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By Brendan Loy
I actually don't think I'll be watching tonight's (final?) Clinton-Obama debate. But if you'll be watching and you want to comment on it, here's your thread.
UPDATE: You can watch the debate in its entirety here:
By Brendan Loy
Barack Obama isn't the only frontrunner who will be on national TV tonight trying to defend his recently acquired top-dog status against a rival's onslaught. At 9:00 PM EST -- the same time as the Democratic debate on MSNBC -- the #1-ranked Tennessee men's basketball team will face #18 Vanderbilt on the Commodores' home floor. The game will be on ESPN, and Bruce Pearl will be in his orange blazer.
Go Vols & Go Barack!
P.S. I'm looking ahead a bit now, but take a gander at the Big East standings, and then ponder for a moment Thursday night's big game: Notre Dame at Louisville, 7:00 PM on ESPN. Holy cow. Mike Brey's boys playing, maybe, for a Big East regular-season championship? I love it! Oh, and did I mention it's part of an Irish Trojan doubleheader? USC visits Arizona at 9:00 PM Thursday, also on ESPN. Sweet.
By Brendan Loy
John McCain already seems intent on running a more honorable campaign against Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton has. To wit:
Republican John McCain quickly denounced the comments of a radio talk show host who while warming up a campaign crowd referred repeatedly to Barack Hussein Obama and called the Democrat a "hack, Chicago-style" politician. ...
"I apologize for it," McCain told reporters, addressing the issue before they had a chance to ask the Arizona senator about Cunningham's comments.
"I did not know about these remarks but I take responsibility for them. I repudiate them," he said. "My entire campaign I have treated Senator Obama and Senator (Hillary Rodham) Clinton with respect. I will continue to do that throughout this campaign.
McCain called both Democrats "honorable Americans" and said "I want to dissociate myself with any disparaging remarks that may have been said about them."
Asked whether the use of Obama's middle name—the same as former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein—is proper, McCain said: "No, it is not. Any comment that is disparaging of either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama is totally inappropriate."
There have been so many times during Hillary Clinton's campaign -- yesterday's shenanigans being only the latest example, Buffenbarger being another recent one -- when the honorable thing for her to do would have been to come out and quickly make a statement just like the one McCain made. But that's not how Hillary operates. She thinks it makes her a good "fighter" that she never concedes an inch -- that it would somehow be a sign of weakness to repudiate bad behavior by her surrogates and supporters. This attitude was fully on display yesterday, when her new "tough as nails" campaign manager, Maggie Williams, refused to condemn an obvious attempt (by someone) to play the Muslim Card against Obama, instead grotesquely accusing Obama of being the "divisive" one for daring to cry foul against such tactics. Hillary, with all her rhetoric about being a "fighter" who can go toe-to-toe with the "Republican attack machine," seems to think this take-no-prisoners approach is a badge of honor. In fact, it is a badge of shame. She is the very thing she detests (or claims to detest). Thankfully, it appears the American people see right through her, and that's a big part of the reason Hillary Clinton almost certainly will not be our next president.
By CNN
Massive power outage hits Central and South Florida.
UPDATE BY BRENDAN: The outage was apparently caused by a nuclear power plant shutting down -- or possibly vice versa. Quoth the AP:
Florida's largest electric company shut down a nuclear reactor south of Miami for safety reasons Tuesday, causing sporadic power outages covering large portions of the state that could last well into the night. More than 3 million people are affected, the state says.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that the two Florida Power & Light nuclear reactors at its Turkey Point power point 30 miles south of Miami automatically shut down. ...
"We don't know whether the grid disturbance caused the units to shut down or that their shut down caused the grid disturbance," said Kenneth Clark, a spokesman at the NRC regional office in Atlanta. He said the two reactors were automatically shut down and in safe standby.
"There are no safety concerns. The reactors shut down as designed," said Clark in a telephone interview.
Federal officials say there's no indication terrorism is involved. The Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel, Palm Beach Post and St. Petersburg Times have more. UPDATE 2: Lending credence to the "vice versa" theory (i.e., that "the grid disturbance caused the [nuclear] units to shut down" rather than "their shut down caused the grid disturbance"), the Palm Beach Post says "a 'massive equipment failure' just after 1 p.m. at an
FPL substation in Miami-Dade County caused the massive power outages
that affected parts of the state today, an FPL spokesman said." FPL stands for Florida Power & Light.
"There has been a major equipment failure at the FPL transmission substation in South Florida that has caused major transmission imbalances throughout the state," Public Service Commission spokeswoman Bev Demello said today.
Something caused the protective tripping mechanisms of some generating units to activate, which has caused rotating blackouts, she said.
I don't think "FPL transmission substation" and "nuclear power plant" are synonymous, so it appears we have conflicting explanations here. Lending further credence to this interpretation: the Post's website has a separate headline stating, "Nuclear plant affected." Cause and effect are different, so I assume they're saying the plant didn't cause it, but was merely affected by it. Personally, I blame some combination of butterfly ballots, Raul Castro, and Hillary Clinton, not necessarily in that order. P.S. Oh, and Canada. Always Blame Canada.
By Brendan Loy
This may explain the Clintons' emerging Texas-doesn't-count theory.
Tomorrow's Clinton talking points today: the new firewall is Rhode Island! ;)
By Brendan Loy
Two articles out today, one from the Washington Post and one from Politico, really paint a vivid picture of disarray and dismay in Hillaryland, as Senator Clinton's increasingly frustrated top tier of advisors careen madly from storyline to storyline and talking point to talking point, unable to craft a winning message and unwilling to recognize that this is primarily their own (and the candidate's) fault, not Obama's or the media's.
The inability to settle on a strategy or message helps explain why Hillary's last debate performance was so tactically incoherent, and why her public tone since then has been wildly inconsistent. It'll be interesting to see if she can pick a message, and then stay "on" it, in time for tonight's debate. I wouldn't bet on it. Her campaign now bears every indication of being a total train wreck. With each passing day, the "political genius" of Team Clinton is increasingly being exposed as a fraud -- Bill's success was due largely to his own charisma/charm and a healthy serving of dumb luck, IMHO, so when you replace Bill with his charmless wife, and when the other guy's getting all the lucky breaks, there isn't much left to work with.
P.S. Team Clinton's lashing out at the media is a sign of how unfocused they have become in their desperation and frustration. Blaming the media is almost never going to be a winning message if you're a Democrat. It pisses off the media, makes you look like a sore loser, and does nothing to win over voters (since it's Republicans, not Democrats, who instinctively mistrust the MSM).
In any event, if Hillary's political advisers were competent, they would have foreseen Obama's inevitable media advantage and would have come up with a coherent plan to combat it. They didn't, and now they're acting shocked and outraged that the media is behaving the way it always behaves. (The media loves a "change" candidate, something Bill Clinton knew well in 1992. Of course they're going to give more favorable coverage to the exciting, "inspiring" candidate over the wonky "experienced" candidate, particularly when the former has a real flair for public speaking whereas the latter toggles between preachy schoolmarm and screechy monotone. These are "facts on the ground" that Team Clinton obviously should have anticipated and planned for, and their failure to do so is particularly damning given that the ability to "fight" and win pitched political battles is a key component of Hillary's supposed appeal. How is she going to defeat the "Republican attack machine" if she doesn't understand the first thing about how the media works?)
By Brendan Loy
Yesterday, my ten-day-old nerdy post about Michigan's Uncommitted delegates -- in which I asserted that "if the Democratic presidential race goes all the way to the convention, and if Michigan's disputed delegation is ultimately seated, an absolutely crucial question will be the identities and loyalties of the state's 55 'Uncommitted' delegates" -- got a comment from one Abby Dart, the deputy director of Michiganders for Obama. Dart wrote that "we are running an aggressive campaign to elect our slate of Michigan Obama delegates. We aren't going to let the Clinton campaign gain any of our hard fought for uncommitted delegates."
Intrigued, I e-mailed Dart to get more information on this effort. Among other things, I asked whether, to her knowledge, the Clinton campaign is also mounting an organized effort to elect their loyalists as "Uncommitted" delegates -- something they have every legal right to do, voters' intent be damned. Dart answered in the affirmative: "I've heard that the Clinton team in Michigan is organizing as well to try to get our uncommitted [delegates]." But, she added, "now we have the labor unions (of course, critical interest group in Michigan) assisting us and the press understands what is at stake."
Continue reading "Obama's Michigan supporters will fight for "their" Uncommitted delegates" »
By Brendan Loy
Rejecting "entreaties from the Clintons," Chris Dodd, former presidential candidate and senior senator/superdelegate from Connecticut, will endorse Barack Obama at a Cleveland news conference this morning. Dodd is a longtime friend of the Clintons; Bill named him general chairman of the Democratic National Committee back in the mid-90s. Mark Halperin calls it "one of the ten most back-breaking nods Clinton has lost to Obama."
P.S. If Obama were looking for an "attack dog" runningmate, he could do far worse than Dodd, who can growl and bark with the best of 'em. :) Dodd also has experience/gravitas; he's been in the Senate for 28 years, is chairman of the Banking Committee, has been on the Foreign Relations Committee forever, etc. He'd be an unexciting choice, though. I don't see anything about Dodd that would be attractive enough to overcome the two-senators problem, or the Northeastern-liberal problem. Besides, do Democrats really want to risk putting another Democratic senator from Connecticut on the national ticket? :) We all know what happened to the last guy they did that with... heh. (Not a fair comparison, of course; Dodd is as solid of a partisan liberal Democrat as they come. But still.)
All in all, I don't see it happening. If Obama is willing to go with a Northeastern U.S. Senator for the sake of experience/gravitas, I think Biden would be the better choice. The only thing Dodd might have on Biden is that I think he's seen as more of a straight-shooter -- which, admittedly, might be a big deal for the Prophet of Hope and Change. :) But I still think Biden's the pick if Obama wants to solidify his foreign-policy credentials. More likely, though, I suspect we'll be seeing someone like Webb, Sebelius, Schweitzer... or perhaps Bredesen? (But cf., Schweitzer and Bredesen haven't endorsed yet.)
UPDATE: The Boston Globe speculates that Clinton and/or Obama -- more likely Clinton -- may choose a runningmate before the race is over if the battle rages on past March 4. (Hat tip: Reagan's GOP.)
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