Mar. 29, 2008
opening night accomplished!
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
10:53 am
i was going to write last night when i got home at 1:30 a.m., but decided i was already way past overly-tired.
i had hoped to leave the cast party a little earlier, but bev and erin gave me a ride and they had to stop at each clump of people on the way out and have yet another VERY IMPORTANT conversation. we almost made it out the door finally, but then bev stopped just one more time and so i finally grabbed her sleeve and pulled. i’m happy that bev drove, though; i had too much alcohol and was too tired to have made it home alone. bev took many shortcuts, as is her nature, and at one point i wasn’t even sure where we were. i know we didn’t actually go down any back alleys, and we didn’t cut across any golf courses, but i don’t think i’d ever seen some of the streets we took.
the show went well, at least for me. i didn’t fall off the stage, for example. the other women in the chorus (and there are only five of us) have to dance on three-foot-wide platforms that jut out from the stage, but for some reason i get to dance on the actual stage where there’s little risk of falling off the edge. during the number “chicago illinois” where we’re all dancing floozies in pink and black striped jackets, short shorts and thigh-high fishnets, my major concern was that a boob was going to fall out of my very push-up bra, which was visible under the jacket. the bras are supposed to be seen, but not the actual exposed flesh. luckily i had no wardrobe malfunctions.
randy appeared at the finale in women’s character shoes, even though last night was the very first night that he had them. he did admirably, not falling off them or the stage, and he even looked like he totally knew what he was doing.
because i don’t have a lot to worry about in the show, instead i could worry about randy, although i know he was doing plenty of worrying on his own. i gave him a card encouraging him to HAVE FUN in the role because that’s really what it’s all about, but he was probably too harried to even read the card. but he seemed remarkably calm most of the time that i saw him.
because it’s dinner theater, the delicious smells of the dinners were constantly wafting backstage all through the show and it made me really hungry. after it was over the people at the restaurant Catie Girls had invited us to their place for our opening night party. they had lots of delicious and interesting appetizers, including mini crab cakes, pork potstickers, and a big board of cheeses. it’s a totally cool restaurant located in the old st. nicholas hotel at the corner of 4th and jefferson, and you should rush right in there and eat because it’s fantastic, plus of course the fact that they were so nice to give us a party.
but you might have already heard about the place anyway - the bartender told me that on saturday nights they turn over three and a half seatings of dinner. i wasn’t clear on the half seatings, but that seems like a lot. he said it’s all reservations. so like i said, you’ve probably already been there.
today i would really like lolling around and maybe napping, but we’re hosting a party after the show tonight. i made up a list of stuff to do, and in a minute i have to start baking french bread and fixing some sushi. luckily i already made lots of brownies yesterday and by some miracle didn’t eat them all when i got home last night.
i have a little cleaning to do, but when i got up not that long ago, kevin had already WASHED AND WAXED THE KITCHEN FLOOR! i’m a little afraid to do anything in the kitchen now because i don’t want to mess up the floor. i continue to wonder why i deserve such a very good guy like this.
i’m going to take a camera tonight and will hopefully remember to take some pictures of us in our costumes. last night i decided that the white makeup we wear in the finale makes all of us over the age of 25 look like old dead martha washingtons. the white gets into every crease and line, and wearing it makes me want to make hideous faces in the mirror. because i need to get home for the party tonight, bev and i won’t have time to wash the white off, so hopefully we won’t get pulled over. but if we did get stopped i’m sure the cop would just want us to GET MOVING OUT OF HIS SIGHT.
i have to cook now. nap later.
ok then,
saturday grace.
Mar. 27, 2008
right now i could be
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
12:32 am
at steak-n-shake. eating a steakburger. with cheese. and some fries. and a chocolate shake. with whipped cream.
we had rehearsal tonight. the show opens on friday. two short days from now. hard to believe.
very very tired right now. it’s midnight, and i’m watching an episode of “the golden girls.” and there’s a very young george clooney in it. very funny. his face doesn’t look like it’s completely formed.
the play...it’s going ok. not too bad. hard to believe that it’s opening on friday. right now randy is at steak-n-shake and i bet he’s eating a steakburger with cheese. if you live someplace where they don’t have steak-n-shake, i’m sorry for you.
in the finale of the show, all of us in the chorus have to come out with white makeup all over our faces. it’s a little bit scary looking. i had to wash mine off before driving home because i was afraid what might happen if i was pulled over.
and then when i was driving home i suddenly got worried that somebody had snuck into the car and was going to kill me. yes, i realize this is a little bit irrational, but i couldn’t help it. at stoplights i turned on the dome light and tried to peer under the seat in back.
luckily i got home safely, nobody lurking in the back of the car. most of the time i’ve carpooled with bev and her daughter erin, but tonight i had to drive by myself. it’s always interesting driving with bev and erin. last night they picked me up, but they were really late, and neither one was in such a good mood when they got here. so we’re driving along, about 20 minutes late for rehearsal, and we had to stop off at erin’s dad’s house to deliver a piece of pineapple upside down cake to him. it thought this was funny, but then we were driving again and erin realized she’d forgotten key pieces of some of her costumes and she wanted to go back home, but at this point bev put her foot down. so erin had to do a dance number with no pants on.
it’s never boring driving with bev and erin. we don’t necessarily get to rehearsal on time, and it usually takes a very long time to get out of the building when rehearsal is over because one or both of them has some very very critical talking to do with somebody or other. but like i said, never boring.
randy is one of the leads in the show, but i don’t see him very much. at one point we’re squished together behind a door waiting to go onstage, but most of the time when he’s onstage i’m getting ready to go on, or vice versa. sometimes i hear him from the wings, though, and at least it sounds like he’s doing a great job. tonight he had to come onstage at the end of the play and sing, wearing a dress. i was standing in back of him, and i noticed that his wireless microphone was dangling down around his ankles. that must have been very distracting.
like i said, OPENING FRIDAY. so i better get some sleep.
goodnight,
grace
Mar. 23, 2008
easter sunday night...
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
10:29 pm
turkey...rolls...green bean casserole...sweet potatoes...more turkey...more rolls...devilled eggs...more rolls...
and then, coconut cake. lots and lot of coconut cake.
it was delicious.
happy easter. i hope the bunny was good to you.
ok then,
sunday night grace.
Mar. 21, 2008
words of wisdom from my mother-in-law...
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
5:36 pm
nancee sent me this today:
From a professional forgetter, my tip is post-it-notes; on the kitchen table, the bathroom mirror, my purse, the car dashboard. “Close the trunk.” "Wait til you smell the cookies before you ask." “You already fed Mollie, no matter what her eyes are saying.”
excellent advice, thank you nancee.
of course, it’s not likely that we’ll remember it...
ok then,
friday grace.
Mar. 19, 2008
creeping senility...
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
12:22 pm
my sister amy told me that 50% of people who live past the age of 85 get alzheimer’s.
kevin and i have concluded that this is not going to affect us, because it’s starting to kick in already. by the time we reach 85 we won’t even know who we are so we won’t have to worry about it. or anything at all.
two weeks ago we went out to Site M, where we’ve been camping before, to take Mollie for a little walk. kevin’s knee is improving enough so that he can walk a little. we parked near the primitive campsites, i put my purse in the trunk where it would be safer, and we headed out for our walk.
it was colder and windier than it was in town, and pretty soon i was ready to go back. kevin agreed, saying, “can you see the car from here?” we hadn’t walked that far, and i could see it off in the distance. and it appeared that the trunk was WIDE OPEN.
yes, wide open, with my purse perched on top of all the other stuff in the trunk. how did we manage to walk off leaving it open?
senility, creeping in.
and then the day before yesterday i told kevin i was going to make some cookies. i started getting out ingredients but realized i didn’t have enough oatmeal for the cookies, so i put the stuff away. kevin was sitting there in the kitchen with me, tinkering on something, as i flipped through a cookbook. after a while he got up and headed for the kitchen counter with an expectant look in his eyes. “you’re not going to have a cookie, are you?” i asked him. “uh, yeah...”
i hadn’t been making cookies. i hadn’t mixed anything up, i hadn’t baked any cookies, there were no warm and fragrant cookies sitting around anywhere. but since i said i was going to make cookies, kevin assumed that they were then made, even there was no evidence that might make him think this was actually reality.
it would have been kind of crazy of him to think this if he’d been out in the garage while i wasn’t making cookies, but he was SITTING RIGHT THERE WITH ME.
so if you run into either of us and maybe we don’t remember your name, or we’re drooling or walking around in aimless circles, you’ll know why. the creeping has begun.
ok then,
grace.
Mar. 15, 2008
the bitch is the new black, but...
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
11:42 pm
my neck has been hurting so much that i decided to get up and find some drugs in the closet. now i’m waiting for them to kick in.
i decided to turn on Saturday Night Live, knowing there was a risk of seeing yet another INCREDIBLY ANNOYING commentary shilling for hillary clinton.
instead, i turned it on as the they were doing the news, and there was tracy morgan. he talked a little bit about the idiocy of geraldine ferraro; he said that if obama got where he is because he’s black, then he, tracy would be president because tracy is “blacker than obama.” he also pointed out that if Hillary was qualified to be president because her husband had been president, then Robin Givens (former wife of mike tyson), was qualified to be the heavyweight boxing champion.
he was funny, he was cool, he made good points. and then he referred to tina fey’s MOST ANNOYING OF ALL talk about how yes, hillary is a bitch, but “bitches get things done.”
Tracy said, “i love you tina, but bitch may be the new black, but black be the next president.”
perfect.
goodnight.
saturday night grace.
i offer no apologies...
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
5:25 pm
today randy and i were at lunch at the very delicious Lakeview Grill (located on Toronto road, just east of the taco bell, you should definitely check it out because it’s really good) and randy asked, “so you’re just writing on wednesdays, are you?”
i did feel a twinge of guilt when i got home, but instead of writing, i had to read a little bit of news. just a few stories about the campaign, not a lot...but now i’ve been sitting here for quite a while when i really just wanted to take a nice nap. but i had to include this column from the huffington post.
before that, though, i do have a fairly large confession to make, mostly because sometimes i can’t believe how i manage to fail to see very very large and obvious things sometimes.
this is about U2. i never used to listen to U2. i don’t know why; i’ve missed great swaths of music in my life. i didn’t listen to bob dylan until i moved to la, but once i was introduced to his music i had to go out and buy most of his cds and i then spent a lot of time listening to them, and i went to two dylan concerts, one of them was with paul simon, and it was really great. the other one was at an outdoor venue and i’m a little fuzzy on the details of who else was playing that day, all i remember for sure about it is that it was a beautiful evening, but it was usually beautiful there anyway. details of that concert are a bit hazy, and if you ask me i’ll be happy to give you more details of that experience.
But then there’s U2. like i said, i had never really listened to the band, and although i had heard some of their music, i’m sure i didn’t know it was theirs. but then a boyfriend took me to a U2 concert, at the former Aneheim Pond (now the Honda Center)arena in orange county, and i was wearing very tall platform sandalsand we were so far up in the bleachers that i felt quite uneasy teetering around up there and was sure i was going to plunge to my death. for this i reason i didn’t move at all from my seat once were finally made it to the top.
anyway, the concert was AWESOME, even though i’d never listened to any U2, and even though we were ridiculously high up in the stands. i LOVED U2 - but i was also fascinated by the event - i kept noticing that every single other person in the arena was singing EVERY SINGLE NOTE of EVERY SINGLE SONG.
these were TRUE FANS.
so of course i felt that i didn’t have quite as much right to be there as them; i guess i mostly felt like an imposter. but at the same time i was fascinated by all this singing of every single note by every fan in the the vast auditorium.
after the concert i mentioned to my boyfriend at the time about the fans' singing (he was a huge fan but wasn’t the kind of person who would ever sing) and he, naturally got VERY MAD at me because i wasn’t paying more attention. this is just one example of why that is not the man i married. he got mad frequently, for no good reason.
but ok so here’s the bad part - today, on my way home from randy’s house, i was listening to NPR on the radio, and the rick steves show was on, and i enjoyed that because i love his tv show. he was in ireland, and talking to some irish guy and they were talking about irish music and listening to all these different irish performers, including U2.
and i thought, irish? is U2 IRISH?
and at this point i know you’re saying HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW THAT?
i have no answer. after that U2 concert i went out and bought some U2 cds and listened to them and i’ve always been incredibly impressed with the great things that bono is always doing.
but the irish thing - missed it. sorry. i’ll try to pay more attention.
maybe i DID know they were irish, and i forgot? hmm, i kind of doubt it.
here’s this good piece about barack obama and miss badmouth geraldine ferraro:
ZZ Packer Takes on Geraldine Ferraro
Posted March 15, 2008 | 01:29 PM (EST)
Breaking News
The author and political genius ZZ Packer, soon to be a HuffPo contributor, offers the following:
Ferraro’s Barack Problem
So, forty-three white male presidents to date, and Geraldine Ferraro says Obama’s gotten where he is because he’s black?
If you’ve been following the latest statement by Geraldine Ferraro in which she said “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” you might also be operating under the assumption that our last 43 presidents have been black, or that blacks overwhelmingly make up the bulk of Fortune 500 CEOs, or for that matter, the majority of Andover kids whining about the lack of locales for spring break or the cast of The OC.
Just at the beginning of his campaign it seemed like an absolute long shot because of his race. Now, having overcome all this and other these obstacles–including the ones that contribute to high percentages of black men who are jobless, in prison, or dead by the age of 25–he is where he is because of race?
The horrible double standard is obvious. According to those of Ferraro’s ilk: if you’re a poor black man, or incarcerated, or jobless or homeless, you are where you are because of your own ineptitude and should take responsibility for your actions. However, if you’ve excelled at one of the top schools in the nation, then later on became a star attorney and later become a senator who inspires millions, then you’re only there in spite of your ineptitude and you really shouldn’t take responsibility for it. Talk about movin' on up.
This famous double-bind–one whose motto is that all black folks' failures are the norm and all black folks' successes are the exception–is one educated African-Americans live with daily, and it is exceptionalism at its worst. Conservatives claim blacks would be free from this damned-if-you-do-damned-if you-don’t scenario if only they would renounce affirmative action and join the Republicans, and the invitation is about as sincere as inviting John McCain’s illegitimate black love child to tea. Conservatives regularly twist Martin Luther King’s vision of a society in which we are judged by “the content of our character, not the color of our skin,” as a sort of paen to a colorblind society (read: no need for affirmative action) and conveniently invoke this line when explaining why they should be able to dismiss the concerns of poor blacks without feeling a smidgen of human compassion. What MLK actually meant was that we should be able to see the person beyond his color, not merely in spite of it. Which brings us back to Ferraro.
Perhaps if Ferraro wasn’t blinded by rage and loyalty she would have been more diplomatic and said that Barack Obama has become a sort of curio, an oddity to be gawked at and admired, adored and petted. True, there exists a subset of those Iowans and Vermonters (and voters from other Arctic-white states who voted overwhelmingly for Obama) who treat him with the sort of awe and wonder that was once reserved for, disturbingly enough, Michael Jackson. He is black, and yet...he somehow isn’t! Without the fear of physical threat, it seems, black men can be quite charming and respectable; Obama is like Bill Cosby, but more handsome and less funny; he is like Jesse but more inspirational, and with fewer rhyming couplets.
But that segment of the population who, by dent of their particular East Coast-Left Coast ideology have to vote for Obama to maintain their liberal street cred is relatively small, a “white guilt” demographic blown out of proportion–primarily because the media itself belongs to that demographic.
And yet it is that perceived defection of the upper-middle classes that so upsets Hillary and her surrogate, Geraldine Ferraro. Ferraro deliberately targeted white voters by appealing to their sense that Obama is filling a quota, of sorts, and that he is the undeserving beneficiary of their niggling “white guilt.” How else can we view the statement, “He happens to be very lucky to be who he is,” when the majority of blacks struggle in poverty and never thought they’d see a black president in their lifetime?
Yet if white guilt is so prominent, what prevented MLK, Shirley Chisolm, Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton from becoming president? The sad truth is that in much of America it’s difficult for black men to become the head of households, much less heads of state. To deny that Obama had to work just as hard as Hillary Clinton to win a Senate seat and a bid for the presidency–harder, assuredly, since he has neither parent nor spouse from whom he can inherit an organization–is to play into that double bind paradox that says nothing blacks accomplish is earned by their own perspicacity and perseverance.
Educated blacks in this same double-bind paradox see themselves in Obama; for them to vote in droves for Obama was to be expected. For working-class whites and a large plurality of Hispanics to flock to Obama might have been acceptable–though they broke for Hillary. But for Obama to garner a sizable number of votes from the white upper-middle class and their Obama-maniacal progeny is nothing short of traitorous in the eyes of Clinton & Co. How can Ferraro say, with a stright face, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position” when there is a white man in a much better position than Obama's–a man by the name of John McCain who is already his party’s nominee.
John McCain and the Republicans are already seizing upon this as the foundation for their opposition research, should Obama become the nominee. They will allude to–without ever saying–that Obama is the Democrats “affirmative-action candidate” because Ferraro will have already said it. And it does not matter that Ferraro has stepped down from the Clinton campaign finance committee. The damage has been done. This was, as Keith Olbermann put it, “not a campaign strategy, but a suicide pact.”
And in case it’s not clear why this is political suicide to Ferraro or Clinton, let me put it bluntly: the Democratic Party is a loosely held federation of voters whose concerns range far and wide; there are working-class whites who would otherwise be Republicans if they weren’t in unions; there are Catholics and other religious voters who believe in peace and social justice issues despite being wooed by the right’s pro-life extremists; there are the progressive East and West Coast middle and upper-middle class whites, Latinos in Texas and California and Arizona. There are gay and gay families who believe the Democrats' championing of civil rights is their best hope as a safeguard against bigotry. There are socially conservative African-Americans in the cities like Detroit and Chicago and New York, but also in the “Solid South;” a region whose support is absolutely necessary to for any party’s nominee to win the presidency. The party is a sort of connective tissue for various issue voters; a loss of one constituent threatens the viability of the entire organism.
But we should give Ferraro another chance; perhaps she simply meant Barack Obama could never have sustained his lead without white votes? This is true. And yet Hillary will not be able to walk into the White House without black votes. But Hillary, with all her experience, has somehow forgotten this: we all hang together or we’ll all hang separately. In light of Senator Clinton’s political suicide, all of Senator Obama’s unity-speak turns out not to be mere feel-good rhetoric after all, but a genuflection to the cold, hard math of electoral politics. Without every segment of the Democratic voting-block united behind the nominee–whomever he or she may be–the Democrats are toast.
I used to say that I would gladly vote for any one of the candidates who became our nominee–Edwards, Clinton, or Obama. I was proud of them all, each offered policies and promoted ideas which I deemed progressive. When it came down to Clinton and Obama, I was still happy to see either one win the nomination. Now, however, the Clinton camp has gone entirely too far.
The first straw was when Clinton comparing herself to LBJ and Obama to MLK–nothing wrong there, unless you stop to consider that Obama happens to be running for the exact same commander-in-chief slot as she, so why not compare them both to LBJ? Then there was the little matter of her proxy invoking Obama’s erstwhile (and self-confessed) drug use. Then there was her patently Republican-esque scare tactic of leaking pictures of Obama in traditional Somali garb to–to what? Imply that he is Muslim? To invoke fears that he will bring on an al-Qaeda lovefest? There’s also her supposedly playful–but entirely disingenuous–SNL send-up, asking if Obama needed another pillow during their last debate. Still, all the aforementioned are very small fry compared the possibility of her camp’s role in the Canadian NAFTA leak.
The Democrats need all eight cylinders for this election, and that requires a leader who can unite, not a candidate who will shoot the party in the foot for her own self-aggrandizement. This need for unity now puts me squarely in the Obama camp. But I don’t think anyone should become an Obama supporter out of a misguided sense of black pride or white guilt, but rather because one believes he can accomplish what he promises, believes his policies to be sound, and believes that he has what it takes to be a leader.
Apparently, the majority of Democrats feel the way I do, which is why Obama is currently leading. Yet for Ferraro to imply that Obama has garnered these votes from some grand white pity party for Obama–or equally perverse–some sort of strange messiah-cult around him is tantamount to stating he’s accepted the same token position she herself accepted declaring, “In 1984, if my name were Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would never have been the nominee for vice president.”
But we are not living in the eighties. It is 2008, and the times, they are a ‘changin’. Though our first and most important qualification for president should be his/her ability to lead, our secondary and sometime tertiary concerns often do end up being ones of identity, though we hardly recognize this is the case when the candidate is a white male.
Despite this hegemony of forty three white male presidents, some of us–we used to be called Democrats–feel a need to see what other people bring to the table. In 1960, after an unbroken change of middle-aged WASPs, enough people were eager to see what a young, Irish-Catholic like John F. Kennedy would do as president to elect him over Nixon. Did he win because he was Irish-Catholic, or in spite of it?
It is understandable how Senator Obama, who is very much the political descendent of JFK (good-looking, charismatic, a great writer, an amazing speaker, and a formidable intellect), frustrates the Clintons. But let’s not pretend race buoys a man who assuredly receives death threats from the Klan and who requires a security detail that rivals the current president’s. Likewise understand that of all the candidates, Barack Obama alone is the one who can’t afford too “racialized” a campaign, necessitating him to run from the word “race” as if it were a stick of dynamite.
Though I’m confident that Senator Clinton and Senator Obama would both hold fast to the Democratic platform if either became the party’s nominee, this race has shown that one of these two candidates has abandoned the progressive spirit underpinning the Democratic party itself, and that apostate is Hillary Clinton. Both candidates are brilliant minds, but Barack Obama is in addition eloquent, sincere, inspiring and black; in short, a photonegative of George W. Bush–and Hillary.
Mar. 12, 2008
wednesday morning
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
10:02 am
aunt sandy sent me an e-mail last week entitled “this is really funny,” but i was too busy reading about the election to bother with the trivialness of funny.
but we know that funny is important. and what she sent me was, indeed, very funny.
MYSTERIOUS WATER LEAK PROBLEM
Jennifer and Jim kept getting huge water bills. They knew beyond a doubt that the bills weren’t representative of their actual usage, and no matter how they tried to conserve, the high bills continued.
Although they could see nothing wrong, they had everything checked for leaks or problems: first the water meter, then outdoor pipes, indoor pipes underground pipes, faucets, toilets, washer, ice maker, etc. – all to no avail. One day Jim was sick and stayed home in bed, but kept hearing water running downstairs.
He finally tore himself from his sick bed to investigate, and stumbled onto the cause of such high water bills. Apparently this was happening all day long when they were not at home Knowing that few would believe him, he later taped a segment of the ‘problem’ for posterity – below is a link to the video. You won’t believe what he discovered!
WATER LEAK
Mar. 11, 2008
buzzflash.com
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
10:45 am
this is the ONLY piece i’ll post today about the election. once again, it’s from wanda, who is great at digging out good stuff to read.
BUZZFLASH EDITOR’S BLOG
Mark Karlin
Editor and Publisher
March 11, 2008hc
When it Comes to the Vice-Presidency, Should Hillary Run on a McCain Ticket?
It is the one inviolable rule of party politics; don’t promote the other party’s candidate at the expense of your own.
In the past couple of weeks, Senator Hillary Clinton has violated that cardinal rule again and again as she personally vouched for the readiness of John McCain to assume the presidency, while belittling Barack Obama as nothing more than a speech.
Here is perhaps the most devastating gift she gave to the Republicans as she patronizingly dismissed Obama:
"I think that since we now know Sen. McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.
“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.
Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold.”
Clinton couldn’t stop herself from praising McCain: The pro-McCain comments were quickly and widely panned — so Clinton repeated them.
James Fallows reported on Wednesday, “In a live CNN interview just now, Sen. Clinton repeated, twice, the ‘Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience, I have a lifetime of experience, Sen. Obama has one speech in 2002’ line. By what logic, exactly, does a member of the Democratic party include the ‘Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience’ part of that sentence?”
Eric Zorn, a normally low-key columnist for the Chicago Tribune, reacted with uncharacteristic alarm: “Last week, I posted twice on a statement by Hillary Clinton that struck me as one of the lowest and most destructive things I’ve ever heard one candidate say about a rival candidate in the same party.”
Former Senator Gary Hart was one of the many long-term party activists who was appalled by Clinton’s pumping up of John McCain while patronizingly dismissing Barack Obama. He decried her comments:
By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party’s nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her.
Former presidential candidate and Senator Bill Bradley was quoted in a London newspaper:
Bradley believes that Clinton will stop at nothing to tear down Obama even if it boosts John McCain, who was confirmed last week as the Republican nominee: “The Clintons do not do long-term planning. They’re total tacticians and right now their focus is on Obama, not McCain.”
Bill Clinton presaged the strategy of his wife when he noted a few weeks ago that Senator Clinton and Senator McCain had deep respect for each other and would run a civilized campaign.
We don’t know what Senator Clinton’s criteria are for the crossing “the commander-in-chief threshold.” The Chicago Tribune pretty much debunked Clinton’s scant claims to foreign policy and military experience, and McCain wants to bomb Iran and continue the war in Iraq for a hundred years. What allowed McCain and Clinton to cross that threshold? It appears to be poor judgment in foreign policy as far as their Senate careers are concerned.
We’ll be further exploring the Clinton-McCain connection in foreign policy and D.C. establishment ties in tomorrow’s BuzzFlash Editor’s Blog, "Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Barack Obama and Judgment Day."
Mar. 10, 2008
one more story...
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
9:33 pm
ok, just one more today, this from the sunday times in england. maybe we should move THERE. it would be easier than france, because of not having to try to speak french. but on the other hand they have pain au chocolat everywhere in france. not to mention the bread & wine.
From The Sunday Times
March 9, 2008
The Clintons, a horror film that never ends
Andrew Sullivan
It’s alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover’s tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . .
Put your own movie analogy in here. Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction – whoosh! she’s back at your throat! – has often occurred to me when covering the Clintons these many years. The Oscars host Jon Stewart compares them to a Terminator: the kind that is splattered into a million tiny droplets of vaporised metal . . . only to pool together spontaneously and charge back at you unfazed.
The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: unkillable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy. You can’t escape; you can’t hide; and you can’t win. And these days, in the kinetic pace of the YouTube campaign, they are like the new 28 Days Later zombies. They come at you really quickly, like bats out of hell. Or Ohio, anyway.
Now all this may seem a little melodramatic. Perhaps it is. Objectively, an accomplished senator won a couple of races – one by a mere 3% – against another senator in a presidential campaign. One senator is still mathematically unbeatable. But that will never capture the emotional toll that the Clintons continue to take on some of us. I’m not kidding. I woke up in a cold sweat early last Wednesday. There have been moments this past week when I have felt physically ill at the thought of that pair returning to power.
Why? I have had to write several columns in this space over the years acknowledging that the substantive legacy of the Clinton administration (with a lot of assist from Newt Gingrich) was a perfectly respectable one: welfare reform, fiscal sanity, prudent foreign policy, leaner government. But remembering the day-to-day psychodramas of those years still floods my frontal cortex with waves of loathing and anxiety. The further away you are from them, the easier it is to think they’re fine. Up close they are an intolerable, endless, soul-sapping soap opera.
The media are marvelling at the Clintons’ several near-death political experiences in this campaign. Hasn’t it occurred to them how creepily familiar all this is? The Clintons live off psychodrama. They both love to push themselves to the brink of catastrophe and then accomplish the last-minute, nail-biting self-rescue. Before too long the entire story becomes about them, their ability to triumph through crisis, even though the crises are so often manufactured by themselves. That is what last week brought back for me. The 1990s – with a war on.
Remember: Bill Clinton could have easily settled the Paula Jones lawsuit years before he put the entire country through the wringer (Jones sued Clinton for sexual harassment alleged to have occurred while he was governor of Arkansas).
Recall: Hillary Clinton could have killed what turned out to be the White-water nonstory at the very outset by disclosing everything she could (the scandal centred on a controversial Arkansas property deal).
Consider: the Clintons could have prepared for primaries and caucuses after February 5 – so-called Super Tuesday, when 24 states held their presidential nomination vote – as any careful candidate would. They chose not to do any of these things. Not because they are incompetent. But because they live to risk.
Politics is also their life. They know nothing else. Most halfway normal people in politics could at some point walk away. Reagan seemed happy to. Not the Clintons. In the words of the American-based British writer Christo-pher Hitchens, these are the kind of people who never want the meeting to end. Hillary Clinton will never concede the race so long as there is even the faintest chance that she can somehow win.
They endure all sorts of humiliation – remember the taped Clinton deposition in the Ken Starr investigation (in which Clinton admitted to the inquiry headed by the far-right prosecutor that he had had an “improper physical relationship” with Monica Lewinsky)? Hillary’s dismissal of the Lewinsky matter as an invention of the right-wing conspiracy? – because they know no other way to live. They have been thinking of this moment since they were in college and being a senator or an ex-president or having two terms in the White House are not sufficient to satiate their sense of entitlement. Even if they have to put their own party through a divisive, bitter, possibly fatal death match, they will never give up. Their country, their party . . . none of this matters compared with them.
The patterns are staggeringly unaltered. Last Thursday The Washing-ton Post ran an article reporting on the almost comic divisions within the Clinton camp: how chaotic the planning had been, how much chief pollster Mark Penn hated all the other advisers, how even in the wake of a sudden victory most of the Clintonites were eager to score rancid points off each other.
The secrecy and paranoia endure too. Releasing tax returns is routine for a presidential candidate. Barack Obama did it some time back. The Clintons still haven’t – and say they won’t for more than another month. Why? They have no explanation. They seem affronted by the question.
When you look at the electoral map if the Clintons run again, you also see a reversion to the old patterns of the 1990s – the patterns that cynical political strategists such as Karl Rove and Dick Morris have been exploiting for two decades. The country – scrambled by the post-baby-boomer pragmatism of Obama – snaps back into classic red-blue mode, with the blue areas denoting Democratic-leaning states around the edge and true red Republican states in the heartlands.
The Clintons are comfortable with this polarisation. They need it. Even when running against a fellow Democrat, they instinctively reach for it. Last week, in response to the Obama camp’s request that they release their tax returns, Clinton’s spokesman called Obama a new Ken Starr. For the Clintons, all Democrats who oppose them are . . . Republicans. And all Republicans are evil.
And evil means that anything the Clintons do in self-defence is excusable – even playing the race card, and the Muslim card, and the gender card, and every sleazy gambit that the politics of fear can come up with. This is how they have arrested the Obama juggernaut. It’s the only game they know how to play.
One is reminded of the words of Bob Dylan: “And here I sit so patiently / Waiting to find out what price / You have to pay to get out of / Going through all these things twice.”
how did it get to be after noon on monday already?
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
12:40 pm
i started my day with very very fast driving over to riverton to record yet another FABULOUS security bank radio ad. this time i managed to read the copy three times in a row, without mistakes, and the whole thing took only ten minutes. i love doing radio ads. i loved the fact that even though my brain was feeling fuzzy and i really wanted to ask for a drink of water, somehow my brain made my mouth say all those words in a row, and sound sincere and enthusiastic.
and then i came home and FOUGHT WITH THE COMPUTER. kevin’s computer, that is. have i mentioned comcast, which has taken over insight, our cable provider? COMCAST TOTALLY TOTALLY SUCKS. i couldn’t send a message using kevin’s computer; the comcast website would’t even come up. kevin is looking around to alternatives for our cable and internet. they also raised our cable rates, of course, and i’m sure the internet rate will go up soon.
for a monday, though, it’s good. fighting with a computer isn’t really much of a fight, because i could just walk into the living room and sit in my comfy chair with my own computer on my lap.
plus DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME has begun. this is always a good thing. on saturday evening i got back from rehearsal and was happily reading the nice e-mails from BARACK OBAMA’S CAMPAIGN, when randy called. he said he was on his way to see “a funny thing happened on the way to the forum,” but it was a quarter to nine, and the show started at eight.
YOU’RE VERY LATE, i told him. but then kevin said that when i was gone he’d changed all the clocks in the house already. so then i had one more hour to do things, because it was still early, even though it was actually late if you were already thinking in terms of sunday.
my friend wanda sent me a GREAT article from the huffington post, and i feel that i must copy it here for you.
(or here’s the link in case you want to obsessively read the many many other blogs about the election there, too): THE MONSTER
The Monster: A Loyal Clinton Soldier Turns in His Badge
Posted March 9, 2008 | 03:37 PM (EST)
She has no idea.
She has no idea how many times I defended her. How many right-leaning friends and relatives I battled with. How many times I played down her shady business deals and penchant for scandals – whether it was Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, Cattle Futures, Web Hubbell, or Norman Hsu. She has no idea how frequently I dismissed her husband’s serial adultery as an unfortunate trait of an otherwise brilliant man. For sixteen years, I was a proud soldier in the legion of “Clinton apologists” – who believed that peace and prosperity were more important than regrettable personality traits.
And then she ran for president.
After seven years of George W. Bush, America is hungry for change. Big change. And let’s face it – Hillary Clinton, the party standard-bearer and former White House denizen – isn’t it. But even after voters coalesced around Barack Obama, handing him eleven straight primaries (twelve, if you count Vermont), she refused to accept the possibility -though math, money and momentum were clearly against her – that the Bush/Clinton Family Band might not be #1 on America’s Billboard chart anymore.
So, rather than step aside and become the hero of her party, she made a strategy decision to go negative in advance of Ohio and Texas. Not just negative – personal. She cynically chided Mr. Obama’s message of hope. She played the victim card. The gender card. The Muslim card. She cried “shame on you, Barack Obama” for his campaign tactics, while (if we’re to believe Matt Drudge) simultaneously floating a picture of him in Somali garb to stir up questions of his patriotism.
She accused Mr. Obama of his own shady business deals (the irony of which nearly ripped a hole in the fabric of space/time). She accused him of being two-faced on NAFTA, when it was her campaign that had winked at the Canadians. She demanded that he “reject” the endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, but remained silent when Rush Limbaugh stirred up votes for her in Texas. And she crafted the now-infamous “3am” attack ad – which used scare tactics to highlight Senator Obama’s perceived lack of experience in foreign affairs. Straight out of the ol' Atwater/Rove playbook. Of course, all of this paled in comparison to her husband’s patronizing, racially insensitive comments earlier in the primary season.
Was this the same Hillary Clinton whose husband ran on the idea that hope was more powerful than fear? The wife of a president who had less foreign policy experience than Barack Obama when he was elected? And exactly which crisis is she referring to when she claims to have more experience? And while we’re at it, where the hell are those tax returns?
It’s clear that Hillary’s back in this thing, at least for the time being. But at what cost? Short of some cataclysmic event, there’s no way either she or Mr. Obama can reach 2,025 delegates in the remaining contests. That means she’s accepted the inevitability of a brokered convention. A convention she’ll almost certainly enter with fewer delegates than her opponent. That raises some important questions:
Will she subvert the will of the voters? Will she turn Denver into a series of shady back-room deals and arm twisting? Will she dispatch her husband to pressure superdelegates into switching allegiances at the last minute? Are we in for, as one pundit put it, a good ol' fashioned “knife fight?”
And if she does manage to secure the nomination, what about the scores of disenfranchised Obama supporters (many of them young people with little loyalty to the Democratic Party)? How will she bring them back into the tent? Hillary seems confident that this can be remedied by offering Mr. Obama a spot on her ticket. Really? And what would his motivation be for accepting? Playing third-fiddle to Bill?
However, if Mr. Obama goes on to secure the nomination, she’ll have handed his rival a treasure trove of sound bites. All John McCain has to do between August and November is play clips of Hillary questioning Obama’s experience and belittling his platitudes. In a way, she’ll have become Mr. McCain’s second running mate.
She’s proven that she cares more about “Hillary” than “unity.” More about defeating Obama than defeating the Republicans. She’s become a political suicide-bomber, happy to blow herself to bits – as long as she takes everyone else with her.
On Friday, one of Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisors, Samantha Power, resigned after calling Senator Clinton “a monster” during an off-the-record exchange. It was an unfortunate slip, but one that echoed the sentiments of many Clinton apologists like me – who’ve watched Hillary’s descent into pettiness and fear-mongering with the heartbreak of a child who grows up to realize that his beloved mother has been a terrible person all along.
Are the conservatives right about the Clintons? Will they do and say anything to get elected?
I don’t know.
All I know is...I’m through apologizing.
Mar. 08, 2008
Barack Obama’s office has watched my video!
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
7:33 pm
after being so annoyed with the nutty/snide comments about my Barack Obama video, i didn’t want to look at the incoming messages from You Tube about it. I ignored a message that was posted Wednesday, but tonight decided to look at the messages because there was yet another one in my inbox and i figured maybe the crazy people wouldn’t be so crazy when writing to me, personally, instead of posting their own diatribes about why they don’t like obama or that they think i’m crazy or whatever.
MY TWO NEW MESSAGES WERE FROM OBAMA’S OFFICE! I can’t tell you how GREAT this felt - i made the video because i figured it would be fun, and i hoped it might get people to pay attention to the message that they should get out and vote. i wanted it to be funny and different, because that’s what i enjoy doing, making people laugh.
i had no idea i’d get all those annoying negative comments. what kind of nasty, humorless person wastes his time and energy saying unpleasant things about something meant to merely make people smile? clearly there are plenty of folks completely devoid of humor out there. too bad for them. i do my best to ignore them.
here’s the message i got from a woman in the Obama office on Wednesday:
Hi Grace,
Thanks for getting in touch and sending us that awesome video!. The support and energy of people like you fuel this movement, so thank you for being integral to the amazing strength of this grassroots campaign–let’s keep it up!
and here’s the message that yet another woman from his office sent me today:
Hi Grace. Thank you for your creativity and enthusiasm. We’re glad that you’ve taken the time to get in touch and share your video.
this woman went on to list the way i can post my video to the obama website. of course i started trying to do that immediately, but i have to use kevin’s computer and it’s saturday night and we had dance rehearsal until a couple of hours ago so i think it can wait till morning.
but THANK YOU OBAMA CAMPAIGN OFFICE. you made my day.
ok then,
Obama supporter grace.
Mar. 06, 2008
happy, happy feet...
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
10:25 pm
i don’t know anybody who won’t be delighted when george bush finally moves right out of the white house...and i believe that includes george himself. i keep seeing him on tv, grinning and guffawing and joking, and tonight on jon stewart they showed him dancing all around. he looks a little nutty, but it must be the huge amount of relief he feels, knowing his days living in that big white place are numbered.
i have quit reading anything online about the presidential race. maybe i’ll start doing it again in a few days, but right now it is too unbearable. i just can’t stand all the blah blah blah.
aside from that...tomorrow, friday. ahhhh. i’m especially looking forward to sitting around in my jammies for a good long time on saturday morning.
you gotta have goals.
ok then,
thursday night grace.
Mar. 04, 2008
france
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
11:48 pm
that’s where we might as well move. i couldn’t bear to watch the results tonight. i looked at them briefly at about 10 o'clock and they were predicting a win for hillary in ohio and i decided that maybe it could change. i thought about that night several years ago when i worked for that political consulting firm in LA, and we were all in a bar in sacramento watching the election results and they said gore won, and then they said bush won, and it kept going on like that, and finally they said gore won, and the one guy at the firm who is a CRAZY repulican stormed out and went to bed. but look what happened there.
so i figured that tonight they needed to keep counting those ohio votes. but i keep having bad feelings about hillary’s vicious and relentless attacks and lies and her manic laughter. i finally turned it back on just now, and thank god i missed her victory speech. but now they’re saying it’s too close to call in texas, that the results of the total delegates won’t be clear until SATURDAY or maybe EVEN LATER, and that obama could end up with more delegates from this whole mess, but hillary will just keep DECLARING VICTORY anyway. and of course she’s going to hang on in the race, and VERY STUPID PEOPLE will believe all her venom that she just keeps spewing like some wild ATTACK DOG.
i can’t stand it, and that’s why i think it is best that we move to france. the only problem is that we can’t fly to france with mollie, so we’ll have to sail to france. which would actually be just fine with me, because i’ve always had a desire to sail across the ocean. i’m not sure how the kitties will enjoy the ride. i don’t know what they do about pets on cruise ships, but i fear that they won’t all get to sleep in our bed with us. not that honey would be agreeable to that anyway.
i’m going to bed. i don’t think i’m going to get up and obsessively read all the stories in the morning.
france. bonjour, france. i need a croissant.
ok then,
grace.
...here on a snowy tuesday...
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
4:51 pm
on the news last night they kept saying HUGE STORM A COMIN' - FROM SIX A.M. TILL SIX P.M. TOMORROW IT’S GONNA SNOW SNOW SNOW.
i woke up this morning expecting to look out and see gobs of snow on the ground.
but, nothing.
i drove to an appointment, no snow.
but less than an hour later i was driving home and it started to snow. it didn’t look consequential at all, but then the flakes got bigger. as i drove down veteran’s parkway, suddenly it was coming down ridiculously hard and it was impossible to see up ahead and snow was covering the pavement.
so here i am at home now, watching the snow fall the the wind whip all around.
was it really 72 degrees just two days ago?
because it’s march, though, it’s bound to get warm again sometime soon. except for the temperatures in the teens that are expected this week.
maybe rehearsal will be cancelled tonight. i’m in “victor victoria,” in case i haven’t mentioned it before. it’s going to be at the hoogland at the end of the month, dinner theater. i’m in the chorus, which means i have to both SING and DANCE, which i haven’t had to do in about...many many years. it’s actually kind of fun, though, the singing and dancing.
well, the dancing, anyway...even though it is a musical, the music director is also the music director of a show that’s going on at the same time, so we haven’t seen her in a few weeks. last night she was back, plus we also had a piano player for the first time...ever? and it was interesting to sing the songs again. we haven’t tried singing and dancing both together, yet. soon, hopefully. i only have to sing three songs, not much. one of the dances is kind of like tap dancing, without the tap shoes. modified tap. it’s a fun dance except VERY VERY FAST.
the director of the play, matt schwartz, is 22 years old. TWENTY TWO. i couldn’t have directed a play at 22. i did manage to direct a movie at 31, but a lot of stuff happened in those nine years for me. at 22, i couldn’t have directed anything. but matt, he’s a very old 22. he doesn’t look OLD, per se, but he just seems to have it all together, pretty much, especially for somebody so young. besides directing, he’s also doing his own choreography. he shows us the steps, and he doesn’t seem to have anything written down at all, but his memory seems infinitely large. i find this incredible, but the thing that is really nice is he clearly has a vision of how he wants things, and he’s cheerful and polite, most of the time.
another funny thing about the production is that matt’s mom, barb, is the lead, and his brother, brett is also in the show. one night we were rehearsing a dance but not that many people were there, and i pointed out that half of the people dancing were schwartzes. it’s also funny because matt will say, “ok, you stand there, and mom, you do this...” i bet there has never been a play around here directed by a son with his mom playing the lead.
if rehearsal isn’t cancelled, then i will be forced to sit around and worry about the primary results. last night after a not very good day, i got home and wanted to watch jon stewart’s “the daily show” but was horrified to see that hillary was the guest, via satellite from austin, and she continued to talk throughout the entire rest of the show.
luckily randy called me so i didn’t have to actually listen to her.
randy, by the way...at this very moment randy is stuck in a ditch outside of decatur. he had to drive there for work and when it started to snow i told him YOU SHOULD COME HOME, but he felt he had to do a few more things. so now there he is in the ditch. a cop or a sheriff or somebody in an unmarked car is now sitting next to him, and in between randy in the ditch and the guy in the car, four cars have skidded off the road and run in between them.
so it’s a little bit dicey for randy right now. but i know he’ll pull through it. but he won’t be in a very good mood.
ok then,
snowy grace.
Mar. 03, 2008
judging, judgement, judges everywhere...
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
2:23 pm
i saw in my ibox that there were two new comments on you tube about my barack obama video. a video i made because i thought it would be fun, and funny, and people would be entertained.
i’ve started dreading getting the e-mails saying there are new comments. one guy wrote that i needed to have my head examined. another guy thought the video was funny but then wrote that people are only endorsing obama because of his skin color. yet another guy, or should i just say another asshole, just went on and ON about why he hates obama.
it’s just depressing. why do they bother to post these comments? i guess the cretin who just hates obama wasn’t making a comment about the video, but instead wants any forum to spew his hatred for obama.
depressing. besides the fact that today it is cold and grey and getting colder and is going to snow and sleet later.
i think there’s a GOOD REASON i start feeling blue on sunday nights. because then there’s monday.
kevin is sleeping now because in addition to the knee injury, he’s also getting more and more sick.
blue monday.
ok then,
grace.
Mar. 02, 2008
ok, this is the last one tonight, i promise...
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
10:44 pm
...because i’m shutting the computer and going to bed RIGHT NOW. first, though, there is this article in the Independent, the british newspaper.
Independent.co.uk
An American President: My friend, Barack Obama
As the Illinois Senator stands on the brink of the Democratic nomination, Cass R Sunstein, his colleague for 15 years, offers a fascinating insight into what makes this trailblazing politician tick
Sunday, 2 March 2008
Not so long ago, the phone rang in my office. It was Barack Obama. For over a decade, Obama was a colleague of mine at the University of Chicago Law School. He is also a friend. But since his election to the Senate, he does not exactly call every day.
On this occasion, he had an important topic to discuss: the controversy over President Bush’s warrantless surveillance of international telephone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists. I had written a short essay suggesting that the surveillance might be lawful. Before taking a public position, Obama wanted to talk the problem through.
In the space of about 20 minutes, he and I investigated the legal details. He asked me to explore all sorts of issues: the President’s power as Commander-in-Chief, the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Authorisation for Use of Military Force and more. Obama wanted to consider the best possible defence of what Bush had done. To every argument I made, he listened and offered a counter-argument. After the issue had been exhausted, Obama said that he thought the programme was illegal, but now had a better understanding of both sides. He thanked me for my time.
This was a pretty amazing conversation, not only because of Obama’s mastery of the legal details, but also because many prominent Democratic leaders had already blasted the Bush initiative as blatantly illegal. He did not want to take a public position until he had listened to, and explored, what might be said on the other side. This is the Barack Obama I have known for nearly 15 years – a careful and even-handed analyst of law and policy, unusually attentive to multiple points of view.
The University of Chicago Law School is by far the most conservative of the great American law schools. It helped to provide the academic foundations for many positions of the Reagan administration. But at the University of Chicago, Obama is liked and admired by Republicans and Democrats alike. Some of the local Reagan enthusiasts are Obama supporters. Why? It doesn’t hurt that he’s a great guy, with a personal touch and a lot of warmth. It certainly helps that he is exceptionally able. But niceness and ability are only part of the story. Obama also has a genuinely independent mind, he’s a terrific listener and he goes wherever reason takes him.
Those of us who have long known Obama are impressed and not a little amazed by his rhetorical skills. Who could have expected that our colleague, a teacher of law, is also able to inspire large crowds? The Obama we know is no rhetorician; he shines because of his problem-solving abilities, his creativity and his attention to detail. In recent weeks, his speaking talents, and the increasingly cult-like atmosphere that surrounds him, have led people to wonder whether there is substance behind the eloquent plea for “change” – whether the soaring phrases might disguise a kind of emptiness and vagueness. But nothing could be further from the truth. He is most comfortable in the domain of policy and detail.
I do not deny that sceptics are raising legitimate questions. After all, Obama has served in the Senate for a short period (less than four years) and he has little managerial experience. Is he really equipped to lead the most powerful nation in the world?
The United States is in the midst of a kind of Obamamania, in which a series of wonderful speeches and unexpected victories have created a storm of enthusiasm, sometimes verging on hysteria. Some people think that the fervour is thin, and could abate as fast as it has arisen. Even if it persists, the very enthusiasm that accounts for Obama’s political success might have unfortunate effects on his ability to lead, if elected. It will undoubtedly raise expectations to an unrealistic degree, both domestically and internationally.
Obama speaks of “change”, but will he be able to produce large-scale changes in a short time? What if he fails? An independent issue is that all the enthusiasm might serve to insulate him from criticisms and challenges on the part of his own advisers – and, in view of his relative youth, criticisms and challenges are exactly what he requires.
Fortunately, the candidate’s campaign proposals offer strong and encouraging clues about how he would govern; what makes them distinctive is that they borrow sensible ideas from all sides. In this sense, he is not only focused on details but is also a uniter, both by inclination and on principle.
Transparency and accountability matter greatly to him; they are a defining feature of his proposals. With respect to the mortgage crisis and the debate over credit markets, Obama rejects heavy-handed regulation and insists on disclosure, so that consumers will know exactly what they are getting. It is highly revealing that he worked with Republican (and arch-conservative) Tom Coburn to produce legislation creating a publicly searchable database of all federal spending.
Obama’s healthcare plan places a premium on cutting costs and on making care affordable, without requiring adults to purchase health insurance. (He would require mandatory coverage only for children.) Republican legislators are unlikely to support a mandatory approach, and his plan can be understood, in part, as a recognition of political realities. But it is also a reflection of his keen interest in freedom of choice.
Obama acknowledges that large increases in the minimum wage might “discourage employers from hiring more workers”. It should not be surprising that in terms of helping low-income workers, he has long been enthusiastic about an approach, pioneered by Republicans, that supplements wages but does not threaten to throw people out of work. In combining concern for the disadvantaged with an appreciation of free markets, he rejects old-style leftism, and his approach sometimes overlaps with the Third Way thinking associated with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.
But Obama is not a compromiser; he does not try to steer between the poles (or the polls). Both internationally and domestically, he is willing to think big and to be bold. He publicly opposed the war in Iraq at a time when opposition was unpopular. He favours high-level meetings with some of the world’s worst dictators. He would rethink the embargo against Cuba. He wants to hold an unprecedented national auction for the right to emit greenhouse gases.
These are points about policies and substance. As president, Obama would set a new tone in US politics. He refuses to demonise his political opponents; deep in his heart, I believe, he doesn’t even think of them as opponents. It would not be surprising to find Republicans and independents prominent in his administration. Obama wants to know what ideas are likely to work, not whether a Democrat or a Republican is responsible for them. Recall the most memorable passage from his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention: “We coach Little League [baseball] in the blue [Democratic-voting] states, and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.”
In his book The Audacity of Hope, he asks for a politics that accepts “the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point”. Remarking that ordinary Americans “don’t always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal”, Obama wants politicians “to catch up with them”. Rejecting one of the most intense and seemingly unbridgeable divisions in American politics, he writes of “the middle-aged feminist who still mourns her abortion, and the Christian woman who paid for her teenager’s abortion”. After he received an email from a pro-life doctor, Obama recalls how he softened his website’s harsh rhetoric on abortion, writing: “[T]hat night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own – that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me.”
In short, Obama’s own approach is insistently charitable. He assumes decency and good faith on the part of those who disagree with him. And he wants to hear what they have to say. Both in substance and in tone, Obama questions the conventional political distinctions between “the left” and “the right”. To the extent that he is attracting support from Republicans and independents, it is largely for this reason.
Obama’s unusual background undoubtedly plays a significant role here. He is, after all, a child of a woman from Kansas and a man from Kenya, an African-American who spent several years being raised by his white grandparents. A former community organiser with extensive experience in the inner city, he became president of the Harvard Law Review and worked for much of his career at the University of Chicago. He knows that simple divisions badly disserve human realities.
From knowing Obama for many years, I have no doubts about his ability to lead. He knows a great deal, and he is a quick learner. Even better, he knows what he does not know, and there is no question that he would assemble an accomplished, experienced team of advisers. His brilliant administration of his own campaign provides helpful evidence here. But there is some fragility to the public fervour that envelops him. Crowds and cults can be fickle, and if some of his decisions disappoint, or turn out badly, his support will diminish. Some people think it might even collapse.
My own concern involves the importance of internal debate. The greatest American presidents benefited from robust dialogue and from advisers who were willing to say: “Mr President, your thinking about this is all wrong.” Because Obama himself is exceptionally able, and because so many people are treating him as a near-messiah, his advisers might be too deferential, too unwilling to question. There is a real risk here. But I believe that his humility, and his intense desire to seek out dissenting views, will prove crucial safeguards.
In the 2000 campaign, George W Bush proclaimed himself a “uniter, not a divider”, only to turn out the most divisive President in memory. Because of his own certainty, and his lack of curiosity about what others might think, Bush polarised the nation. Many of his most ambitious plans went nowhere as a result.
As president, Barack Obama would be a genuine uniter. If he proves able to achieve great things, for his nation and for the world, it will be above all for that reason.
Maureen Dowd
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
9:29 pm
ok, i had to start looking for stories, and i really like this piece by maureen dowd of the new york times:
Op-Ed Columnist
A Wake-Up Call for Hillary
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 2, 2008
SAN ANTONIO
Channeling her inner Cheney, Hillary Clinton dropped a fear bomb, as Michelle Obama might call it, implying in a new ad that if her opponent is elected, your angelic, innocent, sleeping children could die in a terrorist attack.
Only she has the wise head to go nuclear, should that Strangelovian phone call from a power-mad Putin come into the White House at 3 a.m. Her ad shows how composed she would be at the dread moment when she picks up the phone. Her nuke look is feminine, in a tailored camel-colored jacket and gold necklace, yet serious, in Tina Fey black reading glasses.
It’s hard to discern the message of the ad. The scariest thing is not the persistently ringing phone but an Andrea Yates-looking mother who’s creeping up on the sleeping babes in the dark. The point can’t be that Hillary is superior to Obama in international crisis management, because she’s done no more of it than he has. She’s only done domestic crisis management, cleaning up after Frisky Bill.
Is the message that Hillary is Ready on Night One? That she won’t have to waste any time if she’s rousted out of bed in the wee hours, because she’s wearing a pantsuit under her pantsuit? (Or is it just, as Wesley Clark said during an appearance with her in Waco on Friday, that Hillary’s “been in the White House when the tough decisions were made. I guess you’ve been at the bedside when that phone rang at 3 a.m.”)
It’s rather Mommie Dearest for the first serious female contender to try to give the kiddies nightmares. How maternal is that? But since her nightmare is losing, she doesn’t mind scaring the pj’s off of little Jimmy and Johnny.
Obambi-No-More briskly dismissed Hillary’s attempt to cast him as a global ingénue. “Senator Clinton may not be aware, but we already had a red phone moment,” he said at an outdoor rally here, with the crowd of 8,000 booing at the mention of Hillary’s ad. “It was the decision to invade Iraq. Senator Clinton picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer. And John McCain picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer. And George Bush picked up the phone and gave the wrong answer.”
(In fact, there is no red phone in the Oval Office, but maybe Obama will redecorate. He wants to put in a hoops court.)
On “Nightline” last week, Hillary once more wallowed in gender inequities, asserting that it’s harder for her to run than her opponent — a black man with an exotic name that most Americans hadn’t even heard a year ago.
“Every so often I just wish that it were a little more of an even playing field,” she said, “but, you know, I play on whatever field is out there.”
Is that how she would deal with dictators, by playing the refs and going before the U.N. to demand: “How come you’re not asking Ahmadinejad these questions first?”
Tangled in her own victimhood, she snipped to Cynthia McFadden that Obama had written in his book that “he’s a blank screen and people of widely different views project what they want to believe onto him.” She said voters were projecting their hopes onto that blank screen even though “he just hasn’t been around long enough.”
In the next breath, asked about the women who feel sorry for her, she said: “I think a lot of women project their own feelings and their lives on to me, and they see how hard this is. It’s hard. It’s hard being a woman out there.”
So projection is bad with Obama but good with her?
On a conference call Friday with Hillary’s ever-more-hysterical male strategists, Slate’s John Dickerson asked exactly when she had been tested in a foreign policy crisis. After a silence long enough to knit a sweater in, as the Web site The Hotline put it, Mark Penn cited “her work on the Armed Services Committee.”
Hillary’s boys pout that the press should find some dirt on Obama before time runs out. Their once fearsome campaign is now reduced to whining that Obama did not hold any substantive hearings of his Subcommittee on European Affairs. What’s next? Bitterly complaining that he missed a quorum call?
Hillary keeps trying to dismiss Obama’s appeal as emotional, something that can be overcome with enough mental discipline. But behind that ethereal presence he’s a wonky lawyer, just like Hillary. He reads The Times and Philip Roth and talks about the fine points of Medicare Part B in a way W. never could have when he first ran for president. (Or now.)
Hillary’s visceral attacks will not work. And the Republicans’ visceral attacks on the Obamas’ patriotism, and their usual attempt to make the Democrat seem foreign (Hussein, Hussein, Hussein!), may not have the same traction.
The president took the country to war on his gut, exploited our fears and played the patriotism card to advance his political agenda.
This time, Americans may prefer cerebral arguments to visceral ones. What a refreshing change reality would be.
the way things could really be around here....
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
9:13 pm
today it was SEVENTY TWO degrees outside. when mollie and i went running she got hot and i had to keep giving her water. on the bitingly cold days we’ve been running this winter she was always hurrying along, straining at the leash, making me feel slow and cold and not so happy about the whole outside thing.
but today...today i trimmed the rose bushes, i threw piles of leaves on the mulch pile, i had a great time outside.
one perfectly fine day.
tonight it’s going to get colder and colder. 45 at six a.m., but then by noon it’s supposed to be 32, with snow/rain. so if i was going to get up at six i could go running, but i think maybe that won’t happen.
at least today was spectacular.
last night’s birthdday dinner for mom was fun, despite people dropping like flies. jim is so sick that he didn’t even come over, randy was exhausted because he stayed out late/got up too early, amy was tired from working all day, kevin was tired from doing too much plus he’s also getting sick...
but the lemon cheesecake was a big hit, also the poppy seed lemon cake with lemon frosting. plus there were plenty of gifts for mom.
after watching “meet the press” this morning and being annoyed with james carville who kept hemming and hawing and trying to say that things aren’t over for hillary, i didn’t want to waste any time inside, so i haven’t kept up with any breaking stories about the campaign. i hope obama did ok without my constant surveillance of the situation.
ok then, good luck with your monday morning,
sunday night grace
Mar. 01, 2008
on a lighter note...
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
10:05 am
RICKY GERVAIS! this man is incredibly funny. he created the original “the office” series in britain, as well as starring in and directing it. then he turned the series into an american version, and writes/produces is. and he created another series in britain called “extras,” and it’s SO FUNNY. i read about this show somewhere, and then i just signed up for NETFLIX, where you get videos delivered to your door. i’ve only seen the first three episodes of “extras,” but they’re all great. in the series, ricky plays an extra in movies, and in the first episodes they’re all serious period pieces. his friend on the show is the actress ashley jensen, who is the irishwoman christina on “ugly betty.”
in the first episode, kate winslet is a nun in a very heavy movie, but kate spends her time giving ashley tips on stuff to say to ashley’s boyfriend, who wants her to talk dirty to him on the phone. all of kate’s very helpful tips are given with her dressed as a nun. very very funny.
this, and the english version of the office, are funny and edgy and being able to watch them seems worth the price of netflix. if you sign up for it, you get a two-week free trial, by the way.
ok then,
saturday morning about to be very very productive but i’m already tired just thinking about it,
grace
just one little clinton thing this morning...
[
General ] -
grace -
grace@graceuncensored.com
@
9:40 am
i found this story from a reader comment on a wall street journal story. it certainly should tell women who want to vote for hillary because she’s a woman and who think she’s all about women that something is very wrong in their thinking. i would like to send it to tina fey, who was very PRO HILLARY on saturday night live last week and continues to make me mad about that.
this is from nbc:
CLINTON DONATIONS FROM TROUBLED FIRM
Posted: Friday, February 29, 2008 5:47 PM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under: 2008, Clinton
From NBC’s Lisa Myers and Jim Popkin
Sen. Hillary Clinton has declined to return $170,000 in campaign contributions from individuals at a company accused of widespread sexual harassment, and whose CEO is a disbarred lawyer with a criminal record, federal campaign records show.
The federal government has accused the Illinois management consulting firm, International Profit Associates, or IPA, of a brazen pattern of sexual harassment including “sexual assaults,” "degrading anti-female language" and “obscene suggestions.”
In a 2001 lawsuit full of lurid details, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claims that 103 women employees at IPA were victimized for years. The civil case is ongoing, and IPA vigorously denies the allegations.
“This is by far, hands down, the worst case I’ve ever experienced,” said Diane Smason, one of the EEOC lawyers handling the lawsuit. “Every woman there experienced sex harassment, they were part of a hostile work environment of sex harassment. And this occurred from the top down.”
Sen. Clinton’s spokesman, Howard Wolfson, told NBC News in a statement that the senator decided to keep the funds because the lawsuit is “ongoing” and because none of the sexual harassment allegations has been proven in court.
“With regard to the pending harassment suit, as a general matter, the campaign assesses findings of fact in deciding whether to return contributions,” Wolfson said.
0.586 [powered by b2.]
|
|
  |
|
