Pssssst! Here’s the secret hand-sign. . .

1) If you’d like to have your very own Obama salute, there is a company hoping their idea for an Obama hand sign takes off. According to USNews and World Report:

“You interlace your hands in a circle, the interlacing being a symbol of different types of people coming together and the circle a symbol of unity,” he says. Their design, . . . is free, and Husong is urging people to download it and print it on posters and T-shirts. “We want to see it everywhere, but more importantly we want this sign to take the world by storm.”

Now that the secret hand-sign has been revealed, Obama supporters will be able to recognize each other at a distance. Of course, so will the rest of us.

Read the rest ->

2) MSNBC is reporting that Bill Clinton will be offered the Wednesday night speaking slot right before the VP candidate speech. What does this mean? I have no idea but the author seems to think that means Clinton will introduce his wife as the VP candidate. Yeah, right.

3) An interesting bit from the National Review talks about affirmative action. Mentioning Obma peripherally, the writer talks about having served on CSU hiring committees. The interesting part is not what affirmative action was designed to do and the merits of that idea, but how it plays out when hiring.

We had a variety of recent immigrants from the Caribbean as professors and students, almost all from affluent families. One can imagine the problems of others supposedly with 3/4, 1/2, 1/8 black or Hispanic ancestry. What qualifies as a minority, and who ascertains it in the post-Ward Churchill era? Many of our white students with parents from the Oklahoma diaspora rightly claimed American-Indian heritage, albeit in the 1/16th to 1/8th range. The Asian problem was even weirder — 3rd-generation affluent Japanese, no? But the Hmong immigrant of 10 years, yes? The recent Taiwanese arrival, no? More likely, there were de facto Asian quotas — given the ability of such minorities in many fields to outperform almost everyone else and thereby become “overrepresented” in the UC system.

Bumper-sticker identification was unfortunate. The half-Hispanic student with Wilson as his surname never could obtain the authenticity that his counterpart with a Hispanic father received. Accented and hyphenated names, and renaming, were common, in addition to occasional ethnic dress.

Interesting and confusing. Particularly for a big-tent Democratic party.

4) There’s an interesting campaign analysis at realclearpolitics. The author suggests the McCain campaign has realized this election really IS all about Obama and has taken to skewering him as humorless and “fussy.”

Yes, the [Britney] ad was silly but this is what political observers fondly call the silly season - that time in August when everyone is looking for a bit of light relief. Obama’s allies overplayed their hand by claiming Celebrity was racist and it will be many years before Bob Herbert of the New York Times lives down his fantasy about the phallic symbols therein.

For once, Obama seems a little rattled. He even accused McCain of lying about his energy plan for the relatively mild offense of trying to reduce it to an off-hand remark about tire inflation. He was clearly irked by the mildly amusing stunt of distributing Obama tire gauges. “We weren’t lying, we were mocking him,” said one McCain aide. “He’s so fussy.”

The aide added that he had a theory that the campaign that laughed the most tended to win. There could be something in that. Suddenly, after coming across as unremittingly dour during the primaries, McCain is enjoying himself a lot more, quipping about his wife Cindy taking part in a topless beauty pageant and telling people to lighten up about Celebrity. By comparison, Obama is straight faced.

McCain’s The One ad, which painted Obama as a would-be messiah, complete with Charlton Heston as Moses parting the Red Sea, also hit home. The suggestion that Obama sees himself as too grand to relate to the concerns of ordinary people has real potential to damage him.

Makes me want to look at those ads again.

5) Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan now at the WSJ, has a piece describing the “political landscape” right now. Like many pundits, she describes the “known knowns” of unexpectedly tight polls, a European tour without much “bounce” and the McCain campaign “catching on” to the idea of Obama as shallow celebrity.

She goes on to say all the preening by Obama is strategy rather than vanity. It is all part of a plan to make voters comfortable with Obama wearing the trappings of the President. But, the campaign makes mistakes.

However. Mr. Obama consistently shows that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. It’s a theme with his talented, confident staff. They don’t know what they don’t know either. Because they’re young and they’ve never been in power and it takes time to know what you don’t know. The presidential-type seal with OBAMA on it, the sometimes over-the-top rhetoric about healing the earth and parting the seas. They pick the biggest, showiest venue for the Berlin speech, the Brandenburg Gate, just like a president, not realizing people would think: Ya gotta earn that one, kid. Going to Europe was fine, but they should have gone in modestly, with a modest venue, quietly spread word that his speech was open to the public, and then left the watching world awed by the hordes that showed up. For they would have. “We couldn’t help it, they love him!” It would have looked as if Europe was coming to him, and let that sink in back home.

She ends with this:

Is Mr. Obama’s self-conception in line with his gifts, depth, wisdom and character? That’s the big question, I suspect, on a number of minds.

As for Mr. McCain, I think he had the best moment of the month this week at the big motorcycle convention in Sturgis, S.D., when he was greeted with that mighty roar. And his great line: “As you may know, not long ago a couple hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I’ll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day.” Oh, that was good.

There’s a thing that’s out there and it’s big, and latent, and somehow always taken into account and always ignored, and political professionals always assume they understand it. It has been called many things the past 50 years, “the silent center,” “the silent majority,” “the coalition,” “the base.” The idea of it has evolved as its composition has evolved, but the fact that it’s big, and relatively silent, and somehow always latent, maintains. And watching that McCain event—vroom vroom—one got the sense it is perhaps beginning to pay attention to the campaign. I see it as the old America, and if and when it reasserts itself, the campaign will shift indeed, and in ways you can even see from 10,000 feet.

I hadn’t heard about the Harleys. She is right. That is good.

6) Also at the National Review is this piece about HRC speaking in Denver.

The writer notes that HRC is scheduled to speak on Tuesday - Women’s Equality Day. He also notes there is still some skirmishing about whether Hillary’s name will be placed in nomination and that Hillary herself said:

I know that there have been a lot of questions on this subject. Senator Obama and I share the goal of ensuring that the voices of everyone who participated in this historic process are respected. I want to assure everyone we are working together with Senator Obama’s campaign and the DNC, and I am confident we will have a successful and unified Convention in Denver.

The the author says:

Nothing in there to tell you anything one way or another.  But look at it this way: Hillary Clinton speaks to the convention on Women’s Equality Day, amid a big celebration of the role of women in the Democratic Party, and everyone is feeling good about how inclusive they are — and then, just hours after celebrating the right of women to vote, the convention denies a vote to the millions of women who supported Hillary Clinton?  How’s that gonna work?  Might it be that the fortuitous occasion of Women’s Equality Day will actually create pressure for a floor vote?

Hmmmmm. Hope so!

7) The WaPO has an article today about the Democratic convention. Nothing really new here, but it doesn’t start well:

With the clock running out on preparations for the Democratic convention, advisers to Sen. Barack Obama are scrambling to reach a compromise with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to appease her supporters and find roles for her and her husband.

The Obama and Clinton camps said this week that they agree on a central point: They would like to avoid an embarrassing display of discord from Clinton’s most ardent backers when the national convention begins in just over two weeks. Conversations about how to achieve that have increasingly focused on the question of whether Clinton’s name will be offered in a roll-call vote by delegates to determine the nominee, even though she has said she is not challenging Obama’s claim as the party’s standard-bearer.

Appease? “Appease” does not imply “take seriously” or “listen to” or “talk with.” “Appease” means throwing a bone.

Still, some Clinton supporters and delegates are mobilizing to attempt to force a symbolic vote, or at least draw as much attention to the Clinton team as possible during the Denver events. Michele Thomas, 40, a photographer in Los Angeles, said she is helping organize delegates who think that only through a roll call can Clinton be properly honored.

“If the party is speaking about unity, they [the Clinton delegates] believe the only way to unify the party is actually allowing them to vote,” Thomas said in a phone interview yesterday. “Moving beyond the convention, if they were not allowed to vote there would be a lot of resentment.”

Lastly, there is this ironic bit:

The back and forth with Clinton — as well as questions about whether her husband will actively campaign for Obama after the convention — threatens to distract attention from what Obama’s backers hope will be one of the convention’s central themes: change. Planners are hoping to create an event that looks and feels different from past conventions, with more interactive components and an emphasis on the grass roots, in order to mirror the core message of Obama’s candidacy.

“Emphasis on the grass roots.” Heh. What grass roots would those be? How about all the nascent and established grass roots movements like PUMA? Yeah, there’s the rub.

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