NYT Struggles Under The Weight Of Carrying Obama's Water

Hillary’s near 10 point win in Pennsylvania means that the contest goes on and Obama will be unable to duck the many legitimate questions about his character, his judgment, and his weaknesses in numerous areas, particularly national security. All of this has the NYT editorial board quite upset as they see an Obama nomination on the horizon and the potential for disaster in November.


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The NYT, with its editorial today, "The Low Road to Victory," has clearly decided that Obama is going to win the Democratic nomination. Their editorial is written to two audiences, Hillary and the rest of America that is not part of the far left of the Dem base. The NYT wants Hillary to stop any criticism of Obama and, in particular, does not want Hillary to legitimize criticism of Obama on national security issues. In a larger context, the NYT is trying to frame the boundaries of all future political debate so as to place any question of Obama's character or judgment out of bounds and to delegitimize any criticism of him on the issues of national security and terrorism.

The NYT begins their editorial by calling the result of yesterday’s primary in Pennsylvania an “inconclusive result.” While there are many ways to assess yesterday’s primary, “inconclusive” is not among them. The NYT's canard of calling the results inconclusive is necessary for them to then be able to claim that Obama's glaring weaknesses are unimportant to voters and should not be part of the political debate.

Hillary’s near ten point drubbing of Obama saw her perform exceptionally well, and Obama perform poorly, in all of the demographics the Dems will need to capture in order to win the general election. Rick Moran, writing at PJM, dissects the results and discusses why the Keystone primary should have Dems very worried about selecting Obama as their candidate for president. The NYT eventually articulates its real premise, that Hillary’s “negativity” will harm “her opponent, her party, and the 2008 election.”

The NYT is so upset because Obama doesn't just have feet of clay, he's clay from the vocal cords down. I did not hear one cheap shot from Hillary in the run up to yesterday's primary. To the contrary, all Hillary did was highlight Obama's self-inflicted, perhaps mortal wounds. What the NYT wants her to do is adopt the far left position that those wounds are meaningless and beyond mention. The NYT wants to establish as a threshold that shining a light on these gaping holes in the Obama narrative - from Rev. Wright to Bittergate - constitutes "unfair attacks." Moreover, the NYT is horrified that Hillary has committed the unforgivable sin of deviating from the far left dogma laid down by the Soros/Kos crowd – that any serious discussion of national security issues is not to be tolerated.

The far left of the Democratic wing, in ascendance ever since the ideological purification of the party in 2006, want a national security policy that reflects their belief that America, its war on terror and its capitalist economy are the primary sources of evil in the world. They have adopted the canard that terrorism is fundamentally a figment of the conservative imagination and its mention a mere tool in the conservative bag of dirty tricks. Thus any criticism of the far left's policies on Iraq, Iran, 9-11 and the war on terror - all embodied in the utterances of Obama - is beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse and is to be labled illegitimate pandering to the “politics of fear.” They have no desire to debate these issues, only to label them and lock them away.

Hillary not only criticized Obama for his self-inflicted wounds on the eve of the Democratic primary in the Keystone state, she also took him to task on the issue of national security and terrorism. The ad, a variant on the 3 a.m. ad that worked in Texas, was designed to highlight the fact that Obama’s performance under pressure was very poor and, in the process, it mentioned 9-11. Thus the NYT apoplexy.

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.

If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.”

Obama is the weaker of the Democratic nominees in terms of foreign policy and national security. Clinton has always remained relatively quiet on this point and, in occasional bouts of mindnumbing stupidity, tried to get to the left of Obama as a means of currying favor with the far left – almost all of whom are now fully in Obama’s camp anyway. With nothing to lose, Clinton has decided to expound upon the national security theme. The problem of course is, however much Hillary tries to morph from ardent dove into Atilla the Hen, she has zero chance of winning on the national security issue against McCain. And to the horror of the NYT editorial board, she will likely only legitimize questions of Obama’s national security weakness for the general election.

At any rate, this editorial by the NYT is a forlorn cry to Hillary just let the inevitable occur without, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, raging against the dying of her electoral light. It is written carefully in the far left venacular to insure that all who read it will know that any attacks on Obama’s character or his national security credentials are illegitimate and mere dirty politics. I think we should leave the combined Clinton and conserative response to the NYT editorial board to our current leader of the Republican Party, President Bush: