CHECK OUT THIS NEW MINNESOTA OBAMA SUPPORT PAGE
http://www.myspace.com/obamamn08
LETS GET FIRED UP!!!
Among the nuances that get glossed over amid the fervor of this process is precisely what the campaign reveals and/or doesn't about the aspirants. The attributes voters admired in the previous general elections gave us George W. Bush, resulting in a series of policy decisions that at best leave the economy and our standing in the world in a shambles for whoever is elected to clean up. Nobody can deny that he was an effective campaigner.
In the current race Senator Clinton, too, is running a polished, effective campaign. She's got good people, effective fund-raisers, and reacts adeptly to adversity, having preserved plausible deniability when a viral smear linked back to her organization emerges.
The challenge is to help voters see that while Senator Obama is undeniably a politician, he uses politics as a means to demonstrably noble goals, which is why so many believe he will wield the power of the Presidency in pursuit of bettering the country.
Unfortunately the qualities we need in our next President are not simply those of the veteran campaigner; being effective in the race is neither sufficient, nor inherently synonymous with being worthy of our votes.
Senator Clinton is as aware of what's going on with progressive voters as the rest of us are, likely more so. Naturally she's disappointed and doing all she can to regain the spotlight and momentum in the fight for delegates. I was stunned to hear her in the New Hampshire debate claiming 35 years of experience yet finding fault with John Edwards when his patient bill of rights stalled in the House of Representatives despite being passed by the Senate. The two are same sort of "experience," working hard on something you believe in which flounders - and ultimately sometimes fails, as was the case with her laudable health care initiative while First Lady. Yes, that's experience, and doubtless Senator Clinton and Senator Edwards both learned from the process.
Ironically, every experienced Democrat persisting after Iowa has taken up Obama's message, each claiming to be an Agent of Change. Yet Senator Clinton, for example, has resorted to very old-school ad hominem sound bite politics as her inevitability has evaporated.
In fact, if all we needed in the White House could be summed up as "effective campaigner" she might be the best. What we need, however, is not somebody who smiles and orchestrates a slick, effective campaign, but rather a visionary capable of reversing the disenfranchisement of the citizens of this country while restoring the integrity of the office of the President.
I'm forwarding this letter from Chris Miller...it's such a good story of what we are all doing. Keep up the good work. Call me if you can come to Mason City, IA. We need more MN help!
David Jensen, 651-260-3531
Subject: From Mason City: 5 days remaining... Now is our time Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2007 02:30:17 +0000
Obama Friends, I awoke today at 7:00 a.m. on a couch in a log cabin on State Road 300 outside of Mason City, Iowa. Much to my surprise, I was the last one awake: the six staffers and volunteers sharing the cabin with me were already up, dividing up walk lists of voters to visit, counting literature, and coordinating rides to our turf. The temperature was 16 degrees. I walked in to Coffee Cat, the local coffee shop, and found an Obama poster on the wall. At the Kum N’ Go, the attendant squealed with delight at my Obama pin. I sat in traffic on a snow-covered road behind a pick-up truck with an Obama bumper sticker. At 3:00 p.m. a camera from channel 3’s news team arrived in the office. We have a lot of work left to do but things feel good here. In Minnesota, Kansas, and North Dakota our campaign teams have generated over 2200 calls to Iowa voters each day for the last three days. Here in Iowa our teams have been knocking doors 8 hours a day and phone banking 4 hours a day since December 27. There are supporters here from as far away as California, Florida, and New York. We will knock our entire ID universe twice in these last 10 days. We are knocking doors of targeted Independents and Republicans, as well as Democrats. Melissa from Minneapolis and Sarah from New York, two volunteers in for the final 10 days, just returned from canvassing an area of 66 square miles. We are going to towns no campaign has knocked in before, and talking with voters that other campaigns will not talk to. This is an unprecedented field program. It is unmatched by any campaign in Iowa currently or previously. From North Dakota today great news: the endorsement of U.S. Senator Kent Conrad, an unprecedented show of support from North Dakota. In Minneapolis today Council Member Elizabeth Glidden pledged her support to Barack Obama. In 12 hours yesterday we worked together to generate 72 Iowa volunteer day commitments, and more are committing today. This morning in Mason City we were joined by 16 Minnesotans including Kim Ellison and her daughter Amira, Minneapolis Council Members Don Samuels and Paul Ostrow, and Paul’s son Matt. This past Wednesday St. Paul Congresswoman Betty McCollum joined Senator Obama in Mason City. On Sunday Council Member Glidden will join us to knock doors. On Wednesday Minneapolis Council Member Ralph Remington and his wife, and Minneapolis Mayor Rybak and his family will join us here in Mason City. This weekend Senator Cohen, Representative Jaros, and Duluth Council Member Elect Tony Cuneo will phone bank with us from Minnesota. Mayor Rybak, Minneapolis Council Member Ralph Remington, and St. Paul Council Member Elect Melvin Carter are doing online outreach for Senator Obama. With 5 days to go before the first contest in this election we are standing at a rare moment in time: a moment in which we can change the future. A moment in which we can help to decide the outcome of this election and the direction of our country for the next four years. This moment will be with us only briefly, and then forever it will be gone. Now is our time. Thanks for all that each of you has done. Thanks for all that you have given. That which you have left to give is that which will make the difference: it will make this moment happen. In the time that we have left, give the following: Come to Iowa to work with us: Call David at 651-260-3531 or go to http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4vplp Work with us from your state or your home: Call Jared at (612) 801-0059 or go to http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4vplp Reach out to folks you know. Ask them to support Senator Obama and to work with us in these next days http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4vplp Thanks to each of you for all that you’ve done in the last year. Let’s make the most of this moment before it passes. Now is our time. -Chris 5 days remaining... Chris MillerMidwest Field DirectorObama for Americacmiller@barackobama.com312-533-0374
Our van trips to Iowa have been a huge success thus far. This weekend volunteers got a special treat and attended a rally that Barack hosted in Mason City. Photos from the event can be found at the link below.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=9927&l=5433f&id=529339527
Now, more than ever, is the time to do the hard work that will get Barack the nomination. The Iowa Caucus is only 16 days away and we still need to contact thousands of Iowa Democarats and ask them to caucus. Help our supporters spread the word of why Barack Obama should the the Democratic Nominee by joining us on our Saturday trips to Iowa!
We are in a defining moment in our history:
"Our nation is at war. The planet is in peril. The dream that so many generations fought for feels as if it's slowly slipping away.
And that is why the same old Washington textbook campaigns just won't do. That's why telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won't do.
America, our moment is now. I don't want to spend the next year, or the next four years, re-fighting the same fights that we had in the 1990s. I don't want to pit 'red' America against 'blue' America; I want to be the President of the United States of America."
Talking with Tehran may help us wage the wars we need to fight.
BY SHELBY STEELE, Monday, November 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
After a recent Democratic presidential debate, Barack Obama proclaimed that were he to become president, he would talk directly even to America's worst enemies. One could imagine President Obama as a kind of superhero taking off in Air Force One for Tehran, there to be greeted on the tarmac by the villainous Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Was this a serious foreign policy proposal or simply a campaign counterpunch? Hillary Clinton had already held up this idea as evidence of Mr. Obama's naiveté. Wasn't he just pushing back, displaying his commitment to "diplomacy"--now the most glamorous word in the Democratic "antiwar" lexicon?
Whatever Mr. Obama's intent, history has given his idea a rather bad reputation. Neville Chamberlain springs to mind as a man who was famously seduced into the wishful thinking that seems central to the idea of talking to one's enemies. Today few Americans--left or right--would be comfortable with direct talks between our president and a character like Mr. Ahmadinejad. Wouldn't such talk only puff up extremist leaders and make America into a supplicant?
On its face, Mr. Obama's idea seems little more than a far-left fantasy. But perhaps it looks this way because we are viewing it through too narrow a conception of warfare. We tend to think of our wars as miniature versions of World War II, a war of national survival. But since then we have fought wars in which our national survival was not immediately, or even remotely, at stake. We have fought wars in distant lands for rather abstract reasons, and there has been the feeling that these were essentially wars of choice: We could win or lose without jeopardizing our nation's survival.
Mr. Obama's idea clearly makes no sense in a context of national survival. It would have been absurd for President Roosevelt to fly to Berlin and talk to Hitler. But Mr. Obama's idea does make sense in the buildup to wars where survival is not at risk--wars that are more a matter of urgent choice than of absolute necessity.
I think of such wars as essentially wars of discipline. Their purpose is to preserve a favorable balance of power that is already in place in the world. We fight these wars not to survive but--once a menace has arisen--to discipline the world back into a balance of power that best ensures peace. We fight as enforcers rather than as rebels or as patriots fighting for survival. Wars of discipline are pre-emptive by definition. They pre-empt menace to the peaceful world order. We don't sacrifice blood and treasure for change; we sacrifice for constancy.
Conversely, in wars of survival, like World War II, we fight to achieve a favorable balance of power--one in which a peace is established that guarantees our sovereignty and survival. We fight unapologetically for dominance, and we determine to defeat our enemy by any means necessary. We do not harry ourselves much over the style of warfare--whether the locals like us, where the line between interrogation and torture might lie, whether or not we are solicitous of our captive's religious beliefs or dietary strictures. There is no feeling in society that we can afford to lose these wars. And so we never have.
All this points to one of the great foreign policy dilemmas of our time: In the eyes of many around the world, and many Americans as well, we lack the moral authority to fight the wars that we actually fight because they are wars more of discipline than of survival, more of choice than of necessity. It is hard to equate the disciplining of a pre-existing world order--a status quo--with fighting for one's life. When survival is at stake, there is no lack of moral authority, no self-doubt and no antiwar movement of any consequence. But when war is not immediately related to survival, when a society is fundamentally secure and yet goes to war anyway, moral authority becomes a profound problem. Suddenly such a society is drawn into a struggle for moral authority that is every bit as intense as its struggle for military victory.
America does not do so well in its disciplinary wars (the Gulf War is an arguable exception) because we begin these wars with only a marginal moral authority and then, as time passes, even this meager store of moral capital bleeds away. Inevitably, into this vacuum comes a clamorous and sanctimonious antiwar movement that sets the bar for American moral authority so high that we must virtually lose the war in order to meet it. There must be no torture, no collateral damage, no cultural insensitivity, no mistreatment of prisoners and no truly aggressive or definitive display of American military power. In other words, no victory.
Meanwhile our enemy is fighting all out to achieve a new balance of power. As we anguish over the possibility of collateral damage, this enemy practices collateral damage as a tactic of war. In Iraq, al Qaeda blows up women and children simply to keep alive the chaos of war that gives it cover. This enemy's sense of moral authority--as misguided as it may be--is so strong that it compensates for its lack of sophisticated military hardware.
On the other hand, our great military might is not enough to compensate for our weak sense of moral authority, our ambivalence. If we have the greatest military in history, it is also true that we lack our enemy's talent for true belief. Our rationale for war is difficult to articulate, always arguable, and distinctly removed from immediate necessity. Our society is deeply divided and there is a vigorous antiwar movement ready to capitalize on our every military setback.
This is the pattern of disciplinary wars: Their execution is always undermined by their inbuilt lack of moral authority. In the end, our might neutralizes our might. Our vast power makes all such wars come off as bullying, even when we fight selflessly for the freedom of others.
Great power scares unless it is exercised within a painstaking moral framework. Thus, moral authority is the single greatest challenge of American foreign policy. This is especially so in wars of discipline, wars fought far away and for abstract reasons. We argue for such wars as if they were wars of survival because we want the moral authority that comes so automatically to them. But Iraq is a war of discipline, and no more. If we left Iraq tomorrow there would be terrible consequences all around, but we would survive.
Our broader war against terror, on the other hand, is a war of survival. And it is rich in moral authority. September 11 introduced necessity and, in its name, we have an open license to destroy that stateless network of terrorism that attacked us. America is not divided over this. It was Iraq--a war of discipline--that brought us division. This does not mean that the Iraq war is invalid. Ultimately, it may prove to be a far more important war in preserving a balance of power favorable to America than our war against al Qaeda.
The point is that wars of discipline will always have to be self-consciously fought on a moral as well as a military front. And the more we engage the moral struggle, the more license we will have to fight these wars as wars of survival. In other words, our military effectiveness now requires nothing less than a smart and daring brinkmanship of moral authority.
If Mr. Obama's idea was born of mushy idealism, it could work far better as a hard-nosed moral brinkmanship. Were an American president (or a secretary of state for the less daring) to land in Tehran, the risk to American prestige would be enormous. The mullahs would make us characters in a tale of their own grandeur. Yet moral authority would redound to us precisely for making ourselves vulnerable to this kind of exploitation. The world would witness not the stereotype of American bullying, but the reality of American selflessness, courage and moral confidence.
If we were snubbed, if all our entreaties to peace were flouted, if war became inevitable, then we would have the moral authority to fight as if for survival. Either our high-risk diplomacy works or we have the license to fight to win. In the meantime, we give our allies around the world every reason to respect us.
This is not an argument for Mr. Obama's candidacy, only for his idea. It is a good one because it allows America the advantage of its own great character.
Mr. Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author, most recently, of "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win," published next week by Free Press.
I’m an optimist. My husband has made constant fun of me for the 12 years of our marriage because of this. I really don’t care. I still tend to look on the bright side of things. Lately that’s been difficult.
My optimism was tested shortly after GW got elected. 9/11 was a huge test. Invading Afghanistan made me uncomfortable, but I realized there probably needed to be some sort of military action taken—I just worried that it might be overkill in the worst sense of the word.
Paul Wellstone’s death was a serious blow to my optimism. I had been counting on him to bring Congress around on the issue of Iraq. The war in Iraq was also a serious test of my optimism. The lack of WMD, Abu Ghraib, Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, global warming and peak oil contributed mightily to a chink in my sunnyside armor. Iraq in general continues to sort of send me over the edge with respect to my optimism.
But now I understand. It was all a test. We weren’t really ready to tackle all of the problems of this new century. We had to bring them all to this critical juncture. George Bush had to bring us to the point where we are right now in order for us to fully understand what the lack of sunshine really means. If Al Gore had been elected in 2000, I never would have been able to appreciate Barack Obama for the godsend he is. I needed to earn this guy. We all did.
Senator Barack Obama believes this is a defining moment for education in this country. In this global economy, countries who out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow. That’s why Obama has introduced a plan to make college affordable by creating a $4,000 per year refundable tax credit and why he unveiled a proposal to strengthen our community colleges. Yesterday, in Manchester, New Hampshire, Obama spoke about his plan to prepare every student to succeed in college – preparation that begins at birth and continues with world-class schools, outstanding teachers, and transformative principals.
The first part of his plan focuses on providing quality, affordable early childhood education to every American child. The second part of his education plan is to recruit, support, and reward teachers and principals to ensure that every school in America is filled with outstanding educators. The third part of his plan is to work with our nation’s governors and educators to create and use assessments that can improve achievement in school districts all across America by including the kinds of research, scientific investigation, and problem-solving that our children will need to compete in a 21st century knowledge economy. Finally, Obama understands that government alone cannot solve the problems in our education system and that parents have to meet their own responsibilities and get involved in their children’s education.
Obama believes our commitment to education has to be real and not just rhetorical. He often says the problem with No Child Left Behind is that George Bush left the money behind. But it wasn’t just Bush. It’s pretty popular to bash No Child Left Behind out on the campaign trail, but when it was being debated in Congress four years ago, Obama’s colleague Dick Durbin offered everyone a chance to vote so that the law couldn’t be enforced unless it was fully funded. Senator Edwards and Senator Clinton passed on that chance. Obama believes that was a serious mistake. As President, he will reform No Child Left Behind.
Two weekends ago we sent 768 volunteers from MN to IOWA & we meet by 789 from other states
we knocked over 45,000 doors and gained almost 2,000 NEW supporters
AT the JJ dinner we filled 4,000 of 9,000 seats!!!!!!!
now you know
Full text of Barack's speech at J.J. If you did not see it -!WOW! -it was amazing! You can read it here. This is what a speech is like when someone really cares, when compassion, truth, and vision are not just rhetoric.
Check out his speech and make a donation of $25 if you can. We are in it for change and so is he.
In solidarity,
Shauen
FIRED UP! READY TO GO! FIRED UP! READY TO GO! FIRED UP! READY TO GO!
The next PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. . . BARACK OBAMA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Barack Obama Honors Sacrifice of America’s Veterans by Addressing Homelessness
As Nation Observes Veterans Day, Obama Visits Veterans’ Transitional Housing Facility
Yesterday I went to the memorial service for an old friend at Carleton College's Skinner Chapel in Northfield, MN. Warren Ringlien was a renaissance man, born in the 1930s. He had built everything from ski-jumps to pitching machines to telescope mounts. Warren put solar cells on his home, built an electric car, and still had time to string tennis rackets and bowl with the guys, play with his grandchildren, and go dancing with his wife. There was nothing he couldn't fix, or improve; he was the go-to guy for everybody who knew him, never passing up an opportunity to teach and empower those he helped. Warren might sound gruff when you brought him your problem, but his mind was already taking a shot at the challenge. You always sensed that both you and he had gained information - and competency - although in the way of such exchanges one knew clearly who had been less than adequate to frame the examination properly. The outcomes were more valuable and elegant than the needy could initially imagine.
Warren's creative 'streak' knew no limits. His vision, the vision that led to his glorious solutions, wasn't constrained by the thinking of the people asking for his help. His desire wasn't just to solve the problem, but to enable others to do so, too - to see beyond the immediate challenge, and to spur others to look at the bigger picture with him.
This morning, as the sundry eulogies I'd heard yesterday intersected with my reading about matters more political than physical, I had an epiphany. Senator Barack Obama brings his own fearless, boundless creativity to the political and social challenges which define our global culture, and so dominate our national dialog.
We all know the stereotypes of established politicians, from being part of some mysterious culture filled with back-room deals to making carefully scripted, risk-aversive non-answers when asked a direct question while implying informed expertise as they espouse expedient fixes that patch whatever problem the media wants to report on this week: offend nobody, look smart, preserve your power.
Yet Senator Obama defies that conventional wisdom; Obama's not scripted, not a slave to managing an oracular appearance. He's willing to take responsibility for his actions and positions today while taking a long view and seeking more information all the while. Not confirmation, not validation, this is a person who constantly owns his decisions while at the same time clearly yearning to do more than hand off solutions: Barack wants to teach and empower you, and me, and the world to seek and create something better than we have yet imagined.
That determination is what I'll miss about Warren Ringlien.
That same approach informs my abiding faith in Barack Obama's fitness to be our next President.
Copy and paste this link in your address bar to watch the J.J. Rally in IOWA.
http://www.c-span.org/watch/cs_cspan_rm.asp?Cat=TV&Code=CS
