It looks like 2008 is really going to be a race between good and evil, and that this time good is going to win.
A visit to memeorandum this morning provided a lot of evidence for this -different links to the two leaders, Clinton and Giuliani, showed different attempts by the candidates to pull ahead. Hillary Clinton is connecting with voters far more than the pundocracay predicted, as Judith Warner pointed out in her NY Times op-ed today. She quoted Tucker Carlson as a representative of a class that stated "the one thing we know about Hillary, the one thing we absolutely know, bottom line, [is] she can't win, right?" Warner argues that Maslow's theory of human motivation helps explain why the upper middle class Carlsons are so frequently wrong - their affluence essentially prevented them from understanding the needs of those "beneath" them. I'm not sure that you need Maslow, although there's no harm in using him, to see that people who can afford a full time nanny see child care issues differently than the rest of the country. Hillary is telling the middle class that she knows what the economy has been doing to them, and they like it that someone is listening.
Rudy Giuliani can't appeal to the middle class based on economic reality. Part of being a Republican is saying that the economy is marvelous, even in a depressed Dearborn, Michigan. As Paul Krugman wrote this week - the Republican mantra is that there is nothing that a tax decrease for the rich cannot fix. So Rudy tries to appeal by using fear. Fear of Muslims, fear of blacks - he remains the king of a divisive, manipulative strategy that need not be grounded in reality. So constant is his anti-Arab rhetoric that I don't think the reader needs reminding. Memorandum did remind us of his racist appeals, linking to a post about a Rudy choice to help his campaign in Minnesota:
The campaign's press release promised that Stanek "will work with law enforcement personnel throughout the state to communicate Mayor Giuliani’s record of fighting crime and his commitment to first responders..."
[Stanek had previously] "admitted in a deposition that he'd used racist slurs in the past, including repeated use of the word "nigger."
Some candidates could claim that selecting a guy like Stanek was simply a mistake. But it's a "mistake" that Rudy continually makes. His man in South Carolina calls the N.A.A.C.P. the national association of retarded people and is a proud member of the "Sons of Confederate Veterans". Rudy himself led a mob of white cops as they protested his predecessor, the African American Mayor Dinkins, yelling racist slogans and calling him a "washroom attendant." Another link led to a report of Rudy's coded lies to the Values Voters Conference in Washington. His speech tried to finesse his position on abortion,
[I'd only appoint judges who know] that it is their role to interpret what other men and women meant when they wrote the Constitution, not what they would like it to mean.’’
“If you need a yardstick… what kind of judges would he appoint -- judges in the mold of Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas, Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts"
Of course Rudy does not mean he'd appoint people who would actually try to follow what the crafters of constitution meant. That's just code for appointing Catholic foes of abortion, like the judges he names. In the 18th century, when the Constitution was written, abortion was completely legal. It was only in the 19th century that some states started to restrict it - their goal was to protect the mother, not the fetus. Even the Catholic church waited until 1866 to consistently object to abortion.
In a contest between Hillary and Rudy - one would be listening to the needs and aspirations of Americans, the other would be using code words to divide and frighten them.
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