Okay, for real, I'm not that tired of futures. I take it back. There are fears of failure here that the delegate math has done nothing to alleviate. Plus, I tend to take my Dad's advice on these matters, and he's calling a brokered convention. He had Allen beating Webb in 2006, though, so...
Still...fears! What happens when the core left decides phased withdrawal is too goddamned slow and boycotts the election? I mean, what happens when I and my class hop off the wagon? [I like to pretend there's a whole crop of us out there...] I don't like war on ghosts -- and an Obama presidency guarantees continued predator strikes on blind targets in Central Asia? Alternately, what happens when suburban whites abandon the era-of-good-feeling and vote their prejudices? Or, what happens when Republicans stop registering as Democrats in order to vote against Hillary Clinton? Sure we have Obama-McCain polls and Clinton-McCain polls, but no one is really, literally out of the race yet. Where is the long arm of the Bradley Effect? Fears!
Or: Hey, how we doing! Thass Chaka and Bob! Thass Philadelphia, bee! How exciting. But typically, the paper covered the scrum surrounding the speech, said "Obama spoke for more than half an hour," and left. Like he was talking about his new living-room set or some shit...
Also, here's Kaus. It is, as the man says, a Category II Kinsley Gaffe, i.e., a true statement.
The only trouble is no one likes being psychoanalyzed, viz.:
I think that when people ascend socioeconomically, they tend to spend less time with their families, and so issues of family become very important to them, and pretty soon everything Ivy-educated people do starts to become a search for a missing family life. People like Senator Obama are clinging to their own ambition in order to compensate for the loss of his father, for instance. It's the same impulse behind all of Paul Simon's work, Juno, so forth. Wes Anderson is the first satirist of what i call "yuppie remorse." [snip]
Now, that's not a quote from anyone, but it should have been. I think BHO's survival has less to do with his ability to thread the rhetorical needle than with the impotence of his opponents. The point of bittergate is that it's not over. It's the first sentence in the doomed-by-his-class narrative. I walked by Geno's the other night, which was blasting right-wing talk radio, and the guy used the word "elitist" seven times in a minute. This is the tip of the oiceberg.
And the point of the video, sadly, is visual: Barack and Chaka and their thug bodyguard, Bob. Not at all reassuring to Overland Park KS or Montgomery County PA or Fairfax VA. O for a radio age...
hasta
--
ds
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