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Friday, February 29, 2008

More Thoughts on Hill's Ad ...

Posted by: Matt Lewis at 5:00 PM

Napoleon famously said:

As to moral courage, I have rarely met with two o'clock in the morning courage; I mean instantaneous courage.

Apparently, Hillary thinks three o'clock is even scarier than two o'clock in the morning ...

The ad presuposes that if people ask themselves who they would want answering the phone at three o'clock, they will pick Hillary. But I'm not so sure that's true.

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Hillary's Plan to "Mess With Texas" ...

Posted by: Matt Lewis at 4:19 PM

While the Texas primary will account for about two-thirds of the delegates awarded, there are also precinct conventions taking place similtaenously that will award about a third of the Texas deletages:

Obama almost always cleans up at caucuses, so Hillary's team is attempting to find a way to argue that the popular vote is all that matters. As Glenn Smith writes, Hillary's team hopes,

... that if they win the popular vote, they can avoid, at least for one news cycle, news reports that even if they do so they will very likely lose the delegate fight in Texas and fall further behind Obama in the national delegate contest.

This is not speculation. This has been the subject under discussion. While I have not been part of that discussion, plenty of sources last night and this morning confirmed this as the core of the dispute.
It is widely assumed that Obama's organizational advantage will achieve in the caucus portion of the Texas election just what it has achieved in earlier caucuses: a significant victory in delegates. There are 67 delegates at stake in those caucuses. The Clinton campaign would like to delay the reporting of the caucus results, and that is why they have continually "reserved the right to challenge" Texas law and Democratic party procedures.

If Hillary wins Ohio -- and the popular vote in Texas, that might be enough to keep her in the race -- even if she techically loses Texas (due to the caucus). She could then argue to Super Delegates that she -- having won the popular vote in both Ohio and Texas -- is the candidate with momentum. It's a stretch, but this is clearly her plan ...

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Friday, February 29, 2008

The Appeal of "Yuck"

Posted by: Carol Platt Liebau at 3:41 PM

As many people know -- and as many more will find out -- Barack Obama's political views are far left.

But from time to time, he goes out of his way to tack traditionalist on a cultural issue of the day. Most recently, he has announced that his daughters think anything having to do with Britney or Paris is "yuck."

They may really think so -- and I couldn't agree more (see this if you're interested in exploring just how pernicious the Spears/Hilton influence is). But it's noteworthy that Barack offers these kinds of pronouncements. Not only are they pefectly designed to enhance his appeal to (and allay the suspicions of) those who might otherwise be opposed to his lefty policies, it also opens the door for starry-eyed commentators to tout his candidacy as a harbinger of the culture wars' conclusion. And who can disagree, or take offense, at the notion that Paris and Britney aren't optimal role models for his 6- and 9-year-old girls?

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Friday Afternoon Moment of Zen

Posted by: Matt Lewis at 3:34 PM

I would never in a million years have paired Alison Krauss with Robert Plant ... but it works. The entire album is good. I'd recommend picking it up, if you have the means. In the meantime, enjoy this phantasmagorical video version of the Everly Brothers classic ...

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Harry's Secret Raises Questions About New Media

Posted by: Matt Lewis at 1:26 PM

Aside from demonstrating his character and bravery, the Prince Harry story raises some interesting thoughts and questions about the blogosphere and new media. As you have probably read, the Drude Report essentially made it a world-wide story:

British officials had hoped to keep Prince Harry's deployment secret until he had safely returned, but they released video of him serving in Helmand province after the leak. The Australian women's magazine New Idea reported on Harry's deployment in January. The news appeared Wednesday in the U.S. Web site the Drudge Report, and media around the world subsequently reported it

In most ways, the rise of the now ubiquitous "new media" has been a positive development. For example, it has allowed more diversity of ideas, depriving the three big networks and major newspapers of their long-held monopoly.

But the fact that everyone now essentially owns their own printing press and microphone, also makes it much more difficult to keep anything secret. This is often a good thing, but on a rare occasion, there is information that ought to be kept secret due to legitimate national security or public safety concerns. This could be an inchoate military invasion (think D-Day being leaked by a soldier/blogger), or information about a suspect that the police want to keep quiet, before making an arrest. It's one thing for a president to ask a hand-full of networks to keep a story quiet, but how does he ask a million bloggers to do so?

It's not hard to imagine this having gone badly. For example, let's suppose that Prince Harry had randomly been killed yesterday in Afghanistan, in the maelstrom of war. Were this to have happened, some would today be comparing the temerity of the new media to the paparazzi who were involved in the death of Harry's mother ...

This entire event, of course, raises interesting questions, such as: do bloggers have an ethical responsibility to the public to not report on some things? I don't have an answer to that question, but I think it's an interesting debate to have.

Update: This is so thought-provoking that I continue to ponder these questions, myself. I must say there are definitely things that I have not written about, because my writing about it would have done more harm than good. But the problem with having so many blogs and bloggers is that, in the case of a big story that multiple bloggers will know about, you can't count on all of them being ethical. This, of course, creates a situation where bloggers can essentially "cop out" by saying, "If I don't report it, someone else will..."

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Obama's Campaign Manager Getting Cocky

Posted by: Mary Katharine Ham at 12:51 PM

Well, this is a change from Obama's "Remember New Hampshire" line of yesterday.

Today, his campaign manager is addressing their opponent's chances with considerably less grace:

"They said that they would have huge gains on March 4," Plouffe said. "They’re going to fail and fail miserably. "

Really, now? That doesn't sound like the politics of positive thinking. David Plouffe should remember New Hampsire, too, lest the campaign find itself with nothing but a lost opportunity and a pair of britches several sizes too big. As we've seen all year, voters don't take kindly to too much arrogance from the front-runner.

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Red Phone Redux and Daisy Done-to-Death

Posted by: Mary Katharine Ham at 11:58 AM

Here's hoping she wins the primary (ha) and conducts her general election in the mold of Mondale as well. Here's Mondale's red phone ad, created in '84 by Clinton ad guy Roy Spence. Clinton gets credit for using children for tugging extra heartstrings, but I wonder (with good reason, since McCain will levy a similar argument) if these ads just get old and lose their impact.

We've seen a thousand attempts over the years, but nothing quite matches the impact of the "Daisy" ad or the "Bear in the Woods" ad, partly because we've seen a thousand attempts. Most recently, Bush 2004 used "Wolves," which was haunting and well done, but not super, as the wolves looked lanky and dog-like instead of terribly menacing. Then, there was the 2006 "The Stakes," featuring Zawahiri and a ticking clock. More menacing than "Wolves," but we see how much good it did in a midterm election.

I think the message of these commercials is a fair one, even if the imagery and narrations are a mostly emotional appeal. Picking a president is an important decision with weighty consequences, and American voters are susceptible to such emotional appeals. Thus, we have the retooled "Daisy" ad every couple of years.

In this election cycle, American voters are clearly just as susceptible to emotional messaging as ever before, as Obama's message consists of very little more than feelings. The very real danger for Hillary, and the GOP in the general, is that voters only wish to be warm and fuzzy this year instead of warned of danger.

The problem with arguing against a "vacation from history" is of course, the risk that the electorate wants one.

But who am I kidding? Negative advertising always works, right?

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Don't Destroy Scouting; Create an Alternative

Posted by: Michael Medved at 11:52 AM

The Philadelphia City Council has voted to evict the Boy Scouts of America from the headquarters building they’ve occupied for 80 years, punishing them for not allowing openly gay scouts or scout masters. Even though Scouting’s Cradle of Liberty Council has invested millions in constructing, restoring and maintaining their historic building, it’s located on city land and politicians want to enforce their “non-discrimination” policy by terminating a time-honored relationship.

Scouting currently serves 56,000 Philadelphia youngsters—many of them inner city kids with no fathers. Rather than destroying a cherished program because it doesn’t meet their standards, why don’t gay rights activists start a new program that does?

If they launched their own scouting program—call it “Rainbow Scouts”—they could serve even more kids, including some who feel excluded by the Boy Scouts. By choosing to wreck an existing organization, rather than building a constructive alternative, the left exposes its underlying intolerance and negativity.

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Deconstructing the "Judgment" Meme

Posted by: Carol Platt Liebau at 11:42 AM

Below, Mary Katharine has posted Barack Obama's campaign ad featuring General Merrill McPeak extolling Barack's "judgment" in opposing the war in Iraq from the beginning. That, of course, has been the all-purpose response to Clintonian charges of inexperience when it comes to foreign policy.

But if "judgment" in one case is all he's able to offer, it's fair to examine the contours of it. The United States -- and the world in general -- thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction he might be willing to give to other terrorists, and perhaps was even in the process of obtaining nuclear weapons. Why hasn't Barack answered this question: If everything we had feared about Saddam's cache of WMD -- and his willingness to use it -- had been true, would it still have been a mistake to go to war?

Barack has said in the past that he doesn't oppose all wars -- just "dumb wars." So when he claims superior judgment, is he arguing that he somehow knew that Saddam didn't have the weapons that intelligence services throughout the world thought he had, or that it was "dumb" to remove Saddam from power even if our worst case scenarios about his intentions and capabilities had been true? And now that the situation in Iraq is improving, does he still believe that the difficulties would have outweighed the threat had the worst case scenarios been true?

Finally, even if one were to concede that Barack's judgment was correct when it came to the Iraq war, a single correct call hardly establishes an extensive track record for an aspiring Commander-in-Chief. My "judgment" about who's going to win American Idol might turn out to be correct this season, but that doesn't make me Quincy Jones (or even Simon Cowell), does it?

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Subtlety in Advertising

Posted by: Mary Katharine Ham at 11:30 AM

I'm in NYC for the day, where I caught sight of this billboard for the new Fox Business Channel. What is it, pray tell, that the advertisers are communicating that I might have been "missing" thus far in my business news consumption?

I just can't quite get my head around the message.

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Murtha Pork Bash

Posted by: Amanda Carpenter at 11:20 AM

Americans for Prosperity's Ed Frank has a good wrap up with all the fun piggy photos HERE.

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Friday, February 29, 2008

It's 3 am I Must be Lonely ...

Posted by: Matt Lewis at 11:00 AM

Regarding Hillary Clinton's "3 a.m. Phone Call" ad, Jon and I were joking that it would be funny if Bill were the one who answered the phone.

... Or better yet -- Hillary answers -- and then you see her fumbling around looking for Bill (for advice) -- but he's not in the bed ...

Not sure if it's funny or frightening. Maybe SNL will pick this up?

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Obama Responds to Hillary's Phone Ad

Posted by: Mary Katharine Ham at 10:37 AM

By re-releasing this one, "Gulf":

Eh. Combat vet: Check. Criticism of Hillary's Iraq War vote: Check. Lauding of Obama's supreme foreign policy judgment based on that one speech he gave in 2002: Check. But there's no gut feeling like the "Phone" ad.

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Is Michelle the Next Hill?

Posted by: Matt Lewis at 10:24 AM

Good point. Does this mean we can look forward to Michelle! '2016?

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Friday, February 29, 2008

Devil's in the Details

Posted by: Mary Katharine Ham at 9:53 AM

I meant to post this yesterday...You're telling me this photographer couldn't frame a shot so that the horns appeared to be on her head? Amateur.

Reuters is giving Hillary the Bush treatment, here, and it's unfair, but Team Hillary should have known better than to stage this event with a giant devil on her shoulder. As we speak, Obama's likely planning an event at the home of the Central Akron High School Angels.