EVENING UPDATE,  MARCH 8, 2008

OBAMA FOR PREMIER!

Reading Guy Sorman's column in the great City Journal, an Urgent Agenda favorite site, is today's treat.  He examines why Barack Obama is so popular in Europe.  Look, all our readers can probably predict some of the reasons, but it's a wonderful piece to read.  I can just see President Obama getting ovation after ovation from the members of the German parliament, whose grandparents would have been happy to exterminate him.  We may be about to see hypocrisy defined:

Let us understand why, from the European perspective, Obama is good. First, he belongs to a minority. Europeans love minorities—when they live in the U.S. We tend not to like our own minorities, whom we willingly discriminate against on the basis of skin color or religion. Black Americans, however, are popular in Western Europe, since they play good music and revolt against the white establishment. For European leftists, whites in the U.S. are inclined to be Christian, racist, and imperialist. Whites started the war in Iraq. A white U.S. soldier is an imperialist; a black soldier is a victim, fighting in the army only because he is poor.

Right on the head.  Read it.

BARONE ON HILLARY'S FUTURE

Superb political analyst Michael Barone analyzes Hillary Clinton's political future, and concludes that she has only one path open to the nomination.  He examines the state of the race:

Hillary Clinton appeared confident and vibrant on primary night, while Obama's graceful cadences sounded a little emptier than before. The storyline is changing, too. For the first time in a long campaign cycle, mainstream media have been pursuing stories that reflect badly on Obama: his close ties and property purchase with Chicago political operator Tony Rezko, now on trial in federal court; his chief economic adviser's purported assurance to a Canadian diplomat that Obama doesn't really mean he'll ditch NAFTA, as he was suggesting in trade-wary Ohio; Obama's pastor's recent award to the man Obama refers to as "Minister Farrakhan."

McCain takes questions until the last reporter runs out of things to ask. Obama terminated a probing press conference last week after eight questions with the lame excuse that he was running late. Obama's oratory has been compared to John Kennedy's. But he doesn't have Kennedy's gift for gracefully parrying hostile questions.

The March 4 results suggest Obama may not turn out to be as strong a candidate against McCain this November as he is in current polls. Clinton's "red phone" ad asked which candidate you would want to rely on to respond to a crisis at 3 o'clock in the morning. Obama's campaign said this was a Republican tactic.

And Clinton's fate?

But Clinton is still about 100 delegates behind, and the Democrats' proportional representation rules make it impossible for her to close the gap in the remaining primaries. Her only plausible path to the nomination is to win a majority of super-delegates (party and public officials) and, perhaps, to reverse the party's decision disqualifying the Michigan and Florida delegations -- i.e., overruling the voters in one case and changing the rules after the game has been played in the other.

This might pass muster if the national polls show an unambiguous and substantial move toward Clinton. Otherwise, in more likely and ambiguous circumstances, a Clinton nomination will seem illegitimate to many who have been swooning over Obama and streaming into polling booths because he alone offers hope.

Barone is right.  Clinton must not only win primaries and superdelegates, she must move those national polls.  She's also got to use all the clout she has to get Florida and Michigan seated.  Here she has a powerful argument:  How will it look to the voting public if the Democrats hold a national convention and exclude two of the largest states?

OBAMA MAY OR MAY NOT MEET THE PRESS

Michael Barone referred to Obama's problems answering press questions. John Heilemann, in New York Magazine, expands on the issue.  Can Obama handle the increasing pressure of press scrutiny?  He begins with "monstergate," the flap over now-resigned Obama adviser Samantha Power's description of Hillary Clinton as a monster:

But Monstergate, I think, reflects something deeper: the fact that many of the people around Obama have grown accustomed to, shall we say, a forgiving national press corps. Retroactive declarations of off-the-recordness happen all the time. Whether the journalist confronted with one chooses to let it slide or be a hard-ass is a matter of discretion. How much do you like the source? How much do you need the source? It's fair to say that many people in Obama's circle believe that Clinton is in fact a monster. Many have said something similar to reporters. And this was not the first time one of them slipped up on attribution. But until now, the press, as part of a broader pattern of kid-gloves treatment of Obama, has largely chosen to let those mistakes pass. And that has bred a certain sloppiness — one that, in the case of Power, has now come back to bite them.

And later:

Let's be clear. Few campaigns I've ever covered have been run with as much skill and discipline as Obama's has. His chief strategist, David Axelrod, handles the press with aplomb and savvy. Robert Gibbs, his communications czar, is one tough cookie. But the rest of Obama's adjutants — and the candidate himself — had better get with the program. The Media Beast, after months of blissful slumber, is now awake and as grouchy as an undercaffeinated grizzly bear. And the Clinton campaign has no intention of letting it return to sleep. Unless and until all of Team Obama understand what that means, there are going to be a lot more days like this. Days that end with blood and severed limbs all over the floor.

Pretty blunt.  I can't wait for tomorrow.

THE TRAVELS OF A PRESIDENT

As we were letting the political blood flow, there was news from the region where real blood flows every day.  The president of Iran, the very exciting and talented Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made a two-day visit to Iraq this past week.  But the tour apparently did not go as well as planned, according to analyst Amir Taheri:

IT had been billed as a "triumph" for the Islamic Republic and "a slap in the face of the American Great Satan." However, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's two-day state visit to Iraq last weekend showed the limits of Iranian influence in the newly liberated country.

Weeks of hard work by Iranian emissaries and pro-Iran elements in Iraq were supposed to ensure massive crowds thronging the streets of Baghdad and throwing flowers on the path of the visiting Iranian leader. Instead, no more than a handful of Iraqis turned up for the occasion. The numbers were so low that the state-owned TV channels in Iran decided not to use the footage at all.

Hmm.  I didn't see that point made on CNN.  Did you?  Should we write to Christiane Amanpour and ask why?  I'm sure we'll all get courteous letters.  It gets better:

Instead, much larger crowds gathered to protest Ahmadinejad's visit. In the Adhamiya district of Baghdad, several thousand poured into the streets with cries of "Iranian aggressor, go home!"

The visit's highlight was supposed to be a pilgrimage to Karbala and Najaf, the "holiest" of Shiite cities in Iraq. There, Ahmadinejad was supposed to become the first Iranian government leader since 1976 to pray at the mausoleums of Imam Hussein and Imam Ali.

In the end, however, the tour was canceled amid reports that Shiite pilgrims, including thousands from Iran, were planning to demonstrate against his presence at the "holy" cities.

You know, it's so hard to get a good travel agent.  If only Mahmoud had called American Express, they could have alerted him.  But I'll bet he has one of those discount cards.

And these uppity Iraqis.  What shocking behavior:

Nor did Ahmadinejad's presence in Baghdad go as smoothly as he'd hoped. A good part of the Iraqi political elite, including Cabinet ministers and members of the parliament, boycotted functions held in his honor. Tehran has branded the boycotters as "Saddamites and Sunnis."  In fact, a good number of Shiite politicians, including the leaders of the Fadila (Virtue) Party, also stayed away.

Finally...

To be sure, Tehran exerts influence through a number of Shiite militias it has recruited, trained and financed for years. And some insurgent groups depend on Iran as their main source of weapons, especially sophisticated explosive devices. Iran also remains Iraq's biggest trading partner and the second-biggest investor in the Iraqi economy. Iranian pilgrims account for more than 90 percent of all foreign visitors in Iraq.

Yet the visit highlighted one crucial fact: Few Iraqis wish to see their country dominated by the Khomeinist regime in Tehran.

Iraq proved too hot for Ahmadinejad. He had to get out as fast as he could.

Good reading.  It will encourage you.

BERKELEY IN BRITAIN

We're not the only ones with a lunatic fringe.  A major debate has erupted in Britain over whether British servicemen and women should wear their uniforms in public.  Now, that may seem to be a no-brainer.  But some British citizens have apparently had their brains imported from Berkeley:

Plans to urge soldiers, sailors and airmen to wear their uniforms in public were in disarray last night after RAF personnel were ordered to dress in civilian clothes while off-duty because of persistent threats and abuse.

The uniform ban was imposed by the station commander at RAF Wittering, near Peterborough, after a number of servicemen and women walking in the city in their military clothes were targeted because of their involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gordon Brown and Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, tried last night to overturn the ban. But the incidents in Peterborough threaten to undermine a new planned policy, favoured by the Prime Minister, that aims to draw the military and general public closer together.

This is the country that held off the Luftwaffe single-handedly in 1940. 

The abuse, said to have been from a cross-section of the community, came to light after Parviz Khan, from Birmingham, was jailed for planning to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier.

But wait.  Before you become judgmental, let us understand the root causes, the motivations.  Okay, dears.

Had they thought that way in 1940, where would we all be today?

And I'll be back in the morning.

Posted on March 8, 2008.