Democrats, take heart! Rudy 9iu11ani, the spectacularly failed presidential candidate, has re-emerged, singing the same tired, off-key song that failed to garner him more than a handful of votes in the Republican primaries. The good folks at TPM Election Central provide some much-needed perspective on all this, on which hopefully the MSM will pick up.
But Rudy’s emergence begs a serious question: How much authority will the national press accord Rudy as a voice on terrorism during the general election? Rudy has no foreign policy experience whatsoever. His aura of national security experience comes solely from having been photographed walking through the smoke and dust on 9/11.
When Rudy ran for president it took the press corps many months to realize that Rudy has absolutely no authority to speak on this topic. Now that he’s popped up again as McCain’s front man it may take the press many more months to awaken to this reality again — unless perhaps Team Obama makes sure to stress this obvious point as often as possible.
Rudy’s a fake. Always has been. The Republican primary voters had no trouble figuring that out. Let’s see how the media does with it.
If McCain needs Rudy to save him, he’s in worse shape than we thought.
That a retired war hero conservative Senator, and GOP Presidential nominee, needs some bucking up on national security grounds, and it comes from a cross-dressing former mayor of NYC?
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p>Because that would seem to be a problem to me.
in any active Republican campaign will be a banner day on BMG!
Example – in Manchester, Tancredo was making phone calls for Romney.
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p>I am willing to bet that pretty much all ten of the candidates (maybe not Huckabee, with his new entertainment gig) will be out campaigning for and bolstering the nominee. Each had their own constituency, their own volunteers and people, that can be appealed to for various reasons. Mitt has probably been most active with this, but Brownback and Hunter have been doing events and holding press conferences, too, but a press conference in Kansas doesn’t get the national coverage that Rudy might get.
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p>So – how YOU guys doin’ with that Unity thing?
… according to the polls I’ve seen around, well enough to win.
Don’t get cocky, kid.
… she didn’t ask how will we do, she asked how we’re doing (now).
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p>As evidenced by the Lakers in game 4, collapse is certainly a possibility, but that wasn’t the question.
I guess the question will be whether all of the PO’ed Hillary voters who go for McCain will make up for the Republican base who stay home, because they don’t like McCain.
The latest. You’ll have to do better than that, PP.
Progressives view poll numbers as proof positive of succcess – you’re almost Vulcan in your insistance on data, as opposed to personal interaction.
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p>We are more Klingon – more into tribal ties, loyalties, and PERSONAL ACTION. A quick press and photo op isn’t support – it’s a gloss, a mere hat tip. Door knocking, phone calling, putting YOUR reputation publicly behind somebody – and at the Elks Hall not at a glitzy cyber venue – that’s more our style.
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p>Where are the other 8 Democrats? (Well, maybe you wouldn’t WANT Dodd this minute second…) Waiting for the convention? Are any of them travelling around, boosting Obama? Or are you going to rely on HAL-like outreach right through November?
That’s not a poll. It’s an announcement of Clinton and Obama appearing jointly at a major fundraising event in DC. Sounds like personal action to me.
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p>Plus, this notion that Republicans are the true grassroots-ers … let’s just say that I find that pretty amusing. I’ll give credit where credit’s due to the Christian Coalition and other special interest groups that have helped out the GOP in the past. But this time, the Democrats have the clear grassroots advantage.
I think it is true that many, in some places most, local organizations probably skew Republican. Churches, Elks, Rotarians, Scout troops, hunting clubs, VFW, American Legion, etc. When things spread using these existing institutions, it is more effective than having some political canvasser bang on peoples’ doors.
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p>Liberals have, in many of these instances, simply ceded the field. Yes, there are liberal variants of these. The trade unions, to note the biggest and baddest of them all. Some churches that exist in true-blue states.
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p>But it sure seems to me that liberal “grassroots” –to the extent improved in 2008– might just be leveling the playing field, rather than tilting it the other way.
The church groups are massively demoralized now, as are teh VFW, American Legion, etc. McCain’s going around refusing to increase tuition aid for soldiers, even though college prices have skyrocketed, and they’re gonna go stump for him?
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p>The netroots are a real thing, however. They don’t need a hall or a local chapter, they’re all wired up via email and they are ready for a fight right now. They’re bigger than the republican grassroots this cycle in terms of actual political activity, for sure. Obama can entrance 75,000 of them at a time.
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p>Meanwhile, going forward? I’m gonna bet on the republican groups stagnating/diminishing while the wired youngsters increase. Esp if Obama stays smooth and doesn’t give the wackos a rallying cry to fire up their troops against him.
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p>You think everybody is America has FiOS like Cambridge? Heck, we don’t even have it in Barnstable and Berkshires! Set ASIDE issues of affordability at $60/mo.! MANY people have little or no direct internet access in their homes, esp. in rural areas, but they DO go to church and bowling. And they don’t much like remarks from NObama adherents that imply that the world will be a better place when they just die off, as they are so less REAL than the NetRoots, so the Kool Kidz can take over.
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p>But don’t take my word for it. Wait until December, and let me know how this worked out for you.
Elitism is thinking that the INTERNET is some wacky space age technology that only sophisticates like ourselves can use and understand!
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p>Check the #s for growth in internet usage, broadband, etc. Nationwide. Look at the demographics using it. Then put that out 10 years — each new year of voters is more wired than the last. This will continue, and it’s not elitist, IMO it’s the exact opposite.
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p>I’m not advocating that anybody dies off but you don’t see too many octogenarians doing a full-day canvas. Some, sure, and they’re usually the darling of the group but it’s a rarity.
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p>PS Did you need fios to log onto bluemassgroup or send emails to your local RSC chapter?
I mean are you watching this campaign? You see the speeches on super-final-tuesday? Puke green background?
And you rarely make dumb statements.
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p>One doesn’t need FiOS to be wired. One doesn’t even need a computer or an ISP; blackberries and iPhones do just fine. Furthermore, libraries have the Internet, as do universities, which serve plenty of young people who have little money.
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p>I’d be shocked if, per capita, folks in rural areas* subscribe to Internet access of some kind at rates any lower than urban areas.
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p>But keep putting words into jaybooth‘s post that he never wrote, and keep pretending that the Internet — the most democratizing communication medium ever known — is “elitist.” The word doesn’t stick, especially coming from a Republican from Cape Cod.
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p> * Barring really rural areas like upstate Alaska and the like.
Will you believe it if John Kerry says so?
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p>http://www.masslive.com/news/i…
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p>And for those of you saying – well, we can STILL be cool and wired with existing service – ever tried to download a candidate web site with a 56k modem? Or make a donation with one?
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p>FiOS is a far away dream for many of us. Already, I’m doing more at hot spots, because my home DSL service is experiencing the summer slowdown – as more people come to the cape, they suck the bandwidth out of the ONE T-1 line, and when you get east of the Bass River, coverage is shaky except for late at night.
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p>Stomv – we do not have a single university, and our libraries experience the same service problems as the rest of us. Blackberries,et al, argue a level of affordabiltiy that may not be universal. ‘Of some kind’ accurately describes our access.
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p>But hey, jes keep on keepin’ on – wired it is. Me, I’ll be at the VFWs, local parades and seafood festivals with Beatty and McCain stuff, amid the 20th century hoi polloi.
There’s tons of ways to be wired. Cable, satellite, and cell phone are three ways to get higher bandwidth than 56k that don’t include FiOS. In fact, traditional broadband telephony connection isn’t FiOS, and that’s what I have in metro Boston. It’s true that broadband non-fiber is easier in the city because you have to be within a few hundred feet of particular telephone equipment and fewer people are that close in less dense areas, but this claim of “FiOS or die!” is just plain silly.
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p>It also ignores the reality that there are people who can get faster Internet access at their office job because their business pays for fiber or some other connection.
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p>Do cities have more/better/faster Internet connections? Sure. But this suggestion that rural areas have nothing more than 56k is just flat out wrong.
“Eight years into the 21st century, more than half of Americans have either no Internet access at all or are still using dial-up.”
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p>I do not have reliable year-round DSL because of bandwidth bottlenecks. Which is why this is at one AM.
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p>Tell me, Stomv – how many Blackberries do they have at the public libraries you all like to point to as evidence of the ‘universality’ of the internet?
BMG is nice and everything, but I don’t confuse it with actual social interaction. Much of what I have seen on the other, national liberal sites barely qualifies for the adjective “social.”
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p>What, you think people are going to stop going to church, to the Chamber of Commerce Breakfast, to their Elks meeting, to the VFW post, to their kids’ scout troop meeting, because Bush is a turd and McCain is past his sell-by date?
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p>Republcians have a huge, huge advantage in the “grassroots” because those institutions (i) skew conservative, and (ii) have an existence, and a purpose, that is 100% independent of politics, which means that the institutions don’t turn to dust when the polls close on election day.
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p>Liberal institutions tend to be primarily, rather than secondarily, political– with the exception of unions. Therefore they must be re-invented anew every single campaign.
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p>I don’t think the “netroots” evens the disadvantage, though it certainly helps.
Depressing because if it is true that actual community institutions atrophy as you suggest, and are replaced by online activty, that suggests a depressing degree of social atomization.
A violent, imperialistic, xenophobic culture from a fictional universe? Hmm… good analogy, PP.
It is great that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are holding a joint event, but I fear we are still far from unity. It is going to take a while and a lot of hard work. I know a lot of Hillary Clinton supporters who are still trying to figure out what they are going to do in the Fall. Some of these people are people who in the past have volunteered a lot of hours on campaigns. The Obama campaign needs to carefully consider how they are going to convince these people to fully support Barack Obama and, most importantly, get out there and work for him in the Fall. (Most of them probably will vote for him.) The Obama campaign needs these people in order to win.
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p>A little word of advice to anyone who is listening out there from the Obama campaign, if the campaign is going to send out letters and emails to Clinton supporters asking for donations, why not acknowledge Hillary Clinton and state what a great Democrat she is? A lot of Clinton supporters are still angry about all the nasty, unsupported things that were said about her, and about Bill Clinton, during the primary campaign. Even though those comments may not have come from the Obama campaign or his supporters, it would help win over a lot of Clinton supporters if the Obama campaign simply acknowledged what a great Democrat and leader Hillary Clinton is in its initial direct contact with her supporters.
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h/t Atrios:
Any questions?
just b/c rudy ran a failed campaign for president — i thought the joke that he was running for “President of 9/11” was hilarious — why does that mean
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p>a) he failed to prepare NYC to the extent reasonably possible (name a mayor, D or R, of a any of our 10 largest cities who did a better job, or any gov for that matter)
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p>b) his work on 9/11 and the days and weeks afterwards, which was stellar, needs to be torn down?
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p>(this is more for david’s original post, dismissing Rudy simply as “having been photographed walking through the smoke and dust on 9/11″….i mean come ON)
(a) He put the command center in the twin towers and he didn’t fix the communications problem that cost many firefighters their lives.
(b) I’m not so sure what was stellar about the post 9/11 period other than being a calming presence.
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p>His relationship with Kerik is not just a little bit troubling, not even troubling, it is extremely troubling.
But being a calming presence post 9/11 ought not be so cavalierly dismissed. Doesn’t make him an expert on anything at all, but ought not be pooh-poohed.
…for he pales in comparison to their ideal of how a mayor should react to a crisis.
I didn’t write the bit about Rudy being photographed, though I did quote it and thought it was harsh but a good way of pointing out that, in fact, the guy has no national security experience and has no special knowledge or qualifications with respect to terrorism. He was a prosecutor and a mayor, for God’s sake.
but, for me, even that’s not a powerful critique.
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p>obama has about the equivalent low level of “special knowledge,” but i like what i understand about his “big picture.”
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p>if qualifications are needed just to critique, wouldn’t they be even MORE needed to actually be elected?
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p>i don’t buy it. i want good decision-makers. bill clinton made reasonable foreign policy decisions.
Giuliani has not demonstrated that he is a quick study either. His understanding of the Middle East remains willfully rudimentary.
is Rudymentary. Ha!
I missed that pun. Must have been unconscious.
I thought this had merit. Giuliani’s essay was so bad I wondered if it was something he had simply entirely delegated to some committee while he dialed for dollars.
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p>Peripheral: this WaPo editorial argues that Obama and McCain are actually not dissimilar on foreign policy….
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http://www.usnews.com/blogs/ma…
…was coined in a DKos limerick thread the Saturday before Rudy dropped out of the race. At the time, there was five candidates still in it:
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p>I can’t remember who to credit the limerick with, but I do remember the limerick – Rudy wrecked it by dropping out so soon!
Rudy’s a fake. Always has been. The Republican primary voters had no trouble figuring that out. Let’s see how the media does with it.”
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p>If you’ve ever dealt with reporters, you walk away impressed that someone so stupid can put word to paper. We all know some “fact” that made the newspaper that had no basis in reality. Well, everyone’s facts get the same treatment. The reporters put down what they think or are told is the truth, the editors “massage” the information based on news media time/print constraints, political considerations, advertiser needs, etc. You can’t tell what animal was put in the sausage. Just a business. Rudy is taken seriously by the press because it is politically expedient to do so.
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p>Wouldn’t it be cool to see stories like this hit the MSM? How’s about “Accused war criminal goes to work for major oil company!?”
I am surprised that Rudy G is even trying to get back into politics especially considering three of his core supporters are being investigated by the FBI. Bill Powers who was once the leader of the New York Republican Party and a man whose been given allot of credit for the Republicans 12 year reign in New York State and NYC is being investigated by the feds. I hear it has to do with his role and another Rudy supporter former Congressman John Sweeney’s connections to Jack Abramoff. You also need to take a look at New York Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno who is also being investigated by the feds for corruption. My father used to tell me that you can tell allot about a person by the company they keep.
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p>I would think that three major supporters being investigated for corruption and fraud shows the reality of Rudy. Having lived in NY during his rule I was not impressed. I saw the neighborhood I grew up in more or less turned into a playground for the uber-wealthy and it was done with the thumbs up from city hall. It looks like Rudy is trying to get himself into the running for VP. If that is the case, I hope he gets it. There is nothing I would love more then to open up a door so the world can see how crooked and incompetent “America’s Mayor” really is. He is a fraud through and through and his leadership turned the city of my birth into a city of economic apartheid.