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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review March 28, 2008 / 21 Adar II 5768

Slam dunks are only in basketball

By Wesley Pruden


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Presidential candidates are a lot like new shoes. They fit better after a few strolls around the block. A candidate's flaws that look fatal in April look more like footnotes in October.


The row between the women and the blacks in the Democratic primaries is more entertainment than meltdown, but some Democrats are about to reach for the panic button. When the going gets tough the not-so-tough surrender to hysteria. The new polling numbers by Rasmussen, the most reliable pollster of the moment, would in fact be terrifying for the Democrats if this were October. But this is only almost April, not October.


What's happening among the Democrats illustrates once more that slam dunks are for March Madness, not presidential elections. Barring candidates like George McGovern and Barry Goldwater, there are no slam dunks in November. Only a few weeks ago, the Democrats could hardly wait for November, plotting to leave Iraq in confusion and chaos, to raise taxes, to make nice with the nation's enemies, to pump up the welfare state, to do for health care what we've done for public education. Republicans, ever eager to show the white feather when a Democrat says boo, were looking for the best and fastest routes out of town. Who could blame them? The media, ever eager to demonstrate even-handedness and a lack of bias, were in thrall to Obama and not quite ready to abandon the Clinton myth, but keen to encourage Republican despair.


But now look: Barack Obama, once the beige knight on a dappled horse, got caught hanging out with hatemongers and America-lasters in Chicago, and Hillary, ever the coquette, got caught flirting with the race issue, making up war stories about her heroics in Bosnia, and otherwise being a Clinton. Now both Hillary and Obama are villains among the party faithful, depending on which faithful you talk to, and Rasmussen finds that substantial numbers of Democrats don't want either one of them, with 1 in 5 saying both should quit and let someone else try. But 4 of 5 Democrats don't want the struggle to end, which is a measure of the depth of the mutual rage.


John McCain has opened 10-point leads over both Obama and Hillary in the latest measurement of national sentiment. Some of the most frightened Democrats even want to bring Al Gore in from the cold, as it were, and crown the king of the melting solar system as the man who can "bring us together." (Try not to laugh.) Nobody talks about slam dunks any longer, though a 10-point McCain lead on Election Day would translate to "landslide."


Restoring the Democratic National Convention, like its counterpart moribund for decades as nothing more than a pep rally, to a real nominating convention was dismissed as a pipe dream of bored reporters and conniving pundits as recently as Christmas. Now nobody rules out anything. A floor fight over whether to seat the delegates elected in the disputed primaries in Florida and Michigan could set everything afire, and a runaway convention might nominate anyone. Barack Obama could, in this event, practice unifying the country by first unifying the Democratic Party, acceding to Al Gore or someone else as the third way to the White House. This would give him a long leg up four years hence, when John McCain would likely be completing his first and only term. Who knows what the Clintons would do.


Nevertheless — and this is the big nevertheless — there's scant evidence that the gap between left and right, between red states and blue, has closed. Bill Clinton, the most popular Democrat of his generation, never won a majority of the popular vote. George W. Bush won two national elections, but only barely. The margins of the past two decades are not likely to tighten this year. We're as divided as we ever were, and as salutary as the right landslide might be in calming tempers and soothing anger we won't see one this year. Slam dunks are for pituitary giants running up and down the floor in colorful underwear. The rest of us, like it or not, will have to break in new shoes.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.

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