Notes On The Candidates

[poliphilo]

They say old soldiers make peace-loving politicians because they know first-hand how horrible war is, but this doesn't seem to apply to McCain, who has already- and he's not even in the White House yet- threatened to go to war with Russia.  Maybe this is because his military service involved flying above battlefields, not slogging accross them.

I'll say this for Palin: she hasn't pulled strings or called in favours to keep her son out of her holy war.

As for Obama, he's supposed to be hugely intelligent, right? So why in the world did he make that crack about the pig and the lipstick when he- or his minders- should have known that the GOP attack dogs would be all over it? The more I see and hear of him, the flimsier he seems to be.

Comments

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

He didn't throw his enemies a bone; he threw them an entire haunch!

I watched the clip on YouTube. Obama paused after "you can put lipstick on a pig," and waited while the audience let out a number of appreciative hoots and cat-calls that suggested that they, at least, linked it with Palin. He then went on to say [I paraphrase, may not be perfect] "and you can wrap up an old fish with newspapers and call it change but it's still going to smell."

It was clear that his audience there took this as references to Palin and McCain, which helped with the perception that he did it in order to get that effect. I think that at the very least, Obama had a tin ear for how those particular figures of speech would be received.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I noticed that pause.

I wondered whether it was a "whoops, now I've said it" moment- and he was wishing he could backtrack and start again.