"I have this nagging feeling that this drama unfolding on the airwaves out in the states may be a bigger story than the one 15,000 journalists are covering here in Denver."

Bingo. Go get 'em, Mike. Tell us what you find out.

McCain is certainly hoping that this is the case. But, I think the move amounts to pretty much a head fake designed to get the Obama campaign moving in the wrong direction. Of course, left unchecked, the ad will have negative effects. But that is no cause for overreaction on Obama's part. I think Obama's counter ad does a very good job of striking home the basic irrelevance of the Ayers-boating (you can worry about some schmuck Obama denounces, or you can worry about the economic policies of the candidates); as long as he's putting that ad out there sufficiently (I've seen both several times now) it should be a push.

Thanks, tep -- that needed to be said. And you were much nicer than the sarcastic "You think?!" I was going to use.

Maybe today's thousand-repetition computer simulations are more advanced than my simple Excel spreadsheets, but I continue to believe that anyone who thinks the Democratic candidate has an advantage in the Electoral College is either certifiably crazy or a Republican plant lying in an effort to lull people into complacency. The math this year isn't that much different than the math last time, or the time before, or the time before or, well, pretty much every election since 1972. Republicans are disproportionately strong in parts of the country with disproportionately high Electoral College influence. Assuming the demographic makeup of the country in 2000 and 2004, the Republican candidate can expect to win the Electoral College most of the time if the Democrat fails to exceed 52 percent of the two-party vote.

I was on the treadmill this morning, listening to my Ipod, because the music is terrible and plugging into the television feeds never helps me maintain my momentum.  But I was staring at the TVs, and in between footage of Clinton's speech last night, economic grids and items about the hijacking of a Sudanese airline, there was a map of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, with a thick red dot somewhere between Haiti and Cuba, and several multi-colored lines, indicating potential trajectories of said dot.  

So.  He were are almost three years to the day of Katrina, and on the cusp of the Republican National Convention, a mild PR crisis for the GOP is brewing down in the Southeast.  About the time they ready their responses to the Democratic convention, something else will be sharing--perhaps, depending on intesity of the storm, leading--the news cycle.  

I think Obama needs to ready attack ads that invoke Katrina to be aired during RNC comemrcial time.  I really do--why hasn't Katrina been brought up, anyway?  It's a perfect counter to GOP Foreign Policy hawks, who profess that only their candidates can keep America safe, but didn't Katrina blow that argument right out of the water?  

Furthermore, this storm looks like its headed for Texas.  So, no matter how bad it is, we can be sure that Bush and Co. will be there to clean up FAST this time, less his wealthy Texan investors/cronies lose some rigs out in the Gulf.  But then he would have to explain why Texas is so important to him, while LA, MS and AL were allowed to go by the wayside three years ago.

Go get 'em, Barack.  

There you go Crowley... hop on a plane and go do some actual reporting.  Maybe dig into this Simmons guy in Texas and find some good dirt.  Or go to Ohio and talk to actual swing voters about the ads.  But then you'll have to miss the free cocktail parties and gossiping with the DC press circuit.  And you might then hear Maureen Dowd's gossip about the Clintons third-hand instead of second.  The horror.

"you can worry about some schmuck Obama denounces,"

Except, he didn't.

"Personally, I don’t think Obama’s association with William Ayers says anything about where he wants to take the nation. There’s no reason to infer that Obama sympathizes with the Weathermen’s agenda, and to suggest otherwise is more than a touch overwrought. Then again, given the attempt on his family’s lives, Murtaugh is entitled to being more than a touch overwrought. The Obama/Ayers relationship does, however, say a great deal about how Barack Obama is a conventional thinker and actor who thoroughly and meekly reflects the values of his environment.

In the Wall Street Journal today, Dan Gerstein has a phenomenally obtuse op-ed positing that Obama is “an independent-minded, orthodoxy-challenging, gutsy leader.” The orthodoxy in Obama’s Hyde Park neighborhood was to embrace the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers. Now let’s say there was an aspiring politician in the neighborhood who was a truly "independent-minded" and gutsy leader with proper moral bearings. That guy would have eschewed the opportunity to befriend William Ayers. Famously, the putatively gutsy Obama did no such thing. Barack Obama embraced Ayers with particular gusto.

Closely associating with William Ayers was a moral decision and a wretched one at that. All Obama has left to do in regards to this issue is deny the obvious - that it was indeed a moral decision. For the morality of cozying up to such a figure will strike most people as indefensible."

What Obama can do is not duck this issue -- that would be a disaster.  He's got to get a clear answer out there that says three simple things

1.  He rejects Ayers' attitudes and actions, but those were in any case thirty-five years ago when Obama was a kid;

2.  Ayers has come around to the democratic process, as his work in Chicago and his support for Obama show;

3.  The Republicans are running scared, so they drag up this like they did to Kerry.

I might thsi more seriously if Crowley wasn't the resident bed wetter/chicken little at TNR. I seem to remember him declaring Obama's campaign dead a few times - Rev Dingdong episode, guns and god, etc. This Ayers business isn't going to make a dent. Anyone that would fall this type of trash wasn't going to vote for Obama to begin with.

ironyroad  said

"2.  Ayers has come around to the democratic process, as his work in Chicago and his support for Obama show;"

A very good point. Let's all hope that Obama accepts your advice.

4. hit back with an equally harsh/unfair attack on John McSame to change the topic.  Charles Keating?  Infidelity?

(why do Ds always skip the last one???)

5. Get the researchers going on smearing the sponsors of this ad (preferably personal stuff -- past girlfriends' abortions, affairs, etc.) to scare GOPpers from getting involved in this effort.  Don't be too concerned with accuracy here.

Agreed, prnoonan, no one ever takes into deep consideration the accuracy of the smears until years after the election.

Incidentally, this is how Clinton won in 96, by doing under the radar advertising away from the national media.  How's Obama in that respect?

Irony: re your point number 2, I don't think defending Ayers will help too much, unless Ayers himself decides to depend himself, and I somehow doubt that he would.  But, certainly, the idea of redemption runs strong in both Catholic theology and American politics.  Bush overcame youthful discretions; others can too - that sort of thing.

hey, jake- when you quote someone else's writing it is usually customary to let people know where it comes from.

What tep said.

My friend the 300-pound bladder doctor who's not only a meaty urologist but also a meteorologist says you don't need to know the Weathermen blew to know not to piss into the wind, and likewise Tip O'Neill didn't need GPS to note that all politics is local.

The rats have crawled down the ropes to terra firma, their fleas have hopped off, and now the attack ads are bursting like oozing buboes in every swing-state hamlet.

irony: maybe stick to American lit and leave the political tactics to the pros.

Your advice, with all due respect, is terrible.

Ayers poses Obama a real fucking problem. www.youtube.com/watch

How does he deal with it? Not as you say.

If the Republicans are smart they will hammer this connection in a ob./co. Sean Hannity like way.

My amatuer thought: Downplay his connections with Ayers, but say he was wrong to have any connection with Ayers at all, that he had not thought through what it meant to have even minor associations with him, and that he (not "rejects" which sounds like an argument in court) absolutely and viscerally stomps on everything that Ayers stood/stands for, and the approbation Ayers now enjoys in polite Chicago society. He's got to go "nukuleer" on Ayers's ass, but not look panicked doing it.

Oy vey: what a problem he has; and what a meme he is subject to in the great mugs' gane of politics.

boney: on another topic:

Here's exhibit A for journalistic competence, I'd argue.

www.nytimes.com/.../14kristol.html

And I'd be personally fiulfilled in discussing it with you, parrying various thrusts and so forth, entirely now unstoned.

My advice may be terrible, basman, but so is, historically, the result of Democrats trying to avoid rather than confront difficult issues that are part of American political culture in the real world but are being twisted by the Repugs as if the world was divided into two sides, Republicans and Evil.

Example #1  If Kerry had not tried to up-play his Vietnam service while downplaying his subsequent anti-war activism, he would not have been in such a vulnerable position when it came to the Swift-Boat venom patrol.  If he had honestly stood by both aspects of his past, he wouldn't have given himself such a narrow line to walk, and It's likely he'd be now looking at a second term.

Example #2  If Gore had stood by the achievements of the Clinton administration and emphasized that, whatever he thought about Clinton and Lewinsky on a personal level, he wasn't going to distance himself from the president and would welcome him into the campaign.  If he had done that, he would certainly have had a very good chance of winning Arkansas, which would have given him the White House.

This bullshit needs to be confronted head-on.  Anything else will look like guilt feelings or nervousness about (a) breathing, (b) thinking, (c) meeting/working with people whose earlier actions you disagree with but with whom you currently share some political goals, (d) not having lived in an airtight container for 20 years before running for the presidency.

And, just as a matter of interest, have your advice/predictions been especially on target this election season?  I'm curious.

Count Bassy-

OK, let's parry.  Sadly, this will be my last post of the day, as I am skipping work to take advantage of a beautiful day before settling in to convention-watching/heavy drinking.  

To start- what Obama said sounded awful, but it also was: true.  When people are suffering, they always collapse back to what they know, and believe it with more fervor.  It is normal.  

What Kristol did in his column was immediatly bring up Marxism, and then repeated San Francisco a couple of times.   This was in order to satisfy the talking points of Obama's elitism, rather than be honest and explain his musing about what motivates people.   It was a parroting of the meme which the Repubs were already picking up, and which Hillary didn't disdain to ape.   There was nothing "marxist" about what Barack said.  Kristol, having to push talking points incessantly, brought it into the conversation (and decided to paraphrase the quote when repeating it in German).

Dammit, I am out of here.  I'll be back on this thread, or we can keep arguing this throughout threads, like a dorky Highlander.

The real peril to Obama here is getting bogged down in the Ayers mess and elevating it into a major campaign issue, they way Kerry did the Swift-Boaters.  If the election turns into a candidate-level discussion of how Obama feels about the 60's and a contrast between McCain and the likes of Ayers, then Obama loses twice -- Baby Boomer and older voters are turned off by Obama having to explain how he ever came to be associated with Ayers, while younger voters are turned off by more mucking around in the politics of the 60's.  I think Obama's low-key response to these ads is good, although he can and probably should hit harder and throw around some dirt at the people funding this stuff.  He can always reject and denounce Bill Ayers for better effect when the question comes up in a debate.

irony last point first: God no, on balance.

But let's not get into that and let's rather dispassionately consider your advice.

My apology for saying you should stick to American lit. It was a strident and uncalled for remark.

All that said, if you entertain the idea that your advice may be terrible, I can't see how that entertained admission is helped by theories about what's bad or terrible in what Democrats have traditionally done. That sounds like a kind of self immolation on the altar of a theory of righting Democratic political practice. That, the generally cautious, pragmatic and oh so incremental Obama will never do, I wouldn't think.

In the meantime, Obama has a big league problem with Ayers.

I agree that that Obama needs to meet the bullshit head on. But what's the bullshit? The reality is that Ayers is an unconvicted domestic terrorist who (what?) blew up buildings?, caused the deaths of folks?, said recently he had not done enough?, made some compromising commenst about America after 9/11? Stuff like that. I'm suggesting to you that these things cannot be discounted for how they are/will be perceived by the voters who count and Obama desperately need and wants--down the middle Americans who swing both ways.

Ayers, post 9/11,  seems of a different order than your examples, which by the way I have no quarrel with your prescriptions for.

So I especially have a problem with your advice # 2. The meme on Ayres is that he is unrepentant terrorist. I say and am willing to argue till I'm convinced otherwise that Obama cannot by any means be seen to embrace him or accommodate hin or explain him away. And so I stick to the advice I offered, which probably is worth the vast unsums I am being paid for it.

But I am open to being convinced by a better argument.

boney, I like the notion that the posts stop once the work day ends. :-)

"why hasn't Katrina been brought up, anyway?"

It was brought up by one of the lesser known speakers yesterday; it was a good jab, but not a lot of people were looking when it was landed. I can't remember who said it anymore, but I think it came out during that 4-person panel they held earlier in the evening.

"Assuming the demographic makeup of the country in 2000 and 2004, the Republican candidate can expect to win the Electoral College most of the time if the Democrat fails to exceed 52 percent of the two-party vote."

I think this is one of the reasons Obama has been high on GOTV. Increased Dem turnout will help a lot in this regard; just look that those districts the dems already took from the republicans in early elections, nothing changed except basically the blacks in those districts all came out and voted for the Democrat.

"Except, he didn't."

Except, your little anti-factual commonly referred to as an op-ed, and affectionately referred to by me as an opinionated, blow-hard wind-fest, not withstanding, that he did indeed: blog.washingtonpost.com/.../obamas_weatherman_connection.html

Obama spokesman Bill Burton noted in a statement that ... "Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. ..."

Addressing Ayers is a waste of time. Nobody with a brain is falling for this trash. The Republicans have gone from the two of them being at the same parties, to what? Assembling bombs in the basement while the University of Ill filmed for the archive? What a joke. This is a desperate gamble by a loser with too much money. The media has no interest and it will fade away except in the fever swamps of Hannity Land.

Sounds simple to me! The redneck, (or moron, or near-senile) demo that would believe the Ayers ad only needs Barack to attack McCain and the Pride Of The Rust Belt will take Obama's side. (Pass the hat, I'll chip in)

Or, are people who believe Obama is an Arab plant & Noah herded baby dinosaurs in a boat beyond any rehab of an ad-buy?

Maybe 50+ years in Indiana has jaded me but I know bars where a squad of Army Rangers would be suspect if they weren't white. My years in radio convinced me of the power of advertising. I'll even take credit for persuading people I thought were unlikely buyers. But if the goal is changing the minds of people who are shaking their heads and saying 'Yes!" to these ads? Good Luck!

basman, I often say myself I should stick to Am Lit (esp. when my chair assigns me some other teaching duty!), so no worries.

I agree with your point that there is something of a moral scorched earth policy in what I'm suggesting, and that that makes no pragmatic sense (and Obama -- despite the weird readings of him that some posters here have -- is very much a pragmatist).

However, it seems to me that some (not all by any means) of the Democrats' problems over the past couple of decades have arisen because people are afraid to stand by the value of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, which include the anti-war movement.  I think Kerry made a bad mistake there, and Clinton handled it better in 1992 (it wasn't exactly the same issue, but whatever).

Clinton's implicit case was that he had an objection to being drafted and sent overseas to kill people in a small Asian country who had done nothing to us.  In 1992, twenty-something years on, that didn't mean that he thought that the people who did go were evil, or that he wouldn't send American troops into a combat situation if that was the only option.  Which in fact he did.

In contrast, the "I didn't inhale" crap was a classic example of how to sound like a dork.  Why not handle it like Obama? -- "Yes, I experimented with some drugs as a young guy, as very many people did, in fact, and I stopped it a long time ago."  If you face the issue, it's much harder for it to be hijacked and returned to you with the sharp edge facing.

In this case, Obama isn't even standing by the 1960s.  He'd be standing by having done some work with and having had some personal contact with a respected UIC teacher and advisor to social projects (including to the Mayor of Chicago at one point) who indeed has a particular history of violent protest from almost four decades ago.  Ayers was never indicted or convicted, and I know of no evidence for him being involved in anything illegal now.  To say that Obama should never have had anything to do with him is to asssert that you can never associate in any way with people whose previous methods you reject but whose current goals make some sense to you.

What I'm trying to say is that many Democrats would be far better off standing by their history than trying to make it fit some Republican Brady Bunch notion of America in which nice middle-class suburban white people dance in the narcissistic glow of their own virtue.

I wonder . . . if Abraham Lincoln had known John Brown.

"In this case, Obama isn't even standing by the 1960s.  He'd be standing by having done some work with and having had some personal contact with a respected UIC teacher and advisor to social projects (including to the Mayor of Chicago at one point) who indeed has a particular history of violent protest from almost four decades ago."

This is the problem for Obama. He can't explain why the guy who had a luck to give  that famous interview  on 9/10 was "respected".  It might not be a problem for you, but might be a problem for people who cling to guns and religion.

It's not a problem for me, as I cling (stupidly, perhaps) to the notion that we live in a country in which a person is presumed innocent until proven otherwise by due proces of law.

You?

Maybe, just maybe, Ayers has actually done some good things in his life, and made a positive difference in the lives of many people in Chicago, and that makes him a little more complex than "former student radical" and "unrepentent terrorist"?

You can choose to believe that what he advocated in the 60s and the activities he was associated with make him a bad person no matter what he has done since. But you can't say that everyone has to have the same opinion, to the extent that anyone who does not reject and denounce him is also tainted.

boney let me comment on your last post as soon as I can, can't now. And we can get into it a bit. Bookmark blogs.tnr.com/.../obama-s-electoral-strength-and-peril.aspx

irony, maybe I can make a further comment or two on your last post, when time permits. So give me a day or two and check me out at the above site.

And jef frey I'd on the same basis be interested in responding to your last post as well.

But over and out for now.

Good luck defending guys saying:

"Much of the controversy about Ayers during the decade since the year 2000 stems from an interview he gave to the New York Times on the occasion of the memoir's publication.[17] The reporter quoted him as saying "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough", and, when asked if he would "do it all again" as saying "I don't want to discount the possibility."

BTW, ironyroad, I cling (stupidly, perhaps) to the notion that we live in a country in which a person can own several rental properties without being a subject of vicious attack be a presidential candidate of a major party. You?

Your attempts at sarcasm would sink the USS John F. Kennedy.  Leave it alone.

basman, I'll leave the window open and check back late tonight to see what you have to say.

Can't promise an answer today, bust day, and night--I think someone's giving an important speech or some such.

Can't promise an answer today, bust day, and night--I think someone's giving an important speech or some such.

fwiw my main interest here is in learning about a story that will probably have a major impact nt he campaign. Crowley or whoever may well dig up something that reflects terribly on McCain; there's also the chance that he elevates a story that turns out to hurt Obama.

Either way, for me the real point here is to give us more reportage and scoops in the digital version of tnr.com. More meat, fewer cheese puffs.

bone:

Not exactly on point but:

1. Kristol called for Palin some months ago;

2. Of everyone on Fox, he was most praiseworthy last night of Obama's speech--so was Chris Wallace--which speech was in fact praiseworthy.