Brilliant Politics

In October, 2004, Scott Dadich wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times about the messages inherent in the graphic designs of the campaign bumper stickers of Bush and Kerry. Bush clearly had the better design, one that was consistent with the overriding message of his campaign.

The wavy-ness of the letters in “HILLARY” on the flatbed truck, in the picture below, are an artifact of reducing the picture; the letters were in fact straight and solid. This picture was taken June 2, 2007 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. What is the visual image from each campaign communicating, beyond Hillary having more money?

David’s Halberstam’s last article before his recent death in a car accident discusses George W. Bush’s superficiality with uncommon insight and clarity:

Many of us have always sensed a deep and visceral anti-intellectual streak in the president, that there was a great chip on his shoulder, and that the burden of the fancy schools he attended—Andover and Yale—and even simply being a member of the Bush family were too much for him. It was as if he needed not only to escape but also to put down those of his peers who had been more successful. From that mind-set, I think, came his rather unattractive habit of bestowing nicknames, most of them unflattering, on the people around him, to remind them that he was in charge, that despite their greater achievements they still worked for him.

Halberstam identifies what a leader who had a deep and broad understanding of history – apparently no one in the Bush Administration – would know about the insurmountable obstacles we face in Iraq.

The non-Western world does not think of the West as a citadel of pacifism and generosity, and many people in the U.S. State Department and the different intelligence agencies (and even the military) understand the resentments and suspicions of our intentions that exist in those regions. We are, you might say, fighting the forces of history in Iraq—religious, cultural, social, and inevitably political—created over centuries of conflict and oppressive rule.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole article by a first-class journalist.

-Doc

If the Mrs. follows through on her threat to give Senator Vitter the Bobbitt Treatment, will it affect his potency on the job?

Someone once said:

The only thing I trust less than a Louisiana senator who sleeps with whores is one who doesn’t.

Will his constituents feel the same way?

-Doc

Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools and, more recently, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, writes the editorial column, “The Big Enchilada” in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine (not online yet).

He provides the sleazy details on how corporations are using the No Child Left Behind Act to win private contracts to teach kids in failing schools. Investors are salivating at the financial prospects.

The black and Hispanic kids with whom I’ve worked for forty years in Boston and New York have no reason to suspect that their little destinies, downgraded and diminished for so long by governmental penury, have now become the object of so large a corporate appetite…. Among the various “sanctions” that this highly controversial law [NCLB] imposes upon low-performing schools are two provisions that have opened up these schools to interventions by private corporations on a scale that we have never before seen in the United States.

Will Democrats do anything to chase the vultures away? I’m not holding my breath.

-Doc

Barack Obama raised $32.5 million in campaign donations in the second quarter and now leads in the money race for Democrats. How far can you go on “the audacity of hope” and tons of cash? Not all the way, in my estimation.

Obama has looked tentative and bland so far in the Democratic debates. When a question has called for a prompt display of healthy natural aggression in a response, Obama has tended to escape into abstractions and vague “larger considerations.” When it gets down to crunch time in the primaries, voters watching future debates will see this for what it is: fear. This looks to me like an enduring aspect of his personality, and thus something that cannot be easily changed. I suspect that this personality characteristic will, more than any other factor, ultimately sink his campaign.

-Doc

George W. Bush the World-Saving Hero likes to think of himself as the modern Winston Churchill.  Lynne Olson is author of the recent book, Troublesome Young Men, about how Churchill and other young Tories forced Chamberlain the Appeaser to resign.  She has a different slant on Mr. Bush:

But I think Bush’s hero would be bemused, to say the least, by the president’s wrapping himself in the Churchillian cloak. Indeed, the more you understand the historical record, the more the parallels leap out — but they’re between Bush and Chamberlain, not Bush and Churchill.

-Doc

Here’s my letter to Chris Mattews at Hardball:

Dear Mr. Matthews,

If you are going to support hate speech by having Ann Coulter on the show and allowing her to get away with calling Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Edwards “fags,” among other outrageous comments, then you should be allowing the KKK, skinheads, anti-Semites, and neo-Nazi’s on the show, also.  Then it would be absolutely clear to the audience what your editorial policy is on the issue.

Because right now it is quite confusing as to your criteria for who is allowed to indulge in hate speech on your show. What other guest on your show has been allowed to spew such vicious slander?  Could you provide a list?

Thank you.