This was sent to me by a fellow woman Democrat today. The story it tells is one we should not forget or fail to honor.
This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers; they lived only 90 years ago.
Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.
The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote.
(Lucy Burns)
And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of 'obstructing sidewalk traffic.' They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.
(Dora Lewis)
They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.
Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.
Thus unfolded the Night of Terror on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote.
For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms.
(Alice Paul)
When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.
So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because--why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?
Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie 'Iron Jawed Angels.' It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.
All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.
My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was--with herself. 'One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,' she said. 'What would those women think of the way I use, or don't use, my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.' The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her 'all over again.'
HBO released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.
It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy.
The doctor admonished the men: 'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'
Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know.
We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party - remember to vote.
History is being made.
I don't get this vote for FISA.
Glenn Greewald writes at Salon.com:
"Obama's spokesman, Bill Burton, back in in September, vowed that Obama would "support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies." MoveOn believes Obama should be held to his word and is thus conducting a campaign urging Obama to do what he promised -- support a filibuster to stop the enactment of telecom amnesty. You can email Burton here to demand that Obama comply with his commitment not just to vote against, but to filibuster, telecom amnesty:
bburton@barackobama.com
I don't approve or appreciate supporting this bill and find it to be a distressing change in the tenor of Barack Obama's positions on foreign policy and his adherence to Constitutional law.
I am disappointed by this turn of events. Greenwald writes further:
"What Barack Obama did here was wrong and destructive. He's supporting a bill that is a full-scale assault on our Constitution and an endorsement of the premise that our laws can be broken by the political and corporate elite whenever the scary specter of The Terrorists can be invoked to justify it. What's more, as a Constitutional Law Professor, he knows full well what a radical perversion of our Constitution this bill is, and yet he's supporting it anyway. Anyone who sugarcoats or justifies that is doing a real disservice to their claimed political values and to the truth."
I agree with Glenn Greenwald. I have worked hard enough and have contributed money I could have used for something else to this campaign. I have hosted debate watch parties, served as a state delegage for Obama, have committed myself to serving the local democratic party in its efforts to get him elected. I have served in more ways that I can begin to remember. I argued for him at the caucuses on the basis of his background as a constitutional scholar--but I don't see that scholarship in this decision.
I feel betrayed and deeply disappointed.
Posted March 7, 2008 | 12:45 PM (EST)
It will come as a surprise to many people that there are rules in politics. Most of those rules are unwritten and are based on common understandings, acceptable practices, and the best interest of the political party a candidate seeks to lead. One of those rules is this: Do not provide ammunition to the opposition party that can be used to destroy your party's nominee. This is a hyper-truth where the presidential contest is concerned.
By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party's nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her.
As a veteran of red telephone ads and "where's the beef" cleverness, I am keenly aware that sharp elbows get thrown by those trailing in the fourth quarter (and sometimes even earlier). "Politics ain't beanbag," is the old slogan. But that does not mean that it must also be rule-or-ruin, me-first-and-only-me, my way or the highway. That is not politics. That is raw, unrestrained ambition for power that cannot accept the will of the voters.
Senator Obama is right to say the issue is judgment not years in Washington. If Mrs. Clinton loses the nomination, her failure will be traced to the date she voted to empower George W. Bush to invade Iraq. That is not the kind of judgment, or wisdom, required by the leader answering the phone in the night. For her now to claim that Senator Obama is not qualified to answer the crisis phone is the height of irony if not chutzpah, and calls into question whether her primary loyalty is to the Democratic party and the nation or to her own ambition.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-hart/breaking-the-final-rule_b_90420.html
The ugliest prejudices in this campaign season are not directly about race. Barack Obama’s skin color may cost him some working-class white voters, but it’s also winning some votes among blacks and among whites eager to signal their open-mindedness.
Sexism seems more of a factor. Americans have typically said in polls that they are less willing to vote for a woman than a black, and Shirley Chisholm (a black woman who ran for president in 1972) always said that she encountered more prejudice because of her sex than her race.
Yet the most monstrous bigotry in this election isn’t about either race or sex. It’s about religion.
The whispering campaigns allege that Mr. Obama is a secret Muslim planning to impose Islamic law on the country. Incredibly, he is even accused — in earnest! — of being the Antichrist.
Proponents of this theory offer detailed theological explanations for why he is the Antichrist, and the proof is that he claims to be Christian — after all, the Antichrist would say that, wouldn’t he? The rumors circulate enough that Glenn Beck of CNN asked the Rev. John Hagee, a conservative evangelical, what the odds are that Mr. Obama is the Antichrist.
These charges are fanatical, America’s own equivalent of the vicious accusations about Jews that circulate in some Muslim countries. They are less a swipe at one candidate than a calumny against an entire religion. They underscore that for many bigoted Americans in the 21st century, calling someone a Muslim is still a slur.
There is a parallel with presidential campaigns in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when one of the most common ways to attack a candidate was to suggest that he was partly black, or at least favored racial intermarriage. For example, the Federalists charged that Thomas Jefferson was “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” And the word “miscegenation” was coined in 1863 and 1864 in charges that Abraham Lincoln secretly plotted for blacks to marry whites, especially Irish-Americans.
As late as the 1920 presidential campaign, a quarter-million letters were sent to voters accusing Warren Harding of being descended from a “West Indian Negro. ... May God save America from international shame and domestic ruin.”
In looking back at that history, you wish that a candidate had responded not only with, “No, I don’t have any black ancestor,” but also with, “So what if I did?”
Likewise, with countless people today spreading scurrilous rumors that Mr. Obama is a Muslim, the most appropriate response is a denial followed by: And so what if he were?
Granted, that’s not politically realistic as a comeback. A 2007 Gallup poll found that 94 percent of Americans said they would vote for a black candidate for president and 88 percent for a woman. In contrast, a Los Angeles Times poll in 2006 found that only 34 percent of respondents said they could vote for a Muslim for president.
Even if a prejudice is directed to a matter of choice, like religion or long hair, it’s still prejudice. It’s possible to believe that Catholics have every right to be president while opposing a particular Catholic candidate who would ban contraception; likewise, it’s possible to believe that Muslims have every right to hold office without necessarily embracing the candidacy of particular Muslims who advocate enveloping all women in burkas.
To his credit, Mr. Obama has spoken respectfully of Islam (he told me last year, on the record, that the Muslim call to prayer is “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset”). If he were to go further — “and so what if I were Muslim?” — many Americans would see that as confirmation that he is a Sunni terrorist agent of Al Qaeda who is part of a 9/11 backup plan: If you can’t reach the White House with a hijacked plane, then storm the Oval Office through the ballot box.
This is a case where Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain should take the initiative and denounce the fear-mongering about Mr. Obama as hate speech. The wink-wink references to “Barack Hussein Obama” and lies about his going to a madrassa are the religious equivalent of racial slurs, and Mr. McCain and Mrs. Clinton should denounce them in the strongest terms. This is their chance to show leadership.
When Mrs. Clinton was asked in a television interview a week ago whether Mr. Obama is a Muslim, she denied it firmly — but then added, most unfortunately, “as far as I know.” To his credit, Mr. McCain scolded a radio host who repeatedly referred to “Barack Hussein Obama” and later called him a Manchurian candidate.
Martin Luther wasn’t a model of tolerance but even he took the position that, “I’d rather be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.” In this presidential campaign, we should at least aspire to be as open-minded as 16th-century Germans.
Posted March 9, 2008 | 03:37 PM (EST)
And then she ran for president.
After seven years of George W. Bush, America is hungry for change. Big change. And let's face it -- Hillary Clinton, the party standard-bearer and former White House denizen -- isn't it. But even after voters coalesced around Barack Obama, handing him eleven straight primaries (twelve, if you count Vermont), she refused to accept the possibility -though math, money and momentum were clearly against her -- that the Bush/Clinton Family Band might not be #1 on America's Billboard chart anymore.
So, rather than step aside and become the hero of her party, she made a strategy decision to go negative in advance of Ohio and Texas. Not just negative -- personal. She cynically chided Mr. Obama's message of hope. She played the victim card. The gender card. The Muslim card. She cried "shame on you, Barack Obama" for his campaign tactics, while (if we're to believe Matt Drudge) simultaneously floating a picture of him in Somali garb to stir up questions of his patriotism.
She accused Mr. Obama of his own shady business deals (the irony of which nearly ripped a hole in the fabric of space/time). She accused him of being two-faced on NAFTA, when it was her campaign that had winked at the Canadians. She demanded that he "reject" the endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, but remained silent when Rush Limbaugh stirred up votes for her in Texas. And she crafted the now-infamous "3am" attack ad -- which used scare tactics to highlight Senator Obama's perceived lack of experience in foreign affairs. Straight out of the ol' Atwater/Rove playbook. Of course, all of this paled in comparison to her husband's patronizing, racially insensitive comments earlier in the primary season.
Was this the same Hillary Clinton whose husband ran on the idea that hope was more powerful than fear? The wife of a president who had less foreign policy experience than Barack Obama when he was elected? And exactly which crisis is she referring to when she claims to have more experience? And while we're at it, where the hell are those tax returns?
It's clear that Hillary's back in this thing, at least for the time being. But at what cost? Short of some cataclysmic event, there's no way either she or Mr. Obama can reach 2,025 delegates in the remaining contests. That means she's accepted the inevitability of a brokered convention. A convention she'll almost certainly enter with fewer delegates than her opponent. That raises some important questions:
Will she subvert the will of the voters? Will she turn Denver into a series of shady back-room deals and arm twisting? Will she dispatch her husband to pressure superdelegates into switching allegiances at the last minute? Are we in for, as one pundit put it, a good ol' fashioned "knife fight?"
And if she does manage to secure the nomination, what about the scores of disenfranchised Obama supporters (many of them young people with little loyalty to the Democratic Party)? How will she bring them back into the tent? Hillary seems confident that this can be remedied by offering Mr. Obama a spot on her ticket. Really? And what would his motivation be for accepting? Playing third-fiddle to Bill?
However, if Mr. Obama goes on to secure the nomination, she'll have handed his rival a treasure trove of sound bites. All John McCain has to do between August and November is play clips of Hillary questioning Obama's experience and belittling his platitudes. In a way, she'll have become Mr. McCain's second running mate.
She's proven that she cares more about "Hillary" than "unity." More about defeating Obama than defeating the Republicans. She's become a political suicide-bomber, happy to blow herself to bits -- as long as she takes everyone else with her.
On Friday, one of Barack Obama's foreign policy advisors, Samantha Power, resigned after calling Senator Clinton "a monster" during an off-the-record exchange. It was an unfortunate slip, but one that echoed the sentiments of many Clinton apologists like me -- who've watched Hillary's descent into pettiness and fear-mongering with the heartbreak of a child who grows up to realize that his beloved mother has been a terrible person all along.
Are the conservatives right about the Clintons? Will they do and say anything to get elected?
I don't know.
All I know is...I'm through apologizing.
She is undeniably resilient. But it seems that Hillary Clinton is often recovering from her campaign's self-inflicted wounds.
There are a number of reasons that Hillary Clinton was able to come back against Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas, but a big one is the "red phone" advertisement that began to air the weekend before the primaries. "It's 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep," intones the announcer. "But there's a phone in the White House and it's ringing. Something is happening in the world … Who do you want answering the phone?" Too late, the Obama campaign began to ask: exactly what world crises has Hillary Clinton handled? The Clinton campaign went on somewhat unpersuasively about the First Lady's peacemaking role in the Balkans and Northern Ireland during the Bill Clinton administration. The real answer is that Hillary Clinton was deeply involved in many of the crises faced by her husband as president, some of them of their own making.
She has implied that she shared a kind of co-presidency with her husband during her White House years in the 1990s. That suggests the co-presidency would continue in another Clinton administration. If the phone rings at 3 a.m. in the Hillary Clinton White House, will she awaken her husband to discuss what to do? (No one really thinks that a First Spouse would be deeply involved, say, in picking bombing targets in response to a terror attack, but the campaign rhetoric and red-phone ad do suggest experience in dealing with security crises.) In fact, a terrorist attack did occur late on the Clintons' first watch: in August 1998, Al Qaeda blew up two U.S. Embassies in Africa. At that time, Hillary Clinton may not have been as engaged as she usually was talking through the president's problems. A couple of weeks earlier, independent counsel Ken Starr had turned up the semen-stained blue dress in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and, at the time of the embassy bombings, the Clintons were reportedly not speaking.
When NEWSWEEK asked voters in a new poll, "Who would you most trust to answer the phone at 3 a.m.?", 45 percent said John McCain, 27 percent said Hillary Clinton and 18 percent chose Barack Obama. It is impossible for voters to truly know how a presidential candidate will respond to a crisis in the Oval Office. But there are clues in Hillary Clinton's background. She can certainly be tough-minded, and she has shown remarkable—and reliable—resiliency. The real wild card is her relationship with her sometimes domineering husband, who can offer good advice but be undisciplined.
The biggest crisis facing Hillary Clinton in recent times is her own campaign. Mixed and ever-changing messages and tactics have confused voters. The Obama campaign out-organized the Clinton campaign, especially in the caucus states. Reports of vicious feuds between her top aides have leaked into the press. It seems that Clinton has been saved mostly by her own gutsiness, not by any particular flair for strategy or for running a large organization. "The major reason she won is her own true grit, resilience and ability as a candidate," Patti Solis Doyle, who was ousted as campaign manager in mid-February, tells NEWSWEEK. Some top staffers have laughed over the comparison between Hillary Clinton and the Hollywood movie monster Freddy Krueger: you can run her over, stab her, shoot her—and she still keeps coming. With her devoted aides in "Hillaryland," Clinton can be full of slightly hokey Midwestern cheer and Methodist do-good stoicism. "If you're wringing your hands, you can't hold others," she'll say; in other words, stop whining and help someone. When things go wrong, she can get icy. "You fix this now," she says in a stone-cold voice, recalls a longtime aide, who does not wish to be identified discussing a private conversation.
Hillary's doggedness is admirable. Her campaign, however, does not offer a model of good government. It has seemed to be afflicted with a siege mentality. The senator puts a great premium on loyalty, and she has kept a faithful coterie of advisers throughout the years. But two of her principal advisers, inherited from her husband's White House, cannot abide each other. The campaign's chief strategist, Mark Penn, is a larger-than-life, if widely misunderstood, character. Soft-spoken, with a high-pitched laugh, he often seems nervous. He sweats profusely under bright lights and, except for postdebate spin duty, is rarely seen on TV. Brilliant, he appears to compensate for his social awkwardness by shows of arrogance and contempt. In the movie, he would be the clumsy geek who gets tripped with a full tray in the high-school cafeteria and then spends the rest of his life getting even by becoming rich and successful (he is the world-wide CEO of the giant PR firm Burson-Marsteller). His arch foe is Harold Ickes, an equally brilliant and even more abrasive labor lawyer, a profane hard-core partisan who can't stand Penn's corporate-pollster-speak, with its talk of "target groups" and "persuadables." Last week The Washington Post published this exchange between the two antagonists: " '[Expletive] you!' Ickes shouted. '[Expletive] you!' Penn replied. '[Expletive] you!' Ickes shouted again." Solis Doyle, once the First Lady's scheduler in the Clinton White House, was ultimately unable to keep peace between the two men. Hillary Clinton, who does not like personal confrontations, chose to float above the feuding. (Penn declined to comment; Ickes did not respond to inquiries from NEWSWEEK.)
Biographies of Hillary Clinton during her White House years depict her as tense and rigid, suspicious of backstabbers and determined to keep the press at bay. Her aides say that she feels burned by exposure, and that her caution about showing her more human, sympathetic side is rooted in painful experience. During one of Hillary's trips to San Francisco last year, Susie Tompkins Buell, one of her close friends and top fund-raisers, tried to persuade Hillary to "show her heart," Tompkins Buell recalls. "I said: 'I think one of your strengths is you're so passionate. You need to show it more'." Clinton replied, "I know, I know, but it gets taken out of context." Tompkins Buell blames the campaign: "I think they tell her not to show her emotion because that looks like 'you're afraid'," she says. "Look how criticized she gets for things you never criticize a man about … her moods, her emotions, how she's looking, what she's wearing, her laugh."
Interestingly, Hillary's Senate office appears to be much more stable and better run than the Bill Clinton White House. Staffers say that she created a friendly competitiveness, though she could be a bit fastidious. She liked her staff to have clean desks and if she saw a messy one, she'd say, half humorously, "Do you know everything on your desk?" She liked to know the gossip, but stayed out of personnel matters, other than to issue a curt "Fix this" from time to time. On the morning of 9/11, she was calm and steady. Arriving as her staff was being evacuated from the Russell Senate Office Building, she reassured them, "It's going to be OK, you are all going to be all right."
Her campaign staff, however, has been disrupted by the influence of Hillary's husband, the former president. As Hillary's polls dipped in Iowa late last fall, some of her closest advisers, including Solis Doyle and ad maker Mandy Grunwald, advised her to show her softer side. They argued that voters wanted to see the former First Lady as a human being, and that Iowans especially did not like negative advertising. But Penn wanted to attack Obama, and he was contemptuous of what he called "the weepy stuff" advocated by Grunwald and others. During endless conference calls, the argument went round and round, recalls an adviser who wished to remain anonymous discussing internal deliberations.
Then Bill Clinton stepped in. He was frustrated and angry, says the adviser, because he thought that Obama was getting a free ride. At a Dec. 1 meeting at Senator Clinton's brick colonial on Whitehaven Street in Washington, the former president —a lover of polls—was examining Penn's data showing that negative messaging drove down Obama's ratings. At the end of the meeting, Hillary agreed with her husband, and the campaign essentially followed the Penn strategy of going negative. At a press conference on Dec. 2, the senator rather grimly signaled the onslaught by announcing, "Now the fun part begins."
It backfired in the land of "Iowa nice." After one speech, the campaign dialed back. Obama won overwhelmingly regardless—by doubling voter turnout. But while Bill Clinton ranted at the rotten press and the poor predictions of pollsters (including his friend Penn), Hillary stayed focused on the next stage, micromanaging, ordering staff around and—crucially—changing her approach. She took the advice of campaign communications director Howard Wolfson to jolly up the cranky reporters in the back of the plane. She allowed herself to get misty at a New Hampshire campaign event, revealing more passion for the campaign and the country than many voters had seen in her before.
For all his bad advice, Bill was not going away, however. Indeed, after New Hampshire, the former POTUS asked for an office at campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., an arrangement that was sure to be too awkward and was abandoned after a couple of days. The campaign wanted to limit stumping in South Carolina as a mostly lost cause, but Clinton would not take orders. Through an aide, the former president informed headquarters that its plan was "crazy" and declared that South Carolina could still be won—if only he would go there. (A spokesman for Bill Clinton declined to comment.)
His tour through the Palmetto State was a disaster. Finger wagging, face reddening, he lectured reporters and appeared to clumsily play the race card, comparing Obama with Jesse Jackson. Senator Clinton lost badly in South Carolina and achieved no more than a draw on Super Tuesday. The former president took the hint from fund-raisers who told him to lower his profile. (A NEWSWEEK reporter who followed the president for the past two weeks was kept fenced off, along with other members of the national press, far, far away from the rope line.) It fell to Hillary to once again brace and buck up her troops. Right before a sure defeat in the Wisconsin primary in mid-February, she told her dispirited staff to stay focused on the battles ahead: "We can win this. I know we can win this." Solis Doyle fell on her sword and was replaced by Maggie Williams, a former Clinton White House aide with more stature and perhaps more ability to cope with strong egos. A campaign adviser who did not wish to be quoted for obvious reasons describes the campaign as "basically, just a mess" without any clear lines of authority. "There are way too many chiefs, power plays, inside games." But this adviser has some hope for Williams: "She's pretty quiet, she doesn't speak up a lot, but she is also in charge. She lets you know it."
The campaign's new (new) approach was obvious but necessary: to both sharpen the negatives against Obama and personalize Hillary. She has never wanted to go on "Saturday Night Live" or "The Daily Show," but in the days before Ohio and Texas she did both—and did well, showing surprising comic timing and self-deprecation.
Hillary is not, and will never be, a happy warrior. Her broad, fixed smile masks resentments not far from the surface. Though she sometimes lost herself to teary outbursts as First Lady—at least a few aimed at her husband—she has, by and large, controlled her emotions on the campaign trail, behind the scenes as well as onstage. An exception was her reaction to MSNBC reporter David Shuster's suggestion that the Clintons had "pimped out" their daughter, Chelsea. She was "extraordinarily upset," says a staffer who was on the conference call informing her of the journalist's comments but declined to be identified discussing conversations with the candidate. "Enough is enough," Hillary said, and threatened to pull out of an MSNBC debate (Shuster was suspended for two weeks and the debate went on).
Both Hillary and the former president share a world view that it may be necessary to tolerate the press from time to time but that in the long run, the media will never give them a fair shake. It is a dark, if perhaps realistic, view reinforced by Mark Penn, who counsels the once and possibly future First Couple to forget about the "impressionable elites," the know-it-all journalists, professors and think-tankers who are obsessed with "likability." Pay attention to the "jugheads," not the "eggheads," counsels Penn in his book, "Microtrends," the voters who make less than $50,000 a year and "know what it feels like to be without health insurance or a job."
Hillary Clinton has shown that she can handle the pressures of a relentless campaign. Her friend and adviser Sidney Blumenthal jokes that the press is in love with the "Perils of Pauline" storyline about Hillary that makes her seem like the heroine of one of those old silent movies, tied to the tracks while the locomotive bears down. The difference is that Hillary herself has slipped out of the bind without being rescued by anyone—certainly not by her husband.
Posted March 6, 2008 | 01:35 PM (EST)
With the media in full CSI: Ohio and Texas mode, slicing and dicing the body politic for clues to Hillary Clinton's latest resurgence (don't forget to check under the fingernails!), theories abound:
It was the economy, stupid. It was the Latino/African American disconnect. It was the media finally giving Obama some heat. It was Saturday Night Live (all hail Amy Poehler, Lorne Michaels, and Jim Downey -- political kingmakers).
But the real answer is to be found deep in our lizard brains. Clinton won by dealing from the bottom of the deck -- and the bottom of the barrel -- and playing the fear card. And, as happened in 2002 and 2004, Be Very Afraid proved to be a very effective campaign pitch.
After her New Hampshire comeback, Clinton famously declared: "I found my own voice."
For this latest comeback, she found Karl Rove's voice.
People aren't currently stocking up on Cipro and duct tape but, as the cable channels' hyped up reaction to the Times Square explosion showed, these are still jittery times. And appeals to voters' lizard brains still move the needle.
After an 11 state losing streak, Hillary Clinton didn't suddenly transform into a more compelling candidate. Only a spookier one.
So we got the 3 a.m. phone call, making no real argument about preparedness to lead, only the shadowy insinuation that bad things will happen to your kids if you vote for Obama. Trailers for slasher movies have less of a creep-you-out factor.
We got Hillary's ready-to-lead scorecard: "I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002." This scorched earth pronouncement led Air America's Rachel Maddow to tell Keith Olbermann, "That's what you say when you want to be John McCain's vice-presidential choice. That's not what you say when you're trying to become the Democratic nominee for president." Olbermann's take: "Unbelievable."
And we got that jaw-dropping moment on 60 Minutes where Clinton generously announced that she takes Obama at his word that he's not a Muslim and rejected rumors that he is with the so-big-you-could-fit-a-madrass-in-it caveat, "As far as I know." What's next, "Obama is a human being... as far I know"?
It's worth remembering that earlier in the campaign, when Clinton was still pitching the inevitability of her candidacy and fending off attacks from her opponents, she roundly disavowed these kinds of tactics. "I'm not interested in attacking my opponents," she claimed in Iowa in November. "I'm interested in attacking the problems of America and I believe we should be turning up the heat on the Republicans." Terry McAuliffe reiterated the do-no-harm-approach: "We're going to focus on the Republicans. We're going to focus on winning the White House. We're not going to attack our fellow Democrats. That's not what we want to do."
I've written before about how fear-mongering works, causing voters to react not with their linear and logical left brain but with their lizard brain and their more emotional right brain.
Deep in the brain lies the amygdala, an almond-sized region that generates fear. When this fear state is activated, the amygdala springs into action. Before you are even consciously aware that you are afraid, your lizard brain responds by clicking into survival mode. No time to assess the situation, no time to look at the facts, just: fight, flight or freeze. When we are in this state, we are biologically programmed to pay less attention to left-brain signals -- indeed, our logical mind actually shuts itself down. Fear paralyzes our reasoning and literally makes it impossible to think straight. It's the neuroscience, stupid!
After Tuesday's success, you can be sure the Clintons' march through the mud will continue over the seven weeks until Pennsylvania. Bill Clinton understood the potency of playing to voters' lizard brains -- it's why he started rolling the fear dice back on the Charlie Rose show. How to counter this kind of fear-mongering without kicking off a round of Mutual Assured Destruction for the Democrats is the Obama campaign's greatest challenge.
Just as they did for a full decade with "Whitewater," reporters are now tossing around "Rezko" to imply wrongdoing without having any idea what it means.
Glenn Greenwald
Mar. 05, 2008 | (updated below)
Throughout the 1990s, the word "Whitewater" was the weapon used continuously by the Limbaugh Right and the establishment press to cast innuendo on the Clintons' financial lives. The word was just tossed around as slippery shorthand for corrupt dealings. It never had any substance. No specific allegations of wrongdoing were ever made about the original "Whitewater" transactions by those throwing the term around. And after $73 million was spent on an endless investigation, no wrongdoing on the part of the Clintons was found.
One could read literally thousands of news accounts about the "Whitewater scandal" and never encounter a single, specific charge of impropriety. The word simply stood for a series of confusing, complex, boring financial transactions that were combined with dark and vague innuendo which, repeated enough, led to a "where-there's-smoke- there's-fire" presumption of guilt. Slothful journalists could not get enough of the tactic because tossing "Whitewater" around required no real work, active investigation or critical thought -- the mortal enemies of most establishment reporters -- but instead was just a cheap and easy way to imply that they were pursuing some sort of scandal.
"Rezko" is the Whitewater of the Obama campaign. It's almost impossible now to find an article or news account about Obama that doesn't include some dark reference to the "Rezko" affair, always with the suggestion or even overt claim that it's reflective of some serious vulnerability, some suggestion of wrongdoing and corruption. But what is it? The reporters throwing the word around quite plainly have no idea.
Having paid only casual attention to it in the past, I spent several hours yesterday morning reading every "Rezko" article I could find in an attempt to understand as much as possible about the allegations. The point isn't that there is no credible evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of Obama, although that's unquestionably true. It's far beyond that. There aren't even any theoretical allegations or suggestions as to what he might have done wrong at all. The person who is accused of wrongdoing is Tony Rezko, in matters inarguably having nothing to do with Obama. Nobody claims otherwise (although many try to imply otherwise).
The only substantive connections Obama and Rezko have is that the latter was a contributor to Obama's campaign and was a partner in a standard residential real-estate purchase which nobody suggests, at least in terms of Obama's conduct, was anything but above-board. But Rezko himself has a sinister-sounding, villain-like last name and is of Syrian origin, which, for multiple reasons, helps build the shallow media drama.
But Obama isn't even accused of -- let alone proven to have engaged in -- any wrongdoing at all. I spent many years litigating all sorts of civil cases involving financial transactions like these. Few things are easier than concocting some nefarious angle to innocuous real estate transactions, yet they can't even do that here. Despite that, the "Rezko" innuendo lurks and grows and clearly isn't going anywhere.
Yesterday, Digby -- citing a post she wrote more than a year ago on this specialized GOP template for manufacturing media scandals out of pedestrian though boring financial transactions -- described exactly how this process works:
Over a year ago I took one of my periodic trips down memory lane and roughly outlines the press treatment of the Whitewater story. At the time, the Rezko story was just starting to bubble up out of Chicago, and I explained how these stories are used to degrade the reputations of Democrats . . . . These are patented Whitewater-style "smell test" stories. They are based on complicated details that make the casual reader's eyes glaze over and about which the subject has to issue long confusing explanations in return. They feature colorful and unsavory political characters in some way. They often happened in the past and they tend to be written in such a way as to say that even if they aren't illegal they "look bad" . . . No single story will bring down a candidate because they have no substance to them. It's the combined effect they are looking for to build a sense overall sleaziness. "Where there's smoke there's fire" right?
These are patented Whitewater-style "smell test" stories. They are based on complicated details that make the casual reader's eyes glaze over and about which the subject has to issue long confusing explanations in return. They feature colorful and unsavory political characters in some way. They often happened in the past and they tend to be written in such a way as to say that even if they aren't illegal they "look bad" . . . No single story will bring down a candidate because they have no substance to them. It's the combined effect they are looking for to build a sense overall sleaziness. "Where there's smoke there's fire" right?
No single story will bring down a candidate because they have no substance to them. It's the combined effect they are looking for to build a sense overall sleaziness. "Where there's smoke there's fire" right?
These stories are very difficult to control once they get going. The MSM gasbags start "analyzing" the whole thing in terms of whether the subject of the inquiry is being forthcoming or if he's "stonewalling" and it snowballs into armchair psychology and novelistic character studies. From what I gather of the Rezko matter so far, we can probably expect this to have the same trajectory. The press conference yesterday was deja vu all over again.
Yet somehow, the standard in those cases is that, in the absence of specific allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the political official, merely being linked -- even intimately -- to thieves and felons won't be held against the political official. By rather stark contrast, the multiple former Clinton associates who were convicted of wrongdoing -- the McDougals and Webster Hubbell -- were constantly used to imply that the Clintons themselves had done something corrupt, and now, Tony Rekzo's conduct is being sloppily and dishonestly cast onto Barack Obama without the slightest attempt to actually make the case that Obama has done anything even arguably wrong at all.
One very simple and self-evidently warranted rule ought to be applied: no reporter should toss around "Rezko" innuendo unless they're able to explain what it means specifically when assessing Obama's conduct, what specific allegations of any substance are being made against Obama when the scary specter of "Rezko" is invoked. If they're incapable of articulating even those basics -- and they are -- then the whole exercise is just deceitful and worthless.
It's precisely the empty nature of the "scandal" that makes it impossible to resolve. The more he addresses it, the more he fuels it; conversely, the more he refuses to address it, the more he will be accused of "stonewalling" and not being forthcoming. It's just illusory innuendo that, by design, can never be satisfactorily addressed because nobody can ever apprehend what the substance of the "scandal" is. Substance-free scandal is the only kind that attracts the intense attention of the media hordes.UPDATE: Here's the headline from an article today by The Politico's Kenneth Vogel, complaining that the Rezko trial isn't getting enough media attention:And here's the headline from a similar article today from ABC News' Brian Ross:Can anyone find even a single fact in either of these long, breathless pieces reflective of possible wrongdoing of any kind on Obama's part? Shouldn't such facts be a bare pre-requisite for trying to build something like this up into some sort of scandal?
-- Glenn Greenwald
Posted March 5, 2008 | 12:53 PM (EST)
On this occasion, he had an important topic to discuss: the controversy over President George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance of international telephone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists. I had written a short essay suggesting that the surveillance might be lawful. Before taking a public position, Obama wanted to talk the problem through.
In the space of about 20 minutes, he and I investigated the legal details. He asked me to explore all sorts of issues: the President's power as commander-in-chief, the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Authorization for Use of Military Force and more.
Obama wanted to consider the best possible defence of what Bush had done. To every argument I made, he listened and offered a counter-argument. After the issue had been exhausted, Obama said that he thought the programme was illegal, but now had a better understanding of both sides. He thanked me for my time.
This was a pretty amazing conversation, not only because of Obama's mastery of the legal details, but also because many prominent Democratic leaders had already blasted the Bush initiative as blatantly illegal. He did not want to take a public position until he had listened to, and explored, what might be said on the other side.
This is the Barack Obama I have known for nearly 15 years -- a careful and even-handed analyst of law and policy, unusually attentive to multiple points of view.
The University of Chicago Law School is by far the most conservative of the great American law schools. It helped to provide the academic foundations for many positions of the Reagan administration.
But at the University of Chicago, Obama is liked and admired by Republicans and Democrats alike. Some of the local Reagan enthusiasts are Obama supporters. Why? It doesn't hurt that he's a great guy, with a personal touch and a lot of warmth. It certainly helps that he is exceptionally able.
But niceness and ability are only part of the story. Obama also has a genuinely independent mind, he's a terrific listener and he goes wherever reason takes him.
Those of us who have long known Obama are impressed and not a little amazed by his rhetorical skills. Who could have expected that our colleague, a teacher of law, is also able to inspire large crowds?
The Obama we know is no rhetorician; he shines not because he can move people, but because of his problem-solving abilities, his creativity and his attention to detail.
In recent weeks, his speaking talents, and the cult-like atmosphere that occasionally surrounds him, have led people to wonder whether there is substance behind the plea for "change" - whether the soaring phrases might disguise a kind of emptiness and vagueness. But nothing could be further from the truth. He is most comfortable in the domain of policy and detail.
I do not deny that skeptics are raising legitimate questions. After all, Obama has served in the Senate for a short period (less than four years) and he has little managerial experience. Is he really equipped to lead the most powerful nation in the world?
Obama speaks of "change", but will he be able to produce large-scale changes in a short time? What if he fails? An independent issue is that all the enthusiasm might serve to insulate him from criticisms and challenges on the part of his own advisers -- and, in view of his relative youth, criticisms and challenges are exactly what he requires.
Fortunately, the candidate's campaign proposals offer strong and encouraging clues about how he would govern; what makes them distinctive is that they borrow sensible ideas from all sides.
He is strongly committed to helping the disadvantaged, but his University of Chicago background shows; he appreciates the virtues and power of free markets. In this sense, he is not only focused on details but is also a uniter, both by inclination and on principle.
Transparency and accountability matter greatly to him; they are a defining feature of his proposals. With respect to the mortgage crisis, credit cards and the broader debate over credit markets, Obama rejects heavy-handed regulation and insists above all on disclosure, so that consumers will know exactly what they are getting.
Expect transparency to be a central theme in any Obama administration, as a check on government and the private sector alike. It is highly revealing that Obama worked with Republican (and arch-conservative) Tom Coburn to produce legislation creating a publicly searchable database of all federal spending.
Obama's healthcare plan places a premium on cutting costs and on making care affordable, without requiring adults to purchase health insurance. (He would require mandatory coverage only for children.) Republican legislators are unlikely to support a mandatory approach, and his plan can be understood, in part, as a recognition of political realities.
But it is also a reflection of his keen interest in freedom of choice. He seeks universal coverage not through unenforceable mandates but through giving people good options.
It should not be surprising that in terms of helping low-income workers, Obama has long been enthusiastic about the Earned Income Tax Credit -- an approach, pioneered by Republicans, that supplements wages but does not threaten to throw people out of work.
But Obama is no a compromiser; he does not try to steer between the poles (or the polls). "Triangulation" has no appeal for him. Both internationally and domestically, he is willing to think big and to be bold. He publicly opposed the war in Iraq at a time when opposition was unpopular.
He favors high-level meetings with some of the world's worst dictators. He would rethink the embargo against Cuba.
He proposes a $150 billion research budget for climate change. He wants to hold an unprecedented national auction for the right to emit greenhouse gases. He has offered an ambitious plan for promoting technological innovation, calling for a national broadband policy, embracing network neutrality, and proposing a reform of the patent system.
His campaign has spoken of moving toward "iPod Government" -- an effort to rethink public services and national regulations in ways that will make things far simpler and more user-friendly.
These are points about policies and substance. As president, Obama would set a new tone in US politics. He refuses to demonize his political opponents; deep in his heart, I believe, he doesn't even think of them as opponents. It would not be surprising to find Republicans and independents prominent in his administration.
Obama wants to know what ideas are likely to work, not whether a Democrat or a Republican is responsible for them. Recall the most memorable passage from his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention: "We coach Little League [baseball] in the blue [Democratic-voting] states, and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq."
In his book The Audacity of Hope, he asks for a politics that accepts "the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point". Remarking that ordinary Americans "don't always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal", Obama wants politicians "to catch up with them,"
After he received an email from a pro-life doctor, Obama recalls how he softened his website's harsh rhetoric on abortion, writing: "[T]hat night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own -- that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me."
In short, Obama's own approach is insistently charitable. He assumes decency and good faith on the part of those who disagree with him. And he wants to hear what they have to say. Both in substance and in tone, Obama questions the conventional political distinctions between "the left" and "the right". To the extent that he is attracting support from Republicans and independents, it is largely for this reason.
From knowing Obama for many years, I have no doubts about his ability to lead. He knows a great deal, and he is a quick learner. Even better, he knows what he does not know, and there is no question that he would assemble an accomplished, experienced team of advisers. His brilliant administration of his own campaign provides helpful evidence here.
But there is some fragility to the public fervor that envelops him. Crowds and cults can be fickle, and if some of his decisions disappoint, or turn out badly, his support will diminish. Some people think it might even collapse.
My own concern involves the importance of internal debate. The greatest American presidents (above all Lincoln and Roosevelt) benefited from robust dialogue and from advisers who avoided saying, "how wonderful you are," and were willing to say: "Mr President, your thinking about this is all wrong."
Because Obama himself is exceptionally able, and because so many people are treating him as a near-messiah, his advisers might be too deferential, too unwilling to question. There is a real risk here. But I believe that his humility, and his intense desire to seek out dissenting views, will prove crucial safeguards.
In the 2000 campaign, Bush proclaimed himself a "uniter, not a divider", only to turn out to be the most divisive President in memory. Because of his own certainty, and his lack of curiosity about what others might think, Bush polarized the nation. Many of his most ambitious plans went nowhere as a result.
As president, Barack Obama would be a genuine uniter. If he proves able to achieve great things, for his nation and for the world, it will be above all for that reason.
March 5, 2008 11:29 AM
Going into yesterday's primaries, the media obsessed themselves with gathering public opinion on what conditions should precipitate a Clinton withdrawal. What if she won only one of the two big states? What if she won neither? Well, the point is moot after last night -- an outright win in Ohio and a claim on the popular vote in the Texas primaries have punched Clinton's ticket through the Pennsylvania contest.
Buried in the poll-taking, however, was a surprising figure among those who identified themselves as Obama supporters. While 73% of Obama supporters felt that Clinton should drop out of the race if she lost both Texas and Ohio, nearly half of them (46%) felt it would be perfectly appropriate for Clinton to remain in the race, had she only won one of those states.
This percentage was far less than the number posted by "all Democrats" who felt Clinton had justifiable reason to remain in the race in the "win-one, lose-one" scenario by a 67-29 margin.
Still, there's been a lot of hand wringing in the past week about media fairness in the Democratic race. Who was the media treating unfairly, Clinton or Obama? My thought: neither! The most unfairly abused party in the race has been Obama's supporters, who are widely derided as a glassy-eyed cult of personality whose support is insincere, naive, and based on their propensity to faint dead away when they are in Obama's presence. I say "most unfairly," because unlike the two candidates, they don't have a voice in the media. They don't have an avenue to defend themselves. No one is writing SNL sketches for them.
These poll numbers indicate that Obama's supporters aren't quite the scorched-earth, anti-Hillary Kool-Aid drinkers they've been made out to be. On balance, the Obama support registers in the numbers, but a clear sign of fair-minding comity is also indicated.
Credit is due to the eagle-eyes over at 1115.org, who also note that the recent Pew poll shows that Obama's supporters are more likely to stay in the Democratic camp if their candidate doesn't get the nomination:
More Clinton supporters would switch to McCain if Obama is the nominee than Obama supporters would if Clinton is the nominee: "A quarter of Democrats (25%) who back Clinton for the nomination say they would favor McCain in a general election test against Obama. The "defection" rate among Obama's supporters if Clinton wins the nomination is far lower; just 10% say they would vote for McCain in November..."
This may not end the "Obama supporters as cult" meme, but it should.
This is VERY insightful
By E. J. Dionne Jr.Tuesday, March 4, 2008; A19
So how did the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination come down to a choice between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? We have become so accustomed to their pounding each other relentlessly that we've forgotten that this is a remarkable endgame.
To be sure, just about everyone anticipated that when the field narrowed, Clinton would be one of the contenders left standing. She had won allies from her work for her husband and in the Senate, was helped by the residual affection for Bill Clinton in many parts of the party, and created a support base among women.
But the scenario-builders pondering this contest two years ago imagined a showdown between Clinton and -- let's be honest -- a white guy. It was thought that a moderate Democrat (popular choices included Mark Warner of Virginia and Evan Bayh of Indiana) would cast himself as the "electable" alternative to the "divisive" Clinton.
Alternatively, John Edwards had the chance to go at Clinton from her left (he'd run against "Clintonomics" as the pro-labor, mill-town-born populist) and from her right (he was, after all, a Southern white man).
Obama upended all these calculations. Warner and Bayh understood how much the race had changed and decided not to run. Obama bested Edwards in Iowa, effectively blocking Edwards's only path to contention.
Against anyone but Obama, Clinton could have counted on strong support from African Americans. Against an Adlai Stevenson-Gary Hart-Paul Tsongas-Bill Bradley sort of reformer, she would have assembled the "regular" Democratic coalition: blue-collar whites allied with black voters. This is, more or less, how Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton and Al Gore prevailed in the primaries. Against a centrist, Clinton would have won the liberals. Her strength among women would have provided her with additional ballast.
Obama not only created an alliance between African Americans and upscale reform voters, but he also changed the composition of the Democratic electorate by drawing in hundreds of thousands of voters under age 30.
If Obama prevails, historians will see him as the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to bring a whole new constituency into the system. That, the political scientists tell us, is how realignments happen.
Obama changed the dynamic in another way: As my Brookings Institution colleague (and Clinton supporter) William Galston says, Clinton ran the last campaign of the 20th century while Obama ran the first campaign of the 21st century. Galston argues that Clinton ran a first-rate version of the last century's campaign -- her fundraising by past standards was impressive.
But Obama one-upped her by understanding the new possibilities of modern communications. It wasn't just that he outperformed Clinton by raising so much money online; he also exploited the social-networking sites (and built one of his own) and understood the interaction between virtual communities and real communities.
Obama reached out to bloggers without pandering to them. In 2005, the blogosphere went after Sen. Pat Leahy for supporting the nomination of John Roberts as chief justice. Although Obama opposed Roberts, he defended Leahy against criticisms he called "knee-jerk," "unfair" and "dogmatic."
But Obama took an additional step, as Matt Bai reports in his essential book on the new Democratic politics, "The Argument." Obama offered a long post of his own on Markos Moulitsas's Daily Kos site declaring that Americans are "suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon" and that Democrats should stand for "thoughtfulness and openness."
At a stroke (as it were), Obama did two things. He established himself as a unifier capable of, as he likes to say, "disagreeing without being disagreeable." And he demonstrated his respect for the blogosphere by arguing with its members in their own space.
Because the Clinton campaign failed to anticipate the imperatives of a race against Obama, it was only in the past two weeks that she managed to move to offense. Her campaign has gone back to its basic argument that, love her or not, Clinton is the experienced fighter who can be trusted to deal with a nasty world and a decaying economy. She's trying to turn Obama's newness into inexperience, his eloquence into slickness and his conciliatory nature into a form of softness. It is no accident that her "red phone" ad about her readiness to be president was created by a veteran of Mondale's campaign who made a similar ad against Gary Hart in 1984.
This is not the campaign Clinton had hoped to run, but it's the one approach she has left, and it's had the effect of forcing Obama to respond to her. You wonder what would have happened if she had adjusted earlier.
postchat@aol.com
Great article at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/10/080310fa_fact_collins
It's no wonder Barack calls her his rock...
I am not a devotee or disciple. I am a skeptic, and remain somewhat skeptical. Still, over the past few weeks I have become convinced that Barack Obama is the better choice for the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. And, well... God help us all if that's not enough to make him president.
My conclusion is based on several components, but coheres around one theme. Besides what I have experienced as his superior demonstrations of strength, composure, restraint, and reasoning during their last two one-on-one debates, Senator Obama has structured his campaign around what I feel is an irrefutable truth: the United States government will never again function efficiently unless United States citizens force it to do so. His insistence that the U.S. government must serve its citizenry, and his acknowledgment that it will do so only if the citizenry once again holds its government accountable is a statement so simplistic that it is, for some, dismissible. It also happens to be a truism so profound that it might, I have come to hope, be unstoppable.
I don't agree with everything he says, and even find some of Senator Clinton's policy positions to be superior. (I'm sorry, but "If you make healthcare affordable enough, no one will choose not to buy it" doesn't hold water in my world. That's like saying if you made auto insurance cheap enough, no one would drive without it. They would. They do.) Still, I find his positions, and his explanations of those positions, to be equal to or superior to hers on nearly all other counts.
Furthermore -- and it's an important furthermore, since I defy anyone to be able to accurately decipher and predict whose "plans" are actually going to prove more effective in the real time of the real world -- I find him to be a more sincere proponent of his positions. I do not doubt Senator Clinton's heartfelt desire to do well for the American people. The crucial difference is she continues to insist she knows what's best for those people even as they reject her insistence, while Senator Obama states over and over that what he wants is to assist the American people in doing well for themselves. The most crucial way they can help themselves, he stresses, is to create a government that works for them in the ways they want it to, and to exercise oversight to ensure it achieves its missions. There must be accountability in order to have success, he says. To have accountability, there must be transparency. He encourages us to insist upon both, and once the view has been cleared, to keep our eyes peeled.
Some insist that's all he's saying, though I don't see that to be the case. What he is doing that might make it appear that way is repeatedly relating every idea and policy position back to that central theme. But he doesn't seem to be doing that solely out of a desire to stay "on message." He seems to be doing it as a result of his understanding that without those conditions of transparency and accountability being met, nothing else is possible. At least nothing other than what we've seen for the past seven, fifteen, twenty-three, or forty-odd years.
A government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It's not a revolutionary thought -- at least not like it was when the notion was first conceived. It is, however, a stunningly unusual platform for a contemporary presidential candidate. With increasing consistency, each of our more recent candidates has stressed what he is going to provide to the populace, either as an entitlement program, or as a tax break. Concurrently, we've recently endured a nearly decade-long period of previously unthinkable power grabbing and consolidation by the executive branch of our government. Of even greater concern than the power grabbing has been the purposeful erosion of the divisions between the executive, the judicial, and the legislative braches. Attorneys General refusing not only to indict, but even to testify truthfully; Justice Department employees enforcing executive branch vendettas, then refusing to appear in answer to subpoenas; Supreme Court justices ordering an end to the counting of votes. Senator Obama is not raising his flagship position out of the ether, or, as far as I can see, out of excessive opportunism or ambition. He's speaking out about a very real crisis -- one of existential proportions -- in the history, health, and wellbeing of our republic. And he's doing so without histrionics, with tremendous grace and understatement. He seems increasingly to me to be a man of vast insight, both in terms of what he's trying to accomplish, and in terms of his methods of attempting to accomplish it.
Contrast that with Senator Clinton's more recent methods. I took a great deal from the moment during their last debate when Senator Obama questioned Senator Clinton's belief that the best way to accomplish things was to be willing to fight for them. A combative stance, he suggested, is not necessarily the strongest position from which to maneuver. His point is absolutely correct. And the increasing emergence recently of her anger toward him, toward the press, and toward those who've voted against her -- and the ways it has backfired on her -- seems to bear Senator Obama's truth out.
But those are my more minor qualms with her recent behavior. We've now come to the most cynical stage of this particular campaign, with Senator Clinton participating in an advertisement that calls into question the safety of children sleeping in their homes in the Unites States. The ad suggests that of the two candidates, one can provide protection from unnamed threats in superior fashion to the other. It's an absurd argument. Not because, as her campaign suggests, anyone who questions it is questioning the legitimacy of a debate about national security. It's an absurd and ugly advertisement because it says nothing whatsoever about national security. It discusses no policy, and makes no comparisons other than one: I am to be trusted, he is not.
I'd suggest the ad indicates just the opposite. Not merely because it is repulsive, but because it is destructive -- knowingly so and purposefully so -- in pursuit of personal ambition. I make the charge because I do not believe Senator Clinton herself believes that children, or any other U.S. citizens, will actually be safer under an administration headed by herself, as opposed to Senator Obama. That's why I find the defense of the ads, and the pretense that they illustrate any kind of personally held belief, to be terribly sad. Because the choice Senator Clinton has now made with her advertising campaign has the potential, should she succeed in damaging Senator Obama's standing, to prove tragic for the nation come November.
As I've said, I have had no doubts as to the sincerity of Senator Clinton's wish to do well for the American people and their interests. I just no longer believe she has the wisdom or good judgment to know when her own private wishes have come into conflict with the interests of the rest of us. One doesn't have to look far or remember hard to know we've seen too much of that syndrome over the past seven years already.
Senators Clinton and Obama were asked during their most recent debate whether they'd come to regret any votes they've cast while holding public office. I have a regret to confess to. When I voted in the California primary less than four weeks ago, I pulled the lever for Senator Clinton. I now believe I was wrong. If Senator Obama had carried California the contest might be over by now. I hope the people of Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont will make better choices than I did last month, and settle the race decisively -- before Senator Clinton has the chance to do more damage in her quest to protect us while we sleep. I've come to trust the candidate who's encouraging us to wake up, and to protect ourselves - even, if need be, from our own government.
I hope I get the chance to vote for Senator Obama again. I am not a devotee or disciple. I am a skeptic, and remain somewhat skeptical. Still, over the past few weeks I have become convinced that Barack Obama is the better choice for the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. And, well...God help us all if that's not enough to make him president.
February 29, 2008
It was, in this reporter's opinion, the most interesting moment in today's Clinton campaign phoner with reporters. Responding to the release of HRC's new TX TV ad, which asserts in no subtle terms that only she has the experience to deal with a major world crisis, and, relatedly, to keep your children safe, Slate's John Dickerson asked the obvious question:
"What foreign policy moment would you point to in Hillary's career where she's been tested by crisis?" he said.
Silence on the call. You could've knit a sweater in the time it took the usually verbose team of Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Lee Feinstein, Clinton's national security director, to find a cogent answer. And what they came up with was weak -- that she's been endorsed by many high ranking members of the uniformed military.
Take a listen ...
(Visit the page to listen to teh Quicktime file: http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2008/02/pregnant_pause.html)
(JENNIFER SKALKA)
By Lisa Myers and Jim Popkin, NBC News
Sen. Hillary Clinton has declined to return $170,000 in campaign contributions from individuals at a company accused of widespread sexual harassment, and whose CEO is a disbarred lawyer with a criminal record, federal campaign records show.
The federal government has accused the Illinois management consulting firm, International Profit Associates, or IPA, of a brazen pattern of sexual harassment including "sexual assaults,” “degrading anti-female language" and "obscene suggestions."
In a 2001 lawsuit full of lurid details, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claims that 103 women employees at IPA were victimized for years. The civil case is ongoing, and IPA vigorously denies the allegations.
"This is by far, hands down, the worst case I've ever experienced," said Diane Smason, one of the EEOC lawyers handling the lawsuit. "Every woman there experienced sex harassment, they were part of a hostile work environment of sex harassment. And this occurred from the top down."
Sen. Clinton’s spokesman, Howard Wolfson, told NBC News in a statement that the senator decided to keep the funds because the lawsuit is "ongoing" and because none of the sexual harassment allegations has been proven in court. "With regard to the pending harassment suit, as a general matter, the campaign assesses findings of fact in deciding whether to return contributions," Wolfson said.
Allegations:Adrienne Slick, who worked at IPA for seven months in 2000 and 2001 as a business coordinator and is now part of the EEOC suit, told NBC News in an interview that the sexual harassment was oppressive. “I had multiple managers come at me, press themselves up against me ... ask me to go home with them, and to a hotel room so they could fulfill their fantasies," she said.
The EEOC lawyers say the man at the top of the firm - IPA founder and Managing Director John R. Burgess - was among the worst offenders. The EEOC lawsuit claims, “The harassment emanated from the top: the owner and Managing Director, John Burgess, is accused of sexual harassment by at least 10 different women.”
Burgess has a criminal record, too. The former lawyer pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny in 1987 and was disbarred in New York, court documents show. Burgess also pleaded guilty to “patronizing a prostitute” in 1984, according to Erie County, N.Y., court records.
Still, none of that has stopped powerful politicians in both parties from being courted by Burgess and IPA. Since 2000, IPA officials and their family members have given Sen. Clinton at least $170,000 for her Senate and presidential campaigns, federal campaign records show. Senator Clinton also spoke at a company event and rode on an IPA jet in 2004.
In May 2006, the New York Times brought Burgess's criminal history, and the allegations against IPA, to Sen. Clinton's attention. The May 7, 2006, article was titled “Rubbing Shoulders with Trouble, and Presidents.” In the article, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton was quoted as saying the Senator was not aware of Burgess’s criminal past and "will be reviewing" the contributions.
Almost two years later, federal records indicate that Sen. Clinton still has not returned the IPA money. Howard Wolfson, her communications director, did not dispute the $170,000 figure in an email to NBC News. He said Senator Clinton was not aware of Burgess’s past legal problems when she first accepted the donations. "In 2000 and 2003 when Sen. Clinton's campaign accepted money from Burgess, it was not aware of his legal problems from the 1980s," he said.
However, there were public reports of allegations against Burgess as early as 2000. That’s the year that Inc. Magazine first reported that Burgess had patronized a prostitute and had pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny. And Senator Clinton’s campaign has accepted other contributions from other senior IPA officials as recently as last year, the campaign records show.
Many other politicians have been quick to distance themselves from IPA, and have returned donations. In 2002 in New York, Andrew Cuomo, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate at the time, returned $20,000 from Burgess. Cuomo’s office said the donations were returned after a New York newspaper reported on Burgess’s past legal problems and on the EEOC sexual-harassment allegations.
Other prominent Democrats also have returned IPA's donations including Sen. Ted Kennedy and then-Senate candidate Claire McCaskill. On the same day in 2006, Sen. Barack Obama received $4,000 in campaign donations from a senior IPA official and his wife. Obama quickly returned $2,000 from the senior IPA official, campaign records show. But the campaign has held onto the matching $2,000 donation from the IPA official’s wife, the Obama campaign confirms.
Some political analysts say it is surprising that the first viable female candidate for president would not be more sensitive to allegations of sexual harassment.
"The fact that Hillary Clinton at this point is holding onto money from a contributor who has been charged with sexual harassment can only be perceived as insensitive to women's issues and women," says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, Senior Scholar at the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California. "I don't think that fits the definition of feminism, at least the last time I looked."
Adrienne Slick, the former IPA employee, says she's disappointed in any politician who would take or keep money from IPA. "This is not something that should be taken lightly, and to accept those funds makes a statement," she told NBC.
The EEOC lawyers would not comment on any aspect of the political donations, and confined their remarks solely to the lawsuit.Clinton Campaign Response:Wolfson dismissed the notion that keeping IPA money reflected a lack of concern about sexual harassment. "Sen. Clinton is proud of her long record of championing women's causes," he said. "When the EEOC rules on the allegations involving Burgess, we will consider that outcome in assessing if there is any reason to return his contribution." Of the $170,000 total in donations from all IPA officials and employees, Burgess and his family members personally contributed $16,000 to Sen. Clinton, campaign records show.
IPA Reaction:For its part, IPA vigorously denies any wrongdoing and said it has been fighting the EEOC lawsuit for more than six years. "Since a lawsuit was filed in June 2001, IPA has continually and consistently denied the allegations," IPA spokeswoman Jennifer Cumbee wrote in an email to NBC News. "At IPA, we have zero tolerance approach when it comes to sexual harassment."
Cumbee added: "This involves primarily claims by persons who worked a short time in the mid- to late 90s (although there are some persons who worked after that). Immediately after the lawsuit was filed and by early 2001, IPA in an abundance of caution had its sexual harassment policy completely revised by competent outside professionals."
She says, "IPA has had no unresolved claim of harassment for several years now and any one of its 2,000 employees who violate the policy, after investigation, is dealt with swiftly." She would not comment directly on Slick’s claims, citing employee confidentiality. She said that the EEOC already has dropped some claimants from the suit. “All employee claims have been contested as many have no witnesses or records or current complaints,” Cumbee said.
The IPA spokeswoman did not dispute that Burgess had a criminal record from his days in New York. "All that you have asked, in regards to John Burgess, is a matter of public record," she wrote. “Mr. Burgess is not a felon and was never convicted or pled to a felony.” She said that it would be unfair to judge Burgess on two-decade-old crimes, and pointed out that Burgess and IPA are solid employers who donate generously to charities.
Original Post at: http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/02/29/718285.aspx
courant.com/news/politics/hc-obama0302.artmar02,0,6638814.story
By MARK PAZNIOKAS
Courant Staff Writer
March 2, 2008
PROVIDENCE —
Barack Obama's road show on Saturday swept onto the Rhode Island College campus, where several thousand spectators waited in a cold drizzle to glimpse a candidate riding an 11-state winning streak."I'm going to need all of you," Obama told the throng waiting outside a fieldhouse that already had reached its capacity of 5,000.Hillary Rodham Clinton drew 1,500 to the same venue a week ago. In a state where turnouts for presidential primaries languish in the single digits, spectators began arriving at mid-morning to guarantee a decent vantage inside. Doors opened at noon, and Obama arrived at 2 p.m. to deafening applause."As commander in chief, my job will be to keep you safe. That will be my job," Obama said told his audience. "And I will do whatever is required. I will not hesitate to strike against those who would do us harm."Obama was reacting to a new line of attack from Clinton, who suggests that Obama would be outmatched by Republican John McCain in a debate on national security.She also is airing a television commercial touting her own experience and ability to cope with the crises that inevitably will come. "It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep, but there's a phone in the White House and it's ringing," a narrator says in Clinton's ad. "Something's happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call, whether it's someone who already knows the world's leaders, knows the military — someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world."Obama did not directly mention the ad Saturday, but he denounced those who would exploit American fears, a comment that lumped Clinton with President Bush. He reminded his audience that he opposed the war in 2002, unlike Clinton, and pledged to end it."I don't want to just end the war. I want to end the mind set that got us in the war," Obama said. "I want to end the politics of fear, the fever of fear that uses 9/11 as a way to scare up votes instead of a way to bring the country together to go after a common enemy."A week earlier, Clinton stood in the same fieldhouse, mocking Obama's oratory and his calls for change. "It seems like this change thing is catching on, because everybody is talking about change," Obama said Saturday. "Everybody's saying how they stand for change. I want you to understand what real change is — don't be fooled."Other candidates are tailoring their views to fit the moment, he said."Real change isn't voting for George Bush's war in Iraq and then telling the American people it was actually a vote for more diplomacy," Obama said, referring to Clinton's defense of her war vote. "The title of the bill was 'A Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq.'""I knew what it was. Lincoln Chafee knew what it was," Obama said. The crowd cheered Chafee's name.As a U.S. senator from Rhode Island, Chafee was a prominent Republican voice against the war. He lost to Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, who is backing Clinton.Obama's campaign contacted Rhode Island College about using the field house on Wednesday, three days after Clinton appeared here and mocked Obama."Oh, he's so naive," Obama said, imitating Clinton.The crowd laughed and booed. "Wait! Wait! Wait!" Obama said smiling, stilling the boos. "It's true that I talk about hope a lot, out of necessity."He turned to his biography as the multiracial son of a Kenyan father and Kansan mother. His father abandoned them when he was two; all in all, he said, an improbable beginning for a journey to the pinnacle of U.S. politics."The odds of me standing here are very slim," he said.As Obama left the stage, parents thrust babies toward him. He held one child high above his head, smiling broadly.Gently, he accepted a drowsy 9-month-old Naledi Moeng from her mother, Sharonda, whose husband, Thabo, is a South African immigrant who resettles refugees for Catholic Charities.Obama held the baby, smiled for a picture and then carefully handed it back over a metal barricade to a beaming mother.The moment was Moeng's reward for driving with her husband and three children through snow squalls from their home in Worcester, Mass., and arriving at 9:30 a.m., early enough to guarantee a spot by the stage."It's history in the making," Sharonda Moeng said. "It's history."Contact Mark Pazniokas at mpazniokas@courant.com.
Texas turnout may bring historic shifts at polls
Obama, with momentum, could benefit the most, though Clinton holds Latino support.
By W. Gardner Selby, Juan Castillo
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFFSunday, March 02, 2008
The 2008 Democratic presidential race was already primed for the history books, with the early front-runner angling to become the first woman elected to the White House and the late front-runner seeking to become the first African American president.
More surprising, Tuesday's Texas primary, along with votes in Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont, looms as a national turning point: Sen. Barack Obama could achieve a decisive boost toward his party's nomination, or Sen. Hillary Clinton could gain badly needed momentum toward keeping her bid alive.
Texas voters, who may matter more to this presidential race than they have since Lyndon Johnson helped John Kennedy carry the state in 1960, are expected to turn out in record numbers. But the results will depend on who votes and for whom. This is conceivably driven by whether white men lean toward one candidate.
Consider:
Minority voters could eclipse white voters in the Texas Democratic primary, as they did for the first time in 2004.
If the two largest minority groups, Hispanics and blacks, generally vote in blocs — Hispanics for Clinton and blacks for Obama — Anglo suburbanites could prove pivotal, possibly giving moderate and liberal men Democratic influence they have not enjoyed for nearly two decades.
A blast of voters who haven't previously participated in Democratic primaries (including some Republicans crossing over to vote Democratic) could add to the uncertainty.
"It'll be more of everybody" voting, said Celinda Lake, a Washington-based pollster who expects bumps across all age groups, ethnicities and income categories in Texas.
Lake said that if minority voters turn out in big numbers, political perspectives on Texas could shift. "People think of Texas as a conservative white bastion," she said. "This primary, it might not be."
In 2000, more than half of Democratic primary voters were white. That changed in 2004, when black and Hispanic voters made up more than half the Democratic vote. In 2000, women voting Democratic outnumbered men about 56 percent to 44 percent, and in 2004, women outnumbered men 55 percent to 45 percent. Voters younger than 30 accounted for 10 percent.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that both young voters and women will turn out heavily this year, but experts are uncertain whether either group will become a larger share of the electorate, because interest is up across the board. Austin pollster Jeff Smith, who analyzed early voting in the state's five most populous counties plus suburban Fort Bend County outside Houston, found 15 percent of the early voters were 18 to 34 years old. About 60 percent of early voters in those counties were women.
An unpredictable element could be voters new to Democratic primaries. Smith found that 38 percent of the early voters he analyzed had voted in one of the past three Democratic primaries.
Early voting, which ended Friday, was running three to 16 times as high as 2004 in some counties. Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir sees a bandwagon effect and says Texans are "going to vote for the sheer thrill of it."
Precisely who votes will drive who wins.
Clinton is counting on Hispanics to give her a cushion because of long-held ties she and her husband have with South Texas. Latinos heavily favored Clinton in California on Feb. 5. While recent national polls suggest Obama has carved inroads with Hispanic voters, Texas polls still show Clinton with an advantage.
Last week, a Texas A&M/Latino Decisions Poll found that 62 percent of Texas Latinos plan to vote for Clinton, versus 22 percent for Obama and 13 percent who said they were undecided.
So far, young Latinos have been about as likely to vote for Clinton as older Latinos, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, which is tracking Hispanic voting in the presidential primaries. Hispanics ages 17 to 29 made up 21 percent of Latino voters in 16 states on Super Tuesday. They favored Clinton 62 percent to 37 percent, the center found.
Young voters are one of Obama's core strengths, but the Pew Center findings appear to undermine speculation that young Latinos are more likely to vote for him than older ones.
There is an alternate theory: that Latinos will vote less in conformity and more along generational, educational and income lines, like most of Texas. Smith said the Hispanic vote has changed over the past 30 years from a reliable bloc rooted in South Texas to "a much more diverse vote spread throughout the state. ... For Hillary, (the Hispanic vote) is the firewall, and for Obama, it's the wall he needs to breach."
Another turnout issue: African Americans counted on by Obama might not entirely forsake Clinton. Pollster David Beattie maintains that just as Latinos won't bloc-vote for Clinton, African Americans won't entirely flock to Obama.
"This race is not polarized along racial lines," Beattie said. "Obama leads among African Americans, but it's not because she's seen poorly by African Americans. The same holds with Hispanics; they're choosing her, but they're not voting against Obama."
But Ralph Bordie, an Austin pollster, still sees Obama holding a big lead among African Americans. Bordie wrote of a poll he took in Texas last month: "Ethnically, Latinos and African-Americans were mirror images, with Latinos giving Clinton a 75-23 (percent) lead and African-Americans giving Obama a 75-25 lead."
Women, especially older women, tend to support Clinton, but white male Democrats, many of whom supported former U.S. Sen. John Edwards, could give Obama an edge. Obama tends to draw male support, according to CNN exit polls in other states. In California, for instance, Clinton won the primary partly by drawing 59 percent of the female vote. But Obama drew the support of 48 percent of male voters, while 36 percent sided with Clinton. In Wisconsin's Feb. 19 vote, however, Obama pulled even with Clinton among women. Among men, he stomped her 67 percent to 31 percent.
Cal Jillson, a Southern Methodist University political scientist, says that suburban Anglo voters might be the deciding factor in Texas.
Joe Trippi, who was an Edwards strategist, said the Texas primary will "come (down) to white male voters in the suburbs. It was only recently that Obama started to win white male voters," Trippi said, an indication that Clinton could win some of them. "They're still the more fragile part of (Obama's) coalition," Trippi said.
Who are the whites left in a Texas Democratic Party decimated by the growth of the state GOP and its attraction of once-upon-a-time conservative Democrats? "They are badly beaten-down moderates and liberals," Jillson said, adding that Democrats "just went underground" as the GOP took over the state in the 1990s.
But excitement about Clinton and Obama — combined with Democratic wins in Dallas County in 2006 — has Texas Democrats "poking their heads up and looking around and finding each other," Jillson said. "There is an enthusiasm, even among Anglo Democrats, that they haven't had since Ann Richards," who won the 1990 governor's race.
Hispanics tend to support Clinton, regardless of age
Hispanic voter preferences in Super Tuesday Democratic primaries (16 states), by demographic
Total
Clinton: 63 percentObama: 35 percent
Women (56 percent share)
Clinton: 67 percentObama: 32 percent
Men (44 percent)
Clinton: 58 percentObama: 40 percent
Hispanics, by age
17-29 (21 percent)
Clinton:62 percentObama: 37 percent
30-44 (33 percent)
Clinton: 57 percentObama: 42 percent
45-59 (28 percent)
Clinton: 65 percentObama: 33 percent
60 and older (18 percent)
Clinton: 73 percentObama: 25 percent
Source: Pew Hispanic Center exit polls Feb. 5
*States: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah.
Blacks and independents tend to support Obama
Independents
Obama: 53 percentClinton: 40 percent
Blacks
Obama: 76 percentClinton: 18 percent
Source: ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by telephone Feb. 16-20 among a random sample of 603 likely voters in Texas Democratic primary. Interviews were conducted in English or Spanish. The overall results have a 4-point error margin. Sampling, data collection and tabulation by TNS of Horsham, Pa.
wgselby@statesman.com, 445-3644
Additional material from Ken Herman in Washington
