In an otherwise sound column about Michelle Obama, Michelle Malkin concludes with this howler:

Like Lady Macbeth, Lady Michelle and her defenders protest too much.

But Lady Macbeth didn’t “protest too much.”  The line comes from Hamlet, when Hamlet’s mother observes that the queen in the play she, Hamlet and Claudius are watching “protests too much.”  Besides, we need to get our story straight–Hillary Clinton is Lady Macbeth, while Michelle Obama is clearly auditioning for the role of Goneril.

P.S.  On a random Lear-related note, I heartily recommend the BBC production Second Generation for a British desi adaptation of the classic.

At the 2004 Democratic convention, he visited with Newsweek reporters and editors, including me. I came away deeply impressed by his intelligence, his forceful language and his apparent willingness to take positions that seemed to rise above narrow partisanship. Obama has become the Democratic presidential front-runner, precisely because countless millions have formed a similar opinion. It is, I now think, mistaken. ~Robert Samuelson

Samuelson describes Obama’s agenda as “completely ordinary, highly partisan, not candid and mostly unresponsive to many pressing national problems.”  He may be one of the first regular columnists to peer beyond the pleasant “mirage” of Obama’s hype to see the empty deserts that are really there.

There’s a post on Russia and Byzantium that I have up at The American Scene and Cliopatria.  Consider this an open thread on the post and related subjects.

He was saying some smart things about the war, and then Obama started going meta again in his Houston rally speech.  Now he’s talking about the “meaning of hope” and his family background.  “If you talk about hope, you’re fuzzy-headed, you’re not realistic, you’re peddling in false hopes.”  He then repeats his boilerplate about what hope is not.  Now he’s bad-mouthing cynics–that doesn’t sound very unifying to me!

Rasmussen shows Obama defeating McCain 50-38 in Nevada with 9% preferring “some other candidate” and 2% “not sure.”  (For comparison, Clinton trails McCain 40-49 in the same poll.)  Nevada is one of the states Rasmussen lists as a “toss-up,” but if these numbers can be believed it isn’t much of a toss-up in an Obama v. McCain contest.  Looking at the crosstabs for this poll, I find myself completely disbelieving what I see.  Consider: among conservatives, Obama receives 30%, while Clinton receives a measly 9%.  Does that make any sense to you?  It certainly doesn’t to me.  25% of Republicans prefer Obama, while only 11% prefer Clinton.  McCain poaches 22% of Democrats in either match-up.  I can understand why that many conservatives and Republicans might express a preference for “some other candidate” out of frustration, but how are this many people concluding that Obama is, in fact, better than McCain on those things where McCain angers them? 

The age factor appears to be working to Obama’s advantage in a big way with some of the youngest cohorts: the 30-39 year olds prefer him 63-34, while he narrowly wins among the 18-29 year olds, who are split more or less evenly three ways.  It’s encouraging to know that at least one of three people from my age group have some common sense.  McCain’s numbers among the different age groups eerily mirror Clinton’s exit poll data from Wisconsin tonight: he loses every group except 65+, and he loses them badly.  If this held up for the rest of the year Obama would win in a landslide, but I predict that this is not going to hold up.   

Both McCain and Clinton have impressively high unfav ratings at 53 and 59% respectively, while Obama has just 38% unfav.  Of the three, he is obviously the only one with net positive ratings.  This will change significantly over the next eight months.

With early exits indicating an Obama thrashing of Clinton up north, it may be time to start thinking about the Obama v. McCain match-up in greater detail.  In the first installment, New Hampshire.

It makes perfect sense that Obama is trouncing McCain in early New Hampshire polling.  Not only has New Hampshire been trending Democratic for several years now, but all those independents who likely rallied to McCain when the media made it seem as if Obama was going to win in a walk have gone back to the Democrats.  But strength in New Hampshire won’t necessarily tell us who the stronger national candidate is.  In the last two cycles, the New Hampshire winner received fewer popular votes nationwide.  If my guess about Obama’s general election weakness against McCain is right, that could happen again.  As I’ve said before, there are certain battleground states (particularly New Mexico, Florida) where McCain should win handily, and New Mexico has historically been a reliable indicator of the national result.

Michelle Obama has received some bad publicity for her “for the first time in my adult lifetime I feel really proud of my country” remark, but I have the solution for her: she can dismiss the entire controversy by saying that they were “just words.”

In an unusually tiresome lecture from Christopher Buckley, there is this line:

It’s also true — odd — that Mr. McCain is popular among Hispanic voters, who are themselves paradigms of cultural conservatism [bold mine-DL] and without whose support any “conservative” candidate for president may be doomed to failure.

No doubt McCain’s immigration position accounts for his popularity with some Hispanic voters.  I remain very skeptical that selling out on this issue will yield the electoral benefits promised when there are many native-born Hispanics and other naturalised citizens who take just as dim a view of amnesty as anyone, but there is certainly a constituency for what McCain offers.  What is absolutely wrong about this sentence, as you can see for yourself, is this claim of “paradigms of cultural conservatism.”  (Arguably, this same criticism could be leveled at some key voting blocs of the GOP with respect to divorce rates and the like.)  Of course, particularly in the context of the immigration debate the phrase “cultural conservatism” is ambiguous, since there is no clear agreement about which culture it is that is being conserved.  Even when separated from this phrase and recast in dubious “family values” language, the claim does not seem to be true.  As many others have observed before me, the flip side of assimilation is assimilation to the sorts of “values” that cultural conservatives would not recognise as their own.  What do I mean?  Specifically, I mean this:

Nearly half of the children born to Hispanic mothers in the U.S. are born out of wedlock, a proportion that has been increasing rapidly with no signs of slowing down.

And this:

Conservatives who support open borders are fond of invoking “Hispanic family values” as a benefit of unlimited Hispanic immigration. Marriage is clearly no longer one of those family values.

And again:  

As Mona’s family suggests, out-of-wedlock child rearing among Hispanics is by no means confined to the underclass. The St. Joseph’s parishioners are precisely the churchgoing, blue-collar workers whom open-borders conservatives celebrate. Yet this community is as susceptible as any other to illegitimacy.

If Steve Sailer is right and voting patterns coincide closely with being married and, importantly, the stability of marriage, these Hispanics are very likely to be Democratic voters.  On the other hand, as Reihan has observed, many so-called “values voters” are often concentrated most heavily among those that suffer from the most family instability, so it might be that these same Hispanics would make reliable Republican voters if you assume the exact opposite of what all open borders advocates have been saying for decades, which is that they are obvious GOP voters because they are natural, habitual conservatives.  Instead, you would have to assume that they are going to become Republican voters because they are drawn to the symbolism and rhetoric of social order that they find lacking in their own surroundings. 

However, I think even this would be a serious misreading of this particular set of voters, since there are any number of non-immigration economic and social policies that the GOP is not likely to modify or abandon that do not or do not seem to serve their interests.  Of course, once voting patterns in a family or community become established they are not easily broken.  If it is true that the political preferences established in youth endure throughout one’s lifetime, and if it is true that children tend to inherit their parents’ political views, and we know that 18-29 year olds are now trending Democratic by a huge margin (a phenomenon that is even more acute among minorities), the odds of Hispanic voters becoming a reliable source of Republican electoral strength at any time in the next half century are extremely poor.

The Politico continues to impress by reporting on the utterly trivial.  Obama’s haircut bills must have eluded their grasp.

The really crucial question that the Clinton campaign pack of clowns has so far failed to ask: did Obama plagiarise his kindergarten essay?  His words from back then have a familiar ring to them, almost as if other children had expressed themselves in a similar way.  “When I grow up, I want to be President”–see, it’s a pattern of plagiarism!  He has probably also copied other expressions used by Gov. Patrick, such as, “Remember to vote on Tuesday” and “I need your support.”  Clearly, this is an issue of vital importance for Wisconsin voters as they go to the polls.

Until this “plagiarism” charge, I still thought that Clinton could pull off a surprise win tonight.  Even her own voters, who have to have a pretty high tolerance of idiocy to start with, have to be embarrassed by this latest maneuver. 

P.S. What can the Clinton people possibly hope to prove with this “attack”?  That Obama’s rehashed bromides about hope and unity are…rehashed bromides that someone else has used?  We already know that.  We have known that for over a year.  The problem that Clinton has is that she is both platitudinous and boring.  If you must send out a lot of hot air, it might as well be sent out in a memorable way.

In what was probably supposed to be a searing critique of Republican Me-tooism, Jeffrey Lord decided to choose to emphasise what was probably the worst example of all the Republican losses of the 20th century, the 1960 election.  Not Wilkie, not Dewey (who both receive honourable mention later), but Nixon is his main target.  Remarkably, he gives Nixon credit for his ’72 win as a “conservative” after Nixon ran one of the most left-wing administrations on domestic policy of the previous fifty years.  Bush in ’88 won virtue of being Reagan’s successor, albeit by a narrow margin, but was actually a moderate, which he demonstrated during his administration and in the ’92 campaign.  Dole is blamed essentially for running on his record as a moderate Republican against an incumbent President (when incumbent Presidents have lost only three times in the last century), rather than engaging in the illusionism of Bush the Younger’s campaigns that portrayed him as a conservative.  In fact, what several of the moderates on Lord’s list have in common was that they were running against incumbent Presidents.  Two of the three others were incumbent Presidents who were punished either for their decisions (Nixon’s pardon, anyone?) or the perception that they were neglecting domestic policy and “out of touch.”  The conservative objection to all these campaigns was and ought to have been that the policies they were embracing or acquiescing in were bad policies, and not particularly that they have had a poor electoral record.   

The other part of “the legend” of the Nixon-Kennedy televised debate in 1960 was that, according to the radio audience who listened to the same debate, Nixon was ruled the clear winner.  Another problem with this line of criticism is that Eisenhower had won two major victories by running as a Me-too Republican, so Nixon might have reasonably concluded that Me-tooism was fairly popular.  Also neglected in this treatment is the extent to which JFK was engaged in his own kind of Me-tooism, trying to run to Nixon’s right on anticommunism.  (Incidentally, it is Eisenhower‘s successful example McCain has started citing as his model for this election, regardless of how inapt the comparison is.)  Finally, there is the small matter that JFK almost certainly stole the 1960 election, which makes the failure of Nixon’s campaign in that year rather more understandable.