Calibration

Roger Simon at the Politico (not the other Roger Simon) notes that the Clinton campaign may be in more trouble than they even realize. Because instead of being a bit frightened by the outcome in Iowa, they are just recalibrating a little - not trying for a radical makeover. That may be their downfall.

Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, Mark Penn, put his finger on it during the flight from Iowa to New Hampshire Thursday night.

“This has been very much a referendum on her,” he said.

Duh. You think? And you think maybe, like, that is the problem?

There is a risk, by the way, in having your pollster also be your top strategist: There is a natural tendency for someone who holds both positions to say the strategy can’t be wrong because the polling can’t be wrong.

And sometimes you need a strategist who is willing to say, “I don’t care what the damn polling says, we need to try something different.”

That time may be now for the Clinton campaign.

Her failure in Iowa was not about what percentage of women she lost or what percentage of young people she lost or what percentage of union households she lost.

Her failure in Iowa was a failure to connect with voters on a human, emotional and inspirational level.

So the Clinton campaign tries to appeal - in a halfhearted way - to younger voters. Because that is what the polling shows helped Obama. Bill Clinton tries to shift blame for the coming spew of sewage that camp Clinton appears to have in the works onto the media. Hillary tries on more hats than a haberdasher on meth. Clinton even warned voters that Obama was "too liberal" - meaning he was left of even Hillary. But it is all calibration and triangulation and calculation and Clintonian politics as usual. They have not grasped that the game has changed. Simon points to an example of getting it when that happens:

In 1988, George H.W. Bush got clobbered in the Iowa caucuses, coming in third. With the New Hampshire primary just eight days away, Bush could have stuck with his game plan. 

Instead, he retooled his entire image. He took off his coat and tie and put on a parka and a green-and-white baseball cap from East Coast Lumber and went to the Cuzzin Ritchie’s Truck Stop in Hampstead, N.H. He drove an 18-wheel Mack truck, had a friendly snowball fight with reporters and transformed his image from that of a privileged preppie “wimp” to that of a regular guy.

Sure, people made fun of it. Johnny Carson said in his monologue: “He went into a truck stop wearing a pair of overalls, but he had a little alligator sewn over the pocket.”

And the press asked if there was something behind Bush’s sudden transformation.

“Hell, yeah,” said Bush’s press secretary, Pete Teeley. “We’re running scared.”

I think that failing to grasp the change in the game may, indeed, be a disaster for Clinton.

Just How Much Damage Did Bill Clinton Do?

I posted about Bill Clinton's attack on the media and his attempt to blame them in advance for Hillary Clinton having to go negative. I also just posted at what I think is a return volley from the media blasting Bubba as a "campaign prop" and a "Relic." But the damage Bill has done may actually be even worse than that. Joe Gandelman is very angry at Clinton and thinks Hillary may have been badly damaged with those voters she most needs in the general election: the unaffiliated ones.

The fact of the matter is a lot of us Independent voters are tired of the politics of slash and burn where a candidate’s camp feels it must demonize, whip up the voters so they hate someone as the main reason to vote for them — a technique used as by political operatives in both parties under the two Bush administrations and yours. We are truly sick of it and want to toss out those who insist on perpetuating it.

Some independent voters will vote AGAINST candidates that think we’re dumb enough not to recognizing them unleashing the politics of demonization — even if they blame it on the biases and showmanship of Limbaugh trying to build and hold his partisan audience or a press that may not be perfect but helps most candidates who attain the Oval Office get there due to its positive reportage (you would never have arrived in the Oval Office if you hadn’t gotten some good press coverage).

Don’t blame the press.

On the other hand, voters should blame the press if your camp goes negative and it is not fully noted by the press.

On primary day here in California and election day in November a lot of us independent voters, whether we buy into Obamamania or not, are going to vote against candidates who ONCE AGAIN insisted on jumping into the septic tank and have them or their supporters throw the smelly contents out in the political arena.

At this writing, Obama seems to get it.

At this writing, you apparently don’t.

P.S. Going negative does not mean legitimately lambasting Obama on his stands on issues. Americans know going negative when they see it. If your wife wins the nomination, good luck on winning the general election. She will lose the young voters Obama brought into the process — and many of us independents will NOT hold our nose and vote for her. We’ll either stay home or vote for any Republican who isn’t foaming at the mouth or whose name is not Rush Limbaugh — or for Michael Bloomberg.

What set Joe off was the very same article from the Politico that I linked in my first post. I have stressed, over and over, that a candidate with the huge disapproval numbers that Hillary has cannot afford to lose any votes, especially in the middle - which actually does exist in this country. But Bubba's remarks may have just done exactly that. Have done exactly that in at least one case.

Joe dismantles Bill Clinton's claims rather handily, by the way. It's entertaining stuff.

Bring Forth The Relic

The Associated Press evokes a somewhat unflattering image of Bill Clinton by calling him a a campaign prop and a political relic. Reporter Nancy Benac will likely be dropped from Hillary's "Happy Holidays" card list as a result.

WASHINGTON - In a presidential race where the Democratic candidates are competing as agents of change, Hillary Rodham Clinton's most reliable campaign prop is something of a political relic — her husband.

The former president was at her side to help put the best face on her third-place finish Thursday in Iowa, and he was beside her again when dawn broke the next day on the final push to Tuesday's New Hampshire primary.

"I was never more proud of Hillary in all the days we've been together and all the days of this campaign than when she gave that speech in Iowa," the ex-president told New Hampshire voters.

No loyal spouse would say any less.

But with Bill Clinton, it's a far more complicated dynamic than simply that of the supportive husband…..

…..Clinton tries to meld two qualities — change and experience — by offering herself as a president "who won't just call for change, or a president who won't just demand change, but a president who will produce change, just like I've been doing for 35 years."

For all of that, though, "in some ways her campaign is based on nostalgia, which is not very often a good theme to orchestrate in a political campaign," said Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker. "In a sense that's what Bob Dole was doing in 1996 when he ran against Bill Clinton and evoked the Greatest Generation. It was Fleetwood Mac vs. the Andrews Sisters."

Back then, Bill Clinton was the one casting himself as the agent of change; his campaign song had Fleetwood Mac urging voters, "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow."

Now the song is largely passe.

If I were a betting man, I'd say that this is the beginning of the fallout from Bill Clinton's whining yesterday that the media has not been nice enough to the Clintons. This is one reason why it is not a really good idea for politicians to go after the media. Payback can be rapid - and harsh. The whole article is full of some very backhanded compliments of both of the Clintons. That this story was written and vetted by an editor may well mean that Bill's outraged power-whining has backfired spectacularly.

If the media stops treating the Clintons with kid gloves, Hillary is toast. Then maybe both Clintons can be put into the reliquary for good.

The Left Versus The Left

Mark Steyn takes a look at Mike Huckabee's victory in Iowa. He isn't particularly happy about it - but he also points out that if it comes down to Huckabee versus Obama, he would not count Huckabee out.

As for Huckabee, the thinking on the right is that the mainstream media are boosting him up because he's the Republican who'll be easiest to beat. It's undoubtedly true that they see him as the designated pushover, but in that they're wrong. If Iowa's choice becomes the nation's, and it's Huckabee vs. Obama this November, I'd bet on Huck.

As governor, as preacher and even as disc jockey, he's spent his life in professions that depend on connecting with an audience, and he's very good at it. His gag on "The Tonight Show" – "People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off" – had a kind of brilliance: True, it is cornball at one level (imagine John Edwards doing it with all his smarmy sanctimoniousness) but it also devastatingly cuts to the core of the difference between him and Mitt Romney. It's a disc-jockey line: the morning man on the radio is a guy doing a tricky job – he's a celebrity trying to pass himself off as a regular joe – which is pretty much what the presidential candidate has to do, too. Huckabee's good at that.

I don't know whether the Jay Leno shtick was written for him by a professional, but, if so, by the time it came out of his mouth it sounded like him. When Huck's campaign honcho, Ed Rollins, revealed the other day that he wanted to punch Romney in the teeth, Mitt had a good comeback: "I have just one thing to say to Mr. Rollins," he began. "Please, don't touch the hair." Funny line – but it sounds like a line, like something written by a professional and then put in his mouth.

This is the Huckabee advantage. On stage, he's quick-witted and thinks on his feet. He's not paralyzed by consultants and trimmers and triangulators. Put him in a presidential debate, and he'll have sharper ripostes and funnier throwaways and more plausible self-deprecating quips than anyone on the other side. He'll be a great campaigner. The problems begin when he stops campaigning and starts governing.

I'll send you over there to read the whole thing. Steyn is, as always, difficult to excerpt because it is all so good. He sees the Iowa results as victories for the secular left with Obama and what he is calling the religious left with Huckabee. He does not like those choices.

Final Broadside

George MacDonald Fraser, the author of the Flashman books as well as many other works died this week at age 82. In one last piece, published posthumously in the Daily Mail, he blasts political correctness. In the Nineties, a change began to take place. Reviewers and interviewers started describing Flashman (and me) as politically incorrect, which we are, though by no means in the same way.

In the Nineties, a change began to take place. Reviewers and interviewers started describing Flashman (and me) as politically incorrect, which we are, though by no means in the same way.

This is fine by me. Flashman is my bread and butter, and if he wasn't an elitist, racist, sexist swine, I'd be selling bootlaces at street corners instead of being a successful popular writer.

But what I notice with amusement is that many commentators now draw attention to Flashy's (and my) political incorrectness in order to make a point of distancing themselves from it.

It's not that they dislike the books. But where once the non-PC thing could pass unremarked, they now feel they must warn readers that some may find Flashman offensive, and that his views are certainly not those of the interviewer or reviewer, God forbid.

I find the disclaimers alarming. They are almost a knee-jerk reaction and often rather a nervous one, as if the writer were saying: "Look, I'm not a racist or sexist. I hold the right views and I'm in line with modern enlightened thought, honestly."

They won't risk saying anything to which the PC lobby could take exception. And it is this that alarms me - the fear evident in so many sincere and honest folk of being thought out of step.

I first came across this in the United States, where the cancer has gone much deeper. As a screenwriter [at which Fraser was almost as successful as he was with the 12 Flashman novels; his best-known work was scripting the Three Musketeers films] I once put forward a script for a film called The Lone Ranger, in which I used a piece of Western history which had never been shown on screen and was as spectacular as it was shocking - and true.

The whisky traders of the American plains used to build little stockades, from which they passed out their ghastly rot-gut liquor through a small hatch to the Indians, who paid by shoving furs back though the hatch.

The result was that frenzied, drunken Indians who had run out of furs were besieging the stockade, while the traders sat snug inside and did not emerge until the Indians had either gone away or passed out.

Political correctness stormed onto the scene, red in tooth and claw. The word came down from on high that the scene would offend "Native Americans".

Their ancestors may have got pieeyed on moonshine but they didn't want to know it, and it must not be shown on screen. Damn history. Let's pretend it didn't happen because we don't like the look of it.

I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.

I read the original Flashman book but none of the rest of the series. Flashman could be characterized as one of the least politically correct fictional figures ever. Fraser was a hugely talented writer who also co-wrote the screenplays of a number of movies, including the fabulous The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers. His final broadside is worth reading in its entirety. His scathing attack on the PC brigades is a true work of art.

California Storm Update

The family that was missing in California has been located and rescued.

After looking for a missing Clovis family all afternoon, search teams found 64-year-old John Hopper and his 15-year-old twins, Matt and Sarah, safe in a popular hiking destination in the Sierra National Forest.

Crews found the family with three other people who had apparently gotten trapped in the woods after the storm hit, said Madera County Sheriff's spokeswoman Erica Stuart. All six hikers were in good condition.

This is the same article I linked last night, but in the Washington Post. They also have a slideshow of the storm.