Posted on 03/12/2008 5:38:07 PM PDT by presidio9
Sometimes it seems the Dolans run Madison Square Garden better than the Democrats run their party. Start with Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who has already done the impossible in this primary campaign: make politicians in Florida look smarter than he is.
Dean and the rest of the party bosses are talking in earnest about "do-overs" in Florida and Michigan. The Democrats want to run the country and expected to run the country after two straight presidential elections they let George Bush and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove take from them like they were taking their lunch money. But they run their own primary system about as well as Hillary Clinton, the great problem solver, runs her own campaign.
Soon it won't be the outgoing President of the United States doing a clumsy tap dance in front of the White House - to go with seven years of tap-dancing inside - it will be John McCain.
For the time being, and for the foreseeable future, McCain gets a free pass as he doesn't just stand side-by-side with Bush, but begins his own run to the White House on the policies of the worst President of my lifetime, and yours.
Less than two years ago, after midterm elections that effectively put Bush's second term on the scrap heap of political history where it belongs, after the mandate they were going to use to change history, the Democrats are still arguing about their own process. This may all not be worth a thimbleful of spit in the end if the superdelegates decide the thing in Denver, at a convention Don Imus was saying the other day might end up making Chicago in '68 look like a Cub Scout meeting.
But between now and then, McCain can act as if he has taken the high ground by running on Bush's war in Iraq, running on economic policies that have record numbers of people in this country swallowed whole by their own mortgages and walking away from their own homes.
The Democrats should be running hard against all of that. You shouldn't be able to lose running against that.
Instead the campaign degenerates - and this is more Clinton's doing than Obama's, with a strategy that late in the game she seems to have ripped off from "There Will Be Blood" - into a debate about things that have nothing to do with actually getting the country back from Bush and Cheney. While it happens, the leaders of the Democratic Party seem to run in circles. They may have to go running back to Michigan and Florida, and you know how great things always work out for the Democrats when they let Florida decide.
'We're into the silly season," Barack Obama said at the last debate. It is all of that now, and that includes the media, which changes its coverage every couple of weeks and wildly overreacts when accused of something like going too easy on Obama. Perfect. Let "Saturday Night Live" set the debate now.
Clinton wants the idea out there that Clinton-Obama would be some sort of dream team - that's the ticket, of course, because in her mind she's already been vice president - trying to paint herself as some sort of front-runner when she is never going to pass Obama in delegates before they get to Denver.
When Mario Cuomo was running against Ed Koch for governor, he said that if everybody liked both of them they should vote for him and keep Koch as mayor. It worked then. Maybe Clinton thinks it can work now, even if she doesn't have the numbers and isn't going to have them before Denver.
But why not? If she can sell the idea in Texas and Ohio that she has passed the "readiness test" by being First Lady, maybe she thinks she can sell anything. If you look at her record as First Lady, the truth is that the biggest crisis she handled was her own husband. Somehow she thinks that makes her tougher than Barack Obama, who grew up black in America and has made it all the way to this moment in American history.
Does that mean Obama is some sort of amazing problem solver for America? It does not. As Cuomo, always too honest for a politician, said once, "Some problems can't be solved. But they can be managed."
Just from the campaign that has been run so far, Obama is a better manager than Clinton, and there is no reason to think that would change if he ever does beat her and McCain and win the White House. Just not the way this is going in a process that feels like one of those four-hour baseball games that stretches past midnight and won't end.
There have been so many times since Chicago in 1968 when the Democratic Party couldn't get out of its own way. This could be another. Forty years after Chicago, after a Democratic campaign that has brought out record numbers of people, so many of them young people, those people could be told in Denver they don't matter. And this time the Democrats will Swift-boat themselves.
Why does every sportswriter think they are political geniuses?
What’s particularly weird is that the News has been giving him a soapbox in the front pages for a few years now. From there, his “columns” use Don Imus as his go-to sage. Even back when I was growing up and he stuck to sports I thought he was the worst writer in town. Must be the BC “education.”
Lupica is way, way out of his league. He sounds like a child.
C'mon Mike .. even a savvy Sports-writer like you who's been around the block a few times knows that Jimmy Carter and perhaps George H.W. Bush were the worst Presidents of his lifetime, not to mention his hero, B.J. Clinton. /SHEESH!
There’s always been a connection between sports and politics...Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hammill both started out as sportswriters...but at least they could write.
Lippman: So have you ever done this kind of work before?
George: Well you know book reports that kind of thing.
Lippman: What do you read?
George: I like Mike Lupica.
Lippman: Mike Lupica?
George: He’s a sports writer for the daily news, I find him very insightful.
“Why does every sportswriter think they are political geniuses?”
Exactly. It’s just another person standing on their soapbox. I would love to ask him what should have been done after 9/11. And, if Iraq was not a problem why was Clinton routinely dropping ordinance on them. And why is it the president’s fault that people made poor choices when they took out mortgages. It’s so easy to be a Bush basher.
Well, in Michigan we have to suffer with Mitch Albom.
Well, gag me with a spoon!
Because most of them suck at writing about sports which they never played and get paid big bucks to be preening a..holes. So they figure if I get paid this well for not knowing what the hell I’m talking about I may as well become a political pundint and really showcase my ignorance.
So Mike, could you please, um, elaborate on which of President's Bush's or John McCain's economic policies "have record numbers of people in this country swallowed whole by their own mortgages and walking away from their own homes?"
While you're at it, can you tell us the difference between the whole war in Iraq (which one Democrat candidate approved and one might have) and the Troop Surge (which one Democrate candidate might have approved, and one opposed)?
Then tell us how the 2006 elections relegated Bush to the scrapheap, but 2000 did not do the same for Clinton. Or was the Clinton presidency already a total failure by that point?
This is the only thing that makes any sense in Lupica's article, and that ain't saying much.
What a goofball bore.
Carter was the WORST BY FAR.
Even in retirement, Carter continues to show his incompetence, immaturity and lack of patriotism. Loser then, loser now, loser always.
Just like you Mikey.
He "grew up black"? How so? After his black father ran out on him and his white mother when he was a toddler, he was raised by his white mother and his white grandparents, who had plenty of money and sent him to the best schools. Looks to me like he "grew up white in America".
Lupica is a such a little prick. I wish we could put Barack Obama into one of those Star Trek "holodecks" to demonstrate how nightmarishly he would have responded to the 9/11 attacks. Unfortunately we would have to find out FOR REAL, as we did with Jimmy Carter--who was the actual "worst President of my lifetime, and yours".
Or perhaps Professor Lupica could tell us which of Clinton's "policies" were responsible for cutting the NASDAQ index in half on his watch.
I heard that. Listening to Frank Deford pontificate on NPR requires a major barf alert. (I know, I know.....why am I ever listening to NPR in the first place. I honestly don't know....maybe for the same reason I go to the zoo.)
He writes as though he knows all about the Democratic Convention in 1968.
How can he not know how horrible it was , FOR ALL OF US, during the Carter years?
Bill Clinton must be his hero, which shows what an idiot he really is.
He was a bad sports writer — he’s worse as a political analyst.
Go away Mike.
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