Barring a shocking turn of events, Barack Obama will effectively seal the nomination of the Democratic Party on March 4th. While Hillary Clinton may still pull off victories in Ohio and Texas, she would have to win by large margins to have a realistic path to victory – which seems unlikely given the increasingly desperate nature of her on-trail performance and a growing impression that her moment of opportunity has passed, if it ever existed.

Republicans are now confronted with a Democratic candidate who, as Fred Barnes has pointed out, is a candidate of a consensus party for the first time in more than a generation. With a delicate coalition that must come together around the controversial John McCain in order to win, the odds are strongly against the GOP in November.

But should they be?

As we all know by now, Obama comes equipped with many innate gifts that make him the most appealing and pop culturally significant Democratic candidate since John F. Kennedy. As recently as six months ago, I believed it was impossible for anyone other than McCain to have any hope of beating the young Illinois Senator. Yet the primary results led me to reevaluate my opinion, and I now believe that Obama presents not just an inherently flawed candidacy, but a kamikaze leftist candidate, whose out-of-step views will not last the duration of a general election without full exposure, and whose mawkish storytelling can’t carry him to the White House without some serious good fortune.

Read on, then, for the top ten reasons Republicans should not be afraid of Obama in a general election:

1. No McGovern has ever won

The Democratic Party has a long history of choosing candidates whose liberal views and ability to inspire their upper class white and lower class worker voting base make them ideally suited for caucuses and primaries, and terribly suited for general elections. They’ve proven that they can win when they choose triangulating centrist Southern candidates like Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992, but candidates like McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis all went down in the general. While Obama is certainly a more inspiring figure than Dukakis, it’s worth remembering that the Massachusetts Governor emerged from the DNC Convention with a 17 point lead in 1988 in large part because George H.W. Bush was a known quantity, while Dukakis was a bright unknown immigrant talking about change. One wonders whether Obama will be smart enough to avoid any tank incidents, since the modern equivalent would get six million views on YouTube in short order. In the end, the historical path just isn’t there - a fact which makes a win not impossible, but less likely.

2. Latinos

Barack Obama has yet to prove that he can perform well or even consistently compete for Latino voters, who have been a key swing bloc in past elections. McCain is the best candidate out of the Republican field in terms of performance among voting Latinos – he has a long history of winning them in Arizona, and a good deal of cachet among the community – and Obama will have to overcome significant racial divides to compete among them, which is one of the reasons he has a distinct disadvantage in point 3.

3. New map is better for McCain

A McCain-Obama contest effectively throws out the Bush 2000/2004 maps. The battlegrounds shift, and in nearly every case, they shift in a way that plays to Republican advantages. Obama has raised money with an ease unlike any candidate in American political history – even George Washington had to buy scads of alcohol to cater his first campaign – but he will have to spend a large amount of those resources in traditional Democrat states to shore up his base after a divisive primary. On the other hand, McCain will run strong in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, and he is already running even with Obama in western states like New Mexico thanks in large part to Latinos and another key bloc, which leads us to a fourth point.

4. Veterans

The so-called “older belligerent men” vote that granted McCain his come-from-behind victory is in large part a result of emphatic, overwhelming support from veterans and military families. This is no Kerry-Bush race where veterans could be split – McCain’s loyalty runs so deep, he wins both anti-war and pro-war vets. Yes, turnout for African-Americans will be at its highest point ever with an Obama candidacy – but on the other side, strong veteran communities plus Latino voters will enable McCain to realistically compete in states like California, which a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t had a shot at since 1988. It’s notable that Obama couldn’t pass Clinton there, despite his fundraising prowess in the state – but in the end, it’s less important that McCain actually wins in the Golden State than it is that he keeps Obama’s resources tied up there, allowing for gains in other contests.

5. Single Issues Matter This Time

On several hot-button issues, Barack Obama has views that are considerably to the left of both Kerry in 2004 and Gore in 2000 – and unlike those two candidates, his views have yet to be exposed on the national stage. Take this recent column from Stu Rothenberg on Obama’s gun problems, emphasis added:

Even more telling, possibly, was a recent interview Obama gave to television anchor Leon Harris and journalist John Harris. In it, Obama tried to have things both ways.

When he was asked by Leon Harris how he reconciles his support for the D.C. gun ban, which was declared unconstitutional by a federal court last year and which bars all handguns not registered before 1976, with his statement that he has “no intention of taking away folks’ guns,” Obama launched into a confusing explanation of “conflicting traditions in this country.”

He ended his monologue by saying, “We can have a reasonable, thoughtful gun control measure that I think respects the Second Amendment and people’s traditions.” But the D.C. gun ban is based on the premise that the Second Amendment doesn’t give individuals the right to own a gun.

This isn’t just leftism – it’s incoherent leftism. The idea that “reasonable, thoughtful gun control” is somehow not “taking away folks’ guns” might fly now, but just won’t play after every gun-toting middle and lower class white male in the Midwest has heard about it. Gore essentially ran as a pro-gun candidate in 2000, and even Kerry tried to soft-pedal the gun issue, but Obama simply can’t – any more than he can soft-pedal his views on partial birth abortion and other associated issues. Leading pro-lifer Gary Bauer recently sent an email to supporters pointing out that Obama gains roughly 10 percentage points over Hillary Clinton among pro-lifers in states like Wisconsin, Iowa, and Virginia. Some may view this as a problem, but in reality, it’s a huge opportunity for Republicans to completely define a candidate who struggles to define even his own positions on the matter. As we saw with Rudy Giuliani this cycle, when ignorance ends on a candidate’s views on life, the percentages swing.

6. Weakness among typical Democrat voting blocs

Obama’s success among groups like the young professionals, wealthy whites, and poor blacks have been unsurprising – but he’s been less consistent with a key demographic that he needs to win in November: union voters. While I don’t think there’s any question Obama will ultimately win them over, doing so is going to take more sustained outreach, and more attacks along the lines of his anti-NAFTA assault last week. And even after endorsements from the Teamsters and others, there’s a strong undercurrent of union voters who are unenthusiastic about a candidate they view as a weak advocate on their issues, and fundamentally out of step with their experience. You need only look at this recent rant by Tom Buffenburger of the machinists’ union to see the problem:

“Give me a break! I’ve got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won’t last a round against the Republican attack machine. He’s a poet, not a fighter.”

Reaching out to union voters is going to force Obama to take more divisive anti-free market positions, ones that McCain can absolutely exploit.

7. The New Southern Strategy

While Gov. Ed Rendell’s controversial comments about racial politics don’t reflect the situation in most states (if anything, this cycle has revealed it’s more a problem in New England than in the South – not even the Kennedys could deliver Massachusetts for Obama!), they do reveal another problem for Obama. He’s won throughout the primary season by having enormous turnout from African-American voters in places like South Carolina, where they made up half the voting electorate at the polls. It’s not going to be like this in the general. In fact, Obama has only won the votes of white Democrats in a total of two state primaries: Illinois, his home state, and New Mexico. There is not one Southern state where Obama did not have the advantage in a Democratic primary, and not one Southern state where Obama has the advantage going into the a general election. He must expand his base in the South in order to hope to win, and efforts to do that will be stymied without moving right on several issues – issues like guns, marriage, and immigration, all areas he can’t afford to move on. And how many incidents of rank racial politics of the sort Sean Wilentz (no conservative he) details here have the potential to backfire in a general?

8. The Experience Gap

This race has the widest experience gap since Wendell Willkie took on FDR in 1940, never having held elective office. While many members of the mainstream media are eager to make Obama-JFK comparisons, younger voters may forget that the war hero Kennedy had spend 13 years in Congress and the Senate by the time he ran for President. Obama’s inexperience and naivete have already revealed themselves in small moments when it comes to foreign affairs, and this is obviously McCain’s strength. As I noted earlier, McCain’s maverick tendencies are so ingrained that he wins independents and moderates who oppose the war, as well as those who support it and believe it was poorly waged.

If this election is about pop culture and style, Obama wins; if it’s about who is best suited to be Commander in Chief, McCain wins. In one of politics little ironies, the Democrats now have to hope that the surge in Iraq is so successful over the coming months that Iraq is essentially a non-issue: if foreign policy is a priority, either way, it plays to McCain’s advantages.

9. The Barack Obama is My Shiny New Bicycle

The “Building a Religion” cult of personality that has grown up around Obama has certainly propelled much of his success and fundraising. But anecdotal evidence suggests it’s now reached a point where it’s genuinely off-putting to some voters – certainly if it’s reached the point where Hillary Clinton herself is mocking it. Think John Edwards’ “Christopher Reeve will walk again, but only if you vote for Kerry-Edwards!” comment in 2004, but maximize it as the note hit by an entire campaign’s following. As anyone in Hollywood can tell you, all it takes is a few TMZ segments, and one day you go from being Hannah Montana to being Britney Spears. This is the kind of “Obama’s made voting chic” strategy that draws in susceptible young voters, but has massive potential to backfire in a general election where true believers are outnumbered and where a political novice is pitted not against a sluggish partisan candidate like Hillary, but an experienced campaigner who’s proven he wins Independent voters consistently.

10. Even if he wins, it’s not over

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that none of the previous eight factors break Obama’s way. Say the Republicans don’t come together, and he wins a narrow election over McCain, winning states like Missouri, holding onto California, and carrying Ohio and Pennsylvania. Now the hard part begins for the political left: how do you govern successfully as a liberal in the White House? How do you actually make this thing work? It’s not going to be easy to pull off Great Society Redux and post-partisanship at the same time, particularly if Hillary is Majority Leader as some expect. The problem for Democrats is that Obama is so unique, so fresh and new, and those he surrounds himself with … aren’t. They don’t have the farm team to support him in office – just the tired old partisan lions of big government and scandal, known quantities all.

If Obama is elected, his presidency may ultimately resemble Jimmy Carter’s: a candidate who convinced voters that he was nice and good, and then discovered that these good intentions just weren’t enough to actually run the country for four years.

The basic rule of branding still holds here: once you get the candidate out of the box, regardless of how good the branding is, it still has to work.

crossposted at redstate

The decades-long relationship between John McCain and evangelical Christians has had more ups and downs than a Coney Island roller coaster. There is little question that during his 2000 campaign, McCain relished his very public conflicts with the leadership of the evangelical base, and he made his list of Christian activist enemies even longer during his push for Campaign Finance Reform. Yet with the pressing need to unite the varied factions of the GOP against a formidable Democratic machine, McCain needs evangelicals on his side, now more than ever. The question becomes, can Huck’s Army be convinced to come along for a ride on the ”Straight-Talk Express”?

The three most recent presidential contests prove that the polling booth strength of evangelical voters should not to be underestimated. In 2000, Karl Rove said unequivocally that the reason for the nail-bitingly close result was that, according to his estimates, four million evangelical voters stayed home unexpectedly — and he vowed it would never happen again. According to the exit polls in 2004, George W. Bush won 79 percent of the 26.5 million evangelical voters who came to the polls — compared to 52 percent of the 31 million Catholic voters — making up his largest voting bloc. This year, Gov. Mike Huckabee has consistently confounded the oddsmakers due in large part to his overwhelming support among self-identified evangelical Christians.

The voters who make up “Huck’s Army” are ones McCain will need, not just in November, but as activists and supporters at the state level in the months ahead. In an election that will almost certainly see a significant rise in Democratic turnout for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, McCain must match the Bush 2004 numbers as closely as possible in order to win. This could be a difficult task when megachurch leaders such as Rick Warren publicly embrace Obama, and longtime leaders including Dr. James Dobson declare that they cannot vote for McCain under any circumstances.

Part of the complicating factor for McCain is that evangelicals are no longer the straightforward pro-life, pro-family, pro-marriage constituency they once were. The candidacy of Barack Obama appeals to many of them — on the issues of social justice and global warming — but in style more than in substance. In a contest where McCain is pitted against Obama, he will have to keep the drumbeat going on the Illinois Senator’s votes for partial-birth abortion and his aggressive acts to kill the Born Alive Infants Protection Act in Illinois. Because of Obama’s “post-partisan” rhetoric, many otherwise politically inactive voters assume he is a moderate. As one evangelical academic recently told me: “When I tell people [Obama] is an utterly garden variety leftist, they are shocked.”

Another personal complication for McCain is that – unlike both Bush and Huckabee — he has not shown himself to be particularly comfortable talking to the public about his faith. In 1999, McCain was the only candidate not to reference Christ in the Iowa debate where Bush tapped Jesus as his favorite philosopher. McCain’s outreach to evangelicals in the intervening years has often seemed strained, and compared to an Old Testament-drenched speaker like Huckabee, with his widow’s mite and five smooth stones, McCain is positively unchurched. This will need to change — through personal interviews with evangelical publications and other faith-friendly outlets — and testimony at many of the evangelical Sun Belt Latino denominations who will provide the Senator with a friendly and ethnically diverse audience. Huckabee himself, assuming he does not get the Vice Presidential nod, could be a great asset as well as an ambassador to the evangelical community.

On substance, the advantages are ultimately McCain’s. There is simply not one policy area where Obama or Clinton are closer to the policy views of a majority of evangelicals. On the environment, on torture, on abortion, on the war, on education, on marriage, and on the role of government — in every area, McCain is closer to the mainstream of evangelical opinion. It would thus be a triumph of the race, gender, or style card — with, perhaps, a soupçon of white suburban guilt — for evangelical voters to break in any direction but right.

And for their part, McCain campaign insiders do not believe that evangelicals represent as great a challenge. “I don’t believe this is going to be as difficult as people seem to think it is. I believe there is a disconnect between the “talking heads” and the people in the trenches,” says Marlys Popma, former President of Iowa Right to Life and Executive Director of the Iowa Family Policy Center, who has been McCain’s point-woman for state-level evangelical and family groups. “Conservatives, including evangelical conservatives, want less government. We believe that Government and in this case the presidency is really only supposed to do a few things, two of them being: protecting American citizens, and appointing and commandeering the confirmation of qualified judges.”

“John McCain is a stellar candidate on both counts. When the rancor subsides, this will become more and more clear and the difference on these two issues — judges and the war on terror — between John McCain and either Obama or Clinton will become so frighteningly clear that evangelical conservatives will easily see that John McCain is not only superior to the Democrats but has been superior on these counts all along.”

In the larger sense, the candidacy of John McCain represents a last hurrah for the old mainline, the centrist Christian denominations that have declined steadily for the last four decades and are now on the edge of extinction. His faith is a private matter to him, in a way that seems an odd political throwback to roughly a third of the GOP coalition, particularly its most youthful element.

The Pew Research Center’s polling data reveals how isolated McCain’s position is becoming as America’s religious trends shift: while the Millennial generation of voters is one of the most agnostic on record at 19%, they are also the most evangelical — in some denominations, as much as a 20% increase over Generation Xers. But at the same time, non-Christian Millennials have extremely negative views of their evangelical peers — according to the same Pew report, only 13% positive. As the extremes increase in number, the nougat-filled center of occasional-churchgoers is in noticeable decay.

In other words: you think we’re polarized about faith in politics now? Wait twenty years.

crossposted at human events

The interesting thing about tonight, in my opinion, is that nearly everyone who’s won so far has actually deserved it. That’s rare indeed.

Bardem and the Coen Brothers deserved both wins (and No Country will probably take Best Picture barring an upset). The Cotillard over Christie upset was unforeseen and really quite nice, especially because La Vie En Rose needed something like this to get wider distribution (I haven’t seen Away From Her - though I’ve read what it’s based on - yet while Christie’s a fine actress, she just doesn’t deserve two Oscars). Tilda Swinton absolutely deserved the supporting actress nod (she was the best part of the otherwise forgettable Michael Clayton) despite Christopher Orr’s dismissal over at TNR. And of course you already know what I think of Juno.

As a final note: despite being a movie lover, I just have to concede that this show doesn’t deserve to go on. It’s just become unwatchable at this point - I think the moment it died was the Hattie McDaniel Clooney speech - but it’s just an interminable fetish play much about how Hollywood wants to be viewed, as opposed to what it is. The jokes are tired, the setups are ridiculous, and the only way to watch it without politics is with the mute button. You could make Heidi Klum the host and stage it as a battle royale in a cage between old Hollywood and new and I’d still flip back and forth between it and NFL Network’s combine coverage.

Oh: and Harrison Ford is really old.

—

For my own part, my viewed films in 2007: Michael Clayton’s a fine but ultimately forgettable film, loved Juno, liked There Will Be Blood, but No Country For Old Men absolutely deserves the Best Picture nod this year. Elizabeth: The Golden Age was a total trainwreck but with pretty costumes. Transformers was wicked awesome. 300 was overplayed but good. Live Free or Die Hard was surprisingly retro fun. Spider-Man 3 was meh. Ratatouille was another beautifully crafted Brad Bird work. Hot Fuzz was hilarious. In the Shadow of the Moon was touching. Eastern Promises was brilliantly old school. There have been way too many stupid boring films about Zodiac. Knocked Up was sweet. Amy Adams was cute in Enchanted. Superbad was McLovin. La Vie En Rose was gorgeous. Beowulf was about Beowulf the way that God of War is about Greek mythology, but it was still a great old Argonauts ripoff. The Simpsons Movie was nice. Harry Potter was Harry Potter. In the Valley of Elah had some good performances, but was predictable and blah.  The Kingdom deserved more credit for what it aimed at.  Waitress was decent. Oceans 13 is no longer guilty nor a pleasure. The Hitcher was really just an excuse to watch Sophia Bush kick ass. The Darjeeling Limited was the first Wes Anderson movie I actively hated. The Bourne Ultimatum was just like the other two but less entertaining. American Gangster was quality. 3:10 to Yuma was a good western that would’ve been better if it realized it was Tombstone and not Unforgiven.

I didn’t get a chance to see Rescue Dawn, Grindhouse, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Nines, Sunshine, or The Brave One. Have to catch them later.

The less said about Atonement - a movie as pointless and overrated as the book it was based on - the better.

>> If you’re outside the Beltway area, you won’t get this, but if you’re around here, well - I present you the greatest parody of Tony Kornheiser’s Washington Post Radio Show (a daily sycophantic mess) that you will ever read.  Bonus: it also includes the greatest John Junior Feinstein parody you will ever read.  This is like getting a free midget with the purchase of a basket of tasty apples - you can’t go wrong.

For years, I’ve had conversations with friends in politics that all conclude with something like this: “We’re never going to fix the Republican brand until we get our leadership to start recognizing that what a brand is, and that candidates need to sell themselves not by looking at other candidates, but by looking at Nike.”

Yesterday, Barack Obama’s audacious brand continues to triumph. Marketed with dazzling skill to the high end consumer and the conformist college-age Millennial, it enables Obama to make a much broader appeal as a unifying force, in spite of his narrow policy views. He’s the iPhone of politics, sleek, sexy, and pop culture, and even as only 2.5 percent of the market, last year, everyone – even the nonpolitical – know the brand instantly. As Patrick Ruffini noted in his own analysis of Obama: The Brand – “The end result is that great brands are fungible. They can be all things to all people. The branding approach liberates Obama to be the candidate of the MoveOn wing and of national unity. That’s not a criticism. It is a compliment.”

Last night, though, we also started to see a few chinks in this HopeChangeObama brand. See, while the benefits of marketing a candidate like anything in a box are enormous, it’s a dangerous game to play.

Consumer brands are more recognizable, they are more unifying, and they have a broader appeal. But when the American people are increasingly voting based on a desire for authenticity, it still matters what’s actually inside the box you’re selling. If you promise people tea and cake, and it turns out to be death, well, they’re not exactly going to be saying omg ponies! And if your brand is a new entry into the marketplace, and you don’t have a lot of built-up goodwill and gravitas, well, you can be rebranded by your opponents before you know it.

The signs that the Big Rock Candy Mountain candidate gave off last night were not the signs of a brand that has staying power. The Clinton campaign has essentially goaded him into giving longer, more typically political speeches – laundry lists of programs and bureaucratic expansions that make him sound like a typical politician, not a candidate of HopeChange. It leads to scenes like this, the sort of promises that can win you a Democratic primary in Wisconsin hands down, but will come back to bite you in a general election:

“We can restore a sense of economic fairness in this country. I believe in capitalism, but when you’ve got CEOs making more in 10 minutes than ordinary Americans make in a year, that’s not right. I want a $10 billion package to prevent foreclosures, and a mortgage deduction for those who don’t itemize.”

“Yyyesss!”

“We shouldn’t raise the minimum wage every 10 years, we should raise it every year, to keep up with inflation. If you work in this country, you should not be poor.”

“Amen!”

As Thomas put it: “Those folks on the other side attack the ‘failed policies of the last eight years.’ As a cure, they offer the failed policies of the last century.” The Obamanation doesn’t seem to recognize this yet, but the promises made now just aren’t going to play the same way in a general election.

Robert Samuelson’s column on the “Obama Delusion” in the Post is getting a lot of linkage today, and it deserves it; while naturally inclined to like Obama, he still sees a broad distance between brand and reality (emphasis mine):

Political candidates routinely indulge in exaggeration, pandering, inconsistency and self-serving obscuration. Clinton and McCain do. The reason for holding Obama to a higher standard is that it’s his standard and also his campaign’s central theme. He has run on the vague promise of “change,” but on issue after issue — immigration, the economy, global warming — he has offered boilerplate policies that evade the underlying causes of the stalemates. These issues remain contentious because they involve real conflicts or differences of opinion.

The contrast between his broad rhetoric and his narrow agenda is stark, and yet the media — preoccupied with the political “horse race” — have treated his invocation of “change” as a serious idea rather than a shallow campaign slogan. He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation’s major problems when, so far, he isn’t.

If you think that’s the sort of thing that McCain – Mr. Straight Talk, an old brand, a slow brand, but one built on decades of action to back it up – isn’t going to be able to peel back in a drawn out general, well, you’re fooling yourself. But even if he has to do it without the help of the MSM, without further investigation of what Obama really offers beneath all that packaging, it can be done. As Jennifer Rubin notes:

Obama showed a little leg last night and to the relief of the McCain camp showed himself to be a rather ordinary liberal. It sounds trite to recite the litany, but the list of his policy proposals was trite: tax the rich, roll back trade agreements, spend more money, do something (I couldn’t tell what) about lobbyists, and give everyone in America an affordable college education (you might get some Republican takers if you started taxing educational institutions with billion dollar endowments), all while providing universal healthcare. On foreign policy you will find no Joe Biden realism, let alone any Scoop Jackson muscular defense strategy. (He did seem rather enthusiastic about using funds we will save from retreating from Iraq to build roads and provide broadband service in Houston, though.)

This is good news for McCain on two fronts. First, it helps solve, if not totally obliterate, his problem with rallying the base. If conservatives cannot get revved up to oppose a platform that looks like something Ted Kennedy cooked up (come to think of it…) then nothing will rally them. Second, this will enhance McCain’s ability to snag independents. (When you throw in Obama’s positions on everything from partial birth abortion to gun control the task becomes that much easier.)

McCain will, of course, need to fight through the throngs of media boosters and shout over the “Yes, we can” chants. But if the only thing innovative about Obama is stylistic, then McCain may not be such a long shot after all. (He can only hope Obama gives a rambling, self-indulgent mess of a speech after every victory between now and June.)

There’s a meme that’s emerged over the past few months that Obama is – despite resting in age between the runoff of the Baby Boom and the first Gen Xers – the first true candidate of the Millennial generation. The label fits, in large part: Millennials are a responsible bunch, but they still have a mess of conflicts – they say they hate materialism yet spend scads of money, they’re socially conscious but don’t have long memories, and they’re the most secular and the most evangelical generation on record at the same time. Their personal lives are extremely conservative: they drink and use drugs at much lower rates than any generation since the 1950s, and they share those straitlaced conservative attitudes toward sex (the abstinence figures and pregnancy rates are just astounding, and a plurality of them are pro-life), but they’re solidly on the left on the environment and the size of government. They’re optimists, trusting of most authority, and passionate about civic duty.

Yet there’s something else here, too, something that the left should realize is a bigger concern than the political horserace of the moment – this voting bloc is massive, young, and fickle. They’ll turn on a dime after seeing some paparazzi photos and a segment on TMZ. One day you’re Hannah Montana, the next you’re Britney Spears. Just imagine how they would’ve reacted to Dukakis in the tank, with 6 million hits on YouTube, and you get the idea.

Be warned, lefties. Empty promises may sway the Millennials for this election, but putting all your audacious hopes of Great Society Redux in one basket with Obama must have the intended result: once you get the candidate out of the box, regardless of how good the branding is, it still has to work. The past two Democrat administrations have been trainwrecks, and now you’re trusting a guy with no executive experience and a team of political has-beens to achieve glorious HopeChange with a bar set in the stratosphere.

When it comes to the future of conservatism, perhaps the best result for this election and for our future would be the Old Man beating the Kid. The lesson for the left: Even when you packaged it with flowers and puppies and a bright pink bow, you still couldn’t sell McGovernism to the American people. But even if Obama wins, he has to deliver – and it now appears like, after all that sturm und drung, all he’s bringing to the table is a bunch of old failed ideas. The Millennials are too young to remember the welfare state – but they’ll remember what happens next.

crossposted from redstate

>> All I have to say is that I think it is completely unfair and bigoted the way New York is targeting the plumber community.

>> I’m thinking if not for the director whose project this is, “MMA drama featuring Tim Allen” doesn’t attract my attention any longer than I can blurt out how pathetic Hollywood thinks America must be. As it is, I’m just wondering where Mamet sticks Rebecca Pidgeon.

>> “The Dutch government is planning emergency evacuation of its nationals and diplomats from the Middle East should the Wilders film be shown. It is alarmed about the impact on Dutch business. ‘Our Prime Minister is a big coward. The government is weak,’ says Wilders. ‘They hate my guts and I don’t like them either.’” Emergency evacuation…over a film!

>> By the beard of Odin, they’re actually making Thor.  And as a director, Matthew Vaughn doesn’t suck.  Cautiously optimistic, but ask me after Iron Man.

>> The best commentary about this mega-theater I’ve seen thus far: “Pictured: The system’s owner; the love of his life; and a random middle-aged woman to establish scale.”