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The Long Courtship

Ike’s Republican granddaughter has endorsed Barack Obama.

Susan Eisenhower got placed on the Washington Post op-ed page on a Saturday, and one suspects it will be portrayed as lacking the torchlight passing magic of the Caroline n’ Ted event last week.

Unmentioned is her husband Roald Sagdeev, Russian scientist and Hero of Socialist Labor.

“My frame of reference is what works”

Thank goodness Barack Obama isn’t invested in the 60s like those tiresome boomers.

But he appears to replace their obsessions with his own free-floating grab bag of Time “Man of the Year” cliches. If he doesn’t care for the 60s perhaps he can catch up on the 80s.

Obama’s Reagan Mania recalls the grimly practical Deng Xiaoping, ”It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

And has Democratic Hall Monitor Paul Krugman points out, the Reagan Era wasn’t such a buoyant time, boyish charm aside.

“… the great failure of the Clinton administration — more important even than its failure to achieve health care reform, though the two failures were closely related — was the fact that it didn’t change the narrative, a fact demonstrated by the way Republicans are still claiming to be the next Ronald Reagan…Now progressives have been granted a second chance to argue that Reaganism is fundamentally wrong: once again, the vast majority of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. But they won’t be able to make that argument if their political leaders, whatever they meant to convey, seem to be saying that Reagan had it right.”

Truth & Consequences

Ronald Reagan’s miracle working powers are a staple of Republican writing and rhetoric .

Now comes a theory that the infectious optimism from beyond can smote Democrats, even from the grave. OpenLeft’s Matt Stoller suggests that “swing liberals” heard Barack Obama’s comments on the sunlit days of the Reagan Era, and that was enough to flip them to Hillary Clinton.

“We have been fighting Ronald Reagan’s psychologically diseased followers and predecessors since, well, since they called themselves the Confederacy and fought for slavery. And we will keep fighting them if we are to retain a republic. That’s why the self-identified very liberal Democrats swung away from Obama and took Nevada from him. Because he very self-consciously explained that he is not part of that fight, and they want a leader who is.”

Days of Yore

City of Dreams

Time to vote at the Wynn Las Vegas, and casino worker/reluctant Hillary Clinton supporter Don Harris told the Washington Post what his problem with her was:

“I just don’t know how many hours she spends in the Wal-Mart boardroom.”

Good Times There Are Not Forgotten

Clinton has been endlessly analogized to Nixon. Smart but charmless, not a natural politician but works hard. The problem is that while Nixon voters could at least comfort themselves that he would smite their enemies, potential Clinton supporters have no such assurances. At least Nixon was against the damn hippies. Hillary Clinton wants to “dialogue” with the worst her nominal opponents cough up.

Witness the debate on health.

There’s been some competition among Democratic candidates for who can better curse corporations while devising a health plan for the campaign. John Edwards has gotten some mileage mocking Barack Obama’s vision of a “big table” with Obama as Lyndon Johnson saying “Come let us reason together.”

On this one Obama is in full Git R’ Done,DC Edition mode:

“The key to getting this done is to empower the American people, but you also have to have negotiations and you have to be able to listen. Otherwise, stuff is not going to happen….The notion that they will have no say so at all, is just not realistic.

Hall Monitor Paul Krugman says Hillary Clinton’s health plan is an Edwards me-to, but doesn’t let her off probation.

And rightly so. Early January saw the Clinton Library as venue for the who-could-be-against-itly named Better Health Care Together, sponsored by old Hillary pals Wal-Mart. For some reason the event is not mentioned on the Clinton Foundation website.

The Source of Our Troubles

The campaign t-shirt is not one of the higher art forms. For that matter it’s not one of the higher forms of campaigning. But they get made and worn nevertheless.

Not always, though. Past Presidential candidates may have been restrained by lack of ready access to the mills of Asia, or the knowledge that few of their supporters would look attractive in the items. But by harnessing the power of the web, some visionaries have dared to dream the dream of a William Howard Taft t-shirt.

The Des Moines Register calls our attention to retropresident.com, source of this salute to an earlier, less visibly sweaty era.

Neil Swanson launched the notion.

“What if someone could have a Truman or FDR or Nixon T-shirt, just like the vintage sports shirts and hats? They didn’t have T-shirts back in the day, obviously, so why not create some?”

Lesser lights get their moment as well, although reviving Dick Gephardt’s Chrysler star logo isn’t likely to make anyone misty for what might have been. The best graphics are Republican –

Alf Landon

…and Richard Nixon.

The overall lesson is relief that most of these sorry graphics did not get wider exposure “back in the day.” And the certain knowledge that Obama’s small-town-electric-co-op looking logo has company in blandness.