Keeping our ‘civil war’ civil

You would have to be deaf and blind and living in a cave not to have noticed that Barack had a merry little sweep this weekend, and it was a honey. He not only beat out Hil in all the primaries, he also swept Big Bill and Jimmy Carter for a Grammy for the audio version of his book, “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream”.

So is this Obamamania, a wave into the future? Or a suckers bet, Obamanation? And what of Mrs. Clinton, licking her wounds and reconfiguring her campaign? And is the party split, in … oopsie … bad ways?

Barack’s got the mojo, right now — and he’s pulled up neck in neck with Hil except for those worrisome Super Delegates. [A number of Democratic advisers and pundits have declared that if the SD's call this against the public tide, they will quit the Dem party, including Donna Brazile, whom I admire. The Clinton machine has the edge, here, but it's causing a major rift -- this is a bit by Rahm Emmanuel's brother that defines the 'civil war' in the Blue party that Frank Rich writes about, farther down.]

After Saturdays sweep, Obama went on to take Maine, a state Hillary felt she had in her pocket. We have the Potomac primaries upon us now — Virginia, Maryland and DC. Obama is favored. The BIG babies — Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania — loom; that’s where Hillary appears to have an advantage, but Barack has the momentum. Hillary, meanwhile, has changed out her campaign manager, and appears to be restructuring her message [again.]

The wrinkles in all this are mind-boggling — Florida and Michigan gave up their party delegates in order to be one of the first out the door; now what? Those are voters that need representing, but nobody knows what do with with them. Hil took those contests, and wants them “as is” … perhaps a do-over is called for.

The pundits are duking it out over WHO the candidates followers will support if they don’t win — and apparently the Obama supporters are the least inclined to follow Hil if she gets the nod. On the other hand … although Edwards hasn’t tilted toward either [maybe today, maybe tomorrow] his concerns are 1] the continuing message re: poverty and 2] electability. I’m thinking the electability issue is growing more moot by the minute … the base does not support Clinton because she is so very moderate. Obama gives the base hope for possible progressive change, and he’s even got a good share of Independents and Pubs hearing his voice [see the first article.] Perhaps an Edwards nod will give us more insider information.

You already know how I feel about this — there’s not enough change here to suit me with either remaining candidate, so after I licked my wounds on Dennis and John, I’ve become pragmatic. Perhaps the change in tone is the baby step that launches a “new deal” — electing a Democrat is one large bit of that; electing the most progressive Democrat would be another. And for that reason, although I’m hardly convinced, I’ll support Obama, and the last article here speaks to my reasons. Don’t let the title, Jesus Told Me To Endorse Obama, put you off.

A zillion [feels like] years ago, I removed myself from my traditional Christian upbringing by going through the New Testament and underlining every word attributed to Jesus — it was MY baby step toward knocking down the walls of the box of belief I’d been born into. There is a growing movement, now, of what is called Red Letter Christians; you don’t have to underline anymore, you can get a version of the Bible that has that information printed in red. They resonate to the Christ message of caring for the poor, the suffering, the needy; they are anti-war and pro-peace. After all these years of the Man over the Message, it’s good to feel the pendulum swing back. The Founders were not impressed with the Man … but they were clearly influenced by the Message; that is our heritage. In a time for us to maximize what’s best about us, and as a series of first steps, this one is a pivotal.

Still, the separation between church and state is clear, and must be reinforced. You cannot separate a person from their philosophy, but you can expect them to make that a matter of character rather than policy. I see that character in Obama. I don’t know what else he’ll do … and I’m not holding my breath … but that counts with me. And, unfortunately, I’ve seen too many Clintonian gaffs with Hillary’s campaign to think that her character has changed significantly in the last years. She’s a decent person, admirable in many ways, and she’s at the top of the 3D political food chain … but I’m looking for someone who has the capacity to leap. I’d rather take a shot at the possibilities than stay with the probabilities. AND — may I say — no matter WHO the Blue Dog is that leads this pack, this is no time for “hurt feelings” … John McCain represents another four years, maybe eight, of the very policies that have brought this nation to its knees. If we don’t draw that to a close this year, there’s no turning back toward functionality.

This post is some of the better editorials about the Clinton/Obama war — be sure to read the tit/tat on their military positions, and Barack wins that in my mind, again, only in terms of tone. I’ve tried to put a little of everything in here — we have a short window of time to think this through remaining; always best to know too much than not enough.

At the moment, it’s a fight — and I’d rather it was a collaboration. Perhaps we’ll come to that in due time; it will depend on how mature we’ve become. And perhaps this will make a bit of inroad into what is so badly needed — third party dynamics!

Jude

ps — Last night we had a big snow dump in the Patch; a second wave of freezing rain is due in any time. That usually indicated wires down — maybe I’ll check in tomorrow, maybe not. Think warm thoughts!

Why He Won
Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic
10 Feb 2008

Because of experiences like this one (and my email in-tray is now full of them):

I drove for two hours yesterday to Bangor with my sister and daughter to see Barack speak in Maine. I figured it would be interesting to see a candidate speak, when Maine is typically forgotten. We made the mistake of getting there about an hour before the doors opened to the Bangor Auditorium, as the population of the city had increased by a third for his speech. We waited in the longest line I had ever seen in my life for almost two hours. We met some wonderful people, many younger and surprisingly many quite a bit older. After all of that waiting, we were only a few hundred feet from the auditorium when we were told that the main room had filled to capacity as well as the overflow room. Just when we were ready to turn back, we were told that Barack would speak to us outside, and would do so FIRST.

So imagine a scene like the stump speeches only read about in books, people jostling on snowbanks, climbing fences, trees, even each other in the calm cold that was Maine yesterday to hear and see Barack, for only a few minutes. And did he deliver.

There was excitement, there was hope, and there were specifics. Talk of new ways to use our old industrial centers, dead and forgotten by the establishment. Talk of help with college tuition. Talk of thinking about our children and grandchildren first. He then spent time talking to and shaking hands with the crowd before going in.

I could not believe this was happening. No crowd control, no checking of bags, Barack in a potentially dangerous setting with no way for Secret Service to cover him. And he did it without hesitation. Anyone who will do this in a state with a population likely to vote for Hillary, a tiny, white, poor, lost in the back woods near Canada population, and for those foolish enough to show up “late”, is someone who clearly gives a damn. He was comfortable with a chaotic situation, worked it to his advantage on the fly, and did it with grace and aplomb. Hillary speaks of worries about Barack being a likable guy, same as George Bush. She’s right, and also dead wrong. Likable they both can be, yes. But George Bush is the man who drinks you under the table, then drives you all home and thusly off a cliff. Barack is the guy you follow into battle, ready to do what needs to be done to save a country in danger. This life-long Independent is ready to sign on to the Democratic party, participate in today’s caucus, and follow this leader all the way to November and beyond. I exhort everyone else here to consider the same.

A simple question I’ve been asking for a while now. Who else does this? ++

Hillary Heeds Hawks: How Obama’s and Clinton’s Advisors Mirror Their War Stands
Paul Loeb, HuffPo
February 9, 2008

In their focus on the electoral horse-race, the media have ignored a key difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — the positions of their foreign policy advisors on the Iraq war. As political scientist Stephen Zunes points out in Foreign Policy in Focus, Clinton’s key advisors overwhelmingly supported it, while Obama’s opposed it. The differences in their positions on whether to go to war mirror those of the two candidates. They also give a sense of how Clinton and Obama are likely to deal with the immensely difficult foreign policy challenges they’ll face if elected, including dealing with Iraq.

Zunes’s article, revised and shortened for HuffPo:

The president makes the decisions, but who advises the president? We know Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle insisted to Bush that American forces would be treated as liberators if we went into Iraq. McCain has surrounded himself with people likely to encourage him to follow a similar disastrous path if he becomes president. But what about Obama and Clinton?

A major difference stands out among those they are likely to appoint to key posts in national defense, intelligence, and foreign affairs: Almost everyone in Senator Obama’s foreign policy team opposed the U.S. invasion. By contrast, most of Senator Clinton’s foreign policy team, which largely comprises veterans of her husband’s administration, strongly supported George W. Bush’s call for a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

It should come as no surprise that during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Obama spoke at a Chicago anti-war rally while Clinton went as far as falsely claiming that Iraq was actively supporting al-Qaeda. And during the recent State of the Union address, when Bush proclaimed that the Iraqi surge was working, Clinton stood and cheered while Obama remained seated and silent.

Clinton’s advisors are similarly confident in the ability of the United States to impose its will through force. This is reflected to this day in the strong support for President Bush’s troop surge among such Clinton advisors (and original invasion advocates) as Jack Keane, Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon.

Clinton’s top foreign policy advisor — and her likely pick for Secretary of State — Richard Holbrooke, insisted that Iraq remained “a clear and present danger at all times.” He rejected the broad international legal consensus against such offensive wars and insisted European governments and anti-war demonstrators who opposed a U.S. invasion of Iraq “undoubtedly encouraged” Saddam Hussein.

Clinton advisor Sandy Berger, who served as her husband’s national security advisor, insisted that “even a contained Saddam” was “harmful to stability and to positive change in the region” and insisted on the necessity of “regime change.” Other top Clinton advisors — such as former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright — confidently predicted that American military power could easily suppress any opposition to a U.S. takeover of Iraq.

By contrast, during the lead-up to the war, Obama’s advisors recognized as highly suspect the Bush administration’s claims regarding Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” and offensive delivery systems capable of threatening U.S. national security.

Now advising Obama, former Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, argued that public support for war “should not be generated by fear-mongering or demagogy.” Brzezinski seems to have learned from mistakes like arming the Mujahideen. He warned that invading a country that was no threat to the United States would threaten America’s global leadership because most of the international community would see it as an illegitimate act of aggression.

Another key Obama advisor, the Carnegie Endowment’s Joseph Cirincione, argued that the goal of containing the potential threat from Iraq had been achieved as a result of sanctions, the return of inspectors, and a multinational force stationed in the region serving as a deterrent.

Meanwhile, other future Obama advisors — such as Susan Rice, Larry Korb, Samantha Power, and Richard Clarke — raised concerns about the human and material costs of invading and occupying a large Middle Eastern country and the risks of American forces becoming embroiled in post-invasion chaos and a lengthy counter-insurgency war.

These differences in the key circles of foreign policy specialists surrounding these two candidates are consistent with their diametrically opposing views in the lead-up to the war, with Clinton voting to let President Bush invade that oil-rich country at the time and circumstances of his choosing, while Obama was speaking out to oppose a U.S. invasion.

Hillary Clinton has a few advisors who did oppose the war, like Wesley Clark, but taken together, the kinds of key people she’s surrounded herself with supports the likelihood that her administration, like Bush’s, would be more likely to embrace exaggerated and alarmist reports regarding potential national security threats, to ignore international law and the advice of allies, and to launch offensive wars.

By contrast, as The Nation magazine noted, a Barack Obama administration would be more likely to examine the actual evidence of potential threats before reacting, to work more closely with America’s allies to maintain peace and security, to respect the country’s international legal obligations, and to use military force only as a last resort.

In terms of Iran, for instance, Cirincione has downplayed the supposed threat, while Clinton advisor Holbrooke insists that “the Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States,” the country is “the most pressing problem nation,” and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler. This is consistent with Clinton’s vote for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment that opened the door to a potential Bush attack on Iran, and with Obama’s opposition to it.

Given the problems exemplified by the tragic legacy of the current administration, primary voters should recognize that Obama’s promise of change is the most prudent course in these dangerous times.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco.

Walt Kelly meets Barack Obama at the beach
Weldon Berger, Smirking Chimp
February 10, 2008

A recent Barack Obama campaign email carried the tag line “We are the change we’ve been waiting for”, drawn from a speech he made after the February 5th primary extravaganza. The line leaves me cold because my resistance to Obama arises in large part from his inflationary rhetoric, but it nagged at me for several days for reasons beyond that. I finally realized that it reminded me of Walt Kelly’s famous “We have met the enemy and he is us” line from a Pogo strip on pollution; it’s sort of the flip side.

Obama is at pains to simultaneously demythologize himself and cast himself as the harbinger of deep political and cultural change in this country. “I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure” is fundamentally at odds with “We are the change we’ve been waiting for”; there is no “we” in his movement without him. He’s the walrus. Goo goo g’joob.

That’s not inevitably a bad thing. If Dennis Kucinich could have inspired a personality cult, I might have joined it. But Kucinich’s cult would have been policy-driven; more or less singular ideas harnessed to a man. Obama’s is Obama-driven; his policies aren’t notably different from Clinton’s other than a modestly less militarist approach to foreign policy. (I say ‘modestly’ because “the wrong war at the wrong time” isn’t exactly a clarion call to reexamine the fundamentals of America’s historical approach to military power and foreign policy). And there’s little to distinguish him from the rest of the defunct Democratic field: Bleach him, age him, set him up with a volume of Neil Kinnock’s speeches and you’ve got Joe Biden instead of Barack Obama.

Any Democratic president will ring in significant changes from the Bush administration. Political appointees would presumably be directed to run their agencies more for the benefit of the public and less for the benefit of major campaign contributors and theocracy fans. Some of the more egregious Bush executive orders would be undone. Assuming the requisite lack of deference to Senate Republicans, we would get some decent federal judges for a change, maybe even a non-reactionary Supreme Court justice or two.

Those are important and desirable changes. They’re not, however, dependent on the election of a particular individual from a pool of two who are both operating within the margins of a corporate-friendly, militarist orthodoxy, and who both have yet to acknowledge the degree to which their very similar legislative agendas will be hamstrung by the budget and a smaller but more obstinate Republican minority.

Which is to say that supporters of either Democratic candidate, Obama especially, would be well advised to lower their expectations from the “walking on water” ballpark to the “not drowning” one.

According to me. Your mileage may vary. ++

Where’s the Big Idea?
BOB HERBERT, NYT
February 9, 2008

Berkeley, Calif. — There is plenty for Democrats to admire in the candidacies of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

They are smart, appealing and politically gifted. High fives are in order. Their success to date represents advances in American society that many would have seen as unthinkable just a few years ago.

There’s actually a lot for Americans of all political persuasions to admire this election season. This is how we change regimes in the U.S. — peacefully. I had a long conversation the other day with a writer from Kenya, Edwin Okong’o, who is visiting the University of California campus here.

He found it difficult to hide his grief as he spoke of the murderous violence that has followed a disputed election in his country. Then he managed a smile. “It’s all about corruption,” he said. “I am always amazed when people say they are leaving the American government because they have to make more money. In my country, you go into the government to make the money.”

But for all its upside, there is something important missing from this year’s presidential campaign. In an era that cries out for real change, John McCain, the presumptive G.O.P. nominee, is selling himself to voters not as the maverick he may once have been, but as a faithful follower of policies the country should be eager to discard.

With the Democrats, we seem obsessed with whether Senator Obama can get his new voters to the polls, and whether Senator Clinton can keep enough cash coming in, and whether there’s an inch or an inch-and-a-half’s worth of difference between their positions on health insurance and the war in Iraq.

Where, in this alleged season of change, is the big idea?

What’s missing in this campaign is a bold vision of where the United States should be heading in these crucially important early years of the 21st century. In their different ways, Senators Clinton and Obama have shown themselves to be inspirational and at times even heroic figures. But neither has offered the vision that this moment in history demands.

We’re excited more by who they are than by what they’ve promised to do.

All the candidates have detailed policy proposals — masterpieces of minutiae.

But do we have any real sense of what Senator Obama will do to stop the stagnation of the middle class and resuscitate the American dream? Do we have any reason to believe that during a Clinton presidency we’ll see a transformation of the nation’s decaying infrastructure? Does John McCain have the stuff to lead us from a long debilitating period of dependence on foreign oil to a new and exciting world of energy efficiency and innovation?

The essential question the candidates should be trying to answer — but that is not even being asked very often — is how to create good jobs in the 21st century. Thirty-seven million Americans are poor, and roughly 60 million others are near-poor. (These are people struggling to make it on incomes of $20,000 to $40,000 a year for a family of four.)

The middle class is hardly flourishing. In testimony before a House subcommittee last year, Harley Shaiken, a Berkeley professor who is an expert on labor and employment, remarked: “During a period of robust economic growth, record profits and the fastest sustained productivity increases since the 1950s, only a thin slice at the top of the economic heap is enjoying higher living standards.”

Now the country is faced with a possible recession and the likelihood of moving further backward rather than forward on employment.

“We’re building exit ramps from the middle class,” said Mr. Shaiken during an interview. “But what is the path to the middle class for most Americans now? We need to figure out how to resume building entrance ramps.”

The most direct route to the middle class has always been a good job. An obvious potential source of new jobs would be a broad campaign to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure — its roads, bridges, schools, levees, water treatment facilities and so forth.

Another area with big job creation potential is the absolutely vital quest to develop alternative sources of energy. That effort should carry the same high national priority that was accorded the Manhattan Project during World War II. I’d even call it Manhattan II.

There are moments in history that demand not just talent in a nation’s leadership, but greatness — men or women with the courage to dream bigger and the ability to convince others that those dreams can be realized.

The presidential candidates don’t seem to be rising to the nation’s many crucial challenges with the sense of urgency and the creative vision that is called for. Not yet, at least. ++

Next Up for the Democrats: Civil War
FRANK RICH, NYT
February 10, 2008

WHAT if a presidential candidate held what she billed as “the largest, most interactive town hall in political history” on national television, and no one noticed?

The untold story in the run-up to Super Tuesday was Hillary Clinton’s elaborate live prime-time special the night before the vote. Presiding from a studio in New York, the candidate took questions from audiences in 21 other cities. She had plugged the event four days earlier in the last gasp of her debate with Barack Obama and paid a small fortune for it: an hour of time on the Hallmark Channel plus satellite TV hookups for the assemblies of supporters stretching from coast to coast.

The same news media that constantly revisited the Oprah-Caroline-Maria rally in California ignored “Voices Across America: A National Town Hall.” The Clinton campaign would no doubt attribute this to press bias, but it scrupulously designed the event to avoid making news. Like the scripted “Ask President Bush” sessions during the 2004 campaign, this town hall seemed to unfold in Stepford. The anodyne questions (”What else would you do to help take care of our veterans?”) merely cued up laundry lists of talking points. Some in attendance appeared to trance out.

But I’m glad I watched every minute, right up until Mrs. Clinton was abruptly cut off in midsentence so Hallmark could resume its previously scheduled programming (a movie promising “A Season for Miracles,” aptly enough). However boring, this show was a dramatic encapsulation of how a once-invincible candidate ended up in a dead heat, crippled by poll-tested corporate packaging that markets her as a synthetic product leeched of most human qualities. What’s more, it offered a naked preview of how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party, in the endgame to come.

For a campaign that began with tightly monitored Web “chats” and then planted questions at its earlier town-hall meetings, a Bush-style pseudo-event like the Hallmark special is nothing new, of course. What’s remarkable is that instead of learning from these mistakes, Mrs. Clinton’s handlers keep doubling down.

Less than two weeks ago she was airlifted into her own, less effective version of “Mission Accomplished.” Instead of declaring faux victory in Iraq, she starred in a made-for-television rally declaring faux victory in a Florida primary that was held in defiance of party rules, involved no campaigning and awarded no delegates. As Andrea Mitchell of NBC News said, it was “the Potemkin village of victory celebrations.”

The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio set that looked like a deliberate throwback to the good old days of 1992, was equally desperate. If the point was to generate donations or excitement, the effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking on MSNBC, claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an online incarnation of the event in addition to “who knows how many” Hallmark channel viewers. Who knows, indeed? What we do know is that by then the “Yes We Can” Obama video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas had been averaging roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the Obama campaign: zero.)

Two days after her town-hall extravaganza, Mrs. Clinton revealed the $5 million loan she had made to her own campaign to survive a month in which the Obama operation had raised $32 million to her $13.5 million. That poignant confession led to a spike in contributions that Mr. Obama also topped. Though Tuesday was largely a draw in popular votes and delegates, every other indicator, from the candidates’ real and virtual crowds to hard cash, points to a steadily widening Obama-Clinton gap. The Clinton campaign might be an imploding Potemkin village itself were it not for the fungible profits from Bill Clinton’s murky post-presidency business deals. (The Clintons, unlike Mr. Obama, have not released their income-tax returns.)

The campaign’s other most potent form of currency remains its thick deck of race cards. This was all too apparent in the Hallmark show. In its carefully calibrated cross section of geographically and demographically diverse cast members — young, old, one gay man, one vet, two union members — African-Americans were reduced to also-rans. One black woman, the former TV correspondent Carole Simpson, was given the servile role of the meeting’s nominal moderator, Ed McMahon to Mrs. Clinton’s top banana. Scattered black faces could be seen in the audience. But in the entire televised hour, there was not a single African-American questioner, whether to toss a softball or ask about the Clintons’ own recent misadventures in racial politics.

The Clinton camp does not leave such matters to chance. This decision was a cold, political cost-benefit calculus. In October, seven months after the two candidates’ dueling church perorations in Selma, USA Today found Hillary Clinton leading Mr. Obama among African-American Democrats by a margin of 62 percent to 34 percent. But once black voters met Mr. Obama and started to gravitate toward him, Bill Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what African-Americans thought. In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, among others), “the black candidate” (as Clinton strategists told the Associated Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. Clinton himself).

The result? Black America has largely deserted the Clintons. In her California primary victory, Mrs. Clinton drew only 19 percent of the black vote. The campaign saw this coming and so saw no percentage in bestowing precious minutes of prime-time television on African-American queries.

That time went instead to the Hispanic population that was still in play in Super Tuesday’s voting in the West. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles had a cameo, and one of the satellite meetings was held in the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s smart politics, especially since Mr. Obama has been behind the curve in wooing this constituency.

But the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks on the Hallmark show is tainted by a creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.”

It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to “undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types.”

If that was the intent, it didn’t work. Mrs. Clinton did pile up her expected large margin among Latino voters in California. But her tight grip on that electorate is loosening. Mr. Obama, who captured only 26 percent of Hispanic voters in Nevada last month, did better than that in every state on Tuesday, reaching 41 percent in Arizona and 53 percent in Connecticut. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign’s attempt to drive white voters away from Mr. Obama by playing the race card has backfired. His white vote tally rises every week. Though Mrs. Clinton won California by almost 10 percentage points, among whites she beat Mr. Obama by only 3 points.

The question now is how much more racial friction the Clinton campaign will gin up if its Hispanic support starts to erode in Texas, whose March 4 vote it sees as its latest firewall. Clearly it will stop at little. That’s why you now hear Clinton operatives talk ever more brazenly about trying to reverse party rulings so that they can hijack 366 ghost delegates from Florida and the other rogue primary, Michigan, where Mr. Obama wasn’t even on the ballot. So much for Mrs. Clinton’s assurance on New Hampshire Public Radio last fall that it didn’t matter if she alone kept her name on the Michigan ballot because the vote “is not going to count for anything.”

Last month, two eminent African-American historians who have served in government, Mary Frances Berry (in the Carter and Clinton years) and Roger Wilkins (in the Johnson administration), wrote Howard Dean, the Democrats’ chairman, to warn him of the perils of that credentials fight. Last week, Mr. Dean became sufficiently alarmed to propose brokering an “arrangement” if a clear-cut victory by one candidate hasn’t rendered the issue moot by the spring. But does anyone seriously believe that Howard Dean can deter a Clinton combine so ruthless that it risked shredding three decades of mutual affection with black America to win a primary?

A race-tinged brawl at the convention, some nine weeks before Election Day, will not be a Hallmark moment. As Mr. Wilkins reiterated to me last week, it will be a flashback to the Democratic civil war of 1968, a suicide for the party no matter which victor ends up holding the rancid spoils. ++

Particide In Six Easy Steps: Diligent Democrats Demonstrate Dumbness Daily
David Michael Green, Smirking Chimp via WelcomeToPottersville

(Tip o’ the tinfoil hat to reader Cossack for this amazing screed from Green, courtesy of the Smirking Chimp. Over the past three plus years, I’ve made mention of and screamed about all the evils and sins of omission of which the Democratic Party has been guilty but it took a better writer such as Green to sum it all up so succinctly in one massive, overwhelming, caustic ball of invective. - JP)

Suppose you had a political party you were trying to get rid of. How would you do it?

Would you give it some cement shoes and toss it into the bay? Would you roll it up in a carpet and drag it into the trunk of your car in the middle of the night? Would you put out a contract on it?

If the latter sounds appealing, no need to get your hands dirty messing with any nasty mob guys from Jersey. I know some very upstanding establishment folks who’ve perfected a killer formula (pun intended) for particide. They’re called Democrats, and they know how to get the job done right.

In fact, they’ve demonstrated it again for the umpteenth time just as I’m writing these words. Yesterday, that tough guy Harry Reid laid down the law for congressional Republicans thinking he wouldn’t play hardball on the much-needed economic stimulus package now working its way through Congress. He told them: “Well, I think that if they think this is a bluff, wait until we have this vote and they’ll find out if it’s a bluff. I’m not much of a bluffer.” Then, today, he completely caved into their pressure on the bill, proving - though perhaps not quite in the manner he intended - that he is in fact not much of a bluffer, after all, even if he is from Nevada. Nor, as it turns out, is he much of a negotiator either.

Yep, ladies and gentlemen, if it’s particide you’re after, Reid and his fellow Democrats would be happy to show you how it’s done. It’s pretty simple, really. There are just six easy steps that you need to follow to take out a political party that’s grown a bit, shall we say, inconvenient.

First of all, make sure it does nothing. If you’re looking for a good way to anger voters, here’s the best. Have them send you to Congress to address a host of their urgent concerns. Let them invest their full faith in you to rescue them from all the effects of a country gone completely off the rails. Let them believe and let them hope. Then do nothing. Crush their pedestrian little dreams in your blood-soaked hands by protecting corporate interests instead. Spend two years racking up not a single notable legislative accomplishment, and then go before the voters asking for another term. They’ll remember your name.

A second excellent technique is to fail to block the worst tendencies of the worst president ever, the very mission you were most entrusted with by the voters. If they hate this president’s stinking war, make sure you give him the money for it every time he asks. Send all his reactionary nominees to the Supreme Court after they mock you in bullshit hearings. Yeah, go ahead. Allow a supporter of torture and Constitution-shredding to become the highest law enforcement officer in the land. Etc., etc. Get it? Sure, you can go through the motions of opposition, but at the end of the day, be sure to bungle it so badly that you leave everybody scratching their heads and wondering which party actually controls Congress.

Next, while you’re at it, don’t do anything to make this hated president and his administration accountable for their manifold crimes of the century. Treat them as though they’ve got pictures of you in some airport men’s room somewhere that they’re threatening to release if you dare do anything remotely resembling oversight (or patriotism). Let these guys absolutely run rampant thrashing the republic in every imaginable way, while you sit on top of your congressional majority abdicating any responsibility for protecting the people who sent you there to protect them. Show the public how tough you can be by investigating the use of steroids in baseball, while lies about war and illegal phone-tapping and torture and suspension of habeas corpus go ignored. Keep your priorities straight and you’re guaranteed to score points with the voters, for sure.

Of course, not only must you fail to oppose an insane kleptocratic dictator, but it’s crucial that you also have absolutely no program or ideas of your own to offer. I mean, who can’t never not get no excitement going about nothing? Er, something like that… Anyhow, the point is that a political party without ideas is like a car without wheels. And it will go just about as far, too. If you want to get rid of your party, be sure to be about nothing whatsoever.

And yet, even while trying to be the Seinfeld of political parties, you will no doubt sometimes accidentally advance some sort of popular idea or another, despite yourself. You know, like a million monkeys at a keyboard… When these inadvertently beneficial bills are immediately destroyed by the obstructionist minority party - who continually overuse and abuse parliamentary tactics you (of course) never dreamed of all those years when you were in the minority - make sure that nobody in the voting public knows about it. You could run around screaming about them continually blocking you from doing the people’s business, but that would only increase public sympathy for you. And since you’re trying to kill your party, you surely won’t want to do that. No, like a good Democrat, you want to make sure the other guys never have to pay for their crimes.

Finally, one of the very best things you can do to destroy a political party is to avoid at all costs articulating an alternative narrative. Play ball on their turf! Let the other guys define the issues, frame the discussion, and paint you in the worst possible light - as deviants, traitors, cowards and haters of your own country! Now you’re talkin’, my friend. You want your house robbed right? Hand the door key to the thieves! You want your car crashed properly? Park it on railroad tracks! You want your party rubbed out completely? Let the other guys make the rules, fool! Heck, if you really want to make sure of your party’s demise, you can even encourage them steal elections you’ve actually won! It worked in Florida and Ohio!

If these six steps seem like a ridiculously reliable way to destroy a political party, that’s because they are. Still, they may not be entirely infallible. This year will be the acid test.

The good folks running the Democratic Party have assiduously followed the above formula to the letter, carefully dotting every ‘i’ and crossing every ‘t’. But damned if the recalcitrant right isn’t failing to play ball! What’s up with that? Have Republicans become so intractable nowadays that they’re even blocking the Democrats’ own self-induced demise? Is destruction obstruction the latest GOP game?

Or are Republicans just following their own particide formula, which - needless to say, like everything they do - is more disciplined and effective than even this fine blueprint belonging to Dumb Dems’? It kinda looks like it, after all. Consider their prescription: Take the biggest surplus in the history of the federal government and turn it into the biggest deficit. Fight a hugely unpopular war. Get caught lying about the rationale for it. Block efforts to save the planet from a looming environmental crisis, while pretending it isn’t real. Allow religious crazies to deny effective medical treatment to suffering humans in order to protect about-to-be-destroyed blastocysts. Get caught in all manner of corruption and sexual ‘deviancy’ while interminably preaching your own holier-than-thou sanctimonious purity. Shred the Constitution in every way imaginable. Load the government up with every incompetent low-wattage political hack you can find stuck behind a church pew somewhere. Make the whole world hate us. Use the federal government to prosecute people on the basis of their party affiliation. Stand by and watch one of the country’s major cities drown. Destroy a foreign country. Destroy the middle class of your own country. Be asleep at the wheel (at best) when the country is attacked. Fail to come even close to winning a war against the people you blame for that attack. And so on…

Quite a litany, eh? Yet, for all their best efforts, Republicans still can’t seem to get the Democrats to put the GOP out of its stinking misery. Still can’t get them to investigate. Still can’t get them to impeach. Still can’t get them to win. So now Republicans have brought out the big guns, engineering what looks like a massive economic recession on top of everything else. And they’re throwing people out of their homes in droves so that Wall Street can profit even more. Right before an election, too!

Yes, indeed. These guys aren’t messing around. Democrats seeking to kill their party are going to have to work extra hard in 2008, that’s for sure! Six steps may not be enough. If Democrats want to rub themselves out this year, they may need a seventh.

Get on their knees and beg the public not to vote for them? Nah. Too subtle.

Change their name to the Socialist Party? Nah. It might actually increase their share of votes.

Have their own sex scandals? Nah. Been there, done that.

Something else is going to be required to kill the party off for sure this year.

Oh, I know! They could nominate Hillary Clinton! ++

Krugman Claims Obama Supporters Are Cult-Like
Jason Linkins, The Huffington Post
February 11, 2008

Over the weekend, at his eponymous blog at The Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias warned of “the anti-Obama backlash brewing in the press” that was poised to hit “full stride.” I remember wondering how that was going to take shape. It should have occurred to me: Paul Krugman was going to manufacture it!

In a long screed in this morning’s New York Times, Krugman fulminates far and wide on the sins of the Obama camp. “I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody.” He believes that the Obama campaign is “dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. (Oh, really?) He finds it “saddening” how “many Obama supporters seem happy with the application of ‘Clinton rules’” which is, “the term a number of observers use for the way pundits and some news organizations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent.”

Well, it’s a good thing he’s not faking evenhandedness here! Krugman makes a lot of bold claims, and then fails to substantiate every single one of them. As to his claim that “most of the venom” is emanating from the Obama camp, he provides not a single shred of evidence. He provides no example of the Obama supporters, evincing the behavior that “saddens” him. Frankly, he fails to pull off the whole “cult of personality” charge as well, but my wife, having earned a deep dislike of chanted mantras from her work at elementary school, finds the constant “Yes we can!” refrain deeply grating, so I’m happy to sympathize with Krugman on that point.

The only thing that passes for evidence in Krugman’s piece is “the way the press covered Whitewater” back in the 1990s, and the recent remarks of David Shuster - who a) is not a member of the Obama camp, b) was punished swiftly for his remarks, and c) hardly represents the tip of the iceberg of unfair Clinton commentary on MSNBC, which d) has not escaped the attention of the press or similarly aggrieved protesters. Clinton has, admittedly, more than her fair share of nemeses among those who cover the news - Chris Matthews and Bill Kristol come most clearest to the mind. But by and large, their enmity was in place long before Barack Obama arrived on the scene and emerges independently of the Obama campaign’s actions. What’s more, should Obama quit the scene today, those who bare their anti-Clinton bias are not likely to ease up.

In short, a strong case can be made that Clinton’s been roughly treated by the press. The case that cannot be made is that the Obama campaign is culpable for this treatment. The fact of the matter is, the Obama campaign has already been famously cited for the extent to which they avoid courting the press. Writing for the Washington Post, media critic Howard Kurtz complained only weeks ago that the Obama campaign “makes only spotty attempts to drive its preferred story lines in the press,” and that is “aloof,” “not obsessed with winning the news cycle,” and not given to launching campaign “charm offensives.” Ironically, the reason the Obama campaign gives for their tactics was the hard lesson they were dealt when an example of the “venom” Krugman describes leached into the press:

–But ever since Obama was embarrassed by a staff memo that assailed Hillary Clinton as the senator from “Punjab” (over her contributions from Indian Americans), he has ordered his team to steer clear of pejorative attacks not based on public actions.

Kurtz, by the way, notes a point of comparison between the Obama and the Clinton campaigns. The Clinton camp “aggressively lobbies journalists around the clock.” And this is how kindergarten essays make it into the news cycle. This is how questionnaires and false concerns over a candidate’s liberalism fuel fervor one week while neutral observations of Ronald Reagan’s presidency inflame false concerns over the same candidate’s conservatism the next. This is how an A-list columnist - typically zealous about leaving no claim unsupported by evidence - very breezily and comfortably abandons those standards one morning to write a hit piece on those who’ve hit not. But none dare call this venom. ++

When is a Delegate Not a Delegate?
Lessons for Barack Obama
ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, CounterPunch
February 11, 2008

Barack Obama and his supporters are exuberant after their victories this last weekend in the Washington and Nebraska precinct caucuses, in the Louisiana primary and the Maine municipal caucus. But they would do well to remember that since the mid-1970s the Democratic National Committee has spent countless hours plowing firebreaks between expressions of the popular will in such caucus and primary votes and the ultimate selection of the nominee.

Take Alabama. On February 5, Super Tuesday, Obama won that primary in convincing fashion by a margin of nearly 20 points. But when the dust settled, he and Hillary Clinton ended up with an equal number of pledged delegates from the state. Why? The delegates were proportioned according to the votes in the state’s 7 congressional districts and like all such political real estate in the USA, these districts have been gerrymandered to corral the black vote in as small a number of districts as possible. Result, Obama won 83 per cent of the black vote, but the those numbers were concentrated in two or three districts so even though Obama ran up 70-30 triumphs and Hillary battled to 55 to 45 margins of victory, the count at the end of the day gave them the same number of delegates each.

Another firebreak is the follow-on in many states, from caucus to state convention. The current pattern is that Obamian enthusiasts go the caucuses and delivery fiery speeches about their man and his dream of change, rack up a substantial victory and head back to campus, aglow with victory. But then the party regulars regroup, the labor organizers confer, and the party establishment strikes back at the state convention, where those delegates pledged at the caucus are “authorized” in a series of backroom deals.

Gary Hart learned this the hard way in 1984. Hart had won his political spurs in a famous mutiny of the Democratic base, when Hart managed George McGovern’s successful drive to the nomination in 1972. In the early states of the 1984 campaign Hart won a dramatic victory by ten points over Walter Mondale in New Hampshire. Short on money, Hart then aimed, exactly like Obama, at the caucuses to show momentum. After Super Tuesday, Mondale and Hart were neck and neck. Then Hart cleaned up in the caucuses, just as Obama is now doing. The two split the big states. Mondale won New York and Pennsylvania. Hart won Ohio and California. Then, in the weeks before the Democratic Party convention Mondale and the Democratic Party machine went into action at the various state conventions. Hart watched aghast as his hard-won delegates melted back into the smoke-filled rooms and emerged with Mondale buttons on their lapels. The coup de grace came with Mondale’s efficient capture of the Super Delegates, who went to him almost en bloc.

There was another powerful challenge in 1984, from Jesse Jackson. At the early part of the campaign for the Democratic nomination Jackson won five primaries and caucuses ­ Louisiana, Washington DC, South Carolina, Virginia and Mississippi (which duly reversed Jackson’s singular triumph at the state convention.} Altogether, Jackson got 3.3 million primary votes, 21 per cent of the total votes cast in the 1984 primaries and caucuses. He ended up with precisely 8 per cent of the delegates. Jackson bitterly denounced the process as a rigged affair that should be reformed. Nothing has changed.

So although Obama has pulled even and on some counts is ahead in delegates pledged to him thus far, these numbers are far from conclusive.

In the Hillary camp we are witnessing the usual ritual following a bad spell on the campaign trail. Patti Solis Doyle, Hillary’s campaign manager, has been shown the door and Maggie Williams installed in her place. Meanwhile, Bill has been demoted to the telemarketing division of the campaign, speed-dialing Super Delegates.

Still amid such flurries the basic strategy is in place. Hang on until the big primaries in Ohio and Texas on March 4. Here Hillary is still seen as having the advantage of organized labor in Ohio and of the Hispanic vote in Texas. By and large union members are for Hillary, as John Edwards sadly discovered. Bizarre though it may seem, given Hillary’s record as a corporate lawyer, there’s a class divide between her and Obama. Hillary has the support of the white working class. She has also had a commanding edge in winning the votes of white women and people over sixty. These are very formidable assets.

Jackson ran into that wall in 1988. The early part of the campaign was one of the most exciting drives by an outsider in American political history. Hart put himself out of contention by his nautical jaunt with Donna Rice on the good ship Monkey Business. Jackson swept triumphantly through the early primaries: Alabama, Washington DC, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Puerto Rico and Virginia. In the caucus states, he won Delaware, Michigan, South Carolina, Vermont. (His caucus victories in Texas and Alaska were once again diminished at the state conventions.)

By March of 1988 Jackson and Michael Dukakis, the uptight governor of Massachusetts, were neck and neck. Jackson thought he had a good chance of winning in Wisconsin, thus showing he could win a primary in an industrial state with a big slice of white working class voters. Jackson spent much time in the state, particularly on the picket lines outside the American Motors plant, scheduled to shut down. Jackson compared the struggle in Kenosha to the struggle in Selma in the 1960s. In the polling before the Wisconsin primary Jackson had a substantial lead. His hopes were dashed. In the last hours, in the privacy of the voting booth, many of these white working class voters jumped to Dukakis. This was the moment the wind went out of the Jackson campaign.

On the Republican side, the conservatives, distraught at the likelihood of McCain being the nominee, are prophesying disaster in the November vote. An internal assessment circulating though the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting in Washington DC last week predicted “an epic landslide” by the Democratic ticket similar to Lyndon Johnson’s obliteration of Goldwater in 1964. The memo attributed this likely outcome to recession, the war in Iraq and a terrible candidate. Republican senator Thad Cochrane has openly said he trembles at the thought of an unstable McCain in the Oval Office with his finger on the nuclear trigger. Whoever the Democratic nominee is, McCain should be easy meat, with scores of victims of his savage onslaughts ready to testify to his frenzied personal onslaughts and profanity-laden tirades. By insisting on using the word “gooks” about the Vietnamese, he’s already well on the way to losing the Asian-American vote. To an electorate opposed to the war in Iraq by some 70 per cent, he enthusiastically prophesies a century of war.

Against this distasteful and manic figure Mike Huckabee continues his challenge. Five days after the press, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson bowed in surrender and hailed McCain as the nominee, Huckabee this weekend won a primary in Louisiana, and caucuses in Kansas. He came in a very close second in the disputed caucuses in Washington state, where the Republican party chairman, Luke Essers, simply cut off the vote as soon as McCain nosed ahead of Huckabee by a 200 vote margin, with 15 per cent of the votes still to be counted. When asked why he has declined to run up the white flag of surrender, Huckabee said jovially, “You never know, McCain might have a macaca moment”, referring to the ethnic slur that doomed Senator George Allen in the Virginia race in 2006.

He may be right. ++

Hillary Clinton Is Down But Not Out
As Barack Obama wins five weekend contests, Hillary Clinton reorganizes and plans for the Texas, Ohio, and Penn. primaries.
Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
February 11, 2008

The race to the Democratic nomination has hit a turning point. As Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) won five contests this weekend — Maine, Washington, Louisiana, Nebraska and the Virgin Islands — Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) reshuffled her staff, replacing campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle with longtime aid Maggie Williams.

Obama won Maine’s caucus on Sunday 59 percent to 40 percent for Clinton. On Saturday, he won Washington’s caucus 68 percent to 31 percent for Clinton. He won the Nebraska caucus 68 percent to 32 percent for Clinton. He won Louisiana’s primary 57 percent to 36 percent for Clinton. And he won the Virgin Islands caucus 90 percent to 7 percent for Clinton. All these contests had approximately 455,000 voters participating.

The Obama campaign is on a roll. In contrast, the Clinton campaign is down, but hardly out. According to the Obama campaign, it now leads in delegates, 1,030 to 946 for Clinton. But other sources, such as “Democratic Convention Watch, a website, say Clinton continues to lead with 1,108 delegates, compared to 1,063 for Obama. To win the nomination, 2,025 delegates are needed.

No matter who is winning the delegate count, what is clear is the Democratic presidential race is moving into uncharted territory, with the biggest question being can Clinton emerge weeks from now as the nominee if she wins the three last big states: Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania? Ohio and Texas vote on March 4.

The race to the Democratic nomination was supposed to be over by now. At least that is what Hillary Clinton’s campaign assumed going into Super Tuesday. The resignation of her campaign manager is a signal that the campaign’s early assumptions did not play out. But now, as Barack Obama begins a month where he is winning and is expected to win most small-state contests, the question is can the Clinton campaign rebuild and recover before those big state votes. In part, that transition is already underway.

Days before Super Tuesday’, Clinton retooled her stump speech. This weekend in Virginia, which votes with three other states on Tuesday, she drew on that new pitch speaking passionately about the “genius of our constitution … that was crafted to expand as our hearts do, allowing each generation to reach a more perfect union.” This is a notable softening of her tone and a departure from earlier speeches that often were heavy with policy prescriptions. While Obama’s speeches have lacked specifics compared to Clinton, she has struggled to match his inspirational tone. She may have found a balance.

Still, political perceptions can be cruel. There is no doubt it hurts the Clinton campaign to see headlines that Obama swept Saturday’s contests in Washington, Louisiana, Nebraska and the Virgin Islands and Sunday’s caucus in Maine. Those come after other painful news that she personally lent her campaign $5 million, that some staffers were not getting paid and her campaign manager’s resignation. The next locales to vote are Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., whose elections are on Tuesday. News organizations such as The New York Times say Obama has an edge in these contests.

Well-connected and perhaps cynical sources in the Clinton camp said these races hardly matter, because she can win the nomination on or after March 4 when the remaining big states vote. The Clinton campaign no doubt takes comfort in the demographics of Ohio and Pennsylvania, both large industrial states, and Texas, with its large Latino population. After all, she won California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, precedents that cannot be ignored.

But 2008 has been a season that has been unkind to predictions. Across the political aisle, Rudy Giuliani bet he could skip the early contests and rebound a month later in Florida, which John McCain won, pushing Rudy out of the race. It remains to be seen if Clinton can keep campaigning hard for another month - as Obama grabs the headlines — and come out on top. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton has shown she is a very tough and enduring candidate.

The next month may not be smooth sailing for Obama either. While his recent caucus wins in Washington, Nebraska, Maine and several Super Tuesday states just days before show a grassroots operation that Democratic Party officials cannot fail to notice, it remains to be seen how party stalwarts will react to this powerful new force. One fifth of those voting at the Democratic National Convention are so-called super delegates, a mix of Democratic National Committee members, elected federal and state office holders, party officials, donors and other luminaries. Clinton and Obama have launched campaigns within their campaigns to get pledges from these delegates. While the Obama campaign has been touting its progress, Clinton has had an edge because of lingering ties from Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Then there is the looming fight over Florida and Michigan, which the DNC stripped of its delegates after they held unauthorized early primary votes. All Democratic candidates pledged not to campaign in those states, and the only candidate on the ballot in Michigan was Clinton. Florida, however, had all the candidates on the ballot and labor unions supporting Clinton worked for her, winning the non-binding vote. Clinton held a victory rally there and said she would work to seat a Florida delegation, causing much angst in DNC ranks.

Sources close to DNC Chair Howard Dean said he has drawn a line against seating any delegation that could swing the nomination. But there has been talk in DNC circles of those two states holding late-season caucuses, another intangible variable that could put many more delegates in play.

But perhaps the most important factor facing both campaigns and the remaining Democratic voters is how the candidates will position — or reposition — themselves in coming days and weeks.

Clinton has updated her pitch, asking Americans to “give us the child who wants to learn, give us the people in need of work, give us the veteran who need our care, give us this economy to rebuild and this war to end, give us this nation to lift, this world to lead, this moment to seize. I know we’re ready.” In contrast, Obama has stuck with his basic message of bringing leadership that will forge solutions from a coalition of Democrats, independents and some Republicans who are not tied to the past.

Another factor is how the candidates will respond to John McCain, the Republican’s likely nominee who is an untraditional Republican. While McCain has caused much consternation among conservatives, his sometimes-maverick stands endear him to some independents, where Obama has also drawn support. Both Democratic candidates now mention McCain in their speeches, and draw contrasts, saying each would be the best candidate to beat him in the fall. Yet those contrasts, while vivid on issues such as Iraq and tax cuts, are only just beginning and are not well defined.

What Obama and Clinton each must do to tie up the nomination is bring their campaign into new orbits. Obama’s recent victories may be accomplishing this, but so too could Clinton’s new pitch and big state focus on the campaign trail.

Yet there is still more each could do to satisfy voters. Both could be articulate in areas where they have lagged, such as Obama’s lack of specificity — compared to Clinton — on what kind of policies his new politics of unity would offer. In contrast, Clinton could say why her team of already-experienced White House veterans would do better at governing in new and needed directions than Obama. She also has to distinguish herself from McCain, as many of her foreign policy votes are not far from his record — and, right or wrong, foreign policy is his strongest credential.

Campaigning is not governing, but observing how candidates respond to unforeseen events, such as a longer nominating contest, a likely GOP nominee, and a worsening economy should give voters more than enough information and impressions to make a choice. As the nominating process enters a new phase, the candidates and campaigns must react and adapt. If and how they do so will be a telling sign of their leadership abilities. Their political fate may depend on it. ++

Jesus told me to endorse Obama
PHIL HOSKINS, Capital Hill Blue
February 9, 2008

Bear with me. I am not a Christian, big “C” but I was “born again” when at fourteen years of age I read what Jesus is reported to have said to the people he encountered. I found in Jesus the personification of a set of values that seem to me to be essential to being a worthwhile human being. When I listen to those values, when I feel the deepest message of Jesus, Gandhi, Dr. King and any number of lights in history, I am led to see in Barrack Obama the best hope for their expression in our future as a nation.

I am profoundly pro-life, and I mean life after birth unto death. I am profoundly pro-community and think that individual liberty finds its highest expression in service to others. I am in awe of each human being as an expression of that which creates us all, each moment of life, no matter how beastly and bizarre that expression may be. I believe there are no mistakes and nothing outside the penumbra of the values we have found throughout time to lead us forward.

I place more value on making sure no one is left out of the incredible wealth of the earth’s bounty than on accumulating that wealth so others are excluded from it. I place more value on treating each person as I would want to be treated than in imposing what I see as truth on others. I believe we are all equal inheritors of life’s gifts and each entitled to be treated with respect, dignity and deference by any government.

This is what Jesus taught me. I call it love.

We hear that “Jesus loves me” which may or not be true. I do not believe in the resurrection, so I express no opinion about anything regarding those who have died. But any love he may have for me seems irrelevant to what he taught me, that what counts is how much love I put out toward others.

If Jesus ran for President I am convinced he would propose policies that favor family values – support your brothers and sisters, honor your parents and share the burdens and benefits of life itself. I believe Jesus would favor social policies that allow anyone who is willing to commit in love to another human being to marry. I believe if Jesus were running this year he would favor an immigration policy that acknowledges the contribution of those here without documents and insist that they have a living wage, along with all other living among us.

I believe that if Jesus ran for President today he would engender such hope for the future, would bridge every gap or division among us, that he would break through the horrible grip of corruption, corporatism and cronyism now strangling politics. He would, in short, be “Kennedyesque”.

I know Jesus, and Barrack Obama is no Jesus. He isn’t even close. But he is closer than anyone else running, and that includes Gov. Huckabee whose policies are a mix of social responsibility and homophobia and special deference to white Christianity. I am well aware that Obama in large part is riding a wave of “hope” created by spin and commentators. But in large part that was true of John Kennedy when he ran for office as well.

Hope, empowerment and community are streams that run deep in the human spirit and have throughout time. When someone in the public sphere speaks this language, something awakens within us and we reach out, join in and our heart feels a rise. We want that person to be the carrier of hope, fairness and liberation. We overlook much that is inconsistent so that we do not forget the underlying message, that we do not fall into the despair that all is lost and nothing matters.

Barrack Obama has touched that part of me. If you have read my scribbling here you know my first choice was Dennis Kucinich. Dennis touched my mind, fit my politics and never quite made it into my heart. That space is now assigned to the man who can help America find itself once again.

I want to make it clear this is not anything against Senator Clinton. I do not join in the vicious attacks on her and would ask those who do to stop now. It is simple that when I hear her speak, see her on the screen, I don’t hear Jesus tell me to support her.

Jesus told me to support Barrack Obama. Seriously. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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