- Will there be any haphazard sandbagging of the other two candidates, just to level the playing field? If so, when? If not, why not?
- Do you feel any share in the responsibility for generating this nonsense, besides invoking the law of unintended consequences and laying it at Russert's gouty feet?
- Implicit in the mission of the online mediapreneur is the sense that they are able to drive their own narrative without the help or hindrance of the corporate media. How does that square with this occurrence, in which Press the Meat was able to seize and skew that narrative on the basis of some poached quotes? What, if anything, do you or Fowler intend to do to either reclaim your own narrative, or generate a capable counter-narrative? Simply shrugging this off as one that got away from you is unacceptable beyond, say, the high-school newspaper level. You own this one, at least for needlessly enabling the Clinton campaign to start one more round of backstabbing before the PA primary.
Hell, it would be helpful for Rosen and/or Fowler to try to back their own inept exegesis on the "bitter" comment. Fowler herself manages some cheap, surface limo-lib-baiting, trying to waffle on divining what Obama "really meant".
Funny how coastal stereotypes are perfectly acceptable, but heaven forfend anybody look askance at flyover states, most of which take more federal tax dollars than they contribute. Unlike those smug Californians, with the 77¢ they get back for every dollar. You know, that state of douchebags where one in every nine Americans resides.
Why the hell are these dwindling road-to-nowhere states where everyone leaves so they can make more than $20k/year so inviolable and immune from even deserved criticism, but "San Francisco" is some sort of wink-and-a-nod code for, I dunno, "Barack Obama plans to let faggot schoolteachers buttfuck your chilluns in the hallway with impunity"? Perhaps most amazingly (or, you know, not) is the ease with which Clinton herself jumped on that "elitist San Francisco" bullshit. Whatever sympathy the Clintons may have generated in the course of two terms of smears and lies and calumniations must by now be completely gone. Indeed, they seem to have become precisely what they despise, which is the creeps and liars who made careers out of despising them.
How did we come to this, and why does the coastal elite media enable it so? I've said it a million times, but it bears repeating -- if Bobo Brooks and Tweety Matthews and the rest of these bozos like the heartland so much, then fucking move there. Don't hide your lights under the DC/Hamptons bushels, ladies, grab your overalls and get your farm on. Let us know how that works for y'all.
Another paragraph of Fowler's assessments of Obama's situation struck me as odd:
Let's get back to Ockham's Razor, folks; the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. So let's take "small-town white working class antipathy to Obama" as a given, though I think it's a dubious assertion at best. But let's say it's true -- what are the most likely causes of that? The reflex assumption seems to be racism, but I don't buy that. More likely, it's simply a lack of familiarity with him, and an instinctive mistrust of someone who has risen so far so fast. Those are things that can be alleviated over the summer.
But if the problem really is racism, or suspicion of intellect, or any of the usual infantilizing tropes used to veil off these areas and social classes, then Clinton's efforts to capitalize on Obama's contrived misstep are for naught, because such people also would have issues with uppity wimmins, and certainly have issues with Clintons. She can poach a few slivers of percentage points here and there and raise doubt among the superdelegates over his electability all she wants, because those are things that will mostly redound to McCain in the fall.
And if people are having some sort of trouble acquainting themselves with Obama's supposedly complicated thought processes, well, isn't that their problem? They can't even seem to settle on whether he's too condescending or not condescending enough. Apparently he has to spell it out in see-Dick-run terms while downing a shot, eating a greasy slab of mystery meat and bowling a 300 game.
It's as if the notion of running the country doesn't even come up, which it might not for the sort of idiot who festers in the boonies, their biggest worry in life that someone out there thinks they're better'n you. Well, you show 'em, motherfucker. Go ahead and vote for Po' Boy McCain, and get exactly what's comin' to ya. Otherwise, get off your cross already -- as always, the rest of us could use the wood.