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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Yet another = One of two in the last 60+ years. Of which the previous one was the President immediately before her.
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Nov 12, 2013 02:30
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I've yet to read the book, but I found Michael Kinsley's review of Double Down to be worth a read.quote:There is actually no vomit in the scene the authors describe as “vomitous.” It’s just their way of writing vividly. They’re not snobs. They actually have a weakness for colorful vernacular, with a special fondness for a particular bodily function. And it’s not the usual one. The many references to excrement — people serving it to one another on a bun, people burying one another in it and so on — are . . . are . . . help me, I need a word here. Well, they’re vomitous. This may be the first political book ever with more excrement than sex.
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Nov 12, 2013 02:51
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Joementum posted:I've yet to read the book, but I found Michael Kinsley's review of Double Down to be worth a read. My mother's reading it right now. She says the shifting back and forth to different time periods is confusing at times. A few revelations about Romney so far have made her say, "I can't imagine him doing that." When she's done with it I'm going to read it.
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Nov 12, 2013 02:58
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I finished it tonight, reading basically only on my commute to and from work. It's okay - it's the usual Game Change stuff, in that it's tidbits of candid info/gossip that would never be revealed to a journalist with the analytic rigor and mental acumen to actually make something of it. Fortunately for access, Halperin is still writing it. Notable morsels: Romney was kind of a dick, Biden shoots his mouth off, Obama really didn't like Romney and didn't really like the Clintons either (except he learned to love them/tolerate them at the end of the campaign). Yeah, it's really Pulitzer material.
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Nov 12, 2013 03:01
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Double Down is okay, I think Game Change was better. The Newt Gingrich chapters are hilarious though, I'm sure he was happy to sit down and tell his side of the story to the authors.
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Nov 12, 2013 03:04
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Highspeeddub posted:"I can't imagine him doing that." Which almost certainly means Romney really did do exactly that. On a separate note, the last paragraph of the review is quite good. quote:One subject that gets barely a mention in “Double Down” — because it played virtually no role in the 2012 campaign — is race. In a book that aspires to be, and largely succeeds in being, the dispositive (or do I mean definitive?) account of the election, that may be the most remarkable fact of all. Having now read all other 2012 campaign books I can say this is a feature they all share, though I will charitably say that Alter at least makes an attempt.
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Nov 12, 2013 03:05
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Eh, Halperin was in the thick of enough of the 2008 stuff that his analysis on that axis came off banal and self-serving at best. Of course, Double Down describes an election where everyone who was serious avoided race as a third rail, unlike in 2008, where the Clinton operation - to borrow words used to describe Haley Barbour - "hugged the motherfucker." It is worth noting that the much ballyhooed Biden-Clinton swap stuff apparently never made it to the Oval.
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Nov 12, 2013 03:15
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seal it with a kiss posted:Double Down is okay, I think Game Change was better. The Newt Gingrich chapters are hilarious though, I'm sure he was happy to sit down and tell his side of the story to the authors.  Jon Huntsman enters as a disloyal jerk and gets worse from there. The best story is Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan discussing a late challenger to Romney. quote:One day, amid the alternative-hunting flurry, Daniels sent a text message to Ryan: “When you get a minute, give me a call.”
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Nov 12, 2013 03:19
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Does Double Down have anything on Herman Cain?
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Nov 12, 2013 03:29
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Good points in Weigel's response to the TNR Warren piece, but this is the heart of it.quote:Actually, the idea that an insurgency needs to seize a presidency in order to win is sort of retrograde, and it’s surprising that the disappointing (for progressives and a whole lot of other people) victory of Barack Obama hasn’t cured it. Has Ted Cruz taught us nothing? Anyway, until The Professor files with the FEC I'll assume she's smart enough to realize why it's a silly idea.
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Nov 12, 2013 03:48
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Double Down sounds like both the KFC masterpiece and the worst-written bit of tabloid journalism to come along in some time. So, pretty accurate title. I don't remember Game Change being that horribly written.
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Nov 12, 2013 04:17
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Joementum posted:I've yet to read the book, but I found Michael Kinsley's review of Double Down to be worth a read. Game Change was the first time I ever read of Hillary Clinton going, and this is a direct quote, "apeshit".
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Nov 12, 2013 04:41
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That NYT review made me realize how annoying the book is. So far I'm constantly using the iPad Kindle app's built in dictionary to look up a word every other page. Smug assholes with their strange words and french phrases.
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Nov 12, 2013 05:49
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The best part about Double Down thus far was that Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, and Haley Barbour talked for months about how they would join together against Romney if one of them ran but Daniels wife was adamantly opposed to it (Mitch had GWB and Laura call her to talk about it), Jeb knew his last name was still poison, and Barbour's own opposition research on himself painted him as a racist drunk. Oh, and everyone treats Joe Biden like poo poo in the white house.
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Nov 12, 2013 05:53
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Pillowpants posted:
Isn't that just how it is for the VP, except Cheney the Deathless? I could swear a former VP once said the office wasn't worth a warm pitcher of piss
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Nov 12, 2013 06:05
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Amphion posted:That NYT review made me realize how annoying the book is. So far I'm constantly using the iPad Kindle app's built in dictionary to look up a word every other page. Smug assholes with their strange words and french phrases. That's not smug that's just really bad, surprisingly amateurish writing. I really think we should have a pundit paragraph/sentence contest to determine Worst Writer in Journalism (and I use the term journalism loosely, just like they do) though. I submit this amazing sentence by Maureen Dowd: quote:Huma gained renown, movie star suitors and a Vogue spread as the stylish Muslim Garbo silently and efficiently parting the waves for Hillary.
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Nov 12, 2013 06:08
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Rygar201 posted:Isn't that just how it is for the VP, except Cheney the Deathless? I could swear a former VP once said the office wasn't worth a warm pitcher of piss I forget who said that, but I'm pretty sure he was talking about how useless the title of VP is.
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Nov 12, 2013 06:17
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Wanamingo posted:I forget who said that, but I'm pretty sure he was talking about how useless the title of VP is. John Nance Garner
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Nov 12, 2013 06:21
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Should Kinsley just stick to book reviews then? His last two for TNR were veering sharply into "crank who still fears stagflation" territory.
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Nov 12, 2013 06:23
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Rygar201 posted:Isn't that just how it is for the VP, except Cheney the Deathless? I could swear a former VP once said the office wasn't worth a warm pitcher of piss Well, apparently Obama himself is really good friends with Biden, and consults him on every issue. But the staff try to marginalize him as much as possible.
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Nov 12, 2013 06:52
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Amphion posted:That NYT review made me realize how annoying the book is. So far I'm constantly using the iPad Kindle app's built in dictionary to look up a word every other page. Smug assholes with their strange words and french phrases. . . . that's bizarre. It was a little flowery, but there wasn't anything especially obscure in the book.
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Nov 12, 2013 07:05
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Rygar201 posted:Isn't that just how it is for the VP, except Cheney the Deathless? I could swear a former VP once said the office wasn't worth a warm pitcher of piss That was this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nance_Garner He was a conservative Southerner who was FDR's first vice president and opposed labor unions, deficit spending, and the expansion of executive power. Considering he served during the whole "New Deal" thing you can imagine why he might have felt his position was not a particularly good vehicle for affecting change. Pornographic Memory fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Nov 12, 2013 |
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Nov 12, 2013 07:05
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Corek posted:Game Change was the first time I ever read of Hillary Clinton going, and this is a direct quote, "apeshit". EDIT: Of course Hillary also basically kept Bill in line as much as humanly possible, which is something he freely admits. I have wondered at times where they'd be without one another. She could obviously see his native political skills and social intelligence he could see her brilliant mind and discipline. The story's written as if she dropped everything to follow him to Bumblefuck, Arkansas, but two people with that much ambition don't work like that. I always guessed she knew she wasn't politically skilled enough to run and that she was already facing serious glass ceiling issues to begin with, but that with her help he could get them to where she wanted to be. And, of course, I assume they genuinely loved one another. Maybe they still do, but it's not exactly unheard of for couples who've been together that long to grow apart a bit, especially when one of them has among the most publicized affairs in American history. Even with his skills and mind, though, he was a Hell of a longshot play for Hillary to try the "we'll shoot out of Arkansas like a rocket" play with him, so I assume there was real emotion involved there for her to take a gamble like that. ReindeerF fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Nov 12, 2013 |
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Nov 12, 2013 07:13
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The Trump chapter in Double Down was terrible. It spends a lot of time fellating Trump, then has him decide not to run because his life is so wonderful and interesting anyway. Not, you know, because Obama had him laughed out a DC at the Correspondent's dinner. It's pretty clearly Trump's own rationalization after the fact.
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Nov 12, 2013 07:22
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Joementum posted:Good points in Weigel's response to the TNR Warren piece, but this is the heart of it. So, speaking of why this article and pol writers in general are Not Good At Political Strategy, gonna cite a bunch of this to make a point: quote:Simply by existing, articles like these make a progressive upset of Hillary Clinton more likely. They alter the odds from zero to zero. Several things can be true—Warren can be outsmarting the financial industry, the Clintons can be worried about a shift in the Democratic Party, Warren might be more likely to run if Clinton does than if Clinton doesn’t—without there being any chance of the front-runner losing. Actually, the idea that an insurgency needs to seize a presidency in order to win is sort of retrograde, and it’s surprising that the disappointing (for progressives and a whole lot of other people) victory of Barack Obama hasn’t cured it. Okay, that's the case for Clinton being the inevitable candidate. Here's the case against that: -"Obama won because he was black". Really? That's the road you're going to go down to prove that [white person] can't beat [white person] - they're not black? So Hillary has a stranglehold on black voters now? It's not even so much offensive as it is blatantly wrong. Obama didn't win because he was black, he won because there was no enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton and her massive support turned out to be extremely soft. Which is exactly where she is today. -"Hillary won more primaries". He even tosses Florida and Michigan in here. The Florida and Michigan where she won because nobody officially campaigned (except for Hillary making "unofficial" visits lol) and also because she was the only one on the Michigan ballot. Yep, she definitely convincingly won those. By huge margins! ...wait, what's this about her support being soft in states that anyone bothered to actually contest? Also, does winning more states count for something now? -"Hillary won states where only white people vote." Cool, good luck with finding lots of those in '16. -"More popular than ever / worlds better than 2008." She was up by 50 points in 2006, too! A week before Iowa she was up something like 50-20 nationally! None of this means poo poo. -"Primaries are more important than cauclolsfsdfjhfjksdf how does he even do this Political writing, everyone! e: let's make the subtext really clear: Weigel is saying that Obama won because blacks turned out in historic numbers and Hillary beat him in the primaries (of course this last bit was partly accomplished by capturing 100% of the Appalachian racist vote, but let's ignore that) where she played to her strengths with whites, who mostly stayed hers (ignore the WV/KY primary makeup!) While Weigel doesn't explicitly make the next connection, what he means is that unless blacks turn out for {Warren} in exactly those numbers Hillary wins. His support for this is 1.5 year out national and state polling, which is inherently garbage but does contain a speck of truth (namely, that when Hillary is the only person who runs, she gets all the voters.) Counterpoint: Who says that the 2016 primary makeup is as white as 2008? Furthermore, if Weigel is already writing what Hillary's camp is telling him to (he is) and his attitude towards minority voters is indicative of what Hillary's camp thinks about them (it is), who says they're going to meekly fall in line? Sure, she's the favorite, but wow, if this is the best "inevitability" puff piece you can come up with... Adar fucked around with this message at 08:52 on Nov 12, 2013 |
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Nov 12, 2013 08:36
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Adar posted:So, speaking of why this article and pol writers in general are Not Good At Political Strategy, gonna cite a bunch of this to make a point: So what you're saying is that we're in for another entire campaign of Extremely Unlikeable Spring-Summer '08 Hillary who believes the nomination is hers to lose and can't even compute serious competition. I'm excited. Are you excited?
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Nov 12, 2013 09:00
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What other books about the 2012 election have been written? Any worth picking up?
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Nov 12, 2013 09:02
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:So what you're saying is that we're in for another entire campaign of Extremely Unlikeable Spring-Summer '08 Hillary who believes the nomination is hers to lose and can't even compute serious competition. If she's going to make this mistake twice in a row and has genuinely learned nothing, I look forward to two more years of cottage cheese-soft 70-10 national polls cited as inevitability while she's in third place in Iowa with 78% undecided.
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Nov 12, 2013 09:11
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Brown Paper Bag posted:What other books about the 2012 election have been written? Any worth picking up? The latest edition of Darrel West's Air Wars came out a while back, if you prefer your analysis bone dry.
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Nov 12, 2013 09:27
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Weigel's argument is funny. He writes as if there was only one way to beat Hillary Clinton and she had a long history of successful national campaigns up until Obama found a winning issue then ran up the score with black voters.
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Nov 12, 2013 10:24
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Meanwhile, in Oklahoma http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gop-senator-says-he-blames-christie-for-obama-s-re-election quote:Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) has no plans to hop aboard the Chris Christie bandwagon. I seriously doubt that Inhofe's views have much traction among other Republican senators (Cruz/Lee/Paul aside, of course), but Heritage Action, Club for Growth and other tea party groups are probably going to come out swinging during the primaries. Here's hoping that 2016 is as much fun as 2012!
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Nov 12, 2013 10:28
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surrender posted:Meanwhile, in Oklahoma Inhofe is terrified of the Tea Party, because they have already started criticizing him (and running ads against him) for things he hasn't even done. Imagine if he actually did something they disliked? They'd crucify him.
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Nov 12, 2013 10:55
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Adar posted:So, speaking of why this article and pol writers in general are Not Good At Political Strategy, gonna cite a bunch of this to make a point: At the risk of stating a fact, Obama being black was, in fact, key to his winning almost all of the black vote in the primaries. If a hypothetical left-wing white challenger won 75% of the black vote that would still put them in not very good overall shape.
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Nov 12, 2013 11:14
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I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that regardless of whether or not that's true (the black primary vote wasn't nearly as overwhelmingly one-sided until a) Obama showed viability in Iowa or b) Clinton doused those bridges in gasoline and lit them up), Obama winning Iowa was critical and about as far from dependent on black primary voters as possible.
The Warszawa fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Nov 12, 2013 |
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Nov 12, 2013 13:40
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Ugh David Weigel's brain is missing a piece or something (fine, AKA a libertarian). Everything longer than a few paragraphs takes a couple trips into War of the Ghosts territory.
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Nov 12, 2013 15:52
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Pillowpants posted:The best part about Double Down thus far was that Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, and Haley Barbour talked for months about how they would join together against Romney if one of them ran but Daniels wife was adamantly opposed to it (Mitch had GWB and Laura call her to talk about it), Jeb knew his last name was still poison, and Barbour's own opposition research on himself painted him as a racist drunk. At least the Daniels and Jeb stuff was known and published in mainstream media sources. In case anyone was wondering, Joe Scarborough isn't running for President. That's too bad. Who else is going to interrupt Rand Paul during debates?
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Nov 12, 2013 16:46
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dilbertschalter posted:At the risk of stating a fact, Obama being black was, in fact, key to his winning almost all of the black vote in the primaries. If a hypothetical left-wing white challenger won 75% of the black vote that would still put them in not very good overall shape. As Warszawa says, my point was that Obama won the black vote -after- Hillary had already nearly nuked her own campaign from orbit. If she didn't tear up in a diner two days before the NH primary the race would have been over by the time South Carolina even went to the polls because that'd have made Obama 4 for 4. If she's starting off 2016 by leaking bad inevitability pieces like this to hacks she's not going to do much better this cycle either. This poo poo doesn't win Iowa.
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Nov 12, 2013 18:33
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Adar posted:"More popular than ever / worlds better than 2008." She was up by 50 points in 2006, too! A week before Iowa she was up something like 50-20 nationally! None of this means poo poo. Exactly this. The average Democrat has basically zero idea about the 2016 candidates. I'm fairly involved in Democratic politics in my state, and I don't know much about Cuomo or O'Malley or most of the others aside from their home state and the office they hold/held. But come 2016, that will no longer be the case - the average Iowan Democratic primary voter will have heard a lot from these candidates at events and rallies and JJ dinners and TV ads and we'll all have listened to umpteen gazillion debates.
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Nov 12, 2013 18:43
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When considering the value of polls this far out from an election, remember that at this point in the cycle twelve years ago, the polls showed that Joe Lieberman had a lock on the 2004 Democratic nomination. In other words, it's pure muscle-twitch name recognition right now.
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Nov 12, 2013 19:05
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FMguru posted:When considering the value of polls this far out from an election, remember that at this point in the cycle twelve years ago, the polls showed that Joe Lieberman had a lock on the 2004 Democratic nomination. Nah, it was actually showing Al Gore with the lock at this point in the race, which was probably right. After Gore stepped aside in mid-December, most polls showed either Hillary Clinton with a huge lead or a cluttered top tier of Lieberman, Kerry, Daschle, and Gephardt, usually with nobody above 20, depending on whether they included Clinton in their trial heat.
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Nov 12, 2013 19:10
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