Weirdest Campaign Memo EVAR

Was checking what Matt Yglesias has to say for himself today, and saw a post about this campaign memo sent out by the Clinton campaign today.

If you're resorting to stuff like that, Hillary, it's time to throw in the towel. Obama's lead in Texas, according to the most recent American Research group poll, is 7%, and he's closing the gap in Ohio. Hell, while walking to Rite-Aid earlier today, I saw on the ticker of the New Haven NBC affiliate that Obama is within 6% in Pennsylvania. I read the memo above as a shockingly blunt quasi-admission of defeat. Hillary has been trumpeting Texas and Ohio ever since Super Tuesday; to see her already pre-spinning anything short of an Obama sweep is astounding. The memo says that if Obama fails to sweep, "there's a problem" for the Obama campaign, because he will look bad after pouring resources into losing efforts. Maybe it's just me, but didn't he pour resources into California? He lost that one, but it doesn't seem to have affected him all that much - and that defeat came before the Hot Streak.

But the single most bizarre (and, in my opinion, most damaging) line is the last one, which asserts that anything short of an Obama sweep would demonstrate that the Democratic voters "have their doubts about Senator Obama and are having second thoughts about him as a prospective standard-bearer." But the entire memo up to that point seems to be doing nothing but demonstrating how the Clinton campaign is having second thoughts about its own ability to secure the nomination. Projecting their own self-doubt, perhaps? Freud would have a field day...

In other news, John McCain can't seem to figure out how to classify himself politically. Yglesias makes a good point about why Republicans are having a hard time reconciling themselves to McCain, and his calling himself a "liberal Republican" sure isn't going to help matters. And anyway, shouldn't the pilot of the Straight Talk Express be able to refrain from describing himself as "conservative" and "liberal" in the same breath? I realize that this is politics we're talking about, but contradictions in terms seem to be a bit beyond any conceivable definition of "straight talk."

Light dawns on marble head(s)?

Took the RNC long enough, but it looks like they finally got around to denouncing the Tennessee Republican party's ridiculous insistence on using Obama's middle name all the time. Now, I wish we lived in a world where saying someone's given name didn't inherently damage their reputation. Hussein is one of the most common names in the Arab world, one which, unfortunately for Obama, also happened to be shared by a certain dictator. But any rational person should be able to realize that there is no connection between Senator Obama's middle name and Saddam, right?

...right?

Tell that to Senator McCain and his illegitimate black child from way back in 2000. One idea from psychology is the so-called "Spinozan system" of belief formulation, whereby we see something and immediately make an assessment of its validity without seeking any further evidence - only later might we try to validate or disprove our initial judgment with, oh, I don't know, facts. So when a source we'd like to trust, such as someone in the government (or at least someone associated with it), puts forth a piece of "information," there is a decent chance that at least some people out there will use this irrational-yet-effective Spinozan system and blindly accept a patently ludicrous proposition. The more credible the source appears to be, the more likely this blind acceptance becomes.

So we have something of a perfect storm: ignorant Americans who only know "Hussein" as referring to Saddam, not to the thousands of other people with that name; the Spinozan belief-formation system, and its unthinking acceptance of absurdities; and the credibility that information gains by being distributed by the government. It was a pretty ingenious piece of propaganda on the part of the Tennessee Republican Party. But really, guys, couldn't we be putting that ingenuity to better use?

Starting a blog in the middle of midterms is probably not the most fruitful of endeavors. But I really couldn't let it sit empty for the next little while. So while you may have to wait until the weekend for any actual content, at least there are words now.