Italy’s revolving door for the country’s premiership revolves again bringing the centre-right Silvio Berlusconi to power for the third time. But that’s not really the story. His win was expected given the lackluster performance of Romano Prodi’s centre-left government. It is also not that Berlusconi didn’t do well, he did. His Il Popolo della Libertà party won 37.4% of the vote or 272 seats in Italy’s 617 member Chamber of Deputies. Thus falling short of a majority, Berlusconi will have to form a coalition government. And it is the surprising results of his junior coalition partner, Lega Nord led by Umberto Bossi, that has Europe talking.
The Lega Nord, or Northern League, is a successionist party that aims to separate Lombardia-Veneto from the rest of Italy. Being a regional party, the Northern League is never going to win an election nationwide but in these recent polls the party had its one of its best showing ever. It doubled its percentage to 8.3%. In Verona, the Northern League captured 27% of the vote by taking votes primarily from centre-left parties. In the town Crespadoro, fifty miles west of Venice, the Northern League took 53% of the vote.
So what’s got the Italians in the wealthy north of the country so angry?
Use Ed Rendell 24/7. Play that ad across Pennsylvania. Do another one with Evan Bayh in Indiana. Focus on you and ignore Obama. Talk about how poverty is a moral imperative. Talk about how we need to exit Iraq the right way. Talk about the Colin Powell pottery barn dictum. We broke it, we own it. We have to fix it and engage the Iraqis and the region in finding a long-lasting peace for the region. A peace that includes preserving the state of Israel and justice for the Palestinian people. Emphasis how hard working you are. How you work for us and highlight achievements like SCHIP, extra pay for veterans, etc. Embrace the LGBT community. Reach out to African-Americans by going to New Orleans and show the country the legacy of the Bush era. Point out the differences between the Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration on jobs and the economy.
In West Virginia, tell coal miners that the era of lax regulations that permit disasters like the Utah mine collapse will be forever over. Highlight the differences between your health care and your energy plans of those your opponents, plural. Engage Elizabeth Edwards on healthcare. And play the Rendell ad over and over.
You should know that I started this campaign as an ABC voter, Anybody But Clinton. I supported John Edwards but you won me over. I will do whatever you ask. I cannot thank you enough for all you have done.
Via Lambert at CorrenteWire, a number of Obama supporters who happen to be journalists have written a letter of protest to ABC News criticizing their handling of the Democratic Presidential debate held this past week in Philadelphia. Here’s their letter: Journalists Slam ABC Debate Tactics
Your letter might have had some validity if you had spoken out after the NBC debate.
Since you were Labor Secretary during the greatest creation of jobs in the history of the United States, you might remind the very junior Senator from Illinois during your endorsement that statements such as this are offensive and not just patently wrong:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And then afterwards you might stand in front of mirror and say to yourself, I am not a hypocrite and don’t stop saying that until you understand that you are. And don’t worry winning in November is not important.
It worked in Berlin so well. So now let’s repeat one of the greatest offenses in the history of mankind by building a wall in Baghdad to wall off Sadr City. If this is the best US Military planners and the Bush Administration can do, then we are truly in a sorry state. The story from today’s New York Times: US Begins Erecting Wall in Sadr City
How is it that the United States resembles the former Soviet Union more with each passing day? We are bogged and losing a war in Afghanistan and now we are building walls? At least the Soviets had universal health care and free education.
Run this ad non-stop. Leverage your assets and the biggest one you have in Pennsylvania is Governor Ed Rendell. In fact, put him on your short list for Vice President.
Lawrence O’Donnell, Huffington Post blogger and erstwhile MSNBC pundit, fired the first shot on January 11, 2008. His words were simply offensive to me as an Edwards supporter.
John Edwards is a loser. He has won exactly two elections in his life and lost 31. Only one of his wins and all of his losses were in presidential primaries and caucuses. He remains perfectly positioned to continue to lose with a Kucinich-like consistency. Nothing but egomania keeps Edwards in the race now. All presidential candidates are egomaniacs but some of them have party status worth preserving that forces them to drop out when they hit the wall. A loser like Edwards has no status or dignity to lose. Campaigning and losing is his life. So, he will continue his simple-minded, losing campaign and deny Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton the one-on-one contest they deserve.
If John Edwards stays in the race, he might, in the end, become nothing other than the Southern white man who stood in the way of the black man. And for that, he would deserve a lifetime of liberal condemnation.
Over the next three months, this war has waged on. Sometime right after Super Tuesday, I became a refugee imposing a self-exile from the incessant vitriol no longer against John Edwards but now directed at Senator Clinton and all things Clinton. I ceased commenting. There is no reason. Why argue with the clinically insane? But I still visit on occasion to check in the rabid pursuit of the canonization of Saint Barack. Thus it was tonight when I peruse the various bloggers to see how they perceived to be the very junior Senator from Illinois’ performance in Wednesday’s Philadelphia debate.
One has to wonder if the very junior Senator from Illinois didn’t just nod off in Church missing all those fiery sermons from the Reverend Wright, but also if he was simply asleep during the entire administration of Bill Clinton. In his now infamous comments at the home of Gordon Getty in San Francisco, the very junior Senator from Illinois noted that:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
While other blogs have now covered this gaffe, I am not letting go of it because Obama needs to be reminded that a Democratic Administration in his adult life left the country better than it found it. Jobs did not fall during the Clinton Administration. I went and looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the top 100 US Metropolitan Statistics Areas (MSAs) under Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43.