Here are some notes I took from today's conference call, May 28, 2009.
Mind you, I came in after the conference had already started.
Also, this is not verbatim. I have done some paraphrasing but I still think it's pretty accurate.
David Plouffe was introduced at 1:12 p.m. by Mitch Stewart.
David Plouffe thanked everyone for working for Obama to help him get 365 electoral votes. Although we accomplished so much in Nov., this cleared the way for the opportunity to make change. In essence, it was just the first step. We worked very hard for the opportunity to have real healthcare reform for businesses and families that are being crushed by healthcare costs. The President ran on reform to healthcare and education. It had been talked about for so long but nothing had been done. So, now is the time.
David Plouffe went on to say that the President is defying the cynics, skeptics, and critics but this change is not going to happen in D.C. alone. It will come from other parts of the country to Washington. We will be asked to spend precious time that many of us have little to spare, but we need to implement this into our lives where we will be calling of lists, and knocking on doors.
We need to speak with our family members and colleagues. Nothing is more powerful than human beings talking to other human beings. We need to be passionate about why healthcare reform is so important. So, we need to take ownership of this. (House parties on June 6, service on June 27). If the country is demanding healthcare reform, we’ll get it done and Washington will not have any option but to follow us.
We need to get costs under control and make sure everyone can have affordable healthcare coverage. As we head into the summer, we all can’t focus on just relaxing. We will have to roll up our sleeves and go out there and make healthcare happen. There is huge interest in this. This is not some distant Washington debate. Most people have health insurance but they know they are paying more for themselves and so are their employers. It affects everyone.
So, spread your net wide. This shouldn’t be a lonely affair. You can lead it in your community. If we all work together, we can make the promise of the election a reality.
From the President of the United States:
President Obama says hello, Mitch…calling from Air Force One line, I think. Mitch tells President, you are talking to the President.
President: It is great to talk to everybody. I want to start off by saying thanks to everyone who knocked on doors and registered voters. You had the confidence that we could reclaim the sensibility in Washington, that we could restore a sense of fairness and stability to our economy. We have to keep ourselves safe but be true to our ideals. That is the kind of change you voted for and that is why I am President, and I will never forget this.
Economic Recovery Act was successful because of us. Hundreds of thousands of pledges were signed by all of us. Americans from coast to coast were committed to making investments in energy and healthcare. We passed a budget plan and Economic Recovery Act. Now, we have the task of passing a healthcare reform act. Healthcare costs are crushing families.
Businesses and families are also getting hammered each and every day. Millions of Americans have lost their healthcare. The President has heard these stories via email and other forums from the citizens of the United States. The President cited an example of a lady who is fighting an insurance company who threatens to cut off her health insurance, and she’s already depleted her savings.
We need healthcare reform legislation that fixes the things that are broken. The status quo is unacceptable, and we need to get it done this year, or we won’t get it done. All of us need to educate our friends, relatives, and neighbors. We can protect choice of doctors, hospitals, healthcare providers, and ensure affordable healthcare. The President greatly appreciates all our support.
Question from Mary Alice in Grand Rapids, MI. She mentions her county went blue for the first time since 1968.
Mary Alice asks, as volunteers, what do you need us to do in order to grow this grassroots movement?
Answer by PBO: We need you to stay involved. The election only gave us an opportunity for change. We need to remobilize, reach out to friends and neighbors in support of our agenda. On 6/6, host a kickoff event to help launch healthcare reform. We need to refute arguments as to why we can’t drive down costs. The most important thing is to mobilize people in local communities block by block, neighbor by neighbor to make sure everyone understands. When that happens, Congressmen will take notice. Some are in districts or in states where right now politicians are resistant. We need to mobilize and telll them it’s not acceptable to preserve the status quo. To get involved, go to the Organizing for American website on www.barackobama.com.
Bonnie from Portland:
Question: My son has graduated from college this past winter, and he is burdened with college loans and cannot afford healthcare. What will you make available to young people like my son?
PBO: I have personal experiences and know how tough it is. We want to make higher education more affordable by increasing PEL grants. This year, the Administration will implement an income-based repayment loan and are dedicated also to simplifying the student loan application. We need to eliminate middle men in the current student loan programs who get fees off the top. As to the issue around healthcare for these young people, we must ensure young people can stay on their parents' health insurance plan up to age 25.
From Leanne in Birmingham, AL
Question: In a state as conservative as AL, what is the most important goal that can be accomplished ?
PBO: Keep organizing and talking to people, especially young people (who historically haven’t voted as much.) What I think the American citizens want, even in the most conservative communities, is action. It’s not a red or blue state thing. It is an American recognition that Washington needs to get off the dime. Inaction on healthcare leads to costs everywhere, including AL. If we want to cut our deficits, and a lot of conservative communities are concerned about all the debt we are building up, the most important thing we can do to close our budget gap is to rein in healthcare costs. Change comes from the bottom up, when people in their communities are out there talking, persuading, presenting facts, supplying information. Grassroots work makes a difference primarily because people trust their friends, neighbors, relatives, coworkers as opposed to talking heads on tv. So, having the tone of reasonably presenting the case of why change is needed, that will work everywhere. That is why I was successful, and that’s why we will keep on being successful.
The President thanks us all for a great job and then hangs up.
Mitch:Two more things to go over.
For more info, check out the website.
You are Cordially invited
to Attend the
Washington,DC, Atlanta Georgia and New York City
Unity Celebration:Emerging Leadership in the Era of Obama
Golf and Gala Stellar Weekend
@
Atlantic Station Luxgerious - Twelve Hotel
Friday, July 24th and Saturday, July 25th 2009
Senator Ronald Ramsey, Host
and
Preston L. Harden, Master of Ceremony
Featuring
An Historic Weekend of Events
Twelve Hotel - July 24th & July 25th - 12:00pm to 12Midnight
Sponsored and Hosted by
DC Government Relations Group-Dan Copeland, Director
(Complimentary Food, Spirits and Networking
Twelve Club Lounge, Young Democrats Party - July 24th
6:00pm to 12Midnight
Obama Youth Delegates & Field Organizers
Celebrity Golf Tournament at The Celebrity Golf Club International
Saturday, July 25, 2009 9:00pm to 12am
The Celebrity Golf International: Dr. J (Julius Erving, NBA) and Harold Lewis (NFL)
Coordinators: Harold Lewis & Shelby Daffin
National Panel Discussion on Health and Education
"Emerging Leaders in the Era of Obama"
Saturday, July 25, 2009 2:00pm to 4:30pm
Special invited speakers Moderator: Senator Ronald Ramsey
Saturday, July 25, 2009 6:00pm to 8:00pm
Hosted by
WCalvin Andeson and Chuck Curry (Fox TV) and Media Associates
Food Provided by (Borage & Gourment Soul)
The Chic Unity Gala Event @ Twelve Banquet Hall
Saturday, July 25, 2009 8:00pm to Midnight
Senator Ronald Ramsey, Dove LLC and Georgia Young Professionals for ChangeMaster of Ceremony: Preston L. Harden (Obama Delegate)
Music By (Donnie Long Jazz Ensemble, BB Entertainment, DJ Passion and Colin Forde)Special Guests: Washington, DC New York and Georgia Legislative Leaders, Friends & CelebritiesMayor Shirley Franklin, Hon. John Lewis, Jane Kidd, Chair of Democratic Party of Georgia Food Provided by (Potz & Panz)
Benefiting Charities: Morris Brown College, Pan Hellenic Council Charities, 100 Black Men and 100 Black Women, Sloan Kettering Breast Cancer Research, Dalfur Relief Fund and Help the People, Inc. of Atlanta **********************************************************************************************************************************************
Daffin Enterprises (770) 678-0212; promotion code: "UNIT"
Sponsorship and Journal Ad Packages: Daffin Enterprises (770) 678-0212
or email at shelby.daffin@daffinenterprises.com
Investment for ads are:
Full Page: $300.00
Half Page: $150.00
***For ticket and Registration Information: Kirkland @ 678.665.4304 or tickets may be purchased at: http://www.dovellc.net/UpcomingEvents.htmlby June 15th.***
Thank you for your support, Preston L. Harden,Georgia's 7th CongressionalDistrict Delegate GO OBAMA!!!!! 2008(404) 376-6833
Visit me at:www.prestonlharden.com
INAUGURAL BUS TRIP - FROM: ATLANTA
Register @ www.event-ology.com.
DISCOUNTS FOR GROUPS OF 4+
ON the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy.
Our nation was still in the same ditch it had been the day before, but the atmosphere was giddy. We felt good not only because we had breached a racial barrier as old as the Republic. Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders. The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America.
For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid — easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup my 401(k). Few wanted to take yes for an answer.
So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.
The most conspicuous clichés to fall, of course, were the twin suppositions that a decisive number of white Americans wouldn’t vote for a black presidential candidate — and that they were lying to pollsters about their rampant racism. But the polls were accurate. There was no “Bradley effect.” A higher percentage of white men voted for Obama than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton included.
Obama also won all four of those hunting-and-Hillary-loving Rust Belt states that became 2008’s obsession among slumming upper-middle-class white journalists: Pennsylvania and Michigan by double digits, as well as Ohio and even Indiana, which has gone Democratic only once (1964) since 1936. The solid Republican South, led by Virginia and North Carolina, started to turn blue as well. While there are still bigots in America, they are in unambiguous retreat.
And what about all those terrified Jews who reportedly abandoned their progressive heritage to buy into the smears libeling Obama as an Israel-hating terrorist? Obama drew a larger percentage of Jews nationally (78) than Kerry had (74) and — mazel tov, Sarah Silverman! — won Florida.
Let’s defend Hispanic-Americans, too, while we’re at it. In one of the more notorious observations of the campaign year, a Clinton pollster, Sergio Bendixen, told The New Yorker in January that “the Hispanic voter — and I want to say this very carefully — has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Let us say very carefully that a black presidential candidate won Latinos — the fastest-growing demographic in the electorate — 67 percent to 31 (up from Kerry’s 53-to-44 edge and Gore’s 62-to-35).
Young voters also triumphed over the condescension of the experts. “Are they going to show up?” Cokie Roberts of ABC News asked in February. “Probably not. They never have before. By the time November comes, they’ll be tired.” In fact they turned up in larger numbers than in 2004, and their disproportionate Democratic margin made a serious difference, as did their hard work on the ground. They’re not the ones who need Geritol.
The same commentators who dismissed every conceivable American demographic as racist, lazy or both got Sarah Palin wrong too. When she made her debut in St. Paul, the punditocracy was nearly uniform in declaring her selection a brilliant coup. There hadn’t been so much instant over-the-top praise by the press for a cynical political stunt since President Bush “landed” a jet on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in that short-lived triumph “Mission Accomplished.”
The rave reviews for Palin were completely disingenuous. Anyone paying attention (with the possible exception of John McCain) could see she was woefully ill-equipped to serve half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. The conservatives Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy said so on MSNBC when they didn’t know their mikes were on. But, hey, she was a dazzling TV presence, the thinking went, so surely doltish Americans would rally around her anyway. “She killed!” cheered Noonan about the vice-presidential debate, revising her opinion upward and marveling at Palin’s gift for talking “over the heads of the media straight to the people.” Many talking heads thought she tied or beat Joe Biden.
The people, however, were reaching a less charitable conclusion and were well ahead of the Beltway curve in fleeing Palin. Only after polls confirmed that she was costing McCain votes did conventional wisdom in Washington finally change, demoting her from Republican savior to scapegoat overnight.
But Palin’s appeal wasn’t overestimated only because of her kitschy “American Idol” star quality. Her fierce embrace of the old Karl Rove wedge politics, the divisive pitting of the “real America” against the secular “other” America, was also regarded as a sure-fire winner. The second most persistent assumption by both pundits and the McCain campaign this year — after the likely triumph of racism — was that the culture war battlegrounds from 2000 and 2004 would remain intact.
This is true in exactly one instance: gay civil rights. Though Rove’s promised “permanent Republican majority” lies in humiliating ruins, his and Bush’s one secure legacy will be their demagogic exploitation of homophobia. The success of the four state initiatives banning either same-sex marriage or same-sex adoptions was the sole retro trend on Tuesday. And Obama, who largely soft-pedaled the issue this year, was little help. In California, where other races split more or less evenly on a same-sex marriage ban, some 70 percent of black voters contributed to its narrow victory.
That lagging indicator aside, nearly every other result on Tuesday suggests that while the right wants to keep fighting the old boomer culture wars, no one else does. Three state initiatives restricting abortion failed. Bill Ayers proved a lame villain, scaring no one. Americans do not want to revisit Vietnam (including in Iraq). For all the attention paid by the news media and McCain-Palin to rancorous remembrances of things past, I sometimes wondered whether most Americans thought the Weather Underground was a reunion band and the Hanoi Hilton a chain hotel. Socialism, the evil empire and even Ronald Reagan may be half-forgotten blurs too.
If there were any doubts the 1960s are over, they were put to rest Tuesday night when our new first family won the hearts of the world as it emerged on that vast blue stage to join the celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. The bloody skirmishes that took place on that same spot during the Democratic convention 40 years ago — young vs. old, students vs. cops, white vs. black — seemed as remote as the moon. This is another America — hardly a perfect or prejudice-free America, but a union that can change and does, aspiring to perfection even if it can never achieve it.
Still, change may come slowly to the undying myths bequeathed to us by the Bush decade. “Don’t think for a minute that power concedes,” Obama is fond of saying. Neither does groupthink. We now keep hearing, for instance, that America is “a center-right nation” — apparently because the percentages of Americans who call themselves conservative (34), moderate (44) and liberal (22) remain virtually unchanged from four years ago. But if we’ve learned anything this year, surely it’s that labels are overrated. Those same polls find that more and more self-described conservatives no longer consider themselves Republicans. Americans now say they favor government doing more (51 percent), not less (43) — an 11-point swing since 2004 — and they still overwhelmingly reject the Iraq war. That’s a centrist country tilting center-left, and that’s the majority who voted for Obama.
The post-Bush-Rove Republican Party is in the minority because it has driven away women, the young, suburbanites, black Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, educated Americans, gay Americans and, increasingly, working-class Americans. Who’s left? The only states where the G.O.P. increased its percentage of the presidential vote relative to the Democrats were West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas. Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.
The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.
So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country.
Of the countless words Barack Obama has uttered since he opened his campaign for president on an icy Illinois morning in February 2007, a handful have kept reverberating in my mind:
“For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”
Perhaps the words echo because I’m a naturalized American, and I came here, like many others, seeking relief from Britain’s subtle barriers of religion and class, and possibility broader than in Europe’s confines.
Perhaps they resonate because, having South African parents, I spent part of my childhood in the land of apartheid, and so absorbed as an infant the humiliation of racial segregation, the fear and anger that are the harvest of hurt — just as they are, in Obama’s words, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”
Perhaps they speak to me because I live in New York and watch every day a miracle of civility emerge from the struggles and fatigue of people drawn from every corner of the globe to the glimmer of possibility at the tapering edge of the city’s ruler-straight canyons.
Perhaps they move me because the possibility of stories has animated my life; and no nation offers a blanker page on which to write than America.
Or perhaps it’s simply because those 22 words cleave the air with the sharp blade of truth.
Nowhere else could a 47-year-old man, born, as he has written, of a father “black as pitch” and a mother “white as milk,” a generation distant from the mud shacks of western Kenya, raised for a time as Barry Soetoro (his stepfather’s family name) in Muslim Indonesia, then entrusted to his grandparents in Hawaii — nowhere else could this Barack Hussein Obama rise so far and so fast.
It’s for this sense of possibility, and not for grim-faced dread, that people look to America, which is why the Obama campaign has stirred such global passions.
Americans are decent people. They’re not interested in where you came from. They’re interested in who you are. That has not changed.
But much has in the last eight years. This is a moment of anguish. The Bush presidency has engineered the unlikely double whammy of undermining free-market capitalism and essential freedoms, the nation’s twin badges.
American luster is gone. The American idea has, in Joyce Carol Oates’s words, become a “cruel joke.” Americans are worrying and hurting.
So it is important to step back, from the last machinations of this endless campaign, and think again about what America is.
It is renewal, the place where impossible stories get written.
It is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, in the name of a future freed from the cruel gyre of memory.
It is reinvention, the absorption of one identity in something larger — the notion that “out of many, we are truly one.”
It is a place better than Bush’s land of shadows where a leader entrusted with the hopes of the earth cannot find within himself a solitary phrase to uplift the soul.
Multiple polls now show Obama with a clear lead. But nobody can know the outcome and nobody should underestimate the immense psychological leap that sending a black couple to the White House would represent.
What I am sure of is this: an ever more interconnected world, where financial chain reactions spread with the virulence of plagues, thirsts for American renewal and a form of American leadership sensitive to humanity’s tied fate.
I also know that this biracial politician, the Harvard graduate who gets whites because he was raised by them, the Kenyan’s son who gets blacks because it was among them that mixed race placed him, is an emblematic figure of the border-hopping 21st century. He is the providential mestizo whose name — O-Ba-Ma — has the three-syllable universality of some child’s lullaby.
And what has he done? What does his experience amount to? Does his record not demonstrate he’s a radical? The interrogation continues. It’s true that his experience is limited.
But Americans seem to be trusting what their eyes tell them: temperament trumps experience and every instinct of this man, whose very identity represents an act of reconciliation, hones toward building change from the center.
Earlier this year, at the end of a road of reddish earth in western Kenya, I found Obama’s half-sister Auma. “He can be trusted,” she said, “to be in dialogue with the world.”
Dialogue, between Americans and beyond America, has been a constant theme. Last year, I spoke to Obama, who told me: “Part of our capacity to lead is linked to our capacity to show restraint.”
Watching the way he has allowed his opponents’ weaknesses to reveal themselves, the way he has enticed them into self-defeating exhaustion pounding against the wall of his equanimity, I have come to understand better what he meant.
Stories require restraint, too. Restraint engages the imagination, which has always been stirred by the American idea, and can be once again.
Is not registered to vote:
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/The_Politico_Ben_Smith_s_Blog_The_Joe_file_The_Joe_file
and he does get a tax break but thinks Obama would change things:
http://digg.com/political_opinion/The_Politico_Ben_Smith_s_Blog_Joe_Obama_s_tap_dance_almo
I think Joe would fit in well with some of the people we've seen lately at some of the McCain/Palin rallies.
BTW, in January the Plumbers union endorsed Obama.
Greetings All
Well the book is finally available. Many thanks to those who participated. Your quotes are included. For those of you who still wish to participate for the print version, you can still do so. visit www.obamaworcester.com to enter your quote. The website for download and/or online reading is available, though the contact form will not be working until tommorrow. Please pass this ebook to everyone you know so that everyone will understand the power of leadership based on positive human energy!
www.ebookobama.com
Great video. Share and make it go viral!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg5tl87rEE4
It's also on DIGG:
http://digg.com/politics/I_m_a_Little_Confused_3
RSVP by clicking below at:http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gs79r7
Please sign up to donate tomorrow at noon eastern to try and raise 1 million dollars for the campaign.
http://www.anobamaminute.com/
In the friday, October 3rd issue. I'm Bryan Wither
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/10/election-is-not.html#more
"I'm writing to comment on Sen. John McCain's request to postpone the first presidential debate.
In 1988, when George H.W. Bush debated Michael Dukakis and their running mates, Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen, faced off, there were riots in the streets of Algeria and concerns of a recessionhere. None of this stopped these men from standing squarely in front of the American people and discussing the issues.
Sen. Barack Obama's response was spot on. The president of the United States has to be expected to deal with more than one thing at a time. The two men competing for the highest office in America need to be able to show that they can walk and chew gum at once. "
Fun stuff.
Well, Rovian politics is back in its full hypocritical, Unconstitutional presence in Indiana, suggesting that the Republicans are worried about that state. It's hard to believe that a thinking clergyman with an IQ beyond moronic cannot understand the reasons why churches are protected from paying taxes. If they advocate for candidates (and not issues, many of which ARE moral), they are becoming political platforms for the party they support and should be denied tax exempt status. Frankly, the IRS should crack down vigorously when such violatons occur and invoke sanctions swiftly to keep the practice from spreading.
"Anyone voting for Obama is schizophrenic" was the mantra for the sermon by the "Rev" Ron Johnson Jr. of the "Living Stones" church in Crown Point, Indiana, south of Chicago. He is part of a group, funded not coincidentally by a group from Arizona, that contends that clergy have an obligation to advise their congregations how to vote. Apparently, the members of Living Stones congregation are unable (or unwilling) to think for themselves.
For those who do, I might suggest that the schizophrenia suggested by their pastor is best known by himself, who is providing a first hand account of contradiction in action. There may not be many unemployed, homeless, or citizens without health insurance in Crown Point, but if there are, only but for the grace of God go others who sit smugly and silently in their pews as though they were divinely protected from such sitations. And, anyone who knows scripture, would recognize that policies compassionately aimed at addressing these inequities are what Christianity is about. The Bible is more focused on how people treat other people with compassion and selflesslessness than it is about finding ways to justify the greed and self-interest that hide behind so many Republican policies. That, in my view, is the hyprocrisy that ought to be pointed out as a guide to living life in a Christian way at the Living Stones church.
I'm going to be looking for ways to support efforts to discover these politicos in clerical garb and make sure they are exposed and accountable to the law. I hope you will join me in condemning this violaton of our Constitution. Future posts will contain information on how you can help.You can start by sending the Reverend a piece of your mind. See the church website here, complete with flag waving propoganda.Contact the church here. We must stop this nonsense if we want to preserve the principles of our Constitutional democracy.
.JPG)
