1. law, govt and politics
2. government

August 17, 2008
WSJ Editors on how to make Russia pay.
Vladimir Putin proved last weekend that Russia's army can push over Georgia's army. In the past 48 hours,
the West has begun to push back. If its leaders stay the course, they may yet turn Mr. Putin's meager
military success into a significant political defeat. ...
Andrei Illarionov says Russia lost much in the exchange.
... Russia is now in nearly complete international isolation. Russia's intervention in Georgia was backed only
by Cuba. Neither Iran, nor Venezuela, nor Uzbekistan, nor even Belarus has said anything in support of
Russia.
The political Group of Eight has de facto been transformed into a G7. The series of political defeats suffered
by the Russian leadership, starting with the Rose Revolution in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in
2004 and continuing through the NATO summit in Bucharest in April, has been extended by a new failure.
The main achievement of the Russian leadership -- which the modern world could not (or did not want to)
believe -- is the resurrection of fear of the "Russian bear." The world will long remember its fear and (albeit
temporary) helplessness. ...
Jonah Goldberg introduces us to an article in The Atlantic on the chaos in the Clinton
campaign. The folks that burned through a quarter of a billion dollars.
... reporter Joshua Green picks through the internal e-mail viscera of the Clinton campaign and finds that the
destructive nature of the Clintons is not always aimed at their enemies.
Indeed, shocking as this may be to people naive enough to believe that a woman with no executive
experience, no security clearance, no significant successes under her belt, who was catapulted to
presidential prominence solely because her husband treated her like a cautionary tale in a country-music
song, was nonetheless a co-president for eight years: It turns out that the Bride of Clintonstein was an awful
chief executive. Infected by her husband’s passive-aggressiveness, she stood paralyzed as the HMS Hillary
took on more and more water, until even the string quartet on the deck was leaping for the flotation devices.
As Green pulls memo after memo from the great white’s carcass like so many Florida license plates, we
discover that the Clintons knew long, long ago that they couldn’t beat Barack Obama to the nomination. But
winning was secondary, carnage was king. You might even say of her decision to stay in the race: This was
no polling accident. ...
Craig Crawford comments on the article also.
... But giving so many campaign documents to the press? That suggests a certain hostility between
candidate and underlings that should give pause to those who believed that Clinton was ready "on day one"
to take command of the White House.
Beyond this mutiny, the behind-the-scenes paperwork shows how Clinton horribly mismanaged her own
people. Postponing critical decisions until the roof caved in, and then forcing her staff to manage the
damage control. Not a pretty picture for running the country.
Here is Part I from The Atlantic.
For all that has been written and said about Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse in the Democratic primaries, one
issue still nags. Everybody knows what happened. But we still don’t have a clear picture of how it happened,
or why.
The after-battle assessments in the major newspapers and newsweeklies generally agreed on the big
picture: the campaign was not prepared for a lengthy fight; it had an insufficient delegate operation; it
squandered vast sums of money; and the candidate herself evinced a paralyzing schizophrenia—one day a
shots-’n’-beers brawler, the next a Hallmark Channel mom. Through it all, her staff feuded and bickered,
while her husband distracted. But as a journalistic exercise, the “campaign obit” is inherently flawed,
reflecting the viewpoints of those closest to the press rather than empirical truth.
How did things look on the inside, as they unraveled?
To find out, I approached a number of current and former Clinton staffers and outside consultants and asked
them to share memos, e-mails, meeting minutes, diaries—anything that would offer a contemporaneous
account. The result demonstrates that paranoid dysfunction breeds the impulse to hoard. Everything from
major strategic plans to bitchy staff e-mail feuds was handed over. (See for yourself: much of it is posted
online at www.theatlantic.com/clinton.)
Two things struck me right away. The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign
prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-thegame emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign
staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise
encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic
obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when
pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House.
But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton
never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving
her staff to panic and misfire.
Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she
liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own
staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived
not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make.
Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the
presidency. What follows is the inside account of how the campaign for the seemingly unstoppable
Democratic nominee came into being, and then came apart.
Wondering what to make of Corsi's Obama Nation? Peter Wehner has a cautionary note.
There has been a lot of attention given in the last few days to Jerome Corsi’s new book, The Obama Nation,
which will debut at #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. It seems pretty clear, I think, that conservatives
should not hitch their hopes to it.
Corsi himself, based on press accounts, is a leading advocate of the North American Union conspiracy. The
NAU, for those who believe in it, is, according to a Boston Globe story, “a supranational organization that will
soon fuse Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a single economic and political unit.” In an interview,
Corsi said he believes in the existence of the NAU because, according to Corsi, President Bush was not
securing the Southern border.
According to reports, Corsi has suggested that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lesbian, called John Kerry “antiChristian, anti-American” and called Pope John Paul II “senile,” and said pedophilia “is OK with the Pope as
long as it isn’t reported by the liberal press.”
As for the book: it seems to be riddled with factual errors–some relatively minor ... and some significant ...
John Podhoretz watched Saddleback.
... Obama talked around most issues; perhaps most oddly, he said Clarence Thomas was the one Supreme
Court justice he would not have selected because he hadn’t had enough experience (Thomas had been on
the federal bench for a year and a half before he was nominated, which is about as long as Obama was in
the Senate before he began seriously considering a run for the presidency). ...
Roger Simon too.
And a Corner post from Mark Hemingway.
I don't want to get to overheated about what occurred last night, but I do think McCain had a clear and
decisive victory over Obama. It all comes down to something that Phil Bredesen, the Democratic governor of
Tennessee recently said about Obama: “Instead of giving big speeches at big stadiums, he needs to give
straight-up 10-word answers to people at Wal-Mart about how he would improve their lives.”
By that standard, McCain did extremely well and Obama did very poorly. McCain's answers were direct,
confident and, most importantly, serious. When asked about what leaders he would consult as president, he
first suggested Gen. Petraeus, architect of the surge, who he correctly praised as one of America's all-time
great military leaders. By way of contrast, Obama suggested he would seek out the advice of a typical white
person, er, his grandmother and his wife Michelle, who's still trying to decide whether she's proud of her
country. ...
Daily Mail piece says the Sahara was lush and green 5,000 years ago. Then the climate
changed, without SUV's.
Borowitz and Scrappleface have Olympic reports.
WSJ - Editorial
Making Putin Pay
Vladimir Putin proved last weekend that Russia's army can push over Georgia's army. In the past 48 hours,
the West has begun to push back. If its leaders stay the course, they may yet turn Mr. Putin's meager
military success into a significant political defeat.
In Washington yesterday, President Bush issued a statement1 of precisely the sort the world expects from
American leadership in such circumstances. It made clear what he understands to be Mr. Putin's goals and
made equally clear the intention to resist those goals, and why doing so is in the world's interests.
"The United States and our allies stand with the people of Georgia and their democratically elected
government," Mr. Bush said. In other words, the Russians have made no pretense that their purpose in
Georgia is to remove President Mikheil Saakashvili from the office to which he was elected in 2004. This
would make the West complicit in the overthrow of a democratic government.
Mr. Bush also noted pointedly that "The days of satellite states and spheres of influence are behind us." It
has become clear through this week that Mr. Putin's rationale for the invasion extends beyond Georgia's
violated borders. His intent is to convince independent nations on Russia's periphery -- Ukraine, the Baltic
states -- that persisting as Poland has to deepen formal ties to the West, particularly NATO, will cost them
dearly. In crudest terms, it will be fatal.
This would be a reversion to the vassal-state relationship of the Cold War that the West cannot allow. It is
evident and welcome that in the days between Mr. Putin's decision to belly-slam into the Olympics' opening
weekend and now, Mr. Bush and his team have notably hardened what was a tepid early response.
Both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are specialists in the Soviet
era and are acutely aware of the price paid in human terms to bring the Soviet Union to dissolution in 1991.
It must discomfit them to see that achievement threaten to unravel, especially after having invested so much
in good relations with Mr. Putin. So it is reassuring to hear Mr. Gates say the Russians run the risk of
damaging relations with the West "for years to come." This isn't just some point of disagreement. The
Americans and their allies must continue to make Mr. Putin pay a political penalty for Georgia.
Yesterday the Russians said their General Prosecutor's Office would undertake a "genocide probe" in South
Ossetia, and they called for putting President Saakashvili on trial at the Hague for "war crimes." As it
happens, Chapter 1, Article II of the U.N. Charter, signed amid the smashed borders of World War II, forbids
Members from the "use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state." The
U.S. and France should force Mr. Putin's U.N. ambassador to veto a Security Council resolution describing
his week-long mockery of those words.
Additionally, a genuinely independent prosecutor investigating war crimes might examine the Russian
bombing runs over Georgia and the looting of Georgian villages by Ossetian militias. An intriguing article by
Pavel Felgengauer in Novaya Gazeta, the Russian newspaper, argues that an examination of the movement
of the ground equipment and ships used in the strike against Georgia required planning that predated
August.
Western authorities should also explore the vulnerability of Russian assets abroad. At the least, they can
make life difficult for the holders of those assets. Post-Soviet Russia allowed the emergence of businessmen
and entrepreneurs who indeed wish to function as normal participants in world commerce. Their number,
however, assuredly includes the lucky billionaires under Mr. Putin's protection. All of them want to benefit
from the West's rules. That privilege should be restricted so long as Mr. Putin breaks the rules.
In the world of global commerce, reputation matters. China has calculated that its own ambivalent reputation
can only gain from staging the Olympic extravaganza. The glow of the Games is money in the bank. By
contrast, the Putin government has embarked on a strategy that seems to believe its power grows in sync
with its reputation as an international pariah, an outsider state.
Mr. Bush said Friday that "Russia has damaged its credibility and its relations with the nations of the free
world." True, and if the West remains firm, it can make clear to Mr. Putin that the political price of behavior
beyond the pale of normal relations is high. Overrunning Georgia was easy. Life after that should not be.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Preliminary Conclusions From The War In Georgia
by Andrei Illarionov
It is already possible to outline some theses related to the conflict between Russia and Georgia.
The war was a spectacular provocation that had been long prepared and successfully executed by the
Russian "siloviki" -- those in government with connections to the military and security organs -- that almost
entirely repeats in another theater at another time the "incursion of Basayev into Daghestan" and the
beginning of the second Chechnya war in 1999.
Under the new situation, the idea of legitimizing the de facto loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia may gain
traction in Georgian society.
Georgia's military losses are greater than Russia's. But Russia's financial, foreign-policy, and moral losses
are greater than Georgia's.
The Russian leadership did not achieve its main goals -- the ouster of Georgian President Mikhail
Saakashvili, a change of the political regime in Georgia, and Georgia's renunciation of its ambition to join
NATO. In fact, the opposite has occurred.
Russia has been recognized internationally as an aggressor that sent its military into another UN member
state. Georgia has been internationally acknowledged as a victim of aggression.
Russia is now in nearly complete international isolation. Russia's intervention in Georgia was backed only by
Cuba. Neither Iran, nor Venezuela, nor Uzbekistan, nor even Belarus has said anything in support of Russia.
The political Group of Eight has de facto been transformed into a G7. The series of political defeats suffered
by the Russian leadership, starting with the Rose Revolution in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in
2004 and continuing through the NATO summit in Bucharest in April, has been extended by a new failure.
The main achievement of the Russian leadership -- which the modern world could not (or did not want to)
believe -- is the resurrection of fear of the "Russian bear." The world will long remember its fear and (albeit
temporary) helplessness.
Russian citizens, having no access to unofficial sources of information, found themselves in total
informational isolation. The extent of the manipulation of public opinion and the extent to which society was
brought to a state of mass hysteria are clear achievements of the regime and present an indubitable and
unprecedented threat to Russian society.
An institutional catastrophe in Russia -- which has already been much discussed -- is continuing before our
eyes. The main -- but not the only -- victims of this catastrophe are the citizens of Russia.
The war has revealed the real faces of the so-called liberals and democrats in Russia, people who once
criticized "post-imperial syndrome" but who hurried to rally to the authorities once the fighting began and
who urged "onward to Tbilisi," and who are calling for bolstering the organs of the siloviki.
The only public organization in Russia whose members have been able to formulate diverse positions on the
war -- many of which I disagree with on principle -- is the National Assembly. By doing so, even during a
time of crisis, the assembly demonstrated that at the present time it is the best structure to fill the role of
proto-parliament.
The war once again confirmed the correctness of the most important principles of the moral conduct of
Russian citizens in relation to the current authorities in the country: Don't believe. Don't fear. Don't ask. And
don't cooperate.
Andrei Illarionov, a former economic adviser to the Russian president, is a senior researcher at the Cato
Institute. This comment was originally published by "Yezhdnevny zhurnal." The views expressed in this
commentary are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL
National Review
Nightmare on Dem Street
The Clintons are back.
By Jonah Goldberg
For months now people have been saying to me, “Do you really think they’re gone?” “Is it finally over?” “Is
the coast clear?”
The questions have been in response to Barack Obama’s supposedly yeoman service in putting an end to
the Clintons in public life.
My response to those who believe our long national nightmare is over has always been: “Have you seen no
monster movies?”
Freddy Krueger always comes back. Jason re-emerges from the pond one more time. Dracula had so many
comebacks; nobody was surprised to see him hanging with Abbott and Costello.
Of course the Clintons will be back.
If the monster-movie thing is too offensive for you Clinton voluptuaries out there, think of it like this: They’re
like Richard Gere in “An Officer and a Gentleman” (who, coincidentally, is hounded by a charismatic black
dude but never gives up). They’ve got no place else to go.
And I was right. The Clintons are back. The coffin lid has sprung open, the seal of the crypt has been
broken, the mutant virus has escaped the lab. Both Clintons will speak at the Democratic convention, and
Hillary will get her I-told-you-so’s.
In the horror flicks, it’s not that the creatures are impervious to damage, it’s that no matter how much you
hack them up, they seem to come back again. And again. And again. The Clintons have been horribly
damaged, but they press on.
Bill Clinton is no supernatural serial killer — faint praise to most, too generous to a few. But he does have
this juggernaut-like way of getting where he wants to be. One of his special powers is superhuman passiveaggressiveness. When recently asked if Obama was qualified to be president, Clinton responded, “You can
argue that nobody is ready to be president.” Pressed again about Obama’s qualifications to be president,
Clinton explained, “I never said he wasn’t qualified. The Constitution sets qualification for the president. And
then the people decide who they think would be the better president.”
Bill could have really added some oomph to that endorsement if he’d only been willing to concede that
Obama is a carbon-based life form meeting the minimal requirements defined by scientists for sentient life.
But that’s a lot to expect from the surrogate-in-chief for the Hillary Clinton campaign. At least that’s the
impression one gets from the beautiful corpse, or rather beautiful autopsy of the corpse, on display over at
The Atlantic. Like Richard Dreyfuss in “Jaws” (“This was no boating accident!”), reporter Joshua Green picks
through the internal e-mail viscera of the Clinton campaign and finds that the destructive nature of the
Clintons is not always aimed at their enemies.
Indeed, shocking as this may be to people naive enough to believe that a woman with no executive
experience, no security clearance, no significant successes under her belt, who was catapulted to
presidential prominence solely because her husband treated her like a cautionary tale in a country-music
song, was nonetheless a co-president for eight years: It turns out that the Bride of Clintonstein was an awful
chief executive. Infected by her husband’s passive-aggressiveness, she stood paralyzed as the HMS Hillary
took on more and more water, until even the string quartet on the deck was leaping for the flotation devices.
As Green pulls memo after memo from the great white’s carcass like so many Florida license plates, we
discover that the Clintons knew long, long ago that they couldn’t beat Barack Obama to the nomination. But
winning was secondary, carnage was king. You might even say of her decision to stay in the race: This was
no polling accident.
The Clintons adopted a deliberate strategy of diminishing Obama’s victories, and Mark Penn, Clinton’s
trusted campaign manager, pushed for a strategy of ridiculing their black, funny-named opponent as
insufficiently American. Such memos, if found in the underbelly of a Republican campaign, would be
immortalized by the liberal establishment as permanent proof of conservative racism. When plucked from
the bowels of a Democratic campaign, the response is some mild tsk-tsking.
But fixating on the plot is never a good idea with monster flicks. The point is that the story is always the
same. And so it is this time as well. Bill and Hillary are back. And forever more, Barack Obama won’t be able
to take a shower without fear of that curtain snapping back, as a woman — or is that a man? — prepares to
plunge the knife into his back.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini
to the Politics of Meaning.
Trail Mix Blog
Clinton's Folly
by Craig Crawford
It is difficult to tell which is worse for Hillary Rodham Clinton -- what her campaign staff memos reveal or
that her staff revealed them.
The massive leak of inside dope on the Clinton primary campaign is remarkable in the annals of presidential
election history. Not sure I've ever seen anything like it. The disloyalty to the candidate is breathtaking.
What does it say about Sen. Clinton that so many aides were willing to share private matters publicly?
Clearly, many are eager to shift blame to her and away from themselves. That is not particularly new for
losing bids.
But giving so many campaign documents to the press? That suggests a certain hostility between candidate
and underlings that should give pause to those who believed that Clinton was ready "on day one" to take
command of the White House.
Beyond this mutiny, the behind-the-scenes paperwork shows how Clinton horribly mismanaged her own
people. Postponing critical decisions until the roof caved in, and then forcing her staff to manage the
damage control. Not a pretty picture for running the country.
The Atlantic Monthly
The Front-Runner's Fall
Hillary Clinton’s campaign was undone by a clash of personalities more toxic than anyone imagined.
E-mails and memos—published here for the first time—reveal the backstabbing and conflicting
strategies that produced an epic meltdown.
by Joshua Green
Part I
For all that has been written and said about Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse in the Democratic primaries, one
issue still nags. Everybody knows what happened. But we still don’t have a clear picture of how it happened,
or why.
The after-battle assessments in the major newspapers and newsweeklies generally agreed on the big
picture: the campaign was not prepared for a lengthy fight; it had an insufficient delegate operation; it
squandered vast sums of money; and the candidate herself evinced a paralyzing schizophrenia—one day a
shots-’n’-beers brawler, the next a Hallmark Channel mom. Through it all, her staff feuded and bickered,
while her husband distracted. But as a journalistic exercise, the “campaign obit” is inherently flawed,
reflecting the viewpoints of those closest to the press rather than empirical truth.
How did things look on the inside, as they unraveled?
To find out, I approached a number of current and former Clinton staffers and outside consultants and asked
them to share memos, e-mails, meeting minutes, diaries—anything that would offer a contemporaneous
account. The result demonstrates that paranoid dysfunction breeds the impulse to hoard. Everything from
major strategic plans to bitchy staff e-mail feuds was handed over. (See for yourself: much of it is posted
online at www.theatlantic.com/clinton.)
Two things struck me right away. The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign
prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-thegame emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign
staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise
encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic
obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when
pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House.
But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton
never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving
her staff to panic and misfire.
Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she
liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own
staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived
not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make.
Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the
presidency. What follows is the inside account of how the campaign for the seemingly unstoppable
Democratic nominee came into being, and then came apart.
2003–2006: Laying the Groundwork
As long ago as 2003, the Clintons’ pollster, Mark Penn, was quietly measuring Hillary’s presidential appeal,
with an eye toward the 2004 election. Polling suggested that her prospects were “reasonably favorable,” but
Clinton herself never seriously considered running. Instead, over the next three years, a handful of her
advisers met periodically to prepare for 2008. They believed the biggest threat was John Edwards.
Decisions made before her 2006 reelection to the Senate were to have important consequences
downstream. Perhaps the biggest was Clinton’s choosing to forgo the tradition of visiting early states like
Iowa and New Hampshire. Even if she was presumed to be the heavy favorite, Clinton needed to win Iowa
to maintain the impression of invincibility that she believed was her greatest advantage. And yet Iowa was a
vulnerability. Both husband and wife lacked ties there: Bill Clinton had skipped the 1992 caucuses because
Iowa’s Senator Tom Harkin was running; in 1996, Clinton had run unopposed.
With her Senate race looming, she feared a backlash if she signaled her presidential intentions. If New
Yorkers thought her presumptuous, they could punish her at the polls and weaken her national standing. A
collective decision was made not to discuss a presidential run until she had won reelection, leaving the early
pursuit of Iowa to John Edwards and Barack Obama.
The effect of these choices in Iowa became jarringly clear when Penn conducted a poll just after Clinton’s
Senate reelection that showed her running a very distant third, barely ahead of the state’s governor, Tom
Vilsack. The poll produced a curious revelation: Iowans rated Clinton at the top of the field on questions of
leadership, strength, and experience—but most did not plan to vote for her, because they didn’t like her.
This presented a basic conundrum: Should Clinton run a positive campaign, to persuade Iowans to
reconsider her? Or should she run a negative campaign that would accuse her opponents of being
untrustworthy and under-qualified? Clinton’s top advisers never agreed on the answer. Over the course of
the campaign, they split into competing factions that drifted in and out of Clinton’s favor but always seemed
to work at cross purposes. And Clinton herself could never quite decide who was right.
March 2007: The Strategy
Penn had won the trust of both Clintons by guiding Bill Clinton to reelection in 1996 and through the
impeachment saga that followed. But his poll-tested centrism and brusque manner aroused suspicion and
contempt among many of their advisers. In the White House and during Hillary’s Senate races, Penn often
prevailed in internal disputes by brandishing his own poll numbers (which his opponents distrusted) and
pointing out that he had delivered a Clinton to the White House once before.
In light of this history, he got off to an inauspicious start when Clinton entered the race in January 2007, by
demanding the title “chief strategist” (previously he had been one of several “senior advisers”) and
presenting each of his senior colleagues with a silver bowl inscribed with the words of Horace Mann: “Be
ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
Penn had clear ideas about how to engineer a win for Clinton, in Iowa and beyond. Obama had eclipsed
Edwards right out of the gate and was experiencing the full measure of “next JFK” hype. In a memo dated
March 19, 2007, Penn laid out an “Overall Strategy for Winning” built upon a coalition of voters he called
“Invisible Americans,” a sort of reprise of Bill Clinton’s “forgotten middle class”:
As this race unfolds, the winning coalition for us is clearer and clearer. There are three demographic
variables that explain almost all of the voters in the primary—gender, party, and income. Race is a factor as
well, but we are fighting hard to neutralize it.
We are the candidate of people with needs.
We win women, lower classes, and Democrats (about 3 to 1 in our favor).
Obama wins men, upper class, and independents (about 2 to 1 in his favor).
Edwards draws from these groups as well.
Our winning strategy builds from a base of women, builds on top of that a lower and middle class
constituency, and seeks to minimize his advantages with the high class democrats.
If we double perform with WOMEN, LOWER AND MIDDLE CLASS VOTERS, then we have about 55%
of the voters.
The reason the Invisible Americans is so powerful is that it speaks to exactly how you can be a
champion for those in needs [sic]. He may be the JFK in the race, but you are the Bobby.
Clinton was already under attack for an attitude of “inevitability”—the charge being that she imperiously
viewed the primary process as a ratifying formality and would not deign to compete for what she felt she was
owed. Penn’s memo makes clear that what she intended to project was “leadership” and “strength,” and that
he had carefully created an image for her with that in mind. He believed that he had identified a winning
coalition and knew which buttons to press to mobilize it:
1) Start with a base of women.
a. For these women you represent a breaking of barriers
b. The winnowing out of the most competent and qualified in an unfair, male dominated world
c. The infusion of a woman and a mother’s sensibilities into a world of war and neglect
2) Add on a base of lower and middle class voters
a. You see them; you care about them
b. You were one of them, it is your history
c. You are all about their concerns (healthcare, education, energy, child care, college etc.)
d. Sense of patriotism, Americana
3) Play defensively with the men and upper class voters
a. Strength to end the war the right way
b. Connect on the problems of the global economy, economics
c. Foreign policy expert
d. Unions
Contest the black vote at every opportunity. Keep him pinned down there.
Organize on college campuses. We may not be number 1 there, but we have a lot of fans—more than
enough to sustain an organization in every college.
Penn’s prescription is notable because it is the rare instance of a Clinton campaign goal that panned out—
the coalition she ended up winning a year later is the one described here. Penn’s memo is also notable for
its tone: it reinforces rather than confronts the Clintons’ biases. “The biggest problem we have is the troika
that has been set up to tear Hillary down,” he wrote.
It is a vast right and left wing conspiracy. Listening to Brit Hume say that Obama is surging while Hillary
failed to do X is almost comical and certainly transparent. The right knows Obama is unelectable except
perhaps against Attila the Hun, and a third party would come in then anyway.
By contrast, top consultants like Karl Rove usually aim to temper their clients’ biases with a cold dose of
realism. I suspect the damaging persecution complex that both Clintons displayed drew much of its
sustenance from memos like this one.
Penn also left no doubt about where he stood on the question of a positive versus negative strategy. He
made the rather astonishing suggestion to target Obama’s “lack of American roots”:
All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his
background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.
Save it for 2050.
It also exposes a very strong weakness for him—his roots to basic American values and culture are at
best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center
fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values. He told the people of NH yesterday he has a
Kansas accent because his mother was from there. His mother lived in many states as far as we can tell—
but this is an example of the nonsense he uses to cover this up.
How we could give some life to this contrast without turning negative:
Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the
middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew
up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving
back.
Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a
new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can
give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.
Clinton wisely chose not to go this route. But the defining clash within her campaign quickly became the
disagreement over how hard to attack Obama, if at all. Invariably, Penn and Bill Clinton pressed for
aggressive confrontation to tear Obama down, while senior advisers like Harold Ickes, Patti Solis Doyle,
Mandy Grunwald, and Howard Wolfson counseled restraint and an emphasis on her softer side that would
lift her up. The two strategies were directly at odds.
On March 29, Ickes, who oversaw the targeting and budget operation with the campaign’s manager, Solis
Doyle, circulated a list of the campaign’s “Key Assumptions.” (Though Penn was “chief strategist,” he was a
paid contractor, and thus barred from most targeting and budget planning.) Ickes believed that Iowa and
New Hampshire could determine Clinton’s fate, and that the February 5 Super Tuesday primaries would
determine the nominee. No mention was made of the delegates or the later-caucus states that actually
figured so decisively.
Ickes seemed attuned to the asymmetric risk that accompanies overwhelming front-runner status: the
collapse of momentum that would accompany an unexpected loss. He posited that Edwards and Obama
could sustain losing Iowa and New Hampshire but worried that Clinton could not; he urged that she spend
“substantial” time in Iowa; and he recommended a contingency plan that would haunt the campaign when
his own budget team didn’t fulfill it. Noting the difficulty of raising more than $75 million before Iowa, Ickes
stressed the need to maintain a $25 million reserve, presumably as insurance against a setback. The
campaign wound up raising more than $100 million—but, according to The New York Times, by the time
Iowa was lost, $106 million had been spent. The $25 million reserve had vanished, and the campaign was
effectively insolvent.
April–May 2007: Puzzling Over Iowa
By April 8, Penn seemed to have absorbed the criticism of Clinton as behaving imperiously, as well as the
emerging importance of the “change” theme Obama was touting. “Show more of the happy warrior,” he
counseled in a memo. “Let’s talk more about a movement for change coming from the people. It’s not a
Republican movement or a Democratic movement, but a broad-based movement centered on the idea that
America is ready for change.”
He also seemed cognizant of the growing power of the Web, and, straining for hipness, took at a stab at
brainstorming a “viral” strategy:
I CAN BE PRESIDENT. This idea has potential for a viral campaign among moms—it is about your sons
and your daughters believing that they too can be president. Your success paves the way for them … We
are making a video with celebrities to launch this program in a FUN way, with great clips from kids and from
celebrities saying what they would do if president.
Once again, he returned to the “Invisible Americans”:
Invisibles—need to use this as a creative vehicle to involve people—This can be a cool button where people
appear/disappear. Mandy is working on an early spot that would give this some drama to the idea that it’s
the people’s turn to be seen again.
With Obama’s popularity and fund-raising strength becoming clearer by the day, Penn started advising
Clinton in areas technically outside his purview. He began what would become a contentious, and ultimately
unsuccessful, push to persuade Clinton to hire “a friendly TV face”—a clear jab at Howard Wolfson, the chief
spokesman. He also urged Clinton to gather more data about the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and
suggested major “issue speeches” in both states.
Penn wasn’t the only one worried about Iowa. On May 21, the deputy campaign director, Mike Henry, wrote
a prescient memo noting the cost and difficulty of running there and proposing that Clinton skip the caucus.
The memo was leaked to The New York Times. Henry had estimated (conservatively, as it turned out) that
Iowa would require more than $15 million and 75 days of the candidate’s presence, and would not provide
any financial or organizational edge. “This effort may bankrupt the campaign and provide little if any political
advantage,” he warned. When the story appeared, Clinton felt compelled to publicly recommit, thereby
upping Iowa’s significance even further.
Summer–Fall 2007: Battling Over Iraq
Clinton’s staff spent the summer battling itself over how to take on Obama, and battling the media over her
record on Iraq and just about everything else. Penn had confronted Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod,
at a Harvard symposium in March with the charge that since arriving in the Senate, Obama had voted no
differently on Iraq than Clinton had. “Are we going to ... tell everyone out there the truth about ... who voted
for what, when, or are we going to selectively tell people?” he demanded.
The gambit failed, because Penn was practically the only Clinton adviser eager to push the Iraq issue; the
rest believed it was a debate Clinton would lose. The fact that Edwards had apologized for having voted for
the war resolution further isolated her. Penn insisted that an apology would be “a sign of weakness,” and
Clinton never seriously entertained the notion. But the lingering contrast with Obama did not favor her,
particularly among Iowa’s liberal caucus-goers, and the attacks she did launch only highlighted this
fundamental disparity.
The internal discord over whether to attack Obama led some of her own staff to spin reporters to try to
downplay the significance of her criticisms. The result for Clinton was the worst of both worlds: the
conflicting message exacerbated her reputation for negativity without affording her whatever benefits a
sustained attack might have yielded.
Clinton’s epic and costly battles with the press—and her husband’s, as well—had their genesis in this
incoherence. About the only thing the campaign’s warring factions did agree on was that the press ought to
be criticizing Obama more severely. The more the Clinton team became paralyzed by conflict, the more it
was forced to rely on the press to write negative stories that would weaken Obama—to, in effect, perform
the very function it was unable to do for itself. This led the campaign to aggressively pressure reporters
throughout 2007 and launch the outright attacks against the press that backfired once the primaries began.
December 2007: Disaster Looms
Inside the campaign, Penn was losing the debate. His insistence that Obama’s mounting attacks called for
an expanded press operation was seen as an attempt to weaken his rivals, and he was punished with leaks
suggesting that Clinton might dump him as chief strategist. Meanwhile, Clinton had nervously accepted the
advice from her Iowa campaign staff that negative attacks would backfire.
On December 1, Clinton and her husband attended a private dinner with the influential Des Moines Register
editorial board. Seated at opposite ends of a long table, they were stunned to hear journalists praise the skill
and efficiency of the Obama and Edwards campaigns and question why Clinton’s own operation was so
passive.
On the next morning’s staff conference call, Clinton exploded, demanding to know why the campaign wasn’t
on the attack. Solis Doyle was put on a plane to Iowa the next day to oversee the closing weeks. Within
hours of the call, the panicked staff produced a blistering attack on Obama for what it characterized as
evidence of his overweening lust for power: he had written a kindergarten essay titled “I Want to Become
President.” The campaign was mocked for weeks.
One story line that has featured prominently in the postmortems is Harold Ickes’s attempts to alert the
campaign to the importance of the party’s complicated system of allotting delegates—a system that
Obama’s campaign cleverly exploited, by focusing on delegate-rich caucus states. Ickes wrote a series of
memos, fatefully ignored, that drew attention to this matter. Nothing I was privy to suggests that anyone else
gave it more than passing attention until just before Iowa (though as a cost-saving measure, the budget
team halted polling in many of the caucus states they expected Obama to win). Then, on December 22—just
12 days before Iowa—Ickes tried again, in a memo that seems to be introducing the subject of delegates for
the first time:
Assuming that after Iowa and New Hampshire the presidential nominating contest narrows to two
competitive candidates who remain locked in a highly contested electionthrough 5 February, the focus of the
campaign and press will shift to the delegate count. The dedication of resources (including candidate time)
should be influenced, in part, by factors that will afford HRC an advantage in acquiring more delegates
compared to her opponent(s).
The advice finally registered—but it was too late.
The Corner
McCain Fundraising [Byron York]
Campaign manager Rick Davis just told reporters that McCain raised $27 million in July and had $21.4
million in cash on hand at the end of the month.
MORE: Davis says the RNC raised $26 million in July and has $75 million in cash on hand.
STILL MORE: As far as the campaign's money is concerned, Davis stresses that since McCain is accepting
federal funds, he will have to spend all his primary-season money by the time he gets the money next
month. "We are definitely on a decline curve where we will be spending more than we are raising now,"
Davis said.
Contentions
The Obama Smears
by Peter Wehner
There has been a lot of attention given in the last few days to Jerome Corsi’s new book, The Obama Nation,
which will debut at #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. It seems pretty clear, I think, that conservatives
should not hitch their hopes to it.
Corsi himself, based on press accounts, is a leading advocate of the North American Union conspiracy. The
NAU, for those who believe in it, is, according to a Boston Globe story, “a supranational organization that will
soon fuse Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a single economic and political unit.” In an interview,
Corsi said he believes in the existence of the NAU because, according to Corsi, President Bush was not
securing the Southern border.
According to reports, Corsi has suggested that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lesbian, called John Kerry “antiChristian, anti-American” and called Pope John Paul II “senile,” and said pedophilia “is OK with the Pope as
long as it isn’t reported by the liberal press.”
As for the book: it seems to be riddled with factual errors–some relatively minor (like asserting that Obama
does not mention the birth of his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, in Dreams from My Father; Obama does
mention her), and some significant (suggesting that Obama favors withdrawing troops from Afghanistan; he
wants to do the opposite). But more problematic, I think, is Corsi’s claim that Obama has “extensive
connections to Islam” and his suggestion that Obama is a recent drug user. Those claims are, from
everything I can tell, unsubstantiated. (When challenged to produce the evidence, Corsi counters with the
“prove you’re not beating your wife” defense.)
For example, Obama, who in his book admitted using drugs in his youth, says he hasn’t used any since he
was 20 years old. Corsi, in an interview, said Obama’s words can’t be trusted because “self-reporting, by
people who have used drugs, as to when they stopped is inherently unreliable.” And Corsi’s effort to tie
Obama to the Muslim faith–claims based on questionable sources, reaching back to Obama’s youth in
Indonesia–is especially troubling, since the subtext here is attaching Obama to militant Islam and suggesting
that he’s somehow alien to America and its values (when in fact his candidacy is a confirmation of the
viability of those values).
Corsi’s approach to politics is both destructive and self-destructive. If Senator Obama loses, he should lose
on the merits: his record in public life and his political philosophy. And while it’s legitimate to take into
account Obama’s past associations with people like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright–especially for someone
like Obama, about whom relatively little is known–it wrong and reckless to throw out unsubstantiated
charges and smears against Senator Obama.
Conservatism has been an intellectual home to people like Burke and Buckley. The GOP is the party that
gave us Lincoln and Reagan. It seems to me that its leaders ought to make it clear that they find what Dr.
Corsi is doing to be both wrong and repellent. To have their movement and their party associated with such
a figure would be a terrible thing and it will only help the cause of those who hold both the GOP and the
conservative movement in contempt.
McCain Tonight
by John Podhoretz
I don’t know how to say this more clearly: If John McCain can perform during the three debates the way he
is performing tonight with Rick Warren, he will win this election. The contrast between him and Barack
Obama (who answered the same questions an hour before him) has really been quite startling. In every
case, McCain has answered substantively, directly, and with a surpassing command of detail. Obama talked
around most issues; perhaps most oddly, he said Clarence Thomas was the one Supreme Court justice he
would not have selected because he hadn’t had enough experience (Thomas had been on the federal bench
for a year and a half before he was nominated, which is about as long as Obama was in the Senate before
he began seriously considering a run for the presidency). Once again, as was true in his debates with Hillary
Clinton, Obama has a problem when matters get down to specifics and his rival is better prepared and more
comfortable with them than he is.
Roger L. Simon
Saddleback: Acknowledging McCain
Maybe I was watching through biased glasses (we all do) but I couldn’t agree more with John Podhoretz
when he wrote of the Rick Warren/Saddleback event last night: “If John McCain can perform during the
three debates the way he is performing tonight with Rick Warren, he will win this election.”
No kidding.
And it wasn’t just because McCain was good and Barack Obama was ineffectual and ill-informed. (Others
have said Barack is infected by reactionary post-modernism. I’m not so sure I would give him that much
intellectual credit. It might simply be expedient political vacillation.)
No, it was something more extreme and I think more important: John McCain is the single most prepared
person to be President in my lifetime - and I ain’t young. [Didn’t you vote for JFK?-ed. I’m not that old. But
you did go to college when he was in office. Okay, okay. Don’t rub it in.] Last night McCain exhibited a
grasp of the issues and an ability to communicate them extempore in a concise manner that were
exceptional. Unlike the frequently bumbling Bush and the evasive Obama, he knew precisely what to say on
the big issues - Georgia, radical Islam, energy. He puts to mind the legendary Presidents of a more distant
past - Teddy Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower - and carries with him a pride to be American that surpasses
even Reagan for me, because it is fraught with that personal history we all know.
And, of course, if you care about the ability to cross party lines or about the courage to stick with your
opinions when they are unpopular, McCain has demonstrated that more than any politician of recent
memory. It was ironic that the only example Obama could cite of when he had done such a thing was when
he had worked with John McCain on ethics reform (in an instance when Obama apparently crumped out).
But this is not about Obama. What happened last night is this: An election that the pundits had told us was
about whether the public was ready for Barack Obama suddenly became about acknowledging John
McCain.
The Corner
McCain As Good As Obama Was Bad [Mark Hemingway]
I don't want to get to overheated about what occurred last night, but I do think McCain had a clear and
decisive victory over Obama. It all comes down to something that Phil Bredesen, the Democratic governor of
Tennessee recently said about Obama: “Instead of giving big speeches at big stadiums, he needs to give
straight-up 10-word answers to people at Wal-Mart about how he would improve their lives.”
By that standard, McCain did extremely well and Obama did very poorly. McCain's answers were direct,
confident and, most importantly, serious. When asked about what leaders he would consult as president, he
first suggested Gen. Petraeus, architect of the surge, who he correctly praised as one of America's all-time
great military leaders. By way of contrast, Obama suggested he would seek out the advice of a typical white
person, er, his grandmother and his wife Michelle, who's still trying to decide whether she's proud of her
country.
When asked "At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?," McCain answered "At the moment
of conception." Obama's answer here was flaming-dirigible bad:
Whether you are looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that
question with specificity is, you know, above my pay grade.
That spectacularly inept metaphor is going to haunt Obama throughout the rest of the campaign. News
flash: There's not a job on the planet above the pay grade of the President of the United States. If you can't
solve every problem and are humble about it, that's fine — but you can't get away with being unsure about
the most defining moral issue in politics. Of course, he didn't put down the shovel:
But let me speak more generally about the issue of abortion. Because this is something, obviously, the
country wrestles with. One thing that I’m absolutely convinced of is that there is a moral and ethical element
to this issue. And So I think that anybody who tries to deny the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion
issue is not paying attention.
So after completely hedging on the question and declining to give a specific answer — he wants to speak
"more generally" about the issue? And, lo and behold, speak more generally he does: "I’m absolutely
convinced of is that there is a moral and ethical element to this issue." In related news, Obama is also
"absolutely convinced" that the sky is blue, water is wet and puppies are adorable. None of this, however,
tells me a thing about his judgment and moral worldview.
But what bowls me over about how craptacular his answer here is, did no one on his campaign ever
anticipate that he would have to talk about abortion, such that he could come up with a better answer than
this? Surely they would have had to expect it at this forum in particular.
His answer here was in many ways reminiscent of last April, where he imploded in his last debate with
Hillary. He was asked to respond to his then-recent clinging to God n' guns remark. He totally botched the
answer and, like this evening, it seemed as if he was totally unprepared for the question that would most
obviously be asked.
But I also think that it's worth noting that Obama wasn't just bad, but that McCain was very good. He was the
perfect balance of likable and serious. He also came across as informed, offered far more policy specifics
than Obama, highlighted his faith as was appropriate to the setting, and almost everything he said bolstered
his conservative credentials. (His comments on taxes and what it means to be "rich" were especially good in
that regard.) I'd wager that for a lot of conservatives watching, McCain went from the enemy of my enemy to
someone they felt good about voting for. He may yet foul that up, but I suspect he may be riding high for a
while after tonight.
Daily Mail, UK
Amazing 5,000-year-old skeletons laid on bed of flowers found in Sahara - proving desert
was once green and lush
A tiny woman and two children were laid to rest on a bed of flowers 5,000 years ago in what is now the
barren Sahara Desert. Researchers discovered the slender arms of the youngsters still extended to the
woman in a perpetual embrace. The remarkable cemetery is providing clues to two civilisations who lived
there, a thousand years apart, when the region was moist and green.
Proof of life: The three skeletons buried at Gobero in the Sahara desert
Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago and colleagues were searching for the remains of dinosaurs in the
African country of Niger when they came across the startling find. Some 200 graves of humans were found
during fieldwork at the site in 2005 and 2006, as well as remains of animals, large fish and crocodiles.
'Everywhere you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don't live in the desert,' said Sereno. 'I
realized we were in the green Sahara.'
The graveyard, uncovered by hot desert winds, is near what would have been a lake at the time people lived
there. It's in a region called Gobero, hidden away in Niger's forbidding Tenere Desert, known to Tuareg
nomads as a 'desert within a desert.' The human remains dated from two distinct populations that lived there
during wet times, with a dry period in between.
The triple burial contained a woman and two children, their limbs intertwined
The first group, known as the Kiffian, hunted wild animals and speared huge perch with harpoons. They
colonised the region when the Sahara was at its wettest, between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago. The
researchers said the Kiffians were tall, sometimes reaching well over 6ft. The second group lived in the
region between 7,000 and 4,500 years ago. The Tenerians were smaller and had a mixed economy of
hunting, fishing and cattle herding.
Their burials often included jewellery or ritual poses. For example, one girl had an upper-arm bracelet
carved from a hippo tusk. An adult Tenerian male was buried with his skull resting on part of a clay vessel;
another adult male was interred seated on the shell of a mud turtle. Pollen remains show the woman and
two children were buried on a bed of flowers. The researchers preserved the group just as they had been for
thousands of years.
'At first glance, it's hard to imagine two more biologically distinct groups of people burying their dead in the
same place,' said team member Chris Stojanowski, a bioarchaeologist from Arizona State University.
Stojanowski said ridges on the thigh bone of one Kiffian man show he had huge leg muscles, 'which
suggests he was eating a lot of protein and had an active, strenuous lifestyle. The Kiffian appear to have
been fairly healthy - it would be difficult to grow a body that tall and muscular without sufficient nutrition.'
On the other hand, ridges on a Tenerian male were barely visible. 'This man's life was less rigorous,
perhaps taking smaller fish and game with more advanced hunting technologies,' Stojanowski said.
Paleontologist Paul Sereno stabilizes the nearly perfectly preserved skull of the Tenerian woman
Helene Jousse, a zooarchaeologist from the Museum of Natural History in Vienna, Austria, reported that
animal bones found in the area were from types common today in the Serengeti in Kenya, such as
elephants, giraffes, hartebeests and warthogs. The finds are detailed in the journal PLoS One and the
September issue of National Geographic Magazine. While the Sahara is desert today, a small difference in
Earth's orbit once brought seasonal monsoons farther north, wetting the landscape with lakes with lush
margins and drawing animals and people.
Borowitz Report
China’s Gold Medals Found to Have High Lead Content
Phelps Warned Not to Lick Medals
China's impressive haul of gold medals at the Beijing Olympics was tarnished somewhat today when it was
revealed that "abnormally high levels of lead" were found in the first-place medallions. The medals, which
were supposed to be made entirely of gold, were instead found to be composed of 99% lead alloy and
coated with a gold-colored lead-based paint. The shocking revelations roiled the Olympic complex today and
sent officials looking for answers from the Chinese manufacturer of the medals, the Wuhan One Hundred
Percent Gold Medal Corporation.
"We are trying to determine how exactly so much lead got into those gold medals," said a spokesman for
Wuhan, China's largest exporter of gold medals. "Until we do, we are urging all first-place athletes not to lick,
taste or suck on their medals."
The news about the potentially toxic gold medals spread panic among Olympic champions, especially U.S.
swimming phenom Michael Phelps. "I am very, very concerned about my extensive contact with gold
medals," Mr. Phelps told reporters. "But what am I supposed to do? Stop being so awesome?"
In other Olympic news, China's hopes for winning more medals in women's gymnastics were dashed when
one of their leading gymnasts vanished down a bathtub drain on Tuesday. Immediately after Jiang Qimin's
disappearance, Beijing authorities launched a search for the acclaimed seven-pound athlete. Jiang had
been the subject of speculation earlier this week as many foreign observers doubted China's claims that the
two-foot-tall gymnast was sixteen years old. In an interview with NBC's Bob Costas on Monday, Jiang
sparked controversy with this response to a question about her age: "I want my sippy cup."
Scrappleface
China: Gymnasts' Ages Based on Chinese Calendar
by Scott Ott
Authorities in Beijing today put to rest U.S. claims that girls on the Chinese gymnastics squad were not yet
16 years-old, the minimum age for Olympic competition, by noting that this is the year 4705 in China, not
2008.
“Our girls are actually older than their U.S. opponents based on our government’s more accurate and
efficient method of tracking the passage of time,” said an unnamed spokesman for Communist regime. “We
have already had more than twice as many years as the Western world, and so our gymnasts are double the
12 or 13 years they appear to be. By the way, most of our girls have put off marriage in order to compete in
these Olympic games.”
The spokesman explained that China is able to “pack more time into a year by having fewer seasons.”
“Whereas in the U.S., you squander your time by having four wasteful seasons,” he said, “In China we have
optimized our year, honing it down to only two seasons — the earthquake season and the flood season.
This way we can do two years in the time it takes Americans to do one. Therefore, our girls look like
prepubescent pixies while yours look like post-menopausal Amazons.”
The Chinese calendar also runs in 12-year cycles, each named after one of a dozen animals. The Chinese
year 4705, which started February 7, is the year of the rat.