No Rest for Friday

Maybe it's because it's a grey, cold, windy and generally weary Friday afternoon here on the North Coast of CA where I am, but this campaign is exhausting. One of the reasons I decided to blog on it here at least once a day was to have a personal record, possibly to compare to my less frequent entries in 2006, 2004 and earlier elections. But I wonder whether even I will go back and read these. Because of the role of super-delegates and the TV ad that Hillary unveiled today, there's been a lot of talk about the 1984 primaries between Gary Hart and Walter Mondale. I'm sure I followed them closely (which at the time meant reading the newspapers and watching the evening news and PBS) but I don't remember anything about it. It's exhausting to go through, let alone return to.

Well, we are picking a President at a critical moment for the future of human civilization, so here we go again...

The pace itself is dizzying, as evidenced by today's back and forth, beginning with the release of the Hillary ad (three in the morning, the phone rings, who do you trust to answer it in the White House?), Obama's spoken rejoinder at his next event in Texas, and then by midafternoon, a new Obama ad that directly responds to Hillary's, making the point that the person you want answering that phone is the one with the best judgment. Amazing--and I agree with georgia10 , one of the frontpagers at Kos: "Attacks will be flying fast and furious in the general, and swift responses like this will be required. Should he become the nominee, the Obama campaign's extraordinarily rapid response time is a great sign. "

And then there's this account of the media conference call with the Clinton wolves:

Responding to the release of HRC's new TX TV ad, which asserts in no subtle terms that only she has the experience to deal with a major world crisis, and, relatedly, to keep your children safe, Slate's John Dickerson asked the obvious question: "What foreign policy moment would you point to in Hillary's career where she's been tested by crisis?" he said.

Silence on the call. You could've knit a sweater in the time it took the usually verbose team of Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Lee Feinstein, Clinton's national security director, to find a cogent answer. And what they came up with was weak -- that she's been endorsed by many high ranking members of the uniformed military.

But the most significant event of the day so far may be the quiet endorsement of Obama by Senator Jay Rockerfeller of West Virginia, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He is considered a moderate Democrat, with great national security credentials, and parts of West Virginia are the same as parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Put this together with Obama's other two major endorsements of the week--Senator Chris Dodd and Rep. John Lewis--and you have endorsers with exceptional credentials in three distinct parts of the party.
Impressive, powerful.