THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The joy of jet lag is that one is awake in time to channel-hop between all America’s breakfast news programmes. After an hour or so of this entertainment yesterday morning, it was clear that not just the media, but also the public interviewed over their bacon and maple syrup in diners the length of the East Coast, had decided on one thing: this was a historic morning for America. A black man was for the first time confirmed as a nominee for a major party for a presidential election. There seemed to be not just a sense of self-congratulation at this unquestionably inclusive step being made by a country that has not enjoyed the best international press of late, but also relief that a 17-month campaign to choose the top Democrat was over.
However, one person and her friends seemed not to share these sentiments: and that person was Hillary Clinton. There has not been such a stubborn refusal to die in high politics since the end of Rasputin. Her determination to stay in the race was viewed as courageous by her supporters, who for reasons of taste cannot cite the reason why they think she is right: their belief that a black man, however gifted (and Mr. Obama is 
certainly that) cannot become president of the United States, at least for the moment. Others have seen it as pig-headed and destructive: and typical of a bullying, arrogant, slimy, dishonest and manipulative political culture that ruled in the White House from 1993 to 2001, when her husband was president.
That is Mrs Clinton’s main problem, and has been her undoing. Her style is that of 1990s machine politics. Her views are those of 1990s “third way” Leftism, with their emphasis on the power of the state and extended welfarism and their ignorance of real economics. Her rhetoric is tailored to appeal to the cohorts of organised blue-collar labour who are her power base, and she speaks stiltedly and rather patronisingly in their tongue. For all these reasons she is completely out of date. She has an appeal only to those who wish to defend a position that a sane army would have abandoned long ago. She is an irrelevance to those who see that America has changed, the world has changed, and a new leader needs to make an accommodation with those realities.
It has been difficult, watching Mrs Clinton’s final desperate moments as a would-be nominee, not to draw parallels with our own Prime Minister. She is being rumbled by her own party, and by the wider American public, as someone who can’t do the business. Mr Obama has been gentlemanly in the extreme in his lavish public tributes to her, but his followers regard her as self-serving and destructive. To be fair to Mrs Clinton – and it requires a superhuman effort, given the dirty and charmless way she has run her campaign – she is more experienced than Mr Obama. It is true when she says he is untested in ways that she, as someone who has hacked around high politics for the past 15 years, is not. But to be fair to Mr Obama, he has not merely won a beauty contest by dint of being more beautiful. MORE
JAMES DOOLITTLE: I keep hearing DeNiro from Copland – “You blew it!” Not the media, not the allegiance shifters, nothing but her own 2007 branded bubble of entitlement that had this thing so in the bag because they all said it was so. Obama won this bad boy because he was able to capture the zeitgeist and run the table with a campaign that knew what to do with momentum. No amount of big states or fuzzy math can erase that run, and what still galls most is the knowledge that if the tables were turned, and the presumptive was indeed living up to the presumptiveness of the situation, Obama would’ve been taken out months ago. In closing, it was nice to see the Democrats bat 1.000 through all the primaries, but what a waste…of money! You can see this long-winded fucker’s carbon footprint from Pluto.
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ASSHAT OF THE WEEK: Joe Lieberman
“Senator Joe Lieberman, serving aptly as John McCain’s foreign policy attack dog, jumped on a conference call with
reporters on Wednesday to rip holes into Barack Obama’s stance on Israel. Playing off of Obama’s address to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the Connecticut independent acknowledged that he hadn’t heard the speech — and urged for a “civil and constructive” presidential campaign — before taking Obama to task for not being consistently tough on Iran…McCain, despite tough rhetoric on Iran, has several advisers with deep connections to the country; perhaps the most embarrassing of which is Charlie Black, the campaign’s chief strategist. Before leaving his perch as a D.C. lobbyist, Black represented a Chinese oil company that did business with the Iranian government. He and his firm also represented Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who helped churn up support for the war in the United States and has subsequently been accused of selling U.S. secrets to Iran.” [via HUFFINGTON POST]
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COMEUPPANCE: Obama Straightens Shit Out With Lieberman
“Furthermore, during a Senate vote Wednesday, Obama dragged Lieberman by the hand to a far corner of the Senate chamber and engaged in what appeared to reporters in the gallery as an intense, three-minute conversation. While it was unclear what the two were discussing, the body language suggested that Obama was trying to convince Lieberman of something and his stance appeared slightly intimidating.
Using forceful, but not angry, hand gestures, Obama literally backed up Lieberman against the wall, leaned in very close at times, and appeared to be trying to dominate the conversation, as the two talked over each other in a few instances. Still, Obama and Lieberman seemed to be trying to keep the back-and-forth congenial as they both patted each other on the back during and after the exchange. Afterwards, Obama smiled and pointed up at reporters peering over the edge of the press gallery for a better glimpse of their interaction. Obama loyalists were quick to express their frustration with Lieberman’s decision and warned that if he continues to take a lead role in attacking Obama it could complicate his professional relationship with the Caucus.” [via ROLL CALL]