OODA, I-see-giant-penises-man,”you might not be a bigot,” Clinton birthed Palin, video prophalactic, and Jackie and Dunlap comment on Palin and the media

1) Realclearpolitics has a piece using a bit of pilot jargon for a hook. But what it does well is give a framework for explaining how the McCain campaign has recently run circles around Obama’s.

John McCain was trained as a fighter pilot. In his selection of Sarah Palin, and in his convention and campaigning since, he has shown that he learned an important lesson from his fighter pilot days: He has gotten inside Barack Obama’s OODA loop.

That term was the invention of the great fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd. It’s an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

The writer says the Obama campaign failed to Observe and missed the likelihood of a McCain / Palin ticket. He claims the Obama campaign failed to Orient when they thought that Palin was a sop to Hillary supporters rather than a maverick in the mold of McCain. Lastly, he says the Obama campaign Decided wrong and therefore Acted wrong when it chose to attack Palin on her experience. That ricocheted back on Obama and reinforced negatives against him.

Read the rest ->

Then he says this:

Is she [Palin] neglecting her family? Well, how often has Obama tucked his daughters in lately? For more than a week we’ve seen the No. 1 person on the Democratic ticket argue that he’s better prepared than the No. 2 person on the Republican ticket. That’s not a winning argument even if you win it. As veteran California Democrat Willie Brown says, “The Republicans are now on offense, and Democrats are on defense.”

Perhaps the Obama campaign strategists expected their many friends in the mainstream media to do their work for them. Certainly they tried. But their efforts have misfired, and the grenades they lobbed at Palin have ricocheted back and blown up in their faces. Voters are on to their game.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen finds that 68 percent believe “most reporters try to help the candidate they want to win” and that 51 percent — more than support McCain — believe the press is “trying to hurt” Sarah Palin. The press and the Democratic ticket are paying the price for decades of biased mainstream media coverage.

Interesting piece.

2) There are no words for this one. Bob “I see penises everywhere” Herbert is again attacking in the NYT. Looks like the new word to describe Palin will be “clueless.” Hmmmm. Wasn’t that a movie about a CA valley teen???

Remember Bob saying he saw giant penises? Well, let’s “roll the tape.”

And I cannot resist. Here is, again, the John Stewart version.

Well, Bob had this to say about the Sarah Palin interview on ABC:

While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail.

How is it that this woman could have been selected to be the vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket? How is it that so much of the mainstream media has dropped all pretense of seriousness to hop aboard the bandwagon and go along for the giddy ride?

For those who haven’t noticed, we’re electing a president and vice president, not selecting a winner on “American Idol.”

——————-

With most candidates for high public office, the question is whether one agrees with them on the major issues of the day. With Ms. Palin, it’s not about agreeing or disagreeing. She doesn’t appear to understand some of the most important issues.
—————

John McCain, who is shameless about promoting himself as America’s ultimate patriot, put the best interests of the nation aside in making his incredibly reckless choice of a running mate. But there is a profound double standard in this country. The likes of John McCain and George W. Bush can do the craziest, most irresponsible things imaginable, and it only seems to help them politically.

You know, irony must be one tough cookie to kill. I mean, just when we think it’s completely, irrevocably dead, irony MUST raise its head because that’s when Bob Herbert writes something else. And we realize he’s clueless. Well, unless everyone sees penises everywhere. . .

3) The Telegraph has something interesting today. This article was written by a Brit who hopes Obama wins but can understand how he might lose. It’s a rare article because it doesn’t insult those who don’t like Obama.

As soon as Barack Obama became prominent in the US presidential race, I wanted him to win. Like most people one meets in Britain, my reasons were simple. It is time for a black president, I thought, and this healing, dignified, eloquent man seems fitted for the great task.

———

These truths seem self-evident to educated people over here. Part of it is a strong reaction against the era of George Bush. But even among people like myself, who would almost certainly be Republicans if we lived in America, and support the American presence in Iraq, the Obama pull is strong.

Attending parties given by friends recently, I have found people turning angry at the idea that anyone could think differently. To them, John McCain is a boring, warmongering has-been, but Sarah Palin has been the real outrage.

How could the greatest power on earth allow this untravelled, snow-flecked, ex-beauty queen, stained with the blood of moose, born again in the Lord, with her teeming family of children with names that sound like dogs, near the nuclear button?

My friends rail against the prejudices of “rednecks” whom Mrs Palin represents, but their reaction, the other way round, is just as atavistic.

The writer goes on to describe how Obama appeals to educated, liberal-minded people. Familiar territory. He details some of Obama’s resume. Then this:

So it should not take too much imagination to see that this CV is incredibly off-putting to huge swathes of the American voting population. If you are black, obviously, Obama interests you. If you are white and feel unthreatened, successful, and like to think of yourself as open-minded, he is your man.

But what if you aren’t? What if you are a white Catholic woman married to a blue-collar worker in Pennsylvania?. . .
—————
What if you are a member of one of those minorities – notably Latinos, who are traditionally uneasy with black power? What if you are just an ordinary white American who loves your car, your suburb and your country’s unique position in the world, and feels that all three are disparaged by the Obama world-view?

Your anxieties could be calmed, of course, by actual policies. But Mr Obama has chosen instead to make this a campaign of impressions. Like the movement of his body, his politics are light, floating, slightly narcissistic. “Look at me!” he says, inviting an attention more relentless than he intends.

The author seems to think the main clue to antipathy to Obama stems from his first book – Dreams of My Father.

The implication of the book is that Obama, by understanding the unrealised dreams from his father properly, can somehow fulfil them in and for the United States of America. The intoxicating thought that it might be true is what makes so many of us want Mr Obama to win.

But what if it isn’t true? In the book, Obama introduces the Kenyan phrase “home squared”. It means the place – in the Kenyan case, your tribal village – which you think of as your real home, though you live in the big city.

For Obama, it is “home cubed” – from America to Nairobi to the village. It sounds like the great dream of “from log cabin to White House”. The trouble is that its direction is the reverse; it seems to take him away from America.

So Americans, who actually have to decide what all this means, have a much more serious task than we do. It will not prove that they are bigots if they decide that Barack Obama is too big a risk.

Hey, someone says we WON’T be bigots just because we don’t vote for BO!

4) From the “we knew THIS would happen” department of the irony-free division of political hackery, inc, comes this. Realclearpolitics has a piece up this morning saying it’s Hillary’s fault that Obama is being damaged by McCain’s Palin play.

We will never know whether Clinton would have beaten Senator McCain, though there are powerful reasons to be skeptical about her camp’s conviction that victory would have been a certainty. But while she may not have beaten Obama in the primaries, she may well have sown the seeds for his defeat in 52 days time.

It’s not just that Clinton continued to battle for the nomination beyond the point at which her winning became impossible and the major political damage to the Illinois senator became inevitable.

The crucial point is that if it wasn’t for Clinton, Sarah Palin – who now could well become America’s first female president whether or not McCain wins the White House – would have remained in relative obscurity in Alaska.

The New York senator knew that Obama would never choose her to be his running mate. Even if he’d asked her, she might well have refused. Her looming presence, however, spooked Obama into playing it safe with his vice-presidential pick.

Again and again, Clinton supporters made clear that for him to choose another woman to be on the ticket would cause uproar in Hillaryland. Obama was inclined to choose a Washington outsider who embodied change, had appeal in the heartland, would highlight his change message, had shown personal loyalty to him and with whom he was comfortable and in synch.

Either Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas or Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri would have fitted the bill. But Obama, afraid of a Hillary backlash if he chose a less qualified woman, blinked.
————

Clinton has made clear she won’t be attacking Palin. And why should she? A McCain-Palin victory would make Clinton the Democratic front runner in 2012. It would vindicate everything she said about Obama during their primary battle.

Palin, and what picking her telegraphed about McCain, could be Obama’s nemesis. Hillary Clinton brought us Palin. The Alaska governor is her gift to Obama.

Blech. Articles like this just show that the Obama campaign was not and is not in control. As adults, presumably, they could have chosen other directions. But claiming “Hillary made me do it,” begs the question: “well, if Hillary jumped off a cliff. . . . ”

5) A writer at the NYPost suggests that politicians leery of television interviewers and their editors would be wise to film the interview themselves for their own protection.

Sounds reasonable to me. Of course, if the politicians have their own editors, you’ve got a “he said, he said” situation. So maybe we need a third layer in between – a non-aligned who maintains uncut video?????? Sigh. But this article does go to show how far the press has fallen if people feel the need to protect themselves by maintaining uncut video or audio.

6) Obama’s remarks in Dover, NH (at realclearpolitics) were a pretty standard stump speech. But something caught my eye. Obama talks about not raising any taxes at all.

And I can make a firm pledge: under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase – not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes. My opponent can’t make that pledge, and here’s why: for the first time in American history, he wants to tax your health benefits Apparently, Senator McCain doesn’t think it’s enough that your health premiums have doubled, he thinks you should have to pay taxes on them too. That’s a $3.6 trillion tax increase on middle class families. That will eventually leave tens of millions of you paying higher taxes. That’s his idea of change.

Here’s my problem. For the last few years, as Bush has cut taxes, my state and, particularly, my local taxes have been ratcheting up alarmingly. My local taxes included over $100 in new fees year before last and my property taxes have gone up so much that they now rival my interest payment on the monthly mortgage statement. (And don’t ask me about the principal, I don’t want to weep on my keyboard.)

Obama wants me to think my taxes won’t go up if he’s elected, but they will. It’s probably just a question of where they’ll go up and by how much.

7) Over at Townhall (I know, I know), Hugh Hewit (yeah, I know) has a piece talking about his perception of Palin’s popularity. It doesn’t really cover new ground, but it is the same thing we’ve been saying here at NQ.

Since the day John McCain selected Palin as his running mate, I have spoken with only women callers to my radio show. For the past week I have limited callers to those who are calling a radio show for the very first time. All the lines have been filled every hour of every day. Caller after caller wants to discuss their affection for Sarah, their willingness to work for her and contribute to the RNC and to share stories of like-minded women in their families and among their friends.

He goes on to say that “normal people” are frustrated with what they see as MSM and Obama-elites’ attacks on them and they way they live. He says that this does not preclude asking Palin tough questions, but:

. . .there is resentment that after a year-and-a-half there is not one interview of Obama –who wants the top job not the understudy role– remotely as tough, with sustained lines of questions on sensitive issues of foreign affairs peppered with probing interruptions. Not one. Obama has always been allowed to filibuster, and every interviewer has retreated from attacks that have put Obama on the defensive. The cowing of the MSM by the left-wing bloggers is complete, and they know better than to push The One very hard.

That’s just the way it is with a deeply-biased, almost openly partisan MSM, but a very, very media-savvy American public knows exactly what is going on. The voters’ distaste for the great prop-up of Obama showed itself first in the late primaries where Hillary racked up win after win and now in the sudden shift of independents towards McCain-Palin.

I do think he gets the frustration right.

8 ) Redstateupdate takes on the MSM / Palin kerfluffle. Looks like the “MSM liberal-media” puppet, Shimmysham, makes an appearance. Don’t miss the last comment about Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann.