Dear Friends and Fans:
LIke most of you, I've been following the campaign and I have now seen and heard enough to know where I stand. Senator Obama, in my view, is head and shoulders above the rest.
He has the depth, the reflectiveness, and the resilience to be our next President. He speaks to the America I've envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that's interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where "...nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone."
At the moment, critics have tried to diminish Senator Obama through the exaggeration of certain of his comments and relationships. While these matters are worthy of some discussion, they have been ripped out of the context and fabric of the man's life and vision, so well described in his excellent book, Dreams From My Father, often in order to distract us from discussing the real issues: war and peace, the fight for economic and racial justice, reaffirming our Constitution, and the protection and enhancement of our environment.
After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken. I believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to lead that project and to lead us into the 21st Century with a renewed sense of moral purpose and of ourselves as Americans.
Over here on E Street, we're proud to support Obama for President.
Bruce Springsteen
http://brucespringsteen.net/news/index.html
The World's Most Influential People
Rate Barack Obama based on a scale from 1 (least influential) to 100 (most influential). Cast your vote using the link below and express your support for Barack Obama.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1725112_1723512_1723519,00.html
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"OTTAWA — The NAFTA controversy has done nothing to diminish Barack Obama's popularity with Canadian voters, a new poll suggests.
In fact, a Harris-Decima survey suggests that Canadian support for the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate has skyrocketed in recent months and that he dominates his rivals.
The survey suggests Canadians of every age group, political stripe and gender prefer the rookie senator over his adversaries, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee John McCain.
Respondents preferred him over McCain by an almost five-to-one margin - 39 per cent to eight per cent. Even among self-declared Conservatives, Obama had almost double McCain's support.
Obama also had a nine-point lead over Clinton, his rival in the Democratic primary. That is a drastic turnaround from January, when the better-known Clinton had an 11-point edge among Canadian poll respondents.
That hypothetical landslide is in stark contrast to polls from the United States, which suggest a close presidential race.
The results are despite Obama and Clinton's promise to renegotiate NAFTA, which is popular with Canadians and a key pillar of the national economy.
Obama's popularity was highest in Ontario and especially in Alberta, where he held a 23-point lead over Clinton.
He also led among all age groups, but his support was double that of Clinton's among respondents under age 25 - 54 per cent to 27 per cent.
Obama had a huge lead among male respondents - 44 per cent to 25 per cent - but also held a one-point lead among women. Only four per cent of Canadian women support McCain, the poll suggests.
Obama also led with self-declared Conservative voters - 36 per cent of whom expressed support for him, while 31 per cent supported Clinton and 19 per cent supported McCain."
Read more on http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5jOlHrpEDN8XKw4gVmhIlPOK-OwJQ
Former US president Jimmy Carter has given his tacit endorsement to Barack Obama, boosting his attempt to seal the Democratic Party's nomination for the White House.
Asked about the US primary elections, Mr Carter said: "We are very interested in the primaries. Don't forget that Obama won in my state of Georgia. My town - which is home to 625 people - is for Obama, my children and their spouses are pro-Obama. My grandchildren are also pro-Obama. As a super-delegate, I would not disclose who I am rooting for but I leave you to make that guess," he said.
Mr Carter made the comments while visiting Abuja, the Nigerian capital, to attend the Guinea Worm Eradication Awards set up by the Carter Centre, his global foundation fighting disease and poverty.
The former Democratic president, who served from 1977 to 1981, has along with other party grandees such as former vice-president Al Gore and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refrained from endorsing Mr Obama or Hillary Clinton.
Mr Obama holds a narrow but seemingly impregnable lead over the former First Lady with 10 state primaries and caucuses still to be held.
His rival's only hope is to persuade nearly 800 super-delegates - party officials and grandees who have a free vote at the party's nominating convention - that she is more electable than her inexperienced rival. Mr Obama has secured a number of super-delegates in recent weeks, and Mr Carter's heavy hint is likely to encourage others to follow suit.
Party leaders are keen to avoid a damaging squabble over the nomination at the convention in late August in Denver, just a few months before the presidential election. They are keen for the winner to emerge in mid-summer.
---To read full story, please visit the website below
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/04/wuspols104.xml
LONDON: The guest list is a roll call of London's more glamorous U.S. expats.
Television tycoon Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch, is holding a fundraiser for Barack Obama at her London home.
The invitation to the April 28 event at Murdoch's west London house lists Murdoch as one of eight "event chairs." The others include Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow, Warner Bros. U.K. managing director Josh Berger and U.S.-born chef Ruth Rogers.
The 20 "event hosts" include art collector Kay Saatchi, fund manager David Blood and Elizabeth Saltzman Walker, fashion director of Vanity Fair magazine.
Attendance costs $1,000 each or $2,300 for the event plus a "VIP reception." The higher figure is the maximum individual donation allowed to a primary campaign.
The event has sparked speculation about possible political differences within the Murdoch clan.
Rupert Murdoch is a well-known conservative, and his New York Post newspaper was a longtime foe of former President Clinton and Hillary Clinton during his two terms in the White House and her first run for the U.S. Senate in New York in 2000.
Since then, the couple have worked to reach a detente with the paper and its owner. The Post endorsed Hillary Clinton's re-election bid in 2006, and Rupert Murdoch hosted a fundraiser for her senatorial campaign.
In January, however, the Post endorsed Clinton's rival, Obama, for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.
News Corp. is one of the world's largest media empires, and owns the Times and Sun newspapers in Britain, British Sky Broadcasting and the Fox News Channel.
Elisabeth Murdoch, 39, is a former managing director of Sky Networks who left her father's company in 2000 to start her own television production company, Shine Ltd.
She is married to public relations executive Matthew Freud, great-grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/04/03/news/Britain-Murdoch-Obama.php
By Catherine RampellSunday, March 30, 2008; B07
Just before every presidential campaign of the past few decades, the media have heralded The Year That Young People Will Actually Vote. Yet each of those years turned out to be a youth turnoff. The last time more than half of 18-to-24-year-olds voted in a federal election was 1968.
The hubbub is instigated every election cycle by the youth voter mobilization movement, led by Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself. These nonpartisan groups generally try to make voting more palatable in practice and principle: They make voter registration more convenient, and they try to make casting a ballot sound fashionably subversive. Both strategies have failed. This year, though, youth turnout is doing a turnabout, if numbers from the primaries are any indication. And it's because where Rock the Vote has gone wrong, Barack Obama has gone very, very right.
Well-meaning groups for years have held voter registration drives through concerts, schools, Web sites and cellphones. They have pushed motor voter-type laws -- contending that the inconvenience of voter registration discourages otherwise politically gung-ho young'uns. But with the exception of Election Day registration, removing barriers to registration generally results not in an increase in youth turnout but, rather, in a decline in the proportion of those registered who vote.
Many groups concentrate on marketing voting to youths. Through public service announcements, celebrity endorsements and thugged-out streetwear, they present voting with a subtext of rebelliousness. Early 20th-century efforts to motivate voters portrayed casting a ballot as a selfless, communal act, a sort of fealty to the state and to one's countrymen; today's youth-oriented efforts tend to present voting as self-interested and adversarial, a demonstration of rebellion against those running the state and against one's overbearing, parent-like compatriots. The ads frequently remind youngsters that voting is an avenue for "complaining"; a recurring theme is negation and destruction of the oppressive status quo. Some ads reference censorship of young voices, depicting youths with their mouths duct-taped shut. Some memorable ones involve "desecrations" of national symbols (remember Madonna's 1990 sexed-up American flag ad?). More recent commercials feature performers crooning angry lyrics to such iconic American tunes as " My Country, 'Tis of Thee."
Click on the link below to carry on reading:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/28/AR2008032801857_pf.html
A Pulitzer Prize winning author has compared US presidential hopeful Barack Obama to anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela and civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King Jr.
American author and feminist Alice Walker, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1983 novel The Colour Purple, writes that Senator Obama represents a rare opportunity to change America and the world.
"He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is," she wrote. "He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change it must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves."
Walker, 64, who is longstanding activist for women's rights, criticised those who favoured Senator Obama's Democratic Party rival Hillary Clinton, simply because she is a woman and competent.
"It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see (Senator Obama), cannot hear the fresh choices toward movement he offers."
She said Senator Obama would help to build alliances between people despite barriers of race, ethnicity, colour, nationality, sexual preference or gender.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/bpeopleb-authors-purple-prose-for-stunning-obama/2008/04/01/1206850904451.html
In what could prove both a significant addition to his foreign policy credentials and a boost for the close Indiana primary, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois this afternoon scored the endorsement of former Rep. Lee Hamilton, one of the Democratic Party's leading foreign affairs experts.
Hamilton, a 35-year House member from Indiana, which holds its presidential primary May 6, chaired the Committee on Foreign Affairs and co-chaired both the 9/11 commission and the Iraq Study Group.
“I read his national security and foreign policy speeches," Hamilton told Bloomberg News today, "and he comes across to me as pragmatic, visionary and tough. He impresses me as a person who wants to use all the tools of presidential power.”
The backing of Hamilton, who was said to be on the list of possible vice presidential partners for Bill Clinton in 1992, could help Obama, who's been criticized for his foreign policy inexperience.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/04/barack-obama-ge.html
Barack Obama is the global choice for the Democratic presidential nominee by a margin of almost two to one, according to an international poll conducted by Times Online.
65 per cent of participants – spanning all continents right around the world – said the young Illinois senator was their choice to take on John McCain in the race for the White House, against just 35 per cent who selected Hillary Clinton.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3483296.ece
The international community is interdependent and the next US President will make decisions that that affect us all. Whether you live in Baghdad, Buenos Aires or Bangkok, this matters. As non-Americans, we can't vote in the elections, but if we could we’d support Obama (here's why). This site collects evidence of his international support and provides resources to help global citizens make their own assessments.
http://www.theworldwantsobama.org/
