This is it!
We're coming down to the final stretch and Barack Obama needs your help now, more than ever before!
Please bring your cell phone, a charger and a few fun friends who care about change and join with thousands of your neighbors in the largest ever-attempted phone bank effort in New York state history. The Obama campaign is hosting several of these "mega call centers" all over New York, so invite your friends and family to make calls to voters in key battleground states and change America for years to come.
Visit http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/nylastcall to find a location near you.
SAVE THE DATENovember 1st and 2nd, 2008Barack 'da Vote"ObamaFest, Barack 'da Vote will be a Weekend Music Marathon event starting at Saturday at The Embankment, Erie at 10th Street in downtown Jersey City from 6pm till closing at 3am and Sunday at Sanai's in Journal Square at 510 Summit Ave. (across from Berger King/Dunkin Donuts) from 10am Brunch till 8pm.
Signing-up English, Spanish, all languages Performers now ! Fine artists and musicians, bands, poets, story tellers, etc. etc.
Great news: Co founder of Internet, Vint Cerf, and all 2008 US Nobel Laureates in Science endorse Obama
We've all been warned that Barack Obama has some suspicious friends. Well, you better add Vint Cerf, cofounder of the Internet and Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, and the 2008 Nobel laureates in Science to that list, because they just endorsed the Democratic presidential candidate.
In a YouTube video, Vint Cerf explains why he's voting for Barack Obama by pointing out the importance of net neutrality and why Obama's views on the subject are so important.
http://ny.barackobama.com/NYlastcall
and looking for companions to split gas costs and overnight lodging for one night in a cheap motel somewhere on the way.
40 y.o. gay man, indie film producer/attorney, heading out to Campaign Headquarters.
Hit me back at evanshapiro@gmail.com if interested. Even if money is an issue, give me a shout.
Evan here.
Thanks!
As you likely know, Joan Baez has for the first time ever endorsed a political candidate in supporting Barack Obama's bid for the presidency. You can read it here:
http://www.joanbaez.com/obama
I saw her concert in Englewood NJ last Saturday, and was invited back to speak with her, some gush-and-fawn, but more about our feelings and hopes for the Obama campaign. ( I was hoping to get her to visit the Philadelphia headquarters as she passed nearby on her tour, but her subsequent cold rendered that effort moot, for now. )
She is all one might expect and more: funny, beautiful, smart, profound, kind, cute, thoughtful and loving.
We spoke of reconciling distaste for politics with the hope that this will bring about substantive change for the better, and how urgently change is needed. I myself sometimes have to back away from the partisan politicky stuff and remember why I'm here.
As we were parting, she enveloped me in a cloud of grace with the famous Joan Baez hug, and asked me specifically, pointedly, to take her message of love and support to everyone in this cause.
And that is what I am doing now, for her, from her, for real.
It is my honor to pass along that wonderful hug and her message to each and all, from Joan, as requested.
Please pass this along !
Carry it ON
Yes, we can.
Jeffrey Morgan
Team 2B, Bucks County PA
P.S. Happy Birthday Maya Angelou, and watch Joan's face at 3:52 as she sings of marching in Selma with MLK.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmb9DcterR0
Hey guys, I'm trying something completely new for me! I am in a jazz band, and until Barack gets elected, I'm putting my modest ability to raise funds at his disposal at least once a month.
On February 21st, at 8pm, at the "Thailand Cafe" at 95 2nd Ave, my jazz band will be performing a free concert. There will be a Barack Tip Jar. So if you like the music, just contribute what you can and all proceedings will go to the campaign. Also, bring a receipt for a donation of $10 or more toBarack made on THAT DAY, and you'll get a free CD.
To get a preview of our music and see if you'd like it, check out www.sarinasuno.com. If you do, don't forget to sign up to our event "Jazz for Barack" in the events section of Barack's website.
Thanks, see you there, and see you at the many additional concerts we'll be hosting!
Go Barack!!!
Hara
DOWNTOWN NOTEBOOK Hearing the Passion in Obama's Downtown Supporters By Wickham Boyle ... The meeting took off when Jeffrey Shafer, under secretary of international affairs in the Clinton administration's Treasury Dept., told why he was supporting Obama. The distillate of Shafer's path to Obama involved reading Obama's books and simultaneously writing to the Hillary Clinton campaign with ideas, and getting no response from her advisors. In a 20-minute presentation involving great quotes, and personal stories, the essence emerged. Shafer came to the conclusion that, "Obama understands how other people see the world. He understands that unity is the great need of the hour." David Carden followed; a thin man, brimming over with facts, experience and information all strung together with an intelligence that heated the room. Carden unfolded his path toward supporting Obama and recounted how strongly he feels that we must have inspiration and real intelligence in out next president if we are to in any way redeem our country in the eyes of the world. Carden said, "If you had asked me 22 years ago, when my wife was working at the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago and Obama was organizing on the South Side of Chicago, if this man could be president, I would have said, yes. Let me tell you why. He is the best listener I have ever seen. He emits empathy and intelligence. This is what led Obama to stay in the business of other people's business, which is what politics is."...There was a sense from some attendees that the evening had turned from fact finding to a rally for Obama. And it certainly was difficult not to be caught up in the passion evinced by Shafer, Carden and some other guests who had been in Iowa canvassing for Obama. Carden's retelling of the Iowa trip was moving as he recounted the personal stories of those he met. He concluded with this: "We need a shared mythology. We are the stories we tell and we are also the stories others tell us."
I just sent this letter to the New York Times:
Dear Editors:
As a strong feminist, I am disappointed by Gloria Steinem's Op-Ed column of Januay 8th. In supporting Barack Obama for President, I am not, as Steinem suggests, hoping to "deny or escape the sexual caste system." As a feminist, I believe that it is my responsibility to judge candidates by their merits, not their genders. I support Senator Obama's candidacy because he acknowledges the complexities of issues and attitudes, is willing to hear perspectives that may not be his own, and embraces a foreign policy of diplomacy rather than bullying. In my view, the primary distinction between the candidates is a difference of approach, and Senator Obama's commitment to seeking common ground and recognizing shared humanity is most likely to produce positive change, both in terms of negotiating domestic policies that benefit everyday Americans, including women, and in redeeming our country's reputation in the world, by extension making us safer. Candidates are not representatives of genders; they are representatives of differing visions--and in acknowledging this I am not "denying" sexism but refusing to perpetuate it.
Sincerely,
Lauren Russell
A short video I made about how I and other volunteers are feeling at this historic moment:
Thanks to fellow volunteers Gabe, Jenna Schlosbon, Livia Kamberos, Jennifer Chude Mondlane, Karen, Lauren Russell, Lauren Hall, cameraman Zack Kinney, and sound operators Riqie Klein and Natalia.
By FRANK RICH Published: December 23, 2007
WE can only imagine what is going on inside John McCain’s head when he contemplates Mike Huckabee. It can’t be pretty. No presidential candidate in either party has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator, and yet in a wartime election he is being outpaced by a guy who has zero experience and is proud of it.
“I may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy,” Mr. Huckabee joked to Don Imus, “but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.” So much for the gravitas points earned during a five-and-a-half year stay at the Hanoi Hilton.
But if Mr. McCain has so far resisted slapping down the upstart in his party, Bill Clinton has shown no such self-restraint about Barack Obama. Early this month the former president criticized the press for not sufficiently covering the candidates’ “record in public life” and thereby making “people think experience is irrelevant.” His pique boiled over on Charlie Rose’s show on Dec. 14, when he made his now-famous claim that the 2008 election will be a referendum on whether “no experience matters.” He insinuated that Mr. Obama was tantamount to “a gifted television commentator” and likened a potential Obama presidency to a roll of the dice.
Attention Bill Clinton: If that’s what this election is about, it’s already over. No matter how much Hillary Clinton, Mr. McCain or Rudy Giuliani brag about being tested and vetted, it’s not experience that will be decisive in determining the next president.
For many, Mr. McCain’s long record of experience may be a liability even greater than his party-bucking moderation on immigration and his bear hug of President Bush on Iraq. What his résumé mainly does is remind a youth-obsessed culture of his age. When Gallup asked voters in August to rate traits as desirable or not in the next president, the “undesirable” percentages for being a member of a racial or ethnic minority group (13), a woman (14), a Mormon (22) or having “strained relationships” with one’s children (45) all paled next to being age 70 or older (52). It’s not morning in America for Reaganesque elders in the political arena anymore.
For Mrs. Clinton, the failure of “experience” as a selling point was becoming apparent even as her husband continued to push it on Charlie Rose. Last week’s ABC News-Washington Post poll in Iowa found that she clobbers Mr. Obama on the question of who has the most experience — 49 percent to 8 percent. But to little end. That same survey had Mr. Obama ahead by 4 points over all because, as this year’s pervasive polling matchup has it, the electorate values change over experience.
The rabid hunger for change, it turns out, has made the very idea of experience as toxic as every other attribute of the Bush White House. The once-heralded notion of a C.E.O. presidency, overstocked with “tested” Washington and Fortune 500 executives like Cheney and Rumsfeld, is now in the toilet with Larry Craig. You couldn’t push the pendulum further in the other direction than by supporting a candidate like Mr. Huckabee, who is blatantly unprepared to be president and whose most impressive battle has been with his weight. In a Rasmussen poll in Florida, Mr. Huckabee even did well among foreign-policy-minded Republicans whose most important issue is Iraq.
But for Mrs. Clinton, the problem isn’t just that the Bush years have tarnished the notion that experience is a positive indicator of future performance. She has further devalued that sales pitch with her own inflated claims of what her experience has been. Ted Sorensen, the J.F.K. speechwriter now in the Obama camp, saw the backlash coming in a recent conversation I had with him after Mrs. Clinton had mocked Mr. Obama for counting his elementary-school years in Indonesia as an asset.
“Hillary should be careful about scoffing at other people’s experience,” Mr. Sorensen said. “It’s not as if the process of osmosis gives her presidential qualities by physical proximity.”
Whatever Mrs. Clinton’s experience as first lady or senator, what matters most in any case is not its sheer volume, that 35 years she keeps citing. It’s what she did or did not learn along the way that counts. That’s why one of the most revealing debate passages so far came in an exchange that earned much laughter but scant scrutiny this month in Des Moines.
This was the moment when Mr. Obama was asked how he could deliver a clean break from the past while relying on “so many Clinton advisers.” Mrs. Clinton jokingly called out, “I want to hear that,” prompting Mr. Obama to one-up her by responding, “Well, Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me, as well.”
Well, touché. But what was left unexamined beneath the levity was a revealing distinction between these two candidates. The questioner was right: Mr. Obama, like Mrs. Clinton, has indeed turned to former Clintonites for foreign-policy advice. But the Clinton players were not homogeneous, and who ended up with which ’08 candidate is instructive.
The principal foreign-policy Clinton alumni in Mr. Obama’s campaign include Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state, and Tony Lake, the former national security adviser and a prewar skeptic who said publicly in February 2003 that the Bush administration had not made the case that Saddam was an “imminent threat.” Ms. Rice, in an eloquent speech in November 2002, said that the Bush administration was “trying to change the subject to Iraq” from the war against Al Qaeda and warned that if it tried to fight both wars at once, “one, if not both, will suffer.” Her text now reads as a bookend to Mr. Obama’s senatorial campaign speech challenging the wisdom of the war only weeks earlier that same fall.
Mrs. Clinton’s current team was less prescient. Though it includes one of the earlier military critics of Bush policy, Gen. Wesley Clark, he is balanced by Gen. Jack Keane, an author of the Bush “surge.” The Clinton campaign’s foreign policy and national security director is a former Madeleine Albright aide, Lee Feinstein, who in November 2002 was gullible enough to say on CNBC that “we should take the president at his word, which is that he sees war as a last resort” — an argument anticipating the one Mrs. Clinton still uses to defend her vote on the Iraq war authorization.
In late April 2003, a week before “Mission Accomplished,” Mr. Feinstein could be found on CNN saying that he was “fairly confident” that W.M.D. would turn up in Iraq. Asked if the war would be a failure if no weapons were found, he said, “I don’t think that that’s a situation we’ll confront.” Forced to confront exactly that situation over the next year, he dug in deeper, co-writing an essay for Foreign Affairs (available on its Web site) arguing that “the biggest problem with the Bush pre-emption strategy may be that it does not go far enough.”
In a two-page handwritten letter in response to a recent column of mine criticizing Mrs. Clinton’s Senate votes on Iraq and Iran, Bill Clinton made a serious and impassioned defense of her foreign-policy record. On the subject of her support for the so-called Kyl-Lieberman amendment on Iran this fall, Mr. Clinton wrote: “If Senator Obama, for example, had really believed it was an indirect authorization to attack Iran, he would not have stayed away on the campaign trail, but would have come back to vote against it.” That’s a fair point — and a fair criticism of Mr. Obama as he continues to vilify this particular Hillary Clinton vote. If voting for Kyl-Lieberman was as grave a step toward war as Mr. Obama claims, there’s no excuse for his absence.
Mr. Clinton’s narrow defense of his wife’s Iraq vote in 2002 — it was not “a blanket authorization to go to war,” he wrote — doesn’t persuade me. But even if it did, her choice for foreign-policy director in 2008 makes me question her ability to profit from experience and make a clean break with the establishment thinking in both parties that enabled the Iraq fiasco. Judgment calls like this rather than failures of the press may answer her husband’s question as to why the public finds her experience “irrelevant.”
What Mrs. Clinton clearly has learned from her White House experience, as she reminds us, is to strike back at her critics. Unfortunately, she has assimilated those critics’ methods as well. Attacks on Mr. Obama’s record and views are fair game. But the steady personal attacks — the invocations of “cocaine” and “Hussein” and “madrassa” by surrogates — smell like the dirty tricks of the old Clinton haters. The Clinton-camp denials that these tactics have been “authorized” sound like Karl Rove’s denials of similar smear campaigns against John McCain in 2000.
If Mrs. Clinton is to win, she won’t do so by running on that kind of experience but by rising above it. Bill Clinton wouldn’t have shifted gears to refer to his wife constantly as a “change agent,” however implausibly, if his acute political sensors didn’t tell him that Americans are not just willing but eager to roll the dice.
Posted December 19, 2007 | 03:43 PM (EST)
From the very beginning -- back when our torture chambers still had that new torture chamber smell; and before our chief executive's incompetence exploded like an M80 inside the clenched-fist of the world -- George W. Bush has been an embarrassment.
We know his disgraceful deeds and policies. But it's his utter lack of quality; his unsubstantial presence; his marble-mouthed oratorical retardation; his inability to inspire greatness; and his empty-suit absence of intellectual curiosity which preordained him to be the worst President of the United States in modern history.
Admittedly, when it comes to the presidency, my personal level of idealism rests somewhere between Frank Capra and Aaron Sorkin. I'm a presidential geek. One of my life goals is to work in the White House for one week. My Dad's old office at the Treasury Department used to look out over the east lawn, and when I was a kid I used to imagine that one day the president would invite me and my Dad for a ride on Marine One.
But after seven years in this Dark Age, I've almost forgotten what it was like to have a real president occupying the White House: a president who, even if I disagreed with his policies and ideology, dignified the office with a stature that symbolized the awesomeness of America.
Emerson wrote, "Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, even, 'I pray you, let me never hear that man's name again.'"
We seem to experience this routine with almost every two-term president. But President Bush was never a hero in the first place and only grew more ridiculous with each subsequent crime against the Constitution, against human decency and against democracy itself. If there's any justice left in this nation, history will record that President Bush was an entirely inadequate tool; a bungling villain whose early popularity grew out of a traumatic and patriotic need to support the office regardless of who occupied it.
And when the flood waters literally rose up and washed away the disguise, the slack-jawed poseur was revealed -- the "bore" who had always been there, but who had been previously and cynically costumed in cowboy drag. Some of us recognized the charade from the beginning, but it required a second national tragedy, this time in New Orleans, to alert the media and the rest of America to his criminal incompetence.
American history is inextricably tied to the presidency. It's how we mentally assemble the chronology of our past. For going on eight years, we've endured a chief executive who never should have ascended to this post. Consequently, this decade has been an aberration; a time when Americans somehow championed an illegitimate, Orwellian hooplehead and, naturally, we suffered for our lack of vision. This is how most of the first decade of this century will be remembered.
Yet our generation is being offered another chance here -- an opportunity to set things straight and elect a president who not only illustrates the historical qualities of the office, but who also defines an energetic new approach.
The next president has to be Senator Barack Obama.
Senator Obama's intelligence, passion and quality of character can inspire us to recapture our own potential for greatness. And after all these years of darkness, there is no alternative other than to correct our trajectory with someone who can elevate our common goals -- the American Dream. For the American Dream to survive, this era demands a new president who will include all of us in the debate over our future, whether or not we agree on every issue.
And I'm proud to say that I don't agree with the senator on everything. But it doesn't matter because this campaign is about much more than individuals and their pet issues. This is about the reacquisition of an ideal -- of a benevolent greatness which has been stolen away from us.
I see in Senator Obama an historic character who fits within my persnickety and idealistic template for the presidency -- and this time around, it happens that my idealistic choice has a realistic chance to win. So this isn't necessarily an endorsement based on ideology, but an endorsement based on that which is required from an historical perspective.
The alternatives on either side of this campaign are ultimately redundant to what we have now.
On the Republican side, each frontrunner represents a rage-inducing aspect of the present Bush regime. The Romney Unit represents the Paris Hilton fiscal policy of the Bush administration; Giuliani is the unstable, crazy-ass hubristic gunslinger; and Mike Huckabee is the cross-bearing fundamentalist who floats in the same fantasy world as Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort.
On the Democratic side, John Edwards is a tough call because he has the right idea. But there was a thing with Edwards from 2004 that I can't seem to shake. And I've really, really tried. During one of the primary debates, Howard Dean stood up to answer a question. As was the campaign fashion at the time, Dean rolled up his sleeves. Then, behind him, I spotted John Edwards whose eyes suddenly widened at Dean's sleeve-rolling as if to say, Oh crap, I should roll up my sleeves now or else I won't be awesome like Howard. Then he quickly rolled up his sleeves. It was an awkwardly candid moment which revealed a lack of originality and, for my admittedly nitpicky tastes, a little too much of the staged illusion of it all. But most importantly, I imagined him exhibiting the same derivative behavior when voting with the president on Iraq.
Senator Clinton, meanwhile, is certainly more intelligent and centrist than President Bush, but there's a secretive, calculating DLC side to the senator which drifts too dangerously close to the universe of Dick Cheney than the fresh approach her husband, President Clinton, offered in 1992.
Speaking of which, President Clinton said this week that Senator Clinton would dispatch the first President Bush on a world tour in order to repair America's reputation abroad. First, 'the hell you say?! Second, wouldn't that be just like a Cheney -- to use a Bush as a political tool. Seriously, we can't have this. Not even as a speculative talking point. Not any more.
This is what we're desperately trying to escape, goddamn it. This is why it's imperative that Senator Obama win the nomination and ultimately the White House itself.
Naturally, the day might arrive when President Obama becomes Emerson's bore. One day, years from now, we'll likely be lamenting the traditional media's "Obama Fatigue" narrative. But, by that time, I think we'll be prepared for the next era in American history. Hopefully, after two terms and eight years, President Obama will hand over his legacy to his vice president. But for now he's the historical antidote to the darkness and division we've endured for too many years. He's our best hope to restore the national equilibrium and to fulfill both the expectation of greatness the presidency deserves and, thusly, the greatness of America.
And no. However awesome it'd be, I'm not saying these things in exchange for a flight aboard Marine One. I mean, I wouldn't turn it down, of course... but that's not why.
