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December 06, 2007
Hardballin'
I'll be on Hardball around 5:40 Eastern, talking about Mitt Romney, religion, and the new polls out of New Hampshire.
December 6, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
Ezra, I take your, Matt, and Kevin Drum's critique of Romney's speech with a grain of salt because it is evident you wouldn't vote for him period. So, we can discount your commentary. I bet if Hillary or Obama grave similar speeches you'd try to go out of your way to praise them nonetheless.
Posted by: jones | Dec 6, 2007 5:28:00 PM
Exciting! Hmm, that's 2:40am PST. yikes. You should try to talk as loudly and inyourface-ly to Chris Matthews as he does to you. He's loud on TV, something makes me feel like he's gotta be even louder in person...
Good luck!
Posted by: Los Anjalis | Dec 6, 2007 5:42:26 PM
jones, I think that's kind of a weird perspective. You can go ahead and disagree with their perspectives, but are you really so unable to process other perspectives that you have to discount them altogether?
Posted by: Daniel Munz | Dec 6, 2007 6:00:44 PM
Jones, I take your critique of Ezra's comments with a grain of salt because it is evident you wouldn't vote for him any Democrat, period. So, we can discount your comments. (full stop)
Ezra: Chris didn't leave much time for your panel, but it was surprising balanced - amazingly so from the guy from National Review. I didn't know NR had anyone who wasn't bonkers. But, it seems like Mathews likes you (or your opinions, not sure which), so he doesn't shout you down, even if only a few sentences from you fit into the show. (aside: seems like your hair style varies from month to month LOL. Do you get it cut on the LAX taxi ramp by whoever is available? (hahah).)
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Dec 6, 2007 7:43:32 PM
damn close tag.
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Dec 6, 2007 7:45:37 PM
jim
hope you were okay in the big storms up there :-)
Posted by: jacqueline | Dec 6, 2007 7:56:13 PM
I love every time Ezra is on any show. His take is almost always right on, and he is a hottie!
Posted by: MichaelTheOhioStateUniversity | Dec 6, 2007 8:02:50 PM
My husband and I saw you on hardball and we had to laugh at the discussion of why white people like Obama.
Tell these guys the next time you are on that they are making way too much of things and trying to psychoanalyze things way too much. Tell them to just talk to people in Illinois.
the fact is that some candidates raise a gut feeling or emotional thing. Like how Hillary just raises uneasiness in people's gut or they feel she is not being real or truthful. And you just feel this negative feeling toward her.
Same with Barack Obama. He raises feelings of trust and inspiration. i've heard people, not easily given to emotion, to say they feel secure about him.
It is not anything more than that. How some make you feel positive, like say Elizabeth Edwards does. And some feel an intangible negative to someone.
Posted by: vwcat | Dec 6, 2007 10:10:43 PM
Funny because my own feelings are opposite of vwcat. Clinton inspires confidence in her competence while Obama makes my skin crawl.
Here in Texas I watched W Bush run against the marvelous Ann Richards and then the 2000 campaign against Gore with keen interest. Obama is running Bush's 2000 campaign and I just hate it.
A 'reformer, with results', a 'uniter, not a divider' sound familiar. Compare that to Obama.
It seems to me that if Obama is elected we'll have another W from the other side. Inexperienced and incompetent but with a damnable sense of personal certitude. An absolute disaster for the country.
Posted by: RalphB | Dec 6, 2007 10:27:38 PM
Oh, come on, Ralph. You can say a lot about Obama's attitude being sanctimonious or self-righteous or just plain annoying, but the problem with George Bush is that he led a life of failure-to-failure enterprising, then jumped into politics and displayed an utter lack of interest in actually governing or working as a public servant. Neither of these things is true about Obama in the slightest.
Posted by: mightygodking | Dec 7, 2007 12:02:22 AM
I saw you on Hardball. It's nice that Tweety finally had some liberals on. They have been missing since mid October.
I agree with you that our presidential candidates should want to be president. But the part that everyone seems to forget is that weeks prior Obama had indeed accused her of the "crime" of wanting to be president. In Harlem 2 weeks ago he repeated. " I"m not running because I had long held plans. I'm not running because I'm entitled." He said that about her. I think it's more than legitimate to want to be president....but the long held plans is a reference to the Gerth/vanNatta "20 yr plan" that supposedly both Clinton had plans to be president 20 yrs ago. That was denied by it supposed source, Taylor Branch.
For the weeks prior to the kindergarten missteps by the Clinton campaign, he kept repeating it. No one condemned him for "accusing" her of the terrible ambition to be president.
And you didn't note that on Hardball. Only that her justifed ambition undercut her argument against him...but you didn't say that for weeks he had he had been bad mouthing her ambition.
I think when the Obama people bad mouth her that too many think it's okay for him, but it's not okay for her to fight back. Did they fight back effectively....no. But maybe, if some fair minded commentators had actually noted that it was wrong to go after her ambition...they might not need to have defended themselves so much.
Posted by: debcoop | Dec 7, 2007 1:23:49 AM
Obama is running Bush's 2000 campaign and I just hate it.
Funny... I tend to think that HRC is running the Bush 2000 campaign. Or at the very least her supporters & Dem pols are, with the attempt at a bring-back-the-grownups narrative and corresponding restoration subtext. IMNSHO, Obama's running the Bill Clinton 1992 campaign, thematically and in biographical terms, complete with the annoying and pointless contrarianism/triangulation/sops to conservative thought (unsurprisingly, that's what bugs me most about him).
Posted by: latts | Dec 7, 2007 1:38:28 AM
... and I guess I should point out that neither the Clinton '92 nor Bush '00 campaigns actually resulted in a majority victory, so it's no wonder so many of us are rather disgusted this cycle.
Posted by: latts | Dec 7, 2007 1:41:13 AM
Though I'm no Hillary fan, I have to agree with debcoop. Obama's swipes at her 'ambition' sound an awful lot like the right's attacks, (down here in Texas I hear the word carpetbagger thrown around alot). That being said, the Clinton campaign's counter-punch was ridiculous. Not so much because it was below the belt (which it was), but because it looked extremely petty and immature - with more more than a hint of desperation.
Posted by: brooks | Dec 7, 2007 4:02:14 AM
Can we please stop comparing our candidates to Bush? Pretty please? It's a cheap political shot that has absolutely no bearing on reality.
Ezra, great job. And where did that NRO guy come from! I figured you would be alone in your thoughts on the Romney speech, and he was even more forceful than you!
Posted by: jambro | Dec 7, 2007 8:17:50 AM
"Funny... I tend to think that HRC is running the Bush 2000 campaign."
Certainly more then Obama. The relevant about Bush isn't how he presented himself in 2000, but how awful he was afterward.
Complaining about rhetoric like "A 'reformer, with results', a 'uniter, not a divider" is just a case of weird guilt by association for either HRC or Obama
Posted by: Christopher Colaninno | Dec 7, 2007 8:34:51 AM
The comments about all this God stuff were right on! I am so sick and tired of this campaign being about faith and how much someone has. According to Romney those of us without faith can't particpate in politics, and I guess we should just drop off the face of the earth. But all this talk about faith will come back to haunt the Republicans.
Posted by: MichaelTheOhioStateUniversity | Dec 7, 2007 12:52:23 PM
Ezra:
Where were you and why weren't you speaking out when Obama was attacking Clinton for being ambitious?
You were MIA.
One can't help but think that your silence speaks to your feelings that it's OK for a man to be ambitious but it's not OK for a woman.
Posted by: JoeCHI | Dec 8, 2007 8:13:18 AM
The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride f*cking with you. F*ck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.
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Posted by: Daniel | Apr 2, 2009 8:52:38 AM
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