I am so glad Obama finally left his church. Why? Because Trinity Church of Christ had become an albatross around his neck. It is very hard to resign from one's church especially if one has gone to a particular church for a long time. My church that I left was my second home. I was there for over a decade. Many of my friends were members of the church. It was where my child was "dedicated" and where I found solace from the worries of the world week after week. I threw myself into my church work, volunteering on half a dozen committees including the Trustee Board.
As our nation becomes more diverse, politicians whose subcultures are often different than that of white mainstream Protestants will be increasingly at odds with mainstream media. African American churches came into existence because white churches were racially segregated. The first black church in the North was founded in Philadelphia in 1794. Martin Luther King
Black churches remained segregated for the most part, and they have always been the only institution that blacks owned and controlled without having to be accountable to whites in any way. Therefore, the churches have always been the carriers of black culture, and the pulpit has been the one place where the preachers talked about God as well as the racial oppression from which they and their members suffered.
Throughout history, black ministers have preached a social gospel because they were far more than simply a place to deal wtih the sacred needs. The churches are part community center, social services organization, education school, and job training center. That is what Senator Obama had at Trinity, and that is also why he found it so difficult to separate himself from his church. It is also what white America understands least about our relationship to our churches. It foreshadows what is to come when Hispanics and Asians enter the higher echelons of power as well.
Sometimes churches are like spouses. You don't get along with them but you have very deep ties and you don't want to separate yourself from what has been so important to you for so long. Many people find themselves in similar situations. I have always known people in the black community who were at odds with something that was going on in their churches. Sometimes they waged fights with their ministers for years on end. The black church, obviously, is very different from white churches or that is what the pundits on twenty-four hour cable lead us to believe. I doubt these guys even go to church!
That is why I always empathized with Senator Obama and his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When he said, "I could not disown my pastor any more than I could disown my white grandmother," I instinctively understood his point. Our relationships with our churches and our pastors are more than issues, and what the pastors say in their sermons on any given Sunday. They are richly textured in history, culture, and theology, although it is often not the primary reason some people stay in their churches even though they may be at odds with them.
What Obama was stuck with was more than his pastor. The mainstream media, especially the right wing FOX News hung every association of his like albatrosses around his neck as well. It has gotten so bad---this guilt by association--- that if Martin Luther King were to reappear at Trinity, the pundits would find something wrong with what he says. Trinity has been targeted and the only way for Michelle and Barack to get away from the constant "Trinititis" is to leave the church. The pundits are nowhere near understanding the social and historical context of Trinity or any other black church.
The resignation came in a letter Obama sent to Trinity United Church of Christ's Rev. Otis Moss on Friday, saying, "We are writing to make official our decision to end our membership at Trinity."
"We make this decision with sadness. Trinity was where I found Christ, where we were married and where our children were baptized," the letter said.
"But as you know, our relations with Trinity have been strained by the divisive statements of Reverend Wright, which sharply conflict with our own view."
Just last week Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest in Chicago's inner city, made derisive remarks about Senator Hillary Clinton from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ. Now that Obama has left Trinity, he and his family can at least be relieved of the stress it has caused. Moreover, Trinity, I hope, can go back to trying to fulfill its mission as a religious community that carries out an important social gospel.
The Clarion-Ledger
May 31, 2008
George Bush misspeaks from ignorance and arrogance. Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks from arrogance and anger - anger that a more worthy opponent seemingly came out of nowhere and is hindering her ascent to her supposedly rightful place as president.
She has whined about negative press coverage, sexism and continually being misunderstood. She lies. She and Bill have seeded clouds of doubt and suspicion in their wake. Hillary may be tired, she may be weary, but she knew full well what she was saying to the South Dakota press (citing the June 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as a reason to remain in the race) and what it insinuated. She has now been reduced to courting the bigot vote and she has issued a further call to arms for that portion of the electorate.
That is not the way to show leadership. Hopefully the voters will accept the challenge to rise above our sad history and elect a president who was ready on day one, and who has proven to be a leader of vision and grace. Sen. Clinton is not that person.
D.S. Payne
Ridgeland
Last week the Chicago priest, Rev. Michael Pfleger, was a guest minister at Trinity United Church of Christ. Yes, it's the same Trinity of Jeremiah Wright fame and Pfleger had just resigned as an unpaid Catholic advisory council member for Senator Obama's campaign. He sounded like a traditional black preacher when he mimicked Senator Clinton. He said she would be upset that she didn't get the nomination because she has "white entitlement."
He screamed to the top of his voice as if that's the way a woman speaks. Once again Senator Obama had to get off message and speak out against another nut preacher who is trying to claim his "fifteen minutes" of fame. Then came Pfleger's apology: “I regret the words I chose on Sunday. These words are inconsistent with Senator Obama’s life and message, and I am deeply sorry if they offended Senator Clinton or anyone else who saw them."
Hillary had already demanded that Obama "denounce" Father Pfleger. That's her job--to find a weakness or opening wherever she can and go into attack mode. Obama would have done the same thing had the roles been reversed.
What's wrong with these Chicago preachers? At least Father Pfleger apologized but Jeremiah Wright is still nursing his wounds and probably thinks Obama should apologize to him. Chicago is a very political city. Preachers get into the political act as well. Father Pfleger shouldn't have gotten up there and tried to be a politician in Trinity's pulpit.
He had to have known that he would be made into mincemeat AND it would harm Obama's campaign, that is unless he doesn't care about the campaign like many of us do. This goes beyond his right to free speech. This has to do with whether we will elect a black president. What Jeremiah Wright and Pfleger did do not fit into the positive value system of Obama. These preachers--Wright and Pfleger--are confusing themselves and believe they are politicians instead of ministers.
At least Father Pfleger, who pastors a black congregation and has done so much for the poor and has waged an anti-gang movement, was called on the carpet immediately by his Archbishop. The Archbishop directed him to not engage in any sort of partisan politics during the election campaign. I am so glad he had to answer to someone other than God, and I am so glad the Catholic Church has a hierarchy that pulled him in. Otherwise, he might be on his way to speak at the National Press Club in Washington, D. C., as Jeremiah Wright did.
These ministers could learn from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who never called himself a civil rights worker or a politician. He always said he was a preacher. Would that Pfleger and Wright understand that difference. I want all of these preachers who are looking for their fifteen minutes of fame to stop it right now, else I will unleash the Archbishop on them.
It has been the subject of much speculation over the years as to why the four children of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King never married or had children. Was it because they lived under the shadow of their father's assassination? When Yolanda died much too soon last year the topic resurfaced again. I think older black Americans who lived during the King era saw his children as special because they were his offspring. Tragedy could somehow be lessened if his kids had normal and fulfilling lives.
A few months ago, Marty King, the oldest son announced that he and Andrea Waters had married secretly secretly a year earlier, and they were expecting a baby.
Andrea and Marty's baby girl named Yolanda Renee King was born at Northside Hospital in Atlanta last Sunday. Quite fittingly, she was named for her aunt Yolanda, or "Yoki" as she was known.
Martin and Coretta would be very proud to become grandparents.
I went to an Obama fundraiser in Sarasota, Florida last November. It was very crowded. I had a book I wanted to give him but it looked impossible. There was a tall, dark muscular young man that I took to be a Secret Service agent hovering over Obama. However, when he flashed a broad smile I knew he wasn't Secret Service. He smiled. I smiled. "Will you give this book that I wrote to Senator Obama for me?" I asked. "Of course," he said, "and thank you. I'm sure the Senator will appreciate it." I have watched this guy walking the rope line with Senator Obama as they traversed across the country in the campaign. The New York Times reports below that his name is Reggie Love!
May 27, 2008
New York Times
By Ashley Parker
In the last year, Barack Obama has learned a thing or two about running for president, and Reggie Love has learned a thing or two about Barack Obama.
Mr. Love now knows that when it comes to food, Senator Obama “eats pretty much anything, from chicken wings and barbecue and ribs to grilled fish and steamed broccoli.” But when he is campaigning in a small town with limited options, a cheeseburger is always a good bet. (“Cheddar is the cheese of choice,” Mr. Love added.)
He knows that “the boss,” as he calls Mr. Obama, likes MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew — Black Forest Berry Honest Tea. He keeps a supply of both on hand.
And he has learned that all campaigns have their superstitions — Senator John McCain has a penchant for heads-up coins — and that Mr. Obama is no exception. That means that Mr. Love and Mr. Obama, for luck, play basketball every primary day.
Mr. Love, 26, is Mr. Obama’s body man, the personal aide who shadows the senator and anticipates everything he needs — and everything he does not need. He is not a bodyguard (security is provided by the Secret Service), but rather the ultimate assistant, rarely more than a body length away from the candidate.
Young, eager campaign aides are stock characters in movies and on television, but few have quite the élan of Mr. Love, who, at 6-foot-5, is about three inches taller than the tall candidate, fitter than the fit candidate (he can bench press more than 350 pounds) and cooler than the cool candidate.
“There’s no doubt that Reggie is cooler than I am,” Mr. Obama said, laughing, in a phone interview. “I am living vicariously through Reggie.”
Mr. Love, who played football and basketball at Duke, usually starts the day with Mr. Obama with a dawn workout in the hotel gym. They end the day more than 15 hours later, often unwinding before bed by watching ESPN’s “SportsCenter” or that night’s big game. (Mr. Obama sometimes flosses his teeth to ESPN while lying down.)
What a body man does depends on the politician. Senator John Kerry’s aide for his presidential race in 2004 was dubbed “part butler, part buddy.” Bill Clinton’s aide when he was president said their relationship sometimes felt more like that of an old married couple. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has a body woman, the efficient and glamorous Huma Abedin. On NBC’s “The West Wing,” President Josiah Bartlet treated his body man, Charlie Young, like a son.
Mr. Obama said he regarded “my guy, Reggie,” as the kid brother he never had. “But maybe I’m saying that just because he technically could be my son,” the Illinois senator said. “I don’t want to admit my age.”
Mr. Love said he had been hired with “no job description whatsoever.”
“It was just like, ‘You just go out there and — Take. Care. Of. Stuff,’ ” Mr. Love said, taking his time with each word.
Some of the “stuff” Mr. Love takes care of: When Mr. Obama makes calls to woo superdelegates, Mr. Love is at his side with a briefing book, dialing the numbers. When an outdoor speech ended on a windy day in Noblesville, Ind., he appeared behind Mr. Obama as he shook hands on the rope line. “Jacket?” he asked, a coat draped at the ready over his arm.
When Mr. Obama dropped food on his tie while eating in the car between stops, Mr. Love was ready with a Tide pen. He always carries one, along with ballpoint pens, and has turned himself into a walking dispensary of Sharpies, stationery, protein bars, throat lozenges, water, tea, Advil, Tylenol, Purell and emergency Nicorette, not to mention his ever-present iPhone, BlackBerry and Canon Rebel XT digital camera. (Mr. Love keeps a photo journal of the campaign, and has more than 10,000 pictures so far.)
Compared with the even-tempered and self-controlled Mr. Obama, Mr. Love is raffish, always joking with the Secret Service, offering closed-fist high-fives to members of the news media and making frequent appearances in the daily pool reports. At a V.F.W. hall in Indiana, he helped out when the senator did not want a second Budweiser, taking it off Mr. Obama’s hands.
Mr. Obama often mentions that Mr. Love was a wide receiver on a football scholarship at Duke who also walked onto the basketball team. At a rally a few weeks ago in Mr. Love’s hometown, Charlotte, N.C., the candidate led the crowd in a chant of “Reggie, Reggie, Reggie!”
After the Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia in April, Mr. Obama borrowed a move from the rapper Jay-Z and mimed brushing off his shoulders, but it was Mr. Love who had uploaded his music to the senator’s iPod in the first place — a silver Nano that he bought the senator for his 46th birthday.
“So I’ve gotten pretty fond of Jay-Z,” Mr. Obama said. “He’s broadened my horizons in the hip-hop world.”
In turn, Mr. Obama said he had gotten Mr. Love into “everything from John Coltrane to Frank Sinatra.”
“I think he’s got the most eclectic music of any 26-year-old,” the senator said.
Along the way, some unofficial rules have emerged between the candidate and his aide. From Mr. Obama: “One cardinal rule of the road is, we don’t watch CNN, the news or MSNBC. We don’t watch any talking heads or any politics. We watch ‘SportsCenter’ and argue about that.”
And from Mr. Love: Expect to be grilled about everything as if you were a first-year law student.
When Mr. Obama hits a rough patch in the campaign, Mr. Love is sympathetic. In college, embarrassing pictures of an inebriated Mr. Love from a fraternity house party surfaced on the Internet. “You make mistakes and you learn from them, and you try to use them to make you a better person,” he said. After graduating with a degree in political science and public policy, Mr. Love had summer try-outs with the Green Bay Packers in 2004 and the Dallas Cowboys in 2005 before being cut.
Which is how, in 2006, after applying for an internship on Capitol Hill, Mr. Love ended up interviewing with Robert Gibbs, Mr. Obama’s communications director, for a position in Mr. Obama’s Senate office. “It’s the only time I’ve ever interviewed somebody whose work experience included the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys,” Mr. Gibbs said.
Sports these days, for the candidate and his aide, are limited to morning workouts. And, of course, the primary day basketball games.
“He’s quick and he’s strong,” Mr. Love said of Mr. Obama. “A lot of people still don’t know that he’s left-handed, so he can get to the basket and get his shot off, even though he’s not the most explosive or tallest player on the court.”
If Mr. Obama thinks Mr. Love is dogging it on the court, he can come down hard, shouting at him to hustle, said someone who has played basketball with the two of them.
But on the day of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, Mr. Love and Mr. Obama played at noon and kept up an easy rhythm. “Sorry, Reg, I missed you,” the senator said after a pass to Mr. Love was intercepted. Later, on a fast-break, Mr. Obama dribbled up the right side of the court and passed the ball ahead to Mr. Love, who slam-dunked it.
Later that night, after the senator gave his victory speech in Raleigh after winning the North Carolina primary, Mr. Love rode to the airport with Mr. Obama, who was flying to Chicago. Mr. Love was staying behind in his home state to catch up with friends. (His parents now live in California, and Mr. Love managed to squeeze in a visit there last weekend.)
“Michelle was like: ‘Where are you staying? Don’t get into too much trouble,’ ” Mr. Love said of Mr. Obama’s wife.
Waiting ahead, after all, were more early mornings in the gym and more long days on the road.
By James Fallows
Atlantic Monthly
May 27, 2008
Via reader Rachel, a heads up on a sublime aspect of Barack Obama's recent commencement speech at Wesleyan. (Previously on the speech here and here.)
To review: Obama was there in place of the ailing Teddy Kennedy. Kennedy had given Obama a huge boost in the legitimacy-and-legacy category by endorsing him, even if it didn't help much in the MA. primary. And Kennedy's most famous speech was his "concession" speech at the 1980 Democratic convention in New York, when he brought the house down (I was there) with his defiant reassertion of the liberal values that he thought the doomed incumbent, Jimmy Carter, had abandoned. His speech ended with these words:
For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end.
For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
The structure of Obama's speech, these 28 years later, built toward praise of Kennedy's legacy and record, and ended with these words:
That is all I ask of you on this joyous day of new beginnings; that is what Senator Kennedy asks of you as well, and that is how we will keep so much needed work going, and the cause of justice everlasting, and the dream alive for generations to come.
As Rachel points out, this ending was
an allusion so subtle that Kennedy himself might be the only person who caught it. Obama took the speech of Ted's lifetime... and put the three key words - work, cause, dream - into the last line of the text. Poetry into prose, a private tribute to the man whose endorsement took Obama from runner up to winner.
What is so elegant about this touch? Precisely that Obama did not feel obliged to spell out all the links. ("And what I ask of you, in Senator Kennedy's own unforgettable words...") Politicians shouldn't be obscure. But a willingness to assume good things about the public -- its knowledge, its understanding, its ability to rise above the most immediate appeal to pocketbook or prejudice -- is part of what makes a politician into a leader. Even if the intended audience for this close was strictly the Kennedy family, it is an impressive bit of craftsmanship
.
By Joyce Ladner
Bill O'Reilly, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton and Liz Trotta are the guilty parties
What is wrong with these sick Americans who make jokes about killing Barack Obama? Since when did it become acceptable to speak of the possible lynching of the wife of a presidential candidate, in this case Michelle Obama? Several incidents come to mind.
The first was back in March when Bill O'Reilly, Fox News Pundit said to a caller that he hoped he wouldn't have to organize a lynching party for Michelle Obama.
A week ago Mike Huckabee joked to the veterans he was addressing that the thump he heard was probably Barack Obama being hit.
Last week Hillary Clinton told the editors of a South Dakota newspaper that some primaries have lasted into June. She cited Bill Clinton's nomination that she said was not wrapped up until June (it was actually earlier). She also used Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination as an example of another June date--this time--by death!
The latest of these dastardly incidents was committed on May 25th by Fox news contributor Liz Trotta. She committed the unpardonable sin when she said "...and now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody should knock off Osama... uh.... Obama." When the news anchor asked her to explain, she had the unmitigated gall to say, "Well both (should be assassinated) if we could." WATCH LIZ TROTTA SUGGEST THAT OBAMA SHOULD BE "KNOCKED OFF."
None of these people can be classified as "nut cases" that are dangerous to the safety of Senator Obama or to Michelle Obama. Bill O'Reilly, Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, and Liz Trotta are hardly your garden variety schizophrenics like John Hinkley AS FAR AS I KNOW. However, the fact that they feel free to make these comments is one of the most dangerous trends in America. When these so-called respectable people feel free to voice what we think are attitudes held only by backwater racists, our nation is in very, very serious trouble! Are they giving tacit approval to the mentally ill and the haters to carry out such an unmentionable act?
Would these people say such things about John McCain or Hillary Clinton? Would Bill O'Reilly talk about lynching Cindy McCain or Elizabeth Edwards? Absolutely not. So, why is it okay to take what can be life-threatening pot shots at the Obamas?
Something must be done about this critical problem. It is not acceptable behavior! The mainstream press must address these insidious attacks. WHITE LEADERS should speak out against this dangerous practice.
No, we do not need to hear from civil rights leaders because they already know it's dastardly behavior, and they will be dismissed out of hand if they call attention to it. That is why I said WHITE LEADERS should step up. Maybe these folks will listen to them.
The empire’s hypocritical politics
May 26.08
Fidel Castro took note of Barack Obama's courting the Cuban vote in Miami. Obama has targeted young Cubans as one of the group's he is trying to get to vote for him. Castro wrote a stinging rebuke in which he said, "It would be dishonest of me to remain silent after hearing the speech Obama belivered on the afternoon of May 23 at the Cuban American National Foundation created by Ronald Reagan. I listened to his speech, as I did McCain’s and Bush’s. I feel no resentment towards him, for he is not responsible for the crimes perpetrated against Cuba and humanity. Were I to defend him, I would do his adversaries an enormous favor. I have therefore no reservations about criticizing him and about expressing my points of view on his words frankly."
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2008/reflections-fidel-castro.html
The issue of whether delegates from Florida and Michigan and seated will be decided by the Democratic National Party's Rules & Bylaws Committee. It will meet on Saturday, May 31st at the Marriott Wardman Hotel in Washington, DC.
If you live in the Washington area and want to be a witness to history, the meeting begins at 9:30 a.m. Oral arguments will be presented in the morning, and the committee members will consider and debate the challenges in the afternoon.
This meeting is open to the public, however due to space constraints, guests are being asked to pre-register their attendance. Registration will open online at 10:00 AM on Tuesday, May 27. Members of the public wishing to register should fill out the form at the following link: http://www.democrats.org/rbcmeeting . Those lacking Internet access who would like to pre-register can do so by calling 202-479-5137.
Where: Marriott Wardman Park Hotel - Salon I
2660 Woodley Road NW, Washington, DC
By Muriel Tillinghast
I have read some of the comments on Senator Obama and Rev. Wright here and elsewhere. My interest is exclusively with regard to how Black people and their supporters are processing these most recent and seemingly galvanizing events. They are so obviously staged, but by whom and for what purpose? Apparently, it is not sufficient that as a nation and country, we are bombing, destroying and wrecking the planet. It seems lost that the American presidency has large implications at home and abroad. In the in the middle of a timed contest for the biggest political prize, we/progressives of many hues now pause to consider aloud who can express our pain and disappointment in the American Ideal. I include Rev. Wright in this comment. Excuse me, but our particulars are not the contest. By harping aloud and meanly on our insecurities, we give fodder to the machinations of those who are without question our opponents who happen also to be Obama’s as well. We have never had anyone express in full flurry, much less fury, our particular business here on these shores. And, as much as it would be a shot in the arm for my aging political utility, even I recognize that is not the role of the president all other related issues notwithstanding.
It is amazing to me how many people expand and denigrate other people’s work, try to inject "their" agenda into someone else's agenda. And, then how many others get diverted from the larger picture missing the bigger argument even among our own intelligent progressives. Can we follow the bouncing ball? Where did it – Rev. Wright, for example – come from and why has the press continued to project him as a campaign issue? Who threw his name into the ring? The Clintons and their Republican allies are calling in their chips.
Mounted on the back of one man are the hopes of many -- not all of them Black -- and not all of them American or in the USA. Barack Obama is running for high office. Of course, the inter-racial support is fragile, so what? Whatever we have been able to wrestle for ourselves in Europe and in the Americas – and for now I will omit Africa, itself and the Middle East – has been fragile so, let me know when you get some real news!
Endemic to progressives is quibbling because much of the “work” is gamesmanship rather than actual work. Much valuable time is lost over whether someone or something is more correct than another. Only few can speak to the experience of application. Nevertheless, the human condition is one long chain of events of exploitation with brief moments of interruption branching in numerous directions. Art interrupts; learning interrupts and so does political will among other bursts. Can political will triumph over habit? The historical record suggests that the people who see and do what must be done can turn the tide, but cannot hold it for long. Nevertheless, we progressives are encouraged by those moments in time when the brave, the few, the over-powered and the out-maneuvered make the effort. This is not just an American phenomena, this is the advance of humankind. Who knows being in the moment when the direction of events MIGHT pivot in another [better?] direction?
Activists appreciate and seize the moment, riding the waves of changing thought. Otherwise, the discussion is purely the format for an academic setting or the lounge -- wherever and whenever time and effort are not as costly as is the case when time rules. We understand that the game plan is mostly obscure. That’s American politics! It doesn't mean that the ranging conversation is less important overall, it’s just less important in that particular time and space.
In our day and time, what could have been more fragile than the boycotts, the sit-ins, the marches, the court cases and the jailings, the loses and the deaths? It didn't keep us from trying then and some of us are still trying even now. And, frankly, when we got tired, went our various ways as there were no rewards for us who waged the struggle; we needed to get on with some semblance of our lives. Then the parasites showed up largely at the public trough – folks much more to the liking of the power structure – than we were. They manipulated our words, purportedly spoke for us and in doing so changed to the direction of the Movement laying siege to our legacy to suit their personal agendas and their masters' purposes. But, now that's another story. . . .
Obama and Wright are two buoys, not of equal size or purpose, in the sea of American interest which is churning with self-interest. One is a studied detractor from the other. So it is and so it will be. What are our rights with regard to those interests? That answer will vary from individual to individual, pundit to pundit. Let me, therefore, advance my own thinking: I would relegate Rev. Wright here and now to the bench to wait out the contest. There is nothing being said now that hasn’t been said before and will not be said again. Only after the contest, this will not be first page news. Obama is the first real shot at the presidency for a known person of color; he is the first non-illusionary frontrunner. He should, therefore, be given the support of those who believe that he is the best choice between the contenders. Neither Hillary nor McCain offer or promise any substantive change from the current status quo, real or imagined.
There are formal and informal channels of lobbied interest. We should use what we have and establish others. They are not the newspaper or the television or radio shouting our sound-bites to someone in the contest. Would you have shouted maneuvers to Mohammed Ali from the 300th row behind the pillars while he was locking arms with Liston or Frazier? Even if various speakers are correct, they, admittedly see things from another perspective and another vantage point. What is to be made of our musings and shouts when the moment is upon someone else, confusion and loss of momentum. This is where leadership can and should be exercised. Obama is not the savior of us or the nation, but he’s one of the good guys. He's just one guy in a sea of sharks. Let's try not to be one of them.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study explains why.
When Rev. Jeremiah Wright accused the U. S. government of deliberately infecting African Americans with the AIDS virus, many African Americans nodded with understanding, if not agreement. The Tuskegee experiment is often cited as an example of the United States government deliberately refusing treatment to black men diagnosed with syphilis.
It is difficult for non-blacks to understand the depths of suspicion and fear many African Americans hold because of their experiences in the past. The legacy of slavery and institutional racism and discrimination down through the generations created negative historical memory. The suspicion continues because of the rampant persistence of inequality.
The Tuskegee experiment is summarized below.
U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee
In 1932, the Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began a study to record the natural history of syphilis in hopes of justifying treatment programs for blacks. It was called the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male."
The study initially involved 600 black men – 399 with syphilis, 201 who did not have the disease. The study was conducted without the benefit of patients' informed consent. Researchers told the men they were being treated for "bad blood," a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue. In truth, they did not receive the proper treatment needed to cure their illness. In exchange for taking part in the study, the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance. Although originally projected to last 6 months, the study actually went on for 40 years.
What Went Wrong?
In July 1972, an Associated Press story about the Tuskegee Study caused a public outcry that led the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs to appoint an Ad Hoc Advisory Panel to review the study. The panel had nine members from the fields of medicine, law, religion, labor, education, health administration, and public affairs.
The panel found that the men had agreed freely to be examined and treated. However, there was no evidence that researchers had informed them of the study or its real purpose. In fact, the men had been misled and had not been given all the facts required to provide informed consent.
The men were never given adequate treatment for their disease. Even when penicillin became the drug of choice for syphilis in 1947, researchers did not offer it to the subjects. The advisory panel found nothing to show that subjects were ever given the choice of quitting the study, even when this new, highly effective treatment became widely used.
The Study Ends and Reparation Begins
The advisory panel concluded that the Tuskegee Study was "ethically unjustified"--the knowledge gained was sparse when compared with the risks the study posed for its subjects. In October 1972, the panel advised stopping the study at once. A month later, the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs announced the end of the Tuskegee Study.
In the summer of 1973, a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the study participants and their families. In 1974, a $10 million out-of-court settlement was reached. As part of the settlement, the U.S. government promised to give lifetime medical benefits and burial services to all living participants. The Tuskegee Health Benefit Program (THBP) was established to provide these services. In 1975, wives, widows and offspring were added to the program. In 1995, the program was expanded to include health as well as medical benefits. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was given responsibility for the program, where it remains today in the National Center for HIV/AIDS,Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention.As of May 2007, 19 widows, children and grandchildren are receiving medical and health benefits.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Rd, Atlanta, GA 30333, U.S.A
Tel: (404) 639-3311 / Public Inquiries: (404) 639-3534 / (800) 311-3435 Department of Health
and Human Services
No one can put people in their places like MSNBC's Countdown host, Keith Olberman. Ever so often he lets out his righteous indignation against the powerful folks when they not only cross the line, but obliterate it. When Keith gets pissed, he is really pissed off-- and in the most focused, compelling and beautifully strident prose, he goes for the kill. Like the time he said of President Bush:
"Apologize, sir, for even hinting at an America where a few have that privilege to think and the rest of us get yelled at by the President. Anything else, Mr. Bush, is truly unacceptable."
Last night Olberman laid it on Hillary Clinton. Only a mother could love Hillary after hearing Olberman lay bare "stuff." Hillary, who fancies herself to be slick, is no match for my man, Olberman, for he called her out with two fingers and a snap. He put all of home girl's business in the street and it ain't pretty.
You can listen to Keith, or for my intellectual friends, read the transcript below.
Either way, you will never see this presidential race the same way again. I will put my money on that one.
There aren't as many journalists of the old style who aren't afraid to speak their minds. When Keith Olberman announces that he is going to give one of his "Special Comment" editorials, grab the popcorn and sodas and sit back. His direct, in-your-face tongue lashing of people in high power is a sight to behold and to hear.
http://www.americablog.com/2008/05/keith-olbermanns-special-comment-about.html
Keith Olberman's Special Comment
Finally tonight as promised, a Special Comment on Senator Clinton's "assassination" remark to the editorial board of the Argus-Leader newspaper of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Once again, it was this:
Asked if her continuing fight for the nomination against Senator Obama hurts the Democratic party, she replied, quote... "I don't. Because again, I've been around long enough. You know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the
California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in **June** in California. You know, I just don't understand it. You know, there's lots of speculation about why it is. "
The comments were recorded and we showed them to you earlier and they are on-line as we speak.
She actually said those words.
**Those** words, Senator?
You actually invoked the nightmare of political assassination.
You actually invoked the spectre of an inspirational leader, at the seeming moment of triumph, for himself and a battered nation yearning to breathe free, silenced forever.
You actually used the word "assassination" in the middle of a campaign with a loud undertone of racial hatred -- and **gender** hatred -- and **political** hatred.
You actually used the word "assassination" in a time when there is a fear, unspoken but vivid and terrible, that our again-troubled land and fractured political landscape might target a black man running for president.
Or a white man.
Or a white woman!
You actually used those words, in **this** America, Senator while running against an African-American against whom the death threats started the moment he declared his campaign?
You actually used those words, in **this** America, Senator, while running to break your "greatest glass ceiling" and claiming there are people who would do anything to stop **you**?
You!
Senator -- never mind the implications of using the word "assassination" in any connection to Senator Obama...
What about **you**?
You cannot say this!
The references, said her spokesperson, were not, in any way, weighted.
The allusions, said Mo Uh-leathee, are, quote... "...historical examples of the nominating process going well into the summer and any reading into it beyond that would be inaccurate and outrageous."
I'm sorry.
There is **no** inaccuracy.
Not for a moment does any rational person believe Senator Clinton is actually **hoping** for the worst of all political calamities.
Yet the outrage belongs, not to Senator Clinton or her supporters, but to every other American.
Firstly, she has previously bordered on the remarks she made today...
Then swerved back from them and the awful skid they represented. She said, in an off-camera interview with **Time** on March 6th...
"Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn't wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June, also in California. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing
particularly unusual. We will see how it unfolds as we go forward over the next three to four months."
In retrospect, we failed her when we did not call her out, for that remark, dry and only disturbing, in a magazine's pages.
But somebody obviously warned her of the danger of that rhetoric:
After the Indiana primary, on May 7th, she told supporters at a Washington hotel:
"Sometimes you gotta calm people down a little bit. But if you look at successful presidential campaigns, my husband did not get the nomination until June of 1992. I remember tragically when Senator Kennedy won California near the end of that process."
And at Shepherdstown, West Virginia, on the same day, she referenced it again:
"You know, I remember very well what happened in the California primary in 1968 as, you know, Senator Kennedy won that primary."
On March 6th she had said "assassinated."
By May 7th she had avoided it.
Today... she went back to an awful well.
There is no **good** time to recall the awful events of June 5th, 1968...
Of Senator Bobby Kennedy, happy and alive -- perhaps, for the first time since his own brother's death in Dallas in 1963...
Galvanized to try to lead this nation back from one of its darkest eras...
Only to fall victim to the same scurge that **took** that brother, and Martin Luther King...
There **is** no good time to recall this.
But certainly to invoke it, two weeks before the exact 40th anniversary of the assassination, is an insensitive and heartless thing.
And certainly to invoke it, three days **after** the awful diagnosis, and heart-breaking prognosis, for Senator **Ted** Kennedy, is just as insensitive, and just as heartless.
And both actions, open a door wide into the soul of somebody who seeks the highest office in this country, and through that door shows something not merely troubling, but frightening.
And politically inexplicable.
What, Senator, do you suppose would happen if you withdrew from the campaign, and Senator Obama formally became the presumptive nominee, and then suddenly left the scene.
It doesn't even have to **be** the 'dark curse upon the land' you mentioned today, Senator.
Nor even an issue of health.
He could simply change his mind...
Or there could unfold that perfect-storm scandal your people have often referenced, even predicted.
Maybe he could get a better offer from some other, wiser country.
What happens then, Senator?
You are not allowed **back** into the race?
Your delegates and your support vanish?
The Democrats don't run **anybody** for President?
What happens, of course, is what **happened** when the Democrats' Vice Presidential choice, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, had to withdraw from the ticket, in 1972 after it proved he had not been forthcoming about previous mental health treatments.
George McGovern simply got **another** Vice President. Senator, as late as the late summer of 1864 the Republicans were talking about having a **second** convention, to withdraw Abraham Lincoln's re-nomination and choose somebody else because until Sherman took Atlanta in September it looked like Lincoln was going to **lose** to George McClellan.
You could theoretically **suspend** your campaign, Senator.
There's plenty of time and plenty of historical precedent, Senator, in case you want to come back in, if something bad should happen to Senator Obama.
Nothing serious, mind you.
It's just like you said, "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."
Since those awful words in Sioux Falls, and after the condescending, buck-passing statement from her spokesperson, Senator Clinton has made something akin to an apology, without any evident recognition of the true trauma she has inflicted.
"I was discussing the Democratic primary history, and in the course of that discussion mentioned the campaigns both my husband and Senator Kennedy waged in California in June in 1992 and 1968," she said in **Brandon**, South Dakota.
"I was referencing those to make the point that we have had nomination primary contests that go into June. That's a historic fact.
"The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy. I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, particularly for the Kennedy family was in any way offensive, I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever."
"My view is that we have to look to the past and to our leaders who have inspired us and give us a lot to live up to and I'm honored to hold Senator Kennedy's seat in the United States Senate in the state of New York and have the highest regard for the entire Kennedy family.
Thanks.
Not a word about the inappropriateness of referencing assassination.
Not a word about the inappropriateness of implying -- whether it was intended or not -- that she was hanging around waiting for somebody to try something terrible.
Not a word about Senator Obama.
Not a word about Senator McCain.
Not: I'm sorry...
Not: I apologize...
Not: I blew it...
Not: please forgive me.
God knows, Senator, in this campaign, this nation has **had** to forgive you, early and often...
And despite your now traditional position of the offended victim, the nation **has** forgiven you.
We have forgiven you your insistence that there have been widespread calls for you to end your campaign, when such calls had been few.
We have forgiven you your misspeaking about Martin Luther King's relative importance to the Civil Rights movement.
We have forgiven you your misspeaking about your under-fire landing in Bosnia.
We have forgiven you insisting Michigan's vote wouldn't count and then claiming those who would not count it were Un-Democratic.
We have forgiven you pledging to not campaign in Florida and thus disenfranchise voters there, and then claim those who stuck to those rules were as wrong as those who defended slavery or denied women the vote.
We have forgiven you the photos of Osama Bin Laden in an anti-Obama ad...
We have forgiven you fawning over the fairness of Fox News while they were still calling you a murderer.
We have forgiven you accepting Richard Mellon Scaife's endorsement and then laughing as you described his "deathbed conversion."
We have forgiven you quoting the electoral predictions of Boss Karl Rove.
We have forgiven you the 3 A-M Phone Call commercial.
We have forgiven you **President** Clinton's disparaging comparison of the Obama candidacy to Jesse Jackson's.
We have forgiven you Geraldine Ferraro's national radio interview suggesting Obama would not still be in the race had he been a white man.
We have forgiven you the dozen changing metrics and the endless self-contradictions of your insistence that your nomination is mathematically probable rather than a statistical impossibility.
We have forgiven you your declaration of some primary states as counting and some as not.
We have forgiven you exploiting Jeremiah Wright in front of the editorial board of the lunatic-fringe Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
We have forgiven you exploiting William Ayers in front of the debate on ABC.
We have forgiven you for boasting of your "support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans"...
We have even forgiven you repeatedly praising Senator McCain at Senator Obama's expense, and your **own** expense, and the Democratic **ticket's** expense.
But Senator, we cannot forgive you this.
"You know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."
We cannot forgive you this -- not because it is crass and low and unfeeling and brutal.
**This** is **un**-forgivable, because this nation's deepest shame, its most enduring horror, its most terrifying legacy, is political assassination.
Lincoln.
Garfield.
McKinley.
Kennedy.
Malcolm X
Martin Luther King.
**Robert** Kennedy.
And, but for the grace of the universe or the luck of the draw, Reagan, Ford, Truman, Nixon, Andrew Jackson, both Roosevelts, even George Wallace.
The politics of this nation is steeped enough in blood, Senator Clinton, you cannot and must not invoke that imagery! Anywhere! At any time!
And to not appreciate, immediately -- to **still** not appreciate tonight -- just **what** you have done... is to reveal an incomprehension of the America you seek to lead.
This, Senator, is too much.
Because a senator -- a politician -- a **person** -- who can let hang in mid-air the prospect that she might just be sticking around in part, just in case the other guy gets shot -- has no business being, and no capacity **to** be, the President of the United States.
Good night and good luck.
I attended an Obama rally in Tampa,Florida yesterday and there were at least 20,000 folks there including elderly and young blacks and whites, lots of Hispanics of all ages, lots of Hillary Clinton's "hard working white people" of both genders, as well as every demographic in between.
This election will not be won on the basis of fear and hate mongering. We have to fight every single attack and answer it with a justified response. I have seen some of the old "Woe are we black folks" attitudes also creeping up among people who think Barack will lose because some white people are saying they will not vote for him.
People are tired of the negative attack ads and the political style of Karl Rovism including a lot of the Republicans. They are tired of being told they must balkanize themselves and others into little pockets of hatred and fear. Hillary has tried to cast race and gender in the Rovian way, rather unsuccessfully up to now. I doubt she will be that much more successful with gender than she and Bill have been with race. We will not see many more of these "You must fear and hate that group in order to get what you want" victories in the future. Political races are less and less likely to be run on the basis of negatives or what one is against instead of what one stands for. History will not treat the Karl Rove brand of politics kindly because even though his tactics helped Bush win two terms, they failed miserably in governing and got the U.S. and the world in this mess we're in.
Whites who do not intend to vote for Obama because he is black will have two choices: (1) vote for a candidate who will fill their measurable needs such as income, health care, end the war, housing, etc. or, (2) satiate their psychological needs of hatred. You go figure. If they vote for their own racism and against their material interests, then God bless them.
The key to a Barack win is to register every conceivable voter possible. Here in Florida the focus is on registering Haitians, high school seniors, Independents, disgruntled Republicans, young Mexicans, Cubans, and Central Americans, et al. It is also clear that we have not gotten the correct analysis on the "hard working white people." Obama won huge blue collar numbers in Wisconsin, Oregon, Virginia, North Carolina and other states. Appalachian low income voters are not the only ones that matter but they are important. John Kerry did not get their votes either. Senator Byrd and the Mine Workers endorsed Barack and that counts for something.
Also, the best analysis I have heard on the people who live in Appalachia (in parts of Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia) comes from Senator Jim Webb who recently published a book on the subject and discussed it on NPR (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90595861).
Senator Webb said he believes Barack can find a lot of understanding among these Scotch-Irish settlers in the area, and he believes a powerful coalition can be built between them and black people. Also, check out his new book titled "A Time To Fight."
So, down with Hillary Clinton's last gasps of air and the future where Barack will try to get every single vote.
"What would SNCC workers do?" is a question I ask myself these days. I think we would be right in there swinging and not taking no for an answer.
Washington
Associated Press
May 21, 2008
Obama, his party's presidential front-runner, and his wife, Michelle, were asked in an interview aired Monday on ABC's "Good Morning America" about an online video last week by the state's GOP taking her to task for a comment some considered unpatriotic.
"The GOP, should I be the nominee, can say whatever they want to say about me, my track record," Obama said. "If they think that they're going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful because that I find unacceptable, the notion that you start attacking my wife or my family."
He called the strategy "low class."
The video, posted on YouTube, centered on remarks Michelle Obama made while campaigning in Wisconsin last February, when she said: "For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country."
The four-minute video replayed the remark six times, interspersing it with commentary by Tennesseans on why they are proud of America. In a news release that included a link to the video, Tennessee's GOP said "the Tennessee Republican Party has always been proud of America." It urged radio stations to play "patriotic music" during Michelle Obama's visit to Nashville last Thursday.
Michelle Obama later clarified the remark, saying she meant she was proud of how Americans were engaging in the political process and that she had always been proud of her country.
"Whoever is in charge of the Tennessee GOP needs to think long and hard about the kind of campaign they want to run, and I think that's true for everybody, Democrat or Republican," Obama said in the ABC interview, adding: "These folks should lay off my wife."
Obama said his wife "loves this country. For them to try to distort or to play snippets of her remarks in ways that are unflattering to her is, I think, just low class. I think that most of the American people would think that as well."
Tennessee's Republican Party was roundly criticized in March, including by likely presidential nominee John McCain, for a news release that used Barack Obama's middle name _ Hussein _ and showed a photo of him wearing what it said was "Muslim attire."
The release ultimately was removed from the party's Web site at the urging of the state's two Republican senators and Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan, who said he "rejects these kinds of campaign tactics."
Hillary Clinton and billionaire Haim Saban
Nico Pitney and Sam Stein
The Huffington Post
One of Sen. Hillary Clinton's top financial supporters offered $1 million to the Young Democrats of America during a phone conversation in which he also pressed for the organization's two uncommitted superdelegates to endorse the New York Democrat, a high-ranking official with YDA told The Huffington Post.
Haim Saban, the billionaire entertainment magnate and longtime Clinton supporter, denied the allegation. But four independent sources said that just before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Saban called YDA President David Hardt and offered what was perceived as a lucrative proposal: $1 million would be made available for the group if Hardt and the organization's other uncommitted superdelegate backed Clinton.
May 22, 2008
New York Times
By Sarah Wheaton
Senator Edward M. Kennedy had to cancel his scheduled commencement address to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. But the graduates, which include the senator’s stepdaughter, get a consolation prize: Senator Barack Obama.
“Ted and I talked about me filling in for him at Wesleyan University earlier this week,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “Considering what he’s done for me and for our country, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him. So I’m looking forward to standing in his place on Sunday even though I know I won’t be able to fill his shoes.”
Mr. Kennedy had to cancel the May 25 appearance in the wake of his diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor.
Talking Points Memo Online
May 22, 2008
By Josh Marshall
For the last week it's seemed that Sens. Clinton and Obama were adhering to their tacit truce, continuing the primary campaign but avoiding the harsh exchanges that make later party unity a dimmer and dimmer prospect. Clinton particularly had deescalated her rhetoric. Then we have a speech like Sen. Clinton's yesterday in Florida in which she compared the controversy over seating the Florida and Michigan delegates to the Florida recount debacle and many of the great voting and civil rights battles of the 20th century. She is of course also claiming that whatever the delegate count, she leads in the popular vote and that that is what really counts. Never mind of course that even if you count Michigan and Florida she's still not ahead in the popular vote without resorting to tendentious methods of counting.
I've always assumed, as I think most people have, that once the nomination is settled the Florida and Michigan delegates will be seated. And I can see if Sen. Clinton wants to embrace this issue to claim a moral victory even while coming short of her goal of the nomination. As things currently stand, seating them would still leave Sen. Clinton behind in delegates.
But Sen. Clinton is doing much more than this. She is embarking on a gambit that is uncertain in its result and simply breathtaking in its cynicism.
I know many TPM Readers believe there is a deep moral and political issue at stake in the need to seat these delegations. I don't see it the same way. But I'm not here to say they're wrong and I'm right. It's a subjective question and I respect that many people think this. What I'm quite confident about is that Sen. Clinton and her top advisors don't see it that way.
Why do I think that? For a number of reasons. One of her most senior advisors, Harold Ickes, was on the DNC committee that voted to sanction Florida and Michigan by not including their delegates. Her campaign completely signed off on sanctions after that. And Clinton was actually quoted saying the Michigan contest didn't count. Michigan and Florida were sanctioned because they ignored the rules the DNC had set down for running this year's nomination process.
The evidence is simply overwhelming that Sen. Clinton didn't think this was a problem at all -- until it became a vehicle to provide a rationale for her continued campaign.
Now, that's politics. One day you're on one side of an issue, the next you're on the other, all depending on the tactical necessities of the moment. But that's not what Clinton is doing. She's elevating it to a level of principle -- first principles -- on par with the great voting rights struggles of history. There's no longer any question that she's going to win the nomination. The whole point of the popular vote gambit was to make an argument to super-delegates. And that's fine since that's what super-delegates are there for -- to make the decision by whatever measure they choose. But they've made their decision. The super delegates are breaking overwhelmingly for Obama. They simply don't buy the arguments she's making.
As Greg Sargent makes clear here. There are very good reasons to think Sen. Clinton won't take this to the convention, even as today she suggested she might. But that's sort of beside the point.
What she's doing is not securing her the nomination. Rather, she's gunning up a lot of her supporters to believe that the nomination was stolen from her -- a belief many won't soon abandon. And that on the basis of rationales and arguments there's every reason to think she doesn't even believe in.
Late Update: In this post I originally said that Sen. Clinton had "numerous" quotes saying the disputed primaries wouldn't count. On closer inspection, the only quote from her directly seems to be the one about Michigan not counting.
By Joyce Ladner
Barack Obama reached a milestone today. He returns to the state where it all began - Iowa - to thank the people who launched his candidacy. With only three primaries to go, Obama will end the race against Hillary Clinton with the largest number of elected delegates, super delegates and the popular vote. He will soft pedal his success because Hillary Clinton and her surrogates have said, "It ain't over yet."
I dare not ask when will it be over. While such a question is completely rational, to raise it in this hypersensitive Democratic nomination fight is tantamount to "dissing" Hillary Clinton and the millions of (white) women who support her. If the roles were reversed, I doubt seriously that she would pull back any gloating and celebrations. It was Hillary's race to lose and she lost it. She had the name recognition, money, endorsements of every politician and his mama, and a bevy of advisers and staff that would be the envy of any politician. She lost this election fair and square.
What went wrong with Hillary Clinton is less important to me than what went right with Barack Obama. Fortunately, the tidal wave of history is on his side because he claimed the mantle for change at a time when voters are begging for major changes in what the U. S. stands for in the world and how their government is run. What has made Obama successful is that he redefined how to do politics in this country. He is the first politician in a presidential contest who both understands and has organized his campaign around the way the nation is instead of the way it used to be. Moreover, his redefinition is consistent with the way millions of Americans now live. Ward political bosses are part of the old, and the democratization of the electorate through the Internet is the new.
Obama is the first politician to use high technology-the Internet-to organize America, and to an extent, his supporters around the world. Obama has also redrawn the geographical map of red and blue states to include purple ones as well. His campaign decided, a first for any candidate, to contest the election in each of the fifty states. His skills as a community organizer led him to organize in caucus states as well. In each state, Obama built an organization that is now being expanded for the general election.
Barack Obama is the first post-civil rights, internationalist, with the most diverse background of any presidential candidate. He and voters born over the past fifty years have experienced a very different America than those who subscribe to the political models of the past. Obama came of age at a time when the United States was shifting from a homogeneous society to one that is now dominated by more racial, ethnic, economic and religious diversity than ever. It is also a nation that is more tolerant of differences, even though many of the racist attitudes linger in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky.
Obama has much to celebrate tonight. Let's hope he and his millions of supporters will be able to really celebrate very soon.
Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln
May 19, 2008
Black Voices
By Faye Anderson
Hell hath no fury like women scorned.
Hillary Clinton supporters are furious because they think she has been counted out by the media. In a full-page ad in USA Today, WomenCount, a newly organized political action committee, declared:
Not So Fast...
Hillary's Voice is OUR Voice,
And She's Speaking for All of Us
They were just getting started:We cannot stand by as a cacophony of voices demand that she step aside to smooth the road for another.
Women risked all they held dear to make this country great. They put their lives on the line in all our quests for justice – from Abigail Adams to Sojourner Truth to Susan B. Anthony to Eleanor Roosevelt to Fannie Lou Hamer to Barbara Jordan to Dolores Huerta to Hillary herself.
We know that when women vote, Democrats win. Now it is the responsibility of our party to hear our voices and count all our votes.
We want Hillary to stay in this race until every vote is cast, every vote is counted, and we are convinced our voices are heard.
It's ironic that WomenCount includes Sojourner Truth in the mix. In an address before the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner asked "Ain't I a Woman?":
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?
WomenCount reportedly was organized "to ensure that the 51 percent of American citizens who are women have their values and votes counted in the political process."
In this primary season, black women have voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. Should their voices be heard? Should their votes be counted? Are they not women?
We, who live in Southwest Florida welcome Senator Barack Obama to Tampa.
Please join Barack Obama for a rally where he'll talk about his vision for bringing America together and creating the kind of change we can believe in.
Rally with Barack Obama
St. Pete Times Forum
401 Channelside Drive
Tampa, FL
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Doors Open: 10:30 a.m.
Program Begins: 12:00 p.m.
http://fl.barackobama.com/tampa
The event is free and open to the public. Tickets are required. Admission is on a first-come, first-served basis.
For security reasons, do not bring bags. Please limit personal items. No signs or banners permitted.
Associated Press
May 18, 2008
By Matthew Mosk
PORTLAND, Ore. -- Sen. Barack Obama has seen his share of large crowds over the last 15 months, but his campaign said they have not approached the numbers gathered along the waterfront here right now.
The campaign, citing figures from Duane Bray, battalion chief of Portland Fire & Rescue, estimated that 75,000 people are watching him speak.
The scene suggests this is not an exaggeration. The sea of heads stretches for half a mile along the grassy embankment, while others watch from kayaks and power boats bobbing on the Willamette River. More hug the rails of the steel bridge that stretches across the water and crowds are even watching from jetties on the opposite shore.
By Gayle Clark
The Republicans have now decided it is fine to attack Michelle Obama. Well, if wives are fair game, then let's examine the various aspects of Cindy McCain.
Most recently, she has refused to release her tax returns and says that even if she becomes first lady, she will never release them. Hmmm, where is the attack from the right wing press on this issue? They went after both Clinton's from the beginning to release all of their tax information because without it, we would not know if there were any conflicts of interest. Am I missing something? Or might there not be conflicts of interest with respect to Cindy McCain's holdings that voters should be aware?
When John Kerry's wife refused to provide her tax information the National Review and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal went after her with a vengeance. The Wall Street Journal stated: Their assets should be disclosed to the voters so that they can assess whether there are any potential conflicts of interest." So where is the National Review and the Wall Street Journal with respect to Cindy McCain's failure to disclose?
Next, Cindy McCain was a drug addict -- she came forward with her confession AFTER she heard that a reporter was about to release the information. She was not just a drug addict, she "stole" the drugs. How did she do this -- she cajoled doctors who were doing work for her charity to write prescriptions in the names of others who worked for the organization and then she filled those prescriptions and used the drugs. And, when was this -- when she was raising four small children. And, during the time she was an addict, she was also permitted to adopt a child. The DEA, after a former employee reported the abuse to them, investigated. And what happened with that investigation -- ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
This demonstrates yet another double standard for the rich. And while Mrs. McCain was an addict and subsequently as well, her husband is a hawk in the drug wars -- wanting stronger sentencing for users. This is a clearly a double standard and it is time that someone asks him the tough questions on these issues.
Michelle Obama with two supporters of her husband's campaign.
Bill O'Reily, Fox News pundit leveled an attack against Michelle Obama when he said:
'I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama
unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman
really feels. If that's how she really feels - that is a bad country or
a flawed nation, whatever - then that's legit. We'll track it down.'
Journalist and TV host Star Jones responded to O'Reilly when she said:
'I'm sick to death of people like Fox News host, Bill O'Reilly,
and his ill thinking that he can use a racial slur against a black
woman who could be the next First Lady of the United States, give a
half- 'A' apology and not be taken to task and called on his crap.
What the H ? If it's 'legit,' you're going to 'track it down?'
And then what do you plan to do? How dare this white man with a
microphone and the trust of the public think that in 2008, he can still
put the words 'lynch and party' together in the same sentence with
reference to a black woman; in this case, Michelle Obama? I don't care
how you 'spin it' in the 'no spin zone,' that statement in and of
itself is racist, unacceptable and inappropriate on every level.
O'Reilly claims his comments were taken out of context. Please
don't insult my intelligence while you're insulting me. I've read the
comments and heard them delivered in O'Reilly's own voice; and
there is no right context that exists. So, his insincere apology and
'out-of-context' excuse is not going to cut it with me.
And just so we're clear, this has nothing to do with the 2008
presidential election, me being a Democrat, him claiming to be
Independent while talking Republican, the liberal media or a
conservative point of view. To the contrary, this is about crossing a
line in the sand that needs to be drawn based on history, dignity,
taste and truth.
Bill, I'm not sure of where you come from, but let me tell you
what the phrase 'lynching party' conjures up to me, a black woman born
in North Carolina . Those words depict the image of a group of white
men who are angry with the state of the own lives getting together,
drinking more than they need to drink, lamenting how some black person has moved forward (usually ahead of them in stature or dignity), and had
the audacity to think that they are equal. These same men for years,
instead of looking at what changes, should and could make in their own lives
that might remove that bitterness born of perceived privilege, these
white men take all of that resentment and anger and decide to get
together and drag the closest black person near them to their death by
hanging them from a tree - usually after violent beating, torturing and
violating their human dignity. Check your history books, because you
don't need a masters or a law degree from Harvard to know that is what
constitutes a 'lynching party.'
Imagine, Michelle and Barack Obama having the audacity to think
that they have the right to the American dream, hopes, and ideals.
O'Reilly must think to himself: how dare they have the arrogance to
think they can stand in a front of this nation, challenge the status
quo and express the frustration of millions? When this happens, the
first thing that comes to mind for O'Reilly and people like him is: 'it's
time for a party.'
Not so fast...don't order the rope just yet.
Would O'Reilly ever in a million years use this phrase with
reference to Elizabeth Edwards, Cindy McCain or Judi Nathan? I mean, in
all of the statements and criticisms that were made about Judi Nathan,
the one-time mistress turned missus, of former presidential candidate
Rudy Gillian, I never heard any talk of forming a lynch party because
of something she said or did.
So why is it that when you're referring to someone who's
African-American you must dig to a historical place of pain, agony and
death to symbolize your feelings? Lynching is not a joke to
off-handedly throw around and it is not a metaphor that has a place in political commentary; provocative or otherwise. I admit that I come from a place of personal outrage here having buried my 90 year-old grandfather last year. This proud, amazing African-American man raised his family through the time when he had to use separate water fountains,
ride in the back of a bus, take his wife on a date to the 'colored section'
of a movie theater, and avert his eyes when a white woman walked down
the street for fear of what a white man and his cronies might do if
they felt the urge to 'party'; don't tell me that the phrase you chose, Mr.
O'Reily, was taken out of context.
To add insult to injury, O'Reily tried to 'clarify' his statements, by using
the excuse that his comments were reminiscent of
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' use of the term 'high-tech
lynching' during his confirmation hearing. I reject that analogy. You
see Justice Thomas did mean to bring up the image of lynching in its
racist context. He was saying that politics and the media were using a
new technology to do to him what had been done to black men for many
years -- hang him. Regardless of if you agreed with Justice Thomas'
premise or not, if in fact -- Bill O'Reily was referencing it -- the
context becomes even clearer.
What annoys me more than anything is that I get the feeling
that one of the reasons Bill O'Reily made this statement, thinking
he could get away with it in the first place, and then followed it up
with a lame apology in a half-hearted attempt to smooth any ruffled
feathers, is because he doesn't think that black women will come out
and go after him when he goes after us. Well, he's dead wrong. Be
clear Bill O'Reily: there will be no lynch party for that black woman. And this black woman assures you that if you come for her, you come for all of us.'
Star Jones Reynolds
Obama Campaign Headquarters
Since yesterday, thousands of supporters from all across the country have picked up the phone and reached out to voters in Oregon and Kentucky.
You've given Barack an enormous boost -- but we still have many more potential supporters to reach before Primary Day on Tuesday.
According to our records, you have made at least 2 calls for Barack so far. If you make just 18 calls by Tuesday, you'll be at 20 for the campaign.
One voice could be what sways the decision of an undecided voter in Oregon or Kentucky.
Make some calls now and be that voice:
http://my.barackobama.com/callnow
Barack is just 17 elected delegates away from a majority, and Oregon and Kentucky could provide the delegates he needs.
With just four days remaining, we have to do everything we can to help Barack reach this crucial milestone.
We're close to the nomination -- please keep our momentum going through Tuesday:
http://my.barackobama.com/callnow
Thank you,
Obama for America
May 16, 2008
TV Pundit Backs Whites Who Vote for "One of Us"
When conservative commentator Pat Buchanan told readers of his column in March that black folks ought to be grateful that whites brought them to America in chains, MSNBC executives kept him on the air as a regular political commentator, reassuring themselves that the white nativist — some use a harsher term — showed only his tamer side on television.
Pat Buchanan
But on Wednesday night, in a discussion on MSNBC's "Hardball," Buchanan accused his colleagues of trying to paint white West Virginians as uneducated racists, and he equated white supporters of Hillary Clinton with African American supporters of Barack Obama — in each case, they simply wanted to support one their own.
He aligned himself with the white West Virginians. "Hillary was one of us," Buchanan said.
Then, in the extraordinary session, in which the commentator was joined by host Chris Matthews and NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, Buchanan associated himself with the discredited words of Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic vice presidential candidate, who said in March, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position."
Mitchell, taken aback, explained that Iowa caucus voters, who in January made Obama a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, were overwhelmingly white. "It was smart, targeted, organized campaigning in caucus states" that accounted for Obama's trajectory, she said, rather than "African American voters who are self-identifying.
"Pat, we have to reboot our systems and look at our circuits. The world has changed," Mitchell told Buchanan at the end of the exchange.
The discussion began moments after the news that former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., had endorsed Obama. It was a day after the West Virginia primary, in which Clinton won 67 percent of the vote to Obama's 26 percent, and exit polls showed two in 10 whites said the race of the candidate was a factor in their vote, a figure second only to Mississippi. According to the West Virginia surveys, 95 percent of the Democratic primary voters were white, 70 percent did not graduate from college, and 54 percent had household incomes less than $50,000, the New York Times reported.
Buchanan disparaged Edwards as "a trial lawyer with a 28,000 square foot home and gets $400 haircuts" and said that if Edwards campaigned in Kentucky, site of the next primary, on Tuesday, and Obama "gets walluped again, it's going to raise the West Virginia questions, what's the matter with this guy and white America?"
"Hillary Clinton has been able to identify herself with white rejection," Matthews said, setting off Buchanan in defense of West Virginians.
"We've been calling the white folks in West Virginia, they're uneducated, they're half-educated," he said. "You call them rejectionists. Maybe they like this gal! Last night we sat here on this set again and again and said in effect, 'Well, basically dumb uneducated white people, poor people . . .'"
To read rest of article
http://209.85.215.104/search?q=cache:n7UlByZt8M0J:www.maynardije.org/columns/dickprince/080516_prince/+When+conservative+commentator+Pat+Buchanan+told+readers+of+his+column+in+March+that+black+folks+ought+to+be+grateful+that+whites+brought+them+to+America+in+chains,+MSNBC+executives&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
Steve Capus
The letter below was published in the Washington Post in response to an article, "Misogyny I Won't Miss." Read on.....
Subject: Letter To An Anti-sexist Hillary Supporter
Dear Ms Cocco,
I read with interest your opinion piece in the Washington Post on May 15, 2008 entitled "Misogyny I Won't Miss".
Here is my opinion: Your premise is that candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has suffered outrageous sexism during the current Presidential campaign. I join you in decrying any of and all of the covert and overt sexism on display during the Campaign. However, I grow tired of and find little tolerance for your not-so-subtle accusations that, as a person of color, Senator Obama fares better than a white woman candidate. You make the all too familiar comparison, by some, that sexism is the only evil to be concerned about--thus, ignoring the evil of racism. How ridiculous. You do nothing in making a case against sexism when you compare it to racism declaring that--by extension--all persons of color (including women of color) have it easier than white women.
Even more insulting is your attitude that when you use the term "women" in reference to this campaign you are talking in code language to mean white women. Are not women who are other than white--such as African American women, Hispanic women, Asian women,etc.--women also? Why are you so exclusive in your view of women?
Please understand that women are diverse in their thinking and in every other way. Most women, in my opinion, are more than ready for a woman president in the White House; however, for many women, Hilliary is not that woman. Does this make them sexist or disloyal to the cause of women? I don't think so! To demand women support Senator Clinton based on gender and gender alone is preposterous and such demands have enraged many women--including me.
Ms. Cocco, you do women and feminism great harm in playing down racism in favor of sexism. Racism is very much a part of this presidential campaign--let me count the ways! Unfortunately Bill and Hilliary Clinton and their surrogates have played an overt and covert role in their "win at all and at any cost" strategy which uses race and racist tactics. The Clinton's have manipulated gender and race/racism while Obama has not manipulated race or gender. In fact, Senator Obama has concentrated on bridging the divides in our society.
I am a native of Iowa--born and raised. I am so pleased to see the role that my home state played in demonstrating that white Americans will vote for a person of African descent for the highest and most powerful office in the world. In fact, I am pleased that a majority of whites have voted for Senator Obama which is evident by the fact that he is so close to capturing the nomination and leads Senator Clinton in every count--delegates, number of votes casts, number of primaries won, etc. The fact that Senator Obama is capturing 90% and more of the Black vote reflects pride and recognition of his skill and qualifications as well as the broader politics of peace vs war. Most, if not all, are--regardless of race and background--responding to his message of peace, change and putting the divisive tactics of the Clinton's behind us. Setting gender and race aside for a moment, you must admit that Senator Clinton has run an inferior campaign as compared to Senator Obama's efficient and effective campaign.
In my opinion, you don't and won't rid this country and world of sexism by manipulating and using racism to Hilliary Clinton's perceived advantage. I encourage you to stop the inflammatory insinuations and statements --playing on the division of race and gender. In doing so, you are part of the problem and not the solution. You and others of similar persuasion prolong the day when this country and the world is free of the twin "isms" of racism and sexism.
Sincerely,
Carole Kennerly
Former city council member
Berkeley, California
By Joyce Ladner
If you are one of those Barack Obama supporters who has wondered why John Edwards had not endorsed Barack Obama, it's finally settled. "The reason I am here tonight is because the Democratic voters of America have made their choice and so have I," Edwards said.
No sweeter words were ever spoken when John Edwards said Obama is the one person who can unite this country. Surrounded by auto workers in Michigan where Obama gave a major economic address earlier today, Barack played his trump card. He had a hand full of Aces, Kings, Queens, and Jacks. He laid them all on the table. What an endorsement it was!
I always liked John Edwards. He grew up as a working class boy in North Carolina, much like I did in Mississippi. What defines him is that he kept his tender heart for the poor and oppressed. His was the only voice on the campaign trail that pleaded with Americans to help the poor and to break up the "government for hire" culture between legislators and lobbyists. When he withdrew from the race, he extracted an agreement from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to keep the issue of poverty in the forefront. They kept their promises and today John Edwards threw his lot in a stunning endorsement.
Edwards also stepped on Hillary's parade and nullified the talking heads unsubstantiated claims that the country is irretrievably fractured by race. Hint, hint: the country will never elect a black man. Coming on the heels of Hillary's huge win last night in West Virginia, this endorsement diminishes the importance of her effort to find a miraculous way to get the nomination. Edwards brings with him nineteen delegates which puts Obama short of 100 needed for the nomination.
The most critical role Edwards can play is to take on the issues of race and class. He can campaign in working class white areas of the country, and give Obama the legitimacy he needs very much. Further down the road, if Obama is elected, I hope Edwards becomes attorney general or that Obama will create a special Cabinet Position for reducing poverty in half over the next decade.
Go John and Barack!!
Rachel Maddow's TV Ratings Shoot Through the Roof
The greatest thing for news junkies is the current line-up on MSNBC. Pundits Chris Matthews, Keith Oblberman have been joined by the super-bright Rhodes Scholar, Rachel Maddow. The girl is smart! She is also courageous and calls a spade a spade. Check her out.
By Jan Frel, AlterNet
Posted on September 18, 2008, Printed on September 19, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/99378/
The latest cable news ratings show that Rachel Maddow is already ahead of Keith Olbermann and Larry King. Quite a feat in the ultra-competitive TV news environment.
Cable News Ratings for Tuesday, September 16
8PM - P2+ (25-54) (35-64)
The O'Reilly Factor- 3,060,000 viewers (731,000) (1,253,000)
Election Center-1,166,000 viewers (431,000) (576,000)
Countdown w/Keith Olbermann- 1,635,000 viewers (509,000) (771,000)
On the Money--207,000 viewers (65,000) (106,000)
Nancy Grace -1,166,000 viewers (412,000) (618,000)
9 PM - P2+ (25-54) (35-64)
Hannity & Colmes-3,136,000 viewers (716,000) (1,375,000)
Larry King--1,710,000 viewers (496,000) (801,000)
Rachel Maddow Show-1,801,000 viewers (534,000) (872,000)
Business of Innovation--a scratch w/102,000 viewers (a scratch w/42,000) (59,000)
Glenn Beck- 656,000 viewers (211,000) (354,000)
Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/99378/
McCain's Closing Argument
Washington Post
Columnist
By George F. Will
September 18, 2008
Man is in love and loves what vanishes.
What more is there to say?
-- William Butler Yeats
Conservatives, who reputedly have lumps of coal where their hearts should be, have fallen in love. So have many people who are not doctrinal conservatives. The world is a sweeter place because Sarah Palin has increased the quantity of love, but this is not a reliable foundation for John McCain's campaign.
The tech bubble was followed by the housing bubble, which has been topped by the Palin bubble. Bubbles will always be with us, because irrational exuberance always will be. Its symptom is the assumption that old limits have yielded to undreamed-of possibilities: The Dow will always rise, as will housing prices, and rapture about a running mate can be decisive in a presidential election.
Palin is as bracing as an Arctic breeze and delightfully elicits the condescension of liberals whose enthusiasm for everyday middle-class Americans cannot survive an encounter with one. But the country's romance with her will, as romances do, cool somewhat, and even before November some new fad might distract a nation that loves "American Idol" for the metronomic regularity with which it discovers genius in persons hitherto unsuspected of it.
McCain should, therefore, enunciate a closing argument for his candidacy that goes to fundamentals of governance, concerning which the vice presidency is usually peripheral. His argument should assert the virtues of something that voters, judging by their behavior over time, prefer -- divided government.
The incumbent Republican president's job approval is in the low 30s but is about 10 points higher than that of the Democratic-controlled Congress. The 22nd Amendment will banish the president in January, but Congress will then be even more Democratic than it is now. Does the country really want there to be no check on it? Consider two things that will quickly become law unless McCain is there to veto them or unless -- this is a thin reed on which to depend -- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has 40 reliable senators to filibuster them to deserved deaths.
The exquisitely misnamed Employee Free Choice Act would strip from workers their right to secret ballots in unionization elections. Instead, unions could use the "card check" system: Once a majority of a company's employees -- each person confronted one on one by a union organizer in an inherently coercive setting -- sign cards expressing consent, the union would be certified as the bargaining agent for all workers. Proving that the law's purpose is less to improve workers' conditions than to capture dues payers for the unions, the law would forbid employers from discouraging unionization by giving "unilateral" -- not negotiated -- improvements in compensation and working conditions.
Unless McCain is president, the government will reinstate the equally misnamed "fairness doctrine." Until Ronald Reagan eliminated it in 1987, that regulation discouraged freewheeling political programming by the threat of litigation over inherently vague standards of "fairness" in presenting "balanced" political views. In 1980 there were fewer than 100 radio talk shows nationwide. Today there are more than 1,400 stations entirely devoted to talk formats. Liberals, not satisfied with their domination of academia, Hollywood and most of the mainstream media, want to kill talk radio, where liberals have been unable to dent conservatives' dominance.
Today, as usual, but perhaps even more so, Americans are in the iron grip of cognitive dissonance. It is a genteel mental disorder afflicting those people -- essentially everybody -- who have contradictory convictions and yearnings. Consider health care. Americans want 2008 medicine at 1958 prices, and universal coverage with undiminished choice -- without mandatory purchases or government interference with choices, including doctor-patient relationships. As usual, neither party completely pleases a majority of voters. That is why 19 of the 31 elections since World War II produced or preserved divided government -- the presidency and at least one chamber of Congress controlled by different parties.
Divided government compels compromises that curb each party's excesses, especially both parties' proclivities for excessive spending when unconstrained by an institution controlled by the other party. William Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, notes that in the past 50 years, "government spending has increased an average of only 1.73 percent annually during periods of divided government. This number more than triples, to 5.26 percent, for periods of unified government."
By picking Palin, McCain got the country's attention. That is a perishable thing, and before it dissipates, he should show the country his veto pen.
georgewill@washpost.com
Katrina Memories Give Republicans Reason to Worry
September 2, 2008
By Donna Brazile
Roll Call Staff
What a difference three years have made in the federal government’s understanding of how to effectively, efficiently and compassionately deal with a natural disaster like a powerful hurricane hitting our nation’s shores.
While the soap opera aspect of the Republican presidential campaign continues to unfold under the mainstream media radar, I’d rather spend my time and attention while I’m here at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., focusing on Hurricane Gustav, whose damaging winds and torrential rainfall are at this very moment wreaking havoc on 300 miles of New Orleans levees still under repair from three years ago.
The Republicans gathered here to nominate Arizona Sen. John McCain and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin appear hopeful that Hurricane Gustav will wash away our memories of how the Bush White House and Republican-run federal government mishandled Hurricane Katrina.
Three years ago, we as a nation sat transfixed in horror as we watched our fellow Americans either bake or drown while waiting to be rescued from rooftops and the hellholes that were the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center. After three years, the images that once burned onto disbelieving retinas continue to sear our hearts and memory.
It is impossible to forget the horrors of that week and the pain and suffering of those left behind and forgotten. Nor should we forget. Americans were left to die. And we watched them being left to die. More than 1,600 folks did die. Dead from their government’s incompetence, they live on in our thoughts and prayers — and votes.
Ironically, almost three years to the day after Hurricane Katrina made landfall and displaced hundreds of thousand of Americans left scattered across the country, the nation is once again reminded that it matters who sits behind the desk in the Oval Office. This time, the federal government is not outsourcing its responsibilities to the state and local government. This time, the executive branch has instructed the federal government to respond.
The 2008 Republican National Convention is still up in the air as organizers continue to scramble to pull together a truncated schedule that allows them to nominate their presidential and vice presidential candidates. The delegates and alternates who have gathered from across America are truly sympathetic to the plight of those who had to evacuate.
Yes, they are deeply concerned. Indeed, as I write this, they are looking for ways to help the GOP delegates from areas threatened by Hurricane Gustav get home safely to assess the damage and begin the repairing process.
No doubt McCain is painfully aware that all eyes will be on how his party and its leader will treat this latest attack on New Orleans and its Gulf Coast neighbors. No doubt he remembers where he was when Katrina hit landfall three years ago: in Arizona with President Bush celebrating his birthday. Like the president, who is holding fort in the emergency command centers in Texas, McCain is aware that the American people are watching. Pictures matter, but so do public policies.
We continue to lack public policies that will help people with houses damaged from Gustav (and Katrina and Rita, for that matter) repair their homes and rebuild their lives. Tens of thousands of Americans remain exiled from their homes.
I met one such survivor here at the Republican convention. She’s working as a top chef at one of the major hotels. Like me, she was born at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. When raging storm waters flooded her home, she fled to safety in St. Paul.
While watching the TV set near the hotel dining room with her, I watch as tears stream down her face. I promise her things will be better this time. I tell her the government will get everyone out safely and, later, help them get back home.
“I hope so,” she tells me. “I still am here and cannot go back.”
Aletha is not alone. So many thousands of people, including my own siblings, must answer many questions after this storm has passed. Can they go back and rebuild their lives? Can they afford to replace the roofs, windows and the other broken bits of their homes destroyed by Gustav? And what about the schools, the roads, the bridges and the hospitals? Will they also be rebuilt? When?
Soon, we can only hope. Just as we can only hope that the Republicans gathered here in Minnesota this week will not forget Gustav’s victims after they return home and it’s back to politics as usual.
McCain faces a unique challenge this week. He must not only distance himself from the uncompassionate and incompetent response of the Bush administration concerning Hurricane Katrina; he must also distance himself from his own hapless and heartless response.
After all, McCain voted against the emergency funding bill, including $28 billion for hurricane relief.
McCain voted against giving Katrina victims five months of Medicaid services.
He voted — twice — against establishing a commission to study the response to Hurricane Katrina.
And he opposed granting financial relief to families affected by Hurricane Katrina.
McCain talks about putting the country first. I support those who talk about putting the American people first.
How McCain reacts to and deals with these two latest events — Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Palin (the soap opera involving the politically naive rookie he chose to be his running mate) — will demonstrate to the American people the kind of judgment and leadership they can expect from him as president. Along with the rest of America, the good and beleaguered folks of the Gulf Coast states will be watching closely. And, come Election Day, they will not forget.
Donna Brazile, the campaign manager for Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore in 2000, runs her own grass-roots political consulting firm.
Official 2008 Obama/McCain Presidential Debate Schedule
The official Presidential debate schedule for John McCain and Barack Obama has been finalized and released in a joint statement from each campaign. There will also be a vice presidential debate as well.
Here is the full official debate schedule:
Forums:
August 16, 2008: Video: Saddleback Civil Forum with Rick Warren at Saddleback Church, Lake Forest California
(Not part of the official sanctioned schedule but both candidates attended)
Debates:
-2008-
September 26, 2008: Presidential debate with domestic policy focus, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS
October 2, 2008: Vice Presidential debate, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
October 7, 2008: Presidential debate in a town hall format, Belmont University, Nashville, TN
October 15, 2008: Presidential debate with foreign policy focus, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is a break down of what each debate will consist of:
1. First Presidential Debate: – Date: September 26 – Site: University of Mississippi – Topic: Foreign Policy & National Security – Moderator: Jim Lehrer – Staging: Podium debate – Answer Format: The debate will be broken into nine, 9-minute segments. The moderator will introduce a topic and allow each candidate 2 minutes to comment. After these initial answers, the moderator will facilitate an open discussion of the topic for the remaining 5 minutes, ensuring that both candidates receive an equal amount of time to comment
2. Vice Presidential Debate – Date: October 2nd – Site: Washington University (St. Louis) – Moderator: Gwen Ifill – Staging/Answer Format: To be resolved after both parties’ Vice Presidential nominees are selected.
3. Second Presidential Debate – Date: October 7 – Site: Belmont University – Moderator: Tom Brokaw – Staging: Town Hall debate – Format: The moderator will call on members of the audience (and draw questions from the internet). Each candidate will have 2 minutes to respond to each question. Following those initial answers, the moderator will invite the candidates to respond to the previous answers, for a total of 1 minute, ensuring that both candidates receive an equal amount of time to comment. In the spirit of the Town Hall, all questions will come from the audience (or internet), and not the moderator.
4. Third Presidential Debate – Date: October 15 – Site: Hofstra University – Topic: Domestic and Economic policy – Moderator: Bob Schieffer – Staging: Candidates will be seated at a table – Answer Format: Same as First Presidential Debate – Closing Statements: At the end of this debate (only) each candidate shall have the opportunity for a 90 second closing statement.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All four debates will begin at 9pm ET, and last for 90 minutes. Both campaigns also agreed to accept the CPD’s participation rules for third-party candidate participation.
All 4 debates will be broadcast on the major broadcast networks, including CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX. They will also be aired on cable news channels such as CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and C-SPAN.
We will have full videos of each debate uploaded once they air.
Palin's Problem
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, September 5, 2008
"There are two questions we will never have to ask ourselves, 'Who is this man?' and 'Can we trust this man with the presidency?' "
-- Fred Thompson on John McCain, Sept. 2
This was the most effective line of the entire Republican convention: a ringing affirmation of John McCain's authenticity and a not-so-subtle indictment of Barack Obama's insubstantiality. What's left of this line of argument, however, after John McCain picks Sarah Palin for vice president?
Palin is an admirable and formidable woman. She has energized the Republican base and single-handedly unified the Republican convention behind McCain. She performed spectacularly in her acceptance speech. Nonetheless, the choice of Palin remains deeply problematic.
It's clear that McCain picked her because he had decided that he needed a game-changer. But why? He'd closed the gap in the polls with Obama. True, that had more to do with Obama sagging than McCain gaining. But what's the difference? You win either way.
Obama was sagging because of missteps that reflected the fundamental weakness of his candidacy. Which suggested McCain's strategy: Make this a referendum on Obama, surely the least experienced, least qualified, least prepared presidential nominee in living memory.
Palin fatally undermines this entire line of attack. This is through no fault of her own. It is simply a function of her rookie status. The vice president's only constitutional duty of any significance is to become president at a moment's notice. Palin is not ready. Nor is Obama. But with Palin, the case against Obama evaporates.
So why did McCain do it? He figured it's a Democratic year. The Republican brand is deeply tarnished. The opposition is running on "change" in a change election. So McCain gambled that he could steal the change issue for himself -- a crazy brave, characteristically reckless, inconceivably difficult maneuver -- by picking an authentically independent, tough-minded reformer. With Palin, he doubles down on change.
The problem is the inherent oddity of the incumbent party running on change. Here were Republicans -- the party that controlled the White House for eight years and both houses of Congress for five -- wildly cheering the promise to take on Washington. I don't mean to be impolite, but who's controlled Washington this decade?
Moreover, McCain was giving up his home turf of readiness to challenge Obama on his home turf of change. Can that possibly be pulled off? The calculation was to choose demographics over thematics. Palin's selection negates the theme of readiness. But she does bring important constituencies. She has the unique potential of energizing the base while at the same time appealing to independents.
This is unusual. Normally the wing-nut candidate alienates the center. Palin promises a twofer because of her potential appeal to the swing-state Reagan Democrats that Hillary Clinton carried in the primaries. Not for reasons of gender -- Clinton didn't carry those voters because she was a woman -- but because more culturally conservative working-class whites might find affinity with Palin's small-town, middle/frontier American narrative and values.
The gamble is enormous. In a stroke, McCain gratuitously forfeited his most powerful argument against Obama. And this was even before Palin's inevitable liabilities began to pile up -- inevitable because any previously unvetted neophyte has "issues." The kid. The state trooper investigation. And worst, the paucity of any Palin record or expressed conviction on the major issues of our time.McCain has one hope. It is suggested by the strength of Palin's performance Wednesday night. In a year of compounding ironies, the McCain candidacy could be saved, and the Palin choice vindicated, by one thing: Palin pulls an Obama.
Obama showed that star power can trump the gravest of biographical liabilities. The sheer elegance, intelligence and power of his public presence have muted the uneasy feeling about his unreadiness. Palin does not reach Obama's mesmeric level. Her appeal is far more earthy, workmanlike and direct. Yet she managed to banish a week's worth of unfriendly media scrutiny and self-inflicted personal liabilities with a single triumphant speech.
Now, Obama had 19 months to make his magic obscure his thinness. Palin has nine weeks. Nevertheless, if she too can neutralize unreadiness with star power, then the demographic advantages she brings McCain -- appeal to the base and to Reagan Democrats -- coupled with her contribution to the reform theme, might just pay off. The question is: Can she do the magic -- unteleprompted extemporaneous magic, from now on -- for the next nine weeks?
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
National Election News from The Miss America Organization
This has to be a first: the Miss America Paegant issued a press release on the VP stakes.
McCain Names Former Miss Alaska Contestant as Running Mate
We are pleased to announce that former Miss Alaska contestant, Sarah Heath Palin, has just been named as John McCain’s vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket. In 1984, Palin was chosen as Miss Wasilla and went on to become the first runner-up in the Miss Alaska Pageant and received the Miss Congeniality award the same year. Her husband, Todd Palin was a judge in the 2008 Miss Alaska Pageant.
Congratulations on this exciting news for the Miss Alaska Organization!
The Oprah-fication of Michelle Obama
August 26, 2008
New York Times
By The Editorial Board
If Barack Obama is elected president, a good chunk of credit should go to Oprah Winfrey. Her early and enthusiastic endorsement of Senator Obama – and her heavily attended appearances with him in Iowa and South Carolina – played a big role in winning over bit parts of Middle America to the Obama cause.
Ms. Winfrey has since faded into the background of the campaign, but her impact persists – perhaps nowhere more than in Monday night’s speech by Michelle Obama.
It was one of the most important speeches of the convention – far more so than the crowd-pleasing valedictory of Senator Edward M. Kennedy the same night. The campaign still has a significant selling job to do with Michelle Obama, who has been repeatedly baited by Republicans as angry, hostile to whites, and un-American.
Ms. Obama did an admirable job of turning back the right-wing assault – and she did it with an Oprah script:
Sentiment Is More Important Than Politics – One reason Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement of Senator Obama was so unusual is that with few exceptions, she has stayed away from politics. What she sells on her television show and in her magazine, for the most part, are sentiment, good feeling, and self-improvement.
In her speech, Ms. Obama made the major theme family – a very sweet version of family. She began with her brother, whom she described as “watching over me.” She moved on to the sustaining love of her mother and her late father, and then to her husband and children.
Doting wife and mother may be the role Americans have come to expect from their first ladies, but it was laid on heavily.
Ms. Obama has always talked a good deal about her family, but she has done so with a refreshing tartness. It was not love at first sight with her husband. When he first began asking her out, she has said, she refused, concerned it would interfere with their work.
She has talked about being the taskmaster in the Obama household, doling out assignments and keeping the girls on the straight and narrow. Those more piquant notes were left out Monday night.
Life is About Triumphing Over Adversity – Ms. Winfrey, who has spoken often of being a childhood sexual abuse victim, has emphasized the importance of rising above difficult circumstances. It is one of her favorite themes in life and literature.
Ms. Obama has a lot to be proud of, and her speech emphasized the struggle. She described herself as “raised on the South Side of Chicago by a father who was a blue-collar city worker.” Perhaps since her own rise has been so steady, she recounted her father’s difficulties in detail. He battled multiple sclerosis in his 30s, she said, struggled to button his shirt, and used “two canes to get himself across the room to give my mom a kiss.”
Keeping a Gratitude Journal – Ms. Winfrey has had a lot to be unhappy about over the years, from the early abuse, to racism during her childhood in the Jim Crow South, to obstacles of more recent vintage. Her advice has always been not to dwell on the negative, but to keep a journal of everything one is grateful for.
So it was with Ms. Obama Monday night. The comments she has at times made about America’s flaws - refreshingly candid perhaps, but also politically maladroit - were deleted. In their place was a whole section on “Why I Love This Country.”
The “Oprah Moment” — Ms. Obama’s speech ended with an “Oprah moment.” As a surprise — and as those free-car winners can attest, Ms. Winfrey loves surprises — Senator Obama appeared from a remote location (in a swing state), and bantered with the family. “How do you think Mommy did?” It was quintessential Oprah.
There is, of course, a reason Ms. Winfrey is so popular. Her story lines are ones that resonate strongly with many Americans – and non-Americans. Through those themes, Ms. Winfrey may do as much for Michelle Obama as she has already done for Barack Obama.
Too Much of a Bad Thing
August 24, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
New York Times
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
My mom did not approve of men who cheated on their wives. She called them “long-tailed rats.”
During the 2000 race, she listened to news reports about John McCain confessing to dalliances that caused his first marriage to fall apart after he came back from his stint as a P.O.W. in Vietnam.
I figured, given her stringent moral standards, that her great affection for McCain would be dimmed.
“So,” I asked her, “what do you think of that?”
“A man who lives in a box for five years can do whatever he wants,” she replied matter-of-factly.
I was startled, but it brought home to me what a powerful get-out-of-jail-free card McCain had earned by not getting out of jail free.
His brutal hiatus in the Hanoi Hilton is one of the most stirring narratives ever told on the presidential trail — a trail full of heroic war stories. It created an enormous credit line of good will with the American people. It also allowed McCain, the errant son of the admiral who was the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific during Vietnam — his jailers dubbed McCain the “Crown Prince” — to give himself some credit.
“He has been preoccupied with escaping the shadow of his father and establishing his own image and identity in the eyes of others,” read a psychiatric evaluation in his medical files. “He feels his experiences and performance as a P.O.W. have finally permitted this to happen.”
The ordeal also gave a more sympathetic cast to his carousing. As Robert Timberg wrote in “John McCain: An American Odyssey,” “What is true is that a number of P.O.W.’s, in those first few years after their release, often acted erratically, their lives pockmarked by drastic mood swings and uncharacteristic behavior before achieving a more mellow equilibrium.” Timberg said Hemingway’s line that people were stronger in the broken places was not always right.
So it’s hard to believe that John McCain is now in danger of exceeding his credit limit on the equivalent of an American Express black card. His campaign is cheapening his greatest strength — and making a mockery of his already dubious claim that he’s reticent to talk about his P.O.W. experience — by flashing the P.O.W. card to rebut any criticism, no matter how unrelated. The captivity is already amply displayed in posters and TV advertisements.
The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, the pastor who married Jenna Bush and who is part of a new Christian-based political action committee supporting Obama, recently criticized the joke McCain made at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally encouraging Cindy to enter the topless Miss Buffalo Chip contest. The McCain spokesman Brian Rogers brought out the bottomless excuse, responding with asperity that McCain’s character had been “tested and forged in ways few can fathom.”
When the Obama crowd was miffed to learn that McCain was in a motorcade rather than in a “cone of silence” while Obama was being questioned by Rick Warren, Nicolle Wallace of the McCain camp retorted, “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.”
When Obama chaffed McCain for forgetting how many houses he owns, Rogers huffed, “This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison.”
As Sam Stein notes in The Huffington Post: “The senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba, he offered that his knowledge of music ‘stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile.’ ‘Dancing Queen,’ however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain’s plane was shot down.”
The Kerry Swift-boat attacks in 2004 struck down the off-limits signs that were traditionally on a candidate’s military service. Many Democrats are willing to repay the favor, and Republicans clearly no longer see war medals as sacrosanct.
In a radio interview last week, Representative Terry Everett, an Alabama Republican, let loose with a barrage at the Democrat John Murtha, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who is the head of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, calling him “cut-and-run John Murtha” and an “idiot.”
“And don’t talk to me about him being an ex-marine,” Everett said. “Lord, that was 40 years ago. A lot of stuff can happen in 40 years.”
The real danger to the McCain crew in overusing the P.O.W. line so much that it’s a punch line is that it will give Obama an opening for critical questions:
While McCain’s experience was heroic, did it create a worldview incapable of anticipating the limits to U.S. military power in Iraq? Did he fail to absorb the lessons of Vietnam, so that he is doomed to always want to refight it? Did his captivity inform a search-and-destroy, shoot-first-ask-questions-later, “We are all Georgians,” mentality?
Toby Keith said he likes Barack Obama
LOS ANGELES — Barack Obama is getting praise from Nashville, courtesy of one big, patriotic country star.
Toby Keith, perhaps best known to non-country audiences for his post-Sept. 11 song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue," says he's a Democrat, and was impressed by the senator from Illinois.
Keith has said in the past that the 2002 song — which included lines aimed at the Taliban like "we lit up your world like the Fourth of July" — was more patriotic than pro-war.
Asked while promoting his new movie "Beer For My Horses" about the role of patriotism in the current presidential election, Keith replied: "There's a big part of America that really believes that there is a war on terrorism, and that we need to finish up.
"So I thought it was beautiful the other day when Obama went to Afghanistan and got educated about Afghanistan and Iraq. He came back and said some really nice things.
"So as far as leadership and patriotism goes, I think it's really important that those things have to take place. And I think he's the best Democratic candidate we've had since Bill Clinton. And that's coming from a Democrat."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Par for Mr. Corsi
An expert at misrepresentation takes on Barack Obama.
Washington Post
Editorial
Friday, August 15, 2008
THERE'S A cottage industry in books about Barack Obama; by one count, more than 20 are just out or are in the works. But few debut in the No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list, as Jerome R. Corsi's "The Obama Nation" will do among nonfiction hardcover titles this week. Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, given his earlier hit job on the last Democratic nominee, Mr. Corsi's latest is rife with inaccuracies and innuendo. If the fundamental smear of "Unfit for Command" was that John F. Kerry was no war hero, the insinuation of Mr. Corsi's latest is that Mr. Obama is a closet Muslim and militant, black activist drug-user.
"The Obama Nation" -- the ungainly play on words (abomination, get it?) is "fully intended," the author tells us -- reprises the Corsi method. Mr. Corsi boasts that "I fully document all arguments and contentions I make, extensively footnoting all references" and asserts that "my fundamental opposition to Obama's presidential candidacy involves public policy differences." But footnoting to a discredited blog item does not constitute careful scholarship, and the bulk of Mr. Corsi's book has nothing to do with issues.
He gets facts wrong, from the date of Mr. Obama's marriage to whether he dedicated his autobiography to his family (he did) to whether he revealed that he took his future wife on his second trip to Kenya (he did.) He makes offensive statements: "The sexual attraction of his mother to her African husband jumps out from the page."
When facts are lacking, Mr. Corsi makes his point by suggestive questions. Noting that Life magazine could find no record of an article that Mr. Obama remembered reading as a child about a black man who tried to lighten his skin, Mr. Corsi asks, "How much more imagining, hypothetical lying, or just plain lying is Obama capable of doing?" When facts are present, he twists them to make Mr. Obama bad.
Mr. Corsi's discussion of Mr. Obama's drug use -- disclosed by Mr. Obama in his autobiography -- manages to combine a few of these techniques. "Still, Obama has yet to answer questions whether he ever dealt drugs, or if he stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug usage extended into his law school days or beyond. Did Obama ever use drugs in his days as a community organizer in Chicago, or when he was a state senator from Illinois? How about in the U.S. Senate?" In fact, Mr. Obama has said that he stopped using drugs when he was 20. Mr. Corsi is similarly misleading about Mr. Obama's religious background, questioning his claim to be Christian. "Obama had to know that running for political office, even state office, would be much more difficult to do if voters suspected he was a Muslim," Corsi writes. "Yet once Obama became a member of Trinity, he had proof he was a Christian, as he professed to be."
Mr. Corsi has dismissed criticisms of his book as "nit-picking," an odd defense coming from an author happy to inflate any possible omission into a full-blown evasion. Mary Matalin, the Republican political strategist who heads Threshold Editions, the Simon and Schuster division that published "The Obama Nation," described the book to the New York Times as "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that." That would not be our description.
When political hacks edit books.
chatterbox
Mary Matalin, Publisher
By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2008, at 7:04 PM ET
Jerome R. Corsi has written a book about Barack Obama cleverly titled The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. The book is published by Threshold Editions, Mary Matalin's imprint at Simon & Schuster. It "was not designed to be, and does not set out to be, a political book," Matalin sniffed to Jim Rutenberg and Julie Bosman of the New York Times. Rather, it is "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that." Corsi holds a doctorate in government from Harvard University, and the book's cover highlights Corsi's academic credential with the byline "Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.d."
But Corsi, a staff reporter for the hard-right World Net Daily and co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, a 2004 hit job published by the hard-right Regnery, maintains his scholarly posture with some difficulty. In his off-hours, Corsi calls Arabs "ragheads" and Bill Clinton an "anti-American communist" on Internet message boards. Susan Estrich is "Susan Estrogen" and Katie Couric is "Little Katie Communist." In the past, Corsi's fellow conservative, Debbie Schlussel, has even accused Corsi of plagiarism (though, to be fair, this looks to me more like garden-variety theft, i.e., taking an idea and some facts from another columnist without extending the usual courtesy of a citation; a minor offense in journalism, if not in academia).
Why did Corsi write The Obama Nation? Was it in disinterested pursuit of scholarly truth? Er, not exactly. "The goal is to defeat Obama," he told the Times. "I don't want Obama to be in office."
I haven't read The Obama Nation. But both the Times and Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog Web site (and the source of my above links to "ragheads," etc.), cite multiple errors in the book. Ordinarily, when an author or an editor discovers errors in a book's text, he or she arranges to correct them in the next printing. I've done this myself. But neither Corsi nor Matalin responded to e-mails from me asking whether they intended to correct any errors in The Obama Nation—it would be a miracle if there were none. In the Times, Corsi brushed aside the Media Matters critique because of its politics. Now, I yield to no one in my skepticism regarding the veracity of Media Matters' chief executive officer, the former right-wing hit man David Brock. But Media Matters operates on the principle of transparency, providing links and video clips necessary to assess its claims of falsehood. Sometimes the claims hold up; sometimes they seem like a reach. Most of its findings concerning The Obama Nation are unassailable. For instance, Obama either has or hasn't stated publicly when he stopped using marijuana and cocaine. According to Corsi, he hasn't. According to Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father he has. "I stopped getting high" when he was an undergraduate at Columbia, Obama writes. The Times further notes that in 2003, Obama told the State Journal-Register of Springfield, Ill., in response to a question about drug use, "I haven't done anything since I was 20 years old." When the Times confronted Corsi with this information, he changed the subject from his book's obvious error to what he deems the unreliability of self-reporting on matters of drug use. Which, of course, was entirely beside the point.
All this raises the question of whether the world of "conservative" publishing, which includes not only Matalin's imprint at Simon & Schuster but also Random House's Crown Forum and Penguin Group USA's Sentinel, aspires even to the standards of the nonideological (or what conservatives call the "liberal") publishing establishment, which are nothing to write home about. What I've learned about The Obama Nation suggests it does not. What the hell is Mary Matalin doing running a publishing imprint in the first place? She is a professional propagandist, a political operative who learned her craft at the feet not of Maxwell Perkins but of Lee Atwater. Truth is not what she's about; campaigns are, and for Matalin, The Obama Nation would appear to be just another campaign. This isn't to say that, through her Threshold imprint, Matalin is subverting Simon & Schuster's pursuit of profit to partisan ends. Quite the contrary. Simon & Schuster and the other big publishing houses have started conservative imprints, at arms' length and with noses held, because they recognize them to be a gold mine. The Obama Nation, the Times reports, will debut on its best-seller list this Sunday at No. 1. But part of the deal, clearly, is that conservative imprints aren't required to adhere to the same standards of truth as the grown-up divisions. If an Erwin Glikes or even an Adam Bellow is available to edit your conservative fall list, fine. But in a pinch, a Mary Matalin will do. It's what George W. Bush memorably dubbed the soft bigotry of low expectations. The conservative movement has won the publishing houses' attention but not their respect. Does it even care?
Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2197432/
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Obama as Incumbent
Washington Post
Columnist
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Monday, August 11, 2008
The core strategy of John McCain's campaign is to turn Barack Obama into the incumbent, the man who is too familiar yet still mysterious.
The effort reflects one of the most remarkable aspects of the 2008 campaign: Obama has turned himself into the central figure in American politics. That is an extraordinary achievement, but it comes at a price.
One cost was measured by a Pew Research Center study released last week that found that 48 percent of all those surveyed -- and 51 percent of the political independents -- said they had heard "too much" about Obama. Only 26 percent (and 28 percent of independents) said that about McCain.
This is understandable: From mid- to late-February until only the past week or so, Obama had received far more media attention than McCain, according to the Campaign Coverage Index produced by Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Obama's centrality has created an odd dynamic. The most important influences on the campaign are President Bush's unpopularity and the collapse of public sympathy for the Republican Party, meaning that a majority is inclined to vote for the Democratic nominee unless he is rendered unacceptable.
But with Bush fading into the background, McCain's campaign has been more about Obama than about himself. In recent weeks, McCain's advertising tossed one charge after another at the man painted serially as "the biggest celebrity in the world," "Dr. No" and "The One." McCain's attacks, which helped build Obama fatigue, continued over the weekend.
Yet Obama has absorbed the assaults and headed to his holiday in Hawaii holding an advantage of four to six percentage points -- roughly the same margin he has enjoyed all summer. This led political strategists in both parties with whom I spoke in recent days to challenge the conventional wisdom of an Obama campaign that is "underperforming."
Obama has been criticized for not responding quickly enough to the McCain offensive. But the past two weeks have solidified voters' perceptions, measured in recent polls, that the Republican campaign is far more negative than Obama's. This opens space for Obama to respond forcefully to McCain without being accused of initiating the attacks.
Moreover, a candidate who spends all his time defining his opponent has not spent much time defining himself. McCain is living off his maverick image. This has fed voter perceptions that he is moderate and independent, allowing him to run more competitively with Obama than any of McCain's primary opponents could have.
Despite McCain's longevity in the public eye, though, a CBS News poll last week found a third of voters still undecided in their opinion of McCain or saying they didn't know enough to form one. (Roughly the same proportion said this about Obama.)
This leaves room for Democrats to define McCain as a conventional conservative and a Bush supporter. And some Republicans wonder if McCain, by absorbing so many Bush operatives into his campaign, may have limited his maneuvering room to declare his independence from an unpopular president.
In the past two weeks, McCain has succeeded in narrowing the economic discussion to energy and oil drilling, forcing Obama to respond defensively. But "drill, drill, drill" is not a slogan that can carry McCain through November, given the range of the electorate's economic discontents.
There is a certain shrewdness to the McCain campaign's effort to turn Obama's strengths -- the energy he excites in crowds, the historic nature of his candidacy and the interest he has created overseas -- into weaknesses.
"They're trying to make lemonade out of a lemon," said one Democratic strategist who is not working for the Obama campaign. "It's not a bad thing to do, but it's a sign of weakness."
Thus the effort to turn Obama into the incumbent. McCain loses if the race becomes a referendum on Bush. He is running behind on most issues. And he has yet to generate the commitment among those who say they're for him that Obama has inspired among his own supporters.
The one contest McCain can win is an election about Obama. Paradoxically, Obama's imperative at his convention is to reassure voters about who he is while also moving the spotlight off himself.
postchat@aol.com
Political Wives Enabling Immoral Behavior
By Sally Quinn
Washington Post Reporter
I just want to smack him across the puss, as my Savannah-born mother used to say. I want to smack him across that pretty puss, those pretty eyelashes, that pretty hair. I want to shake him and knock his pretty head against the wall.
At first that was all I could think of when I heard about John Edwards' confession. Because all the words about him had already been said. We've been through this so many times there's almost nothing left to say. Sure, they are all "lyin', cheatin', no-good hypocrites!" as the New York Post headline screamed. So what else is new?
The details are, of course, always different. In this case, Edwards says he wasn't in love with the other woman, it ended in 2006, the baby is not his, he told his wife every painful detail, she forgave him and anyway she was in remission from cancer so it wasn't really all that bad. Frankly, though, I don't see what John Edwards did as being that different from what any of the other men in power -- Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, etc. -- did. I don't see that the moral issues are all that different either. Like the others, Edwards and his wife pretended they were one big happy family, and like the others he lied to his family, the staff and the press. But we're all so cynical now that we don't believe a word they say and I think most Americans are so scandal fatigued that they just shrug them off.
Let's try to give John Edwards the benefit of the doubt for a moment. He lost a son in a tragic automobile accident. His wife developed breast cancer shortly before he lost the exhausting campaign for vice president. The cancer returned. It is inoperable. He has three children to whom he has to give moral support while his wife has been sick and he was running for president at his wife's insistence. That's a lot to deal with. I've had a number of friends die of cancer and often, discreetly, their spouses have turned to someone else for comfort and support, especially if the disease is drawn out. People have not judged them harshly. None of that excuses his behavior but at least it partially explains it. Even if he is a narcissistic, self centered, lyin', cheatin', no-good, hypocritical egomaniac which of course he is.
That, however is not what is interesting about this story. What is interesting here is Elizabeth Edwards.
This is the thing that is driving me crazy. The wives. The enabling wives. Nobody has more respect for Elizabeth Edwards than I do. First of all, any woman who has lost a child gets a pass for life from me. Nothing could be more horrible. Not only that, she is brilliant, clever, capable, decent and courageous. She has battled cancer, taken care of her family and been a loyal campaigner for her husband. The grief she has gone through, having lost a child and knowing she may leave her other three motherless must be unbearable.
The problem is, SHE LET HIM DO IT. She not only agreed to his run for the presidency, she encouraged him to do it, knowing the toll it would take on the family given her health problems. But, worse, she let him do it knowing that he had had an affair. What on earth was she thinking? She said in the Daily Kos, "This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well." I'm sorry but it was not a private matter. Not when you are running for president. The press would surely have left him alone had he not run. The mainstream press left him alone while he was running, but if he had won the primaries she had to know it surely would have come out. It always comes out. Repeat... it always comes out.
Not only did she allow him to run, exposing herself and her children to the pain and humiliation that would inevitably come, she could have allowed him to destroy the Democratic party in the process. This man was running for the President of the United States on a lie and she knew it. If he had not entered the race it could have changed the outcome of the primary. And what if he had won the primary? Think of the people they betrayed -- yes, THEY. They betrayed their devoted staff, the supporters who sent in millions of dollars, the taxpayers who supplied Secret Service protection (I want my money back) , their party and their country. She stood by and let him lie and lie and lie.
This simply can't go on. These women, these political spouses have to stop enabling their husbands to behave like this. Because as long as they do the men will continue to cheat, lie and betray. As long as they believe there will be no consequences (and by their wives tacit support they begin to believe it), what is there to stop them?
This kind of thing hurts everybody. Most importantly it hurts women. It paints all of us as pathetic victims, or potential ones in any case. Every time one of these guys goes off the reservation it creates the perception that it's OK, that that's what men do and the women should just shut up, put on a brave face and support them.
Yes, I want to smack John Edwards across the puss. But more than that I want Elizabeth Edwards to do it for me. Not just for me but for all of us.
Washington Post journalist, author and Washington DC insider, Sally Quinn founded and co-moderates On Faith, a blog from the Washington Post and Newsweek. Co-moderated by Newsweek editor and bestselling author Jon Meacham and hosted by a panel of renowned religious scholars of all denominations, On Faith is the first worldwide, interactive discussion about religion and its impact on global life.
Stalking, Sniffing, Swooning
July 27, 2008
New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By MAUREEN DOWD
LONDON
It could have been a French movie.
Passing acquaintances collide in a moment of transcendent passion. They look at each other shyly and touch tenderly during their Paris cinq à sept, exchange some existential thoughts under exquisite chandeliers, and — tant pis — go their separate ways.
Sarko, back to Carla Bruni. Obama, forward to Gordon Brown. A Man and a Man. All it needed was a lush score and Claude Lelouch.
Even for Sarkozy the American, who loves everything in our culture from Sylvester Stallone to Gloria Gaynor, it was a wild gush over a new Washington crush.
Sarko is right and Barack is left. One had a Jewish grandfather, the other a Muslim one. The French president is a frenetic bumper car; the Illinois senator is, as he said of the king of Jordan’s Mercedes 600, “a smooth ride.”
But the son of a Hungarian, who picked a lock to break into the French ruling class, embraced a fellow outsider and child of an immigrant who had also busted into the political aristocracy with a foreign-sounding name.
After 200,000 people thronged to see Obama at the Victory Column in Berlin, christening him “Redeemer” and “Savior,” it turned out Sarko was also Obamarized, as the Germans were calling the mesmerizing effect.
“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased the candidate after the amorous joint press conference, as he flew from Paris to London for the finale of his grand tour.
“I think we could work well together,” he said of Sarko, smiling broadly.
He did not get to meet his fan, Carla Bruni. “She wasn’t there,” he said. “Which I think disappointed all my staff. That was the only thing they were really interested in.”
He admitted showing “extraordinarily poor judgment” in leaving Paris after only a few hours. Watching Paris recede from behind the frosted glass of his limo was “a pretty good metaphor” for how constricted his life has become, he said, compared with his student days tramping around Europe with “a feeling of complete freedom.”
“But the flip side is that I deeply enjoy the work,” he said, “so it’s a trade-off.”
How do you go back to the Iowa farm after you’ve seen Paree?
“One of the values of this trip for me was to remind me of what this campaign should be about,” he said. “It’s so easy to get sucked into day-to-day, tit-for-tat thinking, finding some clever retort for whatever comment your opponent made. And then I think I’m not doing my job, which should be to raise up some big important issues.”
I asked how his “Citizen of the World” tour will go down in Steubenville, Ohio.
“There will probably be some backlash,” he said. “I’m a big believer that if something’s good then there’s a bad to it, and vice versa. We had a good week. That always inspires the press to knock me down a peg.”
He thinks most people recognize that “there is a concrete advantage to not only foreign leaders, but foreign populations liking the American president, because it makes it easier for Sarkozy to send troops into Afghanistan if his voting base likes the United States.”
How does he like the McCain camp mocking him as “The One”?
“Even if you start believing your own hype, which I rarely do, things’ll turn on you pretty quick anyway,” he said. “I have a fairly steady temperament that has at times been interpreted as, ‘Oh, he’s sort of too cool.’ But it’s not real.”
Obama kept his cool through a week where he was treated as a cross between the Dalai Lama and Johnny Depp.
A private prayer he left in the holy Western Wall in Jerusalem was snatched out by a student at a Jewish seminary and published in a local newspaper. In Berlin, the tabloid Bild sent an attractive blonde reporter to stalk Obama at the Ritz-Carlton gym as he exercised with his body man, Reggie Love. She then wrote a tell-all, enthusing, “I’m getting hot, and not from the workout,” and concluding, “What a man.”
Obama marveled: “I’m just realizing what I’ve got to become accustomed to. The fact that I was played like that at the gym. Do you remember ‘The Color of Money’ with Paul Newman? And Forest Whitaker is sort of sitting there, acting like he doesn’t know how to play pool. And then he hustles the hustler. She hustled us. We walk into the gym. She’s already on the treadmill. She looks like just an ordinary German girl. She smiles and sort of waves, shyly, but doesn’t go out of her way to say anything. As I’m walking out, she says: ‘Oh, can I have a picture? I’m a big fan.’ Reggie takes the picture.”
I ask him if he found it a bit creepy that she described his T-shirt as smelling like “fabric softener with spring scent.”
He looked nonplused: “Did she describe what my T-shirt smelled like?”
Being a Citizen of the World has its downsides.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Barack, Here's How to Get the White People
By Jack White
TheRoot.com
June 25, 2008
A nine-point plan for winning over white voters—and the election.
Is America ready to elect a black president? We'll find out in November. Barack Obama's candidacy poses an unprecedented sociological experiment. Everything about us, including how far we've come toward the creation of the more perfect union in which people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, will be put to the test. And everything about Obama will be put to the test as well, including his ability to forge a winning political strategy.
The sad but unavoidable reality is that race is likely to play a pivotal role in this experiment. If Obama were a generic white, male Democrat of similar eloquence, youthful grace and energy, he would be a guaranteed easy landslide victor over the standard bearer for a party as deeply unpopular as the Republicans have become. As Alan Abramowitz, a professor of public opinion and the presidency at Emory University told Politico.com, "It is one of the worst political environments for the party in power since World War II."
Obama is ahead of John McCain by 15 points in one recent poll, but that's no cause for overconfidence: In 1988, Michael Dukakis had a similar advantage at a comparable point in the race, but wound up a loser to the first George Bush. Other surveys show Obama with only a six-point lead over McCain— a narrow margin that many white analysts seem to be going out of their way to attribute to every factor but the most obvious one, his ethnicity. White commentators may not want to talk about it, but race—not Obama's relatively short resume, or the resentment of Hillary Clinton's feminist supporters or McCain's increasingly obsolete image as a maverick—is the biggest obstacle between Obama and the White House.
That means that despite his lock on the black vote and his popularity among the young and highly educated, Obama must add enough whites to his coalition to win in the electoral college. He need not garner a majority of such voters—no Democrat, including Bill Clinton, has since 1964—but he needs enough of them to win. Can he do it? Yes, he can, with the right strategy. Here's my unsolicited nine-point plan to Obama for winning over white voters and victory in the fall campaign:
1) Remind us who you are. Hire Spike Lee to produce a one-hour story of your life, emphasizing your mother's Midwestern roots, your grandfather's and great-uncle's service in World War II, your climb through excellence to Harvard Law School and your time as a community organizer in Chicago. Include great footage of helping your daughters with their homework and of your participation in pick-up basketball games. The objective is to show that yours is a truly American story of patriotism, hard work and achievement that makes people feel that if you can make it, they can, too. Put it on all the networks before your acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention on August 28.
2) Keep it simple and sunny. The last time we faced an election as pivotal as this was 1980, when Ronald Reagan used his optimistic personality and a simple but powerful message to wrest the presidency from the hapless Jimmy Carter and usher in a conservatism that would dominate American politics for a generation. You have the potential to accomplish a similar re-alignment for your own brand of post-partisan pragmatic liberalism by recycling a few pages from Reagan's play book. Ask voters if they are better off than they were eight years ago. Promise them that we can rebuild the economy if we stop wasting lives and treasury on unnecessary wars and focus on renewing the infrastructure, finding new energy sources and coping with global warming. Don't get bogged down in details about new policy ideas.
3) Go to church every Sunday. This is the best way to combat the rumors that you are a secret Muslim and neutralize the damage from your ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Make sure the congregations are racially mixed. Keep meeting with evangelical leaders to let them know that you are a Democrat who understands their values and shares their belief in Jesus Christ.
4) Re-channel RFK. Use your powerful oratory to revive the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, when blacks and whites united in the cause of racial equality. Ignore the segment of white voters who will never vote for a black candidate under any circumstances. Concentrate, instead, on those who can be persuaded that you offer a better future for everybody by retracing Robert F. Kennedy's visits to in Appalachia, Indian reservations, ghettos and barrios, reminding all of us how much more must still be done to make the American dream real for everyone.
5) Be nice to McCain. Treat him the way you treated the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, "like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with." Call him "sir," when you debate him—which you should do whenever you can. Point out how closely he has tied himself to the failed policies of the Bush administration, but do it with respect and genuine admiration. Smile at him. This will help create the post-partisan atmosphere you'll need to accomplish anything once you get elected.
6) Show off your team. You've got a diverse group of really smart advisors. Make sure voters know that by putting them in the spotlight. Keep letting reporters into your sessions with your economic and foreign policy team, as you did a few days ago, to see how you operate. Let them float innovative new policy ideas while you focus on the big picture. Let voters see that you are smart and confident enough to let yourself be guided by folks who are even smarter.
7) Avoid Washington insiders. You did the right thing by quickly accepting the resignation of Jim Johnson from your vice-presidential vetting team, but you should never have put him on the team in the first place. Inevitably you have to include crafty Washington veterans in your campaign cabinet, but keep them at a minimum. Voters need to know that you are serious about change, and the best way to reinforce that message is to surround yourself with advisors who look like the new America you are trying to create.
8) Talk tough to your supporters, including blacks and liberals. Your Father's Day speech on absentee black dads was a masterstroke. It not only won applause from blacks but showed skeptical whites that you understand their feelings about race even if you don't necessarily agree with them. Follow up by re-iterating your skepticism about paying reparations for slavery and your doubts about race-based affirmative action policies. This will help to demonstrate that you intend to be a president for everybody, not just blacks. By the same reasoning, stand up to your supporters from Moveon.com, by sticking to your support for the compromise Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which protects telephone companies that cooperated with government intelligence agencies from lawsuits. The law sucks, but you can change it if you're elected. Meanwhile, there's no reason to give Republicans an excuse for charging you with being soft on terrorists.
9) Go to the front lines. Pay a visit to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan before the convention to get a first-hand look at how the wars are going. Pay visits to veterans' hospitals and propose big improvements in the way our soldiers are treated. Like putting that flag pin back in your lapel, these steps will help to burnish your patriotism and foreign policy credentials. If you are going to be commander-in-chief, you have to act like one.
There are, of course, lots of other things that you can do to improve your chances in November, and you're already doing some of them. But none of them may be as important, in the end, as something we blacks can do for you. We have to let you have the freedom to run as a candidate for all the people, not just us. If we try to turn your campaign into a black thing that whites don't understand, you won't make it and the country will be stuck with four more years of disastrous policies. This is a case in which we have to put America's interests ahead of our own, by letting you do whatever you need to do to win. Go for it! Yes, you can.
Jack White teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Obama Organizers Meet On Saturday, July 26, just 100 days from November 4th Election
The general election is coming up sooner than you may think. This Saturday, July 26th, is just 100 days from November 4th.
Right now, Senator Obama is on an important trip to Europe and the Middle East where, as president, he will work to restore America's strength in the world. He has spent recent days visiting our troops and meeting with leaders in Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other nations.
Here in Florida, we have some important work to do as well.
This Saturday, July 26th, supporters are joining together at Campaign for Change organizational meetings across the state.
These meetings are an important chance to meet campaign organizers, community leaders, and other Obama supporters in your area. Together, we'll discuss our strategy for building this movement for change in Florida.
Sign up to attend an organizational meeting this Saturday:
http://fl.barackobama.com/FLorgmeeting
Since we're only 100 days from the general election, we can't afford to sit on the sidelines -- we have to start now.
Saturday's organizational meetings are an opportunity to meet fellow Obama supporters in your community and learn about a crucial part of our strategy here -- our new Florida Neighborhood Teams for Change program.
The Florida Neighborhood Teams for Change program is a fun and easy way to turn your commitment to our Campaign for Change into action that will help turn Florida blue in November. Teams will be responsible for reaching out to friends, neighbors, and undecided voters to spread the word about this movement.
No political experience is required. We'll provide you with everything you need, every step of the way.
Join us this Saturday at an organizational meeting in your county:
http://fl.barackobama.com/FLorgmeeting
Thank you,
Jackie
Jackie Lee
Florida General Election Director
Campaign for Change
P.S. -- Want to learn more about programs in Florida?
The Obama Florida homepage is the best resource to stay up-to-date about events and activities in your area. Bookmark the page in your web browser, visit often, and make sure to pass the word to your family and friends:
http://fl.barackobama.com
Sign The Petition foxattacks.com/michelle
I'm sure many of you have seen and/or heard FOX's racist and sexist attacks against Michelle Obama. Brave New Films has a video describing these attacks and a petition to demand that FOX stop attacking Michelle Obama. Please sign the petition and pass both it and the video around.
You can watch the video here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ_kR8nP1Tc
You can sign the petition here.
http://foxattacks.com/michelle
The Obama Agenda
June 30, 2008
New York Times
Op-Ed Columnist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
It’s feeling a lot like 1992 right now. It’s also feeling a lot like 1980. But which parallel is closer? Is Barack Obama going to be a Ronald Reagan of the left, a president who fundamentally changes the country’s direction? Or will he be just another Bill Clinton?
Current polls — not horse-race polls, which are notoriously uninformative until later in the campaign, but polls gauging the public mood — are strikingly similar to those in both 1980 and 1992, years in which an overwhelming majority of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s direction.
So the odds are that this will be a “change” election — which means that it’s very much Mr. Obama’s election to lose. But if he wins, how much change will he actually deliver?
Reagan, for better or worse — I’d say for worse, but that’s another discussion — brought a lot of change. He ran as an unabashed conservative, with a clear ideological agenda. And he had enormous success in getting that agenda implemented. He had his failures, most notably on Social Security, which he tried to dismantle but ended up strengthening. But America at the end of the Reagan years was not the same country it was when he took office.
Bill Clinton also ran as a candidate of change, but it was much less clear what kind of change he was offering. He portrayed himself as someone who transcended the traditional liberal-conservative divide, proposing “a government that offers more empowerment and less entitlement.” The economic plan he announced during the campaign was something of a hodgepodge: higher taxes on the rich, lower taxes for the middle class, public investment in things like high-speed rail, health care reform without specifics.
We all know what happened next. The Clinton administration achieved a number of significant successes, from the revitalization of veterans’ health care and federal emergency management to the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and health insurance for children. But the big picture is summed up by the title of a new book by the historian Sean Wilentz: “The Age of Reagan: A history, 1974-2008.”
So whom does Mr. Obama resemble more? At this point, he’s definitely looking Clintonesque.
Like Mr. Clinton, Mr. Obama portrays himself as transcending traditional divides. Near the end of last week’s “unity” event with Hillary Clinton, he declared that “the choice in this election is not between left or right, it’s not between liberal or conservative, it’s between the past and the future.” Oh-kay.
Mr. Obama’s economic plan also looks remarkably like the Clinton 1992 plan: a mixture of higher taxes on the rich, tax breaks for the middle class and public investment (this time with a focus on alternative energy).
Sometimes the Clinton-Obama echoes are almost scary. During his speech accepting the nomination, Mr. Clinton led the audience in a chant of “We can do it!” Remind you of anything?
Just to be clear, we could — and still might — do a lot worse than a rerun of the Clinton years. But Mr. Obama’s most fervent supporters expect much more.
Progressive activists, in particular, overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama during the Democratic primary even though his policy positions, particularly on health care, were often to the right of his rivals’. In effect, they convinced themselves that he was a transformational figure behind a centrist facade.
They may have had it backward.
Mr. Obama looks even more centrist now than he did before wrapping up the nomination. Most notably, he has outraged many progressives by supporting a wiretapping bill that, among other things, grants immunity to telecom companies for any illegal acts they may have undertaken at the Bush administration’s behest.
The candidate’s defenders argue that he’s just being pragmatic — that he needs to do whatever it takes to win, and win big, so that he has the power to effect major change. But critics argue that by engaging in the same “triangulation and poll-driven politics” he denounced during the primary, Mr. Obama actually hurts his election prospects, because voters prefer candidates who take firm stands.
In any case, what about after the election? The Reagan-Clinton comparison suggests that a candidate who runs on a clear agenda is more likely to achieve fundamental change than a candidate who runs on the promise of change but isn’t too clear about what that change would involve.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that Mr. Obama really is a centrist, after all.
One thing is clear: for Democrats, winning this election should be the easy part. Everything is going their way: sky-high gas prices, a weak economy and a deeply unpopular president. The real question is whether they will take advantage of this once-in-a-generation chance to change the country’s direction. And that’s mainly up to Mr. Obama.
Senator Obama And Telecom Immunity Legislation
By Clayton Woullard
Before we get too riled up about Barack supporting the telecom immunity bill, let's keep in mind what else the bill does and put it in context with a statement from his campaign:
(Posted on Huffingtonpost.com):
Sen. Barack Obama's campaign released a statement Friday afternoon saying that while Obama opposes amnesty for telecom firms that spied on Americans, he will support the House compromise legislation.
The statement in full:
"Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. There is also little doubt that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, has abused that authority and undermined the Constitution by intercepting the communications of innocent Americans without their knowledge or the required court orders.
"That is why last year I opposed the so-called Protect America Act, which expanded the surveillance powers of the government without sufficient independent oversight to protect the privacy and civil liberties of innocent Americans. I have also opposed the granting of retroactive immunity to those who were allegedly complicit in acts of illegal spying in the past.
"After months of negotiation, the House today passed a compromise that, while far from perfect, is a marked improvement over last year's Protect America Act.
"Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance - making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people. It also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future. It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses. But this compromise guarantees a thorough review by the Inspectors General of our national security agencies to determine what took place in the past, and ensures that there will be accountability going forward. By demanding oversight and accountability, a grassroots movement of Americans has helped yield a bill that is far better than the Protect America Act.
"It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives - and the liberty - of the American people."
I think we need to keep in mind the conditions under which Democrats are trying to get things done and that compromise is a necessity in politics. Compromise is also a quality of Barack's that will be fundamental in getting him elected as president.
Goodbye to a Standup Brother
Tim Russert was a rarity in Washington; when he said he wanted to understand other people, he meant it.
TheRoot.com
June 15, 2008--Here is something important you need to know about Tim Russert: On the night Barack Obama clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, even a casual viewer could tell Tim was beside himself with the joy of watching history unfold before his eyes. In that slightly over the top, nearly hokey way that characterized his love of election nights, he simply could not get enough.
I was watching at home, enough of a political junkie myself to know I had to hang in there to see the history being made, but fighting off sleep all the same. And then my friend Tim said something on the air that made me wish I'd said it first.
"I was thinking: What would I like to do tomorrow?" he said to the camera, his face shiny with excitement. "No more primaries to cover! One, I'd like to be in that meeting between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But absent that, I would LOVE to teach American history in an inner-city American school tomorrow morning. How GREAT would that be? Just to look in those faces and listen to those kids—what they witnessed and saw tonight."
I knew he meant every word.
Tim loved a lot of things, a lot of people. And we loved him right back. He hired me at NBC in 1994 on a dare, luring me from my comfy perch at the New York Times with a promise to teach me TV. His reasoning was simple; it was a better bet to teach a good reporter about television than to try to teach a TV-ready talking head about how to be a journalist. His own example was his guide. He took over Meet the Press in 1991 without a lick of television experience, but with a wealth of political knowledge.
He never had to say it, but I also know Tim considered it a bonus that, by hiring me, he was going to be able to add an African-American voice to his Washington bureau—someone who could keep up with him on politics but also tell him stuff he didn't know. He was keenly aware that, as proud as he was of his Irish Catholic, blue-collar roots, other people had different roots that they were equally proud of and that understanding those varied views of the world was important.
I was working for him at NBC during the 1995 Million Man March. As hundreds of thousands of men streamed onto the National Mall, he knew this was a big deal, and he knew there was something he could learn if he would just dig deeply enough. So he assembled a roundtable for that week's Meet the Press unlike anything Sunday morning had ever seen: all black men, including liberal Jesse Jackson and conservative Robert Woodson, Tim and me. It was no stunt. Tim really wanted to understand the significance of the event.
That kind of sincere interest is rare. Many powerful white men limit their curiosity to confirming what they already believe they know to be true. When Tim did not know something, he found someone who did. Over the years, he found me, and NPR's Michele Norris, and the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson and CNN's Suzanne Malveaux and Joe Johns and other voices who could clue him in to how black folk thought, talked, acted—and to help him understand why there was no monolithic answer. When the National Urban League scolded him and other Sunday morning shows about lack of diversity on their roundtables, he showed up at the meeting himself to talk to them about how to address the problem.
I made my last appearance with him on Meet the Press a few weeks ago. We were talking about race in the context of this year's presidential contest and another panelist, Jon Meacham of Newsweek, remarked that race was a subject that made white folks queasy. I countered that black folks only get queasy talking about race when they are in conversation with white folks who get queasy talking about it. Tim's eyes twinkled when he looked at me. He absolutely loved that I was telling him something he had not thought of before.
I never minded talking about race with Tim because he was never queasy talking about it with me.
There is quite a line of people who, at various times, have taken credit for my career. I usually let them do it, even if I remember events quite differently. But Tim deserves the credit. He not only talked me into switching to TV against my first instincts, but—five years later—he engineered a way for me to leave NBC when I was offered the chance to become the first African American to host a weekly public affairs program, Washington Week, over on PBS. He not only talked NBC executives into getting me out of my contract, but he also looked me in the eye and told me this was something I absolutely, positively had to do.
Tim remained a friend to the end. Even when we disagreed—as happened during the infamous Don Imus episode last year—he never stopped wanting to hear what I thought. Imus was his friend, and he had appeared on the radio show many, many times. So when Meet the Press producer Betsy Fischer called to invite me to participate in a Sunday roundtable focused on the controversy, I at first refused.
I felt compelled to call Tim and explain. If I come on your show, I told him, I will be forced to criticize the journalists who had enabled Imus over the years, leading up to his stunning insult of the Rutgers basketball team. Tim knew—and I knew—that Imus had insulted me too, years before. When I told Tim I didn't feel I could come to his house and insult him, he quickly assured me that he wanted me to come and say what I had to say. People needed to hear it, he told me.
So I went, and I told him to his face that I found his defense of Imus disappointing. I got a lot of kudos for speaking truth to power that day, but the real news was that Tim allowed me to say what I had to say, knowing it would not make him look good. That does not happen a lot—in life or politics.
I am stunned and grief-stricken by Tim's death. In a world where many of us realize we are the only black friends our white friends have, I remember Tim as a guy who considered it a thrill to drop by my house, grab the first baby who wandered by in a house full of mostly black people, and work the room like he never wanted to leave.
Now that, right there, was my brother.
Gwen Ifill is host of ''Washington Week'' on PBS.
Senate Should Stop Confirming Bush's Appointment of Judges
Dear Friend,
Thanks to seven years of Bush's ultra-conservative appointments to the courts, the federal judiciary has been shifted far to the right. Now that his presidency is -- finally -- almost over, it's time for the Senate to stop confirming ANY of his judicial nominees.
Let's tell Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that he should shut down the judicial confirmations process until a new president is sworn in next January.
I hope you'll have a look and take action.
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/no_more_bush_judges/?r_by=-1661028-wou2.c&rc=mailto
Obama Speaks to His National Staff in Chicago After Winning
Obama returned to Chicago last week to address his enthusiastic staff. From the video link below, you will hear what he told them. One of these days I will learn how to download the video onto these pages. Until then.....click below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnhmByYxEIo&eurl=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/09/obama-speaks-to-campaign_n_105997.html
ON BARACK OBAMA: Andy Goodman's Ghost
By Danny Lyon
bleakbeauty.com
April 27, 2008
Five years ago I was having dinner with a group of students in a bar in Carbondale, Illinois. As we left I saw five men seated at a back table. Waiting for them as they got up to leave, I stopped the tall and handsome man. It was Barack Obama, then campaigning for the Democratic nomination for Senator from Illinois. He stooped and listened patiently as I told him that Julian Bond was a good friend of mine, that I had photographed the civil rights movement, and that my daughter, Gabrielle, was an activist in Chicago, and my son in law, Dr. Paul Sereno, was also on the University of Chicago faculty where Obama had taught constitutional law.
Obama lives in Hyde Park, Chicago, the neighborhood I left to join SNCC 46 years ago. When he began his run for the Presidency of the United States, I sent him my civil rights book and wrote across the opening page, “The hopes and dreams of untold thousands rest with you”. I wanted to write “millions”.
When I was nineteen and a college student in Chicago, the first reports of the American civil rights movement were reaching me. I read that Martin Luther King was in jail in Georgia. I had no car and no idea of how to get there. In 1962, in my third year as a history student at the University of Chicago, I talked with a fellow student, a white Jewish woman who had been arrested in a demonstration in the South. It was my first contact with the black rebellion that was slowly growing in the southern states. That year I was twenty years old. Segregation, or aparthied, was the law of the land in thirteen American states. With contact information from my fellow student, I hitchhiked south, first to southern Illinois where I met John Lewis, who is now a congressmen and still one of my oldest friends.
Within a week I had reached the deep south in Georgia, was thrown into jail, and looked through the bars across to the Negro section of the jail to watch Martin Luther King being served a special lunch of chicken on a red and white checkered tablecloth and being examined by a doctor. I had managed to reach the southern civil rights movement about one year before it was recognized as a major story by the press. The word “media” was not used in 1962.
Now I am sixty -six and there are two things I like to tell people of my life. One is that I was in jail with Martin Luther King, the other is that I spent four days alone with Muhammad Ali in 1973 just before the second Jerry Quarry fight. Ali is like King, an American great. In 1968 Ali did something that is almost unheard of in our society. He put principles before money and refused to fight in Vietnam. “No Vietcong ever called me Nigger” is as good a line as many that Jefferson wrote, and Muhammad Ali did not go to college.
Any one that experienced segregation in the South, cannot help but jump when he sees a black family being served in a white restaurant in Mississippi. I will never get used to it. I saw too many people thrown through windows, knocked down, beaten up and arrested over and over to ever take this simple event for granted. Nor will I ever feel safe driving down a dark southern highway at night, all alone, because I know of young people that were in the Movement and were murdered as they drove down those roads at night.
As I write this Obama is about to become the 44th President of the United States. The office created for George Washington, a holder of hundreds of African slaves. An office elevated by Abraham Lincoln who wrote very clearly that the black person would never be equal to the white person, and thought sending the slaves back to Africa was the best way to deal with the problem. Of course it was James Baldwin who pointed out that “the problem” was something white people had, not blacks.
Obama’s campaign, in fact the whole phenomenon of his candidacy, is a page torn out of the Southern Civil Rights Movement and is the direct result of the events that occurred in the deep south forty six years ago. The grass roots uprising that I joined in 1962 was called the movement, with a small “m” and within two years I published a book called The Movement, with a capital M. That is what media people do. They take reality and sell it to the public. The entire idea of the leader that does not lead is straight from the life of Bob Moses, the NYC math teacher that led the rebellion in Mississippi and lead the successful fight to secure the right for blacks to vote in that state and across the South. When Hillary stupidly said that President Johnson secured the right to vote by signing the voting rights act in 1967, she insulted a lot of people. The people that won the right to vote in the South were the young people, mostly black, that put their lives on the line and created the pressure that made the voting rights act possible. When the Klan gathered in Mississippi to murder three voter registration workers, one of them was a black boy from Mississippi and the other two were Jewish boys from New York City. So the Obama candidacy has taken the tactics of the Movement, of grass roots organizing, of the “leader that does not lead” and used it successfully in a run for the Presidency.
Just participating in the black rebellion in the South in the early 1960’s was a victory. You didn’t have to win every battle because the biggest battle was overcoming your and your family’s fear to join the movement. Obama’s candidacy is in itself a huge victory. It shows that the media’s constant refrain that Americans all hate each other and that we are a deeply racist society is simply not true.
As the author of many books of journalism and films using pictures and words, I have devoted my life to creating an honest picture of America, almost always in direct opposition to the false world that seems to so naturally come from the Media. Can you change society? Can you change Americans? Can you even see or recognize change? If you live long enough and get old enough, you can see change. You can see it now. The real people that created this wonderful moment in American and world history aren’t the thousands of young people that have worked so hard organizing Obama’s victories. The people that created this moment are now in their sixties and older and worked for this moment when they were young and some that worked for it their whole lives.
I am not much for TV pundits, but one of them, on CNBC, commenting on Obama’s startling victory in Iowa, said something that made me jump and deserves repeating. He talked of the myriad problems of America and how the world and many people have come to view the United States. “Its almost as if he were sent by God,” he said. I agree.
Danny Lyon, April 27, 2008
Is Obama An Enlightened Being?
Spiritual wise ones say: This sure ain't no ordinary politician. You buying it?
By Mark Morford
SF Gate Columnist
Friday, June 6, 2008
I find I'm having this discussion, this weird little debate, more and more, with colleagues, with readers, with liberals and moderates and miserable, deeply depressed Republicans and spiritually amped persons of all shapes and stripes and I'm having it in particular with those who seem confused, angry, unsure, thoroughly nonplussed, as they all ask me the same thing: What the hell's the big deal about Obama?
I, of course, have an answer. Sort of.
Warning: If you are a rigid pragmatist/literalist, itchingly evangelical, a scowler, a doubter, a burned-out former '60s radical with no hope left, or are otherwise unable or unwilling to parse alternative New Age speak, click away right now, because you ain't gonna like this one little bit.
Ready? It goes likes this:
Barack Obama isn't really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.
This is what I find myself offering up more and more in response to the whiners and the frowners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae - or no antennae at all - to all those who just don't understand and maybe even actively recoil against all this chatter about Obama's aura and feel and MLK/JFK-like vibe.
To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally completely unaffected by politics?
No, it's not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn't have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.
Dismiss it all you like, but I've heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who've been intuitively blown away by Obama's presence - not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence - to say it's just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.
Here's where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.
The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.
Are you rolling your eyes and scoffing? Fine by me. But you gotta wonder, why has, say, the JFK legacy lasted so long, is so vital to our national identity? Yes, the assassination canonized his legend. The Kennedy family is our version of royalty. But there's something more. Those attuned to energies beyond the literal meanings of things, these people say JFK wasn't assassinated for any typical reason you can name. It's because he was just this kind of high-vibration being, a peacemaker, at odds with the war machine, the CIA, the dark side. And it killed him.
Now, Obama. The next step. Another try. And perhaps, as Bush laid waste to the land and embarrassed the country and pummeled our national spirit into disenchanted pulp and yet ironically, in so doing has helped set the stage for an even larger and more fascinating evolutionary burp, we are finally truly ready for another Lightworker to step up.
Let me be completely clear: I'm not arguing some sort of utopian revolution, a big global group hug with Obama as some sort of happy hippie camp counselor. I'm not saying the man's going to swoop in like a superhero messiah and stop all wars and make the flowers grow and birds sing and solve world hunger and bring puppies to schoolchildren.
Please. I'm also certainly not saying he's perfect, that his presidency will be free of compromise, or slimy insiders, or great heaps of politics-as-usual. While Obama's certainly an entire universe away from George W. Bush in terms of quality, integrity, intelligence and overall inspirational energy, well, so is your dog. Hell, it isn't hard to stand far above and beyond the worst president in American history.
But there simply is no denying that extra kick. As one reader put it to me, in a way, it's not even about Obama, per se. There's a vast amount of positive energy swirling about that's been held back by the armies of BushCo darkness, and this energy has now found a conduit, a lightning rod, is now effortlessly self-organizing around Obama's candidacy. People and emotions and ideas of high and positive vibration are automatically draw to him. It's exactly like how Bush was a magnet for the low vibrational energies of fear and war and oppression and aggression, but, you know, completely reversed. And different. And far, far better.
Don't buy any of it? Think that's all a bunch of tofu-sucking New Agey bulls-- and Obama is really a dangerously elitist political salesman whose inexperience will lead us further into darkness because, when you're talking national politics, nothing, really, ever changes? I understand. I get it. I often believe it myself.
Not this time.
Democratic Primary Boosts U.S. Image Around the World
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
LONDON, June 4 -- For much of the world, Sen. Barack Obama's victory in the Democratic primaries was a moment to admire the United States, at a time when the nation's image abroad has been seriously damaged.
From hundreds of supporters crowded around televisions in rural Kenya, Obama's ancestral homeland, to jubilant Britons writing "WE DID IT!" on the "Brits for Barack" site on Facebook, people celebrated what they called an important racial and generational milestone for the United States.
"This is close to a miracle. I was certain that some things will not happen in my lifetime," said Sunila Patel, 62, a widow encountered on the streets of New Delhi. "A black president of the U.S. will mean that there will be more American tolerance for people around the world who are different."
The primary elections generated unprecedented interest around the world, as people in distant parliament buildings and thatched-roof huts followed the political ups and downs as if they were watching a Hollywood thriller.
Much of the interest simply reflects hunger for change from President Bush, who is deeply unpopular in much of the world. At the same time, many people abroad seemed impressed -- sometimes even shocked -- by the wide-open nature of U.S. democracy and the history-making race between a woman and a black man.
"The primaries showed that the U.S. is actually the nation we had believed it to be, a place that is open-minded enough to have a woman or an African American as its president," said Minoru Morita, a Tokyo political analyst.
"I think it will be put down as a shining, historical moment in the history of America," said Fumiaki Kubo, a professor at Tokyo University.
While Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has admirers around the world, especially from her days as first lady, interviews on four continents suggested that Obama's candidacy has most captured the world's imagination.
"Obama is the exciting image of what we always hoped America was," said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a London think tank. "We have immensely enjoyed the ride and can't wait for the next phase."
The presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, who has extensive overseas experience, is known and respected in much of the world. In interviews, McCain seemed more popular than Obama in countries such as
Israel, where McCain is particularly admired for his hard line against
Iran. In
China, leaders have enjoyed comfortable relations with Bush and are widely believed to be wary of a Democratic administration.
"Although no one will admit it, Israeli leaders are worried about Obama," said Eytan Gilboa, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University in
Israel. "The feeling is that this is the time to be tough in foreign policy toward the Middle East, and he's going to be soft."
But elsewhere, people were praising Obama, 46, whose heavy emphasis on the Internet helped make him better known in more nations than perhaps any U.S. primary candidate in history.
In Kenya, Obama's victory was greeted with unvarnished glee. In Kisumu, close to the home of Obama's late father, hundreds crowded around televisions to watch Obama's victory speech Wednesday morning, chanting "Obama tosha!" which translates as, "Obama is enough!"
"Our fortunes as the people of Kenya are certain to change. Obama knows our problems and I'm sure he has them at heart," said Salim Onyango, 32, a shoe shiner in Kisumu. "When he becomes president, he will definitely put in place support for us in Kenya."
Sam Onyango, a water vender in Kisumu, said: "Obama's victory means I might one day get to America and share the dreams I have always heard about. He will open doors for us there in the spirit of African brotherhood."
Obama also has strong support in Europe, the heartland of anti-Bush sentiment. "
Germany is Obama country," said Karsten Voight, the German government's coordinator for German-North American cooperation. "He seems to strike a chord with average Germans," who see him as a transformational figure such as John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr.
Despite his Harvard Law School degree and comparisons to historical greats, Obama is an accessible and familiar figure for millions of people, particularly in poor nations.
His father's journey to America as a Kenyan immigrant resonates with millions of migrants. Many people interviewed said that the son's living in Indonesia for several years as a child doesn't qualify as foreign policy credentials, but it may give him a more instinctive feel for the plight of the developing world.
"He's African, he's an immigrant family; he has a different style. It's just the way he looks -- he seems kind," said Nagy Kayed, 30, a student at the American University in Cairo.
For many, Obama's skin color is deeply symbolic. As the son of an African and a white woman from Kansas, Obama has the brownish "everyman" skin color shared by hundreds of millions of people.
"He looks like Egyptians. You can walk in the streets and find people who really look like him," said Manar el-Shorbagi, a specialist in U.S. political affairs at the American University in Cairo.
In many nations, Obama's youth and skin color also represent a welcome generational and stylistic change for America. Obama personifies not the America of Bush and Vice President Cheney but the nation that produced Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods -- youthful, dark-skinned sports stars who are deeply admired household names around the world.
"It could help to reduce anti-U.S. sentiment and even turn it around because of what he represents," said Kim Sung-ho, a political science professor at Yonsei University in Seoul.
"For an African American candidate to compete and perhaps win a presidential election is a strong reason for people in Asia to reconnect with the U.S.," Kim said. "This is such a contrast to the image of the United States as presented through its wars in
Iraq and Vietnam."
In terms of foreign policy, Obama's stated willingness to meet and talk with the leaders of
Iran, Syria and other nations largely shunned by the Bush administration has been both praised and criticized overseas.
In Israel, Gilboa said Obama's openness to negotiating with Iran and Syria has contributed to the sense that his Middle East policies are too soft. When a leader of Hamas, the Palestinian organization that the United States considers to be a terrorist group, expressed a preference for Obama earlier this year, that turned off many Israelis even more.
Many in Israel said they would have preferred Clinton, who is well regarded because of her support for the Jewish state in the Senate and her husband's staunchly pro-Israel positions during his presidency.
Obama's candidacy has generated suspicion among Palestinians as well.
Ali Jarbawi, a political scientist at the West Bank's Birzeit University, said that even if Obama appears to be even-handed in his approach to the Middle East, he would never take on the pro-Israel lobby in Washington.
"The minute that Obama takes office, if he takes office, all his aides in the White House will start working on his reelection," Jarbawi said. "Do you think Obama would risk his reelection because of us?"
In Iran, government officials have taken no official position on the U.S. race, but several people interviewed said the government and average Iranians would welcome Obama and direct talks between Tehran and Washington.
"The majority of Iranians feel that the Democrats support what they want: a major and drastic change in relations with the U.S. So for them, the coming of Obama would be a good omen," said Hermidas Bavand, professor of U.S.-Iranian relations at the Allameh Tabatabai University.
In Latin America, Obama's recent declaration that he would meet with Presidents Hugo Chávez of
Venezuela and Raúl Castro of
Cuba has been widely welcomed as a break from Bush policy.
Obama, though, has pointedly declared that he is not an admirer of Chávez. He recently voiced strong support for Colombia in its fight against its main rebel group, which Colombian officials say receives sanctuary from Chávez.
Those comments were welcomed in Colombia, which has had the closest ties in the region to the Bush administration. Though Colombian officials worry Obama will not support a free trade agreement with their country, Obama strikes a chord with ordinary Colombians because of deep resentments toward the Bush administration's policies, including the
Iraq war.
"My No. 1 wish is that Bush be gone," said Salud Hernandez, a popular radio pundit in Bogota. An Obama presidency, she said, would be "a positive turn because of what Bush represented to the world."
Still, not everyone has been riveted by the U.S. election.
The Chinese public, absorbed by the recent earthquake in Sichuan province and preparations for the Beijing Olympics in August, paid little attention.
Chinese officials, while abstaining from comment on politics in another country, were probably watching the contest closely, aware that a Democratic administration in Washington would be more likely than the Bush administration to heed calls in Congress for protectionist measures against
China's large trade surplus.
And Russians have proven supremely indifferent to the U.S. primaries; one poll earlier this year found that only 5 percent of Russians said they were closely watching the race. Of 40 people approached on the streets of Moscow Wednesday, only five had any opinion on the race or knew who was running.
Still, some Russians hope that a new American president will improve the strained relations between Washington and Moscow, where last month Dmitry Medvedev, a 42-year-old protégé of former president Vladimir Putin, was sworn in as president.
"Barack Obama looks like the candidate that can be expected to take the greatest strides toward
Russia," Konstantin Kosachev, a member of parliament, wrote in the newspaper Kommersant. "Unlike McCain, he's not infected with any Cold War phobias."
Contributing to this article were correspondents Ellen Knickmeyer in Cairo; Blaine Harden in Tokyo; Stephanie McCrummen in El Fashir, Darfur; Griff Witte in Jerusalem; Peter Finn in Moscow; Monte Reel in Buenos Aires; Juan Forero in Bogota; Rama Lakshmi in New Delhi; Edward Cody in Beijing and Thomas Erdbrink in Tehran and special correspondents Karla Adam in London, Shannon Smiley in Berlin, Akiko Yamamoto in Tokyo, Stella Kim in Seoul, Allan Akombo in Kisumu, Kenya, and Samuel Sockol and Sufian Taha in Jerusalem.
Obama's Patriotic Call
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post
May 27, 2008
If the 2008 election is to be a debate about the true meaning of patriotism, then bring it on.
Ever since Barack Obama took off his flag pin, Democrats and liberals have had a queasy feeling that talk of patriotism would be a covert way to raise the matter of Obama's race; to cast him as some sort of alien figure ("You know what his middle name is?"); and to paint him as an effete intellectual out of touch with true American values.
I have no doubt that these things will happen. Moreover, John McCain's sacrifice for his country will be a central theme of the Republican campaign. And why not? Yes, many Republicans refused to honor John Kerry's service during the campaign four years ago, but McCain wasn't part of that, and his service deserves the praise it gets.
Yet Obama cannot simply cede the terrain of patriotism to McCain, and progressives should not assume that patriotism is somehow a bad thing, akin to jingoism or nationalism.
The reaction of too many progressives to patriotism is "automatic, allergic recoil," say two young Seattle writers, Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer, in their important book "The True Patriot."
Instead of recoil, they offer rigorous standards for what patriotism should be. "True patriots," they write, "believe that freedom from responsibility is selfishness; freedom from sacrifice is cowardice; freedom from tolerance is prejudice; freedom from stewardship is exploitation; and freedom from compassion is cruelty."
Their new progressive patriotism bears some resemblance to the old progressive patriotism of Theodore Roosevelt. "We cannot meet the future," Roosevelt said in a 1916 Memorial Day speech, "either by mere gross materialism or by mere silly sentimentalism; above all, we cannot meet it if we attempt to balance gross materialism in action by silly sentimentalism in words."
For good measure, the trust-buster also declared that "the big business man" must "recognize the fact that his business activities, while beneficial to himself and his associates, must also justify themselves by being beneficial to the men who work for him and to the public which he serves."
As Liu and Hanauer and and Roosevelt suggest, anyone who enters into a serious discussion of patriotism is required to offer more than bromides about love of flag and of country. Patriotism has to involve definitions, commitments and actions.
Obama already has the template for moving the debate in this direction. In December, he gave one of his best, and least noticed, speeches: a call to national service. The policies he proposed include a doubling of the Peace Corps and an expansion of the AmeriCorps program from 75,000 to 250,000 slots. (President Bush, by the way, deserves credit for saving AmeriCorps from the hostility of some in his own party.) Obama would link his $4,000 tuition tax credit to a service requirement.
He also suggests ideas that conservatives should embrace, including a Social Investment Fund Network and a Social Entrepreneur Agency that would encourage the innovations of the private, not-for-profit sector.
But Obama's speech was about more than programs. It was suffused with the rhetoric of a reformer's patriotism. "I have no doubt that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it," he said. "Loving your country shouldn't just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July; loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it."
Obama's is just one approach to patriotism and service. Sen. Jim Webb's new GI Bill of Rights is an essential step toward honoring those who have sacrificed in Iraq, and Sen. Chris Dodd has proposed important interim steps toward expanding AmeriCorps by bringing its rewards to those who perform service more closely in line with current college costs.
Dodd says he always explains his decision to join President John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps by saying, "The president asked me." He wins nods from youthful audiences when he says, "Let me tell you what it was like to be young, to be an American and to be asked."
Dodd was campaigning for Obama in South Dakota last Friday when he spoke with me, and he seems to have gotten this message to his candidate. Pinch-hitting for Ted Kennedy as the commencement speaker at Wesleyan University on Sunday, Obama revisited the themes of his December speech and explicitly renewed JFK's call, promising that "service to a greater good" would be "a cause of my presidency."
A competition between Obama and McCain over who can issue the most compelling summons to service would serve the country far better than an empty rhetorical skirmish over which of these candidates is the true patriot. And, yes, it's a good thing that Obama has been seen wearing the flag pin again.
postchat@aol.com
Senator Obama calls on Wesleyan University graduates to enter public service
When Senator Edward Kennedy had to cancel his commencement speech at Wesleyan University, he asked Senator Barack Obama to stand in for him. Obama praised Kennedy, and when he said that Kennedy is "not finished yet," Kennedy's son cried. Obama said when he is President, he will creat a national service program for young people like the Wesleyan graduates.
Log on and see this inspiring speech.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX5WEgqw6pM
The Persistence of Racism and Barack Obama
By Mario Marcel Salas
We are far away from a "post racial society." Look at the political map of the election in West Virginia and Kentucky. Uneducated working class whites were easily duped by the race card that Hillary played. Racism still finds its home with the ignorant and uneducated. Many hard hat working class whites are still swayed by racist tactics. Even though the de jure status of segregation and overt racism are now illegal the racism amongst us is still quite evident. The Katrina disaster in New Orleans is but one example of the racism that lies just below the surface and is rekindled during a crisis. The messages of racism are now coded script, or masked so that its hatreds can be perpetuated on hate radio and the likes. Racism has made an adjustment; it is now "colorblind," using the words of Professor Eduardo Bonilla Silva in his book "Racism Without Racists."
One has to understand that this society and the foundations of the political structures in this country were founded upon a racial birth disorder. The white colonial settlers founded this country on the ideological premise of "manifest destiny," and hence the genocide of the native population. This genocide coincided with the introduction of African slavery and the institutionalization of the rules of racial etiquette that are still working in the background. Obama is not supposed to be running for president by the rules established and practiced by de facto racism. Whenever possible they will go after him with everything in the racial play book to prevent him from winning. The racist ideas that once held sway in the minds of most white Americans has diminished to be sure, but has not disappeared. I teach political science, and every semester I teach I make it a point to ask students if they have heard friends or relatives make racial remarks that made them feel uneasy. Generally, 70-90% of the class responds in the affirmative. Whites tell me that they have friends or relatives that "hate blacks," and the African American and Hispanic students tell me that they have experienced racial profiling or some other form of discrimination. African American student also tell me that even some of their black friends make racist comments about Mexicans or some other racial group and that they felt sorry for them and their ignorant views. I have been doing this survey for seven years now, and the pattern remains the same. "Post Racial Society?" I wish it were true!
The politics of colonialism perpetuated by the white settlers in this country created a system that bends but does not break. It morphs, but it does not disappear. This has led many to suggest that racism may be a permanent structure that will not completely fade away because it was built to last. Today, when blacks and other non-white groups complain of police abuse or racial profiling that are said to "be playing the race card.' When the victims complain they are told we "live in a colorblind society now." Nothing could be further from the truth as the fiasco created from the Rev. Wright controversy illustrates so clearly. White preachers are given a pass in this society. Billy Graham once made some anti-Semitic comments. Recently John Hagee, who endorsed McCain called the Catholic religion a "whore" of some sort. But when Rev. Wright began a discussion about race he was beat to a pulp in the media in an effort to shoot political skates under Obama. This is racism in the raw, but it is masked with charges of being "Unpatriotic" or "Anti-American."
Having said all of that, how could an African American run as a civil rights activist and have any reasonable chance to win unless he or she "toned it down." I think Obama has done a good job of "toning it down" in order to prevent the diehard racists from being able to get him outright. Remember, it was the trumped up charges of the rape of some white woman that allowed for the racist mob to lynch a black. They don't use the real ropes much anymore, but use political ropes that have racial threads. Hillary Clinton acted like a real southern racist white woman when she said that she can carry the white vote in the states she recently won. That mere statement galvanized racist votes to her campaign - it's that real. Racism is still a central motivating factor in elections and other social functions, and Hillary knew how to awaken the not so sleepy monster.
Obama represents the idea that a black man can rule a country and be fair. This may be all he has to offer after they get through with him. Time will tell, but the racial structures in existence in Washington will not go away if he wins. There is even talk about him being killed if he wins. Remember just because your black doesn't mean you are "black." Clarence Thomas is black by definition, but hardly black politically. I am voting for Obama, but I am under no illusions about the power of racism to co-opt, corrupt, and oppress. It is important that he be elected, but it is equally important that we understand the political dynamics of a country founded upon racism. We are not in a "post racial society,' that's pure foolishness. Racial profiling, police abuse, and Katrina tells me different, as does the battering of Rev. Wright (despite his foolishness of letting racism use him as a tool) and the hate mongering going on at talk radio.
Video: Barack Obama on The View
