March 2, 2008
Campaign Season 8: Short Order
by Victor Davis Hanson
Private Papers

Monday, February 25
Obamata

So far, Negative Hillary has sounded petty and mean-spirited when whining about mean Obama ads and not enough debates, and mocking his inspirational but vague speeches. But her team would do better to suggest that a number of seemingly random and trivial tesseras about Obama, when taken in the aggregate, are starting at an early date to form a disturbing mosaic.

The Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers (“I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”) innocent enough connections, the racialist rhetoric emanating from Obama’s church, the racist Farrakhan de facto endorsement, the Robert Malley advisership, the Michelle Obama quip about having no prior pride in the U.S., etc. all add up to a sort of stock leftist stereotype that the United States is at heart a flawed pathological society.

What is dangerous about the Nader campaign for Obama is not that it will make him lose key states (it won’t), but that it will remind, albeit in critical fashion, that Obama, before his recent reincarnation, was well to the left of a traditional liberal. Nader, of course, will remind us about Obama the lapsed leftist to justify his most recent ego-driven run.

Most Americans simply cannot imagine their president as the topic of a two-hour encomium by Farrakhan, or why an unrepentant terrorist like Ayers would have once been associated with him. Those are legitimate issues, and the Obama campaign needs to come up with a comprehensive defense against them before they arise: e.g., “All sorts of diverse people are attracted to various causes under the umbrella of social change; what distinguishes Obama is his singular devotion to working within the system and avoiding the extremism that plagues the movement.”

Until there is some systematic preemptive exegesis, I think more and more of these disturbing hard-Left embarrassments will turn up — none of them alone a problem; all of them in sum finally devastating.

Monday, February 25
What was the NY Times thinking?

Pretty clearly they wanted to do to John McCain what they did to Rudy Giuliani — start a series of stories that required constant replies and corrections whose monotonous net effect was a thousand nicks that bled the target to death. And that has become old hat. Whether it was the ad nauseam spate of daily stories that made national news out of the absence of women at the Augusta Golf Club and the Masters controversy, or the daily running commentary on Abu Ghraib, the signature trademark of the Times now is to take a particular ideological position, and then advance its advocacy by creating "news" on the front page — each subsequent day nuancing and tweaking the theme until the reader is exhausted, sighs "OK, we agree, enough already" and the desired result is achieved. What happened this time was that national outrage nuked the lead story — at least for now.