Running Against Hope

Frank Rich has written a brilliant op-ed piece in New York Times called, "The Audacity of Hopelessness"

This is insightful commentary on both the strategic and rhetorical shortcomings of the Clinton campaign.

Some Highlights:

"Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating."

"As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country."

Meanwhile on the right, the butchers of red meat radio are reminding us that Obama is actually half white...meaning what exactly? On Tuesday Sean Hannity went straight to race baiting with commentary about the black agenda of Obama's pastor. (It's a seemingly conservative agenda of personal responsibility and self reliance.)

I'm looking forward to having the right wing radio talkers expose themselves as ignorant boobs they are. They don't have the skill to negotiate the racial tightrope but they won't be able to keep off the race issue. That's all it's going to take to challenge the broadcast companies who keep putting them on the air.

UPDATE 2.26.08 - SPEAKING OF THE DEVILS

McCain Rebukes Radio Host For Obama Talk

Hey Mister, muzzle your dog.