Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

US & Int'l Papers

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Barak v. Hillary: Yippee!

Friday February 16, 2007

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Dear Mr. Mullings

Memo to everyone who is complaining that the 2008 Presidential campaign has started to early: Put a sock in it. To misquote Delta House pledge Kent "Flounder" Dorfman: "This is gonna be great!"

Last weekend was a case in point. Barak Obama �

SIDEBAR

This is why you have to be careful when you look things up on the Internet. I did a Google search on "what does the name barak mean."
The first website returned by Google was zelo.com which gave me this:
Gender: Male
Origin: Hebrew
Meaning: Lightning

Putting aside the racial connotations of "Lightning" for those of us old enough to remember the Amos 'n Andy show, I suspect old "Madrassa" Obama, Sr. would have not been looking through his well-thumbed copy of the English-Hebrew/Hebrew-English dictionary for a name for his kid.
Then, because I have watched every Mythbusters ever made, I checked zelo.com by entering MY official first name: Manly-stud ("Rich" is just my nom de plume). This is what it said:
Sorry �
We have no information on this name.

Busted!

END SIDEBAR

� Obama made his official announcement on the steps of the old Statehouse in Springfield, Illinois.

A huge crowd was built to watch Obama go from a minor Senator to a major player on the US political stage.

Meanwhile, the Hillary, who had already had to move up her announcement schedule by a couple of months because of the Barak buzz, headed to New Hampshire with the few remaining members of the National Press Corps not on Obama Patrol to try and make some news of her own.

Which she did, but not exactly what the Clinton campaign was looking for.

The fawning coverage of the Obama announcement was countered with not-so-pleasant coverage of Hillary's attempts to get Democratic Primary voters to forget that she voted in favor of the war in Iraq.

The website "Democracy Now" - not exactly a right-wing blog - led its coverage thus:

At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire resident Roger Tilton asked Clinton: "I want to know if right here, right now, once and for all and without nuance, you can say that war authorization was a mistake."

The answer - with nuance - was well, no, she couldn't.

Obama, having delivered a highly praised speech in Illinois, trundled off to Iowa where he found he had been transformed from an icon to � a candidate for President.

To his discomfort, Obama quickly found out that, once you've made it official, different rules apply.

According to an astonishingly brutal column by Maureen Dowd in Wednesday's NY Times, the title of which gave a hint: "Obama, Legally Blonde?":

He was eloquent, if not as inspiring as his advance billing had prepared audiences to expect. He made his first Swift-boat-able slip when he had to apologize for talking about soldiers' lives "wasted" in Iraq.
He sounded self-consciously pristine at times, as if he was too refined for the muck of politics.

The Clinton anti-opponent machine has already begun to rev up. Ms. Dowd's colleague at the NYT, Jeff Zeleny, asked Obama whether or not there had been a heater behind the lectern in Springfield.

According to Ms. Dowd, Obama "shot Jeff a look that said, 'Are you from People magazine?'"

Unlike later when it's all about TV ads and surrogates, this is the luncheonette and living room phase of the campaign.

This is the time when regular voters get to ask candidates searching questions on major issues, and major reporters get to ask candidates searching questions about being regular people - like whether there was a heater hidden behind the lectern.

So, we are potentially in for eleven months of being entertained by a pitching duel between Obama and Clinton.

After one inning, Hillary couldn't get far enough to the Left and Obama couldn't get very much right.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to the "Flounder" and "Lightning" references; links to the Maureen Dowd column and the Democracy Now blog; A Mullfoto showing how I am being discriminated against � again; and a Catchy Caption of the Day.

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