person to do something. Ezra Klein thinks this "beautifully ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on August 27, 2008 14:07
Obama and McCain Not ‘From’ Anywhere
Peggy Noonan laments "The End of Placeness." OK, quick, close your eyes. Where is Barack Obama from? He's from Young. He's from the town of Smooth in the state of Well Educated. He's from TV. John McCain? He's from Military. He's from Vietnam Township in the Sunbelt state. Chicago? That's where Mr. Obama wound up. Modern but Midwestern: a perfect place to begin what ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on August 16, 2008 07:58
McCain Working for Dollars, Not Votes?
Andrew Malcolm has dissected John McCain's schedule and concluded that he's spending all his time scrounging for money rather than reaching out to voters. Just 3 1/2 months out from the presidential election, McCain's national campaign schedule is being driven by the quest for money, not by the hunt for votes in 50 individual state elections. All right, every campaign says ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 18, 2008 16:10
Presidential Succession Crisis?
Bruce Ackerman has read a novel and heard unsubstantiated rumors and from these concocted a Constitutional crisis which he's convinced the folks at Slate to publish. New Yorker writer Jane Mayer's new book, The Dark Side, opens with a shocker. Apparently sometime in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan issued a "secret executive order" that in the event of the death of ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 15, 2008 18:04
McCain and Obama on Iraq and Afghanistan
William Arkin contends that recent political maneuvering has put Barack Obama and President Bush in almost identical positions vis-à-vis Iraq: The Bush administration's potential Iraq withdrawal plan, floated in The New York Times over the weekend, to draw down brigades further before September of this year and to accelerate withdrawals in 2009, has collided with Barack Obama's own 16-month plan, which ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 15, 2008 14:46
John McCain’s Message
Daniel Strauss sat through a session at the center-left New America Foundation yesterday and came away with an epiphany about John McCain's campaign: "It's what he's saying, not how he says it." Jeremy Rosner observed, A lot of people have noted he's just very incoherently between the right and the center, between offshore drilling and $300 million prizes for new electric ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 10, 2008 08:01
War Powers Consultation Act
Former Secretaries of State James Baker and Warren Christopher take to the op-ed pages of the NYT to call for a new War Powers Act. A bipartisan group that we led, the National War Powers Commission, has unanimously concluded after a year of study that the law purporting to govern the decision to engage in war — the 1973 War Powers ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 8, 2008 07:21
Barack Obama, Natural Born U.S. Citizen
One of the more bizarre controversies that refuses to die this campaign is the subject of Barack Obama's birth certificate and whether in fact he is a "natural born citizen" of the United States and thus eligible to become president pursuant to Article II of the Constitution. First, as A.J. Strata explains in elaborate detail, the electronic copy of Obama's birth ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 6, 2008 18:13
McCain and Obama as Leading Men
As I was sorting through my Sunday Washington Post so that I could throw everything but the Parade and Washington Post Magazine my wife reads into the recycle bin, my attention was grabbed by this photo montage on the front of the Style section: For a second, I thought they had juxtaposed Barack Obama with Malcolm X (the newsprint version is ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 6, 2008 08:53
