Weekend Aggrepost: "It's Always Good To Be With You" Edition

Par for the course. I actually make it out of the office at a respectable hour. One meeting later (and dinner), I'm at home with ample sunlight outside. Feels weird, so I check to see what time it actually is. 7:30pm. That's all? So, to make matters worse, I'm now up at 3am wondering what will become of all this free time. Trying to stay out of the office for a day ... no guarantees on that, though. Anyway, here's some required reading that I've managed to not blog about over the past week or so.

» Atlantic: The Amazing Money Machine (Joshua Green)
My sense is that this is a story that might be better told in, say, December. As-is, it's a pretty good insight as to how the candidate from the Muskie-Hart-Dukakis-Tsongas-Bradley wing of the party finally found the missing ingredient to what makes a candidate successful - a way to raise money. I think much of what Green captures under the "Mistakes made by Hillary" case are complete nonsense, though. A little distance may or may not get that part of the story right ... no telling for now.

» TNR: What Went Wrong (Michelle Cottle)
Speaking of the "Mistakes made by Hillary" genre, Cottle at least does a semi-thorough capsulization of the conventional wisdom. But since it comes complete with inhouse leaks from Team Hill, it gets some run. Ed Kilgore, perhaps predictably, highlights some of what's missing from all of this. The whole thing warrants a read, but I'll highlight this snippet:

What's largely missing from the insider accounts quoted by Cottle is a recognition that Barack Obama's campaign surprised virtually everybody in politics. It's hard to remember this, but there was an extended period a few months after Obama entered the race when the CW was that he was a flavor-of-the-month who had created some excitement but was rapidly losing steam against the powerful, disciplined Clinton Machine. One of the post-mortems quoted by Cottle suggests that HRC's big mistake was in not going nastily negative on Obama from the get-go. But that's pure hindsight: a negative campaign made no sense for a candidate with Clinton's poll standings and resources prior to Iowa, a state whose Democratic caucus-goers are notoriously averse to intraparty attacks. And after Iowa, when it became obvious that Obama's was generating previously unimaginable numbers of volunteers and cash, and building a never-seen-before electoral coalition, Clinton's campaign was already in desperate survival mode. Another little fact that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that a couple of days before the NH primary, the chattering classes were busy writing HRC's political obituary, in anticipation of a blowout Obama victory that would have nailed down the nomination then and there.

Perhaps the Obama phenomenon was predictable, but not many political experts actually predicted it in any detail. (I certainly include myself in this assessment; the only aspect of Obama-mania I anticipated was the rapid and massive shift of African-American support to him after Iowa). So it's a little strange that so many people inside and outside the Clinton campaign are so sure her initial strategy should have been based on improbable developments instead of the lay of the land as it first appeared. Sure, the acid test for any political campaign is the ability to adjust to the unforeseen, but given HRC's success in avoiding electoral extinction again and again during the primaries, you have to admit she showed some deft footwork.

» NYT Mag: The McCain Doctrines (Matt Bai)
Bai gets a pretty decent rundown here of McCain's foreign policy over the span of his career in Congress. I'm not entirely sure that Bai gets one of his standard-issue moments from his interview with McCain, but this snippet of the story is certainly a bit illuminating as to the McCain style with the media:

Sitting down at the end of a long granite table, he greeted me warmly, and then, before I could ask a question or even introduce the subject at hand, he dove headlong into a five-minute soliloquy. He told me that he had just driven in from the airport on Eisenhower Boulevard, and that Eisenhower was a man he very much admired, because Eisenhower understood the costs of war and strove to keep America out of it. He then made reference to a "rather hysterical" column by Fareed Zakaria in that morning's Washington Post about McCain's views on foreign policy. His voice was tight and measured.

"I've seen other stories and I've seen comments about my national-security speech," McCain said, referring to an address he gave in Los Angeles a few weeks earlier. "The story line is as follows: 'McCain's not the same McCain. He's changed, and now he's become a hawk, and he is dramatically different from what he was.' " He recited this narrative as if repeating the nonsensical words of dullards. "And anybody is free to write whatever they want and form whatever opinions they want to form. But facts are facts. And the fact is that I know war, and I know the tragedy of war. And no one hates war more than veterans."

From here, McCain went on to list for me some of the military actions he supported (Grenada, Panama) and some that he opposed (Beirut, Somalia). He had always followed the same set of values, he said, grounded in the premise that all people, not just Americans, were created equal and had inalienable rights. And when America could intervene militarily to further those values around the world without needless sacrifice in lives and money, he was all for it, and where we couldn't, he was not, and there was nothing extreme about that.

"As far as people who advise me," McCain went on, though I still hadn't asked a question, "probably one of my most trusted advisers for the last 30 years is Henry Kissinger, not known as a hawk or a neocon." McCain infused the word with sarcasm. "I also remember the days when Ronald Reagan was portrayed as a hawk and a neocon. I remember the near hysteria in response to his 'tear down this wall.' I remember the 'Oh, you can't do that, when you call the Soviets an evil empire.' I remember all those things. Same people who are now saying -- " He stopped himself midsentence, then began again. "I'm always open to new ideas and new thoughts, but my principles were grounded many years ago in places like the National War College and other places where I have learned and studied and talked to people I admire and respect.

"So," McCain said finally, "with that preface, I'd be glad to answer any questions you might have, and again, it's always good to be with you."

» IntelDump: McCain's Blurred Iraq Vision (Phil Carter)
Speaking of McCain & foreign policy, Phil Carter renders a surprisingly harsh assessment of his "2013" speech.

» In the Red: A fifth commit: Tray Robinson
And for something completely different, Trinity High senior RB, Dontrayevous Robinson, commits early to Nebraska. Very impressive. Still counting on UTEP (along with Trevor Vittatoe) visiting UH this season, but with Dmitri Nance starting to make headlines out of Arizona State and Robinson maybe making the bigtime in a few years at Nebraska, it's a good time to be a Trinity Trojan.

Oh, and let's not forget former champion QB, Ryan Taggart playing (maybe) his sophomore year at Holy Cross.