PostBourgie

hilzoy’’s take:

In general, if you had only Penn’s memos to go by, you’d assume that Clinton was obviously superior to Obama in every way, and that all the campaign really needed to do to win was to display her virtues and his faults while avoiding any obvious pitfalls. Even if that were true, I would think that a good advisor would try to game out possible avenues of attack and prepare for them. But in the case of Clinton it was not true. (Here I don’t mean to say that she was worse than Obama, or had more vulnerabilities; only that she had some.) And that makes Penn’s memos hard to understand. You never serve your bosses well when your advice to them flatters rather than challenging them. And you really don’t serve them well when you collude with them in underestimating their opponents.

T. Coates’ take:

It’s now clear that her campaign was fatally flawed, that Clinton herself failed as an executive in the most basic rudimentary ways. So then, why the lionizing? Why Clinton as the champion of all that’s right with feminism? Why Clinton–specifically–as a vessel for the hopes and ambitions of so many women? The answer lies, not with Clinton herself, but with her tormentors.

Obviously, I’m not a Clintonite, but a certain tribe of white men have always evinced a visceral hatred of her which I can’t fathom. There’s a sexism there, but something more than that, something about the men themselves and their own failings. For someone who’s never been a flaming lefty, Clinton draws an incredible amount of venom. I may not completely understand why, but I suspect somewhere out in our fair country there are millions of white women who know exactly what that sort of hatred is all about.

From that perspective, Clinton is not a symbol of the possible, but of what these women have endured. If you see Clinton as a metaphor, not as an actual candidate, not as breathing, loving, fucking, eating, flawed human, but as the personification of all your strife, it almost doesn’t matter whether she’s a good candidate or not. Think about this notion that the sexism endured by the Clinton campaign is cause for a new woman’s movement. The frame is almost jihadic. The concern isn’t, How do we make sure that next time we pick a better female candidate, it’s How do we use the pain we’ve endured to our ends.

Last month, a federal jury in Ohio ordered the town of Zanesville to pay about $11 million in damages for failing to provide water to each of 67 plaintiff for nearly 47 years. Those people all lived in Coal Run Road, a mostly black neighborhood sits outside the city limits.

Like a lot of people in the neighborhood, Doretta Hale, 74, wept on the day the clean water first gushed through the pipes. “I could wash clothes whenever I wanted,” she said, as she sat on her tiny front porch. “I could go out and water the flowers.”

Ms. Hale and her husband, Rodney, had used an electric pump to bring water from a cistern in the front yard. But the water was fouled with crawfish, snakes and rats. The residue from old coal deposits, meanwhile, sometimes could leave the water as red as blood.

Others put buckets on the roof to collect raindrops, and gathered snow in the winter. Water was so scarce that children learned early that it was bad manners to ask for a drink in a neighbor’s home.

“They might not have any,” said Cindy Hairston, a 47-year-old nurse, “and you didn’t want to embarrass them.”

The town defended itself, of course.

Contending that race had nothing to do with water policy, Mark Landes, a county lawyer, said the real issue was geography.

“There is a reason it’s called city water,” he said. “It is water that is supplied to people who live within the city.”

The hollow, he noted, is about five miles beyond the city limit. And he estimated that perhaps 30 percent of county residents did without city water, “and almost all of them are white.”

…

Reed Colfax, a member of the Washington legal team, Relman and Dane, noted that the jury found evidence of racial discrimination, adding it would be difficult to overlook racism in a case where city water was extended “to the last white house.”

Moreover, he said, the state attorney general, Nancy Rogers, supported the suit and praised the judgment.

Mmmm, mmm, MMMM! Just how I like my discrimination: aged to perfection.

(photo from the NYT.)

The much-anticipated Atlantic article which looks at the Clinton campaign’s collapse from the inside is finally, blessedly up. Joshua Green managed to get his hands on copies of memos from people in Clinton’s staff — he even scanned them onto the Atlantic’s site. It’s worth the wait, folks; I’m only two pages in and some of the detais (like keeping tabs on Monica Lewinsky in Oregon to make sure she and HRC didn’t accidentally cross paths) are absolutely hilarisad.  Were she not Hillary Clinton, her campaign would never  have lasted  past March  — it was that dysfunctional. More…

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” — Pat Buchanan.

I’m of two minds on the New York Times magazine’s article on what Barack Obama’s possible presidency may mean to traditional black political establishment. The CBC and its ilk should have their collective feet held to the flame, and not because so many of their members hedged on Obama and supported Clinton. It’s because of stuff like supporting Bill Jefferson, Ed Towns taking bushels of dough from tobacco companies along with Charlie Rangel, who devotes his free time to probably-legal-but-fishy-smelling self-aggrandizement projects. There are legitimate civil rights heroes among their number, of course, and not everyone nurtued by the “old-school black political paradigm” is Sharpe James or Kwame Kilpatrick. (And I personally just feel that, in the main, they’re insufficiently progressive.) But their way of doing business — no Negro shall seek office without our imprimatur! — stifles the plurality of voices in black political discourse and serves mostly to perpetuate their influence and careers.

But the wariness about Obama? That’s totally understandable. “If anybody tells you they expected this result, they’re not being honest with you,” James Clyburn said in the Times piece. He ain’t lyin’. Obvious well-earned racial neuroses aside, these black politicos were being asked to sign on with a dude whose revolutionary campaign model was cribbed in no small measure from Howard Dean, from cultivating the Netroots to the 50-state strategy — ideas with which few people were sold on even two years ago. Rahm Emmanuel and Chuck Schumer, who helmed the party’s House and Senate campaign committees back in ‘06, wanted Dean’s head for trying to put some deeply red states in play somewhere down the line.

When they heard the stories of how Dean was actually spending the party’s cash, however, it was almost more than they could take. Dean was paying for four organizers in Mississippi, where there wasn’t a single close House race, but he had sent only three new hires to Pennsylvania, which had a governor’s race, a Senate campaign and four competitive House races. Emanuel said he was all for expanding the party’s reach into rural states — roughly half the House seats he was targeting were in states like Texas, Indiana and Kentucky, after all — but he wanted the D.N.C. to focus on individual districts that Democrats could actually win, as opposed to just spreading money around aimlessly. The D.N.C. was spending its money not only in Alaska and Hawaii, but in the U.S. Virgin Islands as well. Democratic insiders began to rail against this wacky and expensive 50-state plan. “He says it’s a long-term strategy,” Paul Begala, the Democratic strategist, said during an appearance on CNN in May. “What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.” …

In separate conversations, Reid and Pelosi each asked Dean — Reid in his quiet way, Pelosi more stridently — to send some money to the two campaign committees. Dean rebuffed them too. But he did promise that the D.N.C. would help with get-out-the vote campaigns. Emanuel and Schumer then began pressing Dean for a specific field plan — that is, a blueprint for how the D.N.C. would spend money on mobilizing voters, and where. The argument finally exploded during a meeting in May among Dean, Emanuel and Schumer in Dean’s third-floor office at the D.N.C. Emanuel told Dean that the 50-state strategy was a waste of money; Dean shot back that winning elections wasn’t only about TV ads. Emanuel wanted to know what Dean was doing to help in California’s 50th district, where voters were about to hold a special election. When Dean said he had organizers on the ground, Emanuel erupted. “Who?” he demanded. “Tell me their names!” Emanuel, who had a vote at the Capitol, stormed out of the meeting, cursing as he walked down the hall.

Obama obviously dramatically improved on Dean’s foundation, but we only know how smart a gambit that was in retrospect. As good and on-message as Obama’s campaign been, Clinton was that disorganized. No one expected that, either. Clyburn, John Lewis, and all those other vacillators/fence-sitters should probably be cut a little slack.

This weekend is really sucking.

Andrew Sullivan big-ups a commenter who suggests a great way for Obama to take the air out of* McCain’s stupid tire gauge gag:

Free advice: The Obama Camp should totally co-opt the GOP’s silly tire guage thing. They should start giving out tire gages with the Obama logo on them. They should thank them for the idea. They should promote it as a wonderful post-partisan effort to reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil. If John McCain’s finally on board, maybe we can get Newt to sign off as well!

*Yeah, I did.

Obama’s recent hedge on offshore drilling was about politics, of course. It’s become an increasingly popular idea among the American public who just want lower gas prices, and McCain was hammering him on it.

But we wanna belabor the point here: drilling offshore really won’t make make gas cheaper, and Elizabeth Kolbert hits the nail on the head:

The Department of Energy estimates that there are eighteen billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in offshore areas of the continental United States that are now closed to drilling. This sounds like a lot, until you consider that oil is a globally traded commodity and that, at current rates of consumption, eighteen billion barrels would satisfy less than seven months of global demand. A D.O.E. report issued last year predicted that it would take two decades for drilling in restricted areas to have a noticeable effect on domestic production, and that, even then, “because oil prices are determined on the international market,” the impact on fuel costs would be “insignificant.” Just a few months ago, McCain himself noted that offshore resources “would take years to develop.” As the oilman turned wind farmer T. Boone Pickens has observed, “This is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of.” …

If the hard truth is that the federal government can’t do much to lower gas prices, the really hard truth is that it shouldn’t try to. With just five per cent of the world’s population, America accounts for twenty-five per cent of its oil use. This disproportionate consumption is one of the main reasons that the United States—until this year, when China overtook it—was the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. (Every barrel of oil burned adds roughly a thousand pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.) No matter how many warnings about the consequences were issued—by NASA, by the United Nations, by Al Gore, by the Pope—Americans seemed unfazed. Even as the Arctic ice cap visibly melted away, they bought bigger and bigger cars and drove them more and more miles. …

The impact of rising fuel prices, by contrast, has been swift and appreciable. According to the latest figures from the Federal Highway Administration, during the first five months of this year Americans drove thirty billion fewer miles than they did during the same period last year. This marks the first time in a generation that vehicle miles in this country have edged downward. All told, undriven trips since the start of 2008 amount to some thirty billion pounds of unreleased CO2. Clearly, the only way to change America’s consumption habits is by making those habits more expensive.

Ironically, this is in from an essay chastising Captain Straight-Talk for his, um, complicated relationship with facts. But Obama, of course, also fancies himself the kind of candidate who speaks unpleasant truths. And like McCain, he’s not above abandoning that platform for the sake of political expediency.

Wow. WTF?