Posts with the tag Name

IMPORTANT! Does Your name have a suffix?...Sr, Jr.,

RFLTV for Obama — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:52:25 EDT

This information is very important to read for students and people that are voting for the first time!

ANOTHER REASON TO VOTE EARLY - To meet any issues early own.......

Yesterday I helped my son who recently registered to vote check and see if he was in fact in the registrar system since he recently moved.

In the process, we had to provide address and zip code information that matched his original registration information for verification purposes. We were quite shocked to learn he was not registered and could not figure out why.

We tried every address and zip code we could think of with no match. I checked at least eight times with determination. At that point he had given up on voting.

Finally, I decided to try something less obvious with chances being slim to none it would work (so I thought). I decided to try taking the Jr. off his name and what do you know??? It Worked!!! I was happy but shocked that the suffix of his name might have kept him from voting and it was not his mistake. How many other people might have gone through this, students and others voting for the first time and they decide to give up?

MORAL TO THIS TRUE STORY: Please check early to make sure you are registered properly especially if you’re a Jr., Sr., Henry the VIIIII etc., and know your past addresses and zip codes to locate your proper precinct if you have moved recently. If you know your past address but not the zip, you can look up your old zip code on line at: http://zip4.usps.com/zip4/welcome.jsp (Post office).

BETTER YET, CHECK EARLY AND VOTE EARLY. Go the http://www.voteforchange.com TO LEARN AND FIND OUT MORE.

IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY....VOTE EARLY FOR CHANGE!!!

Sincerely,

T. Hardy, BFU

RFLTV for Obama

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post_edit/_new/Gl7J2

How can you expect change without change?...TH as expressed by a Great Man name Barack Obama

The 'Danger' of Politics

Holly Wyble — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 12:53:20 EDT

“Are you a muslim?”

How dangerous and tainted such an innocent, curious question has become. This inquiry was posed to my seven-year-old son two weeks ago by the older brother of a friend whose home he was visiting for the afternoon. True, my son carries features that could duplicate those of Middle Eastern descent, although they are the product of his father’s Mexican heritage. However, he can no better describe the difference between Islam and Christian than he can Jewish and Hindu. We are not active, church going people but our family is spiritual in our own comfortable way. Grace is offered before meals, we pray in the evening individually to reflect and we have many deep discussions about religion, myth and what is happening in the world with extremism and religious fervor. It is something I feel is vital to my children’s navigation, understanding and compassion.

Yet this question has itched at me, from the inside of my heart outward, because it is no longer a casual inference; it now carries a desire to know if one can be trusted or if one is ‘like the rest of us’. While my son may not grasp the intention, I did, and it hurt my being to think he was being judged by someone else’s fears.

Since September 11, 2001, this country has gone out of its way to make Muslims feel unwanted, uncomfortable and unwelcome. Americans suddenly had an excuse to exclude people different from their own culture and belief by guilt of religious association. It continues today, albeit more subtle, and I would lying if I did not say that I myself have looked at those riding the bus with me and had to fight the fear that welled in my throat at the thought that maybe their innocent transportation was anything but clean. But I recognize my own shortcomings, I go out of my way at times to correct them and I refuse to let a minority people of a religion harm and hurt the vision I carry of others who are innocent of their deeds and atrocities.

Which brings me to the present political climate and the dangers that McCain and Palin have entered into this election. By questioning Barack Obama’s heritage, by raising questions about associations and leaving lingering thoughts of his name Hussein, which for many wrenches a negative gut fear of all things bad about Islam, they are inciting a very dangerous and frightening emotional climate to sustain and grow. At this point, I would have expected John McCain to know and behave better, for the honor he claims and pretends to have for ALL Americans. It is to me, especially disgraceful, for him to raise questions about the muslim religion and its people, to suggest they are less than human, when his own adopted daughter comes from Bangladesh, a country that is 89.7% Islamic. As she grows, desires and wanders of her own roots, will she feel unclean and uncomfortable as a by product of her father’s own political maneuvering? Will she, when she becomes an independent adult and sees these actions for the gross negligence of information they are, be able to look in John McCain’s eyes and wander if there is real love? What if she grows and decides to become a muslim? What then McCain?

In 2000, I felt it was disgraceful, disparaging and in my eyes, unforgivable, that the Republican party insinuated through push polls that Bridget McCain was an “illegitimate black child” and through an email suggested he had “chosen to sire children without marriage”; that they hinted at an affair with a black prostitute as being her entry into the family. It was a disgusting display of politics at its worst, created and orchestrated by Karl Rove, that ended John McCain’s bid for nomination in North Carolina. How is it then, that a man who himself has been the target and bulls eye of such horrendous insinuations and falsehoods, could carry out the same tactics eight years later simple because he is behind in polling numbers? Where has the honorable man defending his daughter gone?

This past February, Bill Cunningham introduced John McCain at a rally inciting the crowd by speaking of his opponent as “Barack Hussein Obama”; McCain denounced the act, said it was inappropriate and that it would never happen again at one of his rallies. The past two weeks, it has happened again, twice, with the last time seeing a rehash of the campaign apologizing for the chair of Lehigh County intentionally using Obama’s name as a negative to infuse fear. Since no one else seems to want to call him on it, I will: John McCain, you need to stop, and you need to stop now.

When I say this to McCain, I also want it to be clear that I am including his campaign’s overt hints via Palin that Barack Obama is friendly with domestic terrorists and taking money from Palestinians. They are lies, they are despicable and at a time when people are genuinely hurting from the blow economics of the Republican party and their President, I think we all can do without the hatemongering and untruths at this point.

I have been walking around this week genuinely, frightfully angry with the boldfaced lies and I finally realized that it comes down to sense of righteous indignation, a sense of feeling so helpless as I watch two grown adults who know better and, I presume, teach their children better, create a circle of chaos and division in this country. My soul aches knowing that there are individuals in this world who are only looking for an excuse or a word that will confirm that the dread and fear they have for those that are ‘different’ is real and that they are condoned for any future actions against those they hate. Have we lost all sense of history and past horrors? Didn’t the holocaust begin because Jewish people were ‘different’ from Adolph Hitler’s version of a pure society? Didn’t the genocide in Rwanda happen because of tribal ‘differences’ that set one group ablaze with machetes on a killing spree? What about Bosnia? What about Darfur? What if, what if, what if…we continue to allow those we call and revere as ‘leaders’ continue to spew hate, suspicion and lies that only fuel the fire for those who exist who may have their own view of what our country should ‘look’ like and ‘talk’ like and what they should ‘worship’?

Somewhere, in all of this, John McCain has lost sight of one of the most important elements of this race. I can brush off that he will not look at Barack Obama during a debate or that he handles him with a sense of contempt as if Obama has not earned his place on the stage next to McCain. Almost crossing the line was his use of the term, “that one”, during the town hall debate that to me smacked and rang like, ‘hey boy’ through that tiny room. But what I will not stand for nor sit silent upon is anyone dehumanizing a human being for their own political gain and rise to power. Lest he forget, Obama was the child of two proud parents. Obama is the grandson of a military hero and a factory woman of WWII. Obama is the husband of Michelle and the son in law and brother in law of her family. Most importantly, he is a father to two young and impressionable young women who deserve more than to hear anyone questioning their father’s motivations and associations when he has done nothing but help those in need and champion the forgotten since graduating from college. He is living, breathing flesh that represents the hopes and dreams of millions of others around this globe who feel his skin color from the inside, whose name (which means ‘blessed good’) is a familiar wind chime to their ears and whose voice speaks for their pain, their heartache and the treatment they have suffered at the hands of those who see them as ‘different’.

In this country, instead of reveling in our differences, in the beauty of all our interwoven culture and the capacity we have for knowing and understanding so many people and having the gift of this insight and wisdom, we tear apart all that glory and make it seem so ugly. We divide our selves by titles, by religion, by color, by birth, by region, by politics, by fear…by and by and by. Our insecurities have become our biggest threat and the fear mongering that feeds those hungry, little monsters is creating, large, angry crowds that have no genuine perspective or interaction or respect for those who views vary from their own.

So when will it halt? Will take someone doing something drastic or attempting to harm Barack Obama for John McCain to act like the man he claims to be? Will it take someone being harassed or harmed simply because they are not what political leaders have told the inciters that person should be? Will it be Bridget McCain in three years as she attends college, doing nothing more than being herself? Will it be one the Obama girls’ classmates hurling an insult they do not understand or deserve, having their innocence shattered because of the hatred of a classmate’s parent? Is it going to be my son who is hurt or beaten one day because he is mistaken for a muslim, although he carries no hate in his heart and is not what others may ‘convict’ him of being?

The notion that anyone is less because of difference needs to end. Our children deserve better; we deserve better; this world is crying for better. I challenge John McCain to show genuine honor and courage and to be the man he proclaims by saying, “Enough,” and living up to his word. Any man vying for our vote to be President owes us at least that much civility and honesty. My children, your children and this world are worthy of such small consideration, deserving to demand, and vote, for so much more.

What`s in a name ?

Russell — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:52:12 EDT

What`s in a name ? Some people will try and scare you by using somebody`s name to tie them to bad people. It`s not right or fare. George Hubert Walker Bush and John McCain have nothing to do with John Walker Lynn the American terrorist . So let that scare tactic stop now !

Message to Barack; GUSTAV!!!

Rpaulino — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 22:58:35 EDT

This blog is directly addressed to Senator Barack Obama. In the name of GOD and you (Mr. Obama); I am ready to assist in any effort directed by you in this time of major concern. I am an IT specialist with over a decade of management experience that happens to be built like a football player. So I make myself available for anything from assisting in the network and communication efforts to cleaning up debris from the street.

The time is now Mr. President, (to be), to take charge, to lead, to react without haste but with keen foresight, to do what you do best. I'm behind you!!!

Bake Sale was a mixed bag

Dave from Springvale — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:47:40 EDT

Well we raised $175 with the Bake Sale for Obama and that is good. First I would like to thanks all my friends who helped. Brandon, Carol, Donny, Mike and Walt all made wonderful stuff for the sale. Even my very Republican neighbors could not resist the charms.

We took the Bake Sale on the road after we had limited visits in Sanford. We went to the Peace march in Kennebunkport arranged by Jamilla el Shafei. We met a few folks who are left of where the campaign currently stands and were not very enthused with Obama. It was good to hear some different perspectives asnd we appreciate their support.

The remaining baked goods will be donated to the local shelter and to the Democratic office here in Sanford to feed some volunteers. It was nice that a couple of the campaign workers Crystal and Adam came by after the day was done to talk to us and get feedback. All in all the day was about what I suspected.

News Article concerning sentiment among Hillary supporters

Joei005 — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:41:42 EDT

From Yahoo!News:

The poll responses also show Obama has more work to do to quell fears among voters like Kirstie Hartle of Rome, N.Y., a registered Democrat who has never supported a Republican presidential candidate. With Clinton out of the race, Hartle said, "I'm Republican all the way now."

She said she doesn't like Obama's name and thinks he has a questionable background. She also said she thought Obama was deceitful when he broke from his church after it hurt his campaign, and she doesn't trust him to handle the Iraq war.

"It sounds to me like a Middle Eastern type of name and whether or not he's born here in the United States, he doesn't seem like, to me, somebody who is trustworthy," Hartle said in a telephone interview. "You can't trust anybody these days, so who's to say he's not a terrorist and we just don't realize it yet?"

How does one respond to this type of thinking?

The Uncommitted Superdelegates

Zax — Sat, 10 May 2008 12:48:11 EDT

213 Preference Unknown

Daniel K. Akaka, Senator, Hawaii Mr. Akaka will not make an endorsement, but is willing to support whoever the Democratic nominee is, according to a spokesman. All the major candidates are qualified, Mr. Akaka said.

Tom Allen, Representative, Me.

Jason Altmire, Representative, Pa. Says that he remains on the fence for now but was wondering whether he had a "moral obligation" to let voters know his preferred candidate.

Max Baucus, Senator, Mont.

Joyce Beatty, Party official, Ohio

Howard L. Berman, Representative, Calif.

Steven Beshear, Governor, Ky.

Joseph R. Biden, Senator, Del.

Donald Bivens, Party official, Ariz.

Anita Bonds, Party official, D.C.

Madeleine Z. Bordallo, Representative, Guam

Dan Boren, Representative, Okla. "I don't think Hillary will carry Oklahoma. I'm not going that far. But if you look at the tide across the country, Democrats rank ahead of Republicans on just about everything except terrorism."

Barbara Boxer, Senator, Calif. Although she does not plan to endorse either candidate as long as both are running, she says she plans to vote for Mrs. Clinton at the convention because Mrs. Clinton won the California primary, saying "the will of the voters is paramount."An aide to Senator Barbara Boxer of California said Ms. Boxer would cast her superdelegate vote for the winner of the California primary.

Nancy Boyda, Representative, Kan.

Bill Bradbury, Party official, Ore.

Robert A. Brady, Representative, Pa.

Donna L. Brazile, Party official, D.C. "I don't want to superimpose my personal views; I want to reflect the will of the voters. Honestly, I don't want to decide this."

Phil Bredesen, Governor, Tenn. Three years ago, he said that Mrs. Clinton would face an "uphill road" to win the White House. "Surely in the United States we can go further than having to have a single family dominate one side and a single family dominate the other."

Scott Brennan, Party official, Iowa

Sherrod Brown, Senator, Ohio

Raymond Buckley, Party official, N.H.

Elsie Burkhalter, Add on delegate, La.

Robert C. Byrd, Senator, W.Va.

Margaret Campbell, Party official, Mont. "I am very interested in endorsing Obama, but party rules preclude me from endorsing." "It's been emotional, it's been frustrating. It has been very frustrating. It is a huge responsibility."

Benjamin L. Cardin, Senator, Md.

Robin Carnahan, Party official, Mo.

Thomas R. Carper, Senator, Del. "I frankly don't care a lot who ends up at the top of the ticket, but I hope at the end of the day they could be convinced to run together."

Jimmy Carter, Party official, Ga. "Obama's campaign has been extraordinary and titillating for me and my family. We have four children with their spouses, we have 11 grandchildren, four or five of them are married, and all of them, except one, are for Obama. I think that Obama will be almost automatically a healing factor in the animosity now and the distrust that relates to our country and its government."

G. Nick Casey, Party official, W.Va.

Don Cazayoux, Representative, La.

Cheryl Chapman, Party official, S.D.

Maria Chappelle-Nadal, Party official, Mo.

Linda Chavez-Thompson, Party official, Tex.

James E. Clyburn, Representative, S.C. "I still remain studiously neutral. I think that the historical significance of so-called superdelegates — these are unpledged delegates — is very, very important for us to maintain. We are in place in order to either extend the wishes of the voters or to try to make corrections if they need to be made."

Gilda Cobb-Hunter, Party official, S.C. "I'm undeclared because I think it's important for the process to play itself out. I don't see inserting myself into the process. I'm not interested in being wooed. I'm not important." "It seems to be making me a pretty popular kind of girl in some circles, at least with the media."

Larry Cohen, Party official, D.C.

Jim Costa, Representative, Calif.

Ed Cote, Party official, Wash. "I am still firmly uncommitted and I am going to stay uncommitted. I do not have to vote until the week of Aug. 25. This is only Feb. 11."

Joe Courtney, Representative, Conn.

Robert E. Cramer, Representative, Ala. Has said that he would not been endorsing anyone in the nomination phase.

C. Richard Cranwell, Party official, Va. "I think the fray will be settled long before the convention starts."

Inez Crutchfield, Party official, Tenn.

John Daniello, Party official, Del.

Susan A. Davis, Representative, Calif.

Lincoln Davis, Representative, Tenn. Says he will head to the convention uncommitted, adding: "Senator Clinton won by a sizable margin in my district, better than 70 percent. I usually try to be sure I represent the wishes of the people in my congressional district."

Ralph Dawson, Party official, N.Y.

Howard Dean, Party official, Vt.

Jennifer DeChant, Party official, Me.

Joseph C. DeCotiis, Party official, N.J.

Nancy DiNardo, Party official, Conn.

Frank Dixon, Party official, Ore.

Joe Donnelly, Representative, Ind.

Wayne Dowdy, Party official, Miss.

Mike Doyle, Representative, Pa.

Nancy Drummond, Party official, Wyo. "I do have a favorite, but I'm remaining uncommitted. If it gets down to the superdelegates as a deciding factor, I want to be sure I represent Wyoming."

Brad Ellsworth, Representative, Ind. "I don't think anyone knows how long the race for the Democrat nomination will go or what role the superdelegates will play. But I am glad that, for the first time in a long time, Indiana will likely have a say on who the nominee will be."

Rahm Emanuel, Representative, Ill. "Everybody knows I worked for the Clintons. I'm very close to the Clintons. And I'm very close to Barack. Let's be honest, does anybody want to pick among friends? It's a human thing, not a political thing. At some point, if I have to make a decision, I will. But I prefer, you know, they've got to go on and develop their campaigns."

Bob Etheridge, Representative, N.C.

Sam Farr, Representative, Calif.

Jimmie Farris, Party official, Tenn.

Russ Feingold, Senator, Wis. "I'm having a hard time deciding between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as are many people. Those are the two I take the most seriously. I go back and forth, to be honest with you. I'm torn on this whole issue of who's more likely to be progressive and really seek change vs. who's ready to do the job today. It really is a true dilemma in my mind."

Bob Filner, Representative, Calif. "It's my dream that each side will get 2,024 delegates, and I'll cast the deciding vote. There seems to be too many delegates this time. Too many people not making decisions who haven't had to be elected in support of a candidate."

Thomas Foley, Party official, Wash.

Carnelia Pettis Fondren, Party official, Miss.

Jim E. Frasier, Party official, Okla.

Lawrence Gates, Party official, Kan.

Yvonne A. Gates, Party official, Nev.

Alice Travis Germond, Party official, W.Va. "We're all hopeful that one way or another it will be resolved without having our first vote at the convention be a test vote or a vote that in any way appears to show Democrats in disarray."

Gabrielle Giffords, Representative, Ariz.

Terry Goddard, Add on delegate, Ariz.

Bart Gordon, Representative, Tenn.

Al Gore, Party official, Tenn.

Jenny Greenleaf, Party official, Ore. "Because I'm an officer of the state party, and we don't want the state party to be seen as providing more or better services to one candidate or another, I plan to stay neutral until Oregon's late primary in May."

Karen Hale, Party official, Utah Has said that she is considering switching her support to Mr. Obama because some party insiders believe the excitement of an Obama candidacy will boost the chances of Utah Democrats running in state races. "I'm conflicted. There has been a lot of pressure to change my vote."

David Hardt, Party official, Tex. Officially uncommitted because he is president of the Young Democrats of America, but plans to vote for Mrs. Clinton after fielding calls from her, Mr. Clinton and Chelsea, who also visited him in Nevada. "It's always shocking when you get a call from someone like that."

Tom Harkin, Senator, Iowa "I haven't made up my mind yet. I'm still neutral in this race, and I intend to remain that way."

Vicki Harwell, Add on delegate, Tenn. "At this point, I'm leaning toward Senator Clinton." She met Mrs. Clinton personally and found her to be a "dynamic, dedicated Democratic woman." "I certainly think she has earned the right to run and certainly to be our nominee."

Kamil Hasan, Party official, Calif. "I think the difference between the delegates for the two candidates will be so small that none of them will have the majority. It looks very likely that the superdelegates will end up deciding who the next Democratic nominee will be."

Alexis Herman, Party official, Va.

Tim Holden, Representative, Pa. "I haven't made a decision on either Obama or Clinton. I usually don't get involved in the primary when there is an open seat. We really haven't talked about it."

Chris Van Hollen, Representative, Md.

Ivan Holmes, Party official, Okla. "My inclination at this point is to stay uncommitted to the end."

Rush Holt, Representative, N.J.

Mike Honda, Representative, Calif.

Steny H. Hoyer, Representative, Md.

William J. Jefferson, Representative, La.

Blake Johnson, Party official, Alaska

Joe Johnson, Party official, Va.

Marcy Kaptur, Representative, Ohio

Awais Khaleel, Party official, Wis. "I don 't think anybody my age, 23 years old, expects to be this deep in the process right now."

Wayne Kinney, Party official, Ore.

Helen Knetzer, Party official, Kan.

Herb Kohl, Senator, Wis.

Debra Kozikowski, Party official, Mass. "I appreciate my position as a party leader and don't shirk those responsibilities. I just don't want to run out on a street corner and scream it out."

Dennis J. Kucinich, Representative, Ohio

Reggie LaFayette, Party official, N.Y.

Nick Lampson, Representative, Tex.

Mary L. Landrieu, Senator, La.

Frank R. Lautenberg, Senator, N.J.

Claude Leach, Party official, La.

Jim Leaman, Party official, Va.

Jerry Lee, Add on delegate, Tenn. Said he intends to "listen very closely" to both Democratic frontrunners in the coming weeks and then vote at the convention "for the one I think is most electable in November."

Belkis Leong-Hong, Party official, Md.

Sam Lieberman, Party official, Nev. "If it had been a blowout for one candidate, I would have probably gone with the Nevada candidate. Because of how close it was ... it will probably play only a small role in my decision."

Pilar Lujan, Party official, Guam

John Lynch, Governor, N.H.

Eileen Macoll, Party official, Wash. "They have so much to offer. It's an amazing experience to be a superdelegate and in this position. I truly am undecided." "I'm going to watch the traffic and watch the flow and see which way it's going. I'll especially be watching how the vote goes in the large states that remain, like Pennsylvania, Texas and Ohio. That will perhaps lead me to a decision."

Joe Manchin, Governor, W.Va.

Edward J. Markey, Representative, Mass.

Christine Schon Marques, Party official, Dem. abroad

Jim Marshall, Representative, Ga.

Catherine Cortez Mastor, Party official, Nev.

Jim Matheson, Representative, Utah

Jim McDermott, Representative, Wash.

Dennis McDonald, Party official, Mont. "Out of respect for this process, our superdelegates will not take a position. Certainly not until after the June 3 primary."

David T. McDonald, Party official, Wash. "Delegate-by-delegate fights are very emotionally intense. There is a great risk to all of us that the support base of the two candidates will not be able to work for the other. The single best way for a Republican to win is for us to have a fight that gets out of hand. Whoever we support, the overriding concern is to not have a Republican in the White House next year."

Mike McIntyre, Representative, N.C.

Jerry McNerney, Representative, Calif.

Leila Medley, Party official, Mo. "I still haven't made a commitment, and I still don't know what to do."

Charlie Melancon, Representative, La.

Michael H. Michaud, Representative, Me.

Glenard S. Middleton, Party official, Md.

Carole Migden, Party official, Calif.

Harry E. Mitchell, Representative, Ariz. "I've read the position papers of the candidates, I've been contacted by them and their surrogates and I'm still not committed yet."

George Mitchell, Party official, N.Y.

Heather Mizeur, Party official, Md.

Alan B. Mollohan, Representative, W.Va.

Dennis Moore, Representative, Kan.

Jennifer Moore, Party official, Ky.

Theresa Morelli, Party official, Dem. abroad "The fact that she has devoted her life to helping children and those less fortunate speak volumes about Hillary Clinton’s character. She has not only an incredible grasp of the issues facing America, but a track record of delivering real results. Hillary is the strongest Democratic candidate to beat John McCain in November and restore America’s standing in the world."

Mike Morgan, Party official, Okla.

Bob Mulholland, Party official, Calif.

Phil Murphy, Party official, N.J.

Jay Nixon, Add on delegate, Mo.

Donald Norcross, Party official, N.J. "We need to seize this momentum, attract a new generation of leaders to our party, while rallying behind the candidate who can best unite the country during these uncertain economic times. That candidate is Senator Barack Obama."

Cynthia Nunley, Party official, Wyo. "It's too early in the process to be in the mode of one-candidate-take-all. There are a lot of voices to be heard yet and there are a lot of questions to be asked."

Muriel K. Offerman, Party official, N.C.

John W. Olver, Representative, Mass.

Ben Pangelinan, Party official, Guam

David Parker, Party official, N.C. "Frankly, I'm torn both ways. My mind is with Hillary, my heart is with Obama, and I'm waiting for my gut to report."

Jay Parmley, Party official, Okla. "I guess if it's still undecided at the convention, I'll be free to make a decision one way or the other."

Gregory Pecoraro, Party official, Md.

Christine Pelosi, Party official, Calif.

Nancy Pelosi, Representative, Calif. Ms. Pelosi says she remains neutral in the race and that her "focus is on reelecting a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives".

Dwight Pelz, Party official, Wash.

John A. Perez, Party official, Calif.

Carol W. Peterson, Party official, N.C.

Collin C. Peterson, Representative, Minn.

Roberto Ramirez, Party official, N.Y.

Robert Rankin, Party official, Calif. "I try to listen to everybody. I would like to weigh everything together before I make a decision. We should consider our own people that we feel we represent."

Gail Rasmussen, Party official, Ore.

Richard Ray, Party official, Ga.

Chris Redfern, Party official, Ohio

Jack Reed, Senator, R.I. He has said the votes of Rhode Islanders will be a major factor in his decision about whom to back. He sees both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama as potentially "very capable" candidates and presidents. "But the qualities of the candidates are important, and so is electability." "There's no on-off switch, there's no simple formula."

Harry Reid, Senator, Nev. Says he is "not going to weigh in on this at all" until the states finish voting.

Jeffrey Richardson, Party official, D.C. "The Democratic Party has an opportunity, with the groundswell of support Sen. Obama has built in his campaign with independents and young people, to expand the party long-term."

Betty Richie, Party official, Tex.

Boyd Richie, Party official, Tex.

Bill Ritter, Governor, Colo.

Keith Roark, Party official, Idaho

Kevin Rodriguez, Party official, V.I.

Roy Romer, Party official, Colo.

James Roosevelt, Party official, Mass. "I would urge superdelegates who are undecided to wait and see to get a better gauge of electability of the candidates."

Eliseo Roques-Arroyo, Party official, P.R.

Ken Salazar, Senator, Colo. "How I'm going to decide the question is to look at each and determine who would be best for Colorado. I'll look at their positions on all the issues in detail."

John Salazar, Representative, Colo.

John Sarbanes, Representative, Md.

Gray Sasser, Party official, Tenn. Says he is fretting over the idea that insiders will "get in the back of some smoke-filled room and decide it." "I'm still hopeful this will be decided like every other nomination in recent history."

Brian Schweitzer, Governor, Mont.

Jerome Wiley Segovia, Party official, Va

.Lottie H. Shackelford, Party official, Ark.

Marva Smalls, Party official, S.C

.Nathan Smith, Party official, Ky.

Meredith Wood Smith, Party official, Ore. "We don't have to make a choice right now. It's too early for that. There are still caucuses and primaries going on."

Edward M. Smith, Party official, Ill.

Zack Space, Representative, Ohio

Cindy Spanyers, Party official, Alaska [Referring to the idea that superdelegates may override the decision of the voters] "I had no idea it would come down to this." "I find myself getting a little sickened over the prospect of that being the key decision."

Sam Spencer, Party official, Me. "I want to figure out how to most broadly represent Maine Democrats in the Democratic National Committee." "Superdelegates are sort of outdated; it's not a very democratic way of doing things."

John M. Spratt, Representative, S.C. He is "lying low," according to a spokesman.

Pete Stark, Representative, Calif.

Irene Stein, Party official, N.Y.

Crystal Strait, Party official, Calif. "I saw my role, being one of two women under 30 on the [Democratic National Committee], to advocate for young voters. It's crucial to understand what they think real investment in general election in the youth vote will be. Neither has come forward with that. The Clinton campaign has been much more serious in their delegate outreach. Senator Clinton and Chelsea Clinton have called me. Obama had Governor Napolitano call me."

David Strauss, Party official, N.D.

Robert Strauss, Party official, Tex.

Marie Dolly Strazar, Party official, Hawaii

John J. Sweeney, Party official, Md.

Gene Taylor, Representative, Miss.

Lena Taylor, Party official, Wis.

John Temporiti, Party official, Mo.

Jon Tester, Senator, Mont. "Jon will vote for the candidate he feels would best serve Montana and represents Montana values. But he won't make any decisions about his vote until at least after the Montana primary," Tester spokesman Aaron Murphy said in an e-mail message.

John F. Tierney, Representative, Mass.

Art Torres, Party official, Calif

.Niki Tsongas, Representative, Mass.

Susan W. Turnbull, Party official, Md

.Joe Turnham, Party official, Ala.

Mark Udall, Representative, Colo.

Tom Udall, Representative, N.M.

Keith Umemoto, Party official, Calif.

Peter J. Visclosky, Representative, Ind.

Patricia Waak, Party official, Colo.

Christine Warnke, Party official, D.C.

Vernon R. Watkins, Party official, Calif.

Henry A. Waxman, Representative, Calif.

Jim Webb, Senator, Va.

Yolanda Wheat, Party official, Mo.

Chris Whittington, Party official, La. He has said Mr. Obama's decisive victory in Louisiana will partly influence his thinking, but the main consideration is who looks to be the eventual nominee. "I think we need to go with a winner."

Charlie Wilson, Representative, Ohio

Harriet Smith Windsor, Party official, Del.

Joshua Wisch, Party official, Hawaii

Beverly Withington, Party official, Hawaii [Referring to Mrs. Clinton's plan for troop withdrawal in Iraq] "It can't be done in less than six months, that's for sure. I believe the sentiment of the majority of America is to get the troops out sooner, but everyone understands that can't be overnight because there needs to be a phase-out, but I don't believe anyone should be there until 2013."

Nancy Worley, Party official, Ala.

Ron Wyden, Senator, Ore.

Steven Ybarra, Party official, Calif. "Hillary Clinton's campaign is in trouble and the highest ranking Hispanic in her camp is paying the price. Campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle stepped down this weekend — after Barack Obama beat Clinton handily in four states scattered in different regions of the country."

Paula Zellner, Party official, Wis.

The Superdelegates Who Support Obama

Zax — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:37:12 EDT

New York Times Count of Superdelegates

265 Supporting Obama*

Based on public announcements, verified lists from the Clinton and Obama campaigns and telephone surveys by The New York Times and CBS News. The tally below does not include confidential responses to the telephone poll, unless the delegate's preference was subsequently publicly announced. Updated May 9.
*One superdelegate who expressed support for Mr. Obama on the telephone poll but wished to remain anonymous is not included in Mr. Obama's total below.
Neil Abercrombie, Representative, Hawaii "I think part of his appeal is the fact that he understands our diversity. He defines us, rather than divides us. And that's a message that I think needs to be taken into this poisonous political atmosphere. I believe he'll do very well. I believe he'll be nominated. I'm certainly going to work very hard for that to take place."

Anibal Acevedo, Governor, P.R. "Not only is he the right leader for Puerto Ricans, but he is the right leader for the Hispanic community and the right leader to unite all Americans. He has the determination to make our collective future great. Senator Obama demonstrates the strongest commitment to Puerto Rico that we have seen in recent times in U.S. politics."

Steven Achelpohl, Party official, Neb. "Sen. Obama continues to transcend 'politics as usual' and focus on the issues that really matter to American families and workers." "Our party can unite behind Sen. Obama and his positive campaign.""I am truly undecided. Hillary is such a lightning rod, and I know she would dampen turnout in our down-ballot races in Nebraska. I know Obama has greater appeal to young people, and I am influenced by the fact that Nebraska went so heavily for Obama."

Steven K. Alari, Party official, Calif.

Yvette Alexander, Add on delegate, D.C.

Joe Andrew, Party official, Ind. [On why he switched his support from Clinton to Obama] "I am convinced that the primary process has devolved to the point that it's now bad for the Democratic Party." "While I was hopeful that a long, contested primary season would invigorate our party, the polls show that the tone and temperature of the race is now hurting us." "John McCain, without doing much of anything, is now competitive against both of our remaining candidates. We are doing his work for him and distracting Americans from the issues that really affect all of our lives.""My commitment to her is profound, but I would be troubled if either she or Barack Obama actually became the nominee because superdelegates decided, opposed to actual voters going to the polls and pulling the lever."

Kitti Asberry, Party official, Okla.

Anthony Avallone, Party official, Conn.

Brian Baird, Representative, Wash.

John Barrow, Representative, Ga.

Willie Barrow, Party official, Ill. "I support Barack because exemplifies a real man. He is a Christian, husband and father. Universal healthcare, employment and education are the primary issues for me. Our children are not going to school and not graduating. The state is closing schools and opening jails. I think that people of faith have to broaden their ministries outside the walls of the church. Anyone can sing in the choir or serve on the deacon board but how many know the level of unemployment in their community or the number of people losing their homes?"

Melissa Bean, Representative, Ill.

Xavier Becerra, Representative, Calif. "Barack Obama is our strongest candidate for president because of his great crossover appeal that spans parties and regions and his unique ability to rally the American people behind a common purpose."

Teresa Benitez-Thompson, Party official, Nev.

Cecil R. Benjamin, Party official, V.I.

Jeremy Bernard, Party official, Calif. "The only way I could honestly sell her to people would be to say she's going to win. What's the point of that? When we started our company, we wanted to pick only candidates we would be enthusiastic about. Obama was that candidate. He absolutely has the best record on gay and lesbian issues."

Judy Bevans, Party official, Vt. "I'm personally very much leaning toward Obama. I'd love to be able to vote for a woman for president ... but I decided Obama represents a fresh start and it's time to be done with the Clinton-Bush years."

Jack Billion, Party official, S.D. "The overall mood of this state probably leans toward Obama."

Jeff Bingaman, Senator, N.M. "To make progress, we must rise above the partisanship and the issues that divide us to find common ground. We must move the country in a dramatically new direction. I strongly believe Barack Obama is best positioned to lead the nation in that new direction."

Sanford D. Bishop, Representative, Ga.

Margaret Blackshere, Party official, Ill. "Every day he was in the State Senate, he was standing up for working people. When the steel mills were shutting down, Obama said to me 'You know, I see the difference when someone belongs to a union and when they don't. You're their advocate, and I'm going to be an advocate for all of you.'"

Rod R. Blagojevich, Governor, Ill. "I know that Senator Obama will fight to make sure that working families have access to health care, good paying jobs, and opportunities to provide for their children. Senator Obama supports the very best of these Democratic values; they are values that he and I share, values I know he will fight for. Senator Obama has the vision, skills and dedication necessary to bring people together and make real progress in Washington to help solve our country's greatest and most pressing problems. Senator Obama offers real hope for the American people and I am proud to give him my support."

Earl Blumenauer, Representative, Ore. "Senator Obama is demonstrating a unique ability not just to unite Democrats, not just to bring in the vast pool of independent voters that are ultimately going to play such a critical role, but I'm convinced based on what I have seen, what I've heard, what I know, that Senator Obama can unite America."

Connie Borde, Party official, Dem. abroad

Rick Boucher, Representative, Va. "He has the broadest appeal of any of the candidates." "His positive message and steadfast focus on the future inspire hope and enable him to attract support from Democrats, independents and Republicans in a way that no other candidate can. He presents our best opportunity to win the presidency and to govern effectively with bipartisan support from the Congress."

Bruce Braley, Representative, Iowa "It's hard not to be excited about Barack Obama. On a cold January night, and again during Saturday's First District Convention in Iowa, I saw countless people participating in the political process for the very first time because they were so inspired by Senator Obama's unique ability to transcend the politics of fear and division that have crippled this country for the past eight years."

Gail Bray, Party official, Idaho

Joyce Brayboy, Party official, N.C.

Roy LaVerne Brooks, Party official, Tex. "I have listened to the words of many seeking to lead this Party and to lead this nation and I believe that the words, sincerity, vision and actions of Sen. Barack Obama prove he is the best candidate to lead our nation. Senator Barack Obama has gained my trust in that he, like I, seek to bring a better life to our communities. As I strive to make this a better place for future generations, I stand for a system of inclusion, a system of change and most of all a system of fairness and equality. Senator Obama will provide affordable health care for all Americans, end the war in Iraq and provide the care our veterans deserve, and I am proud to support him today."

Michael Brown, Party official, D.C.

Mark Bryant, Party official, Mo. "If the Missouri primary had been overwhelmingly in favor of Hillary Clinton, I would have felt obligated to support her."

Jeanne Buell, Party official, Idaho Said she backed Mr. Obama because he campaigned in the state. "I was tired of people flying over the state and not stopping." "I promised my support to the candidate, a serious candidate, who would come to Idaho."

Anna Burger, Party official, D.C. "S.E.I.U. members are waging an unprecedented effort to mobilize their co-workers and communities to elect Barack Obama. We are committed to bringing all of our resources to bear to ensure he is our next president."

Grant Burgoyne, Party official, Idaho

Stewart Burkhalter, Party official, Ala.

G.K. Butterfield, Representative, N.C. "In what has become a two-person race for the Democratic nomination, I believe our country needs Senator Barack Obama."

Carol Ann Campbell, Party official, Pa. "This used to be a Clinton city, but I don't know if this is going to be a Clinton city in this election." Referring to Obama, she added, "This is the first person I've seen on the horizon who is a wonderful example for a little black person — to set their goals higher."

Lois Capps, Representative, Calif. "This wasn't an easy decision for me. Democrats were blessed this year with many talented and capable candidates, and I believe both Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama would make fine presidents. But Sen. Obama's proven judgment, his hopeful vision for America, and his unmatched ability to motivate millions of Americans eager for change made the choice for me.""As a superdelegate, I have decided to stay neutral in the race for the time being. I deeply respect and admire both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton."

Michael E. Capuano, Representative, Mass. "I wouldn't endorse him if I didn't think he could win in November. I've seen him on the stump and as a member of the legislative body. I think he's shown the ability to be a leader and to put his nose to the grindstone and keep pushing."

Ian Carleton, Party official, Vt. "Vermonters overwhelmingly embraced Senator Obama's message of hope and change in our State's primary earlier this week, and so it is with great excitement and optimism that I pledge my support for Barack Obama. Since the very beginning of his campaign I, along with so many Vermonters, have been deeply moved by Senator Obama's commitment to moving beyond the negative partisan rhetoric that has sadly characterized our nation's politics for so long. His leadership and vision for a more productive and decent future is exactly what this nation needs at this moment in history."

Russ Carnahan, Representative, Mo.

Andre Carson, Representative, Ind. "Senator Obama, I believe, will work day and night to ensure that the U.S. government is fighting for everyday hard-working American families."

Rob Carver, Add on delegate, Del. "I strongly believe that this country needs a leader who can lead and who has a fresh and positive outlook for our future. From what I have seen and heard, Barack has those qualities and that confident outlook we so desperately need!""The more they get to know Hillary, the more they realize she is not the right choice for the Democratic party. On the other hand, Obama is having just the opposite effect. As he continues to meet with and impress the likely voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, people get a real appreciation for his character, his positive message and his compassion and sincerity. He is the Bill Clinton of 1992, not Hillary."

Bob Casey, Senator, Pa. "I believe in my heart that there is one person who's uniquely qualified to lead us in that new direction and that is Barack Obama." "I really believe that in a time of danger around the world and in division here at home, Barack Obama can lead us, he can heal us, he can help rebuild America."He said he wants to avoid creating divisions within the party by endorsing a candidate.

Donna Cassutt, Party official, Minn.

Ben Chandler, Representative, Ky. "In these tough economic times, when many in our nation and right here in Kentucky are struggling to make ends meet and to provide for their families, too much is at stake for us to do nothing. I hope all Kentuckians and citizens throughout the nation will join with me in firmly supporting Barack Obama to lead our nation to a better future and to a place of respect for our country around the world."

Will Cheek, Party official, Tenn. "If they use the power to draw the process to a close with the candidate who has momentum, that's fine with me. But if we thwart the electorate, I'm offended by that."

Martha Fuller Clark, Party official, N.H.

William Lacy Clay, Representative, Mo.

Steve Cohen, Representative, Tenn. "Senator Barack Obama is the candidate that I trust to be the agent for change that our nation so desperately needs at this time. Barack Obama is the agent of change. He will demand higher ethical standards so that the government finally belongs to the people once again, and he will bring our troops home. This nation can be proud to have such a candidate running for president."

Brian Colon, Party official, N.M. "I believe that Senator Obama has presented a positive message of change while continuing to focus on our real opponent; a John McCain presidency and another four year term of failed Bush policies."

Toby Condliffe, Party official, Dem. abroad

Kent Conrad, Senator, N.D.

Jim Cooper, Representative, Tenn.

Jerry F. Costello, Representative, Ill.

Jeanette Council, Party official, N.C. "I know that we've got to do more than just talk about solutions. We've got to get people to the point where they work together and they are involved and are inspired enough to come up with solutions."

Michael Cryor, Party official, Md. "I have been inspired by what he represents."

Chet Culver, Governor, Iowa "I believe it's clear that the American people are hungry for change. I believe they're looking for a president to push back on the special interests, and I think it's also time for a fresh new approach to governing in Washington, D.C., and believe Senator Obama represents this new approach. I do think it matters too that Iowans have spoken loudly and clearly. And because of that, in part, I felt compelled to also stand with him."

Elijah E. Cummings, Representative, Md. "This campaign is the audacity of hope. Obama will be the next president of the United States."

Barbara Flynn Currie, Add on delegate, Ill.

Jean Lemire Dahlman, Party official, Mont. "At this point, after thinking about it long and hard, I would like to endorse Barack Obama." "I would just like to honor the Montana primary votes by saying that I would reconsider if there were a significant difference in the outcome on June 3." "I don't feel lukewarm about endorsing Obama. His leadership potential is amazing, and he has brought so many new people into politics."

Richard M. Daley, Add on delegate, Ill. "Of course, I'm endorsing Sen. Obama. He has made that decision and I think this is an exciting time for the country. It brings a new voice in regards to what is taking place far too long in Washington, D.C., the lack of moving the agenda forward in regard to the quality of life for the people of America."

Tom A. Daschle, Party official, S.D.

John Davies, Party official, Alaska [Referring to the role of longtime party activists as unpledged delegates] "The original intent by the party was to provide some long-term perspective on who should be the nominee."

Artur Davis, Representative, Ala. "What tonight shows, in every part of this state, in black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods, in every part of this state, people believed in this man."

Yvonne Davis, Party official, Tex.

Danny K. Davis, Representative, Ill.

Celita Arroyo de Roques, Party official, P.R.

Lois M. DeBerry, Party official, Tenn.

Peter A. DeFazio, Representative, Ore. "Senator Obama has proven he is able to energize young Americans, independents and even moderate Republicans to support his candidacy." "I believe he represents our best hope of winning in November.""You both claim to be better suited than the other to take on the so-called Straight-Talk Express, so prove it. Run the next six weeks of your campaign against McCain, not against the other Democrat. Go after McCain for his policy positions, not the other Democrat for theirs. Allow the Democratic voters to believe in a campaign that can provide a new direction for this country and stop McCain from continuing the failed policies of the Bush Administration. In the end, it is the candidate who can take the fight to McCain and win that deserves my support and, most importantly, the support of the Democratic Party.""This has never come up in my political lifetime. I have no idea how this will play out."

John deJongh, Governor, V.I.

Bill Delahunt, Representative, Mass. "The election of Barack Obama will restore America's image in the world and also reaffirm our claim to moral authority." "It will enhance our national security and our national interest."

Rosa DeLauro, Representative, Conn.

Arrington Dixon, Party official, D.C.

Christopher J. Dodd, Senator, Conn.

Lloyd Doggett, Representative, Tex. "Whether Obama or Clinton lead the ticket, it will be historic. I welcome the opportunity to work with both."

Byron L. Dorgan, Senator, N.D.

James E. Doyle, Governor, Wis. "Obama listens to competing points of view, but makes strong decisions; he identifies problems, and builds coalitions to confront them; and he inspires people to come together behind a vision of change. He has campaigned like he will govern, by bringing people together and inspiring average Americans to participate in the political process so that we can take on the special interests and the great challenges we face."

Martin Dunleavy, Party official, Conn.

Richard J. Durbin, Senator, Ill.

Mary Ellen Early, Party official, Calif.

Al Edwards, Party official, Tex.

Chet Edwards, Representative, Tex. "It's not Senator Clinton's fault, but the baggage she carries is the divisiveness of the 1990s. People are wanting to turn the chapter to the future rather than going back to the last chapter. It's not fair but that is the reality."

Keith Ellison, Representative, Minn. "Obama supporters were ecstatic about the explosion of democracy we saw."

Anna G. Eshoo, Representative, Calif. "Senator Obama's candidacy is historic, and so is the reaction to it. He has brought thousands of disaffected and skeptical people back into the political process, and he has struck a chord with thousands of young voters. Still more are poised to participate in the days ahead. Barack Obama is a true son of America."

Edward Espinoza, Party official, Calif. "This needs to be over and done with by Memorial Day."

Kathleen Fahey, Party official, Neb. "I think he's the one who could come up with something different in terms of being able to handle the nation's problems. It was a difficult decision because if there is any woman so qualified to be a great president, it would be Hillary. But you either love her or you hate her, and I don't think she could get elected in November."

Eni F.H. Faleomavaega, Party official, Am. Samoa "I have nothing against Hillary and respect her very much for her leadership and services to our country, but I believe Obama's style of leadership and his ability to bring people from all different walks of life and political persuasions is what our country needs right now."

Chaka Fattah, Representative, Pa. "This is a transformational moment in the history of America." Obama "motivates ordinary Americans to accomplish extraordinary things."

Adrian M. Fenty, Party official, D.C.

Charlene Fernandez, Party official, Ariz. "Senator Barack Obama is strengthening the Democratic Party by bringing in new voters, young and old, into the process. I believe Senator Obama has the best ability to win the White House in November and lead this country forward."

Michael L. Fitzgerald, Party official, Iowa "Endorsing a candidate this early is no ordinary occurrence in the Iowa caucuses — but Barack Obama is no ordinary candidate. He spoke out in opposition to the war in Iraq before it started, and today he has an aggressive plan to redeploy our troops out of Iraq by the end of March of 2008. We believe that Senator Obama has the vision to meet the challenges America faces, and that his message of hope and unity will lead us to a new kind of politics where we are not defined by our divisions but united by our love of country."

Stephen Fontana, Party official, Conn.

Bill Foster, Representative, Ill.

Carol Khare Fowler, Party official, S.C. She said she will base her decision on who she thinks is most likely to win in November, and "I don't have the answer to that yet."

Ken Foxworth, Party official, Minn.

Kalyn Free, Party official, Okla. "Barack Obama is a once-in-a-generation kind of leader and the best hope the American people have to rebuild the erosion our collective foundation has endured the last eight years. In 2008, we must elect a President who will restore our faith in the possibilities of each and every American, including the First Americans."

Dave Freudenthal, Governor, Wyo. "The negativity, partisanship and lack of purpose that characterize our national debate and government are crippling this country." "While no one individual can effect this change alone, the change must begin with someone. Senator Obama is the Democratic candidate with the openness, honesty and skill to end this vicious cycle of business as usual."

John Gage, Party official, Md. "Our people, I think, recognize the enthusiasm and vitality behind Senator Obama's campaign."

Alexandra Gallardo-Rooker, Party official, Calif.

Eric Garcetti, Party official, Calif.

Liv Gibbons, Party official, Dem. abroad

Parris N. Glendening, Add on delegate, Md. "I do not have anything against Senator Clinton. I just think Obama would provide the fundamental change we need."

Lauren D. Glover, Party official, Md. [Saying she based her decision to endorse Obama on his lead in pledged delegates and popular votes, she called him the best candidate to] "move our country past where we are now."

Charlie Gonzalez, Representative, Tex. "I think as people get to see him up close and personal, they will be moved and they will be inspired."

Enid Goubeaux, Party official, Ohio "I am endorsing Sen. Obama because his message, 'Yes we can' has inspired so many voters, especially younger voters, to take part in shaping our country's future."

Al Green, Representative, Tex.

Christine Gregoire, Governor, Wash. "He is leading us toward a positive feeling of hope in our country, and I love seeing that happen. I believe the nation faces significant challenges domestically and internationally and Obama is the person who has the ability to reach across artificial divides and move our national forward. Barack is that kind of leader."

Janice Griffin, Party official, Md.

Raoul M. Grijalva, Representative, Ariz. "The best opportunity to win in November rests with Senator Obama. I am proud to support Senator Obama as we move forward toward the nomination. This election is not merely about moving the pieces around in Washington, D.C., but to fundamentally change the rules of the game. I am proud to help Senator Obama work toward that change."

Stan Gruszynski, Party official, Wis. "Senator Obama will bring the change we need here in Wisconsin and across America to strengthen the middle class and standing for regular Americans." "From saving jobs from being sent overseas and creating new ones for our hard-working families, to creating universal health care and making college affordable to all, Senator Obama is a leader who will change America."

Luis V. Gutierrez, Representative, Ill. "In December of 2006, when he invited me to his office to talk about running for president [Mr. Obama asked] what do you think Luis, would you support me? And I said absolutely."

Dan Hannaher, Add on delegate, N.D. "Because Barack here won with 61 percent of the vote in a February 5th caucus, that brought out unprecedented numbers of new voters to the caucuses. He'll expand the map if he's the nominee and not start discounting the states before the race even starts."

Phil Hare, Representative, Ill.

Fred R. Harris, Party official, N.M. "I'll be [for] Obama for as long as he's in the race, unless he withdraws, which I don't expect."

Inola Henry, Party official, Calif.

Brad Henry, Governor, Okla. "Senator Obama is uniquely positioned to unite our nation and move beyond the divisiveness and partisan skirmishes that too often characterize politics as usual in Washington."

Stephanie Herseth, Representative, S.D. "I hope the superdelegates are not the ones deciding. It should be the pledged delegates who should be deciding."

Baron P. Hill, Representative, Ind. "Some have advised me to be cautious, to wait and see which way the electoral winds may blow. I confess that I have listened to those voices and been tempted by their reasoning. But, the stakes are just too high. We cannot continue to pursue the same politics of personal destruction we have engaged in for a generation, some never-ending 'groundhog day' endlessly playing out the cultural wars of forty years ago." "I believe Senator Obama has the capability to change the tone and tenor of politics in Washington."

Mazie K. Hirono, Representative, Hawaii

Paul W. Hodes, Representative, N.H.

Wayne Holland, Party official, Utah "Sen. Obama has helped to energize our State Party. Obama was clearly the choice of Utah Democrats on Feb. 5 and is the choice of the majority of Utah Democratic candidates to head the ticket in November. While it is not only important for me to reflect the sentiment of our Party, I also have a responsibility to endorse the candidate whom I believe will help unite the many voices of our 'big tent' Utah Party and help us build for the future.""I've always been pragmatic. I'll vote for what I think is best for the party."

Steven Horsford, Party official, Nev. "I think that the majority of the delegates — those that are representative of voters of states — should decide who the nominee is."

Constance Howard, Party official, Ill.

Waring Howe, Party official, S.C. "While I have great respect for the other two major candidates, Barack Obama has consistently demonstrated that he's the one candidate in this race who can move us past a '50 percent plus 1' politics and build a new, working majority to deliver change we can believe in. With him at the top of the ticket, Democrats will have a candidate they can run with, not run from."

Therese L. Hunkin, Party official, Am. Samoa

Thomas C. Hynes, Party official, Ill.

Jesse L. Jackson, Representative, Ill.

Wilber Lee Jeffcoat, Party official, S.C. Has said he could stay unpledged until the convention and that he was concerned about "taking away what the people back home voted."

Ben L. Jeffers, Party official, La.

Tim Johnson, Senator, S.D. "He is bipartisan and insists on bridging the difference between parties. That's what I see in him."

Denise Johnson, Party official, Tex.

Eddie Bernice Johnson, Party official, Tex. "Senator Obama's campaign has generated interest in young Americans who have never before been involved in politics. American needs these young people not only for their vote in this election, but for their continued participation in the future of our country."

Hank Johnson, Representative, Ga.

Emil Jones, Party official, Ill. "Barack Obama has spent 20 years delivering change we can believe in to communities across Illinois." "Every time we needed his help, Barack Obama stood up for us, and we need to stand up for him by voting on Feb. 5 to elect Barack our next president."

Raymond Jordan, Party official, Mass.

Peter Jorgensen, Party official, Wyo. "Having lived over 70 years and been down [in Cheyenne] six years, I know we need to tip the wheelbarrow over." "We need real change." "My inclination is to stick it out to the end." Saying you will support whoever wins your state "is a very popular thing to say until it comes down to analysis of who can win against McCain."

Steve Kagen, Representative, Wis. "What I plan to do is listen to the will of the people in my district. As they go, so will I."

Tim Kaine, Governor, Va. "Barack's success indicates his broad support and his ability to appeal to folks from across the political spectrum."

Edward M. Kennedy, Senator, Mass. "I'm not only supporting Barack because of what he has done. What counts in our leadership is not the length of years in Washington, but the reach of our vision, the strength of our beliefs, and that rare quality of mind and spirit that can call forth the best in our country and our people. That's why I'm most excited about the promise of President Obama."

Patrick J. Kennedy, Representative, R.I.

John Kerry, Senator, Mass. "I believe more than anyone else, Barack Obama can help our country turn the page and get America moving by uniting and ending the division we have faced."

Jane V. Kidd, Party official, Ga. "In Georgia, we're making grassroots voter contact our top priority in 2008, and I'm convinced that Senator Obama shares our dedication to neighbor-to-neighbor contact. I strongly believe that having Senator Obama as our nominee puts Georgia into play, and I know that, as the nominee, he will invest in our efforts to turn Georgia blue this year."

E. Lee Kinch, Party official, Kan.

Ron Kind, Representative, Wis. Has announced that his vote at the convention would go to whoever wins his district. "No person, regardless of position or office, should have his or her vote count more than anyone else's."

Paul G. Kirk, Party official, Mass. "After the attention paid to the poisonous and polarizing diatribe of recent days, Senator Obama's clear and compelling message which appeals to our best instincts as Americans is more important than ever. For all these reasons, I heartily endorse Senator Obama and hope my colleagues will do the same.""Once the contests are over, do the math. By mid-June, we must unite behind the candidate who has won the most delegates under a process we all understood and approved in advance. After eight years of Bush-Cheney, if we cannot unite our constituencies behind the Democratic nominee, shame on us!"

Amy Klobuchar, Senator, Minn. "I am endorsing Barack because he is a new kind of leader -- speaking with a different voice, bringing a new perspective and inspiring a real excitement from the American people. He is able to dissolve the hard cynical edge that has dominated our politics under the Bush Administration." "The energy that Barack has unleashed is impossible to contain."

John Knutson, Party official, Me. "It is clear that this presidential campaign will come down to a race for delegates, and I believe that by pledging to support the winner of Maine's caucuses, I will help to increase Maine's importance in the nomination process."

Frank LaMere, Party official, Neb.

Rick Larsen, Representative, Wash. "For me, what happened in North Carolina and Indiana ended up being a game changer." "Especially in Indiana where he came back after getting hit hard for a couple of weeks.""If I need to exercise my vote as a superdelegate in order to have a nominee this fall, then I will. I believe the grass roots of the party should select the candidate. The grass-roots process is not done. We should let it finish."

John B. Larson, Representative, Conn.

Nancy Larson, Party official, Minn. "I just think they are both wonderful candidates. Its been really difficult for me to make up my mind." "But I think the thing that really swung me over to Obama was his wonderful grassroots type of campaigning and the number of people he's got helping him out and supporting him.""They never anticipated that we would have two superstars locked in a dead heat, so I think there is no playbook for this." She hopes a decision gets made "before we have to step in."

Patrick J. Leahy, Senator, Vt. "Many around the world have lost respect for America and the hope that America once gave them. That's a tragedy. We need a president who can reintroduce America to the world and reintroduce America to ourselves."

Barbara Lee, Representative, Calif. "I am convinced that Senator Obama is the candidate who is a real agent of change; a man who can lead our nation in this young century in a new, progressive and positive direction. This century cries for social, environmental, diplomatic, global, and neighborhood solutions to the misery that confronts far too many people in our own country and around the globe. Senator Obama promises leadership to meet these challenges."

John Lewis, Representative, Ga. "In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit." "Something is happening in America and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap." "I've been very impressed with the campaign of Senator Obama. He's getting better and better every single day."

Cordelia Lewis-Burks, Party official, Ind.

Daniel Lipinski, Representative, Ill.

Dave Loebsack, Representative, Iowa "In a field of strong candidates, Barack is the strongest. What impresses me about Barack is his commitment to changing the way business is done in Washington. He understands that to pass universal health care, make energy independence a reality, and meet the other challenges we face, we need leadership that can bring all Americans together around a shared purpose."

Zoe Lofgren, Representative, Calif. "This year, above all, we need inspiration. We need a candidate and president who will summon us to unity, who will allow us to believe that America is a country whose ideals and principles matter and a country whose exceptional history can once again serve as a beacon of hope for the world."

Mary Long, Party official, Ga. "After careful thought, it is my honor today to endorse Sen. Barack Obama who day by day and state by state is challenging politics as usual and engaging so many new, diverse, Democratic voters -- voters who will propel Sen. Obama to victory in November and help elect great Democrats at the state and local level. As a delegate in August, I choose to be on the side of Georgians and on the side of history as I cast my vote for Barack Obama."

Leon Lynch, Party official, Pa.

Patrick Lynch, Party official, R.I. "The spirit, energy, intelligence, vision and inspiration that he offers is what our country needs right now."

Richard Machacek, Party official, Iowa "I think it needs to be over, and in good conscience, I can't fly in the face of my precinct, county and district. The raw numbers coming out of the district conventions really sat me down hard."

Michael Madigan, Party official, Ill. "For people who have had an opportunity to work with him and to see him and observe him, they are prepared to trust him with the most important office in the land."

Mark Mallory, Party official, Ohio

Debbie Marquez, Party official, Colo.

Iris Y. Martinez, Party official, Ill. "I really believe that, you know, we are headed towards a change in this country and I think the only one who can lead us there is going to be Barack Obama."

Jim Maxson, Party official, N.D.

Claire McCaskill, Senator, Mo.

Jennifer L. McClellan, Party official, Va. "My role is to vote in what is the best interest for my party as a whole."

Betty McCollum, Representative, Minn.

Rhine L. McLin, Party official, Ohio "I said all along that however Dayton and Montgomery County went, that's how I would use my superdelegate. I'm going with how the area went. That's my story and I'm sticking to it."

Jerry Meek, Party official, N.C.

John Melcher, Party official, Mont.

Brian Melendez, Party official, Minn.

Moses Mercado, Party official, Tex. "I thought he was the right candidate for the country."

Brad Miller, Representative, N.C.

George Miller, Representative, Calif. "Barack has the skills and experience that's necessary to really challenge the status quo in Washington, D.C. I'm very encouraged by the energy of the people responding to him and his vision of how people can come together to solve the problems that confront us."

John A. Millin, Party official, Wyo. "If Barack Obama is the Democratic presidential nominee, we will be the party of new ideas that understands that a united America will be much better able to address the serious problems facing our country than a divided America. If Hillary Clinton is our party's nominee, every Democratic candidate in Wyoming will be painted with that same liberal, big-government brush. We will also be the target of the locker room jokes that rightfully belong to Bill Clinton."

Susan Montee, Add on delegate, Mo.

Dannie Montgomery, Party official, N.C.

Gwen Moore, Representative, Wis.

James P. Moran, Representative, Va.

Mee Moua, Party official, Minn.

Patrick J. Murphy, Representative, Pa. "I am inspired by Senator Obama's call to service and believe he is best suited to bring about the changes we need in our country."

Christopher S. Murphy, Representative, Conn.

Janet Napolitano, Governor, Ariz. "I think we need fresh voices and fresh messages of unity and coming together. I think he's a new, young voice who has new appeal, particularly for those of us in the West."

Sonny Nardi, Party official, Ohio

Ben Nelson, Senator, Neb.

Nick Nemec, Party official, S.D. "South Dakota is a pretty bright red state, and I think a lot of South Dakota Democrats were sick of being beat around the head and shoulders with the Clinton name."

Mary Jo Neville, Party official, Md.

WASHINGTON -- Jeff Radjewski of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers is pretty sure he's backing Barack Obama. Same goes for Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano and Oakland County Commissioner Eric Coleman.

"Probably get the letter out next week," said Coleman.

All three are undecided superdelegates -- a group of Democrats virtually assured of deciding whether Obama or Hillary Clinton becomes the party's presidential nominee. While their support isn't written in stone, it suggests an unmistakable momentum swing.

On Thursday, that shift was evident when former U.S. Rep. David Bonior of Mt. Clemens endorsed Obama. Though he's not a superdelegate, Bonior, who has deep ties to organized labor and ran John Edwards' failed presidential campaign, could help sway those who are.

He called Obama the "one candidate who has proven he can bring the kind of change to Washington that will mean more jobs, better pay for American workers and health care for every single American."

Meanwhile, Michigan party leaders said they would move ahead with a plan to ask the Democratic National Committee to seat their disallowed delegation with 69 delegates going to Clinton and 59 to Obama even though Clinton -- who would have won 73 delegates if the results of the Jan. 15 primary had counted -- rejected it.

Although Obama's 14-point victory in North Carolina this week and the 2-point win Clinton eked out in Indiana appeared to make it almost impossible for her to catch him in the delegate count, many superdelegates still aren't prepared to decide the contest.

Michigan has 29 superdelegates; 27 have been named and two more will be appointed next month by state party Chairman Mark Brewer, if the state's disallowed delegation is reseated. Of those superdelegates, seven have endorsed Clinton, including Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Sen. Debbie Stabenow and Rep. John Dingell. Two are backing Obama: Rep. John Conyers and DNC member Virgie Rollins.

Of the undecided, the Free Press found three leaning strongly Obama's way, none who said they were moving toward backing Clinton and many who are outwardly or apparently waiting for more signals or the naming of a nominee.

The UAW, for instance, hasn't endorsed a candidate, and the union's two superdelegates aren't likely to make a pick public until it does. The same is true for other unions represented by superdelegates, like the National Education Association, which represents teachers.

Other superdelegates, such as U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, National Committeewoman Debbie Dingell, Reps. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick and Bart Stupak, and Brewer weren't expected to make a selection at least until the state's delegation is seated. The state lost its regular delegates because it scheduled an early primary.

"I'm going to wait," Levin said Thursday.

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has a vote, too. His spokeswoman said Thursday, "He's talked to both campaigns and it's not going to be hard for him to make a decision, but he's not ready to make an announcement."

Rick Weiner, former chief of staff to Granholm and former head of the state party, said he has a preference but won't reveal it; not yet, not even to his wife. And Southfield Mayor Brenda Lawrence said she's close but wants to wait for one more primary -- next Tuesday's vote in West Virginia.

It may have been telling, though, when she said: "The numbers have to be there for a nominee."

Lauren Wolfe, a 25-year-old University of Detroit Mercy law student, is president of College Democrats of America, and she's appealing to students on YouTube.com for advice on who to back.

Radjewski, of IBEW Local 58 in Detroit, said he had been leaning toward Obama and "Tuesday really strengthened that." Making his decision official, he said, was a matter of making sure the people he represents know who he intends to back.

"I wanted to support the candidate who could best win in the fall," he said.

Said Ficano: "It's reaching a point where it seems the math is going to be difficult at best and is looking almost impossible" for Clinton.

The Wayne County executive was waiting to work out details before making an announcement.

As for Coleman, he'd pretty much made up his mind that Obama represents the fresh start the nation needs.

"All you've got to do is add up all the delegates from all the remaining elections and she still comes up short," he said.

• Watch Lauren Wolfe's YouTube video

Obama Now Takes The Lead in Superdelegates Too

Zax — Sat, 10 May 2008 10:24:29 EDT
    Obama Now Takes The Lead in Superdelegates Too
ABC News' Karen Travers Reports: For the first time this campaign season, Barack Obama has surpassed Hillary Clinton's support among superdelegates, according to the ABC News delegate estimate.
Sen. Obama, D-Ill., picked up two superdelegates this morning giving him a new metric to tout in addition to his current commanding leads in pledged delegates, popular votes, states won, and money raised.
Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., switched his endorsement from Clinton to Obama and Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., endorsed Obama. DeFazio was previously uncommitted.
With these endorsements, Obama has the support of 267 superdelegates and Clinton has 265 superdelegates.
Every news organization's superdelegate count is a little different because it is an imperfect science. Since October 2007, the Political Unit has continuously reached out to the nearly 800 superdelegates to determine their candidate preference. We also reach out regularly to the Obama and Clinton campaigns for their superdelegate lists and work to confirm any that they include on their lists.
Clinton’s advantage among superdelegates was once massive and has been dwindling steadily since Super Tuesday, when she was ahead by over 60 superdelegates.
Clinton’s institutional support from within the Democratic Party allowed her to build a commanding lead in superdelegates over Obama in the early part of this nomination battle.
Despite several rough weeks on the campaign trail, Obama has maintained momentum in picking up superdelegates. Obama has outpaced Clinton at every marker of this campaign since Super Tuesday -- after the controversial comments of Rev. Wright came out, after Clinton’s big win in Pennsylvania and after the Indiana and North Carolina primaries.

Missing You All At mybrackobama.com

Zax — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:38:40 EDT

Hi everybody. Sorry I've been out for a while. i've been very busy caring for my 24 year old son. He was critically injured in an accident on his job close to three years ago. A forklift he was driving tipped over onto him. He has been going through surgery after surgery since then. He just recently had another surgery and is schuled for another surgery yet in about a month. Hopefully this will be his last one. I haven't forgot about my blog here on Obama.com, I just haven't had the time or mind set to concentrate on my blog recently. I will attempt to post at lease one blog day for now. Thank you all who read my blog and/or wondered what may have happened to me.
Zax
sTAY iN pEACE


Missing You All At mybrackobama.com

Zax — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:36:53 EDT

Hi everybody. Sorry I've been out for a while. i've been very busy caring for my 24 year old son. He was critically injured in an accident on his job close to three years ago. A forklift he was driving tipped over onto him. He has been going through surgery after surgery since then. He just recently had another surgery and is schuled for another surgery yet in about a month. Hopefully this will be his last one. I haven't forgot about my blog here on Obama.com, I just haven't had the time or mind set to concentrate on my blog recently. I will attempt to post at lease one blog day for now. Thank you all who read my blog and/or wondered what may have happened to me.
Zax
sTAY iN pEACE


Missing You All At mybrackobama.com

Zax — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:19:18 EDT

Hi everybody. Sorry I've been out for a while. i've been very busy caring for my 24 year old son. He was critically injured in an accident on his job close to three years ago. A forklift he was driving tipped over onto him. He has been going through surgery after surgery since then. He just recently had another surgery and is schuled for another surgery yet in about a month. Hopefully this will be his last one. I haven't forgot about my blog here on Obama.com, I just haven't had the time or mind set to concentrate on my blog recently. I will attempt to post at lease one blog day for now. Thank you all who read my blog and/or wondered what may have happened to me.
Zax
sTAY iN pEACE


Missing You All At mybrackobama.com

Zax — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:12:28 EDT

Hi everybody. Sorry I've been out for a while. i've been very busy caring for my 24 year old son. He was critically injured in an accident on his job close to three years ago. A forklift he was driving tipped over onto him. He has been going through surgery after surgery since then. He just recently had another surgery and is schuled for another surgery yet in about a month. Hopefully this will be his last one. I haven't forgot about my blog here on Obama.com, I just haven't had the time or mind set to concentrate on my blog recently. I will attempt to post at lease one blog day for now. Thank you all who read my blog and/or wondered what may have happened to me.
Zax
sTAY iN pEACE


Missing You All At mybrackobama.com

Zax — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:10:43 EDT

Hi everybody. Sorry I've been out for a while. i've been very busy caring for my 24 year old son. He was critically injured in an accident on his job close to three years ago. A forklift he was driving tipped over onto him. He has been going through surgery after surgery since then. He just recently had another surgery and is schuled for another surgery yet in about a month. Hopefully this will be his last one. I haven't forgot about my blog here on Obama.com, I just haven't had the time or mind set to concentrate on my blog recently. I will attempt to post at lease one blog day for now. Thank you all who read my blog and/or wondered what may have happened to me.
Zax
sTAY iN pEACE


Missing You All At mybrackobama.com

Zax — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:08:35 EDT

Hi everybody. Sorry I've been out for a while. i've been very busy caring for my 24 year old son. He was critically injured in an accident on his job close to three years ago. A forklift he was driving tipped over onto him. He has been going through surgery after surgery since then. He just recently had another surgery and is schuled for another surgery yet in about a month. Hopefully this will be his last one. I haven't forgot about my blog here on Obama.com, I just haven't had the time or mind set to concentrate on my blog recently. I will attempt to post at lease one blog day for now. Thank you all who read my blog and/or wondered what may have happened to me.
Zax
sTAY iN pEACE


Missing You All At mybrackobama.com

Zax — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:06:35 EDT

Hi everybody. Sorry I've been out for a while. i've been very busy caring for my 24 year old son. He was critically injured in an accident on his job close to three years ago. A forklift he was driving tipped over onto him. He has been going through surgery after surgery since then. He just recently had another surgery and is schuled for another surgery yet in about a month. Hopefully this will be his last one. I haven't forgot about my blog here on Obama.com, I just haven't had the time or mind set to concentrate on my blog recently. I will attempt to post at lease one blog day for now. Thank you all who read my blog and/or wondered what may have happened to me.
Zax
sTAY iN pEACE


Missing You All At mybrackobama.com

Zax — Sat, 10 May 2008 08:53:56 EDT

Hi everybody. Sorry I've been out for a while. i've been very busy caring for my 24 year old son. He was critically injured in an accident on his job close to three years ago. A forklift he was driving tipped over onto him. He has been going through surgery after surgery since then. He just recently had another surgery and is schuled for another surgery yet in about a month. Hopefully this will be his last one. I haven't forgot about my blog here on Obama.com, I just haven't had the time or mind set to concentrate on my blog recently. I will attempt to post at lease one blog day for now. Thank you all who read my blog and/or wondered what may have happened to me.
Zax
sTAY iN pEACE



A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (1)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 05:00:34 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's what folks are saying:

Wonderful author. Wonderful work of theater. Wonderful candidate. WONDERFUL IDEA!!! (Nathan)

I'm passionate about Obama and I like roses a bunch (AND I live in Portland, which is The City of Roses), so I will follow suit and adorn myself with roses from now on :o) (Nancy)

Great idea, i like the peace rose......a real beauty. (T.)

I have been looking for a way to show my support for Barack, without getting into peoples face, this idea is perfect,thank you and I will be wearing a rose from now until he is in the white house. (Joyce)

I'll be glad to wear a rose for Barack! What a wonderful idea. Thank you. (Merrilee)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (3)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:58:36 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's evem more of what folks are saying:

Great idea! I will start wearing my rose today! (Lee Ann)

As a lifelong Malian, I am proud that we're battling marginalization based on ethnic names. It is a sorry fact that in the narrow view of many who advocate the culture wars, the beauty of a name with an interesting or diverse history is completely invisible. Let's reverse that by celebrating what a great name Hussein is - hey, my uncle is named Hasan and he's a Chinese Christian (Jasmine)

Nice idea (Jessica)

Of course! Thank you for such a simple,effective way to undermine the negativity! Blessings, (Cassie)
Although I do not wear pins. I did use your icon with a link back to the event several times. Thanks, (Mary)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (4)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:50:04 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Some more of what folks are saying:

I'll wear a rose (Connie)

What an awesome idea !! I will proudly wear a rose !! (Dawn)

I am very surprised that this is an issue. Equal opportunity and a right to pursue happiness, justice for all? I have believed in this ever since I read the U.S. constitution a couple of decades ago. It never mentioned only folks with Western, Christian names were included in the equation. There is a lot in a name, and for me, Barack Hussein Obama as the name for the one who is uniting us is the best name there can be. I will wear my rose proudly! (Kirsten)

Great Idea (Karanja)

i like this..thank you (Roseann)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (5)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:49:13 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's what folks are saying:

I love this idea. I will wear a rose proudly wherever I go and welcome the chance to explain why I'm wearing it. Thank you for organizing this. (Jody)

Great idea. I love it. Will pass the word. sTAY iN pEACE (Zax)

Finally, an event that does not require a gas guzzler to attend! (Karen)

simply brilliant! (Julie)

This is an amazing idea. You are doing a wonderful thing! (Holly)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (6)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:48:11 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
More feedback. Why? The more, the merrier!

Thanks - I dehydrate and preserve roses ... so this is a special action with many blessings. With Love - (Devavati)

I won't be able to do it constantly but I will make an effort to do it some and to explain to people what it stands for and why I am doing it. (George)

great idea! (Darlene)

Great idea! (Kristine)

I still have hope in my heart. "I'm In" for the duration. (Elizabeth)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (7)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:47:31 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's evem more of what folks are saying:

Great idea! (Tresa)

I will proudly being wearing a rose pin - the National Flower of the United States right next to my Obama '08 pin! What a beautiful idea! (Christine)

YES! A rose indeed will sit on my desk as a reminder. Now until election day!!! (Bethany)

How sweet it is!!! (Kathleen)

A beautiful idea, and I imagine very effective. I'm looking forward to responding to questions about it! (Lauren)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (8)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:46:15 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Some more of what folks are saying:

I love Roses! I will spread the word! (Vicki)

Thank you for this wonderful idea! :) Greetings from Brazil to you! (Marta)

I am glad to be part of this Movement with all the special people of this country (Roxanna)

This is a great idea. We need all the ideas that we can think of to keep the energy moving for this future of our country! (Mikel)

Thanks ... a great idea. (Joyce)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (9)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:45:22 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's what folks are saying:

Hi! I've been trying to find an origami folding instruction on how to make a rose. None of the books I've looked at have one. Can you send us diagrams and instructions please? Thanks (Elizabeth)

Lovely idea! (Denise)

Great idea, even though I feel the negativity is stupid. Would anyone think that Barack was a serial killer if his middle name was Ted (Bundy)? Someone should clue in England as well. After all Prince Charles carries the same first name as "Manson". My mother, neice, and myself will be wearing a different color rose on our lapels for each day of the week. Obama Supporter (Lisa)

What a wonderful idea! We need to find a way to carry it through to the general election!! Let me know if I can help! (Jill)

Great, easy way to talk about this message! Thanks (Martha)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (10)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:44:31 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
More feedback. Why? The more, the merrier!

Thanks! (Adam)

What the American people, especially me, the disinterested voter, truly cares about is the integrity and intelligence of Senator Obama. For sure, he will still be the inspiring leader that he is even if you change his name to John Doe! Let us reframe the issue surrounding Senator Obama's middle name. Won't it be something if we all, supporters of the Senator Obama Movement, put "Hussein" as we blog or log in into our webpages as our middle name? That will send our message to the entire nation and to the world at large for all Americans worldwide to see that his integrity and concern to change the government to a good is what matters! We all know that what really matters is the content of his character. Shakespeare said so! "Barack Obama, regardless of his name, would still be the same leader who has inspired a whole nation with hope and instilled in us a real sense of agency by his exemplary dedication to public service." As what the Senator said, "Let's all SPEAK for the best interest of our country

This is the best idea I have heard since a few minutes ago when Barack said in response to Hillary's offer of VP that He was running to be COMMANDER IN CHIEF !!!!!!!!! I am thrilled to be a rose wearer for this important purpose and will pass the invitation along to my groups. I recieved the email smear the day before the New Hamshire Primary and have been waging my fight for the truth ever since. It is great to have so many united for this purpose. I want to send Michelle and the girls and dozen roses on March 11 at 12:oo a.m. (Karen Chapman)

Beautiful idea.(Amylouise)

God Bless You! (Phoenix)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (11)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:43:49 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's evem more of what folks are saying:

I think this is just a wonderful idea! Thanks for thinking of it! I will wear my rose with PRIDE! At my county convention, that is!!! GO HOPE!!! (Mindy)

Be safe, strong, and encouraged! (George)

This is an AWESOME idea! Could I put this link on our website which will be dedicated to all efforts to support Sen. Obama. It is called nationforchange.com and will be up this week. I would also like to add this link to on our Facebook Group called "Nation for Change --Yes We Can" page? If you would e-mail me personally to let me know, I would greatly appreciate it. (Tracy)

Love the idea and we are in. Beautiful!!! (Laura)

Awesome! (Diana)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (12)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:43:07 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Some more of what folks are saying:

Awesome Idea!

I'll wear my rose at work (barn yard) on my coveralls at the store and to church (Ronald)

His middle name comes from a HERO of ancient Islam. Husayn same as Hassein/Hussein, common as "JACK" or "JOHN" in the western world, the whole idea of demonising him for that name is stupid. Don't feed the problem, teach the truth. (Jeff)

This is very timely. I was just leaving El Paso after having volunteered with the camppaing there. I was carrying a large Obama poster. A man in the security line loudly asked me "Is that Obama or Osama?" I really even louder, I don't care if his name is Mohammed or Sadam he IS THE BEST PERSON WE COULD HAVE AS PRESIDENT! I got quite a few laughs for my boldness! (Maria Julianna)

I hope everyone ROSE to the occasion... (Gordon)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (13)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:42:23 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's what folks are saying:

OK where is this? I'll wear my rose tomorrow (Patricia)

I will have silk roses for all of our guests at our Phone bank to PA this weekend in San Jose, Ca 95123. Great idea! I will type up a paper with your explanation and distribute to my guests. I will also distribute at eh California State convention on Mar 27 (Mari)

I shall wear it with honor! (Peter)

I will wear a silk red, white, and blue rose with pride! (Brandon)

Personally I see no reason to somehow try to submit to the bigots out there. Hussein is a fine name, it is the name his parents gave him, and as such should wear with pride. (Kristin)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (14)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:41:27 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
More feedback. Why? The more, the merrier!

I found a nice enamael red rose pin and am wearing it with pride! (Jessica)

I've pinned a rose pin from the Rose Bowl right next to my Women for Obama pin. (Janet)

Fired Up! (Michelle)

COUNT ME IN!!! (Evelyn)

The problem is some people don't know a rose even when they smell one! (Arlenia)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (15)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:40:41 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's evem more of what folks are saying:

What a great idea. I love it. A suggestion for campaign fundraising would be to sell lapel pins, maybe even use Barack's logo-they could sell them on his website. (Lisa)

Delightful idea. Thinking I'd like to go for a walk through the Rose Garden at our White House with We The People and President Obama. Anyone care to join me? (Joanie)

Thank you.I agree entirely with these sentiments and will get my rose ready! (Joan)

Getting out the lapel! (Finn)

Nice, positive action. Please consider the issue of addressing poverty across ALL of america - and increasing economic insecurity (ie. a slippery slope to poverty). Its a BIG (2 century old) role in race relations of this country. (Sarah)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (16)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:39:47 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Some more of what folks are saying:

The rose idea is a lovely one and gives us a chance to share our feelings of support for Obama with those who comment on the lovely flower!Have an awesome day! (Denise)

A rose will bloom in the highlands of Scotland, in the snow. Obama's message is clear and sound, Scotland also needs to examine its dealings with lobbyists and the new level of accepted corruption of big buiness at every level. The intergrity of Obama's message makes us all consider the reasons why numbers of those voting in elections is falling in my country. The effect that the USA has in a world context is felt here. This man must win for us all. We have the chance ourselves to do this at last. (Hazel)

I wore a rose pinned to my dress collar at church a week ago. After I signed up for your event I could not wait to purchase my roses. I told my friend about your event because I thought it was such a great idea! (Becky)

Amen (Roy)

This is so awesome!!! (Sherri)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (17)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:38:51 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's what folks are saying:

I believe I have a rose pin at home. I'll be sure to add it to my wardrobe. (Casi)

A great idea--one that shows that we are all different and therefore, symbols convey different meanings for us. A rose as the national flower speaks to me of inherent beauty. Perhaps the peace rose would be a good pin instead of a flag lapel pin when the flag has been used to support war and violence in so many instances. How creative that we can support a candidate whose beautiful name can not be used to denigrate or demonize him but instead to reflect the content of his character. (Susan)

Absolutely, as a landscaper I can really go to town on this one! (Amanda)

Thanks!!! :) Great Graphic! (Shelley)

I just bought a pretty red rose pin that I will start wearing everyday when I go out of the house. Count me in! (Michele)

I will not be able to attend - But I will help spread the word. Also - a simple suggestion - How about some bumber stickers and a rose pin? (Warrior)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (18)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:38:04 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
More feedback. Why? The more, the merrier!
Wonderful idea! It is uncanny that I live in the Portland Metro area of Oregon... Portland is coined as "The City of Roses". (Joanna)
I'm taking care of my mum with cancer,but if possible,I shall definitely attend.But if not there in physical form,you can count on me in Spirit1(Hey!At least that's something!)And i shall PROUDLY wear a variety of sizes,colours,and materials of roses all~the~while.What an inspired thought!!! Namaste' (Audrey)
I don't wear lapels but I get it. Wear a pin whenever you are in public. I have to get one. I don't get out much. (Donald)
AWESOME! (Mayra Angelica)
Fabulous idea! Especially since I am an Obama Mom living in England. I have just joined an Obama group and I'll be sure to bring roses to our meeting tonight in London! (Carol)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (19)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:36:55 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's evem more of what folks are saying:
Great idea! I will start wearing my rose today! (Lee Ann)
As a lifelong Malian, I am proud that we're battling marginalization based on ethnic names. It is a sorry fact that in the narrow view of many who advocate the culture wars, the beauty of a name with an interesting or diverse history is completely invisible. Let's reverse that by celebrating what a great name Hussein is - hey, my uncle is named Hasan and he's a Chinese Christian (Jasmine)
Nice idea (Jessica)
Of course! Thank you for such a simple,effective way to undermine the negativity! Blessin gs, (Cassie)
Although I do not wear pins. I did use your icon with a link back to the event several times. Thanks, (Mary)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (850... and counting) (20)

Adoyo — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:35:29 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Some more of what folks are saying:
I'll wear a rose (Connie)
What an awesome idea !! I will proudly wear a rose !! (Dawn)
I am very surprised that this is an issue. Equal opportunity and a right to pursue happiness, justice for all? I have believed in this ever since I read the U.S. constitution a couple of decades ago. It never mentioned only folks with Western, Christian names were included in the equation. There is a lot in a name, and for me, Barack Hussein Obama as the name for the one who is uniting us is the best name there can be. I will wear my rose proudly! (Kirsten)
Great Idea (Karanja)
i like this..thank you (Roseann)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (800... and counting) (5)

Adoyo — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:03:16 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's what folks are saying:
This is very timely. I was just leaving El Paso after having volunteered with the camppaing there. I was carrying a large Obama poster. A man in the security line loudly asked me "Is that Obama or Osama?" I really even louder, I don't care if his name is Mohammed or Sadam he IS THE BEST PERSON WE COULD HAVE AS PRESIDENT! I got quite a few laughs for my boldness! (Maria Julianna)
I hope everyone ROSE to the occasion... (Gordon)
OK where is this? I'll wear my rose tomorrow (Patricia)
I will have silk roses for all of our guests at our Phone bank to PA this weekend in San Jose, Ca 95123. Great idea! I will type up a paper with your explanation and distribute to my guests. I will also distribute at eh California State convention on Mar 27 (Mari)
I shall wear it with honor! (Peter)
I will wear a silk red, white, and blue rose with pride! (Brandon)
Personally I see no reason to somehow try to submit to the bigots out there. Hussein is a fine name, it is the name his parents gave him, and as such should wear with pride. (Kristin)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (800... and counting) (4)

Adoyo — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:03:11 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Some more of what folks are saying:
Be safe, strong, and encouraged! (George)
This is an AWESOME idea! Could I put this link on our website which will be dedicated to all efforts to support Sen. Obama. It is called nationforchange.com and will be up this week. I would also like to add this link to on our Facebook Group called "Nation for Change --Yes We Can" page? If you would e-mail me personally to let me know, I would greatly appreciate it. (Tracy)
Love the idea and we are in. Beautiful!!! (Laura)
Awesome! (Diana)
Awesome Idea!
I'll wear my rose at work (barn yard) on my coveralls at the store and to church (Ronald)
His middle name comes from a HERO of ancient Islam. Husayn same as Hassein/Hussein, common as "JACK" or "JOHN" in the western world, the whole idea of demonising him for that name is stupid. Don't feed the problem, teach the truth. (Jeff)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (800... and counting) (3)

Adoyo — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:03:07 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's evem more of what folks are saying:
Great, easy way to talk about this message! Thanks (Martha)
Thanks! (Adam)
What the American people, especially me, the disinterested voter, truly cares about is the integrity and intelligence of Senator Obama. For sure, he will still be the inspiring leader that he is even if you change his name to John Doe! Let us reframe the issue surrounding Senator Obama's middle name. Won't it be something if we all, supporters of the Senator Obama Movement, put "Hussein" as we blog or log in into our webpages as our middle name? That will send our message to the entire nation and to the world at large for all Americans worldwide to see that his integrity and concern to change the government to a good is what matters! We all know that what really matters is the content of his character. Shakespeare said so! "Barack Obama, regardless of his name, would still be the same leader who has inspired a whole nation with hope and instilled in us a real sense of agency by his exemplary dedication to public service." As what the Senator said, "Let's all SPEAK for the best interest of our country," which is the best way to show that we truly care, and we want CHANGE! (Marinell)
This is the best idea I have heard since a few minutes ago when Barack said in response to Hillary's offer of VP that He was running to be COMMANDER IN CHIEF !!!!!!!!! I am thrilled to be a rose wearer for this important purpose and will pass the invitation along to my groups. I recieved the email smear the day before the New Hamshire Primary and have been waging my fight for the truth ever since. It is great to have so many united for this purpose. I want to send Michelle and the girls and dozen roses on March 11 at 12:oo a.m. (Karen Chapman)
Beautiful idea.(Amylouise)
God Bless You! (Phoenix)
I think this is just a wonderful idea! Thanks for thinking of it! I will wear my rose with PRIDE! At my county convention, that is!!! GO HOPE!!! (Mindy)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (800... and counting) (2)

Adoyo — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:02:58 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
More feedback. Why? The more, the merrier!
I am glad to be part of this Movement with all the special people of this country (Roxanna)
This is a great idea. We need all the ideas that we can think of to keep the energy moving for this future of our country! (Mikel)
Thanks ... a great idea. (Joyce)
Hi! I've been trying to find an origami folding instruction on how to make a rose. None of the books I've looked at have one. Can you send us diagrams and instructions please? Thanks (Elizabeth)
Lovely idea! (Denise)
Great idea, even though I feel the negativity is stupid. Would anyone think that Barack was a serial killer if his middle name was Ted (Bundy)? Someone should clue in England as well. After all Prince Charles carries the same first name as "Manson". My mother, neice, and myself will be wearing a different color rose on our lapels for each day of the week. Obama Supporter (Lisa)
What a wonderful idea! We need to find a way to carry it through to the general election!! Let me know if I can help! (Jill)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (800... and counting) (1)

Adoyo — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:02:40 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's what folks are saying:
Great idea! (Tresa)
I will proudly being wearing a rose pin - the National Flower of the United States right next to my Obama '08 pin! What a beautiful idea! (Christine)
YES! A rose indeed will sit on my desk as a reminder. Now until election day!!! (Bethany)
How sweet it is!!! (Kathleen)
A beautiful idea, and I imagine very effective. I'm looking forward to responding to questions about it! (Lauren)
I love Roses! I will spread the word! (Vicki)
Thank you for this wonderful idea! :) Greetings from Brazil to you! (Marta)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (750 ... and counting) (11)

Adoyo — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:04:33 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Some more of what folks are saying:

A great idea--one that shows that we are all different and therefore, symbols convey different meanings for us. A rose as the national flower speaks to me of inherent beauty. Perhaps the peace rose would be a good pin instead of a flag lapel pin when the flag has been used to support war and violence in so many instances. How creative that we can support a candidate whose beautiful name can not be used to denigrate or demonize him but instead to reflect the content of his character. (Susan)
Absolutely, as a landscaper I can really go to town on this one! (Amanda)
Thanks!!! :) Great Graphic! (Shelley)
I just bought a pretty red rose pin that I will start wearing everyday when I go out of the house. Count me in! (Michele)
I will not be able to attend - But I will help spread the word. Also - a simple suggestion - How about some bumber stickers and a rose pin? (Warrior)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (750 ... and counting) (10)

Adoyo — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:12:19 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's evem more of what folks are saying:

Thank you.I agree entirely with these sentiments and will get my rose ready! (Joan)
Getting out the lapel! (Finn)
Nice, positive action. Please consider the issue of addressing poverty across ALL of america - and increasing economic insecurity (ie. a slippery slope to poverty). Its a BIG (2 century old) role in race relations of this country. (Sarah)
The rose idea is a lovely one and gives us a chance to share our feelings of support for Obama with those who comment on the lovely flower!Have an awesome day! (Denise)
A rose will bloom in the highlands of Scotland, in the snow. Obama's message is clear and sound, Scotland also needs to examine its dealings with lobbyists and the new level of accepted corruption of big buiness at every level. The intergrity of Obama's message makes us all consider the reasons why numbers of those voting in elections is falling in my country. The effect that the USA has in a world context is felt here. This man must win for us all. We have the chance ourselves to do this at last. (Hazel)
I wore a rose pinned to my dress collar at church a week ago. After I signed up for your event I could not wait to purchase my roses. I told my friend about your event because I thought it was such a great idea! (Becky)
Amen (Roy)
This is so awesome!!! (Sherri)
I believe I have a rose pin at home. I'll be sure to add it to my wardrobe. (Casi)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (750 ... and counting) (9)

Adoyo — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:12:16 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
More feedback. Why? The more, the merrier!

I found a nice enamael red rose pin and am wearing it with pride! (Jessica)
I've pinned a rose pin from the Rose Bowl right next to my Women for Obama pin. (Janet)
Fired Up! (Michelle)
COUNT ME IN!!! (Evelyn)
The problem is some people don't know a rose even when they smell one! (Arlenia)
What a great idea. I love it. A suggestion for campaign fundraising would be to sell lapel pins, maybe even use Barack's logo-they could sell them on his website. (Lisa)
Delightful idea. Thinking I'd like to go for a walk through the Rose Garden at our White House with We The People and President Obama. Anyone care to join me? (Joanie)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (750 ... and counting) (8)

Adoyo — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:07:49 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's what folks are saying:

This is very timely. I was just leaving El Paso after having volunteered with the camppaing there. I was carrying a large Obama poster. A man in the security line loudly asked me "Is that Obama or Osama?" I really even louder, I don't care if his name is Mohammed or Sadam he IS THE BEST PERSON WE COULD HAVE AS PRESIDENT! I got quite a few laughs for my boldness! (Maria Julianna)
I hope everyone ROSE to the occasion... (Gordon)
OK where is this? I'll wear my rose tomorrow (Patricia)
I will have silk roses for all of our guests at our Phone bank to PA this weekend in San Jose, Ca 95123. Great idea! I will type up a paper with your explanation and distribute to my guests. I will also distribute at eh California State convention on Mar 27 (Mari)
I shall wear it with honor! (Peter)
I will wear a silk red, white, and blue rose with pride! (Brandon)
Personally I see no reason to somehow try to submit to the bigots out there. Hussein is a fine name, it is the name his parents gave him, and as such should wear with pride. (Kristin)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (750 ... and counting) (7)

Adoyo — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:07:45 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Some more of what folks are saying:

Be safe, strong, and encouraged! (George)
This is an AWESOME idea! Could I put this link on our website which will be dedicated to all efforts to support Sen. Obama. It is called nationforchange.com and will be up this week. I would also like to add this link to on our Facebook Group called "Nation for Change --Yes We Can" page? If you would e-mail me personally to let me know, I would greatly appreciate it. (Tracy)
Love the idea and we are in. Beautiful!!! (Laura)
Awesome! (Diana)
Awesome Idea!
I'll wear my rose at work (barn yard) on my coveralls at the store and to church (Ronald)
His middle name comes from a HERO of ancient Islam. Husayn same as Hassein/Hussein, common as "JACK" or "JOHN" in the western world, the whole idea of demonising him for that name is stupid. Don't feed the problem, teach the truth. (Jeff)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (750 ... and counting) (6)

Adoyo — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:07:40 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's evem more of what folks are saying:

Great, easy way to talk about this message! Thanks (Martha)
Thanks! (Adam)
What the American people, especially me, the disinterested voter, truly cares about is the integrity and intelligence of Senator Obama. For sure, he will still be the inspiring leader that he is even if you change his name to John Doe! Let us reframe the issue surrounding Senator Obama's middle name. Won't it be something if we all, supporters of the Senator Obama Movement, put "Hussein" as we blog or log in into our webpages as our middle name? That will send our message to the entire nation and to the world at large for all Americans worldwide to see that his integrity and concern to change the government to a good is what matters! We all know that what really matters is the content of his character. Shakespeare said so! "Barack Obama, regardless of his name, would still be the same leader who has inspired a whole nation with hope and instilled in us a real sense of agency by his exemplary dedication to public service." As what the Senator said, "Let's all SPEAK for the best interest of our country," which is the best way to show that we truly care, and we want CHANGE! (Marinell)
This is the best idea I have heard since a few minutes ago when Barack said in response to Hillary's offer of VP that He was running to be COMMANDER IN CHIEF !!!!!!!!! I am thrilled to be a rose wearer for this important purpose and will pass the invitation along to my groups. I recieved the email smear the day before the New Hamshire Primary and have been waging my fight for the truth ever since. It is great to have so many united for this purpose. I want to send Michelle and the girls and dozen roses on March 11 at 12:oo a.m. (Karen Chapman)
Beautiful idea.(Amylouise)
God Bless You! (Phoenix)
I think this is just a wonderful idea! Thanks for thinking of it! I will wear my rose with PRIDE! At my county convention, that is!!! GO HOPE!!! (Mindy)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (750 ... and counting) (5)

Adoyo — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:07:35 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
More feedback. Why? The more, the merrier!

I am glad to be part of this Movement with all the special people of this country (Roxanna)
This is a great idea. We need all the ideas that we can think of to keep the energy moving for this future of our country! (Mikel)
Thanks ... a great idea. (Joyce)
Hi! I've been trying to find an origami folding instruction on how to make a rose. None of the books I've looked at have one. Can you send us diagrams and instructions please? Thanks (Elizabeth)
Lovely idea! (Denise)
Great idea, even though I feel the negativity is stupid. Would anyone think that Barack was a serial killer if his middle name was Ted (Bundy)? Someone should clue in England as well. After all Prince Charles carries the same first name as "Manson". My mother, neice, and myself will be wearing a different color rose on our lapels for each day of the week. Obama Supporter (Lisa)
What a wonderful idea! We need to find a way to carry it through to the general election!! Let me know if I can help! (Jill)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (750 ... and counting) (4)

Adoyo — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:07:28 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's what folks are saying:

Great idea! (Tresa)
I will proudly being wearing a rose pin - the National Flower of the United States right next to my Obama '08 pin! What a beautiful idea! (Christine)
YES! A rose indeed will sit on my desk as a reminder. Now until election day!!! (Bethany)
How sweet it is!!! (Kathleen)
A beautiful idea, and I imagine very effective. I'm looking forward to responding to questions about it! (Lauren)
I love Roses! I will spread the word! (Vicki)
Thank you for this wonderful idea! :) Greetings from Brazil to you! (Marta)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (750 ... and counting) (3)

Adoyo — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:07:22 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Some more of what folks are saying:

simply brilliant! (Julie)
This is an amazing idea. You are doing a wonderful thing! (Holly)
Thanks - I dehydrate and preserve roses ... so this is a special action with many blessings. With Love - (Devavati)
I won't be able to do it constantly but I will make an effort to do it some and to explain to people what it stands for and why I am doing it. (George)
great idea! (Darlene)
Great idea! (Kristine)
I still have hope in my heart. "I'm In" for the duration. (Elizabeth)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (750 ... and counting) (2)

Adoyo — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:06:43 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
Here's evem more of what folks are saying:

What an awesome idea !! I will proudly wear a rose !! (Dawn)
I am very surprised that this is an issue. Equal opportunity and a right to pursue happiness, justice for all? I have believed in this ever since I read the U.S. constitution a couple of decades ago. It never mentioned only folks with Western, Christian names were included in the equation. There is a lot in a name, and for me, Barack Hussein Obama as the name for the one who is uniting us is the best name there can be. I will wear my rose proudly! (Kirsten)
Great Idea (Karanja)
i like this..thank you (Roseann)
I love this idea. I will wear a rose proudly wherever I go and welcome the chance to explain why I'm wearing it. Thank you for organizing this. (Jody)
Great idea. I love it. Will pass the word. sTAY iN pEACE (Zax)
Finally, an event that does not require a gas guzzler to attend! (Karen)
Click here to read more reactions -->

A Rose by any other Name (750 ... and counting) (1)

Adoyo — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:06:32 EDT

graphic design by Lynn Griffin
> - CLICK HERE TO JOIN US AND WEAR A ROSE FOR OBAMA! - <
More feedback. Why? The more, the merrier!
Fabulous idea! Especially since I am an Obama Mom living in England. I have just joined an Obama group and I'll be sure to bring roses to our meeting tonight in London! (Carol)
Great idea! I will start wearing my rose today! (Lee Ann)
As a lifelong Malian, I am proud that we're battling marginalization based on ethnic names. It is a sorry fact that in the narrow view of many who advocate the culture wars, the beauty of a name with an interesting or diverse history is completely invisible. Let's reverse that by celebrating what a great name Hussein is - hey, my uncle is named Hasan and he's a Chinese Christian (Jasmine)
Nice idea (Jessica)
Of course! Thank you for such a simple,effective way to undermine the negativity! Blessings, (Cassie)
Of course! Thank you for such a simple,effective way to undermine the negativity! Blessings, (Cassie)
I'll wear a rose (Connie)
Click here to read more reactions -->

Obama shouldn't tap Clinton, most Democrats say.

Zax — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:07:03 EDT

by Mark Silva Posted April 1, 2008 2:40 PM
That sometimes-touted “dream team’’ of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton doesn’t sit well with most Democrats, if Obama is sitting at the top of the ticket. But, if Clinton is topping the ticket, more like Obama as a running mate.
Just 42 percent of Democrats surveyed nationwide say Clinton should be the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee, if Obama wins the party’s nomination. Yet 58 percent say Clinton should tap Obama, should she become the party’s nominee.
The reason for “the disparity,’’ the Gallup Poll reports, “is that a relatively small number of Obama supporters -- just 29 percent --favor Obama choosing Clinton as a possible running mate. Seventy percent say they'd rather he choose someone else. And 55 percent of all the Democrats surveyed say he should choose someone other than Clinton.
In contrast, a majority of Clinton supporters – 53 percent -- would want Clinton to choose Obama for vice president if she is nominated.’’
Similar percentages (a majority of both Clinton and Obama supporters) say they would want their own candidate selected for vice president should the other candidate win the Democratic nomination for president.
The findings are based on a survey of 502 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents on March 24-27, with a possible margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Clinton surrogate says Obama will win presidency

Zax — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:41:46 EDT

Posted April 1, 2008 2:30 PM By Jim Tankersley
Ok, we'll ask: What's up with all this Canadian meddling in our presidential election? First there was a leaked government memo claiming a top economic advisor for Barack Obama had privately assured America's northern neighbor that Obama didn't really mean those nasty things he said about NAFTA (a charge the campaign denied).
Now, it appears a Canadian radio show managed to get a Hillary Clinton surrogate - a member of Congress no less - to say he believes Obama will win the presidency. Even worse for Clinton, the congressman compares her to the anemic Kansas City Chiefs.
Christopher Beam of Slate.com has a post up today on the subject:
"Surrogates seem to think that telling something to a foreign news agency means that their words won’t get back to the United States," he writes. "How else to explain Sam Powers’ 'monster' comment to the Scotsman or a new statement on Canadian radio by Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Clinton superdelegate, that 'Barack Obama is going to be the next president'?
"To call Cleaver’s remarks off-message would be an understatement," Beam continues. "Cleaver goes on to say with brutal, hilarious honesty that '[i]f I do the party line, I'm supposed to say—and maybe I'll say just so if anybody hears it they can say well, "Cleaver did the party line before he told the truth,"—we believe that a contest going all the way to the convention is good for America,' he said. But he calls that scenario a 'tragedy of tragedies.' Cleaver then reveals that he knows he’s supporting the losing team: 'Even though I don't expect the Kansas City Chiefs to beat the Indianapolis Colts, I cheer for the Kansas City Chiefs.'"
     The audio is here.

Former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton to Endorse Obama

Zax — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:11:02 EDT
By TOM DAVIES – 10 hours ago
Former Rep. Hamilton
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton, the top Democrat on the Sept. 11 commission, is backing Barack Obama in an endorsement that could boost the presidential hopeful's national security standing, The Associated Press has learned.
The Illinois senator "champions the politics of consensus and not of partisan division," Hamilton said in an interview. "I think he is driven by the search for the common good."
Hamilton planned to announce the endorsement Wednesday.
The former Indiana lawmaker served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee during his more than three decades in Congress and is best known as vice chairman of the panel that investigated the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Hamilton also was co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan commission that assessed U.S. policy in Iraq.
Although Hamilton is not a Democratic superdelegate, his backing comes on the heels of several high-profile endorsements for Obama, who leads Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in delegates for the party's nomination. Sens. Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota endorsed Obama in recent days.
Hamilton is the highest-profile Indiana Democrat to back Obama before the state's May 6 primary. Sen. Evan Bayh and the bulk of Indiana's Democratic Party leadership have campaigned actively for Clinton in a state where neither candidate is regarded as a natural front-runner.
Hamilton, once mentioned as a possible running mate for Bill Clinton, told the AP he believed Obama was the candidate most likely to unite the country.
"I begin by asking myself what kind of leadership the country needs at this juncture and I think, for me at least, the answer is that you want a candidate that will try to bring together a country that is very evenly divided, a country in which partisanship has been very sharp and to try to get a candidate who will create a new sense of national unity and will try to transcend the divisions within the country," he said.
Hamilton spent 34 years in Congress representing a southern Indiana district. He served as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees, and was a Democratic leader on international relations before retiring in 1999.
Hamilton now leads the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. In a speech there last year, written by a longtime aide to Hamilton, Obama warned Pakistan that he would use military force if necessary to root out terrorists.

Dinner Table Debates

Zax — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:03:15 EDT
By Suzanne Smalley | Newsweek Web ExclusiveMar 28, 2008 | Updated: 5:20 p.m. ET Mar 28, 2008
In Pennsylvania, many young voters are pushing their parents to back Obama.
All over Pennsylvania, parents and their college-age children are battling over the state's Democratic primary. In one dining room in a small industrial town in northeastern Pennsylvania, the animus grew especially strong on Easter Sunday. Over honey-baked ham, Kathleen, 22, a student at a local Catholic college, and her mother, a hairdresser, got into a fight that brought the family dinner to a standstill. Kathleen and her mother have been arguing about the relative virtues of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for months—largely, Kathleen says, because her mother is deeply worried about the economy and doesn't think Obama is capable of fixing it."She says Obama is too idealistic," says Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her middle name because she's working for a local media outlet that does not permit her to publically express her political views. "And I told her I want someone idealistic. I think she believes he's promising too much." Kathleen said the Easter argument began when her 76-year-old grandfather warned her and her brother that he's never seen the country in such bad shape. "'You and your brother are going to have to work to fix this country'," Kathleen recalls him saying. Kathleen says her mother then provoked her by pointing out that life was great under Bill Clinton. "I don't like my mom equating [Hillary] with her husband," Kathleen said. "I said, 'Her husband's not gonna be president, Mom'." That was enough to send grandpa over the edge. He stopped the conversation and demanded the family get back to eating.
Kathleen's family is not the only one grappling with fierce generational rivalries in this election's Democratic contests. In Pennsylvania—as in Ohio, which Hillary won by 10 percent—Clinton currently has bedrock support from the so-called Reagan Democrats: white, blue-collar, middle-age men and women who defected from the Democratic Party in 1980 and 1984 to vote for Reagan. Many voters fitting this profile are now solidly back in the Democrats' corner but have proven difficult for Obama to win over in Pennsylvania, fueling Clinton's 12-point lead in one recent state poll. But Obama may see his support among that group increase soon, thanks to Sen. Bob Casey's endorsement of him, announced this morning. Against abortion and in favor of gun rights, Casey, a Roman Catholic, is the son of a popular Pennsylvania governor who, like Reagan, succeeded by winning over those blue-collar, socially conservative Democrats.
Casey explained his endorsement by describing the intense enthusiasm his kids feel for Obama. "Let me tell you a little story about my four daughters, one by one," he said. "First of all, my daughter Caroline, our second, she saw Senator Obama speak at the 2004 convention. She was not only listening … by the end of his speech, she was standing on her chair. And that's the same reaction that we've all had about his campaign and about his character. My daughter Elyse was sitting in our home the night of the Iowa caucuses. Senator Obama was speaking, and she was transfixed looking at the television set. And all of a sudden—I was standing there in the kitchen with her—the telephone rang, her cell phone rang. One of her good friends called her, she picked up the phone and she said, 'I can't talk to you now, I am listening to Barack Obama,' and she hung up ... My daughter Julia is reading 'The Audacity of Hope' right now. And my daughter Marena, who's our youngest, is 11, she's been giving me messages for Senator Obama that I'm supposed to impart to him later."

Like Casey's daughters, Angie McNie, a 20-year-old sophomore at Penn State and a member of the university's Students for Obama club, has persuaded her dad and stepdad to give Obama a second look. McNie, a   student from a blue-collar Pittsburgh family—her dad works as a bus driver—said she's been steadily campaigning to convince her parents to vote Obama. She said she told them that Clinton's universal health-care plan might not be as great as it sounds. "I tried to explain … that if Hillary does institute this it means you are forced to buy this health care, and if you can't afford it for whatever reason they take it out of your wages," she said. "A couple weeks later my dad said, 'I'm sorry, hon. I'm still voting for Hillary.' I said, 'It's OK, but it would be so much better for me if you'd look into both candidates and their platforms instead of just [thinking] their husband was a good president'." McNie says her dad is still leaning toward Clinton, but has promised he'll think about Obama. She said she made inroads with her stepdad by pointing out that Obama doesn't accept money from special-interest groups. "He didn't believe me at first, and then he looked into it and he said, 'I really agree with that'," McNie said. But she said her stepdad still thinks Obama is too young and inexperienced. McNie said she hasn't stopped trying to persuade them, but her parents are tiring of the conversation. "A lot of people don't like to discuss these things with me," she said, "because they know I get so passionate. Especially my parents."
Andrew Craft, a 19-year-old Penn State student from the western Pennsylvania town of Mars, is also passionate. He does volunteer work for the campaign almost daily—even as he juggles exams, parties and a part-time job. His mom, Nancy, a teacher, and dad, Donald, a FedEx carrier, support Hillary Clinton. They think Bill Clinton was a great president and care deeply about health care and other issues they believe Clinton is more qualified than Obama to fix. The debate over which Democrat will make a better president has grown so heated that the family has adopted guidelines to keep their discourse civil. "We have come to a consensus in our family," says Nancy Craft. "Around the country it's very polarized right now. Some [Democrats] are saying they're gonna vote for John McCain … In our house, we've decided that no matter who gets the nomination, we'll support the [Democratic candidate]." The family still debates, Nancy Craft says, but the tone is good-natured and often stems from Andrew's penchant for flaunting Obama gear around the house. "He has Obama pins on his backpack and on his car he has a bumper sticker," she said, adding that her car is adorned with a Clinton bumper sticker. After months of trying to sell his parents on Obama, whom he respects for being a "real, straightforward positive thinker," Andrew says he has pretty much given up on converting them. But that hasn't stopped him from trying. "I give them my little spiel every now and then, but we're both pretty solidly in support of one or the other," he said.
The debate has brought him closer to his parents. Andrew was upset about the negative tenor of the campaign, especially as the scandal surrounding Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, exploded, and he confided in his mom. "We both agreed that both of those are silly talking points," he said of the warfare between the campaigns about Obama's association with Wright as well as Clinton's made-up encounter with sniper fire in Bosnia. Nancy said she comforted Andrew by telling him that negativity is as old as politics. "He was very upset about the Reverend Wright fracas," Nancy recalled, "and I said, 'It's kind of like Monica Lewinsky and the blue dress'." The younger generation is quickly getting wise to the ways of politics—but hasn't given up on getting their elders to try to see things afresh.
Senator Casey credited his kids in explaining his endorsement of Obama

Joyce Brayboy has endorsed Barack Obama

Zax — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 10:44:26 EDT

Brayboy endorses Obama

Pledged Delegates 1414
Superdelegates 222
Total 1638`
Joyce Brayboy has endorsed Barack Obama. The Democratic superdelegate, whose day job is as a Washington, D.C.-based lobbyist, made the decision recently.
Previously, she told Dome that she would study both candidates' electability and their stances on health care and education before making a decision.
U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield and two other superdelegates, Everett Ward and Dannie Montgomery, are also backing Obama, while Charlotte City Councilwoman Susan Burgess backs Hillary Clinton.

America's Kids Speak Out

Zax — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:46:11 EDT

Posted by Pam Spaulding, Pandagon at 8:48 AM on March 29, 2008.
High School Kids in the Bronx Reflect on Obama's Race Speech
VIDEO- Listen to these young people.

Being Mutiracial in America

Zax — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:55:15 EDT

Multiracial Americans echo Obama's struggle to fit in
By Mireya Navarro
Published: March 31, 2008
Jenifer Bratter once wore a T-shirt that read "100 percent black woman." Her black friends would not have it.
"I remember getting a lot of flak because of the fact I wasn't 100 percent black," said Bratter, 34, recalling her college years at Pennsylvania State University.
"I was very hurt by that," said Bratter, whose mother is black and whose father is white. "I remember feeling like, Isn't this what everybody expects me to think?"
Being accepted. Proving loyalty. Navigating the tight space between racial divides. Americans of mixed race say these are issues they have long confronted, and when Senator Barack Obama recently delivered his campaign speech about race in Philadelphia, it rang with a special significance in their ears. They saw parallels between the path trod by Obama and their own.
They recalled the friends, as in Bratter's case, who thought they were not black enough. Or the people who challenged them to label themselves by innocently asking, "What are you?" Or the relatives of different races who can sometimes be insensitive to one another.
"I think Barack Obama is going to bring these deeply American stories to the forefront," said Esther John, 56, an administrator at Northwest Indian College in the state of Washington, who identifies herself as black, American Indian and white.
"Maybe we'll get a little bit further in the dialogue on race," John said. "The guilt factor may be lowered a little bit because Obama made it right to be white and still love your black relatives, and to be black and still love your white relatives: to love despite another person's racial appearance."
Americans of mixed race say questions about whether Obama, with a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, is "too black" or "not black enough," as the candidate himself brought up in his speech March 18, show the extent to which the nation is still fixated on old categories.
"There's this notion that there's an authentic race and you must fit it," said Bratter, now an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University in Houston who researches interracial families. "We're confronted with the lack of fit."
The old categories are weakening, however. The 2000 census counted 3.1 million interracial couples, or about 6 percent of married couples. For the first time, the census that year allowed respondents to identify themselves as of "two or more races," a category that now includes 7.3 million Americans, about 3 percent of the population.
Many people still stick to a one-race label even if they are of mixed descent, sometimes because of strong identification with one racial group, and occasionally because of a conscious effort not to dilute the numbers of the group they most identify with, researchers say.
In interviews, people of mixed race said their decision about how to identify themselves is deeply personal, not political; it is influenced by how and where they were reared, how others perceive them, what they look like and how they themselves came to embrace their identity.
James McBride, who described growing up in a Brooklyn housing project with his Jewish mother in a memoir, "The Color of Water," said that like Obama, he identifies himself primarily as a black man of mixed race. As a child whose father was black, he said, "I really wanted to be like all the other black kids. It was the larger group around me." And through life, because of his brown skin, society has imposed its own label. "If cops see me, they see a black man sitting in a car," he said.
But being proud to call himself black, said McBride, 50, does not negate his connection to his "Jewish part," his mother's heritage. Asked which part of him was dominant, he said, "It's like grabbing Jell-O."
"But what difference does it make?" he asked. "When you're mixed, you see how absurd this business of race is."
McBride and other mixed-race Americans said they took pride that Obama was presenting his biracial identity as an asset for the presidency. Even if he calls himself African-American, and has made a central element of his campaign biography the quest to claim that identity after his father left him, Obama is seen as giving equal weight in his story to his white mother and grandparents.
"He's really having to play the field and know his audience really well," said Phillip Handy, 21, a junior at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, whose mother is white and father is black. "In the end, when I hear his message, I don't think he's bailing out on any of us."
Many mixed-race people described their struggles to decide their own racial identity, often in the face of pressure from others to pigeonhole them. McBride said his books invariably were shelved in the black sections of bookstores. "Why can't I be a white author? I'm half white," he said.
Shafia Zaloom, 36, a teacher in San Francisco who is Asian and white, said she was often asked if her two children, who look like her white husband, were adopted. "Sometimes, when I'm at the playground, people think I'm the nanny," she said.
Zaloom, who gets her looks from her Chinese mother, said she had been on the receiving end of insensitive racial remarks and gestures about Asians. But she fully identifies as being of mixed race. "It's really unfair to expect people to choose," she said. "It's like asking to be loyal to one parent or the other."
Although still small, the mixed-race population is increasingly visible among the young. The 2000 census found that 41 percent of the mixed-race population was under 18.
And at least, many multiracial Americans say, they are no longer seen as oddities. Zaloom expects her 6-year-old daughter's and 4-year-old son's journeys to self-identity will be different from hers. At times while growing up, Zaloom recalled, she struggled with questions about not being white or attractive enough. She rebelled against Chinese language lessons, her mother's Chinese food and eating with chopsticks.
But when her daughter was born, she named her Mei Lan, like her maternal grandmother, to honor her Chinese roots. Her son was named Kyle in deference to her paternal Irish side. Her wish for them, she said, is that they realize the benefits outweigh whatever challenges come with a mixed identity, and "ultimately, to not have to check a box."
VIDEO-Being Multiracial in America

Hillary Campaign "In The Red"

Zax — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:33:00 EDT

Clinton's Campaign "In The Red"
The latest FEC reports appear to suggest that Hillary's campaign may be "in the red". My questiion is, if she cannot contol her campaign expenses, how will she handle the U.S. budget?
Clinton’s February F.E.C. Filings
By Michael Luo
Despite a strong month of fund-raising in February in which she brought in $35 million, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton finished the month essentially in the red, once her campaign’s outstanding debts are factored in, as well as her personal loan, according to filings submitted late last night to the Federal Election Commission.
After spending about $31 million in her efforts to keep up with Senator Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton finished February with more than $33 million in cash on hand, but $21.5 million of that is earmarked exclusively for the general election, leaving her with $11.7 million for the primary.
Mrs. Clinton, however, loaned her campaign $5 million earlier this year and she listed $8.7 million in debts to various vendors, making clear why she has not yet paid herself back from her loan.
By way of comparison, Senator Barack Obama, her Democratic opponent, brought in $55 million in February, a record-setting sum, and spent about $43 million, leaving him with $31.6 million in cash on hand available for the primary and $7.3 million set aside for the general. He also did a much better job paying his bills, listing just $625,000 in outstanding deb

North Carolina's seven Democratic House members are poised to endorse Sen. Obama

Zax — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:48:07 EDT
New Backing for Obama As Party Seeks Unity
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON -- Slowly but steadily, a string of Democratic Party figures is taking Barack Obama's side in the presidential nominating race and raising the pressure on Hillary Clinton to give up.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota is expected to endorse Sen. Obama Monday, according to a Democrat familiar with her plans. Meanwhile, North Carolina's seven Democratic House members are poised to endorse Sen. Obama as a group -- just one has so far -- before that state's May 6 primary, several Democrats say.
Helping to drive the endorsements is a fear that the Obama-Clinton contest has grown toxic and threatens the Democratic Party's chances against Republican John McCain in the fall.
Sen. Clinton rejects that view. Over the weekend, she reiterated her intent to stay in the race beyond the last contest in early June -- and all the way to the party's convention in Denver, if necessary.
"There are some folks saying we ought to stop these elections," she said Saturday in Indiana, which also has a May 6 primary. "I didn't think we believed that in America. I thought we of all people knew how important it was to give everyone a chance to have their voices heard and their votes counted."
Sen. Obama told reporters, "My attitude is that Sen. Clinton can run as long as she wants."
In earlier eras, the standoff between the two candidates might have been resolved by party elders acting behind the scenes. But no Democrat today has the power to knock heads and resolve the mess. Party Chairman Howard Dean says he was "dumbfounded" at the suggestion by Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy Friday that Sen. Clinton should pull out.
"Having run for president myself, nobody tells you when to get in, and nobody tells you when to get out," Mr. Dean said. "That's about the most personal decision you can make after all the time and effort you put into it."
New York Sen. Clinton still hopes that by turning in strong performances in the final primaries, she can blunt the momentum of her rival from Illinois and make the case that she is best-positioned to take on Sen. McCain. With Mr. Dean, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Vice President Al Gore and other party leaders remaining neutral, the question is whether the trend of party figures endorsing Sen. Obama will build enough momentum to tip the race.
The expected move by Minnesota's Sen. Klobuchar follows Friday's endorsement of Sen. Obama by Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, which holds its primary April 22.
Both senators had planned to remain neutral, according to party officials, but decided to weigh in as the Democrats' campaign became more negative and Sen. McCain was free to exploit the confusion looking to the November election.
One North Carolinian confirmed that at least several of the state's House members would go public in favor of Sen. Obama before long. Meanwhile, elected officials in other states with upcoming contests, including Indiana, Montana and Oregon, are weighing whether to endorse Sen. Obama.
What makes such endorsements significant is that they're from superdelegates. These delegates -- members of Congress, governors and other party officials -- can vote for whomever they want at the Democratic convention in August. Sen. Obama has a slight lead over Sen. Clinton in the pledged-delegate count -- the delegates won during primaries and caucuses -- but neither can amass enough pledged delegates for a majority. That makes the vote of the superdelegates decisive.
Since the "Super Tuesday" primaries on Feb. 5, Sen. Obama has won commitments from 64 superdelegates and Sen. Clinton has gotten nine. Sen. Obama has a total of 217 superdelegates in his camp while Sen. Clinton has 250, and her margin has been shrinking with each week. Sen. Clinton would have several more in her tally, but they're from Michigan, and delegates from Michigan and Florida won't be seated -- at least for now -- because both states defied party rules and held their primaries earlier than permitted.
"I think that says a lot about just where people are and what they're thinking," says former Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle, an Obama supporter. "And I think the numbers are just going to keep getting better" for Sen. Obama. Counting Sen. Klobuchar, Sen. Obama leads 13-11 among their Democratic colleagues in the Senate.
Even raising the prospect of a convention fight could backfire for Sen. Clinton by antagonizing the superdelegates she needs. Many superdelegates are on the ballot themselves this year, and the last thing they want is a chaotic convention that plays into the hands of Republicans.
In interviews, some House Democrats said Sen. Obama has the edge in the chamber. They noted that he has proved himself the stronger fund-raiser and has attracted more new voters to the party than anyone in recent memory -- both advantages that could benefit other Democrats. They worry that Sen. Clinton's high negative ratings in polls would incite more Republicans to mobilize against her and the Democratic ticket.
Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, a former presidential candidate and a past party chairman, told National Journal Friday that Sen. Obama's nomination is "a foregone conclusion" and "enough is enough." Sen. Dodd has endorsed Sen. Obama.
Mr. Dean, the party chairman, is urging uncommitted superdelegates to take sides no later than July 1, and effectively name the nominee. "If we go into the convention divided, it's pretty likely we'll come out of the convention divided," he said.
Democrats across the board, he said, "are haranguing me to show leadership." But they're often partisans for one candidate or the other, he added. Meanwhile, he said he is conferring with other party leaders, including Mrs. Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada; former Vice President Al Gore; civil-rights veteran and Clinton confidante Vernon Jordan; former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo; and Jesse Jackson and his son, Chicago Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.
"Most of their advice is, 'Let this play out, let's get through the primaries,' " Mr. Dean said. "And I think that's right....Voters have to have their say. It's painful, because that means we've got another two months of this."
                           MORE ON ELECTIONS
• Complete Coverage: Campaign 2008
• Washington Wire: Updates from the campaign trail

Minn. Senator Endorses Obama

Zax — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:42:01 EDT

Posted by The Associated Press 9 hrs ago

Pledged Delegates 1414
Superdelegates 217
Total 1631`
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is picking up the endorsement of Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, giving him another superdelegate.
Klobuchar, a freshman Democrat, said in a statement provided to the Associated Press on Sunday night that Obama has "inspired an enthusiasm and idealism" that the country hasn’t seen in a long time.
She called Obama "a new kind of leader" who brings a new perspective and inspires excitement among Americans.
In a statement, Obama said he is grateful for Klobuchar’s support. According to the Obama campaign, Klobuchar is the 64th superdelegate to endorse him over rival Hillary Rodham Clinton since the Feb. 5th Super Tuesday contests.
Neither Democratic candidate is expected to be able to secure enough delegates to cement the presidential nomination before this summer’s national convention in Denver. As a result, the superdelegates — elected officials and party insiders — will probably determine whether Clinton or Obama gets the Democratic presidential nomination.
Klobuchar joins eight other Minnesota superdelegates who are supporting Obama: Reps. Jim Oberstar, Keith Ellison, Tim Walz, Betty McCollum and Democratic National Committee members Mee Moua, Ken Foxworth, Brian Melendez and Donna Cassutt.
Clinton has the backing of three Minnesota superdelegates: former Vice President Walter Mondale and DNC members Jackie Stevenson and Rick Stafford.
Two other Minnesota superdelegates remain uncommitted: DNC member Nancy Larson and Rep. Collin Peterson.
On Sunday, former President Bill Clinton was in California courting superdelegates. "He talked a little bit about letting the process play out," said Christine Pelosi, an undecided superdelegate from San Francisco who described Clinton as "very good, very intense." Pelosi is the daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Undecided superdelegates say they see no urgency to make up their minds, despite the campaigns’ pleas.
Bob Rankin, an uncommitted superdelegate from Carson, said he was still figuring out how to make up his mind.
Senator Amy Klobuchar

Dinner with Barack-Rushville woman chosen for dinner with Barack Obama

Zax — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:37:31 EDT

By EMILY UDELL, Associated Press Write
Congratulations Bonnie!
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Bonnie Locchetta said a lot of people from the small Indiana farming community where she lives will be surprised to learn she's having dinner with presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
The 44-year-old Rushville woman chosen to eat with the man vying for the Democratic nomination after making a $25 donation to his campaign describes herself as an independent voter living in a conservative community.
"I'm friends with a lot of Republicans in my town," Locchetta said Wednesday.
The single mother said she has followed Obama since his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and was inspired to "put a little money where my mouth was" on Monday to support the Illinois senator whose policies on the economy, the war in Iraq and education she believes make him the best candidate in the upcoming presidential election.
"He says a lot of things that make sense to me and he's coming at things from such an angle that I think he can change things," she said.
Locchetta, who manages a church in Rushville, about 40 miles southeast of Indianapolis, said she'll use the dinner as an opportunity to bend Obama's ear about the problems facing average Americans.
"I want to ask him what he plans to do to help people like me send their kids to college and help people like me to retire who have no savings and to help people like my mother who's struggling to afford her medication when she's also struggling to pay her housing and all her bills," she said.
Indiana, which has 72 delegates up for grabs in the May 6 primary, is drawing attention from both Democratic candidates.
The announcement that Locchetta was selected as one of four donors invited to the dinner followed a campaign blitz across Indiana by Obama's rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, former president Bill Clinton and their daughter Chelsea. Hillary Clinton plans to visit the state again Friday and Saturday.
Obama spoke on March 15 to a packed school gymnasium in Plainfield, west of Indianapolis and is expected to return to the state, though another visit hasn't been announced.
Kevin Griffis, a spokesman for Obama's campaign in Indiana, said the campaign wanted to invite at least two first-time donors to the dinner, and selected Locchetta because of the note she submitted with her donation and the fact that she lives in a state that hasn't yet held its primary.
"Obviously it made her that much more attractive as somebody that we wanted to invite for the dinner," he said. "This is an opportunity for him to hear directly from someone from Indiana at length and candidly."
Obama's campaign was soliciting donations until March 31 to fill three other seats at the dinner. A date and location for the event had not been decided.
Meanwhile, Locchetta was receiving congratulatory calls and e-mails from Obama supporters nationwide and planning what she would say to the senator during the dinner.
"I want to give him the perspective of the average schmo who's trying to put gas in car and pay the electric bill and buy groceries and send their kids to school," she said.
------------------------------------------------------------

Profile
Bonnie
Location: Rushville, IN
Why I support Barack Obama: I think we need a huge change in Washington and I believe in Barack Obama---I really think he is the one who can spearhead this change for everyone!
Birth Date: December 3rd
Issues: equality / civil rights; economic fairness / security; environment / conservation; smart energy policy; affordable health care; education
Registered to Vote: Yes
YES WE CAN!
Bonnie Locchetta's Blog

Two Americas: I am for Barack Obama

Zax — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:56:21 EDT

By Uri Avnery

Gush Shalom, March 24, 2008
"WAR IS much too serious a thing to be left to military men," in Talleyrand's memorable words. In the same spirit, one could say: The American presidential elections are much too serious to be left to the Americans.
The US is now the only super-power on earth. It will remain so for quite some time to come. The decisions of the President of the United States affect every human being on this planet.
Unfortunately, the citizens of the world have no part in these elections. But they may, at least, voice an opinion.
Availing myself of this right I say: I am for Barack Obama.
FIRST OF ALL I must confess: my attitude towards the US is one of unrequited love. In my youth I was a great admirer. Like many others of my generation, I grew up on the legend of the new, idealistic country of pioneers, the world's torch of freedom. I admired Abe Lincoln, who freed the slaves, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who hastened to the rescue of besieged Britain, when it stood alone against the Nazi monster, and who entered World War II at the decisive moment. I grew up on Wild West movies.
Gradually, I lost my illusions. Joe McCarthy helped me along the way. I learned that with depressing regularity, the US is seized by some hysteria or other. But every time, just before the brink of the abyss, it draws back.
During the Vietnam War I took part in demonstrations. I happened to be in America in 1967, and participated in the legendary march of the half million to the Pentagon. I reached the entrance of the building and saw before me a line of cold-eyed soldiers who seemed to be just itching to open fire. At the last moment it occurred to me that it would be unseemly for an Israeli Member of the Knesset to be implicated, so I jumped from the ledge of the entrance and twisted my ankle.
Somehow I got on the CIA (or was it the FBI?) black list. I managed to obtain a visa only with great difficulty, and was struck forever from the list of invitees to the American embassy parties in Tel Aviv. I don't know if this happened because of those protests, or because of my friendship with Henri Curiel, a Jewish-Egyptian revolutionary who helped us in our contacts with the PLO. The Americans held him, quite mistakenly, to be a KGB agent.
At the same time, my name was struck by the Soviets from every list of people invited from Israel. Perhaps they considered me a CIA agent (as I was called in the Israeli Communist party paper). So I was one of the few people in the world who appeared simultaneously on the black lists of both the USA and the Soviet Union - a source of moderate pride to me.
My friend Afif Safieh, now the chief PLO representative in the US, argues that there are two Americas: the America which exterminated the Native Americans and enslaved the blacks, the America of Hiroshima and McCarthy, and the other America, the America of the Declaration of Independence, of Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt.
In these terms, George Bush belongs to the first. Obama, his opposite in almost every respect, represents the second.
ONE CAN arrive at Obama by a process of elimination.
John McCain is a continuation of Bush. More attractive, probably more intelligent (which doesn't mean much). But he is more of the same. The same policy - a dangerous mix of intoxication with power and simple-mindedness. The same world of the Wild West myth, of Good Guys (Americans and their stooges) and Bad Guys (everybody else). A macho world of sham masculinity, where everything is seen through the sights of a gun.
McCain will go on with the wars, and may start new ones. His economic agenda is the same "swinish capitalism" (Shimon Peres' phrase), which has now brought disaster on the economy of the US, and the economy of all of us.
Eight years of Bush are enough for us. Thank you.
Hillary? True, there is something very positive in the fact that a woman is a potential candidate for the leadership of the most powerful country in the world. As the old Jewish blessing has it: Blessed art thou, the Lord, our God, who let us live to see this day. I believe that the feminist revolution was by far the most important one of the 20th Century, since it overturns the social patterns of thousands of years, and perhaps also the biological patterns of million of years. This revolution is still going on, and the election of a woman president would be a milestone.
But it is not enough that it be a woman. It is also important which woman it is.
I spent some years struggling against Golda Meir, the worst Prime Minister Israel ever had. Almost all recent female leaders of countries have started wars: Margaret Thatcher started the Falklands War, Golda Meir bears the responsibility for the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, Indira Gandhi made war on Pakistan, the current presidents of the Philippines and Sri Lanka are conducting internal wars.
The usual explanation is that in order to prevail in a man's world, a woman politician has to prove that she is at least as tough as the men are. When she comes to power, she wants to show that she, too, can make war and command armies. Hillary has already acted tough by voting for the disastrous Iraq war.
(Years ago, when she came out for a Palestinian state, Gush Shalom demonstrated in her honor in front of the US embassy in Tel Aviv. We wanted to present her with a bunch of flowers. The embassy people treated us as enemies and refused to accept the flowers. Since then, Hillary has not uttered another word in favor of the Palestinians.)
I don't know how much she was a partner to her husband's decisions in the White House. The President's wife may be closest to his ear - and the President's husband will probably be closest to her ear. Anyhow, in the eight years of Bill Clinton nothing good for Israeli-Palestinian peace happened. In his "peace team" there were a lot of American Jews, but not a single American Arab. He was totally subservient to the Israel lobby, and on his watch the number of Israeli settlers in the Palestinian territories more than doubled.
Israel doesn't really need another term of Billary.
Hillary is a run of the mill politician. If McCain is a continuation of Bush, Hillary is an extension of the entire present American political system, the present policy and the present routine. But the world needs another America.
THE NAME of another America is Obama. Full name: Barack Hussein Obama.
The very fact that this person can be a serious contender for the presidency at all restores my faith in the possibilities inherent in America. After the excesses of Senator Joe McCarthy there was President John Kennedy. After Bush there can be Obama. Only in America.
The great message of Obama is Obama himself. A person who has roots in three continents (and another half: Hawaii). A person whose education spans the wide world. A person who can see reality from the viewpoints of America, Africa and Asia. A person who is both black and white. A new kind of American, an American of the 21st Century.
I am not as naïve as I sound. I realize that in his speeches there is more enthusiasm than content. We can't know what he will do once elected president. President Obama may disappoint us. But I prefer to take a risk with a man like this than to know in advance what the two routine politicians, his competitors, will do.
I am not overly impressed by election speeches. I have conducted four election campaigns myself and I know that there are things one has to say and things one must not say. It's all with limited liability. But beyond all the speechifying, one fact is more important than a million words: Obama opposed the Iraq invasion from the start, when this took integrity and a lot of courage. Hillary voted for the war and changed her position only when public opinion had changed. McCain supports the war even now.
We in Israel know the huge difference between opposing a war in its first, decisive hour, and opposing it after a month, a year or five years.
On the other hand, perhaps this very fact - more even than the color of his skin, his middle name and his "lack of experience" - will work against him. The voters do not like a person who was right when they were wrong. It's like admitting: he was wise and we were stupid. When a politician wants to be elected, he would be well advised to hide the fact that he was right.
A personal note: as an optimist from birth, I like Obama's optimism. I prefer a candidate who brings hope over one destroying hope. Optimism spurs to action, pessimism produces nothing but despair.
America needs a complete overhaul. Not just a wash, not just a wax job, not just a new coat of paint. It needs a new motor, a change of the entire leadership, a reappraisal of its position in the world, a change of values.
Can Obama do this? I hope so. I am not sure. But I am quite sure that the other two will not.
HERE A JEW will pop the classic question: Is it good for the Jews?
The people who claim to speak for the American Jews, the "leaders" who were not elected by anyone, the chiefs of the fetid "organizations", are conducting a dirty campaign of defamation and sly hints against him. If his middle name is Hussein and he is black, he must be an "Arab-lover". Also, he did not distance himself enough from the anti-Semite Louis Farakhan.
The same "leaders" are in bed with the most loathsome racists in the US, obscurantist fundamentalists and blood-stained neo-cons. But most American Jews know that their place is not there. The unholy alliance with those types will inevitably come home to roost. The Jews have to be where they have always been: in the progressive camp, striving for equality and the separation between state and religion.
IT MUST be asked: Is it good for Israel?
All three candidates have groveled at the feet of AIPAC. The fawning of all three before the Israeli leadership is disgusting. They all show a lack of integrity. But I know that they have no choice. That's how it is in the USA.
In spite of this, Obama succeeded in getting out one courageous sentence. Speaking before a mainly Jewish audience in Cleveland, he said: "There is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, you're anti-Israel and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel."
I hope that the American Barack (blessed, in Arabic), if elected, will not turn into a replica of the Israeli Barak (lightning, in Hebrew).
Real friendship means: when you see that your friend is drunk, you don't encourage him to drive. You offer to take him home. I am longing for an American president who will have the courage and the honesty to tell our leaders: Dear friends, you are drunk with power! You are speeding along a highway that leads to an abyss!
Perhaps Barack Obama will be such a friend. This would be a blessing for us, too.

Obama’s NCAA Bracket

Zax — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:04:00 EDT

Updated, 11:17 p.m. |By Jeff Zeleny

CHARLESTON, W.V. – Even on the campaign trail, it’s basketball time. Yesterday, Senator Barack Obama played a morning round of hoops with soldiers from Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Today, as he arrived here for a campaign event, he completed his NCAA Final Four bracket.
Before a bit of armchair political analysis, here are the senator’s selections:
East – North Carolina.
Midwest – Kansas.
South – Pittsburgh.
West – U.C.L.A.
Championship game: North Carolina over U.C.L.A.
Mr. Obama, who has made a point of playing basketball on most voting days during the string of primary and caucus contests over the last three months, is also a fan. At nights, the television on his campaign bus – and hotel – is often tuned to ESPN. (“I don’t want to watch myself,” he said, explaining why he likes “SportsCenter.”)

For the last day, between speeches and campaign events, Mr. Obama has been finishing his bracket. So did he base his picks on politics – several teams, after all, come from states with upcoming Democratic presidential primaries – or on the strength of the teams?
A quick analysis shows that basketball clearly overtook parochial politics.
In three of the regions, Mr. Obama selected the top-seeded team over any local favorites. In the East for example, North Carolina, was the logical pick. The state’s primary is May 6. (But that choice meant overlooking Indiana, where the primary is the same day.)
In the Midwest, Kansas also was the obvious choice, even if that meant not selected Portland State. (The Oregon primary is May 20.)
In the West, U.C.L.A. also was a safe pick. (Sorry West Virginia, the No. 7 seed, where the primary is May 13.)
The South is the only division that Mr. Obama did not choose the top seed. He selected Pittsburgh, ranked fourth, over Memphis, the top seed. (Yes, there a Pennsylvania primary on April 22. But it’s well after the Championship game on April 7.) Mr. Obama and his traveling campaign aides each threw in $10 for the pool. His selections were announced right before the deadline, so it’s likely too late to call your bookie.
As he campaigned in West Virginia on Thursday, Mr. Obama dropped by a sports bar in Charleston where the Georgia-Xavier game was playing.
“I’m fishing for a few votes around here,” Mr. Obama said, taking a seat with a group of men. “At least I can show off my basketball knowledge.”
And, of course, working to increase his appeal to male voters.

Obama Rewriting Rules for Raising Campaign Money Online

Zax — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:51:07 EDT

When Christen Braun decided it was time to learn more about the presidential candidates, the 28-year-old high school teacher from suburban Pittsburgh turned to Google -- right where Sen. Barack Obama's campaign was waiting for her.
Her search triggered an ad for Obama's Web site, which prompted Braun, a Republican, to sign up for the Democratic senator's e-mail list -- and then to make her first political contribution, for $25.
Such transactions help illustrate how Obama has shattered fundraising records and challenged ideas about the way presidential bids are financed. While past campaigns have relied largely on support from small circles of wealthy and well-connected patrons, Obama has received contributions from more than 1 million donors. He raised $91 million in the first two months of 2008 alone, most of it in small amounts over the Internet.
Obama's unprecedented online fundraising success is often depicted as a spontaneous reaction to a charismatic candidate, particularly by young, Internet-savvy supporters. But it is the result of an elaborate marketing effort that has left Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, and Sen. John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, struggling to catch up.
Obama aides say their goal has been to "build an online relationship" with supporters who will not only give money but also knock on doors and help register voters for the candidate. To do so, they have spent heavily on Internet ads -- $2.6 million in February alone, more than 10 times as much as Clinton and more than 20 times as much as McCain.
Ads for Obama pop up on political Web sites, such as the left-leaning blog Daily Kos, and on more general ones, such as those of newspapers. Anyone visiting the Dallas Morning News in the weeks before the Texas primary, for instance, was likely to see an Obama appeal stretched along one edge of the screen. The campaign has also attached ads to certain search terms, such as "Iowa caucus locations" or "Ohio primary," on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft search engines.
Obama has targeted unlikely sites, such as the conservative Washington Times, where an ad for the candidate appeared yesterday on the same page as a story about an economic speech he gave that morning. But a click on the ad did not lead to a request for donations; instead, it took users to a page where they could sign up for invitations to campaign events.
This approach -- not directly asking for donations -- has been part of the campaign's strategy of slow-walking its way into supporters' wallets. Newcomers are led to a blog and an online store and are offered a chance to join local Obama groups.
Zack Exley, a campaign consultant who oversaw Internet fundraising for Sen. John F. Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, said Obama's e-mails to potential donors stand in stark contrast to those sent by the Clinton campaign.
One recent e-mail, from former president Bill Clinton, was blunt: "Any donation, even as little as $5, can make a difference in this campaign. If you haven't given online yet, now is the time."
Exley said that while the Clinton team has been "really aggressive," the Obama campaign has taken more time to build a rapport with potential donors.
"If you just look at the e-mails and the rhythm -- the Obama campaign has not asked for money every time they could have," Exley said. "They've tried to really show people that they're not just after your money. They're not treating you like an ATM".
Obama's online investment has not come cheap. In January, he spent $768,000 on Web ads, while Clinton spent $171,000 and McCain spent $151,000, campaign finance records show. In February, when Obama spent $2.6 million on ads, Clinton spent $198,000 and McCain spent $111,000. Obama's take via the Internet in January and February has dwarfed those of his rivals. Clinton raised $37 million online; McCain raised $22 million overall but has not said how much of that came in online.
Political consultants who specialize in online fundraising say Obama has, in two months, rewritten the rules for raising campaign cash.
"Anytime you can reach 1 million donors with the click of a mouse, you redefine the way campaign finance is done in American politics," said Philip A. Musser, a Republican political strategist who serves as a consultant to Google.
The Internet allows a candidate's message to be put in front of virtually any audience. Emily's List, the nation's largest political action committee, spent heavily on Clinton during the run-up to the Iowa caucuses and ran ads that appeared when women in Iowa searched Google for such terms as "recipe," "stocking stuffer" and "post-Thanksgiving sales."
"We really were trying to get to women where they live," said Ramona Oliver, a spokeswoman for the group.
But whether the ads, which largely serve as points of entry, translate into support is not clear.
When one of Obama's ads caught Braun's attention, she clicked. But that was just the beginning. She was met by a welcome screen that presented an obstacle: It asked the visitor to supply an e-mail address to proceed.
At first she hesitated. The schoolteacher described herself as "one of those apathetic people who always felt, 'What does my single vote matter?' " But Braun wanted to learn more about Obama's education programs, so she relented.
Then the e-mails started to arrive.
One told her about the candidate's plan to end the war in Iraq. Another sought her help in registering voters. A video of Obama's "major speech on race" was sent. Of the dozens of e-mails she received, only a handful directly asked for money.
The approach paid off. This year she made four $25 contributions, and she also persuaded her father, a lifelong Republican, to register as a Democrat so he could join her in voting for Obama

Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey Endorses Barack Obama

Zax — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:55:26 EDT


Barack Obama
Pledged:1,414
Superdelegates211
Total:1,625

By Kim Chipman and Kristin Jensen
March 28 (Bloomberg) -- Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama today, providing the Illinois senator with a boost in a state where rival Hillary Clinton has the lead.
``This campaign is a chance for America to chart a new course, to go down a different path,'' Casey, a Democrat, said today at an Obama rally in Pittsburgh. Obama offers a ``new type of politics and a path of hope and healing.''
The endorsement gives Obama an important ally in his effort to win over voters in Pennsylvania's April 22 primary, the next contest in the Democratic nomination race and a crucial one for Clinton. Casey got 59 percent of the vote when he won election in 2006 and he may help Obama make inroads with blue-collar workers, a mainstay of Clinton's support.
Clinton has the support of other high-level state officials, including Governor Ed Rendell, Representative John Murtha and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter.
Casey, a so-called superdelegate who has a vote at the Democratic convention in August, previously said he would stay neutral before the primary. Obama said he didn't press Casey, the son of a former Pennsylvania governor, for the endorsement.
``I understood we are behind in Pennsylvania. It would have been easy for Bob just to stay out, to stay neutral,'' Obama said today. ``He called me and said `I think this is the right thing to do.'''
Campaign Tour
Casey will join Obama for part of a six-day bus tour through Pennsylvania. He said called Clinton last night to tell her of his decision.
``She was very gracious,'' Casey said. ``We know she's a great Democrat and leader. One thing we all agree on is that in 2008 we are going to elect a Democrat.''
Casey has a strong base among white, working-class voters who are liberal on economic issues yet oppose abortion rights and support gun owners' rights.
While Clinton, 60, a New York senator, is favored to win Pennsylvania, some of the state's superdelegates -- elected officials who get an automatic vote on the party presidential nomination regardless of the primary's outcome -- are remaining on the sidelines as they determine whether Obama, 46, might prove a stronger draw in November.
Delegate Race
Obama leads Clinton in the number of pledged delegates awarded in primaries and caucuses 1,406 to 1,249, according to a tally by the Associated Press. Neither candidate is likely to end up with enough pledged delegates to secure the nomination after the last contest in June. That will leave the nomination in the hands of the party's almost 800 superdelegates.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said today on CBS's ``Early Show'' that he wants the undecided superdelegates to make up their minds ``between now and the 1st of July so we don't have to take this into the convention.''
The former first lady is telling voters that she plans to fight for the nomination to the end.
``Some people have been saying we should just end these primaries,'' Clinton said yesterday in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to screams of ``no'' from the crowd. ``I think a lot of people still want their voices heard.''
Clinton looked past Pennsylvania today, campaigning in Indiana and focusing on the economy in a state that has lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs since President George W. Bush took office in 2001.
``I would be a strong partner and a champion for manufacturing in Indiana,'' Clinton told the crowd of several thousand in Mishawaka.
School Visit Denied
Clinton's appearance in Indiana stirred up a controversy after authorities in South Bend turned down her request to visit Washington High School, the South Bend Tribune reported. Mentions of Washington drew boos at Mishawaka.
The South Bend School Corp. said it decided against hosting Clinton because the event wouldn't be open to all students, might pose a security risk to students and violate a policy of not holding political events during school hours, the Tribune reported.
Indiana and North Carolina both hold their nominating contests on May 6.
To contact the reporters on this story: Kim Chipman in Philadelphia at kchipman@bloomberg.net; Kristin Jensen in Mishawaka, Indiana, at kjensen@bloomberg.net

Progressives for Obama

Zax — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:25:46 EDT

Published on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 by Progressive Democrats of America
by Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Danny Glover
All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama. We descend from the proud tradition of independent social movements that have made America a more just and democratic country. We believe that the movement today supporting Barack Obama continues this great tradition of grass-roots participation drawing millions of people out of apathy and into participation in the decisions that affect all our lives. We believe that Barack Obama’s very biography reflects the positive potential of the globalization process that also contains such grave threats to our democracy when shaped only by the narrow interests of private corporations in an unregulated global marketplace. We should instead be globalizing the values of equality, a living wage and environmental sustainability in the new world order, not hoping our deepest concerns will be protected by trickle down economics or charitable billionaires. By its very existence, the Obama campaign will stimulate a vision of globalization from below.
As progressives we believe this sudden and unexpected new movement is just what America needs. The future has arrived. The alternative would mean a return to the dismal status quo party politics that have failed so far to deliver peace, health care, full employment and effective answers to crises like global warming.
During past progressive peaks in our political history-the late Thirties, the early Sixties-social movements have provided the relentless pressure and innovative ideas that allowed centrist leaders to embrace visionary solutions. We find ourselves in just such a situation today.
We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama’s unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined.
Progressives can make a difference in close primary races like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Oregon, Puerto Rico, and in the November general election. We can contribute our dollars. We have the proven online capacity to reach millions of swing voters in the primary and general election. We can and will defend Obama against negative attacks from any quarter. We will seek Green support against the claim of some that there are no real differences between Obama and McCain. We will criticize any efforts by Democratic super-delegates to suppress the winner of the popular and delegate votes, or to legitimize the flawed elections in Michigan and Florida. We will make our agenda known at the Democratic national convention and fight for a platform emphasizing progressive priorities as the path to victory.
Obama’s March 17 speech on racism was as great a speech as ever given by a presidential candidate, revealing a philosophical depth, personal authenticity, and political intelligence that should convince any but the hardest of ideologues that he carries unmatched leadership potentials for overcoming the divide-and-conquer tactics which have sundered Americans since the first slaves arrived here in chains.
Only words? What words they were.
However, the fact that Barack Obama openly defines himself as a centrist invites the formation of this progressive force within his coalition. Anything less could allow his eventual drift towards the right as the general election approaches. It was the industrial strikes and radical organizers in the 1930s who pushed Roosevelt to support the New Deal. It was the civil rights and student movements that brought about voting rights legislation under Lyndon Johnson and propelled Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy’s anti-war campaigns. It was the original Earth Day that led Richard Nixon to sign environmental laws. And it will be the Obama movement that makes it necessary and possible to end the war in Iraq, renew our economy with a populist emphasis, and confront the challenge of global warming.
We should not only keep the pressure on, but we also should connect the issues that Barack Obama has made central to his campaign into an overarching progressive vision.
- The Iraq War must end as rapidly as possible, not in five years. All our troops must be withdrawn. Diplomacy and trade must replace further military occupation or military escalation into Iran and Pakistan. We should not stop urging Barack Obama to avoid leaving American advisers behind in Iraq in a counterinsurgency quagmire like Afghanistan today or Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. Nor should he simply transfer American combat troops from the quagmire in Iraq to the quagmire in Afghanistan.
- Iraq cannot be separated from our economic crisis. Iraq is costing trillions of dollars that should be invested in jobs, universal health care, education, housing and public works here at home. Our own Gulf Coast requires the attention and funds now spent on Gulf oil.
- Iraq cannot be separated from our energy crisis. We are spending an unheard-of $100/barrel for oil. We are officially committed to wars over oil supplies far into the future. We instead need a war against global warming and for energy independence from Middle Eastern police states and multinational corporations.
Progressives should support Obama’s 16-month combat troop withdrawal plan in comparison to Clinton’s open-ended one, and demand that both candidates avoid a slide into four more years of low-visibility counterinsurgency.
The Democratic candidates should listen more to the blunt advice of the voters instead of the timid talk of their national security advisers. Two-thirds of American voters, and a much higher percentage of Democrats, oppose this war and favor withdrawal in less than two years, nearly half of them in less than one year. The same percentage believe the war has had a negative effect on life in the United States, while only 15 percent believe the war has been positive. Without this solid peace sentiment, neither Obama nor Clinton would be taking the stands they do today.
Further, the battered and abused people of Iraq favor an American withdrawal by a 70 percent margin.
The American government’s arrogant defiance of these strong popular majorities in both America and Iraq should be ended this November by a powerful peace mandate.
The profound transition from the policies of the past will not be easy, and fortunately the Obama campaign is lifted by the fresh wind of change. We seek not only to change the faces in high places, however, but to save our country from slow death by greed, status quo politics, and loss of vision. The status quo cannot stand much longer, neither that of politics-as-usual nor that of our security, energy and economic policies. We are stealing from the next generation’s future, and living on borrowed time.
The Bush Administration has replaced the Cold War with the War on Terrorism led by the same military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against. The reality and public fear of terrorism today is no less real than fear of communism and nuclear annihilation a generation ago. But we simply cannot continue multiple military interventions in many Muslim countries without increasing the vast number of violent jihadists against us, bleeding our military and our economy, becoming more dependent on Middle East oil, creating unsavory alliances with police states, shrinking our own civil liberties and putting ourselves at permanent risk of another 9/11 attack.
We need a brave turn towards peace and conflict resolution in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Getting out of Iraq, sponsoring a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, ending alliances with police states in the Arab world, unilaterally initiating real energy independence and moving the world away from the global warming crises are the steps that must be taken.
Nor can we impose NAFTA-style trade agreements on so many nations that seek only to control their own national resources and economic destinies. We cannot globalize corporate and financial power over democratic values and institutions. Since the Clinton Administration pushed through NAFTA against the Democratic majority in Congress, one Latin American nation after another has elected progressive governments that reject US trade deals and hegemony. We are isolated in Latin America by our Cold War and drug war crusades, by the $500 million counter-insurgency in Columbia, support for the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, and the ineffectual blockade of Cuba. We need to return to the Good Neighbor policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, which rejected Yankee military intervention and accepted Mexico’s right to nationalize its oil in the face of industry opposition. The pursuit of NAFTA-style trade policies inflames our immigration crisis as well, by uprooting countless campesinos who inevitably seek low-wage jobs north of the border in order to survive. We need balanced and democratically-approved trade agreements that focus on the needs of workers, consumers and the environment. The Banana Republic is a retail chain, not an American colony protected by the Monroe Doctrine.
We are pleased that Hillary Clinton has been responsive to the tide of voter opinion this year, and we applaud the possibility of at last electing an American woman president. But progressives should be disturbed at her duplicitous positions on Iraq and NAFTA. She still denies that her 2002 vote for legislation which was called the war authorization bill was a vote for war authorization. She now promises to “end the war” but will not set a timeline for combat troop withdrawal, and remains committed to leaving tens of thousands of counter-terrorism troops and trainers in Iraq amidst a sectarian conflict. While Obama needs to clarify his own position on counterinsurgency, Clinton’s “end the war” rhetoric conceals an open commitment to keep American troops in Iraq until all our ill-defined enemies are defeated-a treadmill which guarantees only the spawning of more enemies. On NAFTA, she claims to have opposed the trade deal behind closed doors when she was First Lady. But the public record, and documents recently disclosed in response to litigation, proves that she was a cheerleader for NAFTA against the strong opposition of rank-and-file Democrats. The Clintons ushered in the Wall Street Democrats whose deregulation ethos has widened inequality while leaving millions of Americans without their rightful protections against market shocks.
Clinton’s most bizarre claim is that Obama is unqualified to be commander-in-chief. Clinton herself never served in the military, and has no experience in the armed services apart from the Senate armed services committee. Her husband had no military experience before becoming president. In fact he was a draft opponent during Vietnam, a stance we respected. She was the first lady, and he the governor, of one of our smallest states. They brought no more experience, and arguably less, to the White House than Obama would in 2009.
We take very seriously the argument that Americans should elect a first woman president, and we abhor the surfacing of sexism in this supposedly post-feminist era. But none of us would vote for Condoleeza Rice as either the first woman or first African-American president. We regret that the choice divides so many progressive friends and allies, but believe that a Clinton presidency would be a Clinton presidency all over again, not a triumph of feminism but a restoration of the aging, power-driven Wall Street Democratic Hawks at a moment when so much more fresh imagination is possible and needed. A Clinton victory could only be achieved by the dashing of hope among millions of young people on whom a better future depends. The style of the Clintons’ attacks on Obama, which are likely to escalate as her chances of winning decline, already risks losing too many Democratic and independent voters in November. We believe that the Hillary Clinton of 1968 would be an Obama volunteer today, just as she once marched in the snows of New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy against the Democratic establishment.
We did not foresee the exciting social movement that is the Obama campaign. Many of us supported other candidates, or waited skeptically as weeks and months passed. But the closeness of the race makes it imperative that everyone on the sidelines, everyone in doubt, everyone vacillating, everyone fearing betrayals and the blasting of hope, everyone quarreling over political correctness, must join this fight to the finish. Not since Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign has there been a passion to imagine the world anew like the passion and unprecedented numbers of people mobilized in this campaign.
Tom Hayden is author of Ending the War in Iraq, a five-time Democratic convention delegate, former state senator, and board member of the Progressive Democrats of America. Bill Fletcher, Jr., who originated the call for founding “Progressives for Obama,” is the executive editor of Black Commentator, and founder of the Center for Labor Renewal; Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of Dancing in the Streets[2007] and other popular works and, with Hayden, a member of The Nation’s editorial board. Danny Glover is the respected actor, activist, and chairman of the board of TransAfrica.

Hillary Is “Experienced” All Right: At Lying

Zax — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:20:13 EDT

We’ve seen her resume and checked her references. She made the short list and we’ve brought her in for some follow up questions; the second round. It’s an arduous process, yes, but it’s also a tough job. This is the President of these United States, for crying out loud, and it’s important we know how she’ll perform.
She was doing okay for a while but then she gave us an answer that didn’t seem right. It was an incidental question so we took it at face value then did a little research. Turns out she was lying. She made the whole thing up. Sure it’s an incidental question but her answer tells us all we need to know:
Hillary Clinton doesn’t deserve the job.
First, let’s take her response at face value and ignore the lie. It’s a terrible answer. When the only example of experience you can cite to is a government paid junket chilling with Sinbad and Cheryl Crow, you are not qualified to be President. (Frankly that set list is so “B” I wouldn’t give her a job as club promoter). Even if the sniper incident were true it has no bearing on her “Experience.” (Would she have been less experienced if snipers didn’t shoot at her?) And yet this is what she points to; a meaningless answer.
But even “bad answers” have meaning. In the job interview they ask you about your experience but this isn’t what they care about; what they want to know is “how are you going to perform?” Questioning the past is merely a proxy to how you might do in the future. Your “experience” is listed on your resume; the point of the Q&A is to size you up, to gauge you as an employee. And in her answer Hillary’s qualities have been lain bare:
She’s a liar.
Hillary’s gut response is to lie. And enough with the Bush-esque double speak: this was not “misrecollection,” this was a bald faced lie. Her statement wasn’t spur of the moment, it was written in a speech prepared by her staff. Lame answers can be excused, lies cannot. I, for one, have had enough of lies fed me by my Government. The act of the lie itself renders her unfit for office.
And please Hillary supporters, stop with the justifications. She’s applying for the job, our job, the highest position in our department, President. There is not an employer in the world who would keep or consider her if she was caught telling a lie like this. Don’t tell me this is how politics is and it means she’s tough. Take the toughest professions in the world — stock broker, mercenary, sniper, whatever — not one of them would consider “lying” as an integral component of that position. “Lying” is never a positive job qualification.
As our prospective employee we should expect the whole package. Ability, knowledge, strength, and character. Hillary doesn’t have it.
Hillary Lies about Bosnia
htt p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxVsdS887HA
http://www.yeswecount.com/

And I wouldn’t have made sh*t up about Bosnia…

Zax — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:04:12 EDT

http://www.yeswecount.com/
Hillary on Obama’s pastor:
“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.”
Within this comment she has revealed the fatal flaw within her candidacy: Her inability to put principle over tactical advantage.
Is there a politician alive who has more first hand knowledge about the totally unfair and damaging effects of “guilt-by-association” tactics than Hillary? Other than Bill Clinton, no. And these tactics haven’t just hurt the Clinton’s, they’ve undermined the entire Democratic Party for years. When presented with an opportunity to stand on principle, dismiss these tactics as the tangential tripe that they are and ultimately help the Democratic Party, what does she do? She sells her soul and her party for short-term advantage.
This isn’t the only time abandonment of principle has hurt her campaign. Most recently it hurt her in efforts to get a revote in Michigan.
Hillary for many weeks held to the notion that the results there should count - as is - despite the fact that Obama wasn’t even on the ballot. Then, when it became apparent that the only way Michigan delegates would be awarded was a wholesale re-vote, her argument changed. Then, despite the fact that she was right on democratic principle, her obvious self-serving shift undermined her position. Jonathan Cohn over at New Republic does a nice job of explaining how it all went down in Michigan.

Will McCain Get the Obama Treatment?

Zax — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:42:06 EDT
by Chris Edelson
March 24th, 2008 @ 8:44 pm EST
Now that the furor has subsided (for the moment at least) over the contrived Obama-Rev. Wright "issue," perhaps the media pack can turn its attention to some of McCain's supporters, who have said a number of inflammatory things themselves.
First, there are the Reverends Hagee and Parsley. McCain was proud to accept the endorsement of Hagee, who claims that the Koran teaches Muslims to kill Christians and Jews, and that Hurricane Katrina was an expression of God's wrath against gay pride parades. Does McCain agree?
McCain has called Rod Parsley his "spiritual guide." Parsley quaintly believes that America was founded, in part, to destroy the "false religion" of Islam, and has his own gay-bashing rhetoric to add to Hagee's. What does McCain think of this?
Parsley and Hagee are just two McCainites who have made extreme statements that McCain should be asked about. McCain's campaign website helpfully provides a list of supporters, which includes additional extreme characters who have made some rather offensive statements. Does McCain stand by these supporters?
Let's start with Senator Sam Brownback, one of McCain's General Co-Chairmen. According to an article in Rolling Stone, Brownback has declared that, as a senator, he has only one constituent–God (the article is a scary read–Brownback has apparently been part of a bizarre group called the Fellowship that has a vision of a U.S. government led by Christ's will alone. This stuff is so wacky it's hard to even type the words on screen–check out the article).
Scroll toward the bottom of McCain's list of supporters and you'll find former ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. Bolton distinguished himself by declaring that "there is no such thing as the United Nations" and "if the UN building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." Does Sen. McCain agree?
Just across the page on the left, we find former Sen. Conrad Burns's name on the list. Burns referred to Arabs as "ragheads" and has made other xenophobic remarks. Does McCain share Burns's views?
I look forward to lengthy discussions on CNN and MSNBC about McCain's duty to disavow extreme statements made by his supporters.

Obama Launches Website to Track Clinton's 'Attacks'

Zax — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:19:25 EDT
By Sarah Lai Stirland 12.03.07 | 6:00 PM
Democrat Barack Obama's presidential campaign launched a new website Monday that has a single purpose: to track and highlight rival Hillary Clinton's negative comments about Obama.
The minisite, simply named Hillary Attacks, catalogs negative newspaper articles, speeches and press releases that the New York senator's campaign has issued that the Obama campaign says are personal attacks on Obama's character.
The site is the latest entry in a trend of specialized candidate microwebsites to refract opponents' campaign rhetoric in a way that's favorable to their own campaigns. Earlier this year Clinton's campaign launched The Fact Hub, an online rapid-response site responding to rumors and speculation from the campaign trail and the blogosphere. And North Carolina Democrat John Edwards launched a tongue-in-cheek Plants for Hillary website ahead of a recent televised presidential debate. That microsite, which has since been taken down, made fun of Clinton for her campaign's admitted planting of a question in an Iowa forum.
The Hillary Attacks site launches as Clinton and Obama are trying hard to distinguish their candidacies from one another in the minds of Iowans, who will be the first in the nation to start selecting their party's 2008 national-convention delegates next month. Negative campaigning has traditionally turned voters off the voting process, and polling shows that Iowans believe Clinton runs the most negative campaign. The latest poll results of likely caucus participants in Iowa show Clinton and Obama running neck and neck.
On the new Obama site, next to the excerpts of Clinton's negative attacks is an embedded YouTube video clip that shows Clinton saying at a Des Moines, Iowa, fundraising dinner that she's only interested in attacking America's problems -- and Republicans. There's also a Hillary Attacks timeline, and a call from Obama's campaign manager for supporters to help the campaign keep a tally of all the attacks.
"Today we're launching a website that will keep track of all the attacks Senator Clinton has launched since she said she wasn't interested in attacking other Democrats at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on November 10," campaign manager David Plouffe wrote in a Monday-morning blog entry. "We're asking all of you to be vigilant and notify us immediately of any attacks from Senator Clinton or her supporters as soon as you see them, so that we can respond with the truth swiftly and forcefully.... These attacks could be phone calls, literature drops, blog posts, mail pieces as well as radio and TV ads. Some could even be anonymous or designed to be."
This is a "very, very impressive effort to enlist the full range of online campaign tools to exploit Hillary's biggest mistake in the campaign to date, which was to go after Obama's personal history (as opposed to his record and rhetoric) and say it was fun," notes Michael Cornfield, vice president of research and media strategy at consulting firm 720 Strategies in Washington D.C. Cornfield was referring to a remark Clinton made to the New York Times, reported Sunday, in which she criticized Obama for consistently launching personal attacks on her for the past several months.
Clinton's campaign was quick to respond to Obama's new site on Clinton's own press site, with a new entry that mirrored the Obama campaign's rhetoric. The entry linked to several of Obama's attacks on Clinton.
"When he entered the race, Sen. Obama said he believed in a new kind of politics where 'the campaigns shouldn't be about making each other look bad,'" read the entry. "He railed against the 'slash and burn, negative campaigning of the past.' His chief strategist said they didn't have a strategy to tear people doown."

Obama: Clinton can't be trusted to end war

Zax — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:05:06 EDT

The candidate speaks on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion
AP Press
updated 2:03 p.m. ET, Wed., March. 19, 2008
FAYETTEVILLE, North Carolina - Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that Hillary Clinton could not be trusted to end the Iraq war because she only started opposing it when she began her bid for president.
In a speech not far from North Carolina's Fort Bragg military base, the Democratic presidential hopeful told military families and local officials that the war has emboldened al-Qaida, the Taliban, Iran and North Korea.
"Ask yourself," Obama told the crowd, "Who do you trust to end a war: someone who opposed the war from the beginning, or someone who started opposing it when they started preparing a run for president?"
Obama used the five-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion to again cast himself as the only true anti-war candidate, one who openly opposed the invasion as a state lawmaker. He renewed criticism of Clinton for voting to authorize the use of force against Iraq.
Obama also teased likely Republican nominee John McCain for a foreign policy gaffe Tuesday in which McCain, touring the Middle East, said several times that Iran was training al-Qaida in Iraq. Iran is a predominantly Shiite Muslim country and has been at pains to close its borders to al-Qaida fighters of the rival Sunni sect. After another senator on the trip, Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., whispered into his ear, McCain finally corrected himself to say Iran was training Shiite militants.
"Maybe that is why he voted to go to war with a country that had no al-Qaida ties," Obama said to laughter and applause. "Maybe that is why he completely fails to understand that the war in Iraq has done more to embolden America's enemies than any strategic choice that we have made in decades."
In the days before she won primaries in Texas and Ohio, Clinton argued that she was better prepared to be commander in chief and broadcast a television ad that asked who could handle a middle-of-the-night crisis. Obama countered that Clinton had bungled her crisis moment when she voted to authorize military force to oust Saddam Hussein.
Obama alluded to that ad in his speech.
"What we need in our next commander in chief is not a stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality or empty rhetoric about 3 a.m. phone calls," he said. "What we need is a pragmatic strategy that focuses on fighting our real enemies, rebuilding alliances and renewing our engagement with the world's people."
He said Clinton and likely Republican McCain talk tough on national security yet they make decisions that leave the country less secure.
"This is why the judgment that matters most on Iraq — and on any decision to deploy military force — is the judgment made first."
Special forces from Fort Bragg were among the first soldiers in Iraq during the 2003 invasion and its paratroopers led last year's troop increase. President Bush visited the base to deliver his 2005 Independence Day speech, where he warned that setting a timetable to withdraw from Iraq would only embolden terrorists.
McCain has issued similar remarks and Obama squarely rejected them.
"These are the mistaken and misleading arguments we hear from those who have failed to demonstrate how the war in Iraq has made us safer," Obama said.
Obama also defended his contention that the United States should act on intelligence about top terrorist targets in Pakistan even if President Pervez Musharraf refuses — a statement last year that drew criticism from Republicans.
"We have a security gap when candidates say they will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, but refuse to follow him where he actually goes," Obama said, referring to McCain's vow to chase down bin Laden.
North Carolina holds its primary May 6. Obama was scheduled to travel to Charlotte on Wednesday evening for a town hall meeting and a fundraiser.
Obama’s Iraq speech

When Barry Became Barack

Zax — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:45:27 EDT

It didn't happen overnight. But in college, the young Barry took to being called by his formal name. What this evolution tells us about him.

GALLERY
From Barry to Barack
A look back, in photos, at Obama's journey
Barry Obama decided that he didn't like his nickname. A few of his friends at Occidental College had already begun to call him Barack (his formal name), and he'd come to prefer that. The way his half sister, Maya, remembers it, Obama returned home at Christmas in 1980, and there he told his mother and grandparents: no more Barry. Obama recalls it slightly differently, but in the same basic time frame. He believes he told his mom he wanted to be called Barack when she visited him in New York the following summer. By both accounts, it seemed that the elder relatives were reluctant to embrace the change. Maya recalls that Obama's maternal grandparents, who had played a big role in raising him, continued long after that to call him by an affectionate nickname, "Bar." "Not just them, but my mom, too," says Obama.
Why did Obama make the conscious decision to take on his formal African name? His father was also Barack, and also Barry: he chose the nickname when he came to America from Kenya on a scholarship in 1959. His was a typical immigrant transition. Just as a Dutch woman named Hanneke might become Johanna, or a German named Matthias becomes Matt, the elder Barack wanted to fit in. America was a melting pot, and it was expected then that you melt—or at least smooth some of your more foreign edges.
But Obama, after years of trying to fit in himself, decided to reverse that process. The choice is part of his almost lifelong quest for identity and belonging—to figure out who he is, and how he fits into the larger American tapestry. Part black, part white, raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, with family of different religious and spiritual backgrounds—seen by others in ways he didn't see himself—the young Barry was looking for solid ground. At Occidental, he was feeling as if he was at a "dead end," he tells NEWSWEEK, "that somehow I needed to connect with something bigger than myself." The name Barack tied him more firmly to his black African father, who had left him and his white mother at a young age and later returned home to Kenya. But that wasn't the primary motivation.
Obama wrote a whole book about his quest for identity, called "Dreams From My Father," and in it he never directly deals with the reasons he reverted to his birth name, or the impression it made on his relatives. The book is a deeply personal narrative that takes some liberties with the facts for the sake of a coherent tale. (Some of the characters, he points out in the introduction, are composites.) Old friends contacted by NEWSWEEK who were present during the time he changed his name recall or intuit a mix of reasons—both personal and social. By Obama's own account, he was, like most kids at that stage of life, a bit of a poseur—trying to be cool. So that could have played a part. He was also trying to reinvent himself. "It was when I made a conscious decision: I want to grow up," says Obama.
It's clear that he was trying to fit in somehow, but not in the way of his father's generation. He wanted to be taken seriously, perhaps to rebel against the compromises blacks and others were expected to make in a white-dominated society. But more generally, he was also looking for a community that would accept him as he was, inside and out.
The identity quest, which began before he became Barack and continued after, put him on a trajectory into a black America he had never really known as a child in Hawaii and abroad. In the end, he would come to see and accept that he was in an almost unique position as an American—someone who had been part of both the white and the black American "families," able to view the secret doubts and fears and dreams of both, and to understand them. He could be part of a black world where his pastor and spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., expressed paranoid fantasies about white conspiracies to spread drugs or HIV, because he understood in his gut the history of racism that stoked those fears. He could, for a time, shrug off Wright's more incendiary views, in part because he knew that whites, in their private worlds, often expressed or shrugged off bigotry themselves, partly because of fears that might seem irrational to African-Americans. Obama's own grandmother, as he pointed out in his Philadelphia speech last week, "on more than one occasion uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

Conservative critics have blasted him, partly for "moral equivalence." (Obama's grandmother, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out, "never spread racial hatred.") Other critics questioned his loyalties to America. They will continue to do so, particularly if he wins the Democratic nomination. Obama responds by telling his own story, and wrapping it into the larger chronicle of America. His pitch is that he can see America as few others can, and that this ability will enable him to pull a majority of the country together and get things done. "That's what we are doing with our speeches and that's to some degree what I think this campaign is about and what America is about," he told NEWSWEEK in one of two recent interviews. "People from diverse backgrounds and unlikely places finding a common culture and a common set of values and ideals that make them American." That is perhaps Obama's greatest talent: to weave compelling narratives about himself that seem to include everyone in a common epic. The stories have a fierce intelligence, but like any good mythmaker, Obama sands down pieces that don't quite fit. How Barry became Barack is just such a story.
Obama's first questions about his own identity came early, when he lived for several years in Indonesia. He moved there with his idealistic mother—whom he has described as a "lonely witness for secular humanism"—when he was 6. The Asian archipelago was an eye-opener for a child who had been raised in the relative comforts of Hawaii. He didn't know what to make of the leper who came to his door, who had a hole where his nose was supposed to be and made a discomfiting "whistling sound" as he asked for food. He had to learn how to deal with street beggars of all types. Obama's bighearted mother gave easily. His Indonesian stepfather, an unsentimental man with a more practical view of the world, counseled the boy that the demands of the needy had no end; it was best to be strong because "men take advantage of weakness in other men."
The young Obama grappled, to the extent a child can, with the guilt of the privileged. But for the first time, he also confronted the potential burden of being dark-skinned. This occurred, according to his autobiography, at the library of the U.S. Embassy, where his mother was teaching English to local businessmen. Barry was there leafing through magazines when he came across disturbing photos of a black man who had tried to erase the darkness from his skin by using chemicals. The man had a ghostly pallor, as if he had suffered from radiation poisoning. After "a stretch of childhood free from self-doubt," seeing the photos was "violent for me," Obama later wrote. He had been warned before about bigots and wasn't completely ignorant about the evils of the world. "But that one photograph had told me something else: that there was a hidden enemy out there, one that could reach me without anyone's knowledge, not even my own."
The boy's mother tried her best to armor him against self-doubt. "To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear," she told him. She also taught him "to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad," and made sure he was respectful of Indonesians and their culture. "My mother always distinguished between certain aspects of Americans abroad that she was embarrassed by: the expats who would never eat in a local restaurant or never socialize with Indonesians or had a patronizing attitude," Obama recalled to NEWSWEEK. "She was always concerned about me never thinking I was superior to Indonesians in that way."
He ate lots of the local street food: chicken satay, traditional fried rice and meatballs the size of tennis balls. He saw shadow-puppet shows and listened to Indonesian music. His backyard was home to baby crocodiles, birds of paradise and a cockatoo. "It wasn't all grim," says Obama's half sister, Maya. Jakarta was like a vast, sprawling village at the time, lit by kerosene lamps—a young boy's paradise.
But Obama's mother didn't want Barry to be denied the many opportunities that American kids had. So she tutored him at 4 a.m., before he went to his Indonesian school, administering three-hour English lessons. Obama got a glancing exposure to Islam. He went to a public school where he had a bit of Islamic instruction, perhaps once a week. But Indonesia wore its religion lightly. "Nobody wore headscarves on the streets," he says. "I mean, women were driving on Vespas, and when you went to the villages they were all taking baths in the river." His mother taught him what she thought of as "Midwestern, traditional American values"—honesty, fairness, plain speaking. "She believed in saying what you mean and meaning what you say, even if it made a situation uncomfortable," he recalls. "To her that was part of her American tradition that she was proud of, and she wanted to make sure that was part of me."
Yet the poverty and corruption of Indonesia would come to instill "a relentless skepticism" in the child, he later wrote. Obama's mother eventually stifled her idealism, and sent her son back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents.
There's no escape from adolescence and the torrent of questions that accompany it. Like all young boys, Obama was plagued by doubts and worries—about girls, about being teased, about his ability to "fit in." He became more aware of his blackness. At his new school, a redheaded girl wanted to touch his hair, and a boy wanted to know if his father ate people. Obama gave a slight shove to a black girl when other kids taunted the two of them, saying she was his girlfriend. Barry later felt guilty about it. When his father came to visit from Kenya—for the first and only time—the 10-year-old was nervous. He didn't want to be seen as different from the other kids, but with no choice, he couldn't resist fibbing that his father was a prince, his grandfather a chief, and that his family name meant "burning spear." In 1975, when Obama started high school in Hawaii, teacher Eric Kusunoki read the roll call and stumbled on Obama's first name. "Is Barack here?" he asked, pronouncing it BAR-rack. "He said, 'Just call me Barry'," recalls Kusunoki. "He didn't say it like he was exasperated or anything; he just corrected me."
Keith Kakugawa was a close friend of Obama's at the Punahou School. (He appears in "Dreams" as a revised character named "Ray" who may be a composite of more than one Obama friend.) He says that Obama, being a dark-skinned kid growing up in a white household, sensed that something was amiss. "He felt that he was not getting a part of who he was, the history," says Kakugawa, who is also of mixed race. He recalls Obama's reading black authors —James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes—looking for clues. Keith didn't know at first that Obama's given name was Barack. "We were in the library and there was a Malcolm X book," Kakugawa tells NEWSWEEK. "He grabbed it and looked at it and he's checking it out, and I said, 'Hold on, man. What you gonna do? Change your name to something Muslim?' He said, 'Well, my name is Barack Obama.' And I said, 'No it isn't.' And we got in an argument about that in the library and they had to tell us, 'Shhhh'."
Back in Hawaii in the 1970s, it could seem that everyone was some kind of a minority. The fact that Obama was half-black and half-white didn't matter much to anyone but Obama, Kakugawa says: "He made everything out like it was all racial." On one occasion, Obama thought he'd gotten a bad break on the school basketball team because he was black. But Kakugawa recalls his father's telling the teenager, "No, Barry, it's not because you're black. It's because you missed two shots in a row." (Here, Kakugawa's memory is different from Obama's. The Ray character in the book is the one obsessed with being discriminated against.)
Darin Maurer, another buddy of Obama's in Hawaii, never noticed any internal struggle. The two met in seventh grade, drawn together by a shared interest in basketball. Both Darin and his mother recall Obama as very integrated. Suzanne Maurer recalls that Barry and her white son, who had very curly hair, both sported Afro-style haircuts at one point. Mostly, both Maurers remember how smart Obama was. "He could whip out a paper that was due the next day the night before, while all the other kids were spending weeks writing," recalls Suzanne. Darin remembers some racial tensions in Hawaii at that time—expressed by Native Islanders against both whites and blacks. There were derogatory native words for both races. "I wouldn't be very surprised about any sort of derogatory stuff about a black person," says Darin, a pastor who now lives in Texas. "I knew that's what you had to accept … It wasn't like it was debilitating. It was just a challenge."
Mostly, perhaps, Barry was feeling stifled in Hawaii, which is best known for its laid-back love of sun and surf. He didn't want to go the way his friend Keith ultimately went. Kakugawa flew off to the mainland and later struggled with drugs, moving in and out of prison, and was homeless for a period. Even as a teenager, Obama had broad ambitions, and seemed determined to make something of himself.
Barry Obama met Eric Moore fresh on arrival from Hawaii at Occidental College in Los Angeles. The two roamed in the same circles, gravitating toward friends who considered themselves "progressive," including many with international backgrounds. Moore came from the mostly white college town of Boulder, Colo. He hoped Occidental and Los Angeles would expose him to African-American culture in a way that his Caucasian-dominated world back home could not. Yet Occidental had 1,675 kids enrolled, and only 17.7 percent were minorities.
"There was a certain kinship right away," Moore says. He remembers Obama as polished and precocious. He seemed older than his age, unless you considered the flip-flops, T shirt and Hawaiian shorts he wore around campus. "He was more worldly than the average kid in California," Moore says, "although he clearly looked like a surfer type."
Their kinship was strengthened in conversations like the one they had about a trip Moore took during the summer of 1980. He visited Kenya—the homeland of Obama's father and other relatives—as part of a program that sent teens abroad to do volunteer work. Moore told Obama about his experiences, and explained how the trip was one of the most powerful events of his life. "It helped me find my own identity," Moore says. "I think for an African-American to go back to Africa is a powerful experience. It's like going to Israel if you're Jewish."
The two men didn't discuss questions of identity much, Moore says, but the struggles were always there, just beneath the surface. There were moments when they'd poke fun at each other, and snippets of private truth would emerge. On one occasion, Moore and Obama were hanging out in a dorm—early on in their friendship—when the subject of names came up. "What kind of name is Barry Obama—for a brother?" Moore asked with a grin. "Actually, my name's Barack Obama," he replied. "That's a very strong name," Moore told him. Obama responded that he didn't want to have to explain his name. "Barry" was just a way of simplifying things—a small compromise to smooth the way in society.
Moore knew then that Obama had been called Barry for a very long time, but he made a point to call him Barack anyway. He did this because he liked the name, he says, but also because he respected anything African. "It was a time when we were very conscious and he actually appreciated that I called him Barack," Moore says. A handful of people, mostly close friends, would use Barack and Barry interchangeably.
But Obama had friends from many different backgrounds. Other friends at Occidental, including his freshman roommate, Paul Carpenter, never heard Obama called Barack at all. At times, he was still asking to be called Barry. Anne Howells, who taught him Introduction to Literary Theory in the winter semester of 1980, had noticed Obama's full name on the enrollment list of about 15 students. She was curious about it, wondering if it was a Hawaiian name. But when she went around the room asking each student how he or she would like to be called, Obama answered "Barry."
Wahid Hamid, a good friend at Oxy who attended Obama's wedding years later, says that even before he became Barack, most friends simply called him "Obama." "It wasn't surprising to me that he decided to embrace that identity because 'Barry' could be perceived as trying to run away from something and trying to fit in, rather than embracing his own identity and, in many ways, kind of opening himself to who he is." For Wahid, an immigrant from Pakistan also trying to find his way in America (he is now a corporate executive in New York), the name Barack was perfectly natural and "somewhat refreshing."
Obama struck Moore as a person who could glide in and out of any social circle on campus. This was the thing about being of "mixed race," Moore says. "You have the benefit of knowing both cultures firsthand and it opens your eyes." Moore said that even though he was older than Obama, he was often worrying and struggling to succeed during that time in his life. Obama always seemed relaxed and well prepared.
He cites as an example Obama's speech during a rally of the Black Student Alliance and other groups concerning divestment from South Africa. The rally was staged near the president's office. In Moore's mind, the students were running a risk doing this. They could get in trouble, or even expelled. He was nervous and jittery, in part because he was also speaking at the event. Then he saw Obama take the stage. He seemed so calm. People slowed down to listen. "He had this booming voice," Moore says. "It helped that people knew who he was [because he was popular on campus], but he also had this commanding presence." Moore says he was reminded of that moment when Obama gave his breakout speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004. "I remember calling friends, saying, 'Are you watching this? That's our boy from school'."
Obama says in his autobiography that the school speech on South Africa was an important moment, but also a confusing one. He was enthralled by the power of his own words—"to hear my voice bouncing off the crowd and returning back to me in applause." Yet he also felt foolish, that the whole demonstration was a farce—more about him than about South Africa. He succumbed to self-pity, and a friend admonished him for it. He still wasn't sure who he was, or who he was supposed to be.
Yet Obama honed his sense of right and wrong at Occidental. "He hung out with the young men and women who were most serious about issues of social justice," recalls Prof. Roger Boesche, who taught Obama two political-science courses and knew him as Barry at the time. Obama also wasn't afraid to stand up for himself, and perhaps had a righteous streak. In one instance, he politely confronted his professor over lunch at a local sandwich shop called The Cooler. "He'd gotten a grade he was disappointed in," Boesche recalls. "I told him he was really smart, but he wasn't working hard enough." Other students might have backed off at that point. But not Obama. He politely told Boesche he should have gotten a better grade. Even today, Obama recalls the demeaning mark. He told journalist David Mendell, author of a recent book called "Obama, From Promise to Power," that he "was pissed" about it because he thought he was being graded "on a different curve." Boesche still insists he gave him the grade he deserved.
Occidental—like Hawaii before—became too small for Obama. "I think the Oxy environment and L.A. in general seemed not to be enough for him," Moore says. He remembered asking Obama when he was a sophomore what he planned to do the following year, since many upper-class friends of Obama's were graduating. Obama told him he was planning to transfer to Columbia University. "I remember trying to convince him to stay at Oxy," Moore says. But Obama had made up his mind that he wanted to move to a more urban, intense and polyglot place. "He said something to the effect that he needed a bigger and more stimulating environment intellectually."
Obama wanted a clean slate. "Going to New York was really a significant break. It's when I left a lot of stuff behind," he says. "I think there was a lot of stuff going on in me. By the end of that year at Occidental, I think I was starting to work it through, and I think part of the attraction of transferring was, it's hard to remake yourself around people who have known you for a long time." It was when he got to New York that, as he recalls it, he began to ask people to call him Barack: "It was not some assertion of my African roots … not a racial assertion. It was much more of an assertion that I was coming of age. An assertion of being comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I didn't need to try to fit in in a certain way."
He stopped drinking and partying, leading what he calls "a hermetic existence" for two years. "When I look back on it, it was a pretty grim and humorless time that I went through," he recalls. "I literally went to class, came home, read books, took long walks, wrote." Politics was a passion, but he was disillusioned by radicals who claimed to have all the answers. At one point after graduation, he went "in search of some inspiration" to hear Kwame Toure (the former Stokely Carmichael) speak at Columbia. A thin young woman stood up to question Toure's push to establish economic ties between Africa and Harlem: was that practical, given the difficult state of African economies? Toure cut her off, calling her brainwashed, and others shouted her down. "It was like a bad dream," Obama wrote later.
Obama kept detailed journals in New York. It was good practice. "Writing journals during those two years gave me not only the raw material for the book, but also taught me to shape a narrative in ways that would work," he says. When he later became a community organizer in Chicago, part of his job was storytelling. "His job largely consisted of interviewing community members and creating a narrative out of their experiences, the problems the community faced," says his boss at that time, Gerald Kellman. Eventually, even Chicago would seem too small a stage. He told Kellman "he did not feel there would be large-scale change brought about by organizing." Large-scale change was what Obama was aiming for.
He lost touch with many of his old Oxy friends. Eric Moore says he had no contact with Obama for about 15 years. Then on a visit to Chicago, Moore was walking through a park when he saw a fund-raising table with an OBAMA placard. He walked up to the woman behind the table and asked if she was promoting "Barack Obama." She said yes, and he left his card with her in hopes she'd pass it along to his old friend. The two reconnected after that. "He was so genuine and unchanged," Moore says. "That's what he is every time I see him, except that now he doesn't wear the flip-flops." Moore says that he's amazed that his friend is on the possible verge of becoming president. "It's not like he came from a family like the Kennedys or the Bushes," Moore says. "He's a self-made man."
Few have willed their self-creation in quite the same way. The absence of his father taught Obama the importance of stories. These tales helped him make sense of who he was. (At least two acquaintances in his postgraduation years thought he was on a track to become a writer.) Stories made the murkier aspects of life coherent, or at least gave him confidence—that he could author his own life story, and thus become a master of the tale and not a victim. As a teenager, he had been skeptical of some family yarns, thinking they had been burnished a little too bright. He was at an age then when kids distinguish between fairy tales and truth, when they often become disillusioned with their parents.
One story that stuck with him concerned his father. It's the only such story about his father—told by his white relatives—that dealt explicitly with race. It goes like this:
Barry's white grandfather and several other Hawaiian friends take Barry Sr. to a Waikiki bar. It's a joyous scene, everyone eating and drinking "to the sounds of a slack-key guitar," when a white man with a booming voice announces to the bartender that he shouldn't have to drink "next to a nigger." The stunned clientele expects a fight. But Barry Sr. smiles and quietly lectures the man "about the folly of bigotry, the promise of the American dream, and the universal rights of man." In response, the shamed white man gives Barry Sr. $100, in apparent payment for his sin of racism. Even the young Obama found the tale hard to believe. But many years later, he recalls in "Dreams From My Father," he got a phone call from a Japanese-American man who had been a classmate of Barry Sr.'s in Hawaii. Unprompted, the man told Obama the same story. Obama says he was struck by the man's tone of "disbelief—and hope."
Obama has collected similar stories over the years—like the one he told in his Philadelphia speech about the young white woman who pretended to love mustard-and-relish sandwiches to help her sick mother through a time of financial stress, and the older black man who felt political kinship for her. The punch line is generally the same: blacks and whites have more in common than you might think, and he knows it because he is it: black and white, together as one. Or so his story goes.
This story was reported by Richard Wolffe, with Obama; Jessica Ramirez and Eve Conant in Washington, D.C.; Sarah Kliff in New York; Andrew Murr in Los Angeles, and Miyoko Ohtake in San Francisco.
© 2008

Obama related to Pitt, Clinton to Jolie

Zax — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:07:55 EDT

Researchers find remarkable family connections for the candidates

updated 7:35 p.m. ET, Wed., March. 26, 2008
BOSTON - This could make for one odd family reunion: Barack Obama is a distant cousin of actor Brad Pitt, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is related to Pitt's girlfriend, Angelina Jolie.
Researchers at the New England Historic Genealogical Society found some remarkable family connections for the three presidential candidates — Democratic rivals Obama and Clinton, and Republican John McCain.
Clinton, who is of French-Canadian descent on her mother's side, is also a distant cousin of singers Madonna, Celine Dion and Alanis Morissette. Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, can call six U.S. presidents, including George W. Bush, his cousins. McCain is a sixth cousin of first lady Laura Bush.
Genealogist Christopher Child said that while the candidates often focus on pointing out differences between them, their ancestry shows they are more alike than they think.
"It shows that lots of different people can be related, people you wouldn't necessarily expect," Child said.
Obama has a prolific presidential lineage that features Democrats and Republicans. His distant cousins include President George W. Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S. Truman and James Madison. Other Obama cousins include Vice President Dick Cheney, British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and Civil War General Robert E. Lee.
"His kinships are across the political spectrum," Child said.
Child has spent the last three years tracing the candidates' genealogy, along with senior research scholar Gary Boyd Roberts, author of the 1989 book, "Ancestors of American Presidents."
Clinton's distant cousins include beatnik author Jack Kerouac and Camilla Parker-Bowles, wife of Prince Charles of England.
McCain's ancestry was more difficult to trace because records on his relatives were not as complete as records for the families of Obama and Clinton, Child said.
Obama and President Bush are 10th cousins, once removed, linked by Samuel Hinkley of Cape Cod, who died in 1662.
Pitt and Obama are ninth cousins, linked by Edwin Hickman, who died in Virginia in 1769.
Clinton and Jolie are ninth cousins, twice removed, both related to Jean Cusson who died in St. Sulpice, Quebec, in 1718.
The New England Historic Genealogical Society, founded in 1845, is the oldest and largest nonprofit genealogical organization in the country.

Media bias helping Clinton?

Zax — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:55:41 EDT

By Chuck ToddPolitical DirectorNBC Newsupdated 7:41 a.m. ET, Tues., March. 18, 2008
WASHINGTON - Forget the pledged delegate issue that Sen. Hillary Clinton is facing; her real problem may be on the superdelegate front.
As many folks following this Democratic fight now realize, Clinton’s only shot at the nomination is to somehow make a case to the majority of the superdelegates that she’ll be the better nominee for the party.
But ask yourself, why does Clinton have less than half of superdelegates publicly behind her right now? Why isn’t her number higher?
At last count, Clinton had 253 superdelegates in her corner, not counting another dozen or so from Michigan and Florida.
But even including those folks, Clinton has fewer than 40 percent of superdelegates supporting her, and that's after more than a year of campaigning.
This is the wife of the former president, after all. Shouldn’t there be at least 400 party leaders who owe something to the Clintons on board?
This has been a campaign riddle that many of us have overlooked.
Clinton problems
One reason this has been brushed under the rug? Media-types don't realize the problems many rank-and-file Democratic activists have with the Clinton family.
Simply take a look at Bill Clinton's record from '92 to '00 and you’ll understand why they're having a harder time corralling party activists and elected officials to their side.
Remember, when his name was on the ballot ('92 and '96) the Democratic party lost Senate seats both times. Never mind the beating the party took in '94; a walloping often blamed on both Bill and Hillary.
Even in '98, which was, perhaps, the most successful Congressional election of the Clinton era, the party netted zero Senate seats and gained less than a handful of House seats.
It's not exactly something to brag about.
While there are plenty of unknowns about Obama’s ability to truly expand the base of the Democratic Party, there are plenty of superdelegates who think they know Clinton couldn't rise to that very same challenge.
The scars of the '90s are still rather prominent for some Democrats, particularly members of the House leadership who appear to be leaning Obama’s way (see Nancy Pelosi’s weekend comments).
The Clintons' up-and-down relationship with some Congressional Democrats in the ‘90s could become an issue when many of these undecided members of Congress (a.k.a. superdelegates)are asked to make up their mind.
In fact, that's not the Clintons' only rocky relationship. Key labor leaders also hold some grudges from that decade, when they felt like they had to capitulate more on certain things, like NAFTA. Some felt that it was beginning of what would be a long, hard fall from power in the '90s and early '00s.
So if Clinton has a pledged delegate problem (something that’s been well documented) and also has a superdelegate problem, then what’s her path to victory?
Believe it or not, it’s the media.
This is one area where Clinton has been running circles around Obama. As far as the media’s concerned, Obama may be the Democratic frontrunner, but Clinton is in the driver's seat.
Looking at the campaign narrative, it's hard to identify the frontrunner.
In fact, if you ignore the numbers and just examine the messages being lobbed back and forth between the two campaigns, one might assume Clinton was in the lead.
This is something that could start being reflected in some national polls. On Monday, a Gallup poll showed that in a potential match-up, Clinton would best John McCain 51 percent to 46 percent. Obama would lead 49 percent to 47 percent. Surely, these numbers are giving Team Obama some serious heartburn.)
Since the unveiling of the "3am phone call" television ad, there hasn't been a news cycle or a storyline that hasn't been controlled by the Clinton campaign.
Whether it's downplaying Obama's momentum ahead of the March 4 contests, placing emphasis on the importance of the Pennsylvania primary, or shifting focus to the potential for re-votes in Michigan and Florida, the media narrative seems to be in Clinton’s favor.
This is a reality for a few reasons.
First, and most importantly, is the media's bias toward keeping the campaign going.
A boost from bias?
But it's more than that, it's also a bias rooted in history. Many a reporter believes that someone with the last name of "Clinton" should never be counted out. And that built-in bias is assisting the campaign, despite the Clintons history of antagonism with the press.
Longtime readers know that when I toss out the word "bias,” I never do so ideologically.
I believe most bias is based on experience or what I call the "been there, done that" disease. We're all prisoners of history and this Democratic nomination fight features two conflicting historical precedents.
The one that favors Obama throws back to the last two major Democratic nomination fights in '80 and '84. The candidate who was in Obama's position (Carter and Mondale, respectively) won, while the candidate in Clinton's position (Kennedy and Hart) lost.
Of course, that historical perspective is a bit warped since unlike this year, the establishment candidate stayed ahead in those two elections, while the outsider always trailed.
It's vice versa this year.
The second historical anecdote, which favors Clinton, is that last name of hers.
Clinton always finds a way to survive, so goes the myth.
Bill Clinton has escaped political death more times than any politician in history. And profiles of Hillary Clinton are rarely written without the word "resilient" being featured prominently.
The irony to all of this, of course, is that while the mechanics of the Democratic nomination fight overwhelmingly favor Obama, the media is giving Clinton a huge lift. And this comes after a year of Clinton complaints that the media was doing them more harm than good.
Does Clinton have a path to the nomination? If this were a pure delegate fight, perhaps not and, frankly, I still have my doubts given what I think is a deeper superdelegate problem.
But anything is possible, and if Obama becomes unelectable for some reason over the next few months, Clinton will be there to pick up the pieces.
The trick for her is how to pick up those pieces without being the person to break Obama into pieces.
If her campaign goes completely "scorched Earth" in its efforts to make Obama appear unelectable, there may not be time to put the party back together for a run at John McCain.
The Rev. Wright stuff is the first major problem for Obama that the Clinton campaign smartly stayed away from.
It’s going to take another troublesome moment or two like this for Obama for the superdelegates to start re-thinking their nervousness about another eight years of a Clinton leading their party.
If this doesn’t happen organically, then it may not be a nomination worth having.

What we want-

Zax — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:41:50 EDT

I do not know who wrote the following but I think this is what we all want, seek, dream of and wish for on this planet, everywhere , for everyone in the world.
---------------------
What we want-
What we want- We want every Politician to accept to say:
Yes, we can change-To leave behind a better world for our children
......................................................................
We want to become the biggest Collection of Helpers and Link collection to them .
We want a better future for our children
We want a clean, green world for our children
We want to help to fight against hunger and diseases
We want a safer world without wars
We want free speech
We want free elections worldwide
We want real democracy
We want to reduce the influence of lobbyists in politics
We want same rights for all of us, for each woman and child.
We want a world where we all have the same colour and this is colourful
We want a world without deathpenalty and torture
We want a world where only one thing is important-the human being worldwide
We want clean water, food and medical care for each human being
We want same rights for everyone
We want a world where we live in social peace,in peace and where a lobbyist does not work for money but for our behalf
We want to be able to live from what we earn, we want to be able to live from one job only
We want good education and schools for every child everywhere and not a better education for those with more money
We want to stop misuse of children as soldiers
We want children to grow up as friends and not enemies
We want a better life for old people and disabled persons
We want fair trade
We want to save nature, environment and climate
We want to reduce weapons
We want to reduce every kind of pollution
We want our politicians to work for us and not for the behalf of industry
We want child labour to be banned worldwide
......................................................................
http://www.yes-we-can-change.de/

The Power of One!

Zax — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:57:00 EDT
The Power of One!By john ⋅ February 16, 2008 ⋅ Email ⋅ Print ⋅ Trackback ⋅ Comment

He is by any standard, the most talented, and qualified candidate from either side of the political divide.
A reader advisory
This particular article is my response to a Barack supporter in the United States who was concerned about the the possibility of colour and race being used surreptitiously in concert with elements of the media, to disguise an attempt to deny Barack Obama a fair opportunity to achieve his destiny. The Presidency of the United States of America.
Dear Barack supporter
To be credible, I need to reveal one or two facts about myself before addressing the subject of your concerns. I am a 68 yr old white male and an Australian citizen of Irish and Scottish heritage! As such I am not eligible to vote in your election. However I support Barack Obama for election as the 44th President of the United States, simply because he is by any standard, the most talented, and qualified candidate from either side of the political divide.
Only one candidate has satisfactorily demonstrated the type of skills and leadership qualities people quite rightfully expect to see in a candidate for the office of President. Specifically, in Obama’s overwhelming favour these include: His sound policy positions, diplomatic skills, political skills, sage judgement, people skills, personal ethics, temperament, proven management skills and of course at 47 yrs, his age advantage, when considering the work load and pressures involved in managing the most demanding job in the world.
Back to the original question! The fact is, we like Barack. Personally I wouldn’t care if he was green, had stripes or that he might be lousy at table tennis. I suppose that last bit is possible! None of this matters. People feel close to Obama. They can see he likes people and genuinely cares for them. He touches us through his natural humanity and in the midst of the political crossfire, we admire his strength, resolve, integrity and even politeness. It’s a rare thing we witness.
People know that his words, while beautiful to contemplate, are not false. We are reassured by his easy demeanour and his truth is reflected in the sincerity of his smile. People feel these things. They are confident in his ability because he communicates a clear understanding as to what needs to be done as President to restore people’s faith in the future. This time people are endowing a special man with their trust in addition to their vote. They sense they have arrived at a special place and time in their country’s history. A time many thought would never happen in their lifetime. And they have made their choice. Obama knows this and is respectful of that great responsibility.
Quite openly he has challenged every American to make a commitment to their own future and that of their country. He has invited them to work with him in solving the country’s problems thereby suggesting that together they can build a brighter future for all Americans. A concept readily embraced by people who are voting for change. It is a willing contract between the people and a man of the people, who if they prevail, will be their next President. Such a pact is historic. People can’t wait to start.
Around the globe people are beginning to feel more safe, more connected and more positive about the future at the prospect of an Obama Presidency. Ask anyone in any country, anywhere. Polls are confirming it. People of all age, race, colour, creed and religion have joined together as one, to work and volunteer, most for the first time, to help bring positive change. The ripple effect of this positive momentum is building like a tsunami as it reaches out and begins to touch the lives of people everywhere. It feels like an election for a world President!
Many years ago I read ” The Power of One” an amazing and inspirational book by the famous Australian author Bryce Courtenay. They made a superb movie based on the book. Those of you who have had the privilege to read it will understand it’s relevance to this article.
Please play the short video before reading the ending.

to the dreamers   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHNhc6TPXts

As human beings seeking a better world, we recognise a gifted leader when we see one.
And as Oprah with deep belief said so aptly. ” He is the One ”
The only colour I see in Barack Obama, is the colour of the future! It is a hue which promises to make the world a better place.
And a Presidency which promises to make America bright and beautiful again.
John Hay
Brisbane. Qld. Australia
Email: john@tellingthoughts.com
Video Produced by: Akin Salawu -AkinScribe5

Who Is Asher Heimermann?

Zax — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:42:00 EDT

I just love it when young people pay attention to how what happens now and how it has a direct affect on their future(s). Here is such a young man and his views of America.
---------------------
SHEBOYGAN --- He could be one of the most politically active people in the state of Wisconsin , and he's not even old enough to vote! 14-year-old Asher Heimermann is a self described youth activist who is making sure his voice is heard everywhere from Sheboygan City Hall to the White House.

Today's TMJ4's Shelley Walcott caught up with Asher as he stood at a street corner in Sheboygan, holding an "Obama '08" placard. It's something he does about two to three times a week. "I'm taking on my first amendement right to express myself," he said. And he's not kidding.

Asher's website, asherheimermann.com, reveals a teenager who is really tapped in. He discusses economic stimulus, global warming and Wisconsin politics. Asher has even released a statement on the assasination of Pakistani president Benazir Bhutto. "I like to relase news releases and tell my supporters where I stand on the issues," he says.

Asher has called Today's TMJ4 to offer opinion on the news of the day. He also hosts regular online chats on his website. The site is updated almost daily, and gets about 98-thousand hits every year.

Asher also sends hundreds of emails to elected officials, and they almost always write back. He has letters from Vice President Dick Cheney, State Senator Joe Leibham, Senator Herb Kohl, the fire commisioner of New York City, and many more.

Asher's father, while supportive, doesn't exactly share his son's love of politics. Jesse Heimermann said: "No, I don't have any interest in politics at all. To tell you the truth, since I was 18 I haven't voted once." Still, he knows his son is special and is waiting, like the rest of us, to see how far this unusual kid from Sheboygan may go. Shelley Walcott

The Anyway Poem

Zax — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 09:31:04 EDT

The Poem, an extract from the Obama Threads - By Michelle
My name is Michelle and I support Barack Obama for President of the United States of America. I love this poem. I’m not sure who wrote it, although it has been credited to Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and a Harvard student who wishes to remain anonymous. No matter who is responsible, these are words that we and this campaign should live by.
The Anyway Poem
People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered; Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.
You see in the final analysis, it is between you and God. It is never between you and those people anyway.