Barack Obama and his team of advisors don’t really want to pick Hillary as VP. We all know this. So how does he deny her a spot on the ticket without alienating her supporters? Simple. Jackie Calmes reports in the Wall Street Journal that they would ask Bill to disclose donors to his presidential library, and both of them would have to go through a thorough vetting process (that could potentially disclose more skeletons in the Clinton closet) in order for her to even be considered as a potential VP. Looks like a deal-breaker to me. Genius move.
Month: June 2008
our democratic nominee
First of all, I want to congratulate Senator Barack Obama for running an outstanding campaign (for the most part) and especially for defeating the Clinton machine. Hillary is still standing, but my guess is that it won’t be for much longer. He deserves credit for finding and exploiting the weaknesses in the Hillary candidacy, and for using his natural abilities to claim the second highest political title in the United States as one of the two candidates for president. His achievement here is historic, and should be noted as such.
However, I fail to see why I should join in this collective group hug even though this milestone has been reached. My intention is not to minimize what Barack has done. I respect that achievement, but it would have the same distinction no matter which African-American became the first Democratic nominee for president. We have our nominees — both imperfect representatives of their respective parties — and it is up to us to do our own homework and decide for ourselves which candidate can best represent our interests. That would be easier to do if we could separate our personal feelings for Barack Obama with his ability to do the top job in the country. It would also help if the media would do its job and keep both sides honest. Guess that’s just too much to ask of them.
no concessions
Silly Democrats. You thought that Hillary would just fade into the background after Barack clinched the nomination. Ok, so it was only a small percentage of your party who actually believed that, but still…the rest of you had to be surprised by the tone of her non-concession speech.
Thanks Hillary. Your speech distracted all of us from how totally uninspiring John McCain’s speech was.
that’s a very big bus
Barack Obama’s bus would have to be quite large to absorb all of the people Barack has thrown under it. The current endangered organism is his former church, Trinity United Church of Christ. It would almost be amusing to watch Barack Obama disown people who he intimately or barely knows, except that we do expect better judgment or discernment from a guy who wants to be our next president. This stuff is no-win for Senator Obama. If he says that he attended Trinity for 20 years, and had no clue that Jeremiah Wright was someone who would be damaging to his political career in the long run, then I’m not sure he’s got the great judgment that he is alleged to have. If he is acquainted with other Trinity pastors/ministers like Father Pfleger and yet he still lacks the ability to take their true measure, this is very troubling to me. Either Barack used these Chicago-area ministers to build his street cred and didn’t really care much about (or intentionally ignored) their political views, or he completely bought what they were selling in addition to using them to further his local political career. Either way, it doesn’t reflect favorably on the man.
I was ready to believe that this Jeremiah Wright stuff would be old news by November. After all, he’s gotten this far with a very compliant and willing press supporting him no matter what he does. If these quotes from Father Pfleger hadn’t come out, Trinity and Jeremiah Wright would have become less of a compelling story than they were when this controversy first started. In addition to that, Obama is not even making a clean break from Trinity. Here’s part of what he said:
I am not denouncing the church. I am not interested in people who want me to denounce the church because it’s not a church worthy of denouncing. And so if they’ve seen caricatures of the church and accept those caricatures despite my insistence that’s not what the church is about, then there’s not much I can do about it.
This is absolute nonsense. What we are seeing with Trinity United Church of Christ is not a caricature. It’s a troubling pattern of behavior and attitudes, starting first with Jeremiah Wright and continuing with the new pastor as well as Father Pfleger. But of course none of the people I’ve mentioned represent what the church believes or what its parishioners believe. It’s only our misconceptions of what the church is based on the views of a few of their pastors. How stupid does Barack Obama think we are? Even when he makes the right decision, there is still this level of “pass the buck” in it. Like we aren’t sophisticated enough to understand the true nature of people like Jeremiah Wright or his fellow travelers at Trinity. We get it. He doesn’t seem to get it. Even now.
congratulations mr. chairman
Get to know the guy in this picture. He’s gonna be a star.
The smiling face you are looking at is the chairman of the York County GOP in South Carolina, Glenn McCall. (My apologies for the quality of the picture.) He was elected on Saturday at the state convention to represent South Carolina Republicans as a member of the Republican National Committee. Lord knows the RNC needs some more solid conservatives, and Glenn McCall is definitely one of those. Hopefully he can knock some sense into those Washington-ites who have “gone native”. I feel much better about the state of the RNC now that he’s going to be part of it.
Anyway, I just wanted to congratulate Chairman McCall on a much-deserved win, and to wish him the best of luck in smacking some sense into the national GOP.