Year: 2010
Why Did ‘Hope and Change’ Fail?
JSF of Valley of the Shadow explains how Barack Obama’s political experience left him unprepared to cope with conservative opposition:
When you study President Obama’s background, he never had to deal with Conservatives or Republicans. . . In Illinois, he never had any hard fought campaigns in his general election. And come 2008, it was going to be a Democratic party year so the only real opposition he had was from Hillary! . . .
President Obama has a Huffington Post understanding of the Right, or the Right as seen from the Left. Not once has he ever spoken to a Conservative to understand his or her views. I say President Obama should invite Rush Limbaugh to the White House for a week to learn about Republicans and Conservatives. . . .
Obama’s ‘Fiscal Responsibility’ Diet
Oh. My. God.
Just when you think Andrew Sullivan can’t possibly go further off the deep end, he manages to surprise you. When someone put this on Twitter — “Andrew Sullivan hits new low in attacking Palin” — I thought they were joking. Surely his new low couldn’t actually be lower than his old low? Foolish naivete!
At what point does Andrew Sullivan’s derangement over Sarah Palin and his bizarre conspiracy theories about how her son was really birthed by her daughter become an issue for an otherwise respectable publication such as The Atlantic? If his employers don’t take action over this blog post of his, then we’re totally through the looking glass.
UPDATE: Best Ace-on-Sully beatdown evah? It’s like Sonny Corleone on Carlo . . . except in this case Carlo’s an AIDS-infected dopehead foreigner who should be deported immediately.
UPDATE II: Almost forgot there’s a Facebook group:
Concerned Patriotic Americans Committee to Deport Andrew Sullivan
We Feel Your Pain. Really. We Do.
Earlier that morning, CBS News executives and bureau chiefs, led by senior vice president Linda Mason, told their employees that 2009 had been a disastrous year in the ad market. They had no cable operation to buoy the sinking revenues. It’s not you, was the message, it’s us. Dozens of employees — including staff members in D.C., San Francisco, Miami, London, Los Angeles and Moscow — were being let go. The changes were effective immediately. There would be no buyouts. According to one longtime staff member, the network had long ago negotiated away most of the severance clauses in staff members’ contracts.
But in the end, the cuts were surprisingly deep. By Monday afternoon, staffers from Washington to L.A. were sputtering in disbelief as they heard of top producers on the chopping block.
“Add these to the jobs not saved category.” I think I just heard General Westmoreland‘s ghost laughing at that joke.
Peter Orzag Gets Schooled
Hat-tip to Pundette, who has much more.
Post-Mortem: CSI Illinois
Dan Riehl says he doesn’t want to engage in hindsight recriminations over the Illinois gubernatorial campaign. As I explained at The American Spectator in the wee hours this morning, the evident narrow victory for state Sen. Bill Brady appears to be a less-bad outcome for conservatives, however disappointing it may be for Adam Andrzejewski’s Tea Party supporters.
In addressing what he sees as a failure of the conservative blogosphere, Riehl writes:
Brady never did make it on our radar.
OK, so whose fault was that? I didn’t see any online activism from the Brady campaign. Maybe Brady’s operatives figured they could win without New Media coverage — and, at this point, who can argue with that calculation? — but if they wanted to generate such coverage, they didn’t make any discernible effort.
Meanwhile, Andrzejewski had Tea Party activists who were employing social networking tools to spread their message. And near the end of the campaign (a bit too late, probably) they engaged the services of a very strong New Media team. An extra week’s advance notice of the Lech Walesa Tea Party appearance in Chicago would have been priceless. But rather than try explaining Andrzejewski, let’s let Brady explain his own victory:
“It’s clean break from the politics of the past,” Brady said. “We’re going to go on to victory in November.” . . .
“Our strategy was simple,” said Brady, the only downstate candidate. “We were running against five, six Chicago guys. We needed to solidify our base. But we did that 11 months ago by deciding we had to build the strongest grassroots effort this state has ever seen.”
Second-guessing campaign strategies is a fascinating sport. However, if there is any New Media takeaway from the Illinois gubernatorial primary, it is this: Campaigns would be wise to engage the blogosphere early in the election cycle, rather than to treat online outreach as an afterthought. (My friend JSF at Valley of the Shadow has been trying to explain this to the California GOP.)
You’ll excuse me for not writing a complete thesis on this subject, but I’m in a hurry today. Tomorrow evening, I’m expected at dinner in Birmingham, Ala., and it’s a 14-hour drive.
The Same Reason I Didn’t Attend Obama’s State of the Union Speech
“I don’t go because it has become so partisan, and it’s very uncomfortable for a judge to sit there. And there’s a lot you don’t hear on T.V. — the catcalls, the whooping and hollering, under-the-breath comments. . . . So we decided not to go. Some members continued to go and that’s fine, but one of the consequences is that now the court becomes part of the conversation, if you want to call it that, in the speech.”
— Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas