Steady Diet of Nothing

photo used under a Creative Commons License from Victoria Bernal

I’ve been less interested in food these days, what with the election going on. The dramatics involved have proven juicier than a bone-in rib eye steak served over 500 thread count. Here are some links that I have been enjoying lately:

Hendrick Hertzberg weighs in on how different Hillary's speech sounded to him because he had been present at the time:

I’m sure that this speech looked confrontational and intransigent on television in ways that it just didn’t in the hall, inside the bubble. In the hall, you don’t see the speaker in closeup. You see her in the distance, in the midst of a crowd. The effect is communal, not egotistic. There are no replays of selected highlights, no panels of experts. You’re left with a mood, and the mood was calm.

So I felt a certain relief, as did other Obama supporters in the room with whom I spoke. And as the crowd drifted out, I had the clear impression that many in it were letting go of some of their anger, allowing it to soften into disappointment, and beginning to reconcile themselves to reality.

This before he goes into a critical look at the math that she had posited that night:

Shall we do the math, as the saying goes?

If, as Hillary said in her speech, thirty-five million people voted and eighteen million of them voted for her, then seventeen million voted for someone else.

In other words, Hillary got a million more votes than Obama! Think of it—that’s nearly double Gore’s half-million-vote lead over Bush in 2000! And in an electorate only a third the size! The equivalent of a three-million-vote general-election majority!

Then there is an article from the Washington Post on David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist. Axelrod's childhood friend recalls:

how, as 13-year-olds, they set up a card table, first at the Bronx Zoo, then on busy 57th Street, to sell buttons and bumper stickers for Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign. Their politics were established even then, Swidler recalls -- New York liberals with an idealistic bent who thought government should help the weakest members of society.

In a profile on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the New Republic, Michelle Cottle describes how early Pelosi (née D'Alesandro) got started in politics:

During Nancy's youth, the D'Alesandro household revolved around her father's political life. "He set the tune, and we danced to it," says Thomas D'Alesandro III, Nancy's eldest brother, who also served as Baltimore's mayor. That tune was combative, pragmatic, and personal. The D'Alesandro home operated like a field office, with the children serving as auxiliary staff. Constituents streamed through the door starting at 10 a.m., and whoever was manning the front desk--a post at which every child served several hours a week starting at age 13--handled requests ranging from finding a family public housing to bailing someone's husband out of jail...

Also, I loved there is a little tidbit in the article about how her mom kept "pots of stew and pasta sauce simmering at all hours to feed petitioners' which also served to go into the "'favor file' on everyone for whom their father had ever found a job or served a hot meal."

Also a few more links:

7 Ways Hillary Changed Politics (The American Prospect)
An Overview of Clinton's Campaign Journey to Second Place (WSJ)
The Fall of Conservatism (New Yorker)