For your use: Commissioner Ramsey’s badass quote

Taking a brief respite from presidential politics to offer our readers a little gift on this Friday afternoon.

WHYY’s Susan Phillips attended a press conference held by Governor Rendell and Mayor Michael Nutter yesterday during which the guv and the may called on Congress to renew the federal assault weapons ban.  You can listen to here story with this link.

Rendell had some particularly pointed words for politicians who choose to side with NRA rather than the boys in blue but the real heated exchange took place between Commissioner Ramsey and an Inquirer reporter who began his question with “It says on wikipedia…”  Never a good way to start a question.

The entire confrontation can be seen in this video (h/t to Philly Will Do):

For those of you who are looking for an awesome, almost Wire-esque, Chuck Ramsey quote for your cell phone ring tone, you can

Add it to the freakin’ list [.mp3]

Feel free to right click and save as to download that clip (Ctrl-click for you Mac users).

How one politician’s campaign may have ended the “honeymoon” of another

Philebrity poses the question about Michael Nutter: “Is the Honeymoon Over?”

Apparently, one of his readers wrote in and expressed some amount of consternation over a number of things, one of those being the mayor’s support of Senator Clinton:

In the past week we have had another cop killed and a police brutality incident. I’m not bitter he didn’t back Barack, but I am bitter he backed Hillz. At least John Street has an Iphone to show for his obsession with the irrelevant, the only thing Nutter might get is a primary challenge.

Philebrity, a big fan of the new administration, has this advice:

Keep your chin up. While many may bristle at your media game over the last two months, what nobody wants to admit is that between the PA Primary and now the Cop Stuff, you’ve been busting your balls doing both maintenance and damage control for the City in the national eye, and you’re pretty much the only person who can do it. And yes, we’re still smarting a little bit from the Hillz thing, but history is already having its way with all of that; pretty soon, you’re gonna forget all about that ridonkulous lil’ bitch Chaka Fattah and you and Obama will shake hands and get psyched together like you should have been doing all along.

And we in Philadelphia will just have to wait and see if Obama succeeds and, if so, how he will treat a mayor who wasn’t in his corner from the beginning. Hopefully, “a new kind of politics” doesn’t include any kind of retribution.

At least Nutter and Governor Rendell were careful not to out-and-out attack Obama as they stumped for Clinton. Rendell was a little better with this than Nutter (see Nutter’s quote about how he would have got up and left the church if Rev. Wright had said those things while he was there) but there’s still plenty of room for Nutter to stump for Obama in the general without having a bunch of embarrassing anti-Obama quotes thrown back in his face.

How the Democrats will lose: being stupid

Time’s Swampland blog provides a nice example of a way that the Democratic party can lose this election by being a little too smart for its own good.

The DNC - not the Obama or Clinton campaigns but still - apparently tried to muddle up McCain’s visit to New York City by pointing out all of the times he was against earmarks that would have brought money to the Big Apple.

The McCain people are happy to have such a conversation because it gives them a chance to reiterate how their candidate is against “pork” and “wasteful spending.” Time’s Michael Scherer thinks this line of attack could have merit:

But the DNC attacks do strike a nerve. Many of the billions in so-called “pork” that comes out of Congress go to things like bridges and after-school programs and foreign aide that lots of Americans support. It’s not all Woodstock Museums and “Bridges to Nowhere.” Rhetorically, McCain likes to talk as if all the billions of dollars now being spent on earmarks can just be eliminated from the federal budget, but the bottom line is if that happened, there would be an outcry among local communities. (In the fine print, McCain says he does not mind some of this spending as long as it goes through the regular budget process, a fact that seems to undermine his claims of billions in savings.)

Rarely in presidential politics do you have a battle in which opponents attack each other with the same message. Both McCain and the DNC want you to know that McCain wants to cut pork projects. Before long, pollsters will tell us who is winning debate among swing voters. In the meantime, we can expect many more maps from the DNC, and more talks by McCain about the DNA of bears.

If I were advising the DNC, I’d ask them why they even want to take a chance that “swing voters” might tell the pollsters that this isn’t an effective argument. By opening up too many lines of attack on McCain, they risk diluting the effectiveness of any of them and of bringing up something - like this issue - that McCain may actually be able to play into a strength.

They should just stick with a simple, easy, disciplined game plan. To paraphrase Joe Biden’s criticism of Rudy Giuliani the Democrats and the nominee should only have four things come out of their mouths every time they talk: “a John, a McCain, a George, and a Bush.” If they want to throw in “and a hundred years in Iraq,” that would work too.

Trying to get into all these fine points about pork vs earmarks, worthy vs wasteful, are just a waste of message space. Everything - like this WaPo story about McCain and lobbyists - needs to be put into the frame of “a John, a McCain, a George and a Bush.”

Want an example of how this can work?

In Philadelphia’s mayoral primary one candidate used the fact that the outgoing mayor - John Street - had an approval rating of something like negative fifty and more than 66% of residents thought the city was heading in the wrong direction to run his first ads establishing that he was not John Street. It was essentially a negative ad against a term-limited mayor. Many “experts” laughed, shook their heads and wondered why the candidate was running against a guy who wasn’t up for election.

As time went on and this candidate was able to establish himself as the “not John Street” candidate, implicitly saying that the other candidates were John Street candidates, he picked up steam. When folks went into the booth and saw the five candidates, all they had to know was that this candidate was most likely to be as far from the outgoing mayor as possible.

That candidate, Michael Nutter, is now the mayor of Philadelphia.

A .22 caliber mind in a .357 magnum world

I’d like to believe that I was the first blogger out of the millions out there to comment about Barack Obama’s use of the phrase “losing his bearings” to describe John McCain’s Hamas-hearts-Obama statement.  I did, after all, post it almost simultaneously with Obama saying it.  At the very least, I’m tied with everyone else who did that.

I bring this up because, unsurprisingly, it has become a big deal.

Michael Cooper at the Caucus wrote this morning that one of McCain’s senior advisers quickly released a statement denouncing (and I assume rejecting) Obama’s choice of words:

“First, let us be clear about the nature of Senator Obama’s attack today: He used the words ‘losing his bearings’ intentionally, a not particularly clever way of raising John McCain’s age as an issue. This is typical of the Obama style of campaigning.”

Obama’s spokesman Bill Burton got in a nice little zinger in response:

“Clearly losing ones bearings has no relation to age, given this bizarre rant that Mark Salter just sent out.”

Ok.  Two things could be going on here.  One is that Obama did very intentionally and very cleverly choose the words “losing his bearings” as a subtle way to bring up McCain’s advanced age.  If that’s the case, the McCain campaign would seem to have made a big mistake by pointing it out because all they’re doing is re-emphasizing the point that McCain is, in fact, old.

The McCain folks made an even worse mistake if Obama did not intentionally try to make a point about McCain’s age because lo and behold it got brought up anyway - by the McCain campaign.

Kind of reminds me a certain fictional “open mike” moment that was meant to bring up an opponent’s apparently lack of intelligence.

The sheen continues to wear off my favorite decade

My prediction:

If this video hasn’t already made it to the major cable nets, expect it to be on there in a few hours now that Drudge has it.

My lament:

Count me among those who just feel sorry that the former president has been reduced to this. Ex-presidents (and one particular vice president) are supposed to devote their time humanitarian efforts, diplomacy, policy development and generally living the good life on the rubber chicken circuit.

As I wrote yesterday, to see President Clinton getting into public arguments with 60-year-old women in West Virginia is just a little depressing.

The more the president lowers himself to this level, the easier it becomes to start remembering the not-so-great things about his time in office. If he had just been able to stay above the fray, we - at least those of us who were in high school and college back in the 90s - could have been left with the warming glow of our relatively peaceful and prosperous coming-of-age decade.

Just when I was starting to forget about Ken Starr…

Project for Excellence in Journalism comes up with excuse to watch the Daily Show and get paid for it

It’s a COMEDY show, people!

Who cares how often they skewer the right compared to how often they go after the left?

It’s not a NEWS show, no matter how much the PEJ wants to say that it should be considered one, even if in just a “quasi” fashion.

But it’s also true that, at times, The Daily Show aims at more than comedy. In its choice of topics, its use of news footage to deconstruct the manipulations by public figures and its tendency toward pointed satire over playing just for laughs, The Daily Show performs a function that is close to journalistic in nature—getting people to think critically about the public square. In that sense, it is a variation of the tradition of Russell Baker, Art Hoppe, Art Buchwald, H.L. Mencken and other satirists who once graced the pages of American newspapers.

The study also points out that the Daily Show fails to cover certain events which dominate other news coverage:

A good deal of the news, however, is also absent from The Daily Show. In 2007, for example, major events such as the tragic Minneapolis bridge collapse were never discussed. And the shootings at Virginia Tech, the most covered story within a given week in 2007 by the overall press, received only a cursory mention.

Could it be because those events just weren’t funny?

Does it matter to you?

Does it matter to you who Barack Obama chooses as vice president if he were to win the nomination?  Really matter?

Viewer questions for Obama - comedy gold

Obama looks a little bemused as he’s forced to answer the question from Joe Schmoe about his lack of support among blue collar workers.  I’m almost certain that was some CNN producer who was forced to run down to a lobby and his his iSight camera to make sure this question was asked.

I’ll have you know that we invented this form of tomfoolery when we had mayoral candidates Al Taubenberger and Michael Nutter answer questions from computer users in a forum that was broadcast exclusively on the internet.

I think I just heard global warming but I’m not sure it was mentioned in a glowing way.

To sum up the answer to this question, which I didn’t catch, America’s foreign policy is strengthened by having a strong economy at home, which means help out the folks who are struggling then watch out for China (who used to be cool).

And with a few nice words about his mother, the interview with Obama is over.

Back from commercials - liveblogging “The Situation Room”

Wolf: McCain is all like, “dude, Obama’s such a surrender man”

Why do all of Wolf Blitzer’s questions involve 10 seconds of McCain quotes that attack Obama?  The latest one is that gem about Obama being the candidate of Hamas.

Obama just decried McCain’s name calling while saying that the 72 million year old Senator is “losing his bearings.”

Obama says “playing politics.”  Chug your beer.

Wolf: What does Israel mean to you?

Obama: (Democratic talking points about Israel) + (required mention of his own personal trip to Israel) + (How Israel strengthens his own faith)

Heading out to commercial again but not before Wolf teases with some user-generated video of a guy in his own “situation room” asking Obama whether he’ll have Clinton as his VP.  Thereby continuing the tactic of having “normal people” ask the “stupid questions.”

Obama in The Situation Room (aka Wolf Blizter’s awesome entertainment center)

So how did Wolfie do with the issues talk?

After three minutes of typical political talk (that Hillary Clinton, she sure was tough, wasn’t she?) the talk turned to issues.

Unfortunately the first issue was a completely made up one - made up by Mitt Romney who said that Obama doesn’t have the experience to be commander-in-chief.

Wolf turns it to domestic issues by parroting McCain’s “attacks” as a tax-and-spend liberal.  Why can’t he just ask a question without saying that he’s asking it because McCain will use it, thereby using it himself before McCain even says it?

Obama nicely explains to Wolf Blitzer (while assuring Wolf that the proprietor of the Situation Room can afford to pay a little more) that the “average” worker has stock accounts that are in a 401k account that doesn’t get touched by capital gains tax anyway.  That’s what he should have told Charlie Gibson during the debate.

Blitzer tosses a pitch right into Obama’s wheelhouse with a constitutional law question about his selections for the Supreme Court.

Now Wolf is teasing more to come, saying that Obama got “angry” about something John McCain said about him.  Judging from the clip, Obama’s “angry” is about as expressive as my “asleep.”  Perhaps Wolf was exaggerating just a bit.