Wow, now *that's* cynical. Really?

Let's see what Gyuri, Reed and Inca think, but I'm dead serious. They were always being confused when they were both senators.

I thought it was a good point, but what do I know?

I agree with Ursus. Also, the fact that Kerrey, when he endorsed Clinton, referred to Obama as Barack Hussein Obama and stated that he went to a madrassa isn't going to help him much. Plus, didn't he admit to killing a whole bunch of unarmed women and children when he was in Vietnam (granted, that might help him with some GOP crossover voters)?

Plus, he's not a very inspiring campaigner.

I'm liking Ed Rendell and Joe Biden more and more. But I still haven't seen a convincing case against Patrick Leahy.

WornOldMotorbike wrote:

QUOTE:
Curiosity lead me to the Rove wiki entry. Among other interesting bits, his birth father ran out on the family, then his mother's new husband 'I knew him as dad' divorced her and came out as gay, then his mother killed herself.

Karl Rove's dad was also good friends with one of earliest body modification proponents, and had several genital piercings (BoingBoing link)

Gyuri, what Kerrey actually said was the following:

QUOTE:
"I've watched the blogs try to say that you can't trust [Obama] because he spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa. I feel quite opposite. I think it's a tremendous strength whether he's in the United States Senate or whether he's in the White House."

"It's probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There's a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal."

...which doesn't strike me as particulalry prejudicial.

Why is he considered a bad campaigner, Toro?

The obvious arguments against Leahy are surely that a) he's a remarkably marginal figure on the Hill for someone who's been there for 32 years and b) he's from Vermont, which means he might as well be Canadian.

AG,

Whether or not the comments look prejudicial now, I think they were in the primary context they were delivered in, and I'd be willing to bet that the Obama campaign found those comments to be pretty prejudicial, as they pushed back pretty hard on them through the media, as the response of the media showed. Here's one example. Here's another.

Also, he sent Obama an apology letter after this.

True. Although a fair reading of those remarks suggests that the Obama camp was crying wolf when they called them a "smear".

You may be right, but I'm not sure about it. Kerrey's comments were set up as a classically political backhanded sting. Say very nice things while dredging up points that are either untrue (madrassa) or meant to perpetuate the idea among the 20%ers that Obama is a secret Muslim. This is a very typical type of attack, as it gets the media to talk about the comments constantly, trying to affix in the minds of some percentage of the voters that Obama is a secret Muslim (which, by the way, clearly is believed by a not-insignificant amount of the American public).

We don't know whether they were meant in good faith, but they were made at the moment that he was endorsing Clinton, so I think the razor cuts the other way.

Another way of looking at it, is if all everyone talked about was: "Sure his dad was a Muslim, and his grandfather was a Muslim and he went to a (secular) madrassa, and his middle name is Hussein, but he's not the Manchurian candidate, but if he was, there's nothing wrong with it, and, anyway, it's great b/c it will make Muslims in the world happy," then a lot of people will come away with the idea that he's a Muslim.

In any event, I think that (combined with the questionable history in Vietnam) would rule him out for the VP slot.

Those comments are Kerrey trying to drag the Muslim thing into the spotlight while hamfistedly dressing it up as nicey-nicey, touchy-feely drivel. Real "I don't think Obama has ever beaten his wife, who could say such a thing" stuff.

I half-remember Kerrey launching an absolutely awful tilt at the presidency in 1992.

So it's impossible to say something positive about the effects Obama's heritage will have on America's image abroad?

Or is it just that anything anyone who supported HRC said must have been malicious?

If Kerrey's comments are out of bounds, what kind of comments would be in-bounds?

C'mon, AG, it's not like he just said "something" about the effects of Obama's heritage on America's image abroad, and it's not like he said them randomly when asked in an effort to promote positive aspects of Obama's candidacy. He said them in the middle of the publicity surrounding his endorsement of Clinton, and, therefore, the statements don't get the presumption of good faith.

Further, saying that Obama went to a "madrassa" is, though technically true, not true in the way that the word is commonly understood in the US, and very provocative in the context of the campaign. In the US, "madrassa" connotes an Islamic religious school, and is known, by most people, to be nothing but a training ground for terrorists. While this is obviously a ridiculous understanding, and should be corrected, that's not what was going on.

In January, the right-wing press pushed the story that Obama was educated in a Islamic madrassa, and was really a crypto-Muslim and claimed that the story was pushed by the Clinton people. The Obama campaign and the media went ballistic, as it wasn't true, and the Clinton campaign (somewhat credibly) denied they had any involvement in the story. For Kerrey to bring this up (even if he refers to it as a "secular madrassa") in the context of what he said, is much more than just saying "something positive about the effects of Obama's heritage on America's image abroad."

My impression was that those quotes were in repsonse to some direct questions from a journalist, but perhaps I'm wrong. They would seem a lot less innocuous if they were unprompted, I agree.

I dunno, though. It just seems to me that for this kind of thing to equal "smearing" Obama requires an a priori presumption of bad faith which I think is kind of harsh.

Politicians are skilled at finding ways to not answer direct questions when the answer would be problematic, so while I think the unprompted/prompted question has some bearing, I don't think it's particularly dispositive.

I think that, in general in (at least US) politics, when a person publicly endorsing one candidate makes comments about the other candidate which could have different good faith/bad faith readi