pH Reading — Tuesday, September 9, 2008

By Patrick Henry 

 

Palin floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee
San Francisco Chronicle · Willie Brown
The Democrats are in trouble. Sarah Palin has totally changed the dynamics of this campaign. Period…

Obama wrong to spurn Hillary, pick Biden
CNN · Ed Rollins
If Obama had done the smart thing, he would have picked Sen. Hillary Clinton for vice president. If he had, he would have united his party for sure and energized his base. He just couldn’t do it and maybe thought he didn’t need to do it. He was wrong. That choice would have meant that McCain probably wouldn’t have picked Palin. And if McCain had picked anybody else from his shortlist, the Republican convention would have been boring, and the party’s base would not have been motivated…

John McCain - master strategist
Jerusalem Post · Caroline Glick
Both the challenges of war and the challenges of politics are challenges of leadership. And both military strategists and political strategists agree that the most basic leadership challenge in both arenas is to know and understand yourself - your strengths and your weaknesses - and to know your opponents and their strengths and weaknesses. While this may seem like basic common sense, it is quite amazing to see how often it is ignored…

pH: The foreign press has been more astute at analyzing the Palin phenomenon — probably because they don’t have a horse in the race.

A Feminist’s Argument for McCain’s VP
RealClearPolitics · Tammy Bruce
In the shadow of the blatant and truly stunning sexism launched against the Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign, and as a pro-choice feminist, I wasn’t the only one thrilled to hear Republican John McCain announce Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. For the GOP, she bridges for conservatives and independents what I term “the enthusiasm gap” for the ticket. For Democrats, she offers something even more compelling - a chance to vote for a someone who is her own woman, and who represents a party that, while we don’t agree on all the issues, at least respects women enough to take them seriously…

Palin: Phantom Of The Oprah
IBD Editorial Board
Oprah Winfrey won’t invite Sarah Palin on her show because she doesn’t want to use it to promote any candidate. Yet she was willing to use the celebrity garnered from her show to promote Barack Obama…

ObamaTax 3.0
WSJ Editorial Board
The good news is that Barack Obama said on ABC Sunday that he might not go through with his plans to increase taxes. The bad news is that the economy has to be mired in recession to avoid the largest tax increase in the nation’s history…

Does Obama Really Want to Talk About Earmarks?
Townhall · Amanda Carpenter
If Barack Obama wants to rail against Sarah Palin’s record on earmarks he’d better be prepared to defend why he allocated hundreds of millions of tax dollars for his own pet-projects…

Woodward on the Surge
Commentary · Peter Wehner
The most important point to make, I think, is that the book underscores what an extraordinary decision President Bush made in deciding on the so-called surge. As Woodward’s book recounts, and my own experience in the White House underscores, in settling on a surge of five brigades to Baghdad and 4,000 Marines to Anbar Province, the President bucked the views of most members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (including the Army Chief of Staff, Peter Schoomaker, and Chief of Naval Operations, Michael Mullen), General George W. Casey, Jr., then the commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq, John P. Abizaid, the commander of U.S. Central Command, military analysts, the entire Democratic Party, much of the Republican Party, most of the foreign policy establishment, the Iraq Study Group, and many within his own Administration…

pH: I’m reminded of a John Wooden quote: “Winning takes talent, to repeat takes character.” Woodward has tried to best his Watergate success for more than three decades. Unfortunately, he has gradually forsaken journalism and succumbed to chasing headlines. Bernstein, too, has also become a parody of his earlier self. Success is often a double-edged sword.