FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'
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VOAvideo YouTube Channel: VOA's Jeffrey Young examines so-called "Identity Politics" in this segment of "How America Elects." Uploaded June 20, 2012. http://youtu.be/a0Hui4sEBfI
James Poulos adroitly connects-the-dots at Forbes.com re 2012 GOP's campaign's strategic/marketing mistakes, and suggests that while much of what Romney criticized (lamented) about Obama playing Identity Politics and patronizing Santa Claus to many niche voters is 100% true, GOP can't win by singing Blues re Obamanomics or chorus of "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Needy, Young & Dumb Single Women Voters?"
This afternoon I read a Forbes.com column, below, that for all practical purposes is the book-end to that earlier Mark Hendrickson piece at Forbes.com that I mentioned this morning, regarding what I perceived to be the self-serving motives of Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and many other GOP pols and consultants' jabs at Mitt Romney, and in particular, Jindal's unfortunate moth-like affinity for TV news cameras, as if lack of exposure was his real problem.
Bobby Jindal's Jab At Mitt Romney Underscores Republicans' Dilemma
Bobby Jindal's looming Mainstream Media "Mirror Mirror" problems are closer at hand than I thought; Mark Hendrickson at Forbes.com on -what I see as Jindal's needless- "Jab At Mitt Romney Underscores Republicans' Dilemma"; Jindal is proving Rush Limbaugh's point about GOP self-regard
Romney's 'Gifts' Gaffe Highlights GOP Confusion On Obamanomics
WASHINGTON 11/15/2012 @ 11:43AM
By James Poulos
Having not particularly relished telling donors what they wanted to hear during the campaign, Romney has now taken his lumps in the thankless task of telling them what they want to hear afterward.
His honesty in this think piece about the Obama campaign's use of identity politics stands in stark contrast to many reporters, columnists and pundits who are twisting themselves into uncomfortable pretzels to deny that it was used, even though it was both obvious and successful. I encourage you to start following him because unlike many better-known pundits, like those seen on MSNBC, Poulos doesn't ask you to deny what you know about human behavior or to deny what your own eyes can see -Obama & Co. used identity politics and it worked. But will that formula actually work for non-African-American, non-presidential Democratic candidates for office? In my opinion, no. I believe it was unique to Obama and has no transferability, which is why much of the crowing I've seen and heard from many national Dems I usually respect, and in some cases actually know, who are drawing all sorts of conclusions and over-reaching on some of the implications of Election Day, reminds me of young kids patiently building sand castles at the beach with their plastic buckets and shovels.
Kids, there's a wave out there in the ocean that you can't even see now, and guess what? It's got very big plans for your castle and all your carefully-laid plans.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal gets played and walks into quicksand, led by CNN's Wolf Blitzer in his condemnation of Mitt Romney: 'We Don't Win Elections By Insulting Voters.' Jindal doesn't seem to fully appreciate the fact that if he were being equally critical of President Obama in his public comments as he was of Mitt Romney prior to his appearance here, he wouldn't be appearing on TV at all. Someone as experienced in dealing with the news media as Jindal should be smart enough to appreciate that he is on TV specifically because he fits the post-election Mainstream Media narrative, but he doesn't. Why? Is the lure of the red light on the camera that powerful to him? sadly, it would appear so, since it's easy to see that when he says something in the future that the same news media wants to exaggerate or misrepresent because it doesn't jibe with the narrative that they want to put forth to the country, who does Jindal think will help him when he's complaining about being left out to dry, the Republican governors? Hardly. It's so damn laughable. And you'll notice that Jindal is so concentrated on blasting Romney and mouthing high-minded feel-good cliches that he never has the good sense to pivot and turn things around by saying, matter of factly, "On the other hand, Wolf, I sure don't envy you and CNN and the rest of the Beltway media on Inauguration Day trying to remind your viewers what the big idea or ideas proposed by President Obama during the campaign were. You know, the ideas or plans that you and CNN presumably plan on holding him to account for in the new year. No, I don't envy you because there weren't any." Nope! There's none of that sort of quick thinking on his feet. LOL! Uploaded November 15, 2012. http://youtu.be/IUsXAseSeXg
Bobby Jindal's looming Mainstream Media "Mirror Mirror" problems are closer at hand than I thought; Mark Hendrickson at Forbes.com on -what I see as Jindal's needless- "Jab At Mitt Romney Underscores Republicans' Dilemma"; Jindal is proving Rush Limbaugh's point about GOP self-regard
TheMark Hendricksoncolumn at Forbes.com that I received late Friday night was clearly written before Friday morning's New Orleans Times-Picayuneeditorial blasting Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal for resisting creating an Obamacare health insurance exchange.
Forbes.com
Bobby Jindal's Jab At Mitt Romney Underscores Republicans' Dilemma
In my opinion, despite all his many admirable qualities and talents, it's likely that Bobby Jindal will STILL likely be trying to reason with the national news media and East Coast elites over the next few years even as they're verbally lynching him by twisting his words and making him seem either ridiculous or dangerous (or both) in ways that he, his friends and supporters can't even imagine now. Well after the point that it's been clear to me and many others I know that those elites are "just not that into him."
To them, Jindal's an interesting oddity, the fish-out-of-water that complicates their usual patronizing view of The South, so far from the norms of Manhattan and the Beltway. He's the human anecdote to bring out when important guests come over and you've got the fine china out on the table and want to show you're refined.
For such a very smart guy, remarkable actually, he displays an air of unreality about him at times that's positively frightening, almost childlike, and truly disconnected from the political history of the past 25 years in this country, where people like him are left on the side of the road.
It's as if Jindal thinks -not unlike John Edwards or Bill Clinton- that he can single-handedly talk anyone and everyone he meets into agreeing that he's not only uniquer-than-unique, but also quite correct on the public policy as well.
In many uncomfortable ways, to me, after years of seeing interviews with him on every matter of policy shows and forums and reading what he's written, Jindal seems like Exhibit A from Central Casting in what radio host Rush Limbaugh regularly says about a certain sub-set of Republican pols and consultants who care, desperately, about what the Beltway news media and pundit class think about him.
Just like former GOP senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, who was never more popular with the Beltway and East Coast MSM than when he was publicly disparaging the House Republicans in the '90's, esp. Newt Gingrich. As I know even better, that was especially the role carved out by the media for Indina Senator Richard Lugar, who for so many years played the role of shadow Secretary of State, even while taking things for granted back in Indiana, where I went to school. It's also one of the chief reasons he lost the GOP primary to Richard Mourdock in a landslide. Sen. Lugar had become the very picture of the media-absorbed pol, albeit a very smart and articulate one, and it was hard fro me not to notice, even before I came back to South Florida in 2003, that he was increasingly getting on TV, on the front pages of major newspapers or being cited in Thomas L. Friedman columns not because of what he had to say about foreign policy, but because he was so consistently willing to publicly criticize other Republicans' policies or ideas. The MSM found him a 'useful idiot' for their purposes of supporting Democratic policies.
All of that is something that was discussed back on May 16th in a post titled, Richard Mourdock: Precursor or anomaly? Greg Garrison and Charlie Cook adroitly pinpoint where Sen. Richard Lugar eventually lost his way, started losing the trust of Hoosier voters, then lost in a landslide due to the dis-connect. Points largely lost on a predictably apoplectic Beltway MSM http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/richard-mourdock-precursor-or-anomaly.html
What Limbaugh says about that is 100% true, in large part because it's simple human
nature, as I witnessed for 15 years while living and working in D.C. with many Republican
friends who were staffers who worked for bosses on The Hill or the agencies who were constantly being fooled into thinking that someone in the Beltway media and Think Tank Cool Crowd really liked them.
Who doesn't want to be liked?
That was the central conceit with many new younger male Members of Congress, many of whom were fortunate to be born with either connections, money or good looks because they sure WEREN'T very bright.
They were so used to people deferring to them that they couldn't tell when they were being played.
Those folks didn't like them, of course, they just wanted to have them around long enough to have some fun at their expense, before eventually tiring of them and sending them packing like Mean Girls -dismissed!
Unless he wises up pretty soon and recognizes reality and stops caring so much what the national news media thinks about him, that's Bobby Jindal's future -mockery and put-downs by the very news media that he so desperately wants to persuade thru his genuine brilliance.
Pow! Former Dem. congressman Artur Davis of Alabama slices-and-dices, marinates and sautés the N.Y. Times' Andy Rosenthal in the National Review Online. Delicious!
But first, the necessary predicate, which I sent some of you the day it appeared in The Post:
The Washington Post The Fix blog Former Democratic Rep. Artur Davis talks party-switching Posted by Aaron Blake at 03:18 PM ET, 12/30/2011
Former Democratic congressman Artur Davis, who has been a thorn in the side of Democrats in the aftermath of his loss in the 2010 Alabama gubernatorial primary, is a man without a political party.
In an interview with The Fix, Davis openly speculated about running for office as an independent or even a Republican. In both cases, he suggested his decision not to make the switch has as much to do with the difficulties involved as any desire he has to remain a Democrat.
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE Rosenthal’s Amnesia The Times columnist forgets how protesters treated LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Bush, . . . By Artur Davis January 9, 2012 4:00 A.M.
Lyndon Johnson was loathed enough that, in his final year in office, he dared not make a public appearance other than at a military base; it was commonplace for chanting crowds to gather and spray verbal obscenities at LBJ’s White House. Jimmy Carter’s presidency was a routine subject of cultural derision, some of it viciously aimed at his pre-teen daughter and his brother. Bill Clinton spawned so much hate that at least some of his adversaries spread strange rumors that he was connected to murder; then there was this thing called impeachment. George W. Bush inflamed some of his enemies enough that they carried signs crudely depicting him as a war criminal or a Hitler clone.
I mention all these instances of ugliness directed at presidents because they are apparently unknown to Andrew Rosenthal, a New York Times columnist, who caused a stir last week by implying that strident opposition to Barack Obama is racially motivated, and that it’s all part of a racist tide building in advance of the November elections.
In case you forgot who ran that race-based ad campaign against Bobby Jindal in 2003 that's mentioned in the article above, it was Kathleen Babineaux Blanco.
POLITICO Artur Davis: From Dem star to exile By: Alex Isenstadt December 1, 2011 11:37 PM EST
The future once seemed limitless for Artur Davis.
Not so long ago, he was viewed as one of the Democratic Party’s rising stars, routinely evoking comparisons to Barack Obama. A smart, ambitious Harvard Law School graduate like Obama, Davis appeared to be on a trajectory to make history as Alabama’s first black governor. Some saw the youthful congressman as a future attorney general.
Anyone who's well-read, with a lick of common sense and possessed of an open mind, and who has spent any serious amount of time living and working in the Washington, D.C. area, knows almost from osmosis that nobody-but-nobody is EVER more popular with the ranks of the Beltway's permanent Democratic-leaning Mainstream Media than a Republican former insider or power-broker who says positive things about the Democratic Party's policies, or, who attacks another prominent Republican, the better-known the better.
This explains the recent phenomena the past three months of appearances on U.S. network TV and the cablenets by former GOP House members, staffers and party officials from the 1990's, many of whom had completely fallen off the MSM's radar, so long as they have something negative to say about Newt Gingrich, even if they owe their own rise from complete obscurity to prominence to Newt. (That is, if you believe that nobody from Romney's PAC was involved in any way with coordinating this shopping of these anti-Newt/pro-Republican establishment types to make it easier for the MSM to find them.)
Conversely, nobody is ever treated more like a leper by the MSM than a Democrat who decides -whether out of an overabundance of backbone, bluster, spite or some other reason- to pop-open the hood of the post-Clinton Democratic Party and take a hard look at the role of their pals in the race-identity politics movement and SEIU by performing a LIVE autopsy. Nobody wants to see under the hood and see the meat being made.
Fox News video: Daily Caller reporter Michelle Fields discusses proposed voter ID laws and former AL congressman Artur Davis says via videotape that he believes voter fraud is more present in the absentee ballot process than it is at the actual voting booth, and relates the experience in Alabama.
