All That Is Necessary

Tag: 2008 Election

  • The Video Clip Jon Stewart Would Make if He Were a Republican

    This is brilliant — a compilation of near-identical sound bites from Obama’s campaign speeches in 2008 and 2012. Well worth a minute & 58 seconds of your time.

  • Civil Rights, and the Intersection of Race and Sexual Orientation

    Not long after the Presidential election last year, the Web Goddess and I had dinner with four of our closest friends, who happen to be a black couple and a lesbian couple. There was exactly one McCain voter in the room.

  • A Centrist Obama May Help Moderate the Democratic Party

    Today’s edition of Obama Silver Lining Watch (hereafter OSLW) starts with a trip down memory lane. In my very first substantive post on this blog, way back in July 2008, I discussed how Obama was, inevitably, moderating his stance on multiple issues after finally knocking Hillary Clinton out of the race: But it turns out […]

  • Minnesota: Not Heads or Tails, but Standing on Edge

    Move over, Florida — Minnesota is making a strong bid for supremacy in the category of freakishly close electoral results. CNN reports today that Sen. Norm Coleman’s unofficial lead over unfunnyman Al Franken has shrunk to a mere 5 votes, out of about 3 million cast. If that holds up — the state is continuing […]

  • The Perils of Participatory Democracy

    Over at change.gov, the President-elect’s transition website, the incoming administration is continuing its efforts to tap the power of social media. Yesterday this took the form of an “Open for Questions” tool that encouraged readers to submit questions and issues they believe the new president should address. Participation in Open for Questions outpaced our expectations, […]

  • Bragging Rights vs. Governing Rights

    Neo-neocon sparked a raucous conversation in the comments of a brief post about the followup to a mischievous Zogby poll that surveyed Obama voters about their level of knowledge of various statements, and reported that the Obama voters surveyed got questions wrong more often than if they had simply guessed randomly. I say it’s a […]

  • McCain Gets More Gay Votes Than Bush

    I meant to follow up in a more timely way on an earlier post about the conservative gay vote. From that earlier post: Along the same lines, I also want to note estimates that nearly one out of every four gay voters pulled the lever for Bush in 2004 (as did I), despite Bush’s odious […]

  • Bush Derangement Syndrome and the Surge

    Peter Wehner, writing in Commentary, does the best job I have seen of chronicling the sordid history of liberal opposition to the surge. For paragraph after relentless paragraph he replays the mockery from the left, from before the surge even started until long after its success was clear. Anti-surge rhetoric died down only when even […]

  • Krauthammer Explains the Election

    I’ve argued before that it is deeply ironic that the financial crisis benefited the Democrats this year, since the Democrats drove the reckless expansion of access to mortgages that led to the crisis, while Republicans — specifically, McCain and the Bush Administration — were sounding alarms. As usual, Charles Krauthammer has the explanation: This was […]

  • Evidence That Obama May Not Be a Socialist

    Here’s hoping that whatever socialist tendencies President-elect Obama may have will be tempered by recognition of the success of his remarkably entrepreneurial, decentralized campaign. Bret Swanson floats this idea in today’s WSJ (free link), in a piece headlined “Obama Ran A Capitalist Campaign.” Some excerpts: The results of Mr. Obama’s decentralized Web effort were staggering: […]