Bob Kelleher, the surprise winner of the Montana Republican primary campaign for the Senate, says this of his conversion from the realm of perpetual candidacy in the Green and Democratic Party to his current alignment as perpetual candidate (and victor amongst) of the Republican Party:

Kelleher said he split from the Democrats and the Green Party because Republicans share his ideas of being pro-life and wanting unity of powers in the government.

Previously he stated, fairly accurately seeing as he runs on every which political party, that party affiliation does not matter because nobody is bound by Party Platforms, so this sort of seems to be a weasley in explaining his Republican Party affiliation.  But it is an interesting reason in one respect.  Kelleher advocates changing our system of government to a Parliamentary system which would effectively put one Party or the other in charge as a bloc as oppsosed to endless compromises made within a party and across party in our legislative body and compromised with the powers of the executive bod.  Here we see him placing his advocacy of a Parliamentary System in line and places it in line behind the “Unitary Executive” of expansive powers vested into the Executive Body and particularly his liberal use of Signing Statements.  This seems arcane to posit as a political party’s ideology and something to campaign on — partly an advocacy of the dismissal of Congressional Perogatives I’d suppose — but I guess it is what Bob Kelleher has to work with, and as this is George W Bush’s legacy, I guess you have to suggest it is fairly accurate.

I should be more bemused than I am that John McCain evoked the name “William Jennings Bryan”.  I suggest that it is odd enough that cannot possibly be politically calculated for electoral effect, such that his more recent reference to Jimmy Carter is — and is instead a sincere show of contempt toward Obama as a man who can electrify a crowed with speeches and is a movement unto himself.  Bryan, I’ve tended to think, missed the boat in his embrace of Bimetallism and would have done better for true Populist credentials to preach the cause of the Zinc Standard.  Some will suggest that Obama has embraced the “Oxygen Standard” — putting a premium on the worth of Hot Air.

Aside from losing three presidential elections — something Barack Obama simply is not going to be allowed to do– there are worse figures to be compared to than Bryan.  I have to feel sorry for whoever lost out to Bryan in the 1908 bid, shouting in their hotel room “AGAIN???”

Judging by his speaking performances, most notably the one done before Clinton’s non-concession speech and Obama’s “This is the moment we healed the Earth” speech, John McCain might be better served doing what William McKinley in 1896 did to battle Bryan’s Presidential campaign speaking tour.  McKinley did that whole “Front Porch” campaign, a lost campaign tactic last employed I believe by Calvin Coolidge.  Here, McKinley simply planted himself on his Front Porch in Ohio, and did not budge.  He issued telegraphs, and brought in delegations of voters to stage conversations on the days’ issues.  It was asymetrical campaigning that avoided direct competition with his opponent’s strength.  Of course, there was also the matter that McKinley outspent Bryan by a rather astronomical amount, as Big Industry filled the Republican Party coffers up something fierce.  Not quite anything McCain has going for him — K Street largely opts to back the one they think is going to win the thing.

McCain should just sit there in Arizona, perhaps plop out a keyboard and fix his lack of computer knowledge and start a blog.  He can explicate his “Carter’s Second Term” comment.  I would be curious to see if he can post something about any other politicians that Obama reminds him of, or maybe a tv character he remembers from a 1950s sitcom?

Hm.  You know the Republican Party “brand” is in trouble when your perenial oddity candidate does this:

There is the issue of Republicans playing games with the “party preference” on their filing forms.

Some of the Republican candidates decided to file as “Prefers G.O.P. Party” — such as Dino Rossi for Governor, and Jim Wiest for Lieutentant Governor. Gordon Allan Pross filed as “Prefers Grand Old Party” for 4th district U.S. House.

Go figure.  But, as he said in his 2002 bid, “I am so your candidate!“, which is a sentiment that I suppose transcends party.

Getting back to Paul Krugman’s foray into baby-boomer psychodrama:

If Barack Obama was not appreciate of the back-drift of 1960s culture war, he is getting a crash course on it right about now.  I can’t say how his dismissiveness of The Weatherman issue plays out with “Okie from Muskogee”, but it probably plays well with everyone who themselves are dismissive.  If you don’t think that weird Weatherman item is reverberating around some corner of this political sphere, understand that “Hannity’s America” weekend program of silliness is working that angle, as the word “Radical” keeps being used to suggest a radicalism beyond anything we’ve ever seen or heard.  (Though, that seems to have a weird racial component to it.)  There’s a standard form to these, and to the extent that Obama’s “post partisan” (witness the absurdity of “This is the moment we begin to heal the Earth.”) campaign is subtextually about dismissing “Baby boomer psycho-drama”, that puts him in a better position than John Kerry having to handle without fighting such a thing the residuals of Vietnam War battles occasioned by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth”.

I occasionally exchange emails with someone, I’ll identify as from a  marginal Southern Swing State, who said this:

Obama would never have a better time to run (or any Democrat for that matter) but I just have to hope he can be a uniter in spite of his low preparation for office. I don’t have anything against him and see some plusses (to shut up Europeans about how the US is “so prejudiced” when they won’t confront their own version) but what was wrong with Bush more than anything was his being out beyond his depth and so I also partly dread the experience of some kind of repeat. Hopefully whether he or McCain wins, neither will not make the country even more polarized than it is.

I don’t really have an answer to this, largely because I don’t see this country as terribly divided.  But I’ve seen here and there a fretful columnist pierce over this nation and say something along the lines of “Has this nation ever been so divided?”  An ahistorical reference that ignores such periods in our nation’s history as … THE CIVIL WAR.

But this emailer, it occurs to me, is geographically planted in a place where that civil war played out, as well as much of the civil rights fight, and as such largely symbolic local political fights continue from the debris left over from there.  And then there’s the fire coming out of the Bible Belt which is a lot closer than I am witness to.

I take a sigh of relief that I was not the only one to do a double-take of sorts when reading Paul Krugman make this comment:

By the way, it was during the heyday of the baby boom generation that crude racism became unacceptable. Mr. Obama, who has been dismissive of the boomers’ “psychodrama,” might want to give the generation that brought about this change, fought for civil rights and protested the Vietnam War a bit more credit.

(A search for “Krugman” “baby boomer” and “psychodrama” will get you most prominently wonkette.)

Where does this come from?  Barack Obama surely hasn’t been raising the issue of “Baby Boomer Psychodrama” at every speech he’s been giving, and while I suppose you can read that into his message, I’d have to dismiss that as an example of baby boomer psycho-drama.

Nay.  Apparently Obama wrote it into his second book — The Audacity of Hope, the more politically posturing and therefor inferior to his first book Dreams of My Father.  Krugman’s thoughts are more annoying as, even though he went off an aside of calling Obama a Cult Leader, I’ve generally thought Krugman was better than most columnist at explaining policy differences in why his preferred Clinton candidate was preferable to him than Obama.  I’ve generally thought these slight differences didn’t matter much, and my ponderances with Obama have had more to do with whether his rhetorical stances has any room for a basic partisan fight… which, actually does in a way go back to Krugman’s concerns about not owning up to the Culture Wars.

As for “Baby-boomer psycho-drama”, the author of Nixon-land in an interview with Reason magazine gives us this:

…………………………………..

reason: The last line in the book is, “How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.” It says something about the book that this felt really compelling as I read it.

Perlstein: (Laughs.)

reason: But then I thought, hold on. Do we live in Nixonland today? The intensity of the violence and paranoia that you describe actually feels pretty alien. Now the hard-core Red Team and Blue Team partisans have to work themselves up artificially into the sort of frenzies that came naturally to people in the ’60s.

Perlstein: It’s a fair criticism. When I say Nixonland is with us still, that could literally mean that things are just as ideologically intense as they were from 1965 to 1972. Or it could be that things were so ideologically intense from 1965 to 1972 that we’re still kind of trailing off the exhaust fumes.

I think the latter is true. There’s a lot of surplus rage from the ’60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton’s earmark for a Woodstock museum. I have a friend whose people live in Sulphur, Louisiana, and they still talk about Woodstock as basically a visitation from hell.
………….

Anyway…

There’s a heck of a lot of, quote-in-quote “Poor Judgement” emenating from Fox News as of late relating to the Presidential campaign of one Barack Obama.

Fox News has 24 hours a day to fill, or maybe it’s 18 hours or 16 hours due to repeating their prime-time programming twice and hazing through the over-night.  Which is why the hosts bring on the “Body Language Experts”, and where we get the question: “Terrorist Fist Jab?”

I typed “Terrorist Fist Jab” into a search engine (the one that everyone uses) and went about 10 pages deep, scanning discussion boards and blog comment sections.  For the most part everyone thought the same “WTF?”, but I did see a couple comments along the lines of “What’s wrong with this?  I see no bias.  She’s simply asking the question as one of three possibilities.”  But leaving aside the particular metrics of “terrorist fist jab”, I am unclear what the ambiguity of this is which needs to be explained by an “expert”.  It strikes me as wondering what this expression is all about:

Go to the images for “Terrorist Fist Jab” and interestingly enough Obama does not compute at the top.  What you will be reminded about immediately is that it is sort of ritualistic for winning baseball teams at the end of the game to line up and give each other “Terrorist Fist Jab”s.  Perhaps that which is being pondered and puzzled over, the “terrorist fist jab”, is actually a celebratory salute between two partners after winning a victory of some sort?  But that would be crazy!

In the meantime, A Nazi Smirk?

A Bataan Death March Embrace?

Actually, that one is a “Death March Embrace” of a political variety, so forget that one.

PRUNE After First Bloom
FRENCH AND ENGLISH ROSES

I don’t know which free newspaper box she stuck this one in, and once again the effect ends up being fairly sad.

WHO WAS Hypatia?  Pythagoras?

The words are written all on a page with a political cartoon — an anti-war message that’s reverberated over the years and has been copied to the point of cliche: a loudmouth shouts out a whole batch of missiles.  A smaller person has a horn to his ear.

MARTHA ON T.V. Says Don’t Prune French or ENGLISH ROSES Until After BLOOM

All a very odd obsession, and I don’t get it.  But next comes the biographical tidbit of what she thinks she is doing here:

I SAY WHERE ARE MY 3 SONS.  3 SONs?!  I Have not SEEN OR Heard from them in 12 Yrs!
HERSTORY

I imagine I’ll stumble past the same place one year from now and see much the same message, just as I did a year ago.