Tom Watson

They Ain't Making Conservatives Like Buckley Any More...

William F. Buckley may be twisting painfully in the eternal hellfires right about now, condemned for rejecting civil rights in a cynical wager against his own views of liberty, but his passing does recall a type of conservative who would gladly make a public argument on the relative merits - and not try to merely shout the opposition down with bully talk and cheap sloganeering.

His death also removes another one of those classic 60s and 70s television personalities from the talk show set, a singular face and voice and style that those of us who can feel those years mourn the dearth of these days. From his half recline, one arm thrown back over a corner of the chair, a pen clutched in the other, Buckley unpacked slow-moving questions on Firing Line - big slow righty curves compared to today's 'roid-raged speedballers - and he inhabited a public world of curling cigarette smoke in black and white, talking world that included names like Mailer, and Vidal and Capote. Jim Wolcott captured that televised eminence perfectly:

Carrying his clipboard like a discus, Buckley slouched into the studio glare of the Jack Paar show or reposed on the set of David Susskind and uncoiled his cobra act, mesmerizing the audience and his antagonists with a battery of mannerisms, his eyes widening with a gleaming twinkle just before he went for the kill. He was a master of the tangential counterattack, to borrow a phrase from Manny Farber, not only removing the stuffing and mummy wrapping from modern conservatism but endowing it with a fizzy bonhomie that enabled him to entertain friendships with liberal foils such as John Kenneth Galbraith and others. Unlike a industrial-strength grievance collector such as Norman Podhoretz, Buckley didn't scrounge for opportunities to cast former friends and allies as enemies and infidels in order to play the role of injured party; he believed in the social emollients of courtesy, banter, and prompt drink refills during the intermission pauses between political jousting matches. His interrogation technique on Firing Line was a marvel of making a guest feel at ease before knocking him off his pedestal, his elaborate foreplay so stylized that it became a comic staple for impersonators ranging from David Frye to SCTV's Joe Flaherty, who didn't miss a trick conjuring Buckley's trademark deployment of fountain pen, flicking tongue, protruding rabbit teeth, sly grin, and reclining posture--his sitting in the interviewer's chair at such a steep incline that he nearly dropped out of camera frame.

It is true that Buckley was a polite man (I once exchanged pleasantries about winter weather and subsidized rail travel with him while waiting out a long delay at the Stamford train station), and he must have recoiled at his so-called heirs on talk radio - the smearing, hateful Limbaughs and Hannities - and the inbred pep squad at The Corner and their giggles about smiley-faced liberal fascists. His humor, too, rose far about the Beavisonian tenor of the right's great comics; asked what he'd do if he was actually elected after a quixotic run for New York City Mayor in 1965, he responded: "Request a recount."

He was also, per the excellent obit by Douglas Martin in today's Times, prolific:

The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 newspaper columns, titled “On the Right,” would fill 45 more medium-size books. His collected papers, which were donated to Yale, weigh seven tons.

That discussion, from the National Review to Firing Line to his many books and columns and appearance on endless talking head programs, was an open and spirited one that many of us with a little living experience miss in today's landscape (this blog excepted, of course). Jane Hamsher has it, I think:

I hate to sound like a geezer but after having listened to a bunch of people born in the 70s and 80s lecture me about what an asshole William F. Buckley was, I want to say one thing.

There is a qualitative difference between Bill Buckley and the conservatives of today. I know he had shitty political opinions and the reason I do is because he told me so. Buckley openly embraced racist, McCarthyesque views that he not only acknowledged but defended. Which made it possible to have meaningful, substantive debate between the left and the right.

That isn't possible with today's conservative leading lights, the Straussians who philosophically believe it's their obligation to determine what you should think and then tell you whatever they need to in order to get you to believe it.

So, respect on the left for the Oxford-clothed, button-downed lion on the right as he leaves the field. Well, Buckley's view of civil liberties took an unfortunate political turn early in his career (he recanted them 30 years later), leaving a stain that will always ruin his perfect preppy suit. One conservative blogger's paean to ole WFB elicited this pithy alternative biography from a commenter named angryclown:

Please. Buckley supported Joe McCarthy and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Privileged upper-class twit spends a lifetime promoting the interests of same, dies. Yawn.

That Liberal Okie Doke

It's a clear sign of how confident Barack Obama feels in the fit of the Democratic nominating coat that's being tailored for his slender frame. A move right out of playbook of his political fathers: the quick slant right, the move to the middle, the shedding of partisan clothing - call it what you like. And nothing hangs so indecorously on the shoulders of a Democratic candidate for President as the word "liberal." So here's Obama at another mass rally in Texas, reported by NBC's Aswini Anburajan.

"Oh, he's liberal,” he said. “He's liberal. Let me tell you something. There's nothing liberal about wanting to reduce money in politics that is common sense. There's nothing liberal about wanting to make sure [our soldiers] are treated properly when they come home.”

Continuing on his riff: "There's nothing liberal about wanting to make sure that everybody has healthcare, but we are spending more on healthcare in this country than any other advanced country. We got more uninsured. There's nothing liberal about saying that doesn't make sense, and we should so something smarter with our health care system. Don't let them run that okie doke on you!"

This kind of talk gives Chris Bowers pause over at OpenLeft - Chris moved from Edward to Obama (in retrospect, part of a late-breaking horde that has pretty much given Obama the nomination) and he expected a full-throated defense of liberalism. Is this buyer's remorse from Bowers?

From this point, a discussion about liberalism and Obama can take many turns. First, it could be argued, as I am sure many Obama supporters will argue, that Obama is taking "liberalism" or "progressivism" and making a some sort of move where the ideas behind those labels are redefined as moderate. Thus, liberalism and progressivism become mainstream. My counter to that is that no, that does not make liberalism and progressivism mainstream, it just makes being "moderate" more like being a liberal or progressive. When the good ideas behind liberalism, like universal health care, are denied from liberalism, what it really seems to do it make liberalism or progressivism some sort of fringe extreme where even universal health care isn't good enough health care. Rather than making liberalism mainstream, is denies liberals any credit for having good ideas, and pushes them further to the fringe.

I agree with that sentiment, especially on universal healthcare - which, in choosing Obama over Clinton, the Democratic electorate is as good as abandoning. Then there's the news of movement toward Obama from the very same DLC types that netroots bloggers blasted Hillary Clinton for cozying up to - there seems to be shock (shock!) that centrist Democrats interested in a centrist, aisle-crossing Democratic president would move to support Obama. Did they imagine leftist purity in Barack Obama?

The New York Tattler

For making the front page his national newspaper the equivalent of the men's room wall, Times editor Bill Keller is justly eviscerated in tomorrow's edition by Public Editor Clark Hoyt. The pathetic excuse for reporting that masqueraded as some sort of halfling-expose of Senator John McCain's maybe-perhaps affair and insiderish dealing with a lobbyist eight years ago threw a flaming sexual cocktail into the Presidential race - and its amateurish standards did more than wound a single candidate.

. . . [I]n the absence of a smoking gun, I asked Keller why he decided to run what he had. “If the point of the story was to allege that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist, we’d have owed readers more compelling evidence than the conviction of senior staff members,” he replied. “But that was not the point of the story. The point of the story was that he behaved in such a way that his close aides felt the relationship constituted reckless behavior and feared it would ruin his career.”

I think that ignores the scarlet elephant in the room. A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did. And if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide.

Exactly. I do not support McCain for the Presidency. As a liberal Democrat, my vote in the fall belongs to Clinton or Obama. But I'd hate to see a relatively fair race wrecked by rumor-mongering on the front page of what was once a great newspaper. McCain doesn't deserve it. And neither do we. And any rookie reporter can read that bunch of half-boiled reporter's notes and understand immediately where The Times stood: they didn't have the story, and it wasn't even close.

UPDATE: More from Jarvis, The New Republic, TalkLeft, and a series of questions for Times editors from Jay Rosen.

The Real Marilyn

New York Magazine has become a sad shadow of its former self, and this week's issue - call it Maxim for upscale shoppers - sensationalizes the body of 21-year-old Lindsay Lohan in a raft of nude photos that used roughly half of the all Internet bandwidth over the last few days. Pure exploitation of a young woman clearly in personal turmoil, and all under the guise of low-brow art - a paean to the final photo shoot of Marilyn Monroe. Yeah, we get it: nudity before accidental death at a young age. Oh, how clever and ironic. In any case, one of our bloggers over at newcritics knew the real Monroe. Go read Bob Stein's terrific post and leave your comments.

I Ain't Worrying and I Ain't Scurrying

Yesterday it was my birthday
I hung one more year on the line
I should be depressed
My life's a mess
But I'm having a good time

Maybe I'm laughing my way to disaster
Maybe my race has been run
Maybe I'm blind to the fate of mankind
But what can be done?

- Paul Simon

Barack Oboomer

In the movies, the best leading men have always been able to portray younger characters - John Wayne played iconic gunslingers into his 50s, Cary Grant was the suave romantic lead into his early 60s, and Harrison Ford will reprise Indiana Jones this spring at a spry 65. Actors like Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington and Nicolas Cage can easily take on parts playing men a decade or more junior to their biological ages.

The more I watch the extraordinary cultural phenomenon that is Barack Obama, the more I realize that the  Senator from Illinois - the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination - is a political actor skillfully portraying a much younger character, and to rave reviews at that.

Obama will turn 47 years old before the delegates to the Democratic convention are seated in August. Yet he is leading what has been described as a generational movement of younger voters, the so-called millennials who were born in the 80s and came of age in the years after September 11, 2001. He is cast by the media as being part of that movement, a much younger voice in American politics than that of Hillary Clinton - who like a lot of leading female actors, must play her biological age pretty much straight up.

But Obama is either a Baby Boomer, according to some generational studies, or he's a Generation Xer, according to others. It's a generational tagging quandary I know pretty well, being less than a year younger than Obama. Culturally, we're either late Boomers without the groovy 1960s experience, or early Gen Xers without the 80s hair gel. Our group came of age in the 70s - we're all Watergate and punk rock, Son of Sam and Bronx is Burning, CBGB and Carter's national malaise. Reagan picked off the conservatives among us, but left the liberals with permanent case of cynicism as as we began our careers. Culturally, we were just kids when the Beatles were in their prime, but we were too old to get much out of The Breakfast Club and that 80s brat pack ilk.

Music makes us late Boomers, I think. We wore out the grooves on the Stones and the Who, and slid easily into the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and Patti Smith - and  all the variations on R&B, reggae, soul, and funk; we took the sound of the 50s and 60s and changed it. Not a one of us grew up on the hip hop beat. So when Obama's campaign events mash up Stevie Wonder's Sir Duke and John Fogarty's Centerfield, the Doobie Brothers' Takin' It To The Streets and  Shining Star by Earth, Wind & Fire, it's a familiar late-Boomer soundtrack. The artists are a bit older than we are, but damn, we grew up on these tunes.

Likewise, the big names in Obama's campaign are just a bit older than he is - media mastermind David Axelrod is 53, as is Oprah Winfrey. Insider Valerie Jarrett is 51. Caroline Kennedy - who the media went wild for passing the "generational torch" to Senator Obama - is 50. The senior kitchen cabinet of experienced hands is much older still: Tom Daschle is 60 (same as Hillary), Illinois power broker Emil Jones is 72, and Teddy Kennedy is 75. The closest advisor of all, the dynamic Michelle Obama, is another member of the shoulder generation at 44 - either a last-minute Boomer or an early Gen-Xer. To my admittedly cursory view, there are no inner circle Obama advisors under the age of 40.

Yet, Obama's is the MySpace and Facebook campaign, easily leading support among the group of voters from 18 to 30, a more idealistic group of young voters than the one that preceded it. Obama is leading the incredibly successfully (but still maddeningly vague, in my view) campaign for "change," with a rallying cry of "yes, we can!" It all feels like a movement, feels like something bigger than a mere campaign, feels like a youth movement in American politics. And it should - because that's how it was drawn up on the storyboards. The incredibly successful strategy was designed to both attract young voters, and convince the supposedly jaded media - many of them Boomers themselves, pining for the lost movement of their youth - that something big was changing.

And at the center is an aging star playing a much younger man.

Barack Obama is often compared to John F. Kennedy, the youngest elected president, who presided over the passing of the torch to "a new generation of Americans." But there's a massive disconnect in this comparison. Kennedy was actually part of the generation he was seeking to lead, a young World War II veteran seeking to remake the national polity to serve the energies of his generational peers. Indeed, his Republican opponent in 1960, Richard Nixon, was also a member of that generation. When JFK spoke about service to his country from a generation of young Americans, he was speaking as a proud member of that generation.

In contrast, Obama has a good two decades on the very generation he has become an icon for. In movie star terms, he's Sean Connery leading the squad of younger G-men in The Untouchables.

Senator Obama himself often uses religious imagery to deal with the generational dynamic at work in his campaign. Last March, when civil rights leaders converged in Selma, Alabama to commemorate the famous march of the Edmund Pettis Bridge in 1965, Obama discussed two very different generations in his well-received remarks. One was the "Moses generation," that group of leaders who brought their people out of slavery but didn't quite make it to the promised land. That task fell to the "Joshua generation," a biblical reference to the son of Moses and a metaphor for Obama's own campaign and its surge of young voters and activists. The ceremony in Selma marked the accomplishments of great African-Americans, yes. But in the hands of the Obama campaign, it also served as Obama's explicit claim on the millennials as his own, his marker of authenticity.

In truth, Obama is younger than the Democrats he ran against - Clinton (60), Dodd (63), Richardson (60), Biden (65), and Edwards (54) - but he's a junior member of their generation nonetheless, a tail-end Charlie who was still using a sippy-cup when they were lighting up. And he's a true generational contrast to Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain, 71, who would be the oldest president ever elected. But it would be a stretch even to call him a Gen-Xer - Obama was a community organizer in his new hometown of Chicago in 1986 when Pretty in Pink hit the big screen, and was undoubtedly as interested in the social angst of our younger Gen-X friends as I was as a young reporter in the Bronx.

"The key to Obama's appeal to young voters," wrote Cora Currier in The Nation recently, "may be that he resembles them." And indeed, as a biracial candidate who talks often about non-partisan government solutions while making it a point to distance himself from Boomer attitudes towards government, he does. But in his growing coalition of big labor, African-American leadership, and upscale progressives, Obama also hearkens back to traditional Democratic strongholds - and his legislative record is clearly that of a Democrat from the post-industrial urban north.

In an essay for Newsweek, self-described millennial independent Andrew Romano wrote that "millions of my peers have fallen under the spell of the freshman senator from Illinois." And indeed, it's true. In every primary or caucus thus, more than 50 percent of voters under 30 have gonna for Obama. But Romano gets to the heart of it when he says that "it's not so much the strength of Obama's youth support that's significant—it's how fully and seamlessly he embodies the attitudes, aspirations and shortcomings of the generation that's rallied around him."

Indeed, it's the portrayal of millennial attitude - the "post-everything" ideal described in a New York Times essay by Yale junior Nicholas Handler - that suceeds mightly for the Obama campaign, combined as it is with an adept use of social networks, text messaging, and other new media tools. And it's a portrayal that is landing him the political equivalent of an Academy Award. Just listen to how the young Andrew Romano describes the contrast in candidates: "On one side is Clinton, the consummate baby boomer. On the other is Obama—not a late boomer, as his birth date would suggest, but the first millennial to run for president. For better and for worse."

To my ear, there are echoes in this of Toni Morrison's famous anointing of Bill Clinton as the first black president in a New Yorker essay a decade ago. Barack Obama may be coming up fast on 50 and feeling every day of it, but young voters think of him as a millennial; in other words, he is not really what he is - he is what we want him to be.

In their new book Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube & the Future of American Politics, Morley Winograd and Michael Hais make the case for a rapidly-changing electorate in this country - one that favors the Democrats and more progressive public policy. According to Winograd and Hais, there are now twice as many millennials as Gen-Xers and a million more millennials alive than Baby Boomers. And I think the Obama campaign keyed in on this change at the outset, and branded their candidate - a good-looking middle-aged legislator from Illinois - as an exciting, young millennial voice.

Early last year, Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod told The Times Magazine: “If we run a conventional campaign and look like a conventional candidacy, we lose.” In the same article, Democratic media consultant Saul Shorr sums up the Axelrod plan for Obama: “What David is basically doing — and this is somewhat new for Democrats — isn’t trying to figure out how to sell policies. It’s a matter of personality. How do we sell leadership?”

It's this personality branding that works so well in short-form media, like movies, television and yes, quickie Facebook profiles and viral YouTube videos. It may well turn off real-life late Boomers like me (I'm supporting Clinton, and her brass-knuckled focus on realpolitik policy after the Bush disaster) but it's a brilliant strategy for creating at least the media-fueled illusion of a wide-ranging movement of young people. I'm writing a book called CauseWired that will examine, in part, how millennials take their new form of activism online - and how leadership and personal brands may well change how we look at social activism and politics. I agree that the strategy to "sell leadership," as Axelrod put it, is tailor-made for online marketing as well as mass rallies in basketball arenas.

One of the defining moments of this campaign thus far was the release of an online video by Jesse Dylan (Bob's son) and will.i.am (aka, William James Adams of the Black Eye Peas) that synced  Obama's "Yes, we can" oratory with sung vocals by a bevy of celebrity singers, many of them millennials themselves. The four-minute video has already been watched more than four million times on YouTube. It's an incredibly effective piece of media, fitting like the missing puzzle piece to an already successful branding strategy around Barack Obama. And it stars a leading man playing a much younger part.

Barack Obama may be the same age as retired athletes like Mark Messier, Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, and Dan Marino. He may have been born in the same year as middle-aged actors Eddie Murphy, Michael J. Fox, and James Gandolfini. He may share the years with well-traveled pop stars like The Edge, Melissa Etheridge, and Boy George.

But he plays a much younger candidate on television.

Vapors on the Left

Quick, somebody order up a fainting couch for those former tough guy liberal bloggers who are growing oh-so-woozy at the thought of a Democratic nomination process proceeding past February. Sure, they can hammer Bush, but their will grows weak and their legs go wobbly at the mere consideration of a real convention battle.

And they're so contradictory! Some argue that superdelegates are undemocratic and will "destroy the party." Barack Obama does not agree - he's busily trying to buy up a few votes with some of that campaign lucre he's got stashed away; that is to say, he's making perfectly legal contributions to the re-election campaigns of every superdelegate he can find. The meter's still in spin and he's dropped 700 large. Yeah, Obama doesn't believe those superdelegates - really, the Senate of the bicameral Democratic nomination process - will count. Uh-huh.

Still others need the smelling salts at the very suggestion that delegations will be seated - based on millions of legal votes, mind you - from Michigan and Florida. You know, a couple of states the Dems can easily afford to lose in November. It's changing the rules, they claim. The DNC - that noble and ethical body of all that is good and righteous - ruled the timing of their primaries to be a flagrant scheduling foul, so their delegates don't count. Until they do, of course. And they will. Hence, the flailing.

No coincidence, mind you, that these incredibly offended Democrats just happen to support Senator Obama over Hillary Clinton - and these instances of abominable, undemocratic behavior may give her candidacy a lift. Nor do these same paragons of electoral morality mention to obvious unfairness of the caucus system, with its short hours, raucus in-person bullying, and unscientific show of hands that get registered as "votes."

Why there's noble Ezra Klein, falling out in grief and despair over the very corpse of the republic itself:

If Hillary Clinton does not win delegates out of a majority of contested primaries and caucuses, her aides are willing to rip the party apart to secure the nomination, to cheat in a way that will rend the Democratic coalition and probably destroy Clinton's chances in the general election. Imagine the fury in the African-American community if Barack Obama leads in delegates but is denied the nomination because the Clinton campaign is able to change the rules to seat delegates from Michigan, where no other candidates were even on the ballot, and from Florida, where no one campaigned. Imagine the anger among the young voters Obama brought into the process, and was making into Democratic voters. Imagine the feeling of betrayal among his supporters more generally, and the disgust among independents watching the battle take place on the convention floor. Imagine how statesmanlike John McCain will look in comparison, how orderly and focused the Republican convention will appear.

This demonstrates not only a gross ruthlessness on the part of Clinton's campaign, but an astonishingly cavalier attitude towards the preservation of the progressive coalition. To be willing to blithely rip it to shreds in order to wrest a nomination that's not been fairly earned is not only low, but a demonstration of deeply pernicious priorities -- namely, it's an explicit statement that the campaign puts its own political success above the health of the party and the pursuit of progressive goals, and one can't but help assume that's exactly the attitude they would take towards governance, too.

What prompted this roar of outrage? The suggestion by Senator Clinton's campaign that if neither candidate is over the 2,025 delegates needed to secure the nomination, they'd be perfectly happy to let the convention decide. Oh, the horror! Imagine running a close second to a candidate with a non-majority and actually exercising your right to an argument on the floor. Yes, Ezra - McCain will look statesmanlike in comparison, so will you consider voting for him in your utter horror? I think not. Me either. (Question: what candidate is Ezra for? Answer: Obama. Hard to guess.)

A few days back, that analyst extraordinaire, Chris Bowers, similarly exploded in vitriol over the thought of superdelegates actually casting the votes awarded them by the sage Dr. Dean. Threatened Chris:

If someone is nominated for POTUS from the Democratic Party despite another candidate receiving more poplar support from Democratic primary voters and caucus goers, I will resign as local precinct captain, resign my seat on the Pennsylvania Democratic State Committee, immediately cease all fundraising for all Democrats, refuse to endorse the Democratic "nominee" for any office, and otherwise disengage from the Democratic Party through all available means of doing so.

Howard Dean was reported to remark: "Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Mr. Bowers." Okay, I jest. Feelings are running high and I have the greatest respect for both Klein and Bowers, but they should really just settle in and let this whole thing play out. Likewise the estimable Donna Brazile, who also threatened to resign over the superdelegate situation. Let's watch this develop over the next few weeks. And why not? For political junkies, this is a gas. And we've got a juiced electorate ready to elect a Democrat either way.

It's February. Senator Obama is in the lead, but Senator Clinton still has a bit better than a two-minute drill to go to pull out victory herself. It's very much possible. There is absolutely no reason to panic now, or indeed in April if this contest is still close. I know the Obama campaign is trying to close things out now with this talk, but it's not their decision to make. If  Obama trailed as slightly as Clinton does, he'd no doubt press on - quite possibly to the convention. So don't tar Hillary Clinton with any imagined foul motive that would surely hang exactly the same way on Barack Obama. They are two highly effective and fully ambitious politicians who will use every weapon in their arsenal to win - until their opponent gets the majority of delegates.

The Left Wing

Clearly, the photos of the week! [from David Pokress at Newsday]. Ahhhhh.

Pitching from the Stretch

On a day when the last threads of decency fell from the shambling, discredited careers of Roger Clemens and Maureen Dowd, a couple of hurlers past their primes, we bring you a variety of commentary to take your mind off of the long horse-race, just now heading for the last turn.

The greatest line of the day in the sordid Clemens saga belonged to Chris "Mad Dog" Russo, who listened to the House testimony and made his own call for change. Listening to Rep. Chris Shays attempt to portray Clemens accuser Brian McNamee as a drug user, Russo made a political endorsement: Here's the thing about Shays. I'm gonna go out of my way in November. We're gonna get him the hell out of Connecticut. We're gonna get Himes in there." Himes is Jim Himes, the Democratic challenger to Shays, an admitted Clemens fan.

It was strange to listen to the hearings and realize the Republicans were out to defend Clemens - "you know, it's Texas and the President, Dawg," opined Russo's partner Mike Francesa - while the Democrats prepped the former Yankee for a perjury charge. Who knew there were strict party lines in the 'roid wars?

Meanwhile, the reaction to MoDo's latest disgrace was swift and terrible. If you descended into the vile sub-basement that has become the Times op-ed page, you probably caught Dowd's column today - a disgusting little screed that quoted magician Penn Jillette's infamous "white bitch" joke about Senator Hillary Clinton. First up, Jim Wolcott:

The shameless gall being modeled down the runway is almost mind-boggling. "Even Jillette admits it's offensive." As if that absolves anything. Here's Jillette telling a self-described "offensive" joke, getting a huge laugh from it, then repeating it on his webcast and analyzing its reaction as if it were some sociopolitical wavelet--as if it he weren't coarsening the discourse but somehow conducting a valuable experiment in group dynamics. And then Dowd quotes it, frowning with disapproval not because the phrase "white bitch" is being slung against the junior Senator from New York but because it creates a sympathy backlash, humanizing someone whom Dowd has gone to such great pains to portray as inhuman, robotic, undefrosted.

"If Hillary fails, it will be her failure, not ours," Dowd decrees. But of course it's never Dowd's fault, or the fault of her fellow Mouseketeers, even though, as Bob Somerby points out, "[N]o one has done more than Dowd to introduce various forms of gender-loathing into our political discourse."

Should Michelle Obama become too prominent and assertive, I wonder if the sort of Restoration wits Dowd likes to quote in her column will start slagging her off as "a black bitch," just to get a laugh y'understand, and whether Dowd will deplore such epithets or tut-tut that Michelle O is an imperfect vessel for the role of First Lady and will need a tougher hide if she intends to move into the White House. Because once Hillary Clinton is out of the picture, Dowd will have to shift her animus elsewhere.

Kiss it good-bye. Next batter, Jane Hamsher:

Is Chris Matthews really worse than this? Is it any better because the New York Times has some acid, waspish harridan who is putatively female saying it?

MSNBC's gyno-bashing problem does not occur because there are no women on the network; rather, it's because -- as Somerby has long noted -- the only women who are asked back are those who flatter the hosts and won't call them on their disfunctional, sexist remarks. Since there are no women in a position of power free to say what they really feel without fear of being shitcanned on the network, we have to settle for Andrea Mitchell, Kate O'Beirne and other women who are willing to get their face time in front of a camera by attacking other women.

Finally, the clean-up hitter and the guy Jim and Jane both quoted, the lefty-hitting slugger Bob Somerby:

Life for a pundit is very easy—when she can simply assert her facts without explanation or argument. Clinton’s judgment was poor “on issue after issue,” Dowd says—without saying what issues she means. And her vote on Iraq “was about her political viability,” she asserts, without qualification.

But at the end, Dowd drops her hands—stops pretending she can hide. You see it in her final word—“ours.” It isn’t about “male pundits” any more. Don’t blame Clinton’s loss on me, the world’s biggest gender-nut tells us.

Now, we also suggest you read about Lance Mannion's troubles with Barack Obama - like me, Lance has trouble hitting the phantom pitch (is there an actual ball, or is it all arm angle?) - as well as Jon Swift's subtle take on Obama's religious, some would say messiah-like, tendencies. I'll nominate this as the best analysis of the day in this super-heated, extra-innings nomination game:

While Obama may not do everything Jesus would do, many Republicans fret that if voters are convinced that Obama is the messiah it will be difficult to beat him in the Fall.

Yes, very tough indeed. But fear not baseball fans, all the action's not on Capitol Hill. Tomorrow is pitchers and catchers, and the very day Johan Santana dons one of those hideous Mets warm-up jerseys for the first time. I do admire a southpaw with a good change-up.

The Tough Old Man

Want a little short-hand for what's next in the cynical, sexist world of political media? Joan Walsh of Salon.com on Hardball just now, argued that when Hillary Clinton attacks Barack Obama on the massive experience gap in their resumes, "she just sounds like the mean old woman." But John McCain? He can get away with it, because he's the wise old man. It's a potential winner for the Republican. Remember that narrative. You'll be hearing it again.