Stop It Now! [Victor Davis Hanson]
There will be more ebbs and flows to come, but right now for the moment Obama is in a partial meltdown mood. Given the number of issues that Obama has contradicted himself on—2004 vows not to run for the Presidency, Rev. Wright, capital punishment, taxes, Iran, the surge, drilling, FISA laws, public campaign financing, etc—it is odd to see him increasingly and in really angry fashion evoke "lies!" and "lying!" when he talks of McCain.
Something is happening. Apparently the Palin presence has gotten to the legendarily easy cool Obama in a way nothing has before, as he seems alternately petulant, frustrated, outraged, and, well, downright madder than hell.
Is it his fear that he's lost his monopoly on hope and change hero worship to a rival fresh maverick?
Are her crowds approaching his?
Is it anger that Palin is so easily drawing identity-politics support of the sort he once so carefully worked at to jump-start his own campaign?
Is it realization that since law school, Chicago politics, the default Senate race, no one has ever really questioned his sincerity or competence, and that to do so now is in some way illiberal and unfair—blasphemous even?
Is it that his furor over her outside status only boomerangs questions back to him over his own level of relative experience?
Is it frustration that his actual attacks on her now raise sexism charges in a way his own preemptory past use of the race card has ensured that everyone has heretofore gone easy on him?
Who knows?— but even diehard Obama supporters sense that the mom of five from Alaska in her high heels and middle -American twang just keeps coming, the more smeared and slandered, the more she waves, smiles, says "Hi guys!" and goes on, McCain at her side basking in reflected adulation.
This may not last, and Palin will have to do her interviews and give new speeches, but for the present all this simply was not supposed to happen, and someone, somewhere better stop it—now!
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Lots of Lipstick Out There [Michael Graham]
Yesterday afternoon I spent two hours in the parking lot of a restaurant in the Boston suburbs collecting lipsticks from angry voters who want to send a message to Sen. Obama. I was expecting maybe 50 people to stop by. Instead, about 200 angry, horn-honking, fired up listeners — mostly women — helped me fill an entire bulk mail bin with lipsticks.
Usually when a talk radio host does a station event, the attendees are overwhelmingly male, as is our listenership. But 75% or more of the folks who came by yesterday were women. And they aren't nit-picking over exactly what was on Sen. Obama's mind when he made the crack about lipstick. They heard it, and they got the message.
One woman, who identified herself as a Hillary supporter, drove in from Rhode Island. Another — a mother in her late 40s — drove 42 miles each way to bring me one lipstick.
I know there are conservatives who think this controversy is a campaign fiction being cleverly exploited by the McCain campaign. But as I wrote in the Boston Herald today, I think they're wrong. The Obama campaign has been working the "lipstick" meme for days. Sen. Obama should have left it to his surrogates, but instead gave into a moment of unbecoming snarkiness towards Gov. Palin.
The crowd knew it, and the women I'm hearing from — I've gotten several hundred emails from them in 24 hours — heard it, too.
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