Goodbye, Jim! Don't Let The Screen Door Hit You In The Ass On The Way Out, Either!

My pair of outraged e-mails to the Obama campaign did the trick. A sleazeball out of the Donkey past — James A. Johnson with ties to Countrywide Financial and the folks who gave us the mortgage industry meltdown — couldn't take the heat and got out of the kitchen. Good riddance! I am glad that The Hopester listened to my voice o'reason. If this is (fair & balanced) self-delusion, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Obama Team Leader Resigns In Bid To Quell Growing Furor
By John M. Broder

Senator Barack Obama, moving to quell a growing furor, accepted the resignation of the head of his vice presidential search team, James A. Johnson, on Wednesday after days of questions about Mr. Johnson’s tenure as head of Fannie Mae and other business associations.

The resignation of Mr. Johnson, a consummate Washington Democratic insider, highlights the challenge Mr. Obama faces living up to his goal of not surrounding himself with people with ties to special interests.

In a statement issued by his Chicago campaign headquarters, Mr. Obama said Wednesday afternoon that “Jim did not want to distract in any way from the very important task of gathering information about my vice presidential nominee, so he has made a decision to step aside that I accept.”

Mr. Johnson, who also directed Senator John Kerry’s vice presidential search when he was the Democratic nominee in 2004, had come under fierce scrutiny in recent days after disclosures that he had received mortgage loans on favorable terms from Countrywide Financial, the beleaguered mortgage lender. His large paychecks and bonuses while president of Fannie Mae, the quasi-public government mortgage agency, also drew heavy Republican criticism.

Mr. Obama had defended Mr. Johnson as recently as Tuesday, saying that he had only a “tangential” role in his campaign and that he was not troubled by his business activities. He said he had not inquired about his mortgages and would not hire people to, as he put it, “vet the vetters.”

But Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Republican Party officials kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism of Mr. Johnson. The case became a test of Mr. Obama’s professed independence from Washington insiders and supposed higher ethical standards. Mr. Obama has refused to accept campaign donations from lobbyists and had made criticism of the cozy financial and political relationships in the capital a hallmark of his campaign rhetoric.

Mr. Obama said the remaining two members of the vice presidential vetting team, Eric Holder, a former deputy attorney general, and Caroline Kennedy, would continue the work that began last week.

“We have a very good selection process under way, and I am confident that it will produce a number of highly qualified candidates for me to choose from in the weeks ahead,” Mr. Obama said in his statement. “I remain grateful to Jim for his service and his efforts in this process.”

Mr. Obama was meeting with campaign aides in Chicago on Wednesday afternoon. . Campaign officials would provide no details of the discussions that led to Mr. Johnson’s departure.

Earlier Wednesday, on a conference call with Obama campaign staff before Mr. Johnson’s departure was announced, Senator Kerry defended him.

“Jim Johnson is a very experienced, very discreet, very capable individual who is performing a voluntary function without pay, without any interest,” Mr. Kerry said. “He’s not seeking a job and, you know, he is acting completely independently to gather information about somebody. And that’s it.”

Mr. Kerry added, “That is the full measure of this, and it seems that this is one of those sort of Washington grab stories where people try to make something out of something it’s not.”

Referring to the 2004 vice presidential vetting Mr. Johnson performed for him, Mr. Kerry said, “There were no leaks from my process, and he was handling unbelievably sensitive information.”

He added, “He did an outstanding job in that capacity, and I have no complaint about what he did for me.”

[John Broder is the Los Angeles Bureau Chief for the New York Times. He previously served as the newspaper's Washington editor and White House correspondent. He also worked in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times, covering defense, the intelligence agencies and the White House. He earlier worked at newspapers in Cleveland, Dayton and Detroit.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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I'm Down With Mrs. Hopester

The Cobra warns that the Righties and The Dumbos are going to savage Mrs. Hopester. Their principal charge is that Mrs. Hopester is a traitor because she acknowledged that she hadn't always been proud of the United States of America. Limber up Google and search for the following (in descending chronological order):

Waterboarding
Abu Ghraib
My Lai
Japanese-American Internment
The Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment
Lynching (up through James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, TX
and Matthew Shepard in Laramie, WY in 1998)
Occupation of the Philippines
The "Battle" of Wounded Knee
The "Battle" of Sand Creek
Slavery, 1619-1865.

The "honor roll" omits "enemy lists" and Watergate and all of the rest of our fun and games. I want to meet the person who can wade through all of this shameful muck and proclaim pride in this country without reservation or qualification. Because that will be a person who lives out where the buses don't run. Mrs. Hopester has an obligation to say that she reserves the right to express pride in her country when her country deserves it. Mindless pride in country leads to the same madness that elected Adolf Hitler in 1933. Give me a thinking, discerning patriot over a wacko who will waterboard some poor devil or vote for a Hitler. If this is (fair & balanced) genuine patriotism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Mincing Up Michelle
By Maureen Dowd

Hillary and Bill are busy updating their enemies lists. And Obama is racking his brain trying to figure out where to stash his erstwhile rival.

If a President Obama put her on the Supreme Court, of course, we would have the infinite fun of hearing Bill rant about how Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Roberts were dissing Hillary.

It’s good news for Obama that Hillary’s out of the race. But it’s also bad news. Now Republicans can turn their full attention to demonizing Michelle Obama. Mrs. Obama is the new, unwilling contestant in Round Two of the sulfurous national game of “Kill the witch.”

There are some who think it will be harder for America to accept a black first lady — the national hostess who serenely presides over the White House Christmas festivities and the Easter egg roll — than a black president.

There are creepy Web sites, like TheObamaFile.com, dedicated to painting Michelle as a female version of Jeremiah Wright, an angry black woman, the disgruntled, lecturing “Mrs. Grievance” depicted on the cover of National Review.

On that site and others around the Internet, the seamy rumors still slither that there’s a tape of Michelle denouncing “whitey,” a rumor that Barack Obama disdained last week as “scurrilous.”

E.D. Hill, the Fox anchor who said that the celebrated fist pump between Michelle and her husband the night he snagged the nomination could be called a “terrorist fist jab,” apologized Tuesday.

In their narrative of how Hillary lost in The Times on Sunday, Jim Rutenberg and Peter Baker said that Mark Penn argued that Hillary should subtly stress Obama’s “lack of American roots.”

That’s a good preview of how Republicans will attack Michelle, suggesting that she does not share American values, mining a subtext of race.

She’s a devoted daughter, wife and mother who has lived the American dream, from the humble South Side of Chicago to Harvard Law School. Hey, isn’t it totally unAmerican to complain that being a black woman in the ’80s at a class-conscious, white-bread college, Princeton, was somewhat uncomfortable?

Just as Bill and Hillary did the “Pssst! He’s black!” thing on Barry, now the Republicans will use the same tactic on the strong and opinionated Michelle.

Unlike her husband, who wrote in his memoir that he had learned at a young age to smile and charm and disarm whites of the notion that he might be a bristly black militant, Michelle has not always hidden her jangly opinions so well. She has spent more time dwelling on the ways in which society can pull down the less privileged and refers a lot to a callous but unnamed “They.”

“Michelle,” as one political observer puts it, “is a target-rich environment.”

Team Obama is hoping for the best. When she’s on her game, after all, Michelle is a knockout. And as one Obama booster enthuses: “Michelle’s story is a lot more mainstream American than Cindy McCain inheriting a brewery.”

But the campaign is preparing for the worst, planning to shore up Michelle with her own slick and quick war room staffed by top operatives from previous campaigns.

David Axelrod thinks “there’s a real recoil potential” if the Republicans go after Michelle. “I don’t think she’s projecting herself into the fray in a way that would justify that,” he said, adding that her charming and polite daughters, Malia and Sasha, are walking testimony to Michelle’s “loving parenting.”

Mike Murphy, the G.O.P. strategist who worked for John McCain in 2000, but not yet this year, said Michelle is heading into her “big moment in the sun.”

“She’ll have the opportunity to do pretty well and the opportunity to really screw up.” he said. “What I glimpse of her from far away makes me think there could be trouble, but anytime you have that size microphone, she will have some control over how she handles the pressure.”

She’s going to take her big microphone on “The View” as a co-host next week, when she will no doubt try to put her remark about her belated pride in her country in context. And she clearly scored a pre-emptive hit both with her chic style — Vogue’s André Leon Talley declared in The Times the dawn of “a black Camelot” — and with her playful fist pump that now has older white guys, like North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley, awkwardly trying to do it with Obama.

The dap or pound, as it’s also called, was a natural and beguiling moment that showed the country that, even though she started out as her husband’s boss and has a résumé that matches his, she likes him and is rooting for him, and is not engaged in a dreaded Clintonesque competition with him. (On the night of the Pennsylvania primary, Bill was eagerly checking to see who had swayed more voters — him or Hillary.)

“She isn’t sitting with a fixed, adoring gaze,” Axelrod said. “But she obviously loves him deeply and believes in him, and more than that, she believes in this. And that motivates him.”

[Maureen Dowd is a Washington D.C.-based columnist for The New York Times. She has worked for the Times since 1983, when she joined the paper as a metropolitan reporter. In 1999, Dowd was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Hurricane Camille's VP Advice To The Hopester: Choose Dorothy!

Unpack a pair of red shoes for The Hopester's Veep. If this is (fair & balanced) eunomy, so be it.

P.S.: I've launched a letter-writing campaign to convince The Hopester to throw one member of his VP Selection Team under the bus. Mr. Jim Johnson, with ties to Countrywide Financial (and the entire mortgage industry mess), has got to go. He represents the sleaze of the Old Politics. Dump Johnson!

[x Salon]
Obama's Best Veep Choice: Here's A Hint: She's Not Hillary!
By Camille Paglia

Shuddering, lurching and stumbling, the 2008 general election has finally, mercifully begun. For a year and a half, U.S. voters have been flogged like a prison gang through the nine circles of media hell. The two dazed survivors of the primary process, John McCain and Barack Obama, are now warily circling each other, looking for an opening even as they try to shed the already hardened public perception of their character and motivation.

For disaffected Republicans as well as many Democrats like me, McCain is an irascible grandstander of slippery ideology who has made a career out of flattering and courting the media. It remains debatable whether McCain's traumatic experiences as a prisoner of war have enhanced or distorted his admittedly wide-ranging knowledge of military and security matters. Crystal clear, however, is McCain's startling awkwardness as a public speaker. With stilted, stodgy intonations that seem to descend from the late-19th century era of one-room schoolhouses, McCain laboriously reading a speech is a painful spectacle. After the mumbling, disjointed George W. Bush, doesn't the U.S. deserve a more sophisticated leader on the international stage?

Meanwhile, conservative talk radio, which I have been following with interest for almost 20 years, has become a tornado alley of hallucinatory holograms of Obama. He's a Marxist! A radical leftist! A hater of America! He's "not that bright"; he can't talk without a teleprompter. He knows nothing and has done less. His wife is a raging mass of anti-white racism. It's gotten to the point that I can hardly listen to my favorite shows, which were once both informative and entertaining. The hackneyed repetition is numbing and tedious, and the overt character assassination is ethically indefensible. Talk radio will lose its broad audience if it continues on this nakedly partisan path.

As an Obama supporter, I of course see things quite differently. Whatever his tactical assertions in the primary trenches, Obama seems to have an open and flexible mind. He is a conciliator and synthesizer, ready to give due respect to opposing views -- a grace desperately needed in paralyzed Washington. When the camera comes close -- as it did last week when CNN's terrific Candy Crowley tenaciously grilled him about Hillary Clinton's prospects for the vice-presidency -- his deliberative thought process is plainly visible. What a deft performance under high-stakes pressure: Obama was firm, authoritative and methodical without ever losing his warmth and geniality. The guy is smart as a whip. And his administration will be as good as its appointments. As for Michelle Obama, she is formidable, representing a bold, stylish feminism more authentically contemporary than the old, bellyaching, blame-the-males style of Hillary's omnipresent cheerleader, Gloria Steinem.

Given the looming importance of national security concerns, I used to think that Virginia's pugnacious junior senator, Jim Webb, an ex-Marine, would be Obama's most prudent running mate. Obama doesn't need some veteran pol like the 66-year-old governor of Ohio, Ted Strickland, who would simply make Obama look younger than he is. Arizona's ebullient Governor Janet Napolitano would certainly fill out my Italian-American dream ticket and help to nail down the Southwest. But I've come to feel that Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius is Obama's best bet. She is a polished public presence who epitomizes that cordial, smoothly reassuring, and blandly generic WASPiness that has persistently defined the American power structure in business and government and that has weirdly resisted wave after wave of immigration since the mid-19th century. An Obama-Sebelius pairing would be visually vibrant and radiant, like a new day dawning.

Governor Kathleen Seblius (D-KS)

Hillary for veep? Are you mad? What party nominee worth his salt would chain himself to a traveling circus like the Bill and Hillary Show? If the sulky bearded lady wasn't biting the new president’s leg, the oafish carnival barker would be sending in the clowns to lure all the young ladies into back-of-the-tent sword-swallowing. It would be a seamy orgy of scheming and screwing. Hillary could never be content with second place. But neither could an alpha male like Obama. The vice-president should be an accomplished but subordinate personality. An Obama-Hillary ticket might tickle party regulars, but it would be a big fat minus in the general election. Republicans have shrewdly stockpiled a mammoth arsenal of past scandals to strafe Hillary with. Only a sentimental masochist would want to relive the tawdry 1990s.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised at the ecstatic media lockstep praising Hillary's so-called concession speech last weekend. This is the same herd of sheep who bleated to Bush's beat and brought us the Iraq fiasco. I first heard the speech on the radio as I was driving back to Philadelphia from a family event in upstate New York. I was shocked and appalled at Hillary's inflammatory demagoguery, which was obviously intended to keep her candidacy alive through the August convention and beyond. The echo in the museum's marble entry hall gave the event an eerily retro quality, as if it were a 1930s fascist rally. Hillary's turgid, preachy rhythms were condescending and manipulative, and her climaxes were ear-splittingly strident. It was pure Evita, a cult of personality masquerading as populism. When I later saw the speech on TV, I was disgusted by how Hillary undercut her insultingly brief endorsement of Obama with a flat expression and cold, dead eyes. The only thing that got her blood racing was the blatantly stoked hysteria of her screeching worshipers.

Hillary's desperate end-game gambit to turn the whole election into a referendum on gender does feminism a serious disservice. It wasn't sexism that cost Hillary the nomination: It was her own misjudgments and mismanagement of a campaign that had the massive support of the nationwide party establishment, constructed by her husband -- to whom she owes her entire career, which has thus far been dismayingly free of any significant, concrete achievement. What kind of feminism is this -- all smiley show and no substance? Hillary's latest pose as tribune of the people is contradicted by her snobbish history of catering to the rich and famous as well as her indifference to the legions of small vendors whom her extravagant campaign has stiffed. And no true feminist would tolerate or enable that decades-long pattern of brazen philandering and crude sexual harassment that will forever brand the Clinton chronicles. When will our paleo-feminist dead-enders wake up to the psychological reality that compulsive seducers are misogynists?

Hillary's authentic contribution to feminism is to have demonstrated for the first time that a woman can win state primaries -- even if she needed her husband's help as well as racially divisive tactics to do so. This welcome development will surely encourage big donors to support future presidential campaigns by women, who (like Elizabeth Dole) were previously forced to drop out early for lack of funding. Obama's meteoric success will also benefit female candidates, who can hope to break out of the pack as suddenly as he did. Past predictors of electoral success have been exploded, and all bets are off.

Speaking of the pack, where the hell were the women in this last one? It's outrageous that none of our other experienced female Democrats had a fire in the belly for the presidency -- or the guts to challenge Hillary. Look at Dennis Kucinich, whose electoral chances were always slim but who stuck to his guns and endured mockery and belittlement far more widespread and routine than anything suffered by Hillary. The public arena is by definition savage and gladiatorial. Women aspiring to high office have to buck up and accept the ritual abuse and taunting that men have playfully used on one another since childhood. The list of allegedly lethal sexist comments flung at Hillary is small indeed -- a few tasteless asides by immature talk-show buffoons. Big deal! As for the "Iron my shirt" hoax (a video of which was posted in my last column), anyone who falls for that minor stunt is naive indeed. But paleo-feminists en masse have seized that tale and are waving it around like Veronica's veil. This kind of mushy gullibility makes one cringe for one's gender.

In point of fact, Hillary's sex helped her more than hurt her. What the media repeatedly claimed was her success in debate was predicated on her silencing of her male competitors, who were bullied into excess caution in dealing with a woman. Not one Democratic male dared attack or rebut her with the zest shown by all the Republican candidates jousting with each other. Hillary had to be coddled with elaborate deference -- or the delicate little woman would squawk bloody murder (as she did when she petulantly complained about always being given the first debate question). All of this rubbish was resurrected last week in the thousand mawkish excuses found by the media and her crooning acolytes for "giving her time" to withdraw from the race. No man would have been treated in that overconcerned way -- as a frail vessel of quivering emotion. Yet another blot on feminism, courtesy of Clinton, Inc.

And here’s another whopping female advantage: Hillary could jet around the country with an elaborate, color-keyed wardrobe and a professional hair and makeup crew, who plastered and insta-lifted her with dewy salon uber-ointments and cutting-edge technology before every appearance. No male candidate has ever had that theatrical privilege. (John Edwards, in contrast, was heaped with scorn for his simple yet pricey haircuts.) When the mega-prep for some reason failed -- as on a frigid morning in Iowa -- the resultant photo of Hillary in realistically wrinkled 60-year-old mode caused repercussions around the world. Golda Meir, with her robustly lived-in face and matriarchal jowls, would have given ever-primping Hollywood Hillary a derisive Bronx cheer.

There can be no doubt that Hillary's travails have reignited the feminist wars, which sputtered out in the mid-'90s after the rousing triumph of the insurgent pro-sex wing of feminism to which I belong. Grab your swords and saddle up, ladies! The spectral Steinem is clinging to Hillary like a limpet. Oh, and there's Susan Faludi wispily brooding in Steinem's papoose. Get ready to rumble: Male-bashing feminism is back with a vengeance.

[Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her most recent book is Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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