'You're Not Going to Get Pregnant'

DENVER--The first thing we want to find here is the Hillary Clinton bitter-enders. A friend back in New York who has connections in the HCBE community has been kind enough to alert us to some of their events, so after filing yesterday's column, we set out in search of them. We manage to find some, but not many, and the organization is not exactly a well-oiled machine.

This announcement tells us that a group called Clintons4McCain is marching to Union Station from someplace eight blocks away on 16th Street, though the starting point of the march is not specified. It's just as well: By the time we leave our hotel, it is past 2:30 p.m., when the march was to begin. We figure we'll just meet them at the station, so off we go.

Getting there is a longer, harder slog than we'd expected. For some reason walking in Denver is much more tiring than walking in New York. (Later someone explains it to us: It's the elevation. Denver is known as the 1,609 Meter High City, and until you're used to the thin air up here, you get winded easily.)

We slowly make our way up 16th Street, a pedestrian mall where no vehicles run save for free city buses, which, as it happens, terminate at Union Station. Once we figure that out, we wait at a bus stop. We see four or five buses going the other direction, but none coming our way. Another reporter tells us the northbound buses have been delayed by pro-life demonstrators. Apparently part of the city's light-rail system also is shut down, for security reasons, in the vicinity of the convention site. This is not an ideal showcase for public transportation as a solution to the energy problem.

We give up on the bus when we see some two dozen HCBEs marching south, away from Union Station, chanting, "Election, not selection!" We ask a woman toward the back of the line if she is part of the McCain group. She says no, she and her colleagues are still hoping Mrs. Clinton wins the Democratic nomination. "We just can't let go yet. She won."

It reminds us a bit of the Al Gore postelection campaign of 2000, except that that was a serious effort that equally matched the other side and lost only because it was wrong on the merits. The HCBEs, by contrast, are the very picture of ragtag. Our interlocutor doesn't even seem interested in the prospect of publicity for her cause. She rushes off to rejoin her group rather than stick around and give us juicy quotes.

But the quest for juicy quotes soon bears fruit. A couple of blocks further north, we notice a white-haired man heatedly arguing with two women carrying Hillary signs. All three appear to be in the vicinity of 60 years old. The man wears a DURBIN button--Dick Durbin being the Illinois senator who isn't a celebrity. The man is for Obama, although he tells the ladies he donated $1,000 to Mrs. Clinton's campaign before she threw in the towel.

The women tell the man that they will vote for McCain over Obama, and he says, "You're making a big mistake!" He raises the question of the Supreme Court, saying that McCain nominees would reverse women's rights. "I don't buy into that," says one of the women. Before storming off, the white-haired man delivers his ageist and sexist coup de grace:

"You're not going to get pregnant."

Buddy, with that attitude, you're not even going to get a date.

Not surprisingly, the two women are outraged. The one who was not on the receiving end of it, Marnie Delano, is carrying a video camera, and she rues that it was not rolling when he said it. She is delighted when we tell her we took down the quote.

It turns out she is working on a film called "The Audacity of Democracy," which documents alleged voter fraud by the Obama campaign in the Texas caucuses. The prime mover behind this film is a man named Brad Mays, who discusses it at some length on his blog, though it is not mentioned among his credits on the Internet Movie Database.

We ask Delano when the film will be released. She doesn't seem to know, although she tells us there was a screening of a 40-minute preview the previous day. It occurs to us that by the end of the week, Obama will be the nominee and the film will be of only historical value. A better-organized effort would have had the film ready in advance of the convention.

Delano acknowledges that the pro-Hillary crowd is a "loose-knit coalition." It is also a highly aggrieved coalition: "A lot of our members have been threatened with death, a number of our bloggers have been hacked. . . . We've had a lot of cyberterrorism." She gives me the office address of PUMA-PAC, the pro-Clinton political action committee, and notes, "It's by the jail"--a location she says was chosen for its police presence.

We finally make it to Union Station. Nearby, MSNBC is broadcasting from a big outdoor stage. David Gregory is moderating a panel when we arrive. Only a few HCBEs are still scattered around, along with an assortment of oddballs hawking products and ideas.

A man on stilts dressed as Uncle Sam advertises timepieces. He holds a sign that reads "Obama watches are guaranteed to be more accurate than George Bush." Someone is dressed up as a giant toilet, with a sign on the back that says, "Running toilets waste water." Two young men accompany him, carrying signs with the "delegate count": "Barack Obama 2,201. Running toilet 0."

A pharmaceutical company has dispatched its New York-based PR team to promote a flu vaccine. "They have a couple of new ways [to administer it] that are needleless," a young man tells us. He hands us a political-style button: "Flu Vaccination: Choose your administration. www.FluVote.com." Instead of a needle, it is affixed via magnet, which a colleague of his later explains is meant to symbolize the needleless injection. We ask if the vaccine is administered via magnet. She says no, it's a nasal spray. We never were good with puns.

As we're chatting with the flu flack, the toilet runs across the street. Ah, the running toilet--even we get that one! For the toilet's sake, though, we hope he isn't carrying urine, feces.

Then the Truth Truck rolls by. This is an old red pickup, the back of which has been made into a sign bearing slogans such as "The Bible is truth, not hate speech," and "Abortion is murder." The truck bears a URL, TruthTruck.com, which identifies the outfit behind it as Operation Rescue, the extremist antiabortion group. About a dozen people move into the crosswalk in front of the truck and begin chanting "No more fear!" and "I got hope!"

This must be why we had trouble getting a bus earlier.

We haven't quite had our fill of the HCBEs, so after a bite to eat, we decide to head to Cheesman Park, some three miles away. That, according to the PUMA-PAC site, is the site of "the beautiful protest and rise":

Campaign will take place on the evening of August 25th from 6 until 10 p.m., in beautiful downtown Denver's Cheesman Park. What makes this historical event special, isn't just that its named after the Maya Angelou's famous poem "Rise," but that it will also close with the lighting of candles to pay tribute to Hillary and all of her achievements, while also symbolically reigniting the flame to America's great Democracy and Lady Liberty's torch. Hundreds of participants are expected to attend, and candles are planned to Rise across the nation, community by community in one harmonious gesture of participation.

A city bus drops us at the north end of Cheesman. The park is nearly deserted except for a haze of tiny flying insects (mosquitoes, we assume, though someone later tells us Denver doesn't have mosquitoes). We begin walking south, traversing the length of the park, about half a mile. Perhaps two-thirds of the way through, we come upon the site of the event. There's a stage, 10 chairs on either side of it and some spotlights. It's exactly 6 p.m. but there are no people except for your humble columnist, three people with a camera who look to be from a foreign TV station, and two guys who are also wondering what happened to the event.

We march on to a home a few blocks away where we've been invited to a small gathering by a local Republican family. There we spend a few hours chatting, drinking wine, eating Mexican food and watching Michelle Obama speak. At 9 p.m. or so the party winds up, and a fellow partygoer offers us a ride. She graciously agrees to swing past the park to check out the HCBE crowd. By this point they have gathered, but they don't look too numerous (though it's very dark, so it's hard to tell), and the event seems to be winding down. It doesn't seem worth foregoing a ride to our hotel, so we skip the event.

The HCBE crowd seems a rather sad lot, abandoned by their own candidate and her once-formidable political machine. Yet their cause is not entirely futile. One must assume that Mrs. Clinton still aspires to become president. Even if some of her supporters have not yet accepted it, she knows she will not be the nominee. That means her best hope is a McCain victory in November, which would leave the Democratic field open in 2012.

Mrs. Clinton's own interests are at odds with those of her party. The nature of partisan politics, of course, is such that she must conceal this and put on a show of supporting Obama 100%. To further her own ambitions, she must be seen as suppressing them. The astonishing thing is that she seems to have a hard core of supporters, not subject to such constraints, who believe in her ambitions as strongly as she does.

Artificial Sweetener
Something seemed to us just a bit off about Michelle Obama's speech. Here's what we mean:

You know, what struck me when I first met Barack was that even though he had this funny name, even though he'd grown up all the way across the continent in Hawaii, his family was so much like mine. He was raised by grandparents who were working class folks just like my parents, and by a single mother who struggled to pay the bills just like we did. Like my family, they scrimped and saved so that he could have opportunities they never had themselves. And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them.

Could it really be that these pieties were what first "struck" Michelle about Barack? Not to take anything away from the admirable values Mrs. Obama describes, but does a woman really fall in love with a man because his mother struggles to pay the bills, or because he believes in the value of hard work? You can easily imagine a woman talking about a man she's been dating, enumerating this same list of admirable qualities and then concluding: "But I don't love him," or "But somehow, it just doesn't click."

There is an even more abstract quality to Mrs. Obama's professions of love for America:

All of us driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won't do--that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be.

That is the thread that connects our hearts. That is the thread that runs through my journey and Barack's journey and so many other improbable journeys that have brought us here tonight, where the current of history meets this new tide of hope.

That is why I love this country.

She loves her country because of the thread that runs through the journey where the current meets the tide? Sorry, but this just doesn't ring true.

The most commonplace observation about Mrs. Obama's speech has been that she had to say she loves America, because other things she's said--most notably, "For the first time in my adult lifetime I'm proud of my country"--have left that in doubt. (Indeed, her comments about America are so downbeat that some wag has started a blog called Michelle Obama Suicide Watch.)

But then we remembered a comment Mrs. Obama made about a year ago in an interview with Glamour:

"We have this ritual in the morning. They come in my bed, and Dad isn't there--because he's too snore-y and stinky, they don't want to ever get into bed with him. But we cuddle up and we talk about everything from what is a period to the big topic of when we get a dog: what kind?"

Maybe Mrs. Obama just expresses affection in the somewhat unusual idiom of the putdown. America is snore-y and stinky, and I love it! This can easily be misunderstood, and the political professionals know it, so they gave her a speech that expressed straightforward admiration of her husband and her country. It was probably a wise choice, even if it rang slightly false.

After her speech, Mrs. Obama brought her two daughters onstage. The younger one, Sasha, seemed scared at first but quickly warmed up. Mr. Obama, appearing through the magic of television, had a senior moment, first saying he was in Kansas City and then in St. Louis.

"What city are you in, Daddy?" Sasha asked (video here). Turns out it was Kansas City.

Thus did Sasha Obama steal the show, ending a carefully scripted evening on a spontaneous note.

Putting On Ayers
"Sen. Barack Obama has launched an all-out effort to block a Republican billionaire's efforts to tie him to domestic and foreign terrorists in a wave of negative television ads," Politico reports:

Obama's campaign has written the Department of Justice demanding a criminal investigation of the "American Issues Project," the vehicle through which Dallas investor Harold Simmons is financing the advertisements. The Obama campaign--and tens of thousands of supporters--also is pressuring television networks and affiliates to reject the ads. The effort has met with some success: CNN and Fox News are not airing the attacks.

Obama has also launched his own response ad, directly addressing Simmons' attempt to link him to domestic terror.

You can watch the original ad, on Obama's longtime friendship with here. The Obama campaign also put out its own ad, and Commentary's Jennifer Rubin has the script:

Obama: I'm Barack Obama and I approved this message.

Announcer: With all our problems, why is John McCain talking about the '60s, trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers?

McCain knows Obama denounced Ayers' crimes, committed when Obama was just 8 years old.

Let's talk about standing up for America today.

John McCain wants to spend $10 Billion a month in Iraq, tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas, selling out American workers.

John McCain, just more of the same.

McCain actually wasn't talking about Ayers; this was an independent ad. But the Obama ad afforded the campaign an opportunity to do just that:

A McCain spokesman fired back: "The fact that Barack Obama chose to launch his political career at the home of an unrepentant terrorist raises more questions about his judgment than any ad ever could. And the fact that he's launching his own convention by defending his long association with a man who says he didn't bomb enough U.S. targets tells us more about Barack Obama than any of tonight's speeches will."

This is just bizarre. Obama is just drawing more attention to his association with Ayers--and this point seems so obvious, it's hard to believe it's just a rookie mistake. If we were conspiracy-minded, we'd suspect some secret Hillary Clinton supporter put the Obama campaign up to this.

A Man, a Plan, a Canal . . .
Yesterday we cited an Associated Press report that Joe Biden got the call inviting him to be Barack Obama's running mate while undergoing a root canal. It turns out that a later AP report corrected the record: It was Biden's wife who was having a root canal. We regret the error, though probably not as much as Mrs. Biden does.

A Weisberg Precedent
Yesterday we noted that Slate's Jacob Weisberg was confused about the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions, and this had led him to the unwarranted conclusion that America is racist (or will be if John McCain wins).

It turns out this isn't the first time a Slate writer has been confused on this matter. This is from a Timothy Noah piece titled "Iraq's Rebuke to the NRA" and dated March 14, 2003:

In the March 11 New York Times, Neil MacFarquhar notes in passing, "Most Iraqi households own at least one gun." This comes as a shock to those of us who've been hearing for years from the gun lobby that widespread firearms ownership is necessary to prevent the United States from becoming a police state.

Noah then proceeds to mock gun-rights advocates on the ground that Baathist Iraq was "one of the world's most repressive police states when just about everyone is packing heat."

But of course the Iraq example doesn't disprove that firearms ownership is a necessary condition to prevent tyranny, only that it is a sufficient condition.

At These Wages, No Wonder People Are Leaving

Hence the New York Steak
"Cattle Shown to Align North-South"--headline, BBC Web site, Aug. 25

Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control

News of the Tautological
"Veterans Assistance Officer to Assist Area Veterans"--headline, News-Democrat & Leader (Russellville, Ky.), Aug. 22

News You Can Use

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