Great in-depth piece by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker on Barack Obama’s relaunch against Hillary. It’s revealing. Obama as a candidate has demonstrated that he’s got some steel in his soul as he finally makes the argument (if still in a dignified way) against a Clinton nomination. He’s figured out that it’s not enough to wait for the media to make the anti-Clinton case. The media, he argues (correctly in my view), is rewarding Hilary Clinton for her tactical excellence at playing the established game.

He even shows that he knows he has to play at least some of this game, even if he is simultaneously raising the stakes in Iowa by rolling up his sleeves:

On November 5th, Obama’s campaign sent reporters a research memo that criticized Hillary Clinton for changing her position on ethanol, Iowa’s most parochial issue. The Des Moines Register, Iowa’s major daily, ignored it, but when the campaign offered Obama himself for an interview a story was assured; it appeared on November 7th, with the headline “OBAMA: CLINTON FLIP-FLOPS ON ENERGY.”

I asked Obama whether ethanol was a subject that merited such personal attention. “It has less to do with the particular issue and more to do with her change in position,” he replied. “Now, Hillary has been in the Senate for seven years now. She has consistently voted against ethanol, because the perception in New York state is that this is making gasoline more expensive and that it’s a boondoggle. Those of us in farm states, obviously, have had a different perspective on it. If she came here, and she made a cogent case as to why she doesn’t think ethanol makes sense and why she voted against it, that’d be one thing. After seven years, she comes here and suddenly she’s an ethanol proponent! Well, how did that happen?” He managed to sound genuinely astonished by such brazenness.

Maureen Dowd also noted the un-Bambi version of Obama last week. If he doesn’t beat or effectively tie Hillary, is there enough in the tank for New Hampshire and beyond?

BTW, am I the only one completely freaked out about how this US presidential bears an eerie resemblance to Seasons 6 and 7 of The West Wing? Read Rudy Giuliani [or McCain, or Romney] as Arnold Vinick, right down to reassuring the social conservatives on judges; read Obama as Matt Santos?
Given how obsessively the English-speaking world’s political class watched/watches the DVD set of The West Wing, and how everybody projects their guy/gal candidate into that universe, is it entirely surprising that they would appropriate, even subconsciously, some of the narrative as their own? Or not so subconsciously - as when the Tories nicked a parliamentary tactic explicitly from a West Wing episode?
Life imitates art?

Another BTW, kudos to Sam Smyth and the TodayFM Sunday Supplement for bringing on an Irish-American (Eddie Hayes, the inspriation for DA Tommy Killian in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities) not so tanked up on Clinton Kool-Aid that he can talk coherently about Obama and the race.
It was in marked contrast to what can charitably be described as a (disappointing and surprising, to me) recitation of pro-Hillary platitudes by Marian Finucane’s RTE panel - with the honourable exception of ex-colleague David Horgan, who as usual talked sense…on the Dollar, Oil and China.
(Also a nice contribution from Damien Corless on hate figures - but about Heather Mills, not Hillary).