“I’m going to tell you something: That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button.”
– Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY), quoted by NBC News, about Sen. Barak Obama.
April 14, 2008
April 13, 2008
April 2, 2008
March 31, 2008
March 29, 2008
Obama and the Class Question
Richard Florida, The Globe and Mail, March 29, 2008
For the past two weeks, all eyes have focused on Barack Obama and race. A couple of weeks ago, it was Hillary Clinton’s gender. A month before that, it was all about the Obama surge among young voters.
Pundits on all sides have framed this election – and especially the Democratic primary – as turning on the traditional fault lines of race, gender and generation.
The talk shows go on and on about how Mr. Obama is attracting black and young voters and how Ms. Clinton finds her voice among women and baby boomers.
But what is seldom discussed and yet most interesting about this election is not any young-vs.-old, black-vs.-white, or male-vs.-female dynamic.
At bottom, both the Democratic primary and the upcoming general election turn on an even deeper economic and social force: class.
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March 26, 2008
March 23, 2008
Frank Rich: The Republican Resurrection
Frank Rich, The New York Times, March 23, 2008
The day before Barack Obama gave The Speech, Hillary Clinton gave a big speech of her own, billed by her campaign as a “major policy address on the war in Iraq.” What, you didn’t hear about it?
Clinton partisans can blame the Obamaphilic press corps for underplaying their candidate’s uncompromising antiwar sentiments. But intentionally or not, the press did Mrs. Clinton a favor. Every time she opens her mouth about Iraq, she reminds voters of how she enabled the catastrophe that has devoured American lives and treasure for five years.
Race has been America’s transcendent issue far longer than that. I share the general view that Mr. Obama’s speech is the most remarkable utterance on the subject by a public figure in modern memory. But what impressed me most was not Mr. Obama’s rhetorical elegance or his nuanced view of both America’s undeniable racial divide and equally undeniable racial progress. The real novelty was to find a politician who didn’t talk down to his audience but instead trusted it to listen to complete, paragraph-long thoughts that couldn’t be reduced to sound bites.
In a political culture where even campaign debates can resemble “Jeopardy,” this is tantamount to revolution. As if to prove the point, some of the Beltway bloviators who had hyped Mitt Romney’s instantly forgotten snake oil on “Faith in America” soon fell to fretting about whether “ordinary Americans” would comprehend Mr. Obama.
Mrs. Clinton is fond of mocking her adversary for offering “just words.” But words can matter, and Mrs. Clinton’s tragedy is that she never realized they could have mattered for her, too. You have to wonder if her Iraq speech would have been greeted with the same shrug if she had tossed away her usual talking points and seized the opportunity to address the war in the same adult way that Mr. Obama addressed race. Mrs. Clinton might have reconnected with the half of her party that has tuned her out.
March 21, 2008
March 7, 2008
March 6, 2008
Ten Reasons Obama Didn’t Finish Off Hillary In Texas and Ohio
Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, March 5, 2008
As it became clear that Hillary Clinton was gaining ground on Obama, especially in the last week, his usually flawless campaign made several blunders. Here, in order of importance, are ten reasons why Obama slipped.
1. NAFTA Flap
When Obama’s leading economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, met with a Canadian official and allegedly told him that Obama’s stated views on NAFTA during the campaign amounted to “political posturing,” this was a huge blunder. It undercut Obama’s attack on Clinton for NAFTA, where she was vulnerable, especially in Ohio. It raised serious issues about Obama’s credibility with the American public, which is just getting to know him. (Especially since Obama first denied that the comment was ever made.) And the NAFTA flap called into question his leadership abilities. As I’ve been saying for days, and as Paul Begala said Tuesday night on CNN, as soon as this story surfaced, Obama should have said that Goolsbee was not speaking for the campaign and should have given Goolsbee the heave-ho. Instead, the Goolsbee comment keeps stinging him.
2. Rezko
It certainly didn’t help the Obama campaign that Tony Rezko’s trial began on Monday. The Rezko story has been lying around like a pulled hand grenade next to Obama’s headquarters for months now. Rezko is the Chicago wheeler-dealer who stands accused of money laundering and extorting bribes. He’s a longtime friend, funder, and supporter of Obama’s. And he helped Obama buy his house in Chicago. The Rezko ties, which the media finally began digging into, cast a shadow not only on Obama’s judgment but on his claim to want to clean up government.
3. A Blunder in the Last Debate
The Clinton camp wisely picked up on an Obama error in the Cleveland debate. Clinton had criticized him for never holding an oversight hearing on NATO’s role in Pakistan, even though he chairs a subcommittee on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that deals with NATO. All Obama could say to that was, “I became chairman of this committee at the beginning of this campaign, at the beginning of 2007. So it is true that we haven’t had oversight hearings on Afghanistan.” He all but admitted he shirked his duties to run for President! Clinton used this footage of Obama’s answer in an effective ad against him in the final week.
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Gene Lyons: Political Awakening Could be Costly
Gene Lyons, The Arkansas Democrat Gazette, March 5, 2007
So it’s two days before the critical Texas and Ohio primaries, and how does the mighty Washington Post decorate its influential Outlook section? Well, the online headline kept changing: first, “Women Aren’t Very Bright,” followed by “Why Do Women Act So Dumb?” and finally, “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” Author Charlotte Allen’s thesis was that Sen. Barack Obama appeared to be winning the Democratic contest because irrational women fell for him like teenaged Beatles fans circa 1964. Also, because Hillary Clinton “has run one of the worst – and, yes, stupidest – presidential races in recent history, marred by every stereotypical flaw of the female sex.” Specifically, whining, weeping, relying too much on her husband, and worst, hiring women staffers “chosen for loyalty rather than, say, brains or political savvy.” Allen’s deepest thought, however, is that “Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true.” Fundamentally stupid, women can’t drive, do math, or much of anything really, apart from care for children and get off on dopey romance novels and TV shows like “Grey’s Anatomy,” allegedly one of Clinton’s favorites. Why, “even men’s brains are bigger than women’s.” Yeah, well, exit polls in 2000 and 2004 showed that women voted against that paragon of masculinity, George W. Bush, both times. So there’s that. Meanwhile, I’ve got a couple of big-brained fellows out in the barn who exchange significant glances whenever I bring them a carrot. Are horses secretly smarter than humans? Eighteenth century adventurer Lemuel Gulliver suspected so, but he was prone to exaggeration.
Chastened by reader reaction, Outlook editor John Pomfret alibied that Allen’s article was “tongue-in-cheek.” To paraphase Eric Altermann, what’s next at the Post? Satires about shiftless Negroes, greedy Jews, Irish drunks, Italian criminals and happy-go-lucky Mexicans?
Editorial advice: If you’ve got to tell people something’s funny, it ain’t.
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March 5, 2008
David Sirota: The Clinton-Lieberman Connection
David Sirota, Credo Action, March 5, 2008
Confusion and misinformation are two of the most powerful weapons in a desperate politician’s arsenal. They were used by Joe Lieberman in the 2006 general election against Ned Lamont, and exit polls suggest that they helped Hillary Clinton blast her way through yesterday’s primary in Ohio.
Over the last few weeks, Clinton has been telling Ohio voters she never supported the North American Free Trade Agreement – an agreement that has become a symbol of corrupt economic policies to many working-class voters. Clinton has made these claims expecting everyone to forget her speeches over the last decade trumpeting NAFTA as a great success.
Her direct quotes praising NAFTA repeatedly are not up for interpretation – and neither are her absurd claims to “have been against NAFTA from the beginning.” We’re talking about pure, unadulterated lying here – and lying with a purpose: To confuse enough voters into thinking she actually did oppose NAFTA and that her strong support for NAFTA is somehow the same as Barack Obama’s longtime opposition to the pact. Last night’s results prove the scheme worked.
CBS News reports that “among Ohio voters who expressed that trade takes jobs away, 55 percent supported Clinton.” The Associated Press has some more details:
“Clinton’s past support of the North American Free Trade Agreement didn’t hurt her in Ohio where most voters think trade with other countries has cost the state jobs. Blue-collar workers and voters who live in union households backed Clinton as did voters in northern Ohio where manufacturing job losses have been staggering the past decade, according to exit polls for The Associated Press and television networks. Clinton won nearly six in 10 votes from union households in Ohio’s Democratic primary Tuesday and the same number among people who earn less than $50,000 a year.”
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March 4, 2008
March 3, 2008
Paul Krugman: Deliverance or Diversion?
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, March 3, 2008
After their victory in the 2006 Congressional elections, it seemed a given that Democrats would try to make this year’s presidential campaign another referendum on Republican policies. After all, the public appears fed up not just with President Bush, but with his party. For example, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center shows Democrats are preferred on every issue except terrorism. They even have a 10-point advantage on “morality.”
Add to this the fact that perceptions about the economy are worsening week by week, and one might have expected the central theme of the Democratic campaign to be “throw the bums out.”
But a funny thing happened on the way to the 2008 election.
Unless Hillary Clinton wins big on Tuesday, Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee. And he’s not at all the kind of candidate one might have expected to emerge out of the backlash against Republican governance.
Now, nobody would mistake Mr. Obama for a Republican — although contrary to claims by both supporters and opponents, his voting record places him, with Senator Clinton, more or less in the center of the Democratic Party, rather than in its progressive wing.
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March 2, 2008
The Texas Star: Obama Campaign Keeps Rising
Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet, March 1, 2008
Like a good soldier, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) dutifully campaigned in Texas on Friday, delivering a gritty, determined and focused speech on her qualifications to be commander in chief to 1,000 people at a midday rally in Waco, a poor, small city in the state’s Bible Belt.
But while Clinton stood on a stage with retired top military officers and veterans from conflicts dating back to World War II, including ex-NATO commander Wesley Clark, her opponent Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) held what could only be described as a political rock concert Friday night in San Antonio, where perhaps 5,000 people turned out in a city whose large Latino population has been touted as one of Clinton’s strongholds.
Indeed, as Dorothy Dean, a longtime political organizer in Dallas who ran Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns in the southern part of that city and delivered historic Democratic turnouts in prior elections, said in an interview Thursday, the state seems poised for an Obama victory on Tuesday, March 4 — not because there is anything wrong with Clinton, but because Obama has touched a deeper, once-in-a-generation nerve.
“I know Hillary. I have talked to her personally,” Dean said. “I have nothing against her. She is knowledgeable. She’s smart. She knows what she’s doing. But this is a new wave. It’s a new day. It’s a new time. And the people have heard the same old promises. They don’t know if Obama can deliver. But at least they want to give him a try.”
Dean, who has worked in local politics for four-plus decades explained.
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Alec Baldwin: Who Can Beat McCain?
Alec Baldwin, The Huffington Post, April 13, 2008
Lotta folks on this site hating Hillary because she’s a woman. Lotta folks on this site loving Hillary because she’s a woman. Makes me think that, in some quarters, men have been uncomfortable with women a lot longer than whites have been uncomfortable with blacks.
Sometimes I honestly believe that a racist white guy would vote for Obama over anyone like his wife or mother. A woman as Commander-and-Chief? Uh-uh, they say.
How sad.
Lotta folks worried about Obama’s level of experience. Whatever you do, don’t buy into that Republican bullshit. Obama is FDR compared to this Bush. The GOP committed every possible sin in order to get Bush elected. They forged a whole set of new ones to get him reelected. Everyone around the world recognizes that America is in real trouble. Most Americans do, too.
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