Wednesday, April 23, 2008

DISPUTING LANNY DAVIS'S "FACTS"

It gets tiresome having to make the same argument over and over, but let me try again, in response to Clinton flack Lanny Davis's Top Ten List of Undisputed Facts Showing Barack Obama's Weakness in the General Election Against John McCain":

Effectively, no one is running against John McCain right now. Furthermore, no one in the Republican Party is running against Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama's anti-Clinton talking points aren't the ones the GOP would use against her. By contrast, the Clinton and GOP talking points about Obama are virtually identical.

So Obama is getting a double dose of a fall-style campaign. Clinton is taking flak, but none of it is coming from the low-blow masters in the GOP. McCain is getting no flak at all.

There's the grain of salt you should take Davis's numbers with.

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ADDING: Yeah, Hillary still gets a lot of grief online and from the press. But the press coverage she's getting is better and better, and that's especially true since Tuesday night -- the press right now is mostly just seconding her indictment of Obama and her recasting of herself as a proletarian champion. She's getting much better press right now than Obama.

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Oh, and it's a minor point, but Davis is wrong about this:

The last time a Democrat did not win Massachusetts by a substantial margin was 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter.

No. The last time a Democrat did not win Massachusetts by a substantial margin was 1984, when Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale.

It's really not hard to get that kind of thing right, Lanny.

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