What Hillary meant...

Melinda Henneberger is right, of course, about RFK-gate:

I agree she didn't mean to say it. But that's not the same as not meaning what she said.

It's seemed obvious to me, for a while, that Hillary's entire end-game strategy is a play at the margins, an attempt to wait around in case something even worse than Jeremiah Wright happens to Obama. Check out this two-week-old Terry McAuliffe interview on Meet the Press. I've transcribed the relevant exchange below:

McAuliffe (with a hint of malice and incredulity): Let me ask you, I know it's your show, but...you think it's impossible for Hillary Clinton to be the nominee? Impossible?

Russert (with light, melancholic dismay and a touch of condescension): Let me, uh...I'm gonna stick with the questions...

McAuliffe (holding his hands up, looking slighlty wounded): Okay, but well, I'm just saying, it's not impossible.

McAuliffe is indisputably correct. Nothing, technically speaking, is impossible. There is the uncertainty principle, first of all, and one must consider that a hamburger could actually be a ham sandwich, and, of course, Barack Obama could, at any point, be eaten by wolves.

If Hillary is sticking in the race because, as McAuliffe says, "anything can happen" then one of the most likely scenarios leading to her nomination would be Obama's assassination. It is a possibility that many in my parent's generation, along with at least one overeager New York Times reporter, have been quietly raising for months now. It's hard to believe that Clinton is oblivious to this fear, especially when she's constantly sending out surrogates to remind us just how unpredictable life can be.

None of this means that Hillary Clinton wishes Obama harm. It only means that if she continues to linger around, long after logic and good manners require her to leave, people will naturally wonder what kind of contingencies she is planning for.

A final point is worth mentioning: if Hillary did simply wish, as she has asserted, to remind voters that nominations often aren't wound up until later in the summer, wouldn't there have been be a better way to say it?

Hillary could have simply pointed out, for instance, that McCarthy and Humphrey were still battling for hearts and minds all through the summer of '68, avoiding mention of RFK's shooting altogether. Or she could have closed her argument one talking point sooner, highlighting her husband's 1992 battle through June.

Alas, there are problems with these arguments as well. First, the rifts in the '68 Democratic party led directly to the calamitous election of Richard Nixon, showing exactly why Hillary should drop out. It was the rifts in the Democratic Party, after all, that allowed this to happen. It was the Party's difficulty in uniting around a nominee that bequeathed the world a uniquely toxic Republican presidency.

Her first argument, then, would seem to be the better justification: if Bill didn't wrap it up until June, why should Barack get a pass? Only one major sticking point: it's not really true. Bill Clinton himself refutes this interpretation of the 1992 primaries deep in the bowels of his bloviating, 1008-page autobiography (as Andrew Sullivan pointed out):

On April 7, we also won in Kansas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. On April 9, Paul Tsongas announced that he would not reenter the race. The fight for the nomination was effectively over...

So yeah, Hillary didn't mean to say that she was staying in just in case Barack gets shot. But it's hard to believe that the basic thought- that Hillary would be waiting in the wings, that "anything can happen"- wasn't at the root of her comment.

Ballin' Obama

Sorry Michelle, I don't mean no disrespect, nor any double entendre.

But audience, please, if any of you get advance notice of an Obama-involved, Chicagoland basketball game like this one at the East Bank Club on Tuesday, let me know first. I'm dying to be watch the big man play.

Rockers watch your back!

For the second time in as many years, the City Council has backed off on plans to force Chicago concert promoters to get prohibitively expensive licenses before throwing events, an ordinance that would dampen the vitality of the scruffy independent music scene we know and love.

Under the scrapped set of rules, as I understand them, any Joe like me would have to purchase a $500 to $2000 license and purchase $300,000 worth of disaster insurance before throwing a single rock show anywhere in the city. Like fast rock 'n roll in cheap dives? Expect a lot less of it if this law ever passes, as many of the small fries who put these shows together just wouldn't be able to scrape together that kind of lettuce or bother with the headache.

This latest City Council retreat notwithstanding, these proposed rules likely aren't going away, and neither should the voices of protest. As the Reader's Ben Joravsky explains in the article linked to above, the ordinance will now go back to committee. Daley, who seems increasingly power-hungry and irascible, will demand action, seeing as he promised to do something, anything in the wake of the E2 fire. Rather than get his fingernails dirty with the actual details of the situation- that no new law is needed, only enforcement of laws already on the books, that other cities are killing themselves to get the free publicity a healthy indie rock scene brings with it-he and his lackeys in the Council will surely attempt to ram a similarly bad ordinance through in the coming months.

This is just one tiny, tiny example of how true city bosses, to whom voters and council members have ceded their power, function. Grand schemes occupy these bosses' daily schedules, not the delicate tapestry of the city's neighborhoods and scattered communities. If a boss says publicly he's going to do something, no matter how unnecessary, it must be so. Ego and the politics of power demand it.

The moral? If you care about this issue, be vigilant. Sometimes these fake-outs have the combined effect of dissipating and confusing the opposition. And if you don't like the way this is being handled, remember that there are scores of other constituencies that Daley is treating the same way.

Rabbi vs. Rabbi

A little surfin' on the Postville situation led me to this classic rabbinical smackdown. Turf war, muthafuckas!

Chris Paul and Tyson Chandler, BFF or MTF?

Is there anything more heartwarming than when two grown men love each other?

Dept. of Disturbing Symbolism

So after raiding a kosher meat plant in Iowa and arresting 400 undocumented workers (and exactly zero employers), the federal government is now holding the detainees on the grounds of an agricultural fair, where, one presumes, cattle are normally housed.

Hmm...

Dumb as I wanna be...

Sometimes Mickey Kaus makes steam come out of my ears. He's got a classic contrarian's case of asinine solipsist syndrome (figure out the hidden acronym if you want!), mistaking originality for truth and pseudo-intellectual browbeating for intelligent scrutiny. Another frequent Slate contributor, Christopher Hitchens, suffers from the same affliction, though exhibits slightly different symptoms.


On Saturday, Kaus decided that the mainstream media wasn't doing enough to bring the following Obama "gaffe," regarding his poor prospects in tomorrow's Kentucky primary contest, to light:

"What it says is that I'm not very well known in that part of the country," Obama said. "Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it's not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.*"

*His boldface, not mine.

Can you imagine being sincerely concerned about this? Does Kaus really feel like wiling away his years on earth by advocating the media make a BIGGER deal out of this kind of meaningless crap?