Why the Kennedys Are Endorsing Obama

Senator Edward Kennedy has decided to endorse Barack Obama for President, saying he wants a President who "can make us believe again." Over the weekend John F. Kennedy's daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, announced her support for Obama, saying he reminded her of her father. Kennedy's speech writer Ted Sorenson asked what he could do for Obama last year, hoping no doubt that after the election Obama will ask what he can do for Sorenson. Like Kennedy, Obama is young, handsome and inspiring and he represents the passing of the torch to a new generation. But it is not just that Obama reminds them of Kennedy, it is also that the Clintons remind them of Lyndon Johnson. And if there is anything that the Kennedys don't like, it's a bunch of hillbillies in the White House, which is being kept in trust until a competent Kennedy can be groomed to take it back for its rightful owners. Until that time Obama will do.

Like Johnson, the Clintons play politics like it was mud wrestling or the roller derby, while the Kennedys have always believed that politics should be like a friendly game of touch football or beanbag. They never had to get down in the dirt with their opponents. Their father and his friends always took care of that for them.

When Hillary Clinton pointed out that it took Lyndon Johnson to get the Civil Rights bill passed, she was not only insulting Martin Luther King but also JFK, who did all the hard work of asking southern Democrats very politely to please vote for the Civil Rights bill, which they might have done some time in future as soon as they looked into their consciences and realized it was the right thing to do. Then Kennedy died and Johnson stepped in, rudely cajoling people and threatening to show them his scar unless they voted for it. Is that the kind of politics we want in America? Of course, if Kennedy had lived he also would have awakened one day and realized, unlike Johnson, that all of his advisers were not the best and the brightest but were really a bunch of dopes and he would have stood up to them and got us out of Vietnam.

In 1968 Robert Kennedy tried to take the White House back from the dumb hick who had taken it over by a fluke of history, but he was killed, too, before he got the chance. Ted Kennedy tried to save the country from another country bumpkin who got the keys to their house in 1980, but he lost to Jimmy Carter in the primaries. At first the Kennedys let Bill Clinton burnish their image by showing the photo of how he was somehow able to sneak his way into the White House to shake President Kennedy's hand when he was a young man. Now the Kennedys are saying enough is enough.

No one loved the Kennedys and hated Johnson more than liberals and the liberal media and they feel the same way about the Clintons. "Is the right right on the Clintons?" liberal pundit Jonathan Chait asks in an article in the Los Angeles Times. For years conservatives have been saying that the Clintons give politics a bad name. We look back with nostalgia to a time when gentlemanly Democrats like Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey lost elections with grace and dignity. They didn't go around smearing their opponents and cynically triangulating the way the Clintons do. Now many liberals and members of the liberal media are coming around to thinking we've been right all along.

Although Republicans do not love the Kennedys the way liberals do, we hate Johnson and the Clintons more. Like many northeastern liberals we hate the way Johnson and the Clintons seem to believe unfairly that Americans are a bunch of racists. Unlike Johnson and the Clintons, Republicans are completely colorblind and never think of race at all. After the Civil Rights bill passed many southern Democrats were so tired of the way Johnson crudely and repeatedly flashed the Race Card that they became Republicans. President Nixon never mentioned race at all in his battles against busing and crime. President Reagan, who paid silent tribute to three Civil Rights workers who were killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, when he launched his campaign there, never used the Race Card either when he fought against Welfare Queens and quotas. The first President Bush loved black people except when they were criminals like Willie Horton and his son appointed black people like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice to his cabinet and felt really bad about all the black people who died in New Orleans.

And you don't see divisive racial battles in the Republican primary. None of the candidates has even mentioned the fact that Alan Keyes is black. When Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York he lowered crime, which disproportionately affects black people, by giving more power to the police and ended all the racial divisiveness that erupted during the previous black mayor's term. Mitt Romney feels really comfortable around black people probably because his father marched with Martin Luther King, which affected his son so much that he imagined he was there, and how he did cry tears of joy when the Mormon Church announced that black people were no longer considered evil and his maid wouldn't have to go to hell after all. Governor Mike Huckabee stood up for the rights of all the people of South Carolina, black, white, brown, yellow and green, not to be told by white northern elites that they can't have the Confederate flag flying on their state buildings, which is a historical symbol of their unique culture going all the way back to 1962. And all the Republican candidates have fought very hard for the rights of African-Americans not to have their low-paying jobs taken away by illegal immigrants.

Conservatives are really appalled at the way the Clintons are injecting race into this campaign. In a piece in Red State called "Democrats: The Party of the Klan?" Eric Erickson writes, "They are always claiming that Republicans are racist, but it is looking more and more like the Democratic Party, to its core foundation, is racist." In South Carolina the Clintons threw everything at Obama they could think of except pointing out that he fathered a black child. Republicans are offended by such down-and-dirty politics, which reminds them of the time they had to employ Lee Atwater to counter all the dirt the Democrats were putting out, which even Atwater himself regretted as soon as he was dying. His protégée Karl Rove no doubt was also troubled by all the dirty politics that erupted in campaigns he was involved with, which could never be traced back to him since he had nothing to do with it at all.

Many conservatives are saying nice things about Barack Obama, even though he is liberal and black, which they probably don't even realize, because they long for the days before the Clintons ruined politics. "I tell you, he almost had me tonight until he talked about the war that shouldn't have been authorized and reminded me there are real policy issues at stake in this election!" gushed Kathryn Jean Lopez in The Corner. "But listening to his inspirational, rallying speech tonight it's clear and obvious that if he's the nominee, he will be tough to beat." Andrew Sullivan, who makes no secret of his hatred for the Clintons, has endorsed Obama. Unlike the Clintons and many white Democrats, they don't see him as the black candidate. Almost 25% of white voters voted for Obama in the South Carolina primary and if he is nominated he may even get a few white votes in the general election, though probably not enough to win. That's because race is no longer an issue for voters in the South and it really is rude of the Clintons to subtly imply that it is, if that's what they were doing and we know it was because the media has constantly pointed it out.

I think everyone is tired of the kind of politics the Clintons represent, which sees voters as easily manipulated racist dupes and does not appeal to the better angels of their nature the way Barack Obama does. Conservatives are really hoping that the Democrats nominate Obama because he gives us a chance to heal the wounds that the mean-spirited Clintons have inflicted on the body politic. Conservatives would relish the chance to debate about ideas again. I can assure you that I and my fellow conservative bloggers and pundits will not go digging around for mud to throw at him. We won't spread rumors that he's a Muslim or bring up past drug use or go looking through his books Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope for contradictions we can exploit.

That was the old kind of politics, which is entirely the fault of the Clintons. We want to transcend that. I agree with Bob Kerrey that it is great that Obama went to a madrassa and I think Hussein is a very nice middle name. I think it's about time we had a President who admits to using cocaine in the past so that he can tell our youth from experience how bad it is. Conservatives can all get behind a man who talks so movingly about faith even if his church does have some wacky ideas about white people being devils and it once honored Louis Farrakhan. And I think we'll all forget that he is black and best buddies with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. If the Democrats nominate Obama conservatives will relish the chance to talk about issues and make the election as he says not "about black and white but about the past and future." Who couldn't be stirred by that kind of rhetoric?

Of course, we won't vote for Obama in the general election but that will only be because he is a tax-and-spend liberal who wants to surrender in Iraq, is against executing murderers and wants to impose gay marriage on everyone. In other words, we will just point out that we have a few policy differences with him. We relish the chance to debate the nuances of Obama's policy proposals and we'll be relieved not to have to drill into the heads of voters simplistic demeaning labels the way we had to do when we constantly referred to John Kerry as a flip-flopper and Al Gore as a phony. And the media will be happy not to have to repeat these charges in every story they write, which must have gotten kind of boring for them. Instead, they will be able to write the kinds of long thought pieces about issues that matter to people, which is what journalists really want to do. Conservatives will be so grateful to actually be able to finally debate the issues in a civil manner that we won't even mention all the other troubling stuff about Obama. You can trust us.

Update: It appears I have scooped the mainstream media if The Washington Post's Mary Ann Akers is correct about the reason Kennedy endorsed Obama.

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Barack Obama, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, 2008 Election, Republicans, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Lee Atwater, Bush, Nixon, Alan Keyes, Politics

Presidential Crossdressing

Back in the days when girls were girls and men were men (except when they were kidding around at USO shows, in Bohemian Grove or in prison), Republicans were Republicans and Democrats were Democrats. But in the 2008 Presidential campaign it seems like all the nominees are a bunch of political crossdressers, and I'm not just talking about Rudy Giuliani.

"Is this the Republican primary or a John Edwards rally?" asked the National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez, who has always preferred manly men and womanly women. She was referring to this Mike Huckabee comment at a rally in Michigan: "For those of us for whom summer is not a verb, for those of us who didn't go to fancy boarding schools on the east coast, for those of us who didn't grow up with a silver spoon, who were lucky to have a spoon — ask those folks and they'll tell you the economy is not doing well for them." Since when did Republicans care about working-class people?

Unfortunately, Ms. Lopez's schoolgirl crush on Mitt Romney (which, at least, is properly directed at a man and not at other schoolgirls) somehow blinded her to a statement by Romney in the very same article she linked to. "I want to bring Michigan back," said Romney. "I'm not willing to sit back and say, 'too bad for Michigan. Too bad for the car industry. Too bad for the people who've lost their jobs; they're gone forever. That's not the kind of pessimism I think that will make Michigan strong again.'" I'm not quite sure how she missed this quote, which was roundly attacked by other Republicans who asserted that not only would Romney not be able to bring their jobs back, he shouldn't try or even care. A real Republican should sound like Rep. Michele Bachman of Minnesota who said in a statement supporting the Middle Class Protection Act, which would protect the middle class by giving corporations a 25% tax cut that will eventually trickle down to the workers who still have jobs: "I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We’re the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs."

Why are Huckabee and Romney showing sympathy for people who can't even find one job instead of saluting those who have two the way Rep. Bachman is? Yet some pundits even claimed that Romney's show of support for these lazy Michigan nonworkers was the reason for his victory and blamed McCain's very manly and straight straight talk, telling Michigan workers that their "jobs aren't coming back," for his loss there. Although McCain is walking the straight and narrow now, he has spent much of his political career as a political crossdresser, opposing conservative judges and torture, and supporting campaign finance reform and immigrants.

Michelle Malkin, who calls Mike Huckabee "an open borders drag queen" and despises John McCain, wants a real man to run for President. She wants someone who will not be afraid to deport all the illegal immigrants and kiss away the Latino vote for generations or to tell people who have lost their homes to "suck it up" and get used to living in the street, and has turned her blog into a personal ad for the man of her dreams. "I need a man," she writes. "A man who can say 'No.' A man who rejects Big Nanny government. A man who thinks being president doesn’t mean playing Santa Claus. A man who won’t panic in the face of economic pain. A man who won’t succumb to media-driven sob stories. A man who can look voters, the media, and the Chicken Littles in Congress in the eye and say the three words no one wants to hear in Washington: Suck. It. Up." But so far it looks like Malkin's desire for a real man has gone unquenched and she will have to make do with her husband.

Giuliani, of course, is not only a real crossdresser but the leading political crossdresser in the race. He has supported gun control, abortion, gay civil unions, immigrants and Democrats. In fact, he was a Democrat until 1975 and his flirtation with the party was no youthful indiscretion. In 1994 he endorsed Mario Cuomo, the Democrat governor over the Republican candidate George Pataki. Giuliani only sounds like a Republican when he is bashing terrorists with his handbag.

Republicans are not the only political crossdressers in this contest. Sometimes if you close your eyes and listen to what the Democrat candidates are saying, they sound just like Republicans. During the debate in Nevada the moderator Tim Russert gave all the candidates a chance to talk about gun control and they all sounded like members of the NRA. The candidates all support the death penalty with the exception of Dennis Kucinich. Only Kucinich supports gay marriage. Suddenly, they all seem to want to get tough on immigration and they don't seem so eager to talk about Iraq anymore. And while it's been years since Mike Huckabee said that a woman should be subservient to her husband and Ron Paul called African-Americans "animals," over the last couple weeks Hillary Clinton has been accused of insulting Martin Luther King and John Edwards has been charged with speculating whether a woman is too weak to be President in a swipe at Hillary. Who knew that Democrats would be split over issues of race and gender?

But while no pictures of Barack Obama in women's clothes have surfaced (though no doubt the Clinton campaign and their good friend Robert Johnson are looking for them), Obama wins the Hasty Pudding award as the most crossdressingest candidate after Giuliani with his sudden transformation into a Reagan Democrat. "I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not," said Obama. "He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." It is unclear what voters Obama is trying to win over with his salute to Ronald Reagan since most Reagan Democrats are now Republicans and they already think Obama is dangerous. Most Democrats nowadays would probably prefer a candidate who would call Reagan "an evil son of a bitch" as Glenn Beck recently called Franklin Roosevelt but Obama is too nice to do that. Although Obama's remarks apparently started off as a way of insulting Bill Clinton by comparing him unfavorably with Reagan, it appears that his dislike for Clinton has begun to eat away at his brain as it has many in the media. When he tells us that Calvin Coolidge is his favorite President, we will know that he has finally lost it completely.

Voting is confusing enough without candidates trying to mix us up even more by trying to appeal across the aisle so much that their contortions make them resemble Rose Mary Woods. What happened to giving voters a clear choice? Isn't that the purpose of the two-party system? Perhaps this is why some people are trying to draft New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, a man who feels strongly about nothing except his crusade to outlaw smoking (which Mike Huckabee can't even keep a consistent position on). Although his candidacy could get a bump if Obama gets the nomination and someone snaps a photo of him sneaking a cigarette after he claimed that he had given up smoking, it's difficult to see who Bloomberg's constituency would be other than other billionaires. Faced with a choice between a Republican who sounds like a Democrat, a Democrat who sounds like a Republican and someone who doesn't have a party and doesn't seem to have any opinions at all, this election may make us all as confused as those Florida senior citizens who accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan in 2000.

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, 2008 Election, Republicans, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama, Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Ron Paul, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Michael Bloomberg, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Michele Bachman, Politics

Iowa Caucus Results Explained

As anyone who watched the pundits on the cable news channels knows, the Iowa caucuses are not like other elections. The presidential nominating process is pretty complicated itself, but very few people other than pundits who have spent years analyzing them understand the Iowa caucuses. The winners of the Iowa caucuses are not decided by who comes in first but instead by a very complex mathematical formula that calculates the quantum spin of the vote, which can be pretty confusing to the layman. It has to be complicated to make it difficult for people to steal the election and more unlikely that voters will get angry and kill each other, the way they do other, less civilized countries where people understand what is going on. So in order to make the results of the Iowa caucuses a little easier for most people to understand, here are some simple explanations of who the real winners and losers were:

Republicans

1) The big winner was John McCain. McCain came in a very strong fourth with a whopping 13% of the vote, which makes him the man to beat in New Hampshire. In fact, he might have won the entire election last night. By giving up his quixotic crusades for immigrants, campaign finance reform and the Geneva Conventions, making up with the Christian Right and taking money from the people he once criticized for "swift-boating" John Kerry, McCain has proven that he is a serious candidate for President, maybe the only serious candidate.

2) Mike Huckabee was the big loser. Although evangelical Christians are his base and they make up 60% of the Republican vote in Iowa, Huckabee only got 34% of the vote. It's clear that he is a fringe candidate and the Republican party establishment doesn't have to worry about him anymore.

3) Mitt Romney came in a weak second. If he comes in a weak second in New Hampshire or even a weak first, his campaign is finished. Romney's only hope now is to change his positions on a few of the issues to appeal to more voters.

4) Rudolph Giuliani lost the nomination when he decided not to compete in Iowa or New Hampshire, which is where the nomination is decided. Even if he wins in South Carolina or Florida, it will be too late. Unless, that is, there is a terrorist attack somewhere in the world -- then all bets are off. Even a small fire that would let Giuliani walk around holding a mask to his face looking very serious could turn his prospects around.

5) Someone named "Ron Paul" got 10% of the vote but was not featured in the pie chart of the vote counts on CNN, and is not listed as a participant in the upcoming Republican debate on Fox. I'm not sure who "Ron Paul" is, but it may be a name Iowans vote for when they want "None of the Above" the way "Alan Smithee" is a name directors use when they want their names taken off a film. Or he may be some sort of joke candidate like Stephen Colbert or Pat Paulsen. If "Ron Paul" is actually a real person, his supporters need to do a better job of publicizing him.

6) Fred Thompson came in third but nobody really cares, least of all Thompson himself.

7) We haven't heard the last of Alan Keyes.

Democrats

1) The big winners were Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson. They were able to secure the cabinet posts they were running for if a Democrat wins the election by not making enemies of the front-runners. Biden and Dodd ran nearly flawless campaigns and got out before they did any damage to their future prospects. It remains to be seen if Richardson can get out before he damages himself but as long as he doesn't say very much in the next few weeks, he should be fine.

2) The other big winners were white voters and white members of the party establishment. By voting for Barack Obama, they were able to prove that they are not racist. The fact that Obama is young, charismatic, inspiring, a mesmerizing speaker, has fresh ideas and appeals across the partisan divide will make no difference in the general election where it is a well-known fact that the American people will be afraid to vote for a black man with a funny name who is inexperienced and might secretly be a Muslim. By letting him win this one, and giving us a historic moment that we can tell our grandchildren about, we can all feel better about ourselves. Of course, it would be too much of a risk to actually nominate him until sometime in the future when America is ready -- maybe in 2032 when he is only 70, a year younger than McCain is now.

3) By throwing both of his votes to Barack Obama, Dennis Kucinich guaranteed that he will win the 2008 election for congressman from the 10th district of Ohio and sets himself up for a 2012 presidential run. Well played.

4) One big loser was John Edwards. By coming in a weak, you might even say girly, second, he proved that he doesn't have the heft and gravitas necessary to be President. Voters rejected his message of economic populism in a year when voters are bored by such issues as health insurance, home mortgages, and job security and the election is going to turn instead on foreign policy and national security. The fact that he not only had the most substantive reaction to Benazir Bhutto's assassination but actually spoke to Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, or "the General" as President Bush affectionately called him when he was running for President, made no difference to voters who aren't even sure where Pakistan is. Most voters were probably thinking of the haircut. His only chance to win the nomination now would be to shave his head like Britney Spears.

5) The biggest loser of all was Hillary Clinton. If she can't win in Iowa, where can she win? In every contested race since 1972 (Bill Clinton ran unopposed in 1996), the winner of the Iowa caucuses for the Democrats has gone on to be elected President, except for 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000 and 2004 when the winner did not go on to be elected President. Iowans have an uncanny ability to predict which Democrat can win in the general election, which means Hillary's campaign may be doomed. Look for members of the party establishment to start looking for another candidate, maybe even going outside the party to someone like McCain who could win both the Republican and Democrat nominations and run on a unity ticket with Mike Bloomberg or Joe Lieberman as his vice president, sparing voters the burden of having to make a hard choice in November. David Broder and his friends are already ecstatic at the prospect.

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