This frankly sounds less like a guy who has too many houses to count than a guy with money invested in various places who doesn’t do his own accounting for it and who’s afraid to give the wrong answer and get called on it.Unfortunately for McCain, his loose-lipped campaign's let the cat out of the bag too early. Marc Ambinder's twittering away this evening: "The media is abetting the firestorm about McCain's home-style gaffarooni."
I learned over the weekend why the Republicans who have seen the tape of Michelle Obama ranting about “whitey” describe it as “STUNNING.” I have not seen it but I have heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape. It features Michelle Obama and Louis Farrakhan. They are sitting on a panel at Jeremiah Wright’s Church when Michelle makes her intemperate remarks. Whoops!! When that image comes out it will enter the politcal ads hall of fame. It will be right up there with the little girl plucking daisy petals in the famous 1964 ad LBJ used against Barry Goldwater.I think Johnson's baseless vitriol speaks for itself, but I'm curious how this reflects on TPM's frequent employment of Johnson as a source, conduit for confidential sources, and expert commentator. TPM deserves a lot of credit for its Muckraker work, but the credibility of future reporting could be in doubt if the unsourced claims of someone who's been proven to have all the veracity and none of the tact of Ahmed Chalabi persist unquestioned in the TPM archives.
Turns out, Obama’s used that exact language in practically every state he’s campaigned in since South Carolina.
Alabama
However, he rebutted efforts to besmirch his character in Birmingham, a cradle of the civil rights movement, where he addressed a cheering, racially mixed crowd of 10,000.
“That’s just the same dirty tricks. That’s old-style politics, trying to bamboozle you, trying to hoodwink you, running the okie-doke on you.”
“This election … it’s not a black or white issue, it’s not a young or old issue it’s a past issue versus a future issue,” Obama said in an impassioned speech at the University of Alabama. “… This is our moment. This is our time.
California
On stage in front of a “change” banner at a fund-raiser at the Avalon club in Hollywood, Barack Obama reprised his his ‘bamboozled” line last night for an audience that included celebrities. (Quentin Tarantino!). “It’s the typical response against a movement for change,” he said. “[It] happens, by the way, every time. It’s fascinating, you know, Bill Clinton was confronted with the same stuff back in the 90s. And now, you know, things go full circle.”
Missouri
Browsing the language news online recently, I found a lively debate under way at the MSNBC politics blog. The item sparking the discussion was a note on Barack Obama’s colloquial language; he was already telling voters not to be bamboozled or hoodwinked by his opponents, not to fall for the okey-doke. And in St. Louis, the MSNBC reporter said (mistakenly, it now appears), he added hornswoggled to the list.
Different context; don’t know where
Obama wants multi-year prison sentences for bankers and others who “hoodwink” poor people into homes beyond their means, and as with some in Congress, he wants bankruptcy judges to be able to change the terms of mortgage contracts.
Osh Kosh, WI
“They will try to bamboozle you, hoodwink you, run the okey-doke on you,” Obama likes to warn of his foes.
Boston, MA
I am not going to cower and quake because the big, bad Republican machine is coming. Because they practiced that old politics. Yes, we have had it with ???. We know the games, the tricks, the bamboozle.
Not only that, but look at this:
Camp Clinton shot back Tuesday that Obama was trying to hoodwink people into thinking Sen. Clinton, D-N.Y., doesn’t want to start pulling out. “Sen. Obama is mistaken,” said Clinton adviser Howard Wolfson, who fired off an e-mail listing Clinton’s repeated calls for a “phased redeployment.”
And in South Carolina, Obama wasn’t saying anything about Clinton, just responding, in jest, to the absurd e-mails that were going around at the time. Although he did not accuse the Clinton campaign directly of smearing him on race and religion, Mr. Obama referred to emails that brand him a Muslim fifth columnist as part of a broad attempt to “hoodwink you”.
In the end, the only conclusion I can see as a dedicated Obamabot is that Taylor Marsh is the one who can’t see anything but race in this. Of course, the history of this is absurd as well:
Is hoodwink related to the KKK? one suspicious commenter ventured. No, or do I mean “duh”? Hoodwink is first recorded in 1562, some 300 years before the debut of the Klan. It meant, at first, “to blindfold” - “We’ll have no Cupid hoodwink’d with a scarf,” says Benvolio in “Romeo and Juliet” - and later “to fool, deceive.”
As for bamboozle, it was the trendiest new slang in London back when Jonathan Swift denounced it, in the Tatler, in 1710. It may or may not have been a favorite with the real Malcolm X, but Disraeli used it, and Walter Lippmann, and Frank Zappa. Not to mention Chris Matthews, who last year asked, “How can the president continue to bamboozle the public?”
A couple of blog commenters insisted that the combination of hoodwink and bamboozle was the giveaway; where else but in the “Malcolm X” speech would you find those “rare” words together?
Well, in Lord Greville’s memoir: “Palmerston never intended anything but to hoodwink his colleagues, bamboozle the French, and gain time” (1885). And in H.L. Mencken: “He does not merely tell how politicians hoodwink, bamboozle and prey upon the boobs; he shows precisely how” (1928). And even in “Some Facts about Treating Railroad Ties” (1912): “‘Quick high vacuum’…and other imaginary words, intended to mystify, hoodwink and bamboozle the uninitiated.”
Does this mean Obama’s not recalling, genuinely/cynically/naively, some of the language of Black America? Of course not. Is it still absurd that Taylor Marsh is bemoaning the media for not paying attention to Obama playing the “hoodwink” card…
]]>