Maureen Dowd on the Secret Link Between Barack Hussein Obama and Saddam Hussein!
Well, not really. In a Times col, Dowd dishes on the Dems' dementia, or "High Anxiety in the Mile-High City":
Democrats have begun internalizing the criticisms of Hillary and John McCain about Obama's rock-star prowess, worrying that the Invesco Field extravaganza Thursday, with Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi, will just add to the celebrity cachet that Democrats have somehow been shamed into seeing as a negative.
So that added to the weird mood at the convention, with some Democrats nitpicking Obama's appearance, after Michelle's knock-out speech and the fabulously cute girls, with a reassuring white family in a town he couldn't remember at one point. They wondered why he wasn't wearing a tie, fearing he looked too young, and second-guessed Michelle's green dress, wondering if it clashed with the blue stage, and fretted that there wasn't a speaker Monday night attacking McCain and yelling about gas prices.
"I'm telling you, man," said one top Democrat, "it's something about our party, the shtetl mentality."
The link between Barry Hussein O and Saddam H?:
Obama's pacification of Bill [Clinton, regarding speech arrangements] made his supporters depressed and anxious that he was going to be a weaker candidate than they had hoped and fearful that, as in Obama's favorite movie, "The Godfather," every time Democrats try to get away, the Clintons pull them back in.
The Godfather was, of course, Saddam Hussein's favorite movie!
I'm anticipating Thursday's night shindig at the Dem convention, if only because it should be quite a spectacle. It'll remind, I'm sure, of why I absolutely hate politics, but it should be really interesting for all sorts of reasons. Not the least of which: Setting the stage for the eventual debates between Obama and John McCain, who both have compelling and widely divergent styles and stories to tell.
An area that is shaping up as pivotal is how compelling Obama's (and the Dems') invocations of economic woes will play with the voting population. The script they're using now reminds me of the one Clinton-Gore played in 1992. That the economy is totally in the shitter, that the middle-class (i.e., everyone in America except the multi-mansioned John McCain) is feeling the pinch on all fronts, that jobs are going overseas faster than lightning, etc. One effect of that focus ironically may be to drain the election of identity politics which will on net hurt Obama I think. Arguably the best reason to vote for him (and certainly the only one, if you worry rightly about the leftward tilt of most of his actual positions) is that he closes out a long, odious racial discourse in American history (at least figuratively).