ON the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy.
Our nation was still in the same ditch it had been the day before, but the atmosphere was giddy. We felt good not only because we had breached a racial barrier as old as the Republic. Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders. The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America.
For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid — easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup my 401(k). Few wanted to take yes for an answer.
So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.
The most conspicuous clichés to fall, of course, were the twin suppositions that a decisive number of white Americans wouldn’t vote for a black presidential candidate — and that they were lying to pollsters about their rampant racism. But the polls were accurate. There was no “Bradley effect.” A higher percentage of white men voted for Obama than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton included.
Obama also won all four of those hunting-and-Hillary-loving Rust Belt states that became 2008’s obsession among slumming upper-middle-class white journalists: Pennsylvania and Michigan by double digits, as well as Ohio and even Indiana, which has gone Democratic only once (1964) since 1936. The solid Republican South, led by Virginia and North Carolina, started to turn blue as well. While there are still bigots in America, they are in unambiguous retreat.
And what about all those terrified Jews who reportedly abandoned their progressive heritage to buy into the smears libeling Obama as an Israel-hating terrorist? Obama drew a larger percentage of Jews nationally (78) than Kerry had (74) and — mazel tov, Sarah Silverman! — won Florida.
Let’s defend Hispanic-Americans, too, while we’re at it. In one of the more notorious observations of the campaign year, a Clinton pollster, Sergio Bendixen, told The New Yorker in January that “the Hispanic voter — and I want to say this very carefully — has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Let us say very carefully that a black presidential candidate won Latinos — the fastest-growing demographic in the electorate — 67 percent to 31 (up from Kerry’s 53-to-44 edge and Gore’s 62-to-35).
Young voters also triumphed over the condescension of the experts. “Are they going to show up?” Cokie Roberts of ABC News asked in February. “Probably not. They never have before. By the time November comes, they’ll be tired.” In fact they turned up in larger numbers than in 2004, and their disproportionate Democratic margin made a serious difference, as did their hard work on the ground. They’re not the ones who need Geritol.
The same commentators who dismissed every conceivable American demographic as racist, lazy or both got Sarah Palin wrong too. When she made her debut in St. Paul, the punditocracy was nearly uniform in declaring her selection a brilliant coup. There hadn’t been so much instant over-the-top praise by the press for a cynical political stunt since President Bush “landed” a jet on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in that short-lived triumph “Mission Accomplished.”
The rave reviews for Palin were completely disingenuous. Anyone paying attention (with the possible exception of John McCain) could see she was woefully ill-equipped to serve half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. The conservatives Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy said so on MSNBC when they didn’t know their mikes were on. But, hey, she was a dazzling TV presence, the thinking went, so surely doltish Americans would rally around her anyway. “She killed!” cheered Noonan about the vice-presidential debate, revising her opinion upward and marveling at Palin’s gift for talking “over the heads of the media straight to the people.” Many talking heads thought she tied or beat Joe Biden.
The people, however, were reaching a less charitable conclusion and were well ahead of the Beltway curve in fleeing Palin. Only after polls confirmed that she was costing McCain votes did conventional wisdom in Washington finally change, demoting her from Republican savior to scapegoat overnight.
But Palin’s appeal wasn’t overestimated only because of her kitschy “American Idol” star quality. Her fierce embrace of the old Karl Rove wedge politics, the divisive pitting of the “real America” against the secular “other” America, was also regarded as a sure-fire winner. The second most persistent assumption by both pundits and the McCain campaign this year — after the likely triumph of racism — was that the culture war battlegrounds from 2000 and 2004 would remain intact.
This is true in exactly one instance: gay civil rights. Though Rove’s promised “permanent Republican majority” lies in humiliating ruins, his and Bush’s one secure legacy will be their demagogic exploitation of homophobia. The success of the four state initiatives banning either same-sex marriage or same-sex adoptions was the sole retro trend on Tuesday. And Obama, who largely soft-pedaled the issue this year, was little help. In California, where other races split more or less evenly on a same-sex marriage ban, some 70 percent of black voters contributed to its narrow victory.
That lagging indicator aside, nearly every other result on Tuesday suggests that while the right wants to keep fighting the old boomer culture wars, no one else does. Three state initiatives restricting abortion failed. Bill Ayers proved a lame villain, scaring no one. Americans do not want to revisit Vietnam (including in Iraq). For all the attention paid by the news media and McCain-Palin to rancorous remembrances of things past, I sometimes wondered whether most Americans thought the Weather Underground was a reunion band and the Hanoi Hilton a chain hotel. Socialism, the evil empire and even Ronald Reagan may be half-forgotten blurs too.
If there were any doubts the 1960s are over, they were put to rest Tuesday night when our new first family won the hearts of the world as it emerged on that vast blue stage to join the celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. The bloody skirmishes that took place on that same spot during the Democratic convention 40 years ago — young vs. old, students vs. cops, white vs. black — seemed as remote as the moon. This is another America — hardly a perfect or prejudice-free America, but a union that can change and does, aspiring to perfection even if it can never achieve it.
Still, change may come slowly to the undying myths bequeathed to us by the Bush decade. “Don’t think for a minute that power concedes,” Obama is fond of saying. Neither does groupthink. We now keep hearing, for instance, that America is “a center-right nation” — apparently because the percentages of Americans who call themselves conservative (34), moderate (44) and liberal (22) remain virtually unchanged from four years ago. But if we’ve learned anything this year, surely it’s that labels are overrated. Those same polls find that more and more self-described conservatives no longer consider themselves Republicans. Americans now say they favor government doing more (51 percent), not less (43) — an 11-point swing since 2004 — and they still overwhelmingly reject the Iraq war. That’s a centrist country tilting center-left, and that’s the majority who voted for Obama.
The post-Bush-Rove Republican Party is in the minority because it has driven away women, the young, suburbanites, black Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, educated Americans, gay Americans and, increasingly, working-class Americans. Who’s left? The only states where the G.O.P. increased its percentage of the presidential vote relative to the Democrats were West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas. Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.
The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.
So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country.
Dear Obama Family,
What a sobering moment. We all worked so hard to get to this moment in time. I awoke this morning after only a couple of hours of sleep. It was the best sleep I have had in a long time. We did it! President-Elect Barack Obama did it! The angels are smiling and so am I.
Just a reminder to us all.....President Obama needs us more now than ever. His is one man who still needs his army…us. In order for him to lead he will need our support, patience, as well as our willingness to get in deep and work through this with him. This is a victory for all… The real work as a family begins now. Let us not let him down, ourselves or our children down. Let’s continue to stand by his side in unison, with the same strength and love we had to make it to this day.
We have grown so much as a family here on this blog, I am proud of all we have accomplished and hopeful for all that we will accomplish in the days and years ahead. In my heart I know God is with us and will continue to give us the strength we will need.
Together we can do anything…YES WE CAN…YES WE DID…YES WE WILL CONTINUE…
We got work to do time to clean up the mess we have inherited….roll up your sleeves and let’s get to busy…Obama needs us.
God Is Good All The Time…
Just a Thought….
Love and peace to all
Karen
Of the countless words Barack Obama has uttered since he opened his campaign for president on an icy Illinois morning in February 2007, a handful have kept reverberating in my mind:
“For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”
Perhaps the words echo because I’m a naturalized American, and I came here, like many others, seeking relief from Britain’s subtle barriers of religion and class, and possibility broader than in Europe’s confines.
Perhaps they resonate because, having South African parents, I spent part of my childhood in the land of apartheid, and so absorbed as an infant the humiliation of racial segregation, the fear and anger that are the harvest of hurt — just as they are, in Obama’s words, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”
Perhaps they speak to me because I live in New York and watch every day a miracle of civility emerge from the struggles and fatigue of people drawn from every corner of the globe to the glimmer of possibility at the tapering edge of the city’s ruler-straight canyons.
Perhaps they move me because the possibility of stories has animated my life; and no nation offers a blanker page on which to write than America.
Or perhaps it’s simply because those 22 words cleave the air with the sharp blade of truth.
Nowhere else could a 47-year-old man, born, as he has written, of a father “black as pitch” and a mother “white as milk,” a generation distant from the mud shacks of western Kenya, raised for a time as Barry Soetoro (his stepfather’s family name) in Muslim Indonesia, then entrusted to his grandparents in Hawaii — nowhere else could this Barack Hussein Obama rise so far and so fast.
It’s for this sense of possibility, and not for grim-faced dread, that people look to America, which is why the Obama campaign has stirred such global passions.
Americans are decent people. They’re not interested in where you came from. They’re interested in who you are. That has not changed.
But much has in the last eight years. This is a moment of anguish. The Bush presidency has engineered the unlikely double whammy of undermining free-market capitalism and essential freedoms, the nation’s twin badges.
American luster is gone. The American idea has, in Joyce Carol Oates’s words, become a “cruel joke.” Americans are worrying and hurting.
So it is important to step back, from the last machinations of this endless campaign, and think again about what America is.
It is renewal, the place where impossible stories get written.
It is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, in the name of a future freed from the cruel gyre of memory.
It is reinvention, the absorption of one identity in something larger — the notion that “out of many, we are truly one.”
It is a place better than Bush’s land of shadows where a leader entrusted with the hopes of the earth cannot find within himself a solitary phrase to uplift the soul.
Multiple polls now show Obama with a clear lead. But nobody can know the outcome and nobody should underestimate the immense psychological leap that sending a black couple to the White House would represent.
What I am sure of is this: an ever more interconnected world, where financial chain reactions spread with the virulence of plagues, thirsts for American renewal and a form of American leadership sensitive to humanity’s tied fate.
I also know that this biracial politician, the Harvard graduate who gets whites because he was raised by them, the Kenyan’s son who gets blacks because it was among them that mixed race placed him, is an emblematic figure of the border-hopping 21st century. He is the providential mestizo whose name — O-Ba-Ma — has the three-syllable universality of some child’s lullaby.
And what has he done? What does his experience amount to? Does his record not demonstrate he’s a radical? The interrogation continues. It’s true that his experience is limited.
But Americans seem to be trusting what their eyes tell them: temperament trumps experience and every instinct of this man, whose very identity represents an act of reconciliation, hones toward building change from the center.
Earlier this year, at the end of a road of reddish earth in western Kenya, I found Obama’s half-sister Auma. “He can be trusted,” she said, “to be in dialogue with the world.”
Dialogue, between Americans and beyond America, has been a constant theme. Last year, I spoke to Obama, who told me: “Part of our capacity to lead is linked to our capacity to show restraint.”
Watching the way he has allowed his opponents’ weaknesses to reveal themselves, the way he has enticed them into self-defeating exhaustion pounding against the wall of his equanimity, I have come to understand better what he meant.
Stories require restraint, too. Restraint engages the imagination, which has always been stirred by the American idea, and can be once again.
SARAH PALIN makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech — longer even than Barack Obama’s — you half-expected some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum’s rush.
Still, attention must be paid. McCain’s address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn’t smug or nasty.
The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.
As is nakedly evident, the speech’s central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)
Even more fraudulent, if that’s possible, is the contrast between McCain’s platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: “I’ve been called a maverick.” If there was any doubt that that McCain has fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah Palin.
We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.
She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.
How long before we learn she never shot a moose?
Given the actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president, it would be helpful to know who this mystery woman actually is. Meanwhile, two eternal axioms of our politics remain in place. Americans vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. And in judging the top of the ticket, voters look first at the candidates’ maiden executive decision, their selection of running mates. Whatever we do and don’t know about Palin’s character at this point, there is no ambiguity in what her ascent tells us about McCain’s character and potential presidency.
He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. “God only made one John McCain, and he is his own man,” said the shafted Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins. The “no surrender” warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.
That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless.
As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article. After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had a “full vetting process.” She had been subjected to “an F.B.I. background check,” we were told, and “the McCain camp had reviewed everything it could find on her.”
The Times had it right. The McCain campaign’s claims of a “full vetting process” for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical details they’ve invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper. Apparently when McCain said in June that his vice presidential vetting process was basically “a Google,” he wasn’t joking.
This is a roll of the dice beyond even Bill Clinton’s imagination. “Often my haste is a mistake,” McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir, “but I live with the consequences without complaint.” Well, maybe it’s fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to complain.
We’ve already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 — even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam’s W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn’t until months after “Mission Accomplished” that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.
In other words, McCain’s hasty vetting of Palin was all too reminiscent of his grave dereliction of due diligence on the war. He has been no less hasty in implying that we might somehow ride to the military rescue of Georgia (“Today, we are all Georgians”) or in reaffirming as late as December 2007 that the crumbling anti-democratic regime of Pervez Musharraf deserved “the benefit of the doubt” even as it was enabling the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. McCain’s blanket endorsement of Bush administration policy in Pakistan could have consequences for years to come.
“This election is not about issues” so much as the candidates’ images, said the McCain campaign manager, Davis, in one of the season’s most notable pronouncements. Going into the Republican convention, we thought we knew what he meant: the McCain strategy is about tearing down Obama. But last week made clear that the McCain campaign will be equally ruthless about deflecting attention from its own candidate’s deterioration.
What was most striking about McCain’s acceptance speech is that it had almost nothing in common with the strident right-wing convention that preceded it. We were pointedly given a rerun of McCain 2000 — cobbled together from scraps of the old Straight Talk repertory. The ensuing tedium was in all likelihood intentional. It’s in the campaign’s interest that we nod off and assume McCain is unchanged in 2008.
That’s why the Palin choice was brilliant politics — not because it rallied the G.O.P.’s shrinking religious-right base. America loves nothing more than a new celebrity face, and the talking heads marched in lock step last week to proclaim her a star. Palin is a high-energy distraction from the top of the ticket, even if the provenance of her stardom is in itself a reflection of exactly what’s frightening about the top of the ticket.
By hurling charges of sexism and elitism at any easily cowed journalist who raises a question about Palin, McCain operatives are hoping to ensure that whatever happened in Alaska with Sarah Palin stays in Alaska. Given how little vetting McCain himself has received this year — and that only 58 days remain until Nov. 4 — they just might pull it off. NOT THIS TIME! WE HAVE HAD ENOUGHT!
TRUTH IN POLITICS + CHANGE=OBAMA/BIDEN 2008-2012!
Barack has chosen you to be his partner. He is counting on you to understand and help lay the ground work for his vision of our future. I trust his instincts and agree with his decision. The two of you are a good fit and it makes sense, both initially and after examination. We have a winning ticket.
Joe, congratulations and a huge welcome aboard the O-Train. It has only one stop...The White House!
WELCOME HOME!
YES WE CAN! YES WE WILL!
OBAMA/BIDEN 08-12
Much about the presidential election is up in the air, but one thing is certain: voters will have trouble casting ballots on Election Day. In a perfect world, states and localities would handle voting so well that the public could relax and worry about other things. But elections are so mismanaged — and so many eligible voters are disenfranchised — that ordinary citizens have to get involved.
Since the meltdown in Florida in 2000, a large, nonpartisan coalition called Election Protection — made up of civil rights groups, good-government organizations and major law firms — has been doing critical work in standing up for voters. It is an effort that anyone who cares about democracy should get behind.
The civic books say that any eligible voter who registers in time can cast a ballot on Election Day. The reality is not so simple. People file registration forms that are not properly processed, or their names are wrongly purged from the voter rolls. They are required to present photo ID even when the law does not require it. They arrive at polling places and find machines that do not work properly or lines that take hours to get through.
A major reason for these problems is that states and localities are stingy about paying for elections, so election officials do not have enough workers, training, computers and voting machines. Frequently, though, the driving force is partisanship. Some political interests benefit from low turnout, particularly among minorities, the poor, students and the elderly.
Campaigns and parties often use dirty tricks to suppress the vote, such as circulating leaflets in particular areas giving the wrong date for the election. In other cases, the obstacles come from election officials. In 2004 in Ohio, the Republican secretary of state made so many anti-voter rulings — including an infamous one disqualifying registrations filed on less than 80-pound paper — that it seemed as if his goal was to keep turnout low.
Groups that are committed to the right to vote have begun to fight back. Election Protection did invaluable work in 2004. It was a powerful advocate for voters when it counted the most — while the polls were still open.
This year, Election Protection is already working with election officials trying to eliminate obstacles to voting. In November, it plans to have 10,000 lawyers, law students and other volunteers working around the country to help voters whose names are not on the rolls when they should be, to get polls to stay open late when there are long lines and generally to see that everyone gets to cast a ballot who is entitled to.
Jonah Goldman, a lawyer with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law who works on Election Protection, notes that “if there were the investment in voting infrastructure that there should be, we would be totally unnecessary.” Until that happens — and until elections are run entirely by people who want every eligible voter to be able to cast a ballot — smart, well-coordinated volunteer efforts are crucial.
So the G.O.P. has found its issue for the 2008 election. For the next three months the party plans to keep chanting: “Drill here! Drill now! Drill here! Drill now! Four legs good, two legs bad!” O.K., I added that last part.
And the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.
Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.
What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”
In the case of oil, this takes the form of pretending that more drilling would produce fast relief at the gas pump. In fact, earlier this week Republicans in Congress actually claimed credit for the recent fall in oil prices: “The market is responding to the fact that we are here talking,” said Representative John Shadegg.
What about the experts at the Department of Energy who say that it would take years before offshore drilling would yield any oil at all, and that even then the effect on prices at the pump would be “insignificant”? Presumably they’re just a bunch of wimps, probably Democrats. And the Democrats, as Representative Michele Bachmann assures us, “want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, take light rail to their government jobs.”
Is this political pitch too dumb to succeed? Don’t count on it.
Remember how the Iraq war was sold. The stuff about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds was just window dressing. The main political argument was, “They attacked us, and we’re going to strike back” — and anyone who tried to point out that Saddam and Osama weren’t the same person was an effete snob who hated America, and probably looked French.
Let’s also not forget that for years President Bush was the center of a cult of personality that lionized him as a real-world Forrest Gump, a simple man who prevails through his gut instincts and moral superiority. “Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man,” declared Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2004. “He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.”
It wasn’t until Hurricane Katrina — when the heckuva job done by the man of whom Ms. Noonan said, “if there’s a fire on the block, he’ll run out and help” revealed the true costs of obliviousness — that the cult began to fade.
What’s more, the politics of stupidity didn’t just appeal to the poorly informed. Bear in mind that members of the political and media elites were more pro-war than the public at large in the fall of 2002, even though the flimsiness of the case for invading Iraq should have been even more obvious to those paying close attention to the issue than it was to the average voter.
Why were the elite so hawkish? Well, I heard a number of people express privately the argument that some influential commentators made publicly — that the war was a good idea, not because Iraq posed a real threat, but because beating up someone in the Middle East, never mind who, would show Muslims that we mean business. In other words, even alleged wise men bought into the idea of macho posturing as policy.
All this is in the past. But the state of the energy debate shows that Republicans, despite Mr. Bush’s plunge into record unpopularity and their defeat in 2006, still think that know-nothing politics works. And they may be right.
Sad to say, the current drill-and-burn campaign is getting some political traction. According to one recent poll, 69 percent of Americans now favor expanded offshore drilling — and 51 percent of them believe that removing restrictions on drilling would reduce gas prices within a year.
The headway Republicans are making on this issue won’t prevent Democrats from expanding their majority in Congress, but it might limit their gains — and could conceivably swing the presidential election, where the polls show a much closer race.
In any case, remember this the next time someone calls for an end to partisanship, for working together to solve the country’s problems. It’s not going to happen — not as long as one of America’s two great parties believes that when it comes to politics, stupidity is the best policy.
By Michael Luo
A new Democratic-leaning group that is looking to intimidate potential donors to conservative 527 groups and other independent efforts is offering a $100,000 reward for information that leads to the legal takedown of one of the groups.
The newly formed group, Accountable America, is planning to send “warning” letters to nearly 10,000 major Republican donors next week listing the potential legal and publicity headaches they might face if they decide to finance one of these groups.
The mailings will also include an announcement of a $100,000 reward for anyone who provides information that leads to the criminal conviction or fines of at least $10,000 for the violation of campaign finance laws or other statutes by a conservative outside group.
The reward is emblematic of the strong-arm tactics envisioned by Tom Matzzie, a veteran liberal political operative who is running the new group.
Accountable America is planning to disseminate through its Web site, media outlets and potentially on television information about major conservative donors, with the goal of intimidating others considering giving to such groups to stay on the sidelines.
Mr. Matzzie is being aided in his efforts by Judd Legum, who was the research director for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.
It remains to be seen whether the unusual new group, focusing on donors, will be able to get off the ground, considering the struggles many groups on the left have been having raising money, in part because of disapproving signals being given from Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign for outside efforts.
Here are the planned letter to the Republican donors and the announcement of the reward.
Family’s Donations to McCain Raise Questions
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The Jordanian business partner of a prominent Florida businessman, who has raised more than $500,000 for Senator John McCain, appears to be at the center of a cluster of questionable donations to his presidential campaign.
Campaign finance records show Mr. McCain collected a little more than $50,000 in March from members of a single extended family, the Abdullahs, in California and several of their friends.
Amid a sea of contributions to the McCain campaign, the Abdullahs stand out. The checks come not from the usual exclusive coastal addresses, but from relatively hardscrabble inland towns like Downey and Colton. The donations are also startling because of their size: several donors initially wrote checks of $9,200, exceeding the $2,300 limit for an individual gift.
Making matters murkier, some couples in the family who contributed more than $9,000 to Mr. McCain also gave the maximum in December to either Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton or Rudolph W. Giuliani, or both, totaling in the case of at least one family more than $18,000.
On Wednesday, an article in The Washington Post said the donations were collected by Harry Sargeant III, a Florida businessman who has also raised money for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Giuliani.
It appears, however, that Mr. Sargeant, the finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party and the part-owner of a major oil trading firm, International Oil Trading Company, did not actually solicit the donations from the Abdullahs and their friends.
That task fell to a longtime business partner, Mustafa Abu Naba’a. Mr. Sargeant said in an interview that he has known Mr. Abu Naba’a for more than a decade and has worked with him on commercial ventures, including a contract with the Pentagon to supply fuel to the military in Iraq.
Through Mr. Abu Naba’a’s connections, Mr. Sargeant has raised more than $100,000 in contributions from several dozen Arab Americans in California, including the Abdullahs, for four candidates: Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Giuliani, Mr. McCain and Charlie Crist in his successful campaign for Florida governor in 2006. Mr. Crist is a close friend and college fraternity brother of Mr. Sargeant.
Several of the donors were emphatic in interviews that they had made the contributions on their own and had not been reimbursed. Indeed, while the donors do not fit the typical profile of people who often make large political donations, it appears many have made relatively successful livings, toiling away at small businesses they own: an auto repair shop, a discount stereo warehouse, a realty company.
Brian Rogers, a spokesman for Mr. McCain, said the campaign strictly followed campaign finance laws and as a general rule would look into a matter if flags were raised, but he declined to say whether it would look into the contributions tied to Mr. Sargeant.
Mr. Sargeant is a former Marine fighter pilot who has business interests around the world. He hosted a fund-raiser for Mr. McCain at his lavish home in Delray Beach, Fla., this year. Mr. Sargeant estimated he had raised more than $200,000 for Mr. Giuliani and helped a business associate raise a similar amount for Mrs. Clinton.
But Mr. Sargeant’s business dealings have caused controversy. Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, opened an investigation last month into whether his company has been overcharging the military for its contract in Iraq, although Mr. Sargeant said Mr. Waxman’s office had an erroneous understanding of what the company was billing.
As for his political fund-raising, Mr. Sargeant said he often turned to his business associates and asked them to solicit their extended families, although Mr. Sargeant said he was unclear exactly how Mr. Abu Naba’a knew the Abdullahs in California.
Mr. Sargeant said Mr. Abu Naba’a, who has a home in Florida, was unavailable for an interview because he was abroad.
Faisal Abdullah, a Palestinian immigrant who works as a director of operations of a window treatment company, identified himself in an interview as the driver behind the McCain donations from his relatives and friends. He sent them to Mr. Abu Naba’a, whom Mr. Abdullah described as an acquaintance.
Mr. Abdullah is an unlikely McCain fund-raiser, admitting he had soured on the Republican Party as a result of President Bush.
Nevertheless, he said that he harbored vague designs on a political career and that a discussion with Mr. Abu Naba’a gave him the idea that fund-raising was a way to get started. He said he initially collected numerous $500 checks for Mr. Crist from relatives and friends, and late last year, set out to raise money for the presidential campaign.
Mr. Abdullah said he cajoled a few relatives into giving the maximum donations to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Giuliani, the early front-runners last year.
But when Mr. McCain claimed the mantle of presumed Republican nominee in March, Mr. Abdullah decided to support him.
“This is the horse I’m betting on for the future,” Mr. Abdullah said.
He told his friends and relatives that the contributions were tax-deductible, something he later seemed surprised to learn from a reporter was not true. Many in his circle appear to have little affection for Mr. McCain but said they gave mostly as a favor to Mr. Abdullah.
Abdullah Makhlouf, the owner of a discount stereo store who is one of Mr. Abdullah’s closest friends, and his wife contributed $9,200.
“He’s like a worse copy than Bush,” Mr. Makhlouf said of Mr. McCain.
When a reporter initially contacted Mr. Makhlouf, he denied giving to the McCain campaign.
After eventually admitting to the donation, Mr. Makhlouf added, “I’m still not going to vote for him.”
Michael Luo was in Riverside and added later reporting from New York. Carolyn Wilder contributed research from New York.
Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.
Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”
There was nothing subtle about that attempt to position Senator Obama as the Other, a candidate who might technically be American but who remained in some sense foreign, not sufficiently patriotic and certainly not one of us — the “us” being the genuine red-white-and-blue Americans who the ad was aimed at.
Since then, Senator McCain has only upped the ante, smearing Mr. Obama every which way from sundown. On Wednesday, The Washington Post ran an extraordinary front-page article that began:
“For four days, Senator John McCain and his allies have accused Senator Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true.”
Evidence? John McCain needs no evidence. His campaign is about trashing the opposition, Karl Rove-style. Not satisfied with calling his opponent’s patriotism into question, Mr. McCain added what amounted to a charge of treason, insisting that Senator Obama would actually prefer that the United States lose a war if that would mean that he — Senator Obama — would not have to lose an election.
Now, from the hapless but increasingly venomous McCain campaign, comes the slimy Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ad. The two highly sexualized women (both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear) are shown briefly and incongruously at the beginning of a commercial critical of Mr. Obama.
The Republican National Committee targeted Harold Ford with a similarly disgusting ad in 2006 when Mr. Ford, then a congressman, was running a strong race for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee. The ad, which the committee described as a parody, showed a scantily clad woman whispering, “Harold, call me.”
Both ads were foul, poisonous and emanated from the upper reaches of the Republican Party. (What a surprise.) Both were designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women.
The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control. It was at work in that New Yorker cover that caused such a stir. (Mr. Obama in Muslim garb with the American flag burning in the fireplace.) It’s driving the idea that Barack Obama is somehow presumptuous, too arrogant, too big for his britches — a man who obviously does not know his place.
Mr. Obama has to endure these grotesque insults with a smile and heroic levels of equanimity. The reason he has to do this — the sole reason — is that he is black.
So there he was this week speaking evenly, and with a touch of humor, to a nearly all-white audience in Missouri. His goal was to reassure his listeners, to let them know he’s not some kind of unpatriotic ogre.
Mr. Obama told them: “What they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky.”
The audience seemed to appreciate his comments. Mr. Obama was well-received.
But John McCain didn’t appreciate them. RACE CARD! RACE CARD! The McCain camp started bellowing, and it hasn’t stopped since. With great glee bursting through their feigned outrage, the campaign’s operatives and the candidate himself accused Senator Obama of introducing race into the campaign — playing the race card, as they put it, from the very bottom of the deck.
Whatever you think about Barack Obama, he does not want the race issue to be front and center in this campaign. Every day that the campaign is about race is a good day for John McCain. So I guess we understand Mr. McCain’s motivation.
Nevertheless, it’s frustrating to watch John McCain calling out Barack Obama on race. Senator Obama has spoken more honestly and thoughtfully about race than any other politician in many years. Senator McCain is the head of a party that has viciously exploited race for political gain for decades.
He’s obviously more than willing to continue that nauseating tradition.
DES MOINES, Aug. 16 — Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, a likely Democratic presidential candidate in 2008, delivered a 15-minute, blistering attack to warm applause from Democrats and union organizers here on Wednesday. But Mr. Biden’s main target was not Republicans in Washington, or even his prospective presidential rivals.
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., joining a growing number of Democratic candidates campaigning against Wal-Mart, said yesterday that he did not “see any indication that they care about the fate of middle-class people.”
With the 2006 Election Guide, you can analyze over 500 races for the Senate, House and governor seats and paint the political map yourself. Go to Guide »
It was Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer.
Among Democrats, Mr. Biden is not alone. Across Iowa this week and across much of the country this month, Democratic leaders have found a new rallying cry that many of them say could prove powerful in the midterm elections and into 2008: denouncing Wal-Mart for what they say are substandard wages and health care benefits.
Six Democratic presidential contenders have appeared at rallies like the one Mr. Biden headlined, along with some Democratic candidates for Congress in some of the toughest-fought races in the country.
“My problem with Wal-Mart is that I don’t see any indication that they care about the fate of middle-class people,” Mr. Biden said, standing on the sweltering rooftop of the State Historical Society building here. “They talk about paying them $10 an hour. That’s true. How can you live a middle-class life on that?”
The focus on Wal-Mart is part of a broader strategy of addressing what Democrats say is general economic anxiety and a growing sense that economic gains of recent years have not benefited the middle class or the working poor.
Their alliance with the anti-Wal-Mart campaign dovetails with their emphasis in Washington on raising the minimum wage and doing more to make health insurance affordable. It also suggests they will go into the midterm Congressional elections this fall and the 2008 presidential race striking a populist tone.
Some Democrats expressed concern about the direction the party was heading, saying it could turn back efforts by such party leaders as former President Bill Clinton to erase the image of the party as anti-business and scare off corporations that might be inclined to make contributions.
Still, what is striking about this campaign is the ideological breadth of the Democrats who have joined in, including some who in the past have warned the party against appearing hostile to business interests.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who was a member of Wal-Mart’s board when she lived in Arkansas, the corporation’s home state, returned a $5,000 campaign contribution from the company last year. Mrs. Clinton said she did so to protest Wal-Mart’s health care benefits, and she has continued to distance herself from the policies of a company she was close to when she was the first lady of Arkansas.
Scheduling conflicts prevented Mrs. Clinton from attending any of the rallies being organized, her aides said. But she supported many of the campaign’s goals, they added.
“It’s not anti-business,” said Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, a former head of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council, appearing at an anti-Wal-Mart rally on Tuesday. “Wal-Mart has become emblematic of the anxiety around the country, and the middle-class squeeze.”
“All you need to know is Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont have appeared at these events,” Mr. Bayh said, speaking of the Connecticut senator and the man who defeated him in the Democratic primary on Aug. 8. “That’s pretty good evidence that Democrats across the country are rallying around this issue.”
Yet there are clear risks for Democrats, not least in alienating Wal-Mart employees and customers.
Wal-Mart has begun a counterattack. In interviews on Wednesday, company executives warned that they would alert their 1.3 million American employees to the anti-Wal-Mart campaign. They also pointed to a poll the company financed that reported that Americans were generally supportive of the company.
“There is far more evidence to show that this short-sighted political strategy will backfire than that it will actually work,” said Mona Williams, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart Stores. “We believe our associates vote, and it is our responsibility to let them know when a politician speaks out for or against our company.”
In a letter to its workers in Iowa, Wal-Mart warned of the political events, including appearances by Mr. Bayh, Mr. Biden and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.
Wal-Mart “would never suggest to you how to vote,” the letter said, “but we have an obligation to tell you when politicians are saying something about your company that isn’t true. After all, you are Wal-Mart.”
Some Republicans said Democrats were trying to appease liberal bloggers, union leaders and an Democratic left wing invigorated by Mr. Lieberman’s defeat in the primary.
But Democrats say they are sure they have a message that will resonate. John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator and Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2004, appeared at an anti-Wal-Mart rally in Pittsburgh two weeks ago. Mr. Edwards said in an interview that his party was not vulnerable to a backlash for this criticism so long as Democrats made clear that their main goal was improving policies for the poor and the middle class.
The unemployment rate spiked again in July, to 5.7 percent, its highest level in more than four years and a strong signal that come Election Day millions of Americans will still be hunting for work.
An employment training facility, JobTrain, in Menlo Park, Calif., offering career counseling.
“We are not seeing a catastrophic collapse in the job market, like you often see in recessions,” said James Glassman, senior domestic economist for JPMorgan Chase. “What we are seeing instead is a steady hemorrhaging of jobs, and that is going to continue until housing stabilizes and stops dragging down the rest of the economy.”
The nation’s employers cut their payrolls for the seventh consecutive month, this time by 51,000 jobs, the government reported Friday. For millions still at work, hours were reduced, a hidden form of unemployment, and the average raise was less than enough to keep up with inflation.
The steady erosion in payrolls — 463,000 jobs have disappeared since January — cut across nearly every sector in July. Teenagers, 16 to 19, trying to land work, were particularly hard hit. Their unemployment rate, 20.3 percent, up 2.2 percentage points in just a month, was the highest since 1992, contributing significantly to the jump in the overall unemployment rate. That rate jumped from 5.5 percent in June and 5 percent in April.
“Parents don’t push their kids to go to work in good times,” Mr. Glassman said, “but they probably are doing so now with gasoline and food prices squeezing family budgets.”
The weak jobs report and the Commerce Department’s finding on Thursday that the economy was growing sluggishly, at best, led Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, to declare in a stump speech in Florida that “anxieties are getting worse, not better,” for many families.
Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate, said the latest jobs report was “a reminder of the economic challenges we face.”
The Bush administration offered a more upbeat assessment. “We are concerned about continued job losses,” Elaine L. Chao, the labor secretary, said in a statement, but “the long-term fundamentals of the economy remain solid.”
The Federal Reserve’s policy makers, who have cut the key short-term interest rate they control to a low 2 percent, in an effort to stimulate the economy, are almost certain to leave the rate at that level when they meet in Washington on Tuesday.
Neither the jobs report nor the persistently weak economic growth suggests that the surge in fuel and food prices will spread soon to a multitude of other items — a prospect that would push the Fed to raise rates to suppress inflation.
“If you are the Federal Reserve, this jobs report might even be enough to convince you to cut rates again,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute.
The weak economy coincides with a sharp increase in labor productivity in the second quarter, which helps to explain why employers have been shedding workers. The latter are increasingly producing more in a day’s work than their employers can sell. That is partly because their employers prod them to do so, or introduce labor-saving devices.
In either case, employers are laying off excess staff or reducing their hours or holding back on weekly raises, which rose at an annual rate of only 2.8 percent in July for the typical white-collar or blue-collar worker. That is well below the inflation rate of more than 4 percent.
The layoffs and staff cutbacks were evident throughout the private sector, with only health care, oil production and computer design showing more employment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Manufacturing and construction lost the most workers, a total of 57,000. Nearly 30,000 temporary workers across many industries also disappeared.
“When the economy barely grows but labor productivity does, you are inevitably putting people out of work,” said Jan Hatzius, chief domestic economist at Goldman Sachs.
In that environment, the percentage of 16-to-19-year-olds holding jobs fell to 32.5 percent in July from 33.1, the lowest level since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting this data, in 1948.
Young people often seek work in retailing, construction and food service, and all of these industries have either been shedding workers or not adding them at their usual pace, said Tom Nardone, an assistant commissioner at the bureau.
Teenagers were not the only ones hit. The unemployment rate for men in their prime working years, 25 to 54, jumped three-tenths of a point, to 4.9 percent.
James McCambridge, a 54-year-old widower living in Park Ridge, Ill., with his three children, is among the victims. In May, he lost his $120,000-a-year job as a salesman for the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau and has been painting houses since then while responding to 100 job postings on the Internet — so far without success.
“Painting helps me to blow off some energy, and some anger,” he said. Next week, he plans to apply for a charter school teaching job on the West Side of Chicago. He would accept it, he said, even though the $53,000 salary is less than half his old pay. “It will mean major lifestyle changes for my family,” he said.
Dino Helke, 38, of Dayton, Ohio, on the other hand, has joined the swelling ranks of those who would like to work but are discouraged from doing so or cannot get full-time employment.
Add these people to the ranks of the officially unemployed, like Mr. McCambridge, and the 5.7 percent unemployment rate swells to 10.3 percent, up from 9.9 percent in June, the bureau reported.
Mr. Helke made $80,000 a year, including overtime, as a production worker at a General Motors plant near his home in Dayton until the plant was shut recently and he was laid off. Since then, he said, he has been unable to find work that pays more than $8 an hour, and he prefers not to work for that wage.
“Who can do anything with so little money?” he said.
Standing before a room of oil company executives in June, John McCain flip-flopped and declared support for coastal oil drilling. Now the Washington Post is reporting that, within days, oil and gas execs ponied up nearly $1 million to elect McCain.1 It's another piece of evidence that in a McCain White House, oil companies will call the shots—just as they have with President Bush.
Yesterday, MoveOn members jumped into action in response to the Post story, placing "For Sale" signs on McCain headquarters in 10 battleground states to call public attention to it.2 At the same time, McCain made our point for us, holding a photo-op yesterday in front of a California oil well and renewing his push for offshore drilling.3
McCain's hoping to use gas prices as a wedge issue to win the election. That's why it's so critical that we keep spreading the message that McCain's been heavily influenced by the oil companies—and so we can't count on him to solve the energy crisis. When people think of Bush, they think "oil," but that's not true of McCain yet—even though his energy policy is almost identical to Bush's and his campaign is literally run by oil lobbyists!4
Here's a video that makes the case, from our friends at Progressive Accountability. Please check it out, then forward it to a few friends, post it on a blog, or stick it on your Facebook page.
https://pol.moveon.org/donate/29guesses.html?r=3987&id=13353-9497382-wak3uOx
The energy crisis is shaping up to be a decisive issue in the election. MoveOn's ongoing campaign on the energy crisis has two goals: 1) highlight the progressive solution—a huge plan to shift our economy to clean energy, prevent climate change, and create millions of jobs, and 2) work together to block McCain and the Republicans from pushing gimmicks like drilling to win votes.
Please forward this email to your friends and family to spread the word about John McCain's ties to big oil companies.
Thanks for all you do.
This November, millions of young people are expected to flood to the polls—enough new voters to elect Barack Obama and a wave of other progressive candidates—all driven by the fragile hope that maybe, this year, things can be different.
The Republican game plan is simple: kill that hope. In fact, they just started running ads Friday on MTV saying that Obama's "worse than a flip-flopper" and no longer against the war.1
Let's fight back right away with an ad of our own that's funny, positive and all about hope. It won "funniest ad" in our Obama in 30 Seconds contest, and it's made by TV actor (and MoveOn member) Rider Strong. Plus, we've just found out that we can air it as the first political ad ever on Comedy Central. https://pol.moveon.org/donate/brainonhope.html?id=13343-9497382-q2NTEvx&t=4
My Trip to Denver:
Yesterday, my cousin from Winston Salem, NC and I flew to Denver for orientation to volunteer to help with the convention. I thought it was crazy to go and come back in one day, but we did. Well, we left at 4:30am set to arrive in Denver at 9:35am. We were scheduled for a 1pm session. This is where the fun begins we met in Charlotte and off we went. In the air for 45mins; we had to turn around, trouble with the plane. Two hours later we were finally on our way. To get to the point, we met at least 15 people who had done the same thing. Traveled to Denver to do what we can to help Obama. People from California, Chicago, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee, Florida, New York, and Las Vegas…I could go on and on…
If we could bottle the energy from this campaign, we would not need oil…
It was a long trip, made more new friends who I hope will accept my offer to come and blog with the family. It was a wonderful experience.
On Wednesday, Fox got a taste of what can happen when folks who care about racial justice come together and push back. The seconds you took to sign the Fox petition helped create a major story in the mainstream media. Here's how it unfolded on Wednesday:
1:00 p.m. Your signature was printed off at a New York City Kinko's along with 620,126 others--filling 19 big boxes.
2:00 p.m. The signatures were piled in front of Fox's national headquarters at 6th Avenue and 48th Street.
3:15 p.m. Hip hop star Nas (whose new album had just risen to #1 on the Billboard charts hours earlier) joined over 100 ColorOfChange.org members and delivered the petitions to Fox on behalf of ColorOfChange, MoveOn, and Brave New Films.
3:30 p.m. Fox refused to accept the petitions. (Sometimes, the truth hurts.)
4:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m. News of Fox's racism and the star-studded petition delivery made its way around the world--with stories in Vibe, Rolling Stone, Billboard, USA Today, Associated Press, Reuters, Bossip, Huffington Post, MTV, OpenLeft, and over 200 other places.
11:30 p.m. Stephen Colbert welcomed Nas as his guest on the Colbert Report and dedicated over half of his show to Fox's racism. The boxes containing our signatures were stacked prominently on Colbert's set in place of his normal interview table and chairs--and he conducted the entire interview surrounded by petitions! Then, Nas performed his new song "Sly Fox," which is all about Fox's racism.
Since then, our poweful message to Fox keeps spreading, and they're sounding desperate. True to form, Fox responded with a racially insensitive statement comparing our partner MoveOn to the Klan -- yes, the KKK! It's outrageous -- comparing an organization that works everyday to engage citizens in politcs to a hate group that hunted and murdered Black people in a reign of terror. It's another example of how far Fox will go, but it also shows that they can't address the real issue -- their racist attacks -- because they have no defense.
But the fight's not over. This week, we changed the conversation about Fox and we'll keep bringing the heat -- watch for a message for us in about a week for next steps. But for now, enjoy the video of Wednesday's petition delivery and the video of Colbert. Both videos are at this link:
https://secure.colorofchange.org/fox_delivery/?id=2236-612035
Thanks and Peace,
-- James, Gabriel, Clarissa, Andre, Kai, and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team July 26th, 2008
